T HE last of the horses had been settled down for the night and the army’s campfires were scattered about the dark earth like some poor counterfeit of the stars overhead. The ground was hard as stone here, a mile from the riverbank, which would make for easy marching, but the cold was difficult to keep at bay with a single blanket, even with one’s feet in the very embers of the fire. Strangely, Corfe felt less tyred than at any time since the King’s Battle, for all that he had snatched barely four hours’ sleep a night on the voyage upriver. It was the freedom of being out in the field with his own command. No more conferences or councils or scribbling scribes, just a host of exhausted, chilled men and animals encamped in the frozen wilds of the north.
The men had meshed together well. They had fought shoulder to shoulder in the King’s Battle, guzzled beer together in the taverns of Torunn and endured the unpleasantness of the river journey north. Now they were a single entity. Cimbric tribesmen, Fimbrian pikemen, Torunnan arquebusiers. There were still rivallries, of course, but they were healthy ones. Corfe sat by the campfire and watched them sleep uncomplainingly upon the hard earth, their threadbare uniforms sodden with mud—and realised that he loved them all.
Andruw picked his way through the fires towards him, then dug into his saddlebags. He handed his general a wooden flask.
“Have a snort, Corfe. It’ll keep the cold out. Compliments of Captain Mirio.”
Corfe unstoppered the neck and had a good swallow. The stuff seemed to burn his mouth, and blazed a fiery path all the way down his gullet. His eyes watered and he found himself gasping for air.
“I swear, Andruw, you’ll go blind one of these days.”
“Not me. I’ve the constitution of a horse.”
“And about as much sense. What about the powder?”
Andruw looked back across the camp. “We lost six barrels, and another eight are wet through. God knows when we’ll have a chance to dry them.”
“Damn. That eats into our reserves. Well, we’ve enough to fight a couple of good-sized engagements, but I want Ranafast’s men made aware that they can’t go firing it off like it’s free.”
“No problem.”
Two more figures came picking their way out of the flickering dark towards them. When they drew closer Corfe saw that it was the unlikely duo of Marsch and Formio. Formio looked as slight as an adolescent beside the bulk of the towering tribesman, his once dapper sable uniform now a harlequin chequer of mud. Marsch was clad in a greasy leather gambeson. He looked happier than he had for days.
“What is this, a meeting of the High Command?” Andruw asked derisively. “Here you two—have some of this. Privileges of rank.”
Formio and Marsch winced over the rough grain liquor much as Corfe had done.
“Well, gentlemen?” their commanding officer asked.
“We found those stores that were lost overboard,” Formio said, wiping his mouth. “They had come up against a sandbank two miles downstream.”
“Good, we need all the match we can get. Marsch?”
The big tribesman threw the wooden flask back to Andruw. “Our horses are in a better way than I thought, but we need two days to”—he hesitated, groping for the word—“to restore them. Some would not eat on the boats and are weak.”
Corfe nodded. “Very well. Two days, but no more. Marsch, in the morning I want you and Morin to saddle up a squadron of the fittest horses and begin a reconnaissance of the area, out to five miles. If you are seen by a small body of the enemy, hunt them down. If you find a large formation, get straight back here. Clear?”
Marsch’s face lifted in a rare smile. “Very clear. It shall be so.”
Andruw was still gulping out of Mirio’s flask. He sat, or rather half fell, on his saddle and stared owlishly into the campfire, leaning one elbow on the pommel.
“Are you all right?” Corfe asked him.
“In the pink.” His gaiety had disappeared. “Tyred though. Lord, how those boats did stink! I’m glad I’m a cavalryman and not a sailor.”
Marsch and Corfe reclined by the fire also. “Makes a good pillow, a war saddle does,” Andruw told them, giving his own a thump. “Not so good as a woman’s breast though.”
“I thought you were an artilleryman, not a horse-soldier,” Corfe baited him. “Forgetting your roots, Andruw?”
“Me? Never. I’m just on extended loan. Sit down, Formio, for God’s sake. You stand there like a graven image. Don’t Fimbrians get tyred?”
The young Fimbrian officer raised an eye-brow and then did as he was bidden. He shook his head when Andruw offered the wooden flask to him once again. Andruw shrugged and took another swig. Marsch, Formio and Corfe exchanged glances.
“Do you remember the early days at the dyke, Corfe? When they came roaring down from the hills and my guns boomed out, battery after battery? What a sight! What happened to those gunners of mine, I wonder? They were good men. I suppose their bones lie up around the ruins of the dyke now, in the wreckage of the guns.”
Corfe stared into the fire. The artillerymen of Ormann Dyke, Ranafast had told them, had been part of the thousand-man rearguard which had covered Martellus’s evacuation of the fortress. None of them had escaped.
A curlew called out, spearing through the night as though lost in the dark. They heard a horse neighing off along the Cathedraller lines, but apart from that the only sounds were the wind in the grass and the crackling of the campfires. Corfe thought of his own men, the ones he had commanded in Aekir. They were a long time dead now. He found it hard to even remember their faces. There had been so many other faces under his command since then.
“Soldiers die—that is what they do,” Formio said unexpectedly. “They do not expect to fall, and so they keep going. But in the end that is what happens. Men who have no hope of life, they either cease to fight or they fight like heroes. No-one knows why; it is the way of things.”
“A Fimbrian philosopher,” Andruw said, but smiled to take some of the mockery out of his words. Then his face grew sombre again. “I was born up here, in the north. This is the country of my family, has been for generations. I had a sister, Vanya, and a little brother. God alone knows where they are now. Dead, or in some Merduk labour camp I expect.” He tilted up the bottle again, found it was empty, and tossed it into the fire. “I wonder sometimes, Corfe, if at the end of this there will be anything left of our world worth saving.”
Corfe set a hand on his shoulder, his eyes burning. “I’m sorry, Andruw.”
Andruw laughed, a strangled travesty of mirth. His eyes were bright and glittering in the flame-light. “All these little tragedies. No matter. I hadn’t seen them in years. The life of a soldier, you know? But now that we are up here, I can’t help wondering about them.” He turned to the Fimbrian who sat silently beside him. “You see, Formio, soldiers are people too. We are all someone’s son, even you Fimbrians.”
“Even we Fimbrians? I am relieved to hear it.”
Formio’s mild rejoinder made them laugh. Andruw clapped the sable-clad officer on the back. “I thought you were all a bunch of warrior monks who dine on gunpowder and shit bullets. Have you family back in the electorates, Formio?”
“I have a mother, and a—a girl.”
“A girl! A female Fimbrian—just think of that. I reckon I’d wear my sword to bed. What’s she like, Formio? You’re amongst friends now, be honest.”