Century of the Soldier: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume Two) (46 page)

"No - I don't believe you will. All right - Andruw, Formio, you heard the man. Time to join the navy."

The trio hauled themselves up one of the high-sided vessels with the help of manropes that had been installed especially for landsmen. They climbed over the bulwark and stood breathing heavily on the deck of the freighter which Corfe jokingly referred to as his flagship.

"All aboard?" the captain roared out from the little poop at the stern of the vessel.

"Aye sir!"

"Cast off fore and aft. Set topsails and outer jib. Helmsman, two points to larboard as soon as she's under weigh."

"Two points. Aye sir."

A great booming, flapping shadow as the topsails were loosed by the men on the yards high above. The offshore breeze took the sails and bellied them out. The freighter accelerated palpably under Corfe's feet and began to score a white wake through the water. All around them, the other vessels in the convoy were making sail also, and they made a brave sight as they took to the middle of the wide river. The Torrin was almost half a mile in width here at the capital, crossed by two ancient stone bridges whose middle spans were ramps of wood which could be raised by windlass for the passage of ships. They were approaching the first one now, the Minantyr Bridge. As Corfe watched with something approaching wonder, the wooden spans creaked into motion and began rising in the air. Gangs of bridge-raisers were kept permanently employed and worked in shifts day and night to ensure the smooth passage of trade up and down the Torrin. Corfe had always known this, but he had never before been part of it, and as the heavy freighter moved into the shadow of the looming Minantyr Bridge he gawped all about him, for all the world like a country peasant come to see the sights of the city for a day.

They passed through the gurgling, dripping gloom under the raised bridge and emerged into pale winter sunlight again. Their captain, a tall, thin man who nevertheless had a voice of brass, yelled out at his crew. "Unfurl the spanker - look sharp now. Ben Phrenias, I see you. Get up on that goddamned yard."

Andruw and Formio were staring around themselves with something of Corfe's wonder. Neither had ever set foot on a boat before and they had thought that the transports which were to take them upriver would be glorified barges. But the grain freighters, though of shallow draught, displaced over a thousand tons each. They were square-rigged, with a sail plan similar to that of a brigantine, and seemed to all intensive purposes to be great ocean-going ships. To a landsman, at any rate. They had a crew of two dozen or so, though their own captain, Mirio, confessed that they were short-handed. Some of his men had jumped ship and refused to take their vessel north into what was widely seen as enemy-held territory now. As it was, all the ship-owners had been well-paid out of the shrinking Torunnan Treasury, and some of the soldiers constituting the cargo of the sixteen craft Corfe had hired would be able to haul on a rope as well as any waterman.

Inside these sixteen large vessels were eight thousand men and two thousand horses and mules. Corfe was bringing north all his Cathedrallers - some fifteen hundred now, with the recent reinforcements - plus Formio's Fimbrians and all the Dyke veterans who had served under him at the King's Battle. It was, he gauged, a force formidable enough to cope with any enemy formation except the main body of the Merduk army itself. He intended to alight from the freighters far up the Torrin, and then thunder back down to the capital slaughtering every Merduk he chanced across, and delivering north-western Torunna from the invaders - for a while, at least. Awful stories had been trickling south to Torunn in the past few days, tales of rape and mass executions. These things were part and parcel of every war, but there was a grim pattern to the reports: the Merduks seemed intent on depopulating the entire region. It was an important area strategically also, in that it bordered on the Torrin Gap, the gateway to Normannia west of the Cimbrics. The enemy could not be allowed to force the passage of the Gap with impunity.

And the last reason for the expedition. Corfe had to get out of Torunn, away from the court and the High Command, or he thought he would go quietly insane.

Marsch appeared out of one of the wide hatches in the deck of the freighter. He looked careworn and uneasy. It had taken some cajoling to get the tribesmen aboard the ships: such a means of transport was entirely inimical to them, and they feared for the welfare of their horses. Those who remained out of Corfe's original five hundred had been galley-slaves, and they associated ships with their degradation. The others had never before set eyes on anything afloat larger than a rowboat, and the cavernous holds they were now incarcerated within amazed and unsettled them.

Corfe could see that the big tribesman was averting his eyes from the riverbank that coursed smoothly past on the starboard side of the vessel. He gave an impression of deep distaste for everything maritime, yet he had greeted the news of their waterborne expedition without a murmur.

"The horses are calming down," he said as he approached his commander. "It stinks down there." His face was haunted, as if the smell brought back old memories of being chained to an oar with the lash scoring his back.

"It won't be for long," Corfe assured him. "Four or five days at most."

"Bad grazing up north," Marsch continued. "I am hoping we have enough forage with us. Mules carry it, but eat it too."

"Cheer up, Marsch," Andruw said, as irrepressible as ever. "It's better than kicking our heels back in the city. And I for one would rather sit here like a lord and watch the world drift past than slog it up through the hills to the north."

Marsch did not look convinced. "We'll need one, two days to get the horses back into condition when they leave the" - his lips curled around the word - "the
boats
."

"Don't let Mirio hear you calling his beloved
Seahorse
a boat," Andruw laughed, "or he's liable to turn us all ashore. These sailors - your pardon - these
watermen
, are a trifle touchy about their charges, like an old man with a young wife."

That brought a grin to all their faces. Corfe detached himself from the banter and made his way aft to where Mirio was standing taking a stint at the helm. The river-captain nodded unsmilingly at him. "We're making three knots, General. Not as fast as I would have hoped, but we'll get you there."

"Thank you, Captain. You mustn't mind my men. They're new to the river, and to ships."

"Aye, well I'll not pretend that I wouldn't prefer to be shipping a hold full of grain instead of a bunch of seasick soldiers and screaming horses, but we must take what comes, I suppose. There - we're past the last of the river-batteries, and the Royal naval yards."

Corfe looked out towards the eastern bank. The shore - the river was big enough to warrant that name for its banks - was some two cables away. The walls of Torunn came right down to the riverside here, protected by a series of squat towers which hid countless heavy cannon. Jutting out into the Torrin itself were dozens of jetties and wharves, most of them empty, but a few busy with men unloading the small riverboats that plied back and forth across the river here. And sliding behind them now he could glimpse the Royal naval yards of Torunna. Two great ships - tall, oceangoing carracks - were in dry-dock there, their sides propped up by heavy beams and hundreds of men swarming over them in a confusion of wood and rope.

"How far is it to the sea?" Corfe asked, peering aft over the taffrail. Behind the
Seahorse
the remainder of the expedition's vessels were in line astern, the foam flying from their bows as they fought upstream against the curent.

"Some five leagues," Mirio told him. "In times of storm the Torrin is brackish here, and sometimes ships are blown clear up the estuary from the Kardian."

"So close? I had no idea." Corfe had always thought of Torrin as a city divided by a river. Now he realized that it was a port on the fringe of a sea. That was something to remember. He must talk to Berza when the admiral returned to Torunn with the fleet. If the Merduks could transport armies by sea, then so could he.

The wind freshened through the day, and Mirio was able to report with visible satisfaction that they were making five knots. The capital had long disappeared, and now the transports were moving through the heavily populated country to its west. Farmers here reared cattle, planted crops and fished from the river in equal measure. But while the southern shore seemed prosperous and untouched by war, many houses and hamlets to the north were obviously deserted. Corfe saw livestock running wild, barn doors yawning emptily, and in a few places, the blackened shells of burnt villages off on the horizon.

The freighters always moored for the night - the risk of running into a sandbank in the dark was too great. Their practice was to moor the bows to stout trees onshore and drop a light anchor from the stern to keep the vessels from being swept into the bank by the current. The men could not be disembarked en masse, but on Marsch's insistence Corfe saw to it that a few of the horses and mules were brought ashore in shifts all night and exercised up and down the riverbank. It was also an effective way of posting mobile sentries, and the duty was popular with the men, who found their squalid quarters in the depths of the freighters less than congenial.

F
OUR DAYS WENT
by. The Torrin arced in a great curve until it began to flow almost directly north to south, and then it turned north-west towards its headwaters in the Thurian Mountains. They could see the Thurians on the northern horizon now, still blanketed by snow. And to their left, or to larboard, the stern white peaks of the Cimbrics reared up, their heads lost in grey cloud. There were no more farms on the riverbank now - this region had been sparsely settled even before the war. Now it seemed utterly deserted, a wilderness hemmed in by frowning mountains and bisected by the surging course of the young river.

The Torrin was barely two cables wide here, and occasionally during the fourth day they had all felt the keel of the heavily laden freighter scrape on sunken sand-bars. In addition, the current had become stronger and they averaged barely two knots. On the morning of the fifth day Corfe finally decided to leave the ships behind, to the obvious relief of both soldiers and watermen, and the sixteen huge craft spent an anxious morning edging and nudging their way to the eastern bank, before dropping every anchor they possessed in order to hold fast against the efforts of the river to shove them downstream.

What followed was a prolonged nightmare of mud and water and thrashing, cursing men and panicky animals. Each of the freighters possessed floating jetties which could be winched over the side to provide a fairly stable pathway to the shore, but they had not been designed for the offloading of two thousand horses and mules. The animals were hoisted out of the holds by tackles to the yardarms and set down wild-eyed and struggling upon the pitching jetties, with predictable results. By the time the last mule and man was ashore, and the army's supplies were piled in long rows on dry land, it was far into the night. Two men had drowned and six horses had been lost, but Corfe counted himself lucky not to have lost more. The eastern bank was a sucking quagmire of mud and horse-shit for almost a mile, and the troops were hollow-eyed ghosts staggering with weariness. But they were ashore, essentially intact, having covered over eighty leagues in five days. Corfe decreed that the following day would be one of rest for men and animals alike. The army bivouacked a mile from the river-bank, gathered firewood, set out sentries, and then as one, eight thousand men fell into a dreamless sleep.

T
HE LAST OF
the horses had been settled down for the night and the campfires were scattered all about the dark earth like some poor counterfeit of the stars overhead. The ground was hard as stone underfoot, which would make for easy marching, but the cold was difficult to keep at bay with a single blanket, even with one's feet in the very embers of the fire. Strangely, Corfe felt less tired than at any time since the King's Battle, for all that he had snatched barely four hours sleep a night on the voyage upriver. It was the freedom of being out in the field with his own command. No more conferences or councils or scribbling scribes, just a host of exhausted, chilled men and animals encamped in the frozen wilds of the north.

The men had meshed together well. They had fought shoulder-to-shoulder in the King's Battle, guzzled beer together in the taverns of Torunn, and endured the unpleasantness of the river-journey north. Now they were a single entity. Cimbric tribesmen, Fimbrian pikemen, Torunnan arquebusiers. There were still rivalries of course, but they were healthy ones. Corfe sat by the campfire and watched them sleep uncomplainingly upon the hard earth, their threadbare uniforms sodden with mud - and realized that he loved them all.

Andruw picked his way through the fires towards him, then dug into his saddlebags. He handed his general a wooden flask.

"Have a snort, Corfe. It'll keep the cold out. Compliments of Captain Mirio."

Corfe unstoppered the neck and had a good swallow. The stuff seemed to burn his mouth, and blazed a fiery path all the way down his gullet. His eyes watered and he found himself gasping for air.

"I swear Andruw, you'll go blind one of these days."

"Not me. I've the constitution of a horse."

"And about as much sense. What about the powder?"