Corfe turned to Ranafast, who still sat his horse nearby.
“Am I a bloody fool, Ranafast? Am I going soft?”
The veteran smiled. “Maybe, lad. Maybe you are just becoming something of a politician. You know damn well those bastards are going to try and rejoin their comrades—they’ve nowhere else to go. But if they make it, the news that the Torunnans treat their prisoners well will spread like a wildfire in high summer. If the Merduk levy thinks it will receive quarter when it lays down its arms, then it may not fight quite so hard.”
“That’s what I was hoping, I suppose, though I’m still not convinced of it. But I’ve come to a conclusion, Ranafast: we can’t win this war through force alone. We need guile also.”
“Aye, we do. Doesn’t taste too good in the mouth though, does it?” And Ranafast wheeled his horse away to rejoin the army column. Corfe sat his own mount and watched the freed Merduks running madly up into the foothills until they were mere dots against the snow-worn bulk of the Thurian Mountains on the horizon before them. For a crazed, indecipherable moment, he almost wished he were running with them.
C ATHEDRALLER scouts guided them in that night. The weather had deteriorated into a face-stinging drizzle which was flung at them by winds off the mountains, but the wind would at least muffle the sound of their marching feet and clinking equipment. The men had their heads down and were dragging their feet by that time, and in the blustery darkness half a dozen pack-mules had somehow broken free from their handlers and been lost, but in the main the army was intact, the column a trifle ragged perhaps, but still whole. Andruw had found a level campsite some five miles north of the town. There was a stream running through it, a boon to both horses and men, but as the weary soldiers filed into the bivouac their heads lifted and they peered intently at the southern horizon. There was an orange glow flickering in the sky there. Berrona was burning.
Andruw greeted Corfe unsmilingly, his face a pale blur under his helm marked only by two black holes for eyes and a slot for a mouth.
“Their cavalry entered the town several hours ago,” he said. “They took the men off to the south. Now they’re having a little fun with the women.”
Corfe rode up close until their knees were touching. He set a hand on Andruw’s shoulder.
“We can’t do it—not tonight. The men are done up. We’ll hit them at dawn, Andruw.”
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
T HE 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.
“H ORSES, 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.