A sea mile astern of Abeleyn’s vessel two wide-bellied nefs, the old-fashioned trading ships of the Levangore, were making heavy going of the swell. Within them was the bulk of Abeleyn’s entourage, four hundred strong; the only subjects whose obedience he still commanded. It was because of them he had taken the longer sea route home instead of trying to chance the snowbound passes of the mountains. He would need every loyal sword in the months to come; he could not afford to abandon them.
“Golophin, I want you to do something.”
The gyrfalcon cocked its head to one side. “I am yours to command, my boy.”
“You must procure a meeting with Rovero and Mercado. You must let the army and the fleet know the truth of things. If the Hebrian navy is against me, then we will never get to within fifty leagues of Abrusio.”
“It will not be easy, sire.”
“Nothing ever is, my friend. Nothing ever is.”
“I will do my best. Rovero, being a mariner, has always had a more open mind than Mercado.”
“If you must choose one, then let it be Rovero. The fleet is the most important.”
“Very well, sire.”
“Sail ho!” the lookout cried from the maintop. “I see five—no, six—sail abaft the larboard beam!”
Dietl, the master, squinted up at the maintop.
“What are they, Tasso?”
“Lateen-rigged, sir. Galleasses by my bet. Corsairs maybe.”
Dietl blinked, then turned to Abeleyn.
“Corsairs, sire. A whole squadron, perhaps. Shall I put her about?”
“Let me see for myself,” Abeleyn snapped. He clambered over the ship’s rail and began climbing the shrouds. In seconds he was up in the maintop with Tasso, the lookout. The sailor looked both amazed and terrified at finding himself on such close terms with a king.
“Point them out to me,” Abeleyn commanded.
“There, sire. They’re almost hull up now. They have the wind on the starboard beam, but you can see their oars are out too. There’s a flash of foam along every hull, regular as a waterclock.”
Abeleyn peered across the unending expanse of white-streaked sea while the maintop described lazy arcs under him with the pitch and roll of the carrack. There: six sails like the wings of great waterborne birds, and the regular splash of the oars as well.
“How do you know they’re corsairs?” he asked Tasso.
“Lateen-rigged on all three masts, sir, like a xebec. Astaran and Perigrainian galleasses are square-rigged on fore and main. Those are corsairs, sir, no doubt about it, and they’re on a closing course.”
Abeleyn studied the oncoming ships in silence. It was too much of a coincidence. These vessels knew what they were after.
He slapped Tasso on the shoulder and sidled down the backstay to the deck. The whole crew was standing staring, even the Hebrian soldiers and marines of his entourage. He joined Dietl on the quarterdeck, smiling.
“You had best beat to quarters, Captain. I believe we have a fight on our hands.”
A T times it seemed as though the whole world were on the move.
From Ormann Dyke the road curved round to arrow almost due south through the low hills of northern Torunna. A fine road, built by the Fimbrians in the days when Aekir had been the easternmost trading post of their empire. The Torunnan kings had kept it in good repair, but in their own road-building they had never been able to match the stubborn Fimbrian disregard for natural obstacles, and thus the secondary roads which branched off it curved and wound their way about the shoulders of the hills like rivulets of water finding their natural level.
All the roads were clogged with people.
Corfe had seen it before, on the retreat from Aekir, but the other troopers of the escort had not. They were shocked by the scale of the thing.
The troop had passed through empty villages, deserted hamlets, and even a couple of towns where the doors of the houses had been left ajar by their fleeing occupants. And now the occupants of all northern Torunna were on the move, it seemed.
Most of them were actually from Aekir. With the onset of winter, General Martellus of Ormann Dyke had ordered the refugee camps about the fortress broken up. Those living there had been told to go south, to Torunn itself. They were too big a drain on the meagre resources of the dyke’s defenders, and with winter swooping in—a hard winter too, by the looks of it—they would not survive long in the shanty towns which had sprung up in the shadow of the dyke. Hundreds of thousands of them were moving south, trekking along the roads in the teeth of the bitter wind. Their passage had had a catastrophic effect on the inhabitants of the region. There had been looting, killing, even pitched battles between Aekirians and Torunnans. The panic had spread, and now the natives of the country were heading south also. A rumour had begun that the Merduks would not remain long in winter quarters, but were planning a sudden onslaught on the dyke, a swift sweep south to the Torunnan capital before the heaviest of the snows set in. There was no truth to it. Corfe had reconnoitred the Merduk winter camps himself, and he knew that the enemy was regrouping and resupplying, and would be for months. But reason was not something a terrified mob hearkened to very easily, hence the exodus.
The troop of thirty Torunnan heavy cavalry were escorting a clumsy, springless carriage over the crowded roads, battering a way through the crowds with the armoured bodies of their warhorses and warning shots from their matchlocks. Inside the carriage Macrobius III, High Pontiff of the Western World, sat with blind patience clutching the Saint’s symbol of silver and lapis lazuli General Martellus had given him. Nowhere in Ormann Dyke could there be found material of the right shade to clothe a Pontiff, so instead of purple Macrobius wore robes of black. Perhaps it was an omen, Corfe thought. Perhaps he would not be recognized as Pontiff again, now that Himerius had been elected to the position by the Prelates and the Colleges of Bishops in Charibon. Macrobius himself did not seem to care whether he was Pontiff or not. The Merduks had carved something vital out of his spirit when they gouged the eyes from his head in Aekir.
Unbidden, her face was in Corfe’s mind again, as clear as lamplight. That raven-dark hair, and the way one corner of her mouth had tilted upward when she smiled. His Heria was dead, a burnt corpse in Aekir. That part of him, the part which had loved her, was nothing but ash now also. Perhaps the Merduks had carved something out of his own spirit when they had taken the Holy City: something of the capacity for laughter and loving. But that hardly mattered now.
And yet, and yet. He found himself scanning the face of every woman in the teeming multitude, hoping and praying despite himself that he might see her. That she might have survived by some miracle. He knew it was the merest foolishness; the Merduks had snatched the youngest and most presentable of Aekir’s female population on the city’s fall to be reserved for their field brothels. Corfe’s Heria had died in the great conflagration which had engulfed the stricken city.
Sweet blood of the holy Saint, he hoped she had died.
The outrider Corfe had dispatched an hour before came cantering back up the side of the road, scattering trudging refugees like a wolf exploding a flock of sheep. He reined in his exhausted horse and flung a hurried salute, his vambrace clanging against the breast of his cuirass in the age-old gesture.
“Torunn is just over the hill, Colonel. Barely a league to the outskirts.”
“Are we expected?” Corfe asked.
“Yes. There is a small reception party outside the walls, though they’re having a hell of a time with the refugees.”
“Very good,” Corfe said curtly. “Get back in the ranks, Surian, and go easier on your mount next time.”
“Yes, sir.” Abashed, the youthful trooper rode on down the line. Corfe followed him until he had reached the bumping carriage.
“Holiness.”
The curtains twitched back. “Yes, my son?”
“We’ll be in Torunn within the hour. I thought you might like to know.”
The mutilated face of Macrobius stared blindly up at Corfe. He did not seem to relish the prospect.
“It starts again, then,” he said, his voice barely audible over the creak and thump of the moving carriage, the hoofbeats of horses on the paved road.
“What do you mean?”
Macrobius smiled. “The great game, Corfe. For a time I was off the board, but now I find myself being moved on it again.”
“Then it is God’s will, Father.”
“No. God does not move the pieces; the game is an invention of man alone.”
Corfe straightened in the saddle. “We do what we must, Holy Father. We do our duty.”
“Which means that we do as we are told, my son.”
The wreck of a smile once more. Then the curtain fell back into place.
T ORUNNA was one of the later-founded provinces of the Fimbrian Empire. Six centuries previously, it had consisted of a string of fortified towns along the western coast of the Kardian Sea, all of them virtually isolated from one another by the wild Felimbric tribesmen of the interior. As the tribes became pacified Torunn itself, built athwart the Torrin river, became an important port and a major fortress against the marauding steppe nomads who infested the lands about the Kardian Gulf. Eventually the Fimbrians settled the land between the Torrin and Searil rivers by planting eighty tercios of retired soldiers there with their families to provide a tough buffer state between the prospering province to the south and the savages beyond.
Marshal Kaile Ormann, commander of the Eastern Field Army, dug a huge dyke at the only crossing point of the swift, gorge-cutting Searil river and for forty years it was the easternmost outpost of the Fimbrians, until the founding of Aekir on the Ostian river still farther east. The Torunnans themselves were thus direct descendants of the first Fimbrian soldier-settlers, and the great families of the kingdom all traced their origins back to the most senior officers from among those first tercios. The Royal family of Torunn was descended from the house of Kaile Ormann, the builder of Ormann Dyke.
It was one of the ironies of the world that Torunna was the first province to rebel against Fimbria and declare its independence from the Electors. It snatched Aekir for itself and was recognized by the then High Pontiff, Ammianus, as a legitimate state in return for four thousand volunteer troops, who were to become the forerunners of the Knights Militant.