Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (44 page)

"I hope, General, that you are not impugning the professionalism of my officers," Count Fournier, head of Torunnan Military Intelligence, snapped.

"Not at all, Count. But they cannot work miracles, and besides, I still need most of them where they are - keeping an eye on the Merduk main body. A larger scale of operation is needed to clean up the north-west. My command will be able to brush aside most resistance up there and reassure the remaining population that we have not abandoned them. That has to be worth doing."

"A bold plan," Colonel Rusio drawled. "When do you intend to move, General - and who will be left in command here in the capital?"

"I shall ride out within the week. And you, Colonel, will be left in charge while I am away. The Queen has graciously approved my recommendation that you be promoted to general." Here, Corfe took up a sealed scroll which had been lying unobtrusively before him, and tossed it to the new general in question.

"Congratulations, Rusio."

Rusio's face was a picture in astonishment. "I have no words to express - that is to say... Your Majesty, you have my undying gratitude."

"Do not thank us," Odelia said crisply. "General Cear-Inaf has stated that you merit such a promotion and so we approved it. Make sure you fulfil our faith in you, General."

"Majesty, I - I will do all in my power to do so." Up and down the table, older officers such as Willem watched the exchange with narrowed eyes, and while several officers leaned over in their seats to shake Rusio's hand, others merely looked thoughtful.

"Your job, Rusio," Corfe went on, "is to get the main body of the army back in fighting trim. I expect to be away a month or so. By the time I get back I want it ready to march forth again."

Rusio merely nodded. He was clutching his commission as though he were afraid it might suddenly be wrenched away from him. His lifetime's ambition realised in a moment. The prospect seemed to have left him dazed.

"A month is not long to march an army up to the Thurians and back again, General," Count Fournier said. "It must be all of fifty leagues each way."

"Closer to seventy-five," Corfe retorted. "But we will not have to walk all the way. Colonel Passifal."

The Quartermaster General nodded. "There are a score of heavy grain lighters tied up at the wharves as we speak. Each of them could hold eight or nine hundred men with ease. With the wind coming off the sea, as it does for weeks at this time of year, they'll be able to make a fair pace upstream, despite the current. And they are equipped with heavy sweeps for when the wind fails. I have spoken to their crews: they usually make an average of four knots up the Torrin at this time of year. General Cear-Inaf's command could be up among the foothills in the space of five or six days."

"How very ingenious," Count Fournier murmured. "And if the Merduks assault whilst the general and the cream of our army is off on his river-outing? What then?"

Corfe stared at the thin, sharp-bearded nobleman, and smiled. "Then there will have been a failure of intelligence, my dear Count. Your agents keep sending back despatches insisting that the Merduks are even more disorganised than we are at present. Do you distrust the judgement of your own men?"

Fournier shrugged slightly. "I raise hypotheses is all, General. In war one must prepare for the unexpected."

"I quite agree. I shall remain in close contact with what transpires here in the capital, never fear. If the enemy assaults Torunn in my absence, Rusio will hold them at bay before the walls and I will pitch into their rear as soon as I can bring my command back south. Does that hypothesis satisfy you?"

Fournier inclined his head slightly but made no reply.

There were no further objections to Corfe's plan, but the meeting dragged on for another hour as the High Command wrestled with the logistic details of feeding a large army in a city already swollen with refugees. When at last they adjourned, the Queen kept her seat and ordered Corfe to do likewise. The last of the remaining officers left and Odelia sat watching her young general with her chin resting on one palm whilst he rose and began pacing the spacious chamber helplessly.

"It was a good move," she told Corfe. "And it was necessary. You have taken the wind out of their sails."

"It was a political move," Corfe snarled back. "I never thought I'd see the day I handed over an army to a man I distrust, merely to gain his loyalty - loyalty which should be freely given, in a time like this."

"You never thought you'd see the day when you'd be in a position to hand out armies," she shot back. "At this level, Corfe, the politics of command are as important as any charge into battle. Rusio was a figurehead for the discontented. Now you have brought him into your camp, and defused their intrigues - for a while at least."

"Will he be that grateful, then?"

"I know Rusio. He's been marking time in the Torunn garrison for twenty years. Today you handed him his heart's desire on a plate. If you fall, he will fall now too - he knows that. And besides, he is not such a pitiful creature as you suppose. Yes, he will be grateful, and loyal too I think."

"I just hope he has the ability."

"Who else is there? He's the best of a mediocre lot. Now rest your mind over it. The thing is done, and done well."

She rose with her skirts whispering around her, the tall lace ruff making her face into that of a doll - were it not for the magnificent green eyes that flashed therein. She took his arm, halted his restless pacing.

"You should rest more, let subordinates do some of the running for a change. You are no longer an ensign, nor yet a colonel. And you are exhausted."

He stared at her out of sunken eyes. "I can't. I couldn't even if I wanted to."

She kissed him on the lips, and for a moment he yielded and bent into her embrace. But then the febrile restlessness took him again and he broke away.

"God's blood, Corfe," she snapped, exasperated, "you can't save the world all by yourself!"

"I can try, by God."

They glared at one another with the tension crackling in the air between them, until both broke into smiles in the same instant. They had shared memories now, intimacies known only to each other. It made things both easier and harder.

"We are quite a team, you and I," the Queen said. "Given half a chance I think we might have conquered the world together."

"As it is I'll be happy if we can survive."

"Yes. Survival. Corfe, listen to me. Torunna is at the end of its strength - you know that as well as, or better than I. The people have buried a king and crowned a queen in the same week - the first Queen ever to rule alone in our history. We are swamped with the survivors of Aekir and a third of the realm lies under the boot of the invader whilst the capital itself is in the front line."

Corfe held her eyes, frowning. "So?"

She turned away and began pacing the room much as he had done, her hands clasped before her, rings flashing as her fingers twisted them.

"So hear me out now and do not speak until I am finished.

"My son was a weak man, Corfe. Not a bad man, but weak. He did not have the necessary qualities to rule well - not many men do. This kingdom needs a strong hand. I have the ability - we both know it - to give Torunna that strong hand. But I am a woman, and so every step I take is uphill. The only reason I am tolerated on the throne is because there are no other alternatives at present. The cream of Torunna's nobility died in the King's Battle around their monarch. In any case, Torunnans have never set as much store upon bloodlines as have the Hebrionese, say. But Count Fournier is quite capable of dreaming up some scheme to take power out of my hands and invest it in some form of committee."

Unable to help himself, Corfe interrupted. "That son of a bitch? He'd have to get through the entire army to do it."

Odelia smiled with genuine pleasure, but shook her head. "The army would have no say in the matter. But I am taking the long road to my destination. Corfe, Torunna needs a King - that is the long and the short of it.

"I want you to marry me and take the throne."

Thunderstruck, he sank down onto a chair. There was a long pause during which the Queen looked increasingly irritated.

"Don't look as me as if I'd just grown an extra head! Think about it rationally!"

He found his voice at last. "That's ridiculous."

She clawed the air, eyes blazing furiously. "Open up your blasted mind, Corfe. Forget about your fears and prejudices - I know how humble your origins are, and I care not a whit. You have the ability to be a great king - more importantly, a great warleader. You could pull the country through this war -"

"I can't be a king. Great God lady, I even feel uncomfortable in shoes!"

She threw back her head and laughed. "Then decree that everyone must wear boots - or go barefoot! Put the petty rubbish out of your mind for a moment, and think about what you could accomplish."

"No - no. I am no diplomat. I could not negotiate treaties or - or dance angels on the head of a pin -"

"But you would have a wife who could." And here her voice was soft, her face grave as a mourner's.

"I would be there, Corfe, to handle the court niceties and the damn protocol. And you - you would have the army wholly your own."

"No - I don't understand. We are already there, aren't we? I have the army, you have the throne. Why change things?"

She leaned close. "Because it could be that others will change them for us. You may have won over Rusio today, but you pushed the rest of them even further into a corner. And that is when men are at their most dangerous. Corfe, there is no legal precedent in this kingdom for a queen to rule alone, and thus no legal basis."

"There's no law forbidding it, is there?" he asked stubbornly.

"I don't know - no-one does for sure. I have clerks rifling through the Court Archives as we speak, hoping to turn something up. The death of the King has shocked all the office-seekers for the moment - they glimpsed the cliff upon which this kingdom teeters. But sooner or later the shock will wear off, and my position will be challenged. And if they manage to curb my powers even slightly, there is a good chance they will be able to take the army away from you."

"So there it is."

"So there it is. You see now the sense of what I am suggesting? As King you would be untouchable."

He jumped to his feet, stalked across the room with his mind in a maelstrom. Himself a king - absurd, utterly absurd. He would be a laughing-stock. Torunna would be the joke of the world. It was impossible. He reeled away from even the contemplation of it.

And marriage to this woman. Oddly, that disturbed him more than the idea of the Crown. He turned and looked at her, to find that she was standing before the fire, staring into the flames as though waiting for something. The firelight made her seem younger, though she was old enough to be Corfe's mother. That old.

"Would it be so terrible to be married to me?" she asked quietly, and the insight of her question made Corfe start. She was a witch, after all. Could she read minds as well as everything else?

"Not so terrible," he lied.

"It would be a marriage of convenience," she said, her voice growing hard. "You would no longer have to come to my bed - I am beyond child-bearing age, so there would be no question of an heir. I do not ask you for love, Corfe. That is a thing for the poets. We are talking about a route to power, nothing more." And she turned her back on him, leaned her hands on the mantle as a man might.

Again, that pain in his heart when he looked at her, and imagined the golden hair turned raven, the green eyes grey. Ah, Heria. Lord God, I miss you.

He did not want to hurt this formidable yet vulnerable woman. He did not love her - doubted if he would ever love her or any other woman again. And yet he liked her, very much. More than that, he respected her.

He strode over to the fireplace, stood behind the Queen and placed his hands on hers so that they were standing one within the other. She leaned back into his body and their fingers intertwined, the ornate rings on hers digging into his flesh. Pain, yes. But he did not mind. Nothing good came without pain in this life. He knew that now.

"I would have you as a wife," he said, and in that moment he believed he meant it. "But the Kingship is too lofty a prize for me. I am not the stuff of royalty."

Odelia turned and embraced him, and when she drew back she looked strangely jubilant, as though she had won something.

"Time will tell," was all she said.

F
IFTY LEAGUES FROM
where Corfe and his Queen stood, the new winter camps of the Merduk army were almost complete. Tens of thousands of men were toiling here, as they had toiled ceaselessly in the days since the King's Battle. Their redeployment - it was not a withdrawal, or a retreat - entailed a massive labour. They had felled a fair-sized forest to raise a series of stockades that stretched for miles. They had dug ditches and set up thickets of abatis out to the west, all covered by dug-in batteries of artillery. They had erected tall watch-towers, created roads of corduroyed logs and set up their tents within the new defences. A veritable city had sprung up on the plains west of Ormann Dyke, the new roads leading to it thronged with troops coming and going, supply-waggons, artillery limbers, fast-moving couriers, and trudging gangs of Torunnan slaves serving as forced labour. Farther east, nestled within yet more lines of field-fortifications, a vast supply-depot had been set up, and boxes, sacks and barrels of food and ammunition were piled in lines half a mile long and twenty feet high. Crates of blankets and spare uniforms and tents were stacked to one side by the thousand. Waggons plied the bumpy log roads between the depot and the camps continuously, keeping the front-line troops fed and clothed. Perhaps ten square miles of the Torunnan countryside had been thus transformed into the largest and most populous armed camp in the world. Alhough Aurungzeb, Sultan of Ostrabar, was commander-in-chief of this mighty host, it now included large contingents from the Sultanates of Nalbeni, Ibnir and Kashdan. The Merduk states had set aside their differences and were finally combining to settle the issue with the Ramusians once and for all. They aimed now at nothing less than the conquest of all Normannia as far as the Malvennors, and had decided to stop there only because of the dread name of Fimbria.