This Forsaken Earth (33 page)

Here Moerus dismounted. Bending, he retrieved Bar Asfal’s buckled and bloody crown from the snow and handed it to Canker. The Thief-King stared at it a moment, face expressionless.

“What of Rowen?” Rol asked him.

“She will die today, if she is not already dead. Bionar is a tired and broken place. Rowen had her chance to take it, but failed. The war ends here. Today.”

“And then hail King Canker, the greatest thief of all.”

Canker nodded. There was no malice in his gaze; there was even a kind of regret. To the men who stood around him, he said quietly, “Kill him.”

Rol turned and ran.

Fleam snicked out left, right. A clash of steel, the buffet of a sword-hilt on the side of his ringing head, and he was sprinting down the hill.

“Kill him!” Canker shouted.

The black gelding stood in his path as though awaiting him. He vaulted into the saddle of the poor, wounded beast and kicked its bloody ribs. The horse took off at a gallop, shouldering running soldiers aside and leaving them sprawling. Gunfire crackled about them both and the horse groaned as a bullet found its flank, but galloped on, tongue lolling out of its mouth like a raw fillet of meat.

Downhill he went, along with Canker’s regiments, a great river of hell-bent humanity intent on plunging into the cauldron below. Rol ripped off his surcoat as he rode, the reins dangling free on the black horse’s neck, the beast plunging and slipping on the icy muck of the wooden road, but somehow always finding its feet again. Downhill, through the huge tented camp, many of the tents flattened now. Men made way for the big horse and its rider, the pair of them a bloody apparition, an avatar of war.

Downhill at a full, lurching gallop, the horse’s blood spattering Rol’s face as it sprayed from the animal’s injuries. The smoke and fume and roar of the battle enveloped them again, a grainy fog lit with flashes of sudden red and yellow light, and in the middle of it men squirming in the snow and the mud, killing one another any way they could, with anything that came to hand.

The gelding stumbled and fell at the very lip of the reserve trenches. Rol leaped from its back as the animal rolled, crushing the pommel of the saddle flat. It kicked its hind legs as though convinced it were still erect, then lay spent, barrel chest heaving. Rol crouched by the animal’s tortured carcass a few seconds and stared into the liquid eye. He patted the gelding’s neck once, then rose and began to run.

He leaped over trenches filled with struggling bodies. Bar Asfal’s men—they would become Canker’s men now, he supposed—were fighting with the knowledge of victory in their eyes, but Rowen’s people, outnumbered many times over, were resisting them with the valor of despair. Rol ran along the ground between the forward and reserve trenches, booting soldiers out of his way, slashing at those who tried to stop him, friend and foe alike.

Gallico. The halftroll’s bellowing was unmistakable, even over the clamor of battle. He loomed up like some myth-made monster in the smoke, swinging his war-hammer and knocking men down like skittles. At his side were Creed and Giffon, both fighting furiously, and with them a dozen of Rowen’s bodyguard, on foot now, their heavy armor streaked with blood. Gideon Mirkady’s ringlets were plastered all across his face, giving him the look of a demented poet. And behind him was Rowen, pale as a lily and as calm, giving orders to a gaggle of junior officers. In the wider circle around them the survivors of the regiments who had marched out of Myconn that morning were gathering in ones and twos and broken squads, rallying to the Queen for a last stand.

Rol stumbled in his relief, going to his knees. He looked back up the hill but could see nothing through the smoke. Canker’s army had not yet reached them. There might be time.

Fleam cleaved a path for him, the sword an intelligence unto itself. Rol felt he was merely propelling it forward while the marvelous blade did the fighting for him, a thing unwearied and unwounded, growing palpably stronger with each life it ended. Gallico shouted gladly in recognition as Rol joined their ranks. Once again his legs went out from under him. His precious blood was nearly drained dry. Giffon tossed down his sword and began searching through his satchel for dressings. For a little while, Rol drifted away.

He came back to himself with cold hands about his face, and Rowen was staring down at him.

“You are cut to pieces, Fisheye. You should take more care.”

He grasped her fingers, striving to make his voice heard over the surrounding tumult.

“Canker has betrayed you. He means to take the crown for himself. Bar Asfal is dead. The field is lost, Rowen. You must get clear.”

She blinked. “Canker?”

“His men are joining the battle as we speak—against us. He means to kill you. It’s over, Rowen. We must get out of here.”

“The bastard.” This was Gideon Mirkady, wild-eyed behind his mask of bloody hair.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Rowen said, her voice so low he had to read the words from her lips.

“It’s death to stay here,” Rol told her.

Giffon was pressing grubby linen into his wounds. “Heave him up,” he said, and as they did he stuffed cloth into the gash in Rol’s back. He tried to lever Fleam out of Rol’s swollen fist.

“No. Leave it.”

The world was graying. This could not be—not now, not here. He fought to keep their swimming faces clear in his head. He could have howled in despair.

Rowen leaned in close, and for a moment the battlefield disappeared. “It is you who must go, Rol. This is not your fight. I’m sorry I brought you to it.”

“I stay with you,” he groaned.

“No. You must live.” She smiled, the true smile he had always treasured. She stroked his bloody face.

“We can run. We could be happy yet, Rowen, if you would leave all this behind you.”

“No, Rol. You and I were not brought upon this earth to have happy lives.” She kissed him on the lips, her flesh as cold as one already dead. “I stay. I can do no other.”

“I love you,” he whispered.

“I know.” Her eyes filled. She straightened. “Gallico, Elias, take him. Get him out of here.” She raised her voice until it carried about the men who were gathering around her.

“All who wish to can try to make their way back to the city, and seek whatever terms Canker chooses to offer. I am Bar Hethrun’s daughter, last of the line of Bion, rightful Queen of this kingdom. I mean to stay here and fight on in this place. It’s as good as any other.”

Men stared at her in fear and awe and a kind of love. The ranks did not shift. Gideon Mirkady knelt at her feet with a smile on his face.

“I serve the Queen of Bionar, to the last of my strength.”

She set a hand on his head.

A space, a gap; a gray intermission. When the world came back to him, Rol was hanging upside down and being pounded in the stomach. Six feet away, the shattered ground retreated at a great pace. He was across Gallico’s shoulder, and the halftroll was running.

He squirmed. “No.” And more loudly, “No—put me down.”

The halftroll halted, and brought him down from his shoulder into his arms. He was wheezing like a punctured bellows. “Rol, we have no time.”

“Turn me around, Gallico. Let me see.”

They were under the walls of Myconn again, and about them the roar of the battle had receded somewhat. Creed and Giffon stood gasping, leaning on each other. Rol turned his head to the north, and stared back into that fuming cauldron, that storm. The arquebus-fire was dwindling to a crackle of isolated shots, and the artillery barked sporadically, as if in bad temper. Dots of scarlet came and went in the smoke, struggling with streaming crowds of figures in saffron and black. Here, even here, their shouting could be heard.

A cluster of scarlet stood out from the smoke for a few moments; a back-to-back group of two or three dozen, no more.

“Gallico,” Rol said. “What do you see?”

The halftroll’s arms tightened about him. “They are surrounded. I see that fellow Mirkady. I see—” He went silent.

They watched. The smoke came and went. Rol’s world grayed in and out. Finally, Gallico gave a low groan.

“It is over.”

The scarlet dots had all disappeared, and it was as though the earth had swallowed them. Gallico bent his head. And silence began to drift down over the battlefield.

Eighteen

THE MOUNTAIN ROAD

IT HAD BEGUN TO SNOW AGAIN. THE COLD BLED DEEP
into Rol’s wounds and seemed to be seeking what warm spaces there were left about his heart. Under him, the handcart rattled and jumped over the rocky ground, and he was aware of people laboring all around, an exhausted mass of humanity. But it was all at one remove. In his mind there burned a memory of Rowen’s face. His poor sister, dead now, lying stark as a cut flower in the muck and mire of that stinking battlefield. At the end she had become a queen in truth, something larger than herself. Men had laid down their lives for her willingly, men who hardly knew her. And now he, who had loved her above all others—or so he had told himself—here he was, fleeing the scene of that crime.

A thing that had been Michal Psellos had once told him that he would never give away more of himself than he could afford. And that thing had been right. No matter how he might mourn his valiant, dead sister, he was glad not be lying next to her on that lost field, glad to be running with his tail between his legs. Glad to be alive.

It was a dream brought me here, he thought. A boy’s infatuation. Well, it is done now, and I saw it out to very near the end.

They were in the Fornivan Hills south of Myconn, that much he knew. If he sat up, he would be able to look down on the Imperial City, its walls scarcely a league away. Canker had taken possession of it after only the briefest of struggles at the Forminon Gate; the massive fortifications had proved irrelevant when there were no men willing to man them. Of their own passage through the city, Rol retained only an impression of chaos and screaming crowds, Gallico’s animal roar clearing a path for them as they trekked south through the city streets, accreting hangers-on as they went.

Canker had a fearsome reputation in Bionar, and though his heralds had ridden up to the city walls offering amnesties for all who threw down their arms, he was not entirely believed. Stark fear propelled a panicked horde out of Myconn into the hills, and many of those refugees had followed Gallico because he stood out, he had purpose, and perhaps also there was simply something reassuring about his blunt physicality. So now they were part of a streaming host of people: soldiers, commoners, nobles, criminals. Something for everyone, Rol thought muzzily.

In the back part of his mind the anger smoldered steadily. The promise that, one day, Canker would die under his hands.

Giffon was fidgeting with him again. It was dark—what had happened to the daylight?—and now the night was stitched with flapping campfires. A blanket had been pulled up to his chin and his breath had frosted it white. He tried to prop himself up on one elbow but the sharp pain that sent shooting through his arm stole the breath from his mouth. He fumbled with his right hand and found it swathed in neatly knotted linen. The rest of his body was cold, shivering, but under that mass of cloth something was radiating a putrid heat. His hand, or what was left of it.

“I had to cut off the rest of the finger,” Giffon said. The boy was kneeling beside him with a steaming bowl. “You were senseless at the time. There’s a fever building. If the rest of the hand goes bad I’ll have to take the arm off at the elbow. Skipper, can you hear me?”

“I hear you.” His mouth was dry. Giffon spooned watery lukewarm soup over his lips. Rol tasted wild thyme, some kind of game.

“Skipper, you must try to heal yourself.” Giffon’s attention never wavered. He wiped soup out of Rol’s rime-frosted beard. His moon-shaped face was drawn now; it seemed narrower. Rol had a glimpse of what Giffon would look like as a middle-aged man—if he ever made it that far.

“Like after Gallitras, when your wounds healed in a night. You must do that again, skipper, or you’ll die. Do you hear me?”

He heard him, but already Rol was drifting past the words and the meaning. One thing hauled him back to earth.

“Fleam,” he said.

“It’s beside you, on your left side.”

He touched the familiar hilt, and smiled at the warmth in it.

“Skipper,” Giffon was saying, tears coursing down his face. But Rol was already far away.

“I see you still carry that sword,” Rowen said.

“Fleam? Yes. She’s a fine weapon.”

“She?”

Rol shrugged. “All things are she to a man. Ships, cities, even kingdoms.”

Rowen knelt by the fire and stirred the logs with the iron poker. “Fleam, you call it. Not the most poetic of names.”

“She was made for the letting of blood.” Rol smiled and stood looking down on his sister, watching the firelight shine out a dark blood-brown from the lighter glints in her hair.

“I wielded it once,” Rowen said.

“I wonder you were willing to give her up. Or did Psellos take her away from you?”