The Forgotten (The Lost Words: Volume 3) (45 page)

CHAPTER 33

S
now and shit
. Mali thought that sounded like a bloody good name for a novel. Not when you were a protagonist, though. Not at all.

The first winter snows were always the worst. They never quite held for long, turning to slush and gray mud, making travel a nightmare. And yet, their frosty bite was just as dangerous as any blizzard, even more so. People tended to take heavy snow seriously, but they disdained the light flurry, only to wake up with black blisters on their cheeks and fingers.

Her wish had come true. The army had left its barracks at the Barrin estate before wintertime. Now, she wished they had stayed there, safe and comfortable and well fed and not heading to their deaths. Whatever training her girls had had would have to do. It was up to discipline to decide things.

The Northern Army counted roughly forty thousand souls. Not a huge force, but the commanders expected that many more to be recruited and prepared for war before the Spring Festival. There was talk of a similar number of troops dragging their feet in the south of the realm, leaderless, but no one had any solid news since the fall of Somar.

A large chunk of the force were green troops—village boys, opportunists, idiots, madmen, and other desperate fools
seeking glory, redemption, and a quick end in battle. Decades of gangrene had well and truly festered the army ranks, leaving it thin, wasted, rotten. For the first time in a very long time, the army was going to taste real battle. This was more than a border skirmish.

Adam’s conquest had only made things worse. True, many Eracians had learned the craft of killing, but they had also left with him, leaving behind cowards and rookies. Some of those left-behinds were officers now, leading men and women against a well-trained, entrenched foe through rain and hail and snow.

Bloody Abyss.

The roads were empty, deserted. Villages were empty, deserted. There was nothing left. Sacks of grain lay forlorn, crumpled, like used frogskins. The people and scavengers had even taken the firewood with them. Most of the houses had their roof thatching stripped off. There were no goats, no chickens, no dogs. The fields were barren, picked clean. Not a tool left in sight, not one sickle, not one spade, not a single broken belt buckle.

This meant the army had to rely on slow convoys to bring food to the front lines, and it took them forever to slog through the muck. Soldiers were forced to carry their own food and water, along with armor and winter clothing. That meant everyone had to make their choice on what they preferred.

In the first days, some of the fools had tossed away their blankets and coats. After all, you were warm enough while marching.

Now, most of the soldiers did not have any armor. The impending combat would be quite bloody, it seemed, but so far, the only enemies they had were the cold and hunger, and no sign of the nomads. The war was a distant worry.

At least, that was last week.

Only a few days away from the Barrin estate, the land had turned desolate. Then, they had passed the no-man’s zone and were now treading in occupied territory.

The tribesmen had done a quick and ruthless job of the Eracian villages, looting and burning, then retreating farther south. They seemed keen on staying, but they did not want to bother themselves with a hundred tiny communities they could not defend. So they congregated in and around towns, trying to figure out how to use the large settlements to their advantage.

Mali’s female spies had worked out a very detailed layout of the enemy defenses. Almost every day, a few of them would join the marching column and report. The Kataji, Namsue, and other tribes each had their own organization, their own way of running things. The only common factor was that they had killed as many men as they could and kept the women as their work force.

The rumor of an advancing Eracian army had done its magic to scatter even the few stragglers away. You would think not a soul lived south of the Barrin county.

One of the girls had returned just before dawn, riding hard through the night. The women kept horses in abandoned barns and farms and secretly fed them. This allowed them to move around quickly when they needed, without being spotted by the nomads.

The town of Dwick lay ahead. It was one of the many places that used to live off Somar. Dwick had sent its pork to the capital in return for gold, protection, fashion trends, and rumors before the war.

The nomads, it seemed, also loved pork.

A force of some three thousand nomads held the area, well dug in. They knew the Eracians might try to retaliate, so they
had fortified all the bridges, erected archery towers and dug moats around them, and kept mounted patrols in the fields.

There was no easy way going around them. The Northern Army wanted Somar, and that meant liberating Dwick. Three thousand men did not pose a great risk to an army fifteen times their size, but the knowledge was a hard, dry chunk in the gullets of all the men and women selected to storm the town.

Mali had been selected, of course.

Her male peers did not like her and doubted her ability to fight as well as they. Which meant she had to send her women to their deaths just because they did not have cocks between their legs. Well, the sooner they bloodied their blades, the better. The first engagements would be brutal, but nowhere near as raw and ugly as the next ones. Wars always tended to become more and more savage and less and less humane as they progressed. You would think no other imagined rule or code of honor could be broken, men could not turn any more animalistic than they had become, and then, in the next battle, they upped themselves and their monstrosities.

Besides, she wanted her girls skilled in killing before the ice and snow made things ever more difficult. In fact, she should be thanking the pricks for their stupid male pride.

Other regiments and battalions were going to participate in the attack as well, ten thousand men in total, two complete divisions. The rest of the army was marching farther west and south, trying to get around Dwick and take position toward the border and cut off the enemy supplies.

It might work.

By nightfall, they reached the town’s outskirts, well aware the enemy had probably spotted them and was busy strengthening their positions and calling for reinforcements. Movements of huge, clumsy armies could not go unseen. An absurd
arrangement, it seemed. The nomads knew the Eracians would come one day; the Eracians knew the tribesmen would wait for them to come. Not one side could really change the inevitable, and still, they all counted on the element of surprise, as if that could somehow lessen the actinic smell of a wintry carnage about to begin at dawn.

Few people slept, Mali included. Captain Gordon and she spent the night fucking like mad, and she was sore in the morning, as if a horse had kicked her in the pelvis.

The day turned out to be just as she expected, gloomy and cold. There was a cloud cover above the town, winnowing tiny flakes of snow. An ashen mist crept through the frosted fields, as if afraid to awake the people. Lamps hung from posts and on top of archery platforms, emitting sallow blobs of light that seemed to shimmer and trick the eye. You could hear the pigs grunting in their sties.

Mali was leaning against a rock, one leg propped up, her arms folded on her knee, flexing her fingers, trying to make them warm. Alexa and Theresa stood by her side, each with her own looking glass tube, inspecting the objective.

There were a few women moving around animal pens, swathed in furs that erased all femininity from their forms, buckets of pig slush slung over their necks. They tottered down narrow passages between the sties, ladling chunks of food and tossing them left and right. The pigs were lively blobs of pink and white from afar. Their body steam was creeping through the wooden fences and around low shed roofs, mingling with the morning fog.

Several nomad soldiers were moving in the open. They looked like sentries, miserable, bored, with spears tossed casually over their shoulders. A single horse was standing in a snow-blanketed field, a rusty, forgotten plow resting near it.

Heather, the scout from yesterday, was whispering the remainder of her report to Major Meagan, as she would be the first to encounter the enemy. Dwick was held by Ram’arush, a northern tribe loosely allied with the Kataji. They had virtually no cavalry of their own, but they had lots of archers in their ranks.

Mali realized someone was looking at her, the side of her face itching. She turned. Gordon was giving her that funny half-guilty look that men had when they thought they were being emotional. She had expressly told him that sex was just sex, several times, but now faced with death, he was probably feeling he ought to be a gallant hero and protect her. Men and their foolish notions. You could not trust them with anything.

Her battalion was mostly ready for the attack. She had to wait for Colonels Finley and Winfred of the Third and Fourth Divisions to give their signal to move. A chewy backdrop of noise breathed at her back, the sound of a thousand throats rasping cold air, trembling fingers needlessly checking straps and belts, hands drawing swords a few inches out of the sheaths and slamming them back, mouths telling sour jokes, sloshing thin ale, women talking to themselves. The anticipation of death.

“Are they expecting us?” Abigail voiced nervously, as grim as ever.

“We must assume they do,” Mali muttered. One of her clerks handed her a wooden cup of soup. She slurped, enjoying the touch of warmth in her belly.

Gordon patted himself on the chest twice, spun around, and walked away to inspect his own company one more time.

“Nothing moving in the city. The towers look quiet,” Theresa observed, scanning the town.

Mali knew how well dawn could hide its surprises. “We assume the worst.”

A footman of the Fourth Division was plodding their way, a short, stocky man. Unceremoniously, he handed her a rolled paper. She unfurled it and read. Her two peers were ready. They would strike in about ten minutes.

“Last chance to drink, eat something and take a good piss,” Mali said. Someone laughed dryly.

Gordon was back. He looked about to say something. A withering glance silenced him. No stupid sentiments. She needed his head clear and focused on the Ram’arush.

And so it began. Without any shouting or words of encouragement. The battalion just spilled into the field and started marching, a steady pace that conserved energy and allowed everyone to keep a straight line.

A bell started to toll. The old Dwick monastery, the only building that had a bell. The peals sounded like thunder. The women in the pens scattered. The enemy soldiers rushed to their posts. The countdown before death began.

Mali followed just behind her companies, her small staff and personal guard around her. There were no really good vantage points around Dwick. If she wanted to see what was happening, she had to be out there. Besides, there would be no time to relay orders if she stayed back, and no reserves to call upon. A simple task, this morning attack.

Half-frozen grass and weed crunched under their boots. The front lines left muck for their comrades in the back, and gaps opened in the battle formation. Mali cursed silently, but there was no point shouting. Well, the enemy had no cavalry, so there ought to be no Cornfield Syndrome mistakes, she hoped. At her side, one of the clerks dropped her ledger. She picked it up, rubbed off the hoary muck as best as she could, and hurried to catch up.

They reached the town outskirts. A low wall choked to death in vines marked the outermost patch of farmland. Women
grunted and cursed as they scrambled over, kicking shingles off, bruising their knees and twisting their ankles against loose rock. Mali sat on the wall and swung her legs around, then lifted her scabbard over. Alexa snagged her foot, staggered, and caught herself. They could not really see the holes in the frozen earth; they were covered with dead crops and hoarfrost.

The orders were simple. The Third Independent Battalion was going to hold the left flank. Her girls were tasked with crossing the southernmost bridge, disabling the two watchtowers that covered the approach, then securing the farms and the slaughterhouses in the eastern district.

The bell was now clanging in earnest.

Another low bloody wall. Her women spilled around and over it, the line shattering before closing again. They reached the riverside. The Marock River was a small stream that wound around Dwick, from north to south, like a horseshoe. It had four bridges, all wooden, all defended.

The companies spread, preparing to charge. Mali glimpsed the enemy towers protecting the bridge. Their platforms bristled with archers. Arrows zipped into the sky, almost too small to notice.

Mali raised her small shield and continued marching.

Sophie veered hard left and led her soldiers into the water, trying to cross the river. The bank was crowded in rushes, each stalk encased in a tube of ice, slowly melting and dripping. The black water slugged past, its sides filmed with thin floes.

Like a herd of stupid animals, the women waded into the shallows, shrieking with shock and fear, staggering, slowing down. The ice crust broke, the soldiers began to sag and fall on their sides and faces. The Ram’arush fired arrows from above. Soon, a few bodies joined the slow stream toward Somar, bobbing on the surface.

Mali shouted, but no one heard her. Alexa rushed to assist and rally the troops back toward the bridge. That was the goal, the bridge. Theresa and Abigail were doing as ordered. One company was attacking the towers; the other was marching fast across the bridge, trying to secure the far side. Maybe twenty paces across all in all, but it took them forever. The nomads were already massing, waiting, spears angled out into their faces and bellies.

Soldiers fell off the bridge, splashing into the water, sputtering, the numbing cold making quick work of the stragglers, even quicker than the zipping shafts from the bowmen in the towers and inside the town. Mali watched with dismay. After twenty years of peace, the killing dazzled her. She remembered things she thought she had forgotten. She realized some of the more glorified memories were nothing but an evil trick of her mind.