The Belly of the Bow (18 page)

Instead, he followed the trail the raiders had left, down the hill towards the next village.

 

Not a good day for making the short but troublesome crossing from Shastel to Scona. Gorgas Loredan, usually a good sailor, had to admit to being a trifle wobbly and green as he walked down the plank from the sloop
Butterfly
and gratefully set foot on the Traders’ Dock.

Gorgas Loredan was always glad to be home, but on this occasion he could feel the relief rushing through him, the way blood starts to flow again through a numb leg when you wake up and find you’ve been lying on it. He’d spent a more than usually unpleasant couple of days in the hectemore country, fought an unanticipated battle and brought back with him a couple of problems that he suspected would turn out to be awkward.

One of these problems had tried his best to die on him during the night. Master Juifrez’ relatively straightforward wound had turned bad, and the wretched man was in the grip of a thoroughly melodramatic fever. Field surgery with a hot knife, raw spirit and a bread-mould poultice had kept him alive, but he still looked awful, and he appeared to have about as much interest in staying alive as Gorgas had in Colleon religious poetry. He could understand that, in a way - a man who’d managed to make such a comprehensive mess of his life and his nation’s affairs might be forgiven for deciding to call it a day. But no businessman likes having the stock die on him; so as soon as the
Butterfly
tied up, a runner was sent off to fetch a doctor. Death was a luxury not permitted to the prisoners of the Bank of Scona.

As the patient was carried off on a door by the doctor’s orderlies, Gorgas shouldered his kitbag and started to walk up the Promenade. He hadn’t got far when a runner skittered to a halt beside him and tugged on his sleeve.

‘Urgent message,’ the boy panted, without waiting to catch his breath. ‘There’s an enemy raiding party loose in the hills around Horn Point. They burnt down a village and killed all the people. The Director wants you to get out there as quick—’

‘Horn Point,’ Gorgas repeated. ‘You’re sure about that?’

The boy nodded. ‘My cousins live up there,’ he said, as if this was somehow definitive proof. ‘Sounds like the village they burnt was Briora; that’s just on the Point, straight down the hill from Horn Rock. I’d say they must have landed in the cove.’

Gorgas frowned. ‘Never been there,’ he said. ‘Who did you get this from?’

‘A kid ran in from there, he’d seen it happening. I talked to him before I came here. They were about to send someone else when your ship was spotted.’

‘That’s just as well, then. Did the boy say how many men?’

The runner shook his head. ‘Just that there were a lot of them, probably more than a hundred.’ He stopped to wipe away the rain that was running from his plastered-down fringe into his eyes. ‘Proper soldiers, he said, in armour. Some of the village men tried to fight them, and then they got really nasty and started smashing up everything in sight.’

Gorgas took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. Run up to the Bank, get a message sent to the Director that I’m on my way and I’m taking the five platoons of the Tenth that’re on standby down here at the Dock. Say that I want the whole of the Seventh called in and sent after me as soon as possible. Then meet me back at the Dock barracks gate - you know where that is?’ The boy nodded. ‘I’ll need a guide, and you sound like you know the way. Are you on for that?’

‘You bet.’ The boy was grinning.

‘That’s good, then. You get on, and make sure you get the message straight.’

Fortunately, Gorgas’ staff who’d come back with him on the
Butterfly
were mostly still hanging round the Dock. He caught hold of one of his runners and sent him to round them up, and dispatched another runner to the barracks with the mobilisation orders and the message that he’d be following straight away.

Briora village, near Horn Point; as he forced his pace along the Dock towards the barracks, he tried not to think about it.
I knew I shouldn’t have let him go swanning off like that; if anything’s happened to him
. . . The rational part of his mind suggested that this was sheer folly. There had never been any reason to assume that the back country around Horn Point was a dangerous place to be; and besides, if Bardas Loredan could survive the sack of Perimadeia, there was a fair chance he’d be able to cope with a Shastel raiding party. There had never been any question of keeping Bardas cooped up in Scona Town; he wasn’t a prisoner, he’d only have fretted and made trouble. He’d done everything he could for the man. It was pointless blaming himself. Yes. But. When it’s family, you can’t help blaming yourself.

The guard captain met him at the gate. ‘We can be ready in an hour,’ he said, fumbling with the hooks of his mailshirt. His hair was uncombed, and under his armour he was wearing an old shirt with frayed cuffs -
probably caught him in the middle of his dinner
, Gorgas thought with a smile.
Food; gods, yes, I remember food. It’s something that happens to other people
. ‘But I haven’t got a ship. What about the one you came in on?’

‘The
Butterfly
,’ Gorgas said. ‘Good idea. Send a runner to find the captain, get him to round up the crew and be ready to leave in an hour. We can get three platoons on board at a push; choose who you want to take the other two and tell him to find himself some transport.’ He looked up at the sky; foul weather for sailing round the island. He didn’t know Horn Cove, but he guessed it’d be tricky work bringing a sloop in anywhere on that side. Still, the captain of the
Butterfly
had seemed like a reliable man. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Get me a map of the area while you’re at it, and see if any of your men know the place. We don’t know how many of them there are and we don’t want to have to waste time pussyfooting about, so some local knowledge’ll be very handy.’

Damn you, brother
, he said to himself as he sat down in the porch to catch his breath and clear his head for a few precious minutes,
why must trouble keep following you like the cat and the farmer’s wife?
But in some deep and rather unseemly way, he had to admit, what he was mostly feeling was excitement, almost pleasure at the thought of rushing to his brother’s rescue. At very bad times, when he caught himself wondering what sort of a man he must be to have done some of the things he’d done, had to do, over the years, he always pulled himself out of it by reminding himself that someone who really cared about family, as he did, couldn’t really be a bad man. After all, what else was there, when you came right down to it? Pulling Bardas out of the fire back in Perimadeia had been a good thing to do; and now here he was doing the same sort of thing all over again. Well, it had to count for something. Saving a brother was sort of like balancing the books.

Bardas can look after himself
, insisted his rational voice.
He was a professional soldier, remember, one of Uncle Maxen’s men, not to mention all those years of swordfighting for a living. You’d better hope he’s left you a few of the enemy
. That’d be right, he reflected; and then he thought of what the boy had said, about some of the villagers trying to make a fight of it, and that was when the trouble had started.
Mess
, he thought bitterly,
and melodrama. Oh, why can’t people stay where they’re put and do as they’re damn well told?

 

Short, sharp and nasty, the Dean of Lay Works had said; a fast response, hitting them right between the shoulder blades where they least expect it, then out again and home before they know what’s happening. It had sounded fair enough when the Dean was explaining it, but between there and here something would appear to have gone wrong.

Master Renvaut, officer commanding the Scona task force, sat down on a fallen tree and scraped some of the thick crust of mud off the sole of his boot with the blade of his halberd. Maybe it was the weather, or the fact that they’d scrambled into action the moment the news of the disaster at Primen reached Chapter, without time for proper preparations and planning. Maybe it was all his fault. Didn’t matter, particularly. The only thing that mattered now was getting out of this mess, before he managed to make Juifrez Bovert look like a strategic genius in comparison.

‘Nine dead,’ the colour-sergeant reported, his voice completely neutral, ‘four wounded, one of ’em’s cut up pretty badly but the other three’ll be all right.’

Renvaut nodded; it was better than he’d expected. He still had sixty-five men on their feet and presumed fit for duty. ‘Fall them in,’ he said, and he grunted with pain as he stood up. ‘I’ve had enough of this. We’re going back.’

It had stopped raining, and there were even a few scraps of blue scattered across the sky, like flotsam on a beach after a storm. A bit of warmth, to dry out their sodden clothes, maybe even dry up the mud so that every step they took wasn’t quite such an effort; a bit of warmth and sunlight might make everything seem better. There was still a chance they’d get out of this mess in one piece, and be home in Shastel by this time tomorrow.

Assuming, of course, that the boats were still there, and that they didn’t sink to the bottom of the sea on the way back. Ah, but all human life rests uncomfortably on a fragile bed of assumptions, interposed between hope and fear like the thin skin of a boat; or so they’d told him in Cloister. Out here it sounded both annoyingly glib and depressingly true. So much for the benefits of a first-class education.

Back the way they’d come? He didn’t fancy the idea. He was all too aware that he was painfully behind on his schedule; the rain and the unexpected resistance had seen to that. The Scona armed forces were supposed to be mostly made up of light infantry and archers, quickly mobilised and able to move at speed. In theory, that oughtn’t to be a problem, since two platoons of trained, disciplined heavy infantry should be capable of ramming its way through the sort of opposition they’d be likely to encounter. But somehow this didn’t seem like a good day for fighting. Being an educated man and a member of a moderately good Poor family, he didn’t believe in luck, but he’d been taught the basics of the operation of the Principle, which as far as he’d been able to make out was nothing more than luck in a fancy hat. So; the Principle wasn’t running his way today, so perhaps it’d be a sensible idea to go back the other way, the one marked in red on his map and annotated as Alternative Route. Besides, the thought of trudging back through those dreary and now rather horrible villages was infinitely depressing. He fished in his rain-soaked satchel for the map, and found a clammy, sticky ball of rawhide, already starting to swell. As the men shuffled into their ranks he spread the map out on the tree-trunk and tried to make some sense of it.

As luck (or the Principle) would have it, the red ink was slightly more watertight than the black, and he was able to trace the line of Alternative Route with his fingertip. If he was where he thought he was (another assumption to add to the fragile bed), then the path lay above the main road they’d come along, under the brow of the mountain ridge, curling up and round through yet another poxy little village until it came back to the beachhead at the little cove. He nodded, dislodging drops of rainwater from the channel formed by the curled-over seam of his visor; they fell on the map and added a couple more red smudges. Just as well he didn’t believe in omens, either.

His feet hurt, and his wet stockings were rubbing his heels into nagging blisters. The stitching of his left boot was just beginning to fray, and the impact of an arrow on the left cheek-piece of his helmet had creased the metal so that it grated just behind the ear, catching him every time he turned his head. The rain had raised the grain in the shaft of his halberd, and a splinter had lodged under one of his fingernails. Nothing about him felt comfortable or right. This wasn’t the way it was meant to be. He gave the order to move on. For twenty minutes or so an old, crazy dog followed them, barking wildly, running up and down the line and prancing away with its ears back, as if cringing away from some anticipated attack; but nobody had the energy or the enthusiasm to aim a kick at it. Eventually it lost interest and lay down in a pool of muddy water, its tongue lolling out and its tail wagging furiously, giving the impression that it could see something tremendously amusing.

 

The second village had looked much like the first, except that there hadn’t been any boats. Instead, the litter in the main thoroughfare had been smashed-up wicker hurdles, the wreckage of an old and decrepit dog-cart, a few sacks of seedcorn ripped open, some storage jars smashed, a few more bodies. They’d tried to break up a plough, but it had proved too solid; there were a few blade-cuts in the shafts and handles, and that was all. A wagonload of sea-coal had been overturned, and the body of another soldier lay a few yards away from it, helmetless and with the mark of something like an axe or a mattock on the crown of his skull.

At least it wasn’t raining any more. Bardas Loredan folded his hood back onto his shoulders and rolled his wet sleeves up to the elbow. It made no sense to carry on following the trail. He sat down on the boom of the overturned wagon, reached in his pocket and found an apple he’d picked up along the way.

No sign of the boy so far, at least, he hadn’t been one of the flotsam of corpses. Loredan frowned. He’d sent the boy to raise the alarm so that people could get clear, but people obviously hadn’t. Well, if he wasn’t among the dead it was reasonable to assume he was still alive. He took a few bites out of the apple, which was small and sour, and then lobbed the rest over a wall.

There was something or someone moving about close by. He stayed put and listened for a while, then hopped off the boom, walked away a few paces, circled back round behind the wagon, stooped quickly and grabbed.

‘I was wondering where you’d got to,’ he said. The boy recognised him and stopped wriggling. ‘Obviously it’s my role in life to fish you out from under carts at the scenes of massacres.’