The sky held clear for two more days, and while no more snow fell, and the wind remained light and fitful from the south-east, the temperature plummeted so that men walked with their cloaks frosted white by frozen breath, and icicles hung from the bits of the horses. The snow became hard as rock underfoot, which made for better going, but on the steeper stretches men had to go ahead of the main column and hack rude stairs out of the ice with mattocks, or else there would have been no purchase for the thousands of booted and hoofed feet following.
They were high up in the mountains now, and far enough within their winding flanks so that the view of the land below was cut off, and they were surrounded on all sides by spires of frozen rock, blinding snowfields, and hoar-white slopes of scree and boulder. In the dark, freezing nights Corfe halved the length of sentry duty, for an hour at a time was as much as the men could bear out of their blankets, and few fires were lit, for they were trying to conserve their meagre store of wood for some future emergency.
So, they came to the end of all man-made tracks, and found themselves at the foot of the Gelkarak glacier, and stared in wonder at what seemed to be a broken and tumbled cliff of pale grey, translucent rock. Except that it was not stone, but ancient ice which had come oozing down from the mountainsides in millennia of winters to form a vast, solid river fully half a mile wide, and many fathoms deep.
'We'll have to rig ropes and pulleys at the top to haul up the animals and the guns,' Corfe said to Comillan and Kyne, who stood swathed in furs beside him. 'We'll work through the night; there's no time to play with. Comillan, you handle the horses; Kyne, give Colonel Rilke a hand with his guns.' The King stared at a sky which was still largely clear, but ahead of them there were sullen clouds gathering on the peaks, heavy with snow.
They were two days and a night hauling up the horses and mules and artillery pieces one by one to the top of the glacier. There was little engineering skill about it. Instead, the commanders had teams of up to three hundred men hauling on a cat's cradle of ropes at the lip of the glacier, and even the most recalcitrant mule could not argue with that amount of brute force.
On the second day of this rough portage the clouds arrived above them and snow started again. Not the wicked blizzard of before, but a heavy silence of fat white flakes which accumulated with amazing speed, until the teams at the top of the glacier were labouring thigh-deep, and the ropes were buried. Yet more men were put to clearing the snow from the bivouacs, and half a dozen fell into hidden crevasses and were lost. A company of Felimbric tribesmen from the Cathedral-lers then explored up the glacier for several miles, roped together and feeling their way step by step. They marked each crevasse with an upright pike thrust into the snow, a dark rag flying from the tip, and thus blazed a safe road for the army to follow. And still it grew colder, and the men's lungs began to labour in the thinning air.
They lost a field piece and six mules as a whole series of rime-stiff ropes snapped in the same instant and they tumbled down the cliff of the glacier's end, but at the end of their fifth day in the mountains proper, the army was united on the back of Gelkarak itself, and the advance went on.
The glacier wound like a vast, flat-backed snake through the heights of the surrounding mountains. A wide, safe highway it seemed with its concealing blanket of snow, but below that snow it was pitted and fissured and cracked and in the dark, windless nights they could hear it groaning and creaking under their feet, so that it seemed they were crawling like ants atop the spine of some enormous, unquiet beast. Its course ran roughly westwards, and every now and then a lesser ice tributary would creep down from the high surrounding valleys to join it. In three more days of travel Corfe lost fifteen men staking out the trail for the main body. Even the tribes had never come this deep into the Cimbrics.
Golophin returned at last, appearing at the door of the King's tent late one icy night and entering with a nod to Felorin, who stood stamping his feet nearby. The wizard's gyrfalcon was perched like a grey frosted sculpture on his forearm, and his face was livid with tiredness.
Corfe was alone, poring by candlelight over the ancient, inadequate text which Albrec had discovered in Torunn. A small charcoal brazier burned in a corner of the tent, but it did little to heat the frigid air within. He looked up as Golophin entered, and frowned. 'You're late,' he said shortly.
The wizard sat down on a camp stool and let his familiar hop to the foot of Corfe's cot. He took off his wide-brimmed hat, letting fall a glittering shower of unmelted snow.
'My apologies.' Corfe handed him a leather bottle and he gulped from the neck before wiping his mouth and replacing the cork. 'Ah, better. Thank you, sire. Yes, I am late. I have travelled far since last you saw me, farther than I had intended. The Eighth Discipline is a great gift, but it sometimes tempts one to overdo things, such is the thirst for news in men.'
'What news?'
'Your daughter reached Aurungabar today, and is to be married in the morning. The new Sultan of Ostrabar will be crowned and wed in the same ceremony. After it is done Nasir will ride forth with the men promised you by his father. Fifteen thousand, mostly heavy cavalry.'
'Good,' Corfe said, though he looked anything but relieved.
'Colonel Heyd has reached Gaderion, and the Himerians there are gearing up for a second assault. I bring General Aras's compliments. He will hold as long as he can, but his losses are high, while the Himerians seem to multiply daily. They have breached the curtain wall in three places but have not yet established a foothold beyond it. Communications with the south are still open. For the moment.'
Corfe nodded silently. His face was gaunt and grey with cold. 'Is that all?'
'No. I save the most startling news for last. In Aurungabar I talked again to Shahr Baraz the Younger. The Sultan and his consort are in their tomb and Ostrabar's succession is now established, but still he is a haunted man.'
Corfe stared at the old wizard but said nothing. His eyes glittered redly in the light of the brazier.
'He is convinced - and much persuading it took for him to admit it - that Aurungzeb died not at the hand of an assassin.' Golophin hesitated. 'But at the hand of his own queen.'
Corfe went very still.
'Not only that, but he then believes she turned the knife on herself. This Ramusian lady, the mother of his children, his wife of seventeen years. She must have harboured an enduring hatred in secret all that time. What finally made her act on it no man can say. Shahr Baraz loved her like a daughter. It is he who put about the story of foreign assassins in the pay of Himerius, and the court and harem believed him. Why should they not? Not even Nasir suspects the truth, and it is perhaps best left that way. But I thought you would like to know.'
The King had turned his face and it was in shadow. Golophin watched him closely, wondering.
'Sire, I cannot help thinking there was something between you and the Merduk Queen. Something . . .' Golophin tailed off.
The King did not move or speak, and the old mage rubbed his chin. 'Forgive me, Corfe. I am like a woman fishing for gossip. It's a besetting fault of old age that when you start a hare you feel you must run it to ground. My mind has become over-subtle with the passing years. I see connections and conspiracies where there are none.'
'She was my wife,' Corfe said quietly.
'What?'
The King was staring into the red gledes at the heart of the brazier, unblinking. 'Her name was Heria Car-Gwion, a silk merchant's daughter of Aekir. And she was my wife. I thought her dead in the fall of the city. But she lived. She lived, Golophin, and was taken by Ostrabar's Sultan and made his queen. Her own daughter I took to wife. Because it was the right thing to do for the kingdom. And now you tell me that when she died it was by her own hand. On the day I wed the girl who should by rights have been my own daughter. My child.
'She was my wife.'
Golophin rose to his feet hurriedly, knocking over the camp stool. Corfe had turned to stare at him through bright, fire-filled eyes, and in that moment the wizard was mortally afraid. He had never seen such torment, such naked violence in another man's face.
Corfe laughed. 'She is at peace, dead at last. I wished her dead over the years, because I could not forget. I wished myself dead also. I might rest, I think, if I were laid in the tomb beside her. But even in death we will never be together again. Once I would have torn every Merduk city in the world brick from brick to get her back. But I am a king now, and must not think only of myself.'
His smile was terrible, and in that moment he radiated more menace than any great mage or shifter that Golophin had ever known. The air seemed to crackle about him.
Corfe rose, and Golophin backed away. His familiar flew to his shoulder with a harsh, terrified screech. The King smiled again, but there was some humanity in his face now, and the terrible light had left his eyes.
'It's all right. I am not a madman or a monster. Sit down, Golophin. You look as though you had seen a ghost.'
Golophin did as he was bidden, soothing his frightened familiar with automatic caresses. He could not get past the stunning realisation which was flooding his mind.
There was Dweomer in this man.
No, that was not correct. It was something else. An adamantine strength greater than the craft of mages, an anti-Dweomer perhaps. He could not fully explain it, even to himself, but he realised that here was a man whose will would never be tamed, whom no spell would ever subdue. And this also: Odelia's dying instincts had been correct. In victory, this man might well revel in an enormous bloodletting. His wife's fate had kindled an unassuageable pain in him which sought outlet in violence. And Golophin, in ignorance, had just stoked the fires of his torment higher.
Three more days the army laboured painfully and slowly up the Gelkarak glacier. They were struck by a series of brief, vicious snowstorms which cost them dearly in horses and mules, and they lost another artillery piece to a crevasse, as well as the two dozen men who were roped to it. There was a crack like a gunshot, and it sank through the crust of snow and ice and dragged them screaming to their deaths like a series of fish snared on a many-hooked line. The troops were warier after that, and their speed decreased as they realised that it was to some extent a matter of luck whether a man put his foot in the wrong place or not. Pack mules were unladen and harnessed to the guns in the place of men, but this meant that the army marched more heavily burdened than ever. They were making at best two and a half leagues a day, and often much less, and Corfe estimated that no more than half their journey was behind them.
The air grew thin and piercing, and even the fittest of the men gasped for breath as he marched. Mercifully though, the weather cleared again, and though the raging, intense cold was a torture in the star-bright nights, the days remained fine and sunlit. Many of the animals became lame as the surface crust of the snow gashed their legs, and the cavalry quickly learned to bind wrappings about the hocks of their mounts. But the cold was wearing down both animals and men. Soon there were many cases of frostbite and snow blindness, mostly among the Torunnans, and after a meeting of the senior officers it was decided that those so afflicted would be left behind with a small guard to make their way back eastwards as soon as they were able. With them stayed scores of worn-out animals that might yet bear the weight of men, and a good store of rations.
But they were over the highest point of their passage, and had left the glacier road behind. There was a narrow pass leading off to the west-south-west and this they took, following the ancient trail described in Corfe's text. It was a harder road than the glacier, being much littered and broken with boulders and shattered stones, but it was less treacherous, and the men's spirits rose.
And at last there came the evening, twenty-four days out of Torunn, when the army paused on the opening of a great glen between two buttresses of rock, and looked down to see the vast expanse of the Torian Plains darkling below under the sunset, and closer by, almost at their feet it seemed, there glittered red as blood the Sea of Tor.
The army was fewer by over a thousand men and several hundred mules and horses, but it had accomplished the crossing of the Cimbrics and there were now only thirty leagues of easy marching between it and Charibon.
Nineteen
Aurungabar had seen a sultan and his queen buried, and a new sultan and his queen wed and crowned, all in the same month. The city was still unsettled and volatile, but the presence within its walls of a host of soldiery entirely loyal to Sultan Nasir had a considerable soothing effect. The harem had been purged of all those who had fomented intrigue in the brief interregnum and Ostrabar's absolute ruler had proved his mettle, acting swiftly and without mercy. A youth he might be, but he had an able vizier in the shape of Shahr Baraz the Younger, and it was rumoured that his new Ramusian wife was a great aid to him in the consolidation of his position. A sorceress of power she was reputed to be, even mightier than her witch of a mother. Unruly Aurungabar had been swiftly cowed therefore, and it was rumoured throughout the city that the Sultan already felt sure enough of his position to wish to set out immediately for the wars of the west.
He was closeted with his new vizier in one of the smaller suites off the Royal Bedchamber. He sat at a desk leafing through a pile of papers whilst Shahr Baraz stood looking over his shoulder, pointing something out now and again, and the spring rain lashed at the windows and the firelight sprang up yellow in the hearth to one side. A set of Merduk half-armour stood on a wooden stand by the door, and a scab-barded tulwar had been set on the mantelpiece. At last Nasir rubbed his eyes and straightened back from the desk with a mighty yawn. He was slim and dark, with olive skin and grey eyes, and he was dressed in a robe of black silk which shimmered in the firelight.
'All this can wait, Baraz. It's frivolous stuff, this granting of offices and remission of taxes.'
'It is not, Nasir,' the older man said forcefully. 'Through such little boons you buy men's loyalty.'
'If it must be bought it is not worth having.'
Shahr Baraz gave a twisted smile. 'That sounds like your mother speaking.'