Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (89 page)

A commotion down on the wharves. Two riders had come galloping through the gate and had come to a rearing halt before the xebec, scattering mariners and panicking the gulls. A man and a woman dismounted, tawny with dust, and, without ceremony or introduction, they ran up the gangplank hand in hand, leaving their foam-streaked and blowing mounts standing. Hawkwood, jolted out of his reverie, shouted for the master-at-arms and met them at the rail.

"What the hell is this? This is a King's Ship. You can't -"

The woman threw back her richly embroidered hood and smiled at him. "Hello Richard. It has been a long time."

It was Jemilla.

Part Two

The
S
OLDIER
K
ING

But I've said goodbye to Galahad,

And am no more the Knight of dreams and show:

For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,

And my killed friends are with me where I go...

- Siegfried Sassoon

Nine

G
ADERION HAD BEGUN
life as a timber-built blockhouse built on a stream-girt spur of the Thurian mountains. The Fimbrians had stationed troops there to police the passage of the Torrin Gap and levy tolls on the caravans that passed through from west to east, or east to west. When their Empire fell apart the station was abandoned, and the only relic left of their presence was the fine road they had constructed to speed the passage of their armies.

The Torunnans had built a series of staging posts in the Gap, and around these had grown up a straggling network of taverns and livery stables that catered for travellers. But these had withered away over the years, first of all in the retrenchment which had followed the crisis of the Merduk Wars, and then in the years after the Great Schism, when trade between Torunna and Almark had all but died out.

More recently, a Merduk army had begun work on a fortress in the Gap, before suffering defeat in the Battle of Berrona. King Corfe, in the years following Armagedir, had had the entire region surveyed, and at the point where the road was pinched in a narrow valley between the buttresses of the two mountain chains, he had had a hilltop spur levelled, and on its summit had constructed a large fortress-complex which in size at least would come to rival long-lost Ormann Dyke. In the subsequent years the defences had been extended for almost half a league, to command the entire pass, and Gaderion now consisted of three separate fortifications, all connected by massive curtain walls.

To the south-east was the Donjon, on its steep spur of black rock. This was a squat citadel with walls fully fifty feet thick to withstand siege guns. There was a spring within its perimeter, and below it bomb-proofs had been hewn out of the living gutrock to house a fair-sized army, and enough supplies to sustain them for at least a year. Here also were the administrative offices of the garrison, and the living quarters of the commanding officer. In the midst of these was a taller feature, a blunt spike of rock which in the youth of the world had been a plug of molten lava within the walls of a volcano. The walls had worn away, leaving this ominous fist of basalt standing alone. There had been a pagan altar on its summit when Corfe's engineers had first surveyed it. Now it had been partially hollowed out with immense, costly, dangerous labour, and provided a last-ditch refuge within the Donjon itself, and a lofty look-out giving a bird's-eye view of the entire Torrin river valley and the mountains on either side. Light guns had been sited in embrasures in its impregnable sides, and they commanded every approach. Men called this ominous-looking tower of stone the Spike.

The Donjon and the Spike loomed over the flat-floored valley, which was perhaps three quarters of a mile wide. The soil here was fertile and dark, watered by the chill stream which hundreds of miles to the south and east grew into the Torrin River, and the soldiers of the garrison tended plots of land in the shadow of the fortress despite the mountain-swift growing season and the killer frosts of the winter. There were currently twenty-eight thousand men stationed at Gaderion. Many of them had wives who lived nearby, and a scattering of stone and log houses dotted the valley east of the walls. Officially this was frowned upon, but in practice it was discreetly tolerated, else the separation between the men and their families would have been well-nigh unsupportable.

Square in the middle of the valley was a low, circular knoll some fifty feet high, and on this had been built the second of Gaderion's fortresses. The Redoubt was a simple square structure with triangular casemates at each corner to catch any foes who reached the walls in a deadly crossfire. The Northern Road ran through it under the arches of two heavily-defended gates, and before these gates were two redans, each mounting a battery of guns. Within the walls were housed the stables of the Royal couriers who kept Gaderion in touch with the larger world, and it was here also that the main sally force of the fortress was billeted, some eight thousand men, mainly cavalry.

The last of Gaderion's fortresses was the Eyrie. This had been tacked on like a swallow's nest to the steep cliffs of the Candorwir, the mountain whose peak overlooked the valley on its western side. The stone of Candorwir had been hollowed out to accomodate three thousand men and fifty great guns, and the only way they could be reached was by a dizzy single-track mule-path which had been blasted out of the very flank of the mountain. The guns of the Eyrie and the Donjon formed a perfect crossfire that transformed the floor of the Torrin valley into a veritable killing ground in which each feature had been mapped and ranged. The gunners of Gaderion could, if they wished, shoot accurately at these features in the dark, for each gun had a log-board noting the traverse and elevation of specified points on the approach to the walls.

The three fortresses, formidable in themselves, had a weak link common to all. This was the curtain wall. Forty feet high and almost as thick, it ranged in strange tortuous zig-zags across the valley floor, connecting the Donjon to the Redoubt and the Redoubt to the cliffs at the foot of the Eyrie. Sharp-angled bartizans pocked its length every three hundred yards, and four thousand men were stationed along it, but strong though it seemed, it was the weakest element of the defences. Only a few guns were sited in its casemates, as Corfe had long ago decided that it was the artillery of the three fortresses which would protect the wall, not the wall itself. If it were overrun, then those three would still dominate the valley too thoroughly to allow the passage of troops. To force the passage of the Torrin Gap, an attacker would have to take all of them; the Donjon, the Redoubt, and the Eyrie. All told, twelve thousand men manned their defences, which left a field army of sixteen thousand to conduct sorties. Once, this had seemed more than ample, but General Aras, officer commanding Gaderion, was no longer so sure.

S
OME SIX LEAGUES
to the north and west of Gaderion the narrow, mountain-girt gap opened out into the wider land of the Torian Plains beyond, and in the tumbled foothills which marked the last heights of the mountains, a line of turf and timber structures signalled the beginning of the Thurian Line, the easternmost redoubt of the Second Empire. Here, with the conscripted labour of thousands, the forces of Himerius had reared up a great clay and wood barrier, part defensive wall, part staging post. It meandered over the grassy hills like a monstrous serpent, bristling with stockades and gabions and revetments. There were few heavy guns stationed along it, but huge numbers of men patrolled its unending length, and to the rear they had constructed sod-walled towns and roads of crushed stone. The smoke of their fires could be seen for miles, an oily smudge on the hem of the sky, and their shanty-towns were surrounded by muddy quaqmires through which columns of troops trudged ceaselessly, and files of cavalry plunged fetlock-deep. Here were garrisoned men of a dozen different countries and kingdoms reaching from Fulk in the far west to Gardiac up in the heights of the Jafrar. Knights of Perigraine, looking like chivalric relics on their magnificently caparisoned chargers. Clanking gallowglasses from Finnmark with their greatswords and broadaxes. Almarkan cuirassiers with pistols strapped to their saddles. Knights Militant, as heavily armoured as the Perigrainians, but infinitely more businesslike. And Inceptines, no longer monks in habits, but now tonsured warriors on destriers wielding maces and clad in black iron. They led ragged columns of men who wore no armour, wielded no weapons, but who were the most feared of all Himerius's soldiers. The Hounds of God. When a troop of these trotted down one of the muddy garrison-streets, everyone, even the hulking gallowglasses, made room for them. The Torunnans had yet to meet these things in battle.

A savage, low-intensity warfare had flickered over this disputed ground between the two defence-lines now for several months. Each side sent out patrols to gather intelligence on the other, and when they met no quarter was asked or given. Scarcely two sennights previously, a Torunnan flying column of a thousand cuirassiers had slipped through the foothills to the north-east of the Thurian Line undetected, and had burned the bridges over the Tourbering River a hundred miles to the north. However, on their way back the Himerians had been ready for them, and barely two hundred of the heavy horsemen had survived to see the walls of Gaderion again.

A
SMALL GROUP
of lightly armed Torunnan cavalry reined in as evening drew on and prepared to bed down for the night on a low bluff within sight of the endless skein of lights that was the Thurian Line. They had been out of Gaderion three days on a reconnaissance, riding the entire length of the enemy fortifications, and were to return to barracks in the morning. Half their number stood guard while the rest unsaddled, rubbed down and fed their mounts, and unrolled their damp bedrolls. When this had been done, the dismounted troopers remained standing and watchful as their comrades did the same. Five dozen tired, grimy men who wanted nothing more than to get through the night and back to their bunks, a wash, and a hot meal. The Torunnans were forbidden to light fires when between the lines, and thus their camps had been chill and cheerless, their food ration scarcely less so. By the time the horse-lines were pegged out in the wooded ground at the foot of the bluff and the animals hobbled and deep in nosebags, it had become almost fully dark, the last light edging down behind the jagged sentinel-bulk of Candorwir behind them, and the seven stars of the Scythe bright and stark in a cloudless night sky.

The troopers' young officer, a lanky youth with straw-coloured hair, stood watching the line of lights glittering on the world perhaps ten miles away to the north and west. They arced across the land like a filigree necklace, too delicate to seem threatening. But he had seen them up close, and knew that the Himerians decorated those ramparts with Torunnan heads mounted on cruel spikes. The bodies they left out as carrion within gunshot of the walls.

"All quiet, sir," the troop-sergeant told his officer, a shadow among other, faceless shadows.

"All right, Dieter. Turn yourself in as well. I reckon I'll watch for a while."

But the sergeant did not move. He was staring down at the Thurian Line like his officer. "Funny, behind the walls it's lively as an ant's nest someone has poked with a stick, but there's not hide nor hair of the bastards out here. Not one patrol! I haven't seen the like, and I've been stationed up here these past four years."