What seemed like hours passed, though they had no way of telling the passage of time, and their estimation of what constituted hours and minutes seemed to have been skewed and twisted until all frames of reference were useless in this new universe.
The screams died away. No-one slept. They sat with their arms about one another and stared at the black doors, awaiting their opening.
And at last the clumps and scrapes as their turn came and the portals of the town hall swung wide once more. Arja was almost relieved. She felt that she had been stretched so taut in the black time of waiting that soon she must snap like a green stick bent too far.
The selection procedure was swifter this time. A shadow which reeked of sweat and beer and urine seized Arja’s arm and drew her outside into the hellish light of the bonfires. There were waggons parked in the square filled brimfull of naked women who hid their faces with their hair. Some had blood matting them. A few bodies, con torted out of all humanity, sprawled upon the cobbles with their innards piled like glistening heaps of mashed berries around them. In one of the bonfires what looked like the trunk of a small tree burnt, but the sickening stink of its burning was not that of charring wood.
Arja’s captor plucked at her clothes. He was a small man, and to her surprise he was not dark-skinned or dark-eyed. He looked like a Torunnan and when he spoke it was in good Normannic.
“Take them off. Quickly.”
She did as she was bidden. All over the square women were undressing whilst a crowd of several hundred men watched. When she had stripped down to her undershirt she could go no further. The numbness was eaten through and she felt a moment of pure, incapacitating panic. The Torunnan-looking Merduk chuckled, swigged from a bottle and then ripped her undershirt from her back so that she stood naked before him.
Some of his comrades gathered with him, eating her up with their eyes. When she tried to cover herself with her hands they slapped them away. They were laughing, drunk. Some had their breeches unbuttoned and their members lolled and shone wetly in the firelight. Again, the panic beat great dark wings about Arja’s head. Again, a sense of the unreality of it all.
The soldiers spoke together in the Merduk tongue, as easy and unforced as men who have met in an inn after a long day’s work. Two of them grabbed her by the arms. Two more forced her knees apart. And then the little Torunnan-like trooper took his bottle and thrust it up between Arja’s thighs.
She screamed at the agony, struggled impotently in the grasp of the four soldiers who held her. The small trooper worked the bottle up and down. When he pulled it out at last the glass was red and shining. He winked at his fellows and then took a long draught from the bloody neck, smacking his lips theatrically.
They bent her over a pile of broken furniture, splintered wood piercing her breasts and belly. Then one mounted her from behind and began thrusting into her torn insides. There was only the pain, the blooming firelight, the hands grasping hers so tightly they were numb. Something soft was pushed against her lips and she pulled her head back from the smell, but her hair was grasped and a voice spoke in Normannic: open up. She took the thing into her mouth and it grew large and rigid and was pushed back down her throat until she gagged. They thrust into her from both directions. Warm liquid cascaded down her naked back and the men cursed and laughed. Liquid pulsed into her mouth, salty and foul. The thing in there softened again and slid out between her lips. She vomited, the taste of her bile somehow cleaner, though it scalded her lips and tongue.
The hands released her and she slumped on to the hard cobbles. They were cold and wet beneath her. It is over, she thought. It is done.
Then another knot of soldiers strode up, pushing aside the first group, and she was seized upright once again.
T HE dawn air was full of the smell of burning, the blue winter horizon smudged with smoke. The mobs of horsemen took their time to rub down their mounts, assemble in the square and root in their saddlebags for breakfast. Finally a series of orders was shouted out and the troopers mounted. Their horses were burdened with wineskins, flapping chickens, bolts of cloth and clinking sacks. Their officers were already outside the town, on a hill to the south. With them was a gaggle of splendidly accoutred senior commanders from the Merduk main body, their banner-bearers holding up bravely flapping silk flags in the freshening wind.
Finally the heavily burdened cavalry formed up and filed out of the gutted wreck of Berrona. Some were sullen and heavy-headed. A few were nodding in the saddle, and yet others seemed to be still drunk with the excesses of the night. They pointed their horses’ noses to the south, where less than two miles away a vast Merduk camp sprawled across the land. They rode with the rising sun an orange blaze in their left eyes and the town smouldering behind them. Near the rear of their meandering and straggling column half a dozen waggons trundled and jolted along, drawn by mules, cart-horses and plodding oxen. A conglomeration of naked, bleeding and sodden humanity crouched in the waggons, silent as statues. Around them some of the soldiers of the Sultan, light at heart, began singing to welcome the dawn of the new day.
Arja had her head bent into her knees to shut out the world. She and the other women of the town—those who had survived—huddled together for warmth and comfort in the beds of the waggons. Some of them were sobbing soundlessly, but most were dry-eyed and seemed almost to be elsewhere, their minds far away. Thus it hardly registered upon them when the Merduks stopped singing.
The waggon halted. Men were shouting. Arja lifted her head.
The Merduk column had coalesced into a formless crowd of mounted men who milled about in disorder. What was happening? Some of the Merduks were throwing their garnered loot from their saddles in panic. Others were fumbling for the matchlocks at their pommels. Officers were yelling, frantic.
Then Arja saw what had caused the transformation. On the hillside behind the burnt-out wreck of Berrona a long line of men had appeared, thousands of them. They were still a mile away, but they were coming on at a run. Black-clad soldiers, some carrying guns, others with shouldered pikes. They advanced with the drilled remorselessness of some terrible machine.
“The army is here!” one of the women called out gladly. “The Torunnans have come!” A nearby Merduk trooper hacked her furiously about the head with his scimitar and she toppled over the side of the waggon.
A few minutes of chaos as the Merduks hovered, indecisive. Then the whole body of cavalry took off to the south in a muck-churning, frenzied gallop. The waggons were left behind along with a litter of discarded plunder.
It was painful to regain interest in the world, almost like coming alive again in some agonising wrench of rebirth. Arja raised herself to her bloody knees the better to see what was happening. Tears coursed down her face.
The ground under the wheels of the waggons seemed to shake with a subterranean thunder. It was both a noise and a physical sensation. The Torunnans were bypassing the burnt-out streets of the town, their formation dividing neatly and with no loss of speed. But they would never catch up with the fleeing Merduk cavalry—they were all on foot. Arja felt a hot blaze of pure hatred flare up in her heart. The Merduks would get away. They had killed her father and her brother, and they would get away.
The thunder in the ground grew more intense. It was an audible roar now, as though a furious river were coursing under the stones and heather of the hills.
— And then they burst into view with all the sudden fury of an apocalypse. A great mass of cavalry erupted in a long line from behind a ridge to the south, at right angles to the fleeing Merduks. Arja heard a horn call ring out clear and free above the awesome rumble of the horses. The riders were armoured in scarlet, and singing as they came.