“Talk to me, or I will hand you over to them.” And he gestured to the press of silent men.
“There are other regiments up north,” the boy bleated. “Four or five of them. They are building a big camp, walls and ditches. Another big army is coming north… they are going to-to the monkish place by the shores of the sea. That’s all I know, I swear it!”
Corfe released him and he sagged, hiccuping and crying. So the Merduks were going to launch an expedition against Charibon, and they were fortifying the gap. Something worth knowing, at last. He turned away, deep in thought. As he did a large group of men advanced out of the shadows, the wall of faces dissolving into a crowd which surged forward.
“We’ll take care of them from here, General.”
“Get back in ranks!” His bellow made them pause, but one stepped forward and shook his head. “General, we’d follow you to hell and back, but a man has his limits. Some of us have lost families and homes to these animals. You have to leave the scum to us.”
At once another knot of figures appeared, with Formio at their head. Sable-clad Fimbrians with their swords drawn. Cimbric tribesmen in their scarlet armour. They positioned themselves with swift efficiency about Corfe and the Merduks as though they were a bodyguard. Formio and Marsch stood at Corfe’s shoulders.
“The General gave you an order,” Formio said evenly. “Your job is to obey. You are soldiers, not a mob of civilians.”
The two bands of armed men faced each other squarely for several moments. Corfe could not speak. If they began to fight one another he knew that the army was doomed, irrevocably split between Fimbrian and Torunnan and tribesman. His authority over them hung by a straw.
“All right, lads,” Andruw said breezily, materialising like a ghost from the surrounding trees. “That’s enough. If we start into them, then we’re no better than they are. They’re criminals, no more. And besides, are you willing to see the day when a Torunnan officer is obeyed by Fimbrians and mountain savages and not by his own countrymen? Where’s your pride? Varian-I know you-I saw you on the battlements at the dyke. You did your duty then. Do it now. Do as the General says, lads. Back to your bivouacs.”
The Torunnans shifted their feet, looking both embarrassed and sullen. Corfe moved forward to speak to their ringleader, Varian. Thank God Andruw had remembered his name.
“I too lost a home and family, Varian,” he said quietly. “All of us here have suffered, in one way or another.”
Varian’s eyes were hot blazes of grief. “I had a wife,” he croaked, hardly audible. “I had a daughter.”
Corfe gripped his shoulder. “Don’t do anything that would offend their memory.”
The trooper coughed and wiped his eyes roughly. “Yes, sir. I’m sorry. We’re bloody fools, all of us.”
“So are all men, Varian. But we were husbands and fathers and brothers once. Save the hatred for a battlefield. These animals are not worthy of it. Now go and get some sleep.”
Corfe raised his voice. “All of you, back to your lines. There is nothing more to do here, nothing more to see.”
Reluctantly, the throng broke up and began dispersing. Corfe felt the relief wash over him in a tepid wave as they obeyed him. They were still his to command, thanks to Formio and Andruw. They were still an army, and not a mob.
In the middle watch of the night he did the rounds of the camp as he always did, exchanging a few words with the sentries, looking in on the horses. He took his own mount, an equable bay gelding, from the horse-lines and rode it bare-back out of the wood and up to the summit of a small knoll which lay to the east of the camp. Another horseman was there ahead of him, outlined against the stars. Andruw, staring out upon a sleeping Torunna. Corfe reined in beside him, and they sat their horses in silence, watching.
On the vast dark expanse of the night-bound earth they could see distant lights, throbbing like glow-worms. Even as Corfe watched, another sprang up out on the edge of the horizon.
“They’re burning the towns along the Searil,” Andruw said.
Corfe studied the distant flames and wondered what scenes of horror and carnage they signified. He remembered Aekir’s fall, the panic of the crowds, the inferno of the packed streets, and wiped his face with one hand.
“I’m sorry I lost my head back there for a time,” Andruw said tonelessly. “It won’t happen again.” And the anger and despair ate through the numbness in his voice as he spoke again. “God’s blood, Corfe, will it ever end? Why do they do these things? What kind of people are they?”
“I don’t know, Andruw, I truly don’t. We’ve been fighting these folk for generations, and still we know nothing about them. And they know as little about us, I suspect. Two peoples who have never even tried to understand one another, but who are simply intent on wiping each other out.”
“I’ve heard that in the west, in Gabrion and Hebrion, the Sea-Merduks trade and take ship with Ramusian captains as though there were no barriers between them. They sail ships together and start businesses in partnership with each other. Why is it so different here?”
“Because this is the frontier, Andruw. This is where the wheel meets the road.
“I stood ceremonial guard in Aekir once, at a dinner John Mogen was giving to his captains before the siege. I think that if anyone had some understanding of the Merduks, he did. I think he even admired them. He said that men must always move towards the sunset. They follow it as surely as swallows flit south in wintertime.
“Originally the Merduks were chieftains of the steppes beyond the Jafrar, but they followed the sun and crossed the mountains, and were halted by the walls and pikes of the Fimbrians. The Fimbrians contained them: we cannot. That is the simple truth. If we are not to fight one another into annihilation, then one day we shall have to broker a peace and make a compromise with them. Either that, or we will be swept into the mountains and end our days the leaders of roving homeless tribesmen, like Marsch and his people.”
“I must talk to Marsch. That mountain savage bit… I have to tell him-”
“He knows, Andruw. He knows.”
Andruw nodded. “I suppose so.” He seemed to be having trouble finding the words he wanted. Corfe could sense the struggle in him as he sat his horse and picked at its mane.
“They shamed us back there, Formio and Marsch and their men. There they were, foreigners and mercenaries, and they stood by you while your own people were almost ready to push you out of the way. Those men were at the dyke with us-they saw us there. A few even served under you in the barbican. There’s no talk around their campfires tonight. They have failed you-and themselves.”
“No,” Corfe said quickly. “They are just men who have been pushed too far. I think none the worse of them for it. And this army is not made up of Fimbrians and Torunnans and the tribesmen. Not any more. They’re my men now, every one of them. They’ve fought together and they’ve died together. There is no need to talk of shame, not to me.”
Andruw grimaced. “Maybe… You know, Corfe, I was ready to slit the throats of those prisoners. I would have done it without a qualm and slept like a baby afterwards. I never really hated before, not truly. In a way it was some huge kind of game. But now this-this is different. The refugees from Aekir, they were just faces, but these hills… I skylarked in them when I was a boy. The people up here are my own people, not just because they are Torunnan-that’s a name-but because I know how they live and where. Varian hasn’t seen his wife and child in almost a year, and he doesn’t know if they’re alive or dead. And there are many more like him throughout the troops that came from the dyke. They sent their families out of the fortress at the start, back here to the north, or to the towns around Torunn. They thought the war would never come this far. Well, they were wrong. We all were.”