Hawkwood and the Kings: The Collected Monarchies of God (Volume One) (90 page)

"They are quiet. Your retainers dare not do anything at the moment. The Knights and the men at arms of the other great houses are watching them closely. The slightest excuse, and they will be wiped out."

Abeleyn had a couple of elderly aunts and a doddering granduncle. The Hibrusid house had become thin on the ground of late. These relics of its past had left all intrigue behind and preferred to stay away from court and live their vague lives in the peace of the extensive Royal estates north of Abrusio.

"We'll leave them out of it, then. We can do it with what we have anyway. Get back to the city, Golophin. Tell Rovero and Mercado that I will be approaching the city in four days, if God is willing. I want them to have a ship waiting ten miles up the coast from the Outer Roads. There is a cove there: Pendero's Landing. They can pick me up, and we'll sail into Abrusio with all honours, openly. That will give the population something to think about."

"You will have no problems with the common folk, Abeleyn," Golophin's falcon said. "It is only the nobles who want your head on a pike."

"So much the better," the young King said grimly. "Go now, Golophin. I want this thing set in train as soon as possible."

The bird took off at once, leaping into the air, its pinions shedding feathers as they flailed frantically.

"Farewell, my King," Golophin's voice said. "When next we meet it will be in the harbour of your capital."

Then the bird was labouring away across the foothills, lost in the star-filled night sky.

T
HE COMPANY SETTLED
for the night, grateful for the fact that the worst of the winter weather had been left behind with the mountains. Abeleyn rolled himself in a boat-cloak and dozed by one of the soldiers' fires. He did not feel like sharing a tent with Jemilla tonight. It seemed somehow more wholesome to sleep under the stars with the firelight producing orange shadows beyond his tired eyelids.

He did not sleep for long, however. It was after midnight by the position of the Scythe when Sergeant Orsini shook him gently awake.

"Sire, pardon me, but there's something I think you should see."

Frowning, blinking, Abeleyn let himself be led out of the camp to the crag he had sat on earlier. Orsini, an efficient soldier, had placed a sentry there because it afforded a good view of the surrounding region. The sentry was there now, saluting quickly and then blowing on his cold hands.

"Well?" Abeleyn asked a little irritably.

Orsini pointed to the south-western horizon. "There, sir. What do you make of it?"

The world was dark, sleeping under its endless vault of stars. But there was something glowing at its edge. It might have been a mistimed sunset: the sky was red there, the clouds kindled with crimson light. A blush which lit up fully a quarter of the horizon glimmered silently.

"What do you think it is, sire?" Orsini asked.

Abeleyn watched the far-off flicker for a second. Finally he rubbed his eyes, squeezing the bridge of his nose as if trying to get rid of a bad dream.

"Abrusio is burning," he said.

A
CROSS THE BREADTH
of Normannia, over the two great ranges of the Malvennors and the Cimbrics, down to the coast of the Kardian Sea and the city of Torunn, capital of Lofantyr's kingdom.

Here it was already dawn; the sun which would not light up Hebrion's shores for hours yet was huge over the rooftops of the city, and the streets were already busy with the morning life of the markets. Carts and waggons clogged the roadways as farmers brought their produce in to sell, and herds of sheep and cattle were being driven to the stockpens which nestled below the city wall to the west. And beyond the walls to the north the steam and reek of the vast refugee camps sprawled over the land like a rash, whilst Torunnan soldiers manned the gates in that direction, vetting every entrant into the city. Once-prosperous citizens of Aekir had turned to beggary and brigandage in the past weeks, and the more disreputable of the refugees were denied entrance to the walled centre of Torunn. Convoys of crown waggons laden with victuals were waiting to be hauled out to the camps to satisfy the immediate needs of the unfortunates, but Torunna was a country at war and had little enough to spare.

T
HE MORNING HAD
started badly for Corfe. He was striding along the stone corridors of Torunn's Main Arsenal with Ensign Ebro hurrying to keep up beside him. The men of his new command had been grudgingly set aside a few barrack blocks for their quarters and were crammed into them like apples in a barrel. Ebro had seen to it that they were issued rations and clothes from the city stores, but as of yet not one sword or arquebus or scrap of mail had been forthcoming. And then, last night, a note had been brought to him from the Queen Dowager by a lady-in-waiting.

I have done what I could
, it said.
The rest is up to you.

So he was on his own.

He had applied to have more officers seconded to him; he and Ebro alone could not effectively command five hundred men. And he had had Ebro indent three times for armour and weapons to outfit his force, but to no avail. Worst of all was the rumour running about the Garrison Quarters that Lofantyr was going to set aside twenty tercios of the regular army for the job of subjugating the rebellious nobles in the south - the task Corfe had been entrusted with. Clearly, the King did not expect the Queen Dowager's protégé to accomplish anything beyond his own discrediting.

He hammered on the door of the Quartermaster's department, wearing again the ragged uniform he had worn at Aekir.

The Quartermaster's department of the Third Torunnan Field Army was housed in a vast string of warehouses close to the waterfront in the east of the city. The warehouses held everything from boots to waggonwheels, cannon barrels to belts. Everything needed to equip and sustain an army could be found in them, but they were giving Corfe's men nothing more than the clothes on their backs and he wanted to know why.

The Quartermaster-General was Colonel Passifal, a veteran with a short, snow-white beard and a wooden stump in place of the leg he had lost fighting Merduks along the Ostian river before Corfe was born. His office was as bare as a monk's cell, and the papers which covered his desk were set in neat piles. Requisition orders, inspection sheets, inventories. The Torunnan army had a highly organized system of paperwork which it had copied from its one-time overlord, Fimbria.

"What do you want?" Passifal barked, not looking up from the scraping nib of his quill.

"I indented for five hundred sets of half-armour, five hundred arquebuses, five hundred sabres and all the necessary accoutrements days ago. I would like to know why the requisition has not been filled," Corfe said.

Passifal looked up, his quill losing its flickering animation.

"Ah, Colonel Corfe Cear-Inaf, I take it."

Corfe nodded curtly.

"Well, there's nothing I can do for you, son. My orders are to release stores only to regular Torunnan troops for the duration - Martellus is crying out for equipment up at the dyke, you know - and that rabble the King has given you to play with are officially classed as auxiliary militia, which means that the Torunnan military is not responsible for their fitting-out. I've stretched things as it is, giving you uniforms and a place for them to lay their heads. So don't bother me any more."

Corfe leant over the broad desk, resting his knuckles on the rim. "So how am I supposed to arm my men, Colonel?"

Passifal shrugged. "Auxiliary units are usually equipped by the private individual who has raised them. Are you rich, Cear-Inaf?"

Corfe laughed shortly. "All I possess is what I stand up in."

Passifal gazed at the ragged uniform. "You got those rents at Aekir, I hear."

"And at Ormann Dyke."

"So you've smelled powder." Passifal scratched his white beard for a moment and then gestured with sudden peevishness. "Oh, take a seat, for God's sake, and stop trying to stand there on top of your dignity."

Corfe drew up a chair. Ebro remained standing by the door.

"I hear the King has played a joke on you, Colonel," Passifal said, grinning now. "He does that sometimes. The old woman rides him hard, and every so often he kicks at the traces."

"The Queen Dowager."

"Yes. What a beauty that woman was in her day. Not bad now, as a matter of fact. It's the witchery keeps her young, they say. But Lofantyr gets tired of being told which pot to piss in. He's outfitting an expedition to bring the south to heel - a proper one, infantry, cavalry and horse artillery - but he's going to let you go south and make an arse of it first to show his mother she shouldn't force her favourites on him."

"I thought as much," Corfe said calmly, though his fists clenched on his knees.

"Yes. My orders are not to let you have so much as a brass button from our stores. Those savages you style a command will have to fight with their fists and teeth alone. I'm sorry for it, Colonel, but that's the way it is."

"Thank you for explaining it to me," Corfe said in a flat voice.

He rose to go.

Passifal stuck out a hand. "Not so fast! There's no hurry, is there? You served under Mogen, I take it."

"I did."

"So did I. I was a cavalryman in one of his flying columns in the days when we went out looking for the Merduks instead of waiting for them to march up to our walls."

"I also was cavalry," Corfe said, unbending a little. "But there was no need for horsemen in Aekir once the siege began."

"Yes, yes, I daresay... Old Mogen used to say that cavalry was the arm of the gentleman, and artillery the arm of the mechanic. How we used to love that cantankerous old bastard! He was the best man we've ever had..."

Passifal stared at Corfe for a long moment, as if weighing him up.

"There is a way to equip your men, after a fashion," he said at last.

"How?"

Passifal rose. "Come with me." His stump thumped hollowly on the floor as he came round from behind his desk and retrieved a set of keys from the hundreds hanging in rows along one wall of the office. "You won't like it, mind, and I'm not sure if it's right, but they're barbarians you're commanding so I doubt if they'll care. And besides, the stuff isn't doing any good where it is, and technically it's not part of the regular military stores..."

Corfe and Ebro followed the one-legged Quartermaster out of the office, completely baffled.

T
HIS SECTION OF
the Main Arsenal resembled nothing so much as the great market squares in the middle of Torunn. There were carts, waggons and limbers everywhere. Men were shifting stores from warehouses or into warehouses, culverins were being drawn by teams of oxen, and everywhere there was the squeal of pulleys and cries of labouring men. Down at the waterfront a trio of deep-hulled
nefs
had put in from the wide Torrin Estuary and were unloading cargoes of powder and pig-iron on to the quays, and a slim dispatch-runner had just docked: bearing news from the east, no doubt.

Passifal led them away from the hubbub to an older building which was set back from the waterfront. It was an ageing stone structure, windowless and somehow deserted-looking, as though it had been long forgotten.

The Quartermaster turned a key in the screeching lock and shouldered the heavy door open with a grunt.

"Stay close behind," he told Corfe and Ebro. "It's dark as a witch's tit in here. I'll strike a light."

The crack of flint on steel, and Passifal was blowing gently on the tinder-covered wick of an oil lamp. The light grew and he slapped shut the glass case on the lengthening flame, then held it up so that the radiance of it flushed the interior of the building.

"What in the world - ?" Corfe said, startled despite himself.

The building was very long; it extended beyond the lamplight into darkness. And it was crowded.

Piles of armour lay all about, in places stacked until they almost reached the raftered ceiling. Helmets, gauntlets, breast- and back-plates, chainmail, vambraces, aventails, rusting and cobwebbed and dented by blows, holed by gunfire. Mixed in with the armour were weapons: scimitars, tulwars, rotten-shafted lances with remnants of silk still attached to their heads. Strange weapons, unlike any the Torunnans used - or any other western army, for that matter.

Corfe bent and picked up a helmet, turning it in his hands and wiping the dust away. It was high-crowned with a flaring neck-guard and long cheek-pieces. The helmet of one of the
Ferinai
, the elite cuirassiers of the Merduks.

"Merduk armour," he said as the realization smote him. "But what is it doing here?"

"Trophies of war," Passifal said. "Been here sixty years, since we threw back the Ostrabarian Merduks after they overran Ostiber. That was Gallican of Rone, if you remember your history. A good general. He beat them as they were approaching the Thurian Passes and sent twenty thousand of the black-hearted bastards to join their precious Prophet. The King staged a triumphal march for him here in Torunn, parades of prisoners and so on. And he shipped back a thousand sets of armour to display during it. When it was over they were dumped here and forgotten. Been here ever since. I had been meaning to get rid of them - we're pressed for warehouse space, you see..."