Andruw nodded. “I know. We must be sensible about it.” His voice was cracking with strain.
“Have you scouted out the main body?”
“They’re still bivouacked to the south. Their camp is full of the loot and women from half a dozen different towns. These lads have been having a fine old time of it up here in the north. It must seem like a kind of holiday for them.”
“It ends tomorrow morning with the dawn, I promise you. Now get the officers together. I want you to tell us all you know about the dispositions of these bastards.”
Andruw nodded and started to move his horse away. Then he halted.
“Corfe?”
“Yes?”
“Promise me something else.”
Andruw’s voice was thick with grief but it was too dark for Corfe to read his face. “Go on.”
“Promise me that tomorrow we will take no prisoners.”
The wind and the subdued clamour of an army settling down for the night filled the silence that stretched between them. Politics, strategy, his talk with Ranafast; they rose like a cloud in Corfe’s mind. But smouldering there under all the rationalisations were his own anger, and his friend’s grief. When Corfe finally responded, his voice was as raw as Andruw’s had been.
“All right then. Tomorrow there will be no quarter. I promise you.”
TWELVE
The town of Berrona had always been an unremarkable place, tucked away on the north-western border of Torunna not far from the headwaters of the River Searil. Some six thousand people dwelt there in the shadow of the western Thurians, their only link with Torunna proper a single dirt road which snaked away to the south across the foothills. With the fall of Ormann Dyke, they had become technically behind the Merduk lines, but thus far in this winter of carnage and destruction they had remained untouched. They were too far out of the way, closer to Aekir than to Torunn, and cradled by the long out-thrust spurs of the Thurian Mountains so that the war had passed them by and was a matter of tall tales and rumours, no more. A few of the survivors of Aekir’s fall had somehow made their way there and had been welcomed, holding forth to packed audiences in the inns of the town and chilling the listeners with tales of war and atrocity. Get out of here, the Aekirians said. Cross the Torrin river while there is still time. But the townsfolk, though they shuddered appropriately at the stories of horror the refugees had to tell, could not believe that the war would touch them. We are too out of the way, they said. Why would the Merduks want to come this far north when the armies are fighting way down on the plains about the capital? We will sit the war out and see what happens.
The Aekirians, shocked, broken travesties of the prosperous city-dwellers they had once been, merely shook their heads. And though they were invited to stay with genuine compassion by the folk of Berrona, they refused and resumed their weary flight west towards the shrinking Torunnan frontier.
But the people of the town were proved right, it seemed. As midwinter passed and the new year grew older they were indeed forgotten and left undisturbed. They hunted in the hills as they had always done in the dark months, bored fishing holes in the ice that crusted the Searil and ate into their stores of pickles and dried meat and fish and fruit. And the world left them alone.
“Horses, Arja! Look! Men on horses!”
The girl straightened, pressing her fists into the hollow of her back as though an old woman, though she was not yet fifteen. She shaded her eyes against the glare of sunlight on snow and peered out across the white hills to where her younger brother was pointing with quivering excitement.
“You’re imagining again, Narfi. I can’t see a thing.” She bent to knot the rawhide rope about the firewood she had gathered, dark hair falling about her face. But her brother Narfi tugged at her sleeve.
“Look now! I’ll bet you can see them now! Anyone could.”
Sighing, she slapped his hand away and stared again. A dark bristle of movement, like a spined snake, off in the distance. They were so far away it was impossible to tell if they were even moving. But they were definitely men on horses, a long column of them riding half in shadow, half in sunlight as the scudding winter clouds came and went before the wind. Even as she watched, Arja saw the fleeting sparkle as the sun glittered off a line of metal accoutrements. Lance points, helmets, breastplates.
“I see them,” she said lightly. “I see them now.”
“Soldiers, Arja. Are they ours, you think? Would they let me up on a horse?”
Arja abandoned the firewood and grasped her brother’s arm roughly. “We have to get home.”
“No! I want to watch. I want to wait for them!”
“Shut up, Narfi! What if they’re Merduks?”
At the word “Merduks” her brother’s round face clouded. “Dada said they wouldn’t come here,” he said faintly.
His sister dragged him away. When she glanced back over her shoulder she could see that they were bigger. The dark snake had broken up into hundreds of little figures, all glittering in long lines. And farther away-back where the cloud and the distance rendered all things hazy-she thought she saw more of them. It looked like the line of a faraway forest undulating along the slopes and hollows of the hill. An army. She had never seen one before but she knew instantly what it was. A big army. She gulped for air, prayers flitting through her head like a tumble of summer swallows. They would ride on past. No-one ever came to Berrona. They would pass by. But she had to tell her father.
That afternoon the column of horsemen rode into the town as though they were triumphal warriors returning home. There were hundreds of them, perhaps even thousands, all mounted on tall bay horses and clad in outlandish armour, their lance points gay with silk streamers and a pair of matchlock pistols at the pommel of every saddle. The silent townsfolk lined the streets and some of the riders waved as they rode past, or blew kisses to the more comely of the women. They came to a halt in front of the town hall and there the leading riders dismounted. The town headman was waiting for them on the steps of the hall, pale as snow but resolute. One of the more gorgeously caparisoned horsemen doffed his helm to reveal a brown smiling face, his eyes as dark as sloes.
“I bring greetings in the name of Aurungzeb my Sultan and the Prophet Ahrimuz, may he live for ever,” he cried in a clear, young voice. His Normannic was perfect, only a slight accent betraying its origins.
“Ries Millian, town headman,” the white-faced figure on the steps said, his voice wavering with strain. “Welcome to the town of Berrona.”
“Thank you. Now please have all the people in this town assemble in the square here. I have an announcement to make.”
Millian hesitated, but only for a moment. “What is it you wish of us,” he asked.
“You will find out. Now do as I say.” The Merduk officer turned and rapped out a series of commands to his men in their own language. The column of horsemen split up. Some two hundred remained in the square before the town hall whilst the rest splintered into groups of one or two dozen and set off down the side streets, the hooves of their horses raising a clattering din off the cobbles.
The headman was conferring with other men of the town in whispers. At last he stepped forward. “I cannot do as you say until I know what you intend to do with us,” he said bravely, the men behind him nodding at his words.
The Merduk officer smiled, and without a word he drew his tulwar. A flash of steel in the thin winter sunlight, and Ries Millian was on his knees, choking, his hands striving in vain to close his gaping windpipe. Blood on the cobbles, squirts and gouts of it steaming like soup. The headman fell on his side, twitched, lay still. In the crowd a woman shrieked, rushed forward and cast herself on to the body. The Merduk officer gestured impatiently and two of his men lifted her away, still shrieking. In full view of the crowd that had gathered, they stripped her, cutting the clothes from her body with their swords and slicing flesh from her limbs as they did so. When she was naked, they bent her over and one thrust his scimitar up between her legs with a grunt, until only the hilt of the weapon was visible. The woman went silent, collapsed, and slid off the end of the blade. The Merduks grinned and laughed. He who had killed her sniffed his bloody sword and made a face. They laughed again. The Merduk officer wiped his tulwar off on the headman’s carcase and turned to the paralysed huddle of men Millian had been conferring with.