The City (12 page)

‘You were watching?’ Doon asked venomously.

‘I was busy,’ Broglanh defended himself. ‘I wasn’t sitting around with my feet up. He was something special. Don’t want to meet too many of them.’ Indaro privately thought he was right. They had become used to killing enemy soldiers swiftly. They all joked about the frailty of the Blues, how easily they died.

‘Indaro can take anybody with a sword,’ Doon said loyally.

‘You didn’t see him,’ retorted blond Garret, and Doon glared at him too.

‘Are you all right, Red?’ Broglanh turned his head and looked closely into Indaro’s face.

She nodded curtly. She hated being called Red, and he was the only one she allowed the discourtesy. Annoying though he could be, Broglanh always raised the energy levels wherever he went. Today, though, she saw deep bruises under his pale eyes, and she could smell the defeat on him. She picked up a piece of cornbread and chewed at it. The fish smelled bad too.

‘Did you see old Bearfoot?’ asked Broglanh generally. ‘He took out two at once with that bloody dangerous sword of his. Straight through both necks.’ He made a cutting motion at his throat and laughed, a sharp sound without humour.

‘I saw,’ said Indaro. Bearfoot’s broadsword was half a foot longer than regulation and he honed it to perfect sharpness every night. It was a legend in the company that it killed more of his friends than his foes.

‘Did he make it back?’ Doon asked.

Broglanh sniffed. ‘Of course he did. They wish. Reckon there’s a price on his head.’

‘He’s a menace.’ Indaro had seen the veteran fall in a melee, before rising again swinging the broadsword, City and Blueskin warriors alike ducking away from its threat. ‘And he must be wounded.’

Broglanh shrugged. Just as they scoffed at their own wounds, so they minimized others’. However black the day, however appalling the slaughter, no mention was made of the dead, only those who had survived. Indaro had seen the deaths of two warriors she had fought beside all season, six or so gravely wounded. But the talk was not of them, only of old Bearfoot who had risen to fight another day.

‘They say there’ll be more recruits arriving in a couple of days,’ offered Garret, who kept his ear to the ground.

A groan echoed round the table. It was the most dangerous time for them all, when youngsters fresh from training camp were put on the front lines. They were either so terrified they were paralysed into uselessness, or so full of unjustified zeal that they put everyone else in peril with their antics.

‘We were all recruits once,’ added Garret piously.

Broglanh snorted. ‘I wasn’t,’ he muttered into his plate. ‘I was born a veteran.’

There were nods all round the table. Indaro looked at her food. For the rest of them it was hard to remember a time when they weren’t fighting. But after the Araz Retreat there were five years when Indaro had escaped the battles. She was invalided home, then her father’s influence kept her in administration for a year, sending other soldiers to the front lines. Then she had dropped out of sight and for three years led an underground life which finally took her underground – into the sewers. She was a deserter, although she never permitted the word to enter her head in those days, or these. She believed she was doing valuable work, and that losing her life in the carnage of battle would be a waste of her talents, a waste to the City.

Then she had met the old man Bartellus in the Hall of Watchers.
And she had seen the look in his eyes – something between contempt and, even harsher, pity – and within a few weeks she had emerged from the tunnels and re-joined the Maritime Army, which was then fighting near her home, defending the coast of the Salient. That was eight years ago …

‘This fish stinks,’ Doon said, wrinkling her nose. She spat chewed grey flesh on her plate and picked up the cornbread instead.

‘Tastes all right to me,’ Broglanh said round a mouthful.

‘Is there anything you won’t eat?’ Doon asked him.

Broglanh shrugged. ‘Eat while you can.’ He swallowed. ‘Somebody once said an army marches on its stomach.’

‘Thank the gods we haven’t got any marching to do.’

They all ate in silence. Even Broglanh was beyond conversation. Indaro, drooping over her plate, was thinking of the walk back to their camp, and it seemed an unimaginably long journey on leaden legs. It was taking all her energy to sit upright.

Suddenly she realized the atmosphere had changed and there was a tension in the air. She looked up and saw a tall dark-haired warrior making his way among the tables, a plate in one hand. All the soldiers had fallen silent. He was coming her way. She willed him to carry on past. He stopped and placed his plate on the table. He looked around at them. Nobody caught his eye, even Broglanh. The dark-haired man sat down and picked up a piece of cornbread. Conversation resumed at the tables around them, though it was muted and Indaro could feel eyes resting on them.

Fell Aron Lee was their company commander and a legend. A twenty-five-year veteran, he was worshipped by his troops. Usually, in Indaro’s experience, a soldier’s reputation plummeted as fast as his rank rose. Platoon leaders were held to be ambitious fools. The generals – with a few noble exceptions – were loathed with a perfect hatred as cruel, cowardly and stupid. Among the many and complicated ranks in between, the company commander was considered a simpleton or a coward, usually both. But Fell Aron Lee was simply a hero to them all. He had risen to fame during the Second Battle of the Salient, when he had masterminded an ingenious expedition which had taken back the beaches of that vital stronghold with the loss of only three soldiers, one of whom died when he was startled by a goat and fell off a cliff. Only the jealousy of senior officers stopped the man being a general, they all agreed, although there was the rumour that he
was the bastard son of their lost hero Shuskara. There were always rumours.

Indaro had only spoken to him once, when she had returned to the army, gripped by doubt. On that day she still believed she might be executed for her three-year absence. She was brought into the tent of a dark-haired man of middle years dressed in regular uniform. He was sitting behind a desk leafing through papers, and the first thing she noticed about him was a deep dent the size of a man’s thumb in the right side of his forehead. The skin of it was pale and stretched and it seemed to pulse. He looked up at her. His eyes were startling blue.

‘Indaro Kerr Guillaume,’ said the guard with her, stumbling over the last.

‘I knew your father,’ the officer told her, though his face remained stone. The tension in her chest lightened a little. Then he added, ‘I never believed them when they said he raised a family of deserters.’

Indaro’s voice came out dry and wooden. ‘He knew nothing of my … absence. He has disowned me, sir.’

It was a lie and the man knew it. He nodded, though.

‘My job is to win battles,’ he told her after a pause. ‘I need all the resources I can get. I’m told you are an excellent swordswoman. I cannot afford to waste you.’

He gestured to the guard then returned to his work.

Sitting at the mess table Indaro watched him covertly. After a moment she realized he could not possibly recognize her among the hundreds of soldiers under his command. And what did it matter if he did? She sat back and flicked the dark red hair off her face. As she did so he raised his head, the piece of bread halfway to his mouth. He gazed at her and nodded his head slightly, then turned to her servant. ‘Something wrong with the fish, Doon?’

‘It’s bad, sir.’

‘Here.’ He held out his hand. Doon stared at it like an idiot, then quickly passed him her plate. He sniffed it and cursed. ‘Garvy.’ He barely raised his voice but in seconds his aide appeared from nowhere.

‘Take this.’ Their leader gave him the plate. ‘Whoever’s responsible for today’s food. Is it Bazala?’ The aide looked blank; he clearly had no idea. ‘Whoever. I want him in my tent by the time I get back. In chains.’

The aide nodded and turned away holding the plate of fish.

Fell Aron Lee looked around the table. ‘You know who I am,’ he said. It was not a question. ‘I’m looking for volunteers.’

Indaro had spent all her adult years escaping one intolerable situation only to run towards another. She had fled active service to escape the bowel-clenching horror of daily death and mutilation. She had walked away from her post in administration because she despaired of the pointless paperwork which tangled the armies in a net of impotent ineptitude. And it was self-loathing that had made her, finally and reluctantly, turn away from Archange and return to the war. And now she was walking towards a new, unknown challenge, a new test.

They had all volunteered for the mission, though they had no idea what it was. Fell Aron Lee wanted two soldiers. He had picked Indaro and Broglanh. He told her to leave Doon behind, and as Indaro left the table with the commander she turned back and smiled at her servant, but Doon merely stared at her, caught, perhaps, between envy and concern.

The two soldiers followed their commander across the darkening land. They passed glittering campfires and rows of sleeping soldiers, dark lumps on the monochrome moonlit earth. It was late and the camp was quiet. There was no carousing, no laughter, only the sounds of muffled snores and the whine of distant machinery. As she followed her commander through the darkness, Indaro’s legs no longer felt like lead. She was no longer bothered by the wound in her side. She could feel the blood thrilling through her veins at the prospect of a new challenge. Even a suicide mission would be better than another day of dreary slaughter.

‘You’re quiet,’ Broglanh muttered.

‘I’m quiet?’ she replied irritably. ‘I’m
always
quiet. You’re the one who never stops talking.’

‘What do you think it’ll be?’

‘Let’s wait and find out,’ she told him, as if indifferent. But in her mind’s eye she was seeing a covert dash behind enemy lines dressed in a Blue uniform, the silent death of an enemy commander, the emperor’s praise, redemption.

‘They want spies,’ he hazarded.

‘They’ve got spies.’ Then she asked, smiling, ‘Who’d make you a spy? You can’t keep quiet about anything.’ Broglanh grinned.

When they came to the commander’s tent they were told to wait outside, and in a few moments one of the cooks came out. It was not Bazala, and he was not in chains, but his face was white as his apron was intended to be. He stumbled away in the dark, flanked by guards.

Inside Indaro glanced around curiously. A narrow bed. An oak chest. A flimsy desk with three straight chairs. Boxes of papers. The only thing that stood out was a suit of dress armour on a rack, gold and silver glittering on red leather. Indaro imagined herself in such armour. Then she imagined Fell Aron Lee garbed in it, and she felt suddenly warm in the midnight tent.

‘Sit down,’ their commander told them, gesturing at chairs, barely looking at them. ‘You are carrying a wound, Indaro.’

How did he know? ‘A scratch, sir.’

‘Show me.’

With only a second’s hesitation, she lifted her jerkin. He stood and moved quickly to her side, peered, then nodded, satisfied.

Fell announced, ‘You will leave immediately to join the Thousand.’

Indaro kept her face impassive, but inside she exulted. The Thousand were the emperor’s personal bodyguard. Only veterans were hand-picked for that role, usually after some dazzling act of bravery.

‘This is not a promotion,’ he added, watching their faces. ‘There has been some … wastage in the ranks of the bodyguard recently. You will join troops from other companies to buttress them on this one mission.’

Indaro didn’t care. This was a chance to get noticed, to have her name remembered for something, other than desertion. She could feel Broglanh crackling with excitement beside her. She wondered how much it was costing him to keep from blurting out something stupid.

‘The emperor is presently at the Fourth Eastern gate,’ their commander told them. ‘He is to travel with the sunrise. He will go north to the Narrows. The Third Imperial is there, battling an Odrysian army twice its size. Reinforcements are being sent this winter, cavalry and some infantry from the Maritime, and the emperor is on a morale-boosting trip, I’m told.’ He turned to his desk and rolled out a hard-used map. Indaro stepped forward eagerly. It was the first time, since she was in training, that anyone in command had bothered to explain anything to her.

She squinted at the map in the gloom of the tent. The dark bulk of the City filled it on the left. Fell indicated the Little Sea at the top and the Narrows stretching out beyond. Indaro could make out the line of the City wall snaking down the length of the map. She looked for the Salient, her home, but it was not there. Too far west.

‘Where are we?’ she demanded. The commander gazed at her without expression, then indicated a large space in the middle, blank but for some cross-hatching.

‘Are these forests?’ she asked, pointing to dark patches on the right.

‘No,’ Fell replied, ‘they are the enemy, soldier.’ His finger moved down the parchment. ‘Odrysians, Fkeni here, some Petrassi, two armies of …’

‘All just Blues to us grunts, sir,’ Broglanh said. He grinned at Fell and his commander looked at him reflectively. Indaro thought something passed between them. Men and their bonding, she thought. Then Fell indicated a tiny drawing of a tower on the City wall.

‘This is the Fourth Eastern,’ he said briskly. ‘You will have to ride hard to get there by dawn.’ He took one hand off the map and it rolled up with a snap. He told them, ‘It is unusual for the Immortal to make such a journey. The situation must be dire. You will ride to the gate and join his bodyguard immediately. My aide has your papers. He will go with you.’ Then he sat back down at his desk. ‘Good luck,’ he said and, though she did not know the man, Indaro heard satisfaction in his voice.

Unmistakably dismissed, Broglanh lingered nevertheless, and asked, ‘Why us, sir? I mean, I know we volunteered, but you came to
our
table.’

Indaro could have kicked him. She kept moving towards the tent flap, willing Broglanh to follow her.