And the last reason for the expedition. Corfe had to get out of Torunn, away from the court and the High Command, or he thought he would go quietly insane.
Marsch appeared out of one of the wide hatches in the deck of the freighter. He looked careworn and uneasy. It had taken some cajoling to get the tribesmen aboard the ships: such a means of transport was entirely inimical to them, and they feared for the welfare of their horses. Those who remained out of Corfe’s original five hundred had been galley slaves, and they associated ships with their degradation. The others had never before set eyes on anything afloat which was larger than a rowboat, and the cavernous holds they were now incarcerated within amazed and unsettled them.
Corfe could see that the big tribesman was averting his eyes from the riverbank that coursed smoothly past on the starboard side of the vessel. He gave an impression of deep distaste for everything maritime, yet he had greeted the news of their waterborne expedition without a murmur.
“The horses are calming down,” he said as he approached his commander. “It stinks down there.” His face was haunted, as if the smell brought back old memories of being chained to an oar with the lash scoring his back.
“It won’t be for long,” Corfe assured him. “Four or five days at most.”
“Bad grazing up north,” Marsch continued. “I am hoping we have enough forage with us. Mules carry it, but eat it too.”
“Cheer up, Marsch,” Andruw said, as irrepressible as ever. “It’s better than kicking our heels back in the city. And I for one would rather sit here like a lord and watch the world drift past than slog it up through the hills to the north.”
Marsch did not look convinced. “We’ll need one, two days to get the horses back into condition when they leave the”—his lips curled around the word—“the boats.”
“Don’t let Mirio hear you calling his beloved Seahorse a boat.” Andruw laughed. “He’s liable to turn us all ashore. These sailors—your pardon, these watermen—are a trifle touchy about their charges, like an old man with a young wife.”
That brought a grin to all their faces. Corfe detached himself from the banter and made his way aft to where Mirio was standing taking a stint at the helm. The river-captain nodded unsmilingly at him. “We’re making three knots, General. Not as fast as I would have hoped, but we’ll get you there.”
“Thank you, Captain. You mustn’t mind my men. They’re new to the river, and to ships.”
“Aye, well I’ll not pretend that I wouldn’t prefer to be shipping a hold full of grain instead of a bunch of seasick soldiers and screaming horses, but we must take what comes I suppose. There, we’re past the last of the river-batteries and the Royal naval yards.”
Corfe looked out towards the eastern bank. The shore—the river was big enough to warrant that name for its banks—was some to two cables away. The walls of Torunn came right down to the riverside here, protected by a series of squat towers which hid countless heavy cannon. Jutting out into the Torrin itself were dozens of jetties and wharves, most of them empty but a few busy with men unloading the small riverboats that plied back and forth across the river here. And sliding behind them now he could glimpse the Royal naval yards of Torunna. Two great ships, tall, ocean-going carracks, were in dry-dock there, their sides propped up by heavy beams, and hundreds of men swarmed over them in a confusion of wood and rope.
“How far is it to the sea?” Corfe asked, peering aft over the taffrail. Behind the Seahorse the remainder of the expedition’s vessels were in line astern, the foam flying from their bows as they fought upstream against the current.
“Some five leagues,” Mirio told him. “In times of storm the Torrin is brackish here, and sometimes ships are blown clear up the estuary from the Kardian.”
“So close? I had no idea.” Corfe had always thought of Torunn as a city divided by a river. Now he realised that it was a port on the fringe of a sea. That was something to remember. He must talk to Berza when the admiral returned to Torunn with the fleet. If the Merduks could transport armies by sea, then so could he.
T HE wind freshened through the day, and Mirio was able to report with visible satisfaction that they were making five knots. The capital had long disappeared, and the transports were moving through the heavily populated country which lay to its west. Farmers here reared cattle, planted crops and fished from the river in equal measure. But while the southern shore seemed prosperous and untouched by war, many houses and hamlets to the north were obviously deserted. Corfe saw livestock running wild, barn doors yawning emptily, and in a few places the blackened shells of burnt villages off on the horizon.
The freighters always moored for the night, for the risk of running into a sandbank in the dark was too great. Their practise was to moor the bows to stout trees onshore and drop a light anchor from the stern to keep the vessel from being swept into the bank by the current. The men could not be disembarked en masse, but on Marsch’s insistence Corfe saw to it that a few of the horses and mules were brought ashore in shifts all night and exercised up and down the riverbank. It was also an effective way of posting mobile sentries, and the duty was popular with the men who found their squalid quarters in the depths of the freighters less than congenial.
F OUR days went by. The Torrin arced in a curve until it began to flow almost directly north to south, and then it turned north-west towards its headwaters in the Thurian Mountains. They could see the Thurians on the northern horizon, still blanketed by snow. And to their left, or to larboard, the stern white peaks of the Cimbrics reared up, their heads lost in grey cloud. There were no more farms on the riverbank; this region had been sparsely settled even before the war. Now it seemed utterly deserted, a wilderness hemmed in by frowning mountains and bisected by the surging course of the young river.
The Torrin was barely two cables wide here, and occasionally during the fourth day they had felt the keel of the heavily laden freighter scrape on sunken sandbanks. In addition, the current had become stronger and they averaged barely two knots. On the morning of the fifth day Corfe finally decided to leave the ships behind, to the obvious relief of both soldiers and watermen, and the sixteen huge craft spent an anxious morning edging and nudging their way to the eastern bank before dropping every anchor they possessed in order to hold fast against the efforts of the river to shove them downstream.
What followed was a prolonged nightmare of mud and water and thrashing, cursing men and panicky animals. Each of the freighters possessed floating jetties which could be winched over the side to provide a fairly stable pathway to the shore, but they had not been designed for the offloading of two thousand horses and mules. The animals were hoisted out of the holds by tackles to the yardarms and set down wild-eyed and struggling upon the pitching jetties, with predictable results. By the time the last mule and man was ashore, and the army’s supplies were piled in long rows on dry land, it was far into the night. Two men had drowned and six horses had been lost, but Corfe counted himself lucky not to have lost more. The eastern bank was a sucking quagmire of mud and horse-shit for almost a mile, and the troops were hollow-eyed ghosts which staggered with weariness. But they were ashore and essentially intact, having covered over eighty leagues in five days.