The Iron Wars (5 page)

“I am going to take you to meet your betrothed,” the wizard said, and led her into the darkness.

I SOLLA had seen bale-fire before, as a child. A ball of it hovered above Golophin’s head in the dark and lit the way for them. But it was a guttering thing, like a candle almost burnt down to the wick. She suddenly realized that the old mage was damaged in some way—something had stolen away his strength and made him into a caricature of what he had once been. It was the war, she guessed. It had drained him somehow.

The passage they trod was smoothly made out of jointed stone, and it rose and wound like the coils of a snake. There were other doors off its sides, leading to other rooms in the palace, Isolla supposed. She knew she, a foreigner, was being trusted with some of the secrets of the palace. But then she’d be Hebrion’s queen soon enough anyway.

They halted. The bale-fire went out and there was a grating of stone. She followed the wizard’s lean back through another low door like the one in her own chambers, and found herself in a high-ceilinged room that was almost totally dark. A rack of tall candles fluttered by the side of a massively ornate four-poster bed, and she could make out weapons on the walls gleaming in the gloom. Maps and books and more of the dull hangings. A bedstand with jug and ewer of silver. And everywhere engraved or embossed, the Hebrian Royal arms. She was in the King’s chambers.

“Speak normally. No whispers,” Golophin told her. “He is far away, but not gone, not entirely. It may be that a new voice will reach him as a familiar one might not.”

“What—?” But Golophin took her arm and led her to the side of the huge bed.

The King. Her horrified eyes took in what was left of him at a glance, and her hand flew to her mouth. This thing was to be her husband.

Golophin was watching her. She sensed a protective anger in him that was not very far from the surface. She brought her hand down from her face and touched Abeleyn’s where it lay on the coverlet.

His features she recognized: the dark hair as thick as ever despite the threads of grey. The face she had known as sun-brown was as pallid as the sheets behind it. She was surprised to feel grief, not for herself who was to be joined to this wreck of a man, but for Abeleyn, the high-spirited boy she had known who had pulled her hair and said cruel things about her nose. He had not deserved to end up like this.

“What was it?” she asked, uncomfortably aware of Golophin’s hawk-like scrutiny.

“A shell. One of our own, God help us, in the moment when the battle was won. I was able to seal the stumps, but I had already exhausted myself in the fighting and could do nothing more. It would take a great work of theurgy to heal him completely, something I’m not sure I would be capable of even if I were at my full strength. And so he lies here, his mind in some fathomless limbo I cannot reach. We have made discreet enquiries for Mind-rhymers, but those who were not murdered under Sastro di Carrera’s regime fled to the ends of the earth. The Dweomer cannot help Abeleyn. His own will must pull him through, and whatever human warmth we can give.” Here he glared at Isolla as if he dared her to contradict him.

But she was not so easily cowed. She released the unconscious King’s hand and faced the old mage squarely. “I take it there will be no wedding until the King is brought to himself again.”

“Yes. But there
will
be a wedding. The country needs it. We may have slaughtered Carrera’s retainers and expelled the surviving Knights Militant, but there are still ambitious men in Hebrion who would stoop to seize a crown if they saw it fall.”

“You cannot fool the world for ever, Golophin. The truth will out, in the end.”

“I know. But we have to try. This man has greatness in him. I will not abandon him to rot!”

He loves him, she thought. He truly does. And she warmed to the fierce old man. She had always responded to lost causes, had always sided with the underdog. Perhaps because it was how she had always seen herself.

“So you brought me here to join your little conspiracy. Who else knows the true condition of the King?”

“Admiral Rovero, General Mercado, and perhaps three or four of the palace servants whom I trust.”

“The whole city is in mourning.”

“I had to put out a bulletin on the King’s health. He is dangerously ill, but not dying. That is the official line.”

“How long do you think you can keep the hounds leashed?”

“A few weeks, maybe a couple of months. Rovero and Mercado have the army and the fleet firmly under control, and in any case Hebrion’s soldiers and sailors fairly worship Abeleyn. No, as always, it is the court we must worry about. And that, my dear, is where you come in.”

“I see. So I am to make reassuring noises about the palace.”

“Yes. Are you willing?”

She looked down at the wrecked King again, and felt an absurd urge to ruffle the dark hair on the pillow. “I am willing. My brother would wish it so anyway.”

“Good. I did not read your character wrong.”

“If you had, Golophin, what would have become of me?”

The old man grinned wolfishly. “This palace would have become your prison.”

F OR the lady Jemilla, the palace had indeed come to seem like a prison. Ever since the retaking of the city she had been shepherded and watched and guarded like some prisoner of war. And she had not seen Abeleyn once in all that time. That old devil Golophin was always there to put her off. The King was too ill to see anyone but his senior ministers, he said. But the rumours were running like wildfire about the palace: that Abeleyn was dead and already buried, that he was too horribly scarred to see the light of day, that his injuries had turned him into an imbecile. In any case, the triumvirate of Rovero, Mercado and Golophin—always Golophin—were running Abrusio as though they wore crowns themselves. It galled her beyond measure that she, who bore the King’s heir, should be put off and shuffled about as though she were some troublesome trull whose swelling belly could be ignored. And then, worst of all, the Princess of Astarac had arrived with due state to be married to the father of Jemilla’s child. Or to the man everyone thought was the father, it made no odds—not now.

Things were slipping through her grasp with every passing day. This wedding must not happen. Her child must be recognized as the rightful heir. And if Abeleyn were as near death as everyone supposed, then surely it made sense to secure the succession. Couldn’t they see that? Or must they be made to see it?

She lay naked on the wide bed in her suite. The short day was almost over and the room was dark but for the blaze of a fire in the huge hearth that dominated one wall. At least they had quartered her in the palace. That was something. She regarded her body in the firelight, running her hands up and down it as a man might with a horse he meant to buy. The swelling was visible now, a bulge that marred the otherwise perfect symmetry of her shape. She frowned at it. Childbirth. Such a messy, painful affair. Even messier if one sought to avoid it. She remembered the blood and her own shrieking the night she rid herself of Richard Hawkwood’s first child. Nothing could be worse than that.

Her breasts were filling out. She cupped them, ran her slender fingers down her abdomen to where the hair sprang in ebony curls at her crotch. She stroked herself there absently, thinking. She thought of her body as an instrument, a tool to be utilized with the utmost efficiency. It was her key to a better life, this flesh and all that it contained.

She sprang up, pulled round her shoulders a robe of Nalbenic silk and padded barefoot to the door. A moment to gather herself, to rehearse her words, and then she yanked open the heavy portal in a rush.

“Quickly, quickly—you there!”

There were two guards, not one. She must have caught them as they were changing shifts. It made her hesitate, but only for the fraction of a second.

“There’s something in my room—a rat. You must come and look!”

The two soldiers were members of the Abrusio garrison, veterans of the battle to retake the city. They were rough, untutored swordsmen who had not been told why they were to guard the lady Jemilla’s door, only that her every move was to be reported direct to General Mercado. They hung back, and one said: “I’ll get your lady’s maidservant.”

“No, no, you fools. She can’t abide rats any more than I can. Get in there and kill it for me, for God’s sake. Are you men at all?”

Jemilla was beautifully unkempt, one shoulder gleaming pale as ivory above the robe she clutched together at her breasts. The two soldiers looked at one another, and one shrugged. They marched into her chambers.

Jemilla followed them, shutting the door behind her. The soldiers poked under the bed, along the wall hangings.

“I believe it’s gone, lady,” one of them said, and then said no more but simply stared. Jemilla had dropped her robe and was standing incandescently nude before them, touching herself, her body undulating like a willow in a breeze.

“It’s been so long,” she said. “Won’t you please help me?”

“Lady—” one of the men said hoarsely. He held out a hand as if to ward her off.

“Oh, please. Do this thing for me, just this once.” She approached them as they stood, thunderstruck. “Please, soldiers. Just this once. It’s been so long, and no one will ever know.”

The men’s eyes met for the briefest moment, and then they moved in on her like wolves on a lamb.

FOUR

T HE men were drooping in the saddle when the lead riders of the screen came in sight of Staed. Corfe called a halt—it was by then the middle of the night—and after seeing to their mounts the tribesmen sank to the ground and slept without fires to warm them, pickets out every hundred yards around the bivouac.

Corfe, Marsch and Andruw stole up to the rising ground that hid them from their objective and took a look at the port itself in the starlit night. It was bitterly cold, and flakes of snow were running before the wind like feathers. The ground was frozen stiff as stone, which was all to the good. It would be better for the horses. Nothing worse than a cavalry charge bogged hock-deep in mud.

Staed was a largish port of some ten thousand people, one of the prosperous coastal settlements that the Fimbrians had founded centuries before in their drive to populate what was then a wilderness dominated by the Felimbric tribes. It had done well for itself. Corfe could see the massive breakwaters that protected the harbour and held in their arms over a score of vessels: galleys of the Kardian, probably hailing from one of the Sultanates, and some caravels, the seaworthy little ships that were the lifeblood of trade in the Levangore. Down by the harbour was the old fortress in which Duke Narfintyr had his headquarters no doubt, his ancestral seat. It was tall under the stars, a castle built before artillery. Nowadays walls were squat and thick to resist bombardment. But three hundred men would not fit in that keep, much less three thousand. Where had he them quartered?

They lay on the hard earth with the cold slowly sinking into them, the warmth of their bodies chilled by the metal armour they wore. The world was vast and starlit and bitter with winter. A few lights burned in Staed and in the keep which dominated it, but the rest of the sleeping earth seemed dark as a cave.

This country had been Corfe’s home once. He had been born in a farmer’s hut not two leagues from where he now lay. He had been a farmer’s son for fourteen years, before he followed the tercios north to Torunn to go for a soldier. It was the only profession allowed to the lowest class of commoners in Torunn, those tied to the land by the obligations to their feudal lords. For the poor, it was soldiering, or serfdom. An age ago it seemed, that last morning on the farm, a time back in the youth of the world. There was no familiarity in the dark hills, nothing for him here that he could recall. He remembered only his mother, small and patient, and his father, a broad, taciturn man who had worked harder than any human being he had ever known before or since, who had not stopped his only son from going for a soldier, though it would mean there would be no one around to look after him in his old age.

Old age. They were ten years dead, worn out by a lifetime of backbreaking labour. Dead in their fourth decade so that nobles like Narfintyr might hunt and drink fine wine and foment rebellion. That was the way the world worked. Ironic that the peasant’s son would come back with an army intent on destroying the noble. There was a sweetness in that which Corfe savoured.

It was Marsch who discovered the enemy camp, with his eagle sight. A scattering of fires to the south of the town, on a hillside. There was no shape or regularity to them. They might have been sparks fallen from the forge of some skyborne god. Corfe studied them, somewhat puzzled.

“No camp discipline. They’re spread over damn near half a mile. What are their officers thinking of?”

“There’s folk in the castle,” Andruw said quietly. “Lights and such. Do you think Narfintyr is in there, or out in the field with his men?”

“It’s a cold night,” Corfe said with a smile. “If you were one of the old nobility, where would you be? And if his senior officers are out of the cold with him, then that would explain the slackness of their men’s bivouac. But doesn’t he know that there’s an army approaching him? It’s criminally remiss of him to sleep separately from his command, even if he is a boneheaded nobleman.”

“We made sixty miles in the last eighteen hours,” Andruw reminded Corfe. “It could be we’ve stolen a march on them. Maybe they’re expecting Aras’s column and no more, and it’s still twenty-five leagues behind us, a week at their pace.”

Corfe considered it. The more he thought, the more he was sure that he had to move at once. Now. If he delayed the attack a day there was every chance his men would be discovered, and there went the advantage of surprise, which was vital when he faced the odds he did.

“We attack tonight,” he said.

Andruw groaned. “You can’t be serious. The men have had no sleep in two days. They’ve just completed a hellish forced march. For God’s sake, Corfe, they’re flesh and blood!”