“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.”
“Yes,” Corfe said, “we were.”
“Are we doomed, do you think? Madmen fighting the inevitable?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care either, Andruw. All I know is how to fight. It’s all I’ve ever known. Perhaps one day it will be possible to come to some kind of terms with the Merduks. I hope so, for the sake of Varian and his family and thousands like them. If it does not prove so, however, I will fight the bastards until the day I die, and then my ghost will plague their dreams.”
Andruw laughed, and Corfe realised how much he had missed that sound of late.
“I’ll just bet it will. Merduk mothers will frighten children yet unborn with tales of the terrible Corfe and his red-clad fiends.”
“I hope so,” Corfe smiled.
“You think that snot-nosed boy was telling the truth about the Merduks marching on Charibon?”
“Possibly. It could be misinformation, but I doubt it. No, I think it’s time the army went hunting. The quickest road to the gap from Ormann Dyke lies two days’ march east of here. Tomorrow that’s where we’re going, with the Cathedrallers out in front under you and Marsch.”
“Any guesses on the size of the army we’re looking for?”
“Small enough for us to take on, I should think. The Sultan still believes the Torunnan military to be penned up in Torunn, licking their wounds, and Charibon has never been well defended. We may be outnumbered, but not by much, I hope.”
“We can’t stay out too long. We carry only enough rations for another three weeks.”
“We’ll go on half rations if we have to. I will not allow them to send an army through the gap. I’ve no more love for the Ravens of Charibon than the next man, but I’m damned if I’ll let the Merduks waltz over Normannia like they owned it already. Besides, I have this feeling, Andruw. I think the enemy is slowing down. We’ve blunted their edge. If they find they have to fight for every yard of Torunnan soil, then they may end up content with less of it.”
“An open battle will do the men good.”
“This is war we’re talking about, Andruw. A battle that will kill and maim great numbers of the men.”
“You know what I mean, Corfe. They need to taste blood again. Hell, so do I.”
“All right, I take your point.” Corfe turned his horse around with a nudge of his knee. “Time to get some sleep.”
“I think I’ll stay here and think a while,” Andruw said.
“Don’t think too much, Andruw. It doesn’t do any good. Believe me, I know.” And Corfe kicked his mount into a canter, leaving Andruw to stare after him.
A LBREC’S cell was sparse and cold, but not unbearably so. To a monk who had suffered through a Ramusian novitiate it seemed perfectly adequate. He had a bed with a straw pallet which was surprisingly free of vermin, a small table and rickety chair and even a stub of candle and a tinderbox. There was one small window, heavily barred and set so high up in the wall that he had no chance of ever seeing out of it, but at least it provided a modicum of light.
He shared his cell with sundry spiders and an emaciated rat whose hunger had made it desperate. It had nibbled at Albrec’s ears in the first nights he had been here, but now he knew to set aside for it some morsel of the food which was shoved through a slot in the door every day, and it had come to await the approaching steps of the turnkey more eagerly than he. The food was not appetising—black bread and old cheese and sometimes a bowl of cold soup which had lumps of gristle bobbing in it—but Albrec had never been much of an epicure. Besides, he had much to occupy his mind.
Every so often his solitary reveries were interrupted by a summons from the Sultan, and he would be hauled out of the cell, to the grief and bewilderment of the rat, and taken to the spacious chambers within which Aurungzeb had set up his household. The eunuchs would fetter him ceremoniously—more for effect than anything else, he thought—and he would stand in a discreet corner awaiting the pleasure of the Sultan. Sometimes he was left forgotten for hours, and was able to watch with avid fascination the workings of the Merduk court. Sometimes Aurungzeb was dining with senior army officers, or venerable mullahs, and Albrec would be called upon to debate with them and expound his theory on the common origin of the Saint and the Prophet. The Sultan, it seemed, liked to shock his guests with the little infidel. Not only were Albrec’s words, often translated by the western concubine, Heria, inflammatory and blasphemous, but his appearance was agreeably bizarre. He was a court jester, but he knew that his words and theories shook some of the men who listened to them. Several of the mullahs had demanded he be executed at once, but others had argued with him as one might with a learnt adversary—a spectacle that Aurungzeb seemed to find hugely entertaining.
He thought about Avila sometimes, and about Macrobius, and could not help but wonder how things were in the Torunnan capital. But for some reason he thought mostly about the cavalry officer he had once briefly encountered outside the walls of Torunn. Corfe Cear-Inaf, now the commander-in-chief of all the Torunnan armies. The Sultan seemed obsessed by him, though to the Merduks he was known only as the leader of the scarlet cavalry. They had not yet learnt his name. Albrec gained the impression that the Merduk army in general existed in a state of constant apprehension, awaiting the descent of the terrible red horsemen upon them. Hence the current emphasis on fortification.