Mordraud, Book One (85 page)

He could only slay or be slain.
Cambria, its soldiers, his brother – they were all parts of the same loathing, the punch-bag for his pain, his sense of failure, his mistakes. His was no longer a war for ideals. It was a catharsis. With his brother as pet scapegoat. For everything Dunwich had done, for that horrendous childhood he’d had to endure.

He could have stopped
Deanna. Taken her with him, run away with their child. Talked it through with Adraman and come to a solution.

Go
t himself killed before making her pregnant, so as to eradicate the problem at its root.

In
stead he’d done nothing. He’d let events follow their course, hoping time would settle everything.

He couldn
’t forgive himself for what he’d done.

“
TO THE RAMPART! THEY MUSTN’T JOIN UP AGAIN WITH THE OTHER MEN!”

Mercy
carried on darting in and out the tents, drenched in blood from head to toe. Mordraud left him to get on with his speciality. Hammer and Benno were up alongside him in his dash, slashing left and right at the soldiers attempting to stage a vague stand. Adraman had already installed the rest of the troops on the beaten earth barricade, and was completing the assault. From the cries washing in from the distance, Cambria was showing its first signs of reaction. The real battle was shifting inside the Imperial camp, and he couldn’t miss out on it.

“
KEEP PUSHING FORWARD!” he yelled to his fellow fighters, who slowed for a moment, surprised. “But orders were to...” responded Benno, as he drove back a foot-soldier who’d rushed at him, waving the shards of a broken bottle in the air.

“
The others will stay, we’re going!”

He
already began racing off, with or without them. His men followed him, leaving the field to the other attack units. They reached a ramp, opened up a path through the soldiers crowding the belt of wall, and climbed atop the Rampart.

The large
camp stretching out west had plunged into utter chaos.

The Imperial Army
had succeeded in braking the rebels’ onslaught, but only at a stone’s throw from their own camp’s first tents. Thanks to Adraman’s cavalry, which had wiped away the initial defence lines, the bulk of the troops had managed to pass beyond the Rampart, and no longer had to fear being squashed against this barrier. Instead, Cambria was lacking the physical space to organise a reaction.

“
We look like a swarm of termites, for love of the Gods! Look!” Giant blurted, pointing to the tents that, one after another, were enveloped by the advancing front.

“What d’you say, Mordraud? Should we go back and give them a hand? Mercy and the others are still there... Berg too...” he asked, turning to his captain, but he found no one.

Mordraud r
olled messily down the Rampart and pulled up at a horse kicking beside its owner, who’d died with a spear through his chest. He seized the reins and nimbly leapt on top. Before Giant had time to call out to him, he was riding alone to his foe.

“
But... does he want to commit suicide?!” Giant asked Benno in alarm, while the friend shrugged his arms, speechless for an answer.

“
Let’s turn back, we can join another group...” Hammer suggested. No one objected. So they came down from the Rampart and returned to their camp, to finish flushing out all the tents and shacks.

***

“Wake up, damn you!”

Dunwich
sprang to his feet, his hand secured around his sword and his eyes still bleary with sleep. It seemed as if the world was coming to its end outside the tent. Shouts, thuds and steel smacking against iron. He’d made himself so groggy with wine he hadn’t noticed he was snoozing in the midst of a battle. Griserio was bundling up the maps, the documents and all the gold he could stuff into his pockets. Dunwich peered out, but saw only panic, plus the bitter smoke of a blaze.

“
What’s happening, Griserio?!” he stammered, confused and dazed.

“
The rebels have attacked in the middle of the night!” the man yelled in reply, not halting his work of filling the large canvas bags with everything he could. “They stormed their old camp, and then took control of the Rampart! And THERE’S A TIDAL WAVE OF THEM!”

“
WHAT?!” was all Dunwich managed.

“
There’s no time. Grab whatever might be useful and let’s make a run for it!”

“
Make a run for it
?! Have you gone mad? I have to direct the defences! I’m not running away!”

“
No, we have to get out of here! If we don’t retreat, they’ll wipe us all away! WE DON’T HAVE ENOUGH MEN TO FIGHT BACK! There’s too many of them!”

“
Too many?! We’ve got
fifteen thousand men
, for love of the Gods!”

Griserio
let out an amused chuckle, even if he didn’t find the situation funny in the slightest.

“
Fifteen thousand, before the latest battalions were sent to the lands the Rinns are claiming!”

“
So how many are left?! I still haven’t done the figures. I signed those wretched papers three days ago!” Dunwich burst out, fumbling around in the mounds of correspondence cluttering his desk.

“
Six thousand... more or less.”

“
HOW MANY?!” bawled Dunwich. He couldn’t believe his ears. With all the approving, stamping and signing dispatches, he’d lost count of his men. “I’ve been a sodding idiot!” he barked, beside himself with rage.

“
And how did they manage to catch us so unawares?! How did they bloody well do it?!”

“
I’ll explain later. For the moment, let’s get out of here! Let’s retreat to the back lines, before it’s too late!” Griserio returned concisely. Dunwich seized his travel bag, found his helmet, and they both raced out the tent. Outside, full delirium reigned. The Cambrian army was totally unprepared for combat. It was lacking in orders, the captains were nowhere to be seen and the regiments were moving at random, driven like sheep by the rebel cavalry’s onslaughts. Many tents were in flames, but things were worse for those being engulfed by the advancing front. The occupants were dragged out and executed on the spot. With his own eyes, Dunwich followed a whole unit that hadn’t managed to flee a mess shack, and had holed themselves up inside for defence. They were hauled out one by one, thrown to their knees and summarily decapitated.

With not a word, no judgement, not a s
hard of pity for the defeated.

“
What were you expecting?! After what we did, were you hoping for a little understanding?!” Griserio blurted sarcastically. The men had managed to escape the first surge, and were converging at the far side of the camp, just waiting for someone to tell them what to do. Dunwich reached them, calculated the survivors at a glance, and then did the same with the rebels.

T
he comparison made him turn pale.

“
Where did they get all those people?! It’s impossible!”

“
They must have all left their posts on the front! We were too busy tinkering with the Rinns, and so they took their chance. If we’d only tried an attack at just the right moment, we’d have won the war in an evening! Instead...” breathed Griserio, in terror.

“
And the men I left guarding the Rampart?! How come they didn’t put the brakes on the advance?!”

Dunwich
already knew he wouldn’t like the answer at all. The cherry was still missing on that cake of cow-dung.

“
I suppose they never noticed. They’re always all drunk. And besides...”

“
BESIDES WHAT?!”

“
I was told quite a few units took the initiative and set off on their own little... foray, inland.”

“
I can’t believe it...!”

“
They wanted to plunder a few villages – the usual soldier stuff. You know better than me how it all works. The rebels must have intercepted and crushed them while they were away.”

“
Bugger the frigging wretched...!”

Dunwich
couldn’t find the right words to define what had happened. Disaster of the most utter and shameful kind. Suicide. They’d done everything imaginable to make things easier for the rebels. His fury was groping to find a vent, and he swiftly hit on it.

Loralon.

“That accursed swine of a mutt.
He
’s the one who caused all this!”

Griserio
didn’t reply. The enemy was drawing closer. Dunwich gathered the few remaining Lances in all haste and wrath, his mouth flowing with curses against the Emperor, the Gods and the rebels – but mainly against himself. He had the horn of retreat sounded, and what little was left of Cambria’s army began to move back. Those unfortunate enough to be left behind were swallowed up by the rebel front, but all the rest managed to pull through. The withdrawal became an unrestrained and jumbled flight. The wounded were deserted, as were the sick shut within the compound. The last scene Dunwich saw, before passing over the hill and losing sight of the Rampart, were the flames dancing up from the huts housing the plague carriers.

The
central front was lost.

***

“Come here... Where did you think you were going?!”

A
foot-soldier was sneaking out the exit. He must have been a brigade leader. Mordraud caught him by the hair and thumped him to the ground outside the door to the shack. “They were hiding under the floorboards, just like rats!” bayed a soldier at his rear. He was the one who’d heard them while searching the premises deserted by the fleeing enemy. The subdued sound of a man crying. Precisely the foot-soldier he had in front of him.

“
Bring them all out, boys!” he shouted to his men “And you... YOU HAVE TO SET AN EXAMPLE!”

Mordraud l
ifted him off the ground, turned towards the hut door and, as his fellow fighters pushed the prisoners out, pulled a knife from his belt to slit the throat of the poor tearful foot-soldier. But not hurriedly. He had to be seen by all. The man scrabbled and howled like an animal at slaughter.

“
THAT’S ENOUGH NOW!” someone called out behind him. Mordraud dropped the writhing body to the floor and put down the knife. Into its back.

Adraman
’s face was ashen, overwhelmed by all that brutal violence. “What are you doing?!” he bellowed in his face. Mordraud didn’t flinch.

“
I’m getting things straight,” he replied in a macabre mechanic tone.

“
What?!” Adraman exclaimed, almost speechless.

“
I’m setting things straight.”

“
What’s got into you, lad?! You’ve never behaved like this!”

“
Because you’ve never seen me with The Stranger in my hands...” retorted Mordraud, before going off without awaiting orders, leaving his friend unsettled and baffled.

“
And you?! What is there for you to look at?” Adraman yelled at the other soldiers. “Escort these prisoners away! And don’t dare hurt them!”

“
Yes, sir,” they replied in chorus, with clear disappointment.

The
battle had ended in the best of ways, but the war was far from over. Adraman gave orders to take everything left intact, the tents, the water supplies, the food and the weapons, and to let the troops rest up for a single night. The situation could get out of hand from one moment to the next. Mordraud wasn’t the only one who’d revealed his worst side. All the soldiers had scores to settle with Cambria’s men: some had lost a son or child, some their homes, others their wives, through cold or famine. Keeping them in line was an undertaking verging on the impossible. But to achieve it, he had to allow the occasional infringement, blinkering his eyes and plugging his ears.

The first was the fire at the infirmary, torched by
soldiers terrified at the idea of falling ill after already escaping the plague once. Adraman had moved away from the camp, to mute to his hearing the piercing cries of those burning alive inside those putrid shacks circled by planks and barbed wire. A gruesome sight, that nevertheless seemed to please many of his men. A mass of them lingered to watch the blaze, until it died out, drinking and eating the food stocks dug out of the officers’ tents.

But
his most harrowing concession was the execution of Lances, craved, proposed and orchestrated by Mordraud. Thirty or so were rounded up among the wounded and prisoners. The mere sight of that armour aroused in his men the murkiest side of their minds strained to the extreme. They tied their victims to the uprooted posts of the torched tents, in the centre of the camp, all in a single line. Mordraud began walking in front of them, imitating a judge, as he guzzled from a flask of wine.

“
You are found guilty of tormenting us for decades!”

A roar of approval from the public.

“You are found guilty of slaying our friends!”