Mordraud, Book One (74 page)

“
I’d have rather not talked about it during the assembly, but...” Asaeld pulled from the inside pocket of his cloak a roll of parchments tied up in a leather lace. He uncurled one and placed it in Loralon’s lap. The Emperor seized it and read it slowly. The chancellor, who was standing at his side, turned frighteningly pale.

“
Is this not your signature, Parro?!”

“
Sir, I’ve never set eyes on these documents before! You have to believe me!” stammered the old chancellor. Asaeld turned towards the room and showed another parchment to the front rows.

“
I took the liberty of sending a few men to sift through Parro’s registry office. They found
these
...” Asaeld thumbed the documents one by one. Dozens of scrolls written in Parro’s hand, marked with the Lance stamp and signed by the chancellor himself. And as if that weren’t enough, each one bore the Imperial wax seal, that only he and the Emperor possessed and could use.

“
Asaeld, are you very sure you found all these in the chancellor’s office? The accusation you advance is most serious...”

“
Your Majesty, I am certain. Just as I am certain that within the court lurk the traitors who wove the web of attacks on my Lances.”

The hum in the hall became a g
ibbering and angry roar. Parro had been accused of treason, by Asaeld in person.

Dunwich
couldn’t believe what was happening. The commander of the Lances was above all suspicion, naturally. But even the most unfaltering faith could waver.

‘
Parro... a traitor? The Emperor’s closest advisor, who was so old he’d also worked alongside Loralon’s father?’

If it hadn
’t been Asaeld to utter the words, perhaps nobody at all would have listened to such an absurd accusation.

“
Loralon, I’m innocent! You can’t really believe a story of this kind, can you?!” barked the old chancellor, as his terrified eyes darted around the whole room. “I’VE KNOWN YOU SINCE YOU WERE A BABY!”

Asaeld
lowered his gaze dolefully, clasping his hands behind his back. “My lord, it’s a nasty shock, I am aware... but the proof is indisputable.”

Loralon
looked from one to the other, gripped by bleak confusion. The councillors struggled to speak with him, their voices clambering over each other. The strategists clutched their broad maps to their chests in deathly embarrassment.

Dunwich
got up and grabbed Asaeld’s arm, hissing in rage. “Why didn’t you tell me?! When did you give the order to search his premises?”

“
You dare doubt me, my boy?” retorted Asaeld with extreme sternness.

“
No... I don’t know...” replied Dunwich, unsettled by his commander’s eyes. How could he not trust him after everything they had been through together? Dunwich felt foolish after his outburst and stopped questioning.

“
Then sit back down. We’ll discuss it later.”

Loralon
got up, waving his arms about to attract the hall’s attention, and silence returned instantly. He was purple in the face and was panting, like after a long run. Choosing between the truths proffered by Asaeld and Parro was killing him.

“
Search the registry office again, and call in a handwriting expert. For now, escort the chancellor to the cells. Don’t take your eyes off him, not even for a second, is that understood?”

His councillors
sprang up and vanished from the chamber. The din was so intense as to make further debate impossible. But Asaeld still had to receive precise orders on how to act now after the Long Winter.

“
Organise the regiments to quell the revolts in the protectorates! For love of the Gods, Asaeld, couldn’t you take care of it?! I’m too upset at the moment to go on with this!”

“
As you wish, my lord. I’ll see to it.”

Asaeld
retreated to his men and ordered them all to leave the room. Parro was arrested by two guards and dragged away without the slightest chance to escape.

“
Cursed Lance! Son of a bitch!” he yelled, foaming at the mouth and kicking out. Unseen by Loralon, one of the soldiers punched his metal glove full on into the old man’s mouth, knocking out a couple of teeth.

“
That’s for our boys that you tried to kill... You’ll get the rest later.”

Dunwich
went out following Asaeld, with the odd sensation something had gone awry. He couldn’t get his mind off the idea that Asaeld was on a false track, and that he was behaving with excessive zeal. The commander had seen his men die at the hands of traitors, and many more had fallen at the front, following feckless and poorly thought-through orders. He could have made a mistake about Parro. They were hard days, with the rebels also finding the source to the Long Winter and the defeat on the Rampart.

He might have got it wrong, considered
Dunwich, halfway between question and answer.

“
Aren’t you overdoing it, Asaeld? You’ve had the chancellor jailed!”

“
Let me make this clear once and for all, Dunwich...”

Asaeld
allowed the group to move on ahead, and stopped opposite him, resting his hands on the young man’s shoulders. His gaze had mellowed, and was more pained than Dunwich had expected. The eyes of a man suffering atrociously for his choices.

“
You have to trust me. I know what I’m doing.”

“
Okay...” replied Dunwich, crushed by Asaeld’s majesty.

“
I won’t doubt you again.”

***

Deanna felt the first symptoms just a few days after reading Adraman’s letter. They were still in the midst of winter, so she had found no reason for alarm. She ate so little, and of such poor quality, that anything might have caused those pains and that dreadful nausea. She hadn’t mentioned it to anyone, especially not to Adrina. That old nag would have done nothing but torment her. Instead, she wanted to be alone, and shut herself up in her room. And that was all.

As luck would have it, she
’d made love with both of them that wretched night. The last and only night Mordraud had spent at home. She’d long lost the decency to be ashamed of herself, smothered by the indelible need to perpetrate mistakes, to break the boredom that had been born with her, and never left her. A supreme tedium gnawing away at her like acid. If at least she hadn’t given herself to Adraman, he’d have worked it all out at once. And she’d be free to feel ashamed, to dislodge that life of hers entrapped in the paranoia she’d shaped with her own hands. Yet, this way, Adraman could delude himself it really was his child. As if it were possible, against all clear reason. For years he’d tried to make her pregnant, unsuccessfully. That it could be her fault and not Adraman’s was an idea Deanna had never entertained. Within her heart, she felt only her husband was to blame. And now she had proof of this.

P
ity nobody could actually know the truth.

Deanna
felt like a filthy coward. If she only had an excuse to come out into the open, then she could free herself of her mountain of guilt. But when she’d seen Adraman race home, brimming with joy to the point of dying from it, any last spark of love she might hold for herself was stifled. She wouldn’t say anything, and would go on with her life as if nothing had happened. She was very good at that – or at least she thought so.

The
idea of giving birth frightened the wits out of her.

What should she do, she wondered. Within her another life was stirring, as the fruit of all her flaws and mistakes. A concentration of her most sordid weaknesses. A monster t
o become flesh and blood in the body of an unworthy heir. She even began thinking about the tales she’d heard the old townswomen tell while lingering outside their houses, of noxious herbs and long sharp metal rods, and only avoided taking these further as she feared for her own life. Another point in favour of her cowardliness. Her only hope was that Mordraud would not show his face again. She knew he would work it all out, and she wouldn’t be able to hold out on his foolish proposals. Run away together. Finally tell the truth. Declare their love for each other to Adraman. All things perfect for a fairy tale – certainly not for real life. There was no happy ending for this story. Or at least Deanna couldn’t see one anywhere.

S
pring had finally come, but it wasn’t the way all had dreamt about it. Once the fleeting initial euphoria had passed, it became miserably obvious that they wouldn’t be able to leave that ghastly year behind them as if it had never existed. Too many people had died, and many more would still have to die from illness, famine and wounds suffered during the long freezing months. The soil had been so thoroughly raped that it no longer yielded fruits, with the exception of a few tufts of tough bitter grass. The few surviving trees thrust out their buds at the first mild breeze, but as their last salute to the skies. Their roots were undermined, and the strain to bloom again finished them off for good. And there was not even the recollection of any animal. Everywhere, as far as the eye could see, Eld was a lump of drenched rock, deserted in the midst of a bogland infested with putrescent carcasses.

Against all expectations,
Adraman did not set out again as usual after a few days’ rest. Eldain had asked him to stay in the fiefdom to maintain order with his personal guard. Far-sighted instructions. The population was in need of everything, including a watchdog to keep an eye on those who’d lost their minds. Several riot hot-spots sprang up, all exclusively over food. The farm labourers were literally pushed to return to the fields to attempt to save whatever they could, while swarms of cavalry had to defend the carts sent from the eastern regions that were allies in the cause. Every day a few citizens got themselves killed trying to lay their hands on a ration of bread or rice. Deanna lived shut up in her home, surrounded by her staff in fighting trim, armed with sticks and brooms. The Long Winter was over, but it had left in its wake the worst imaginable debris.

Adraman
detested that task. He felt his heart die every time he had to cage someone up for a crime that, in better times, wouldn’t have existed. Deanna knew her husband well enough to appreciate that his stay at home, with those dreadful duties to carry out every day, would be a drawn-out and harrowing suffering. Instead, her forecasts were contradicted by the exceptional vitality Adraman had plucked out when he learnt he was to have an heir. He no longer seemed himself. He never raised his voice, he smiled at her every word, he cuddled her and looked after her without claiming anything in return. For the first months, Deanna went on with her usual caustic and intolerant attitude, but Adraman seemed able to withstand any reproach. And he beamed, like never before. Slowly, she too began to succumb.

She had
never had her husband home for so long, not even during the early period of their marriage, when she was still little more than a child. Many a time she’d told herself that sooner or later she’d try to get her life back on its feet, but her good intentions were swept away at each attempt by her ego. With Adraman close every day, Deanna realised that perhaps she really could manage it.

However, her resolutions moved in pace with her moods. N
ot every day was a good one – in fact quite rarely it was – and she had to struggle with the thought that she had another man’s baby inside her. A recognition that weighed down her belly and threatened constantly to drag her into a new depression. But she fought back and endeavoured to hold out, like she’d never tried before.

All she needed was for
Mordraud to stay away from her. She thought about him, she desired him, and many a morning she woke up with the unhealthy dream of seeing him beside her, in Adraman’s place. Each time she felt her child kick inside her, she thought of Mordraud, and she hoped with all her heart it would have his green eyes, his mouth and his hair.

Yet s
he knew she couldn’t afford to see him again. And she vowed to herself that she would not turn back on this decision.

Never.

‘The work’s the same,’ the woman mused, sitting outside the old derelict hut facing the road swamped with puddles and mud.

‘
Here, just like at home.’

The
soldiers were all the same, once you got to know them. And she’d gotten to know a good deal of them, since she’d been working. She was no longer a fresh flower in bloom, but she wasn’t looking bad. What set her apart from the younger ones, the girls, was that she was much better at faking. Men lacking confidence were after women like her. Often they were lads, thrust between her legs by their more worldly companions. All it took was a smile, a caress in the right spot and a few moans, and her job was done.

She
’d spent so long in the encampments near the front that she could no longer recall her first customer. He was brought home by her mother, just for her. After all, an unsullied virgin’s services could rake in a fortune. The war had ruined them, sucking away all the males in the family. They had to come up with something to put food in their stomachs.

Over the years, she
’d managed to get quite used to that life. It was hard to find a man on the Rampart who hadn’t paid for her services. With time, she’d come to know them all, from the foot-soldiers to the captains, and she had suddenly become a respected citizen. She was putting in her war effort. She earned their respect. While they were in combat on the battlefield, she went on fighting in the tents in the back lines, bolstering up the morale among those who were on the brink of giving up. She too was one of Eldain’s rebels, when it came down to it.

The muddy road was sometimes tr
undled along by peasants’ carts, jabbed at from behind by a few listless Imperial horsemen. The world had been turned upside down by the Long Winter, and once spring returned, nothing changed. Farm labourers became hunters, hunters became gendarmes, gendarmes found openings among the soldiers’ ranks. A twisted cycle, whose result was so blandly obvious that even she was able to work it out, despite not being able to read or write. There was nobody left to tend the land.

And
without wheat, a plough and the harvest, the Empire was nothing but a giant crippled by hunger.

The
flailing rains had stopped long ago, but the fields had soaked up too much water to succeed in freeing themselves any time soon. Food was in short supply everywhere, and what little there was had been seized by the army’s exactors. Nothing new for her. She’d had to get used to eating extremely little when she was still living at the Rampart. By comparison, life near Cambria was a breeze.

“
Hi!”

A farm-hand was approaching, dragging behind him a cart loaded with tools for tilling the soil. The woman was good at sizing people up in a flash. He wasn’t a real peasant. Probably a deserter who’d been caught.

“
How much do you want?”

I
t was a fairly large group, escorted by a whole cavalry unit. Better them than him, she thought, as she wagged her finger at the man.

“
Too much for your pockets, I’ll bet... But perhaps one of you good gentlemen would fancy stretching your legs a bit...” she suggested, as she swayed her hips towards the group of soldiers. She was wearing merely a garment made out of a grain sack, washed in the river and split along her thigh up to the girdle. She could still cut a striking figure, she observed, noticing the glow of interest in their eyes.

“
Just for you, today’s prices are very low, an absolute bargain...”

“
How low?” asked one of the younger lads. He was certainly no picture, but she’d make do.

“
Ten coppers, or twenty for... the full works...”

The
soldier smiled in surprise, slapped the back of the comrade nearest to him, and broke away from the cluster. “I’ll catch up with you later,” he told the others as they moved on. The female took him by the hand and led him into the tumbledown shack, rubbing her bottom against him as they walked. Her work space was no palace. She’d scraped together a bed with a bit of straw, and in the old half-crumbling fireplace she’d arranged some wood for a fire, but nothing more. The cracks with daylight filtering in were blotted out with a few old blankets, and likewise for the room’s sole window. She preferred to stay in the dark while working. That way the customers couldn’t see her properly as she undressed. She lived on what food they left her before heading off, and she drank from a barrel she’d found to the rear of the hovel: it filled up at each new rainfall. The mice were taken care of by Claw, a big bald cat who sometimes showed up around the house, ready for lunch. She even occasionally considered eating him, recalling the enticing flavour. During the Long Winter’s first months, finding a cat was like winning some fantastic prize. And in fact they’d all immediately grown scarce.

“
So what will it be... ten, or twenty?”

“
At that price?!” the soldier answered. “Twenty, of course! And if you make it good, there might even be a tip in it for you!”

The
woman grappled with the buckles to his armour, then slipped out of her sack with a single fluid and well-practised movement. The young man stretched out a hand to let down her mousy hair, but she gently stopped him. She didn’t want to show him how filthy it was. It all had to be served up as well as possible. As she brushed her nakedness against him, she drew herself up on tiptoe and kissed him, slipping in her tongue. The soldier didn’t react immediately, caught unawares.

“
What are you doing?! Normally...”

“
You paid for the full works... didn’t you?” the woman replied, licking her lips.

It was, as ever, a quick job.
And it wasn’t at all bad. She even helped him strap his armour back on, once she’d finished her labours. He gave her a handsome tip, almost equal to her fee, and left her a few strips of dried salted meat.

“
You charge too little, if I may say so. You’re worth much more than twenty meagre coppers.”

A true gentleman, she thought
.

The
woman’s eyes followed him as he untied his horse and set off along the road heading south. The soldier turned to wave goodbye, and she returned the greeting with a smile. The better the service, the greater the number of customers.

“
You’re mistaken, young man,” she uttered, when the horse was no more than a dot on the horizon. “My price is too high...”

Because, besides those few moments of pleasure, she
’d also made him a secret gift. That was her real work. She didn’t care a jot about the money in itself. Since she wouldn’t live long enough to enjoy it.

She
’d just infected another Imperial soldier.

A lad who was
, as yet, unaware he’d just condemned himself to death, even paying for it out of his own pocket.

All for t
wenty meagre coppers.

***

Nobody had given a firm order. Eldain had opposed the idea, and with him many others. But the decision was made from the bottom up, by the same people who’d had the misfortune of falling ill.

The people
of Eld had toiled solid to free the fields, the towns and the front from the gruesome bed of fetid carcasses the snow had ruthlessly exposed. Yet it soon became clear they were too great in number, so many that they went far beyond any macabre stretch of the imagination. Animals, soldiers and entire families came to light, contaminating the air, the wind and the homes with their stench. Hundreds of bonfires burnt throughout the region day and night, fuelled by thousands of carts heaped high with bodies rotting in the thaw. A spectacle made even more dreadful by the ash falling on the roofs and the heads of the living, at any time of day. Fragments of the innocent dead, who prevented the survivors from getting over that terrible year they’d just left behind them, a black 1638.

The
coming of the warm weather drove the situation to plummet. First at hamlets scattered among the fields, then in a few contingents deployed along the front, to then reach Eld. A plague spread. One no herb seemed able to ward off or cure. It emanated from the corpses like the breath of death itself.

The skin on the
victim’s back became wrinkled and dry. A mere fingernail was enough to rip it to reveal flesh that gradually grew blacker and blacker. When the first symptoms appeared, it was already too late. Teeth fell out, eyes puffed up until they hung from eyelids. Death was excruciatingly slow and painful. Some managed to hold out only a few days, others many weeks. But their end, and that of the people around them, was unfailingly the same. A disease nobody had ever seen. Stirred up from the bowels of the earth by the Imperial chanters’ lunacy.

Eldain
had to take a dramatic decision.

The hamlets
wiped out by the winter would serve as the new homes for the ill. Open-air cemeteries, with no contact at all with the still-living town and villages. His troops began rounding up anyone with the slightest sign of infection. Many soldiers fell sick, and in turn became the sad cause of that vile task. The ailing independently opted to handle the situation among themselves. Eldain’s only hope lay in the strong will of his people.

The first to suggest the idea was a
foot-soldier. A veteran, a man who’d spent half of his life in the Rampart camp. One morning he didn’t attend the customary roll-call, leaving in his tent a piece of bark simply and hastily carved with his knife.

I
’m going to try to reach Cambria. I don’t want to die in vain.

T
o avoid condemning his comrades to death, he set out as soon as he realised he was ill. Cambria had to suffer what they were all experiencing. Word got around. Like a slow procession, the soldiers who discovered they were doomed made their own attempt to reach the Empire’s lands, to take as many people as possible to their graves with them. The captains informed Adraman, who immediately consulted Eldain. The old nobleman seemed even more elderly than he should have. He’d grown thin, and was losing his hair at an alarming rate. Adraman wasn’t sure whether he ought to be more dismayed at that vision or at the news he brought with him.

“
What should we do? The plague’s spreading and we can’t contain it!” he’d said to his friend that evening, as they dined together in his lodgings.

“
Can’t we carry on confining the sick to the villages?”

“
Not for much longer. We’ve done everything possible...”

“
What would you do?”

“
You’re the unfortunate one who has to decide, Eldain...” Adraman had sighed.

“
Not always. I repeat, what would you do?”

Eldain
’s words rang off-key to him, but he lacked the time to ponder on this. “I’d leave them to decide. When it boils down to it, it’s their own free choice, if they want to feel useful through their deaths.”

“
But it’s a despicable way to strike our enemy, wouldn’t you say?”

“
Yes, it is, but on the other hand... they did do the same to us,” was the reply from Adraman.

Eldain
went on in an even wearier voice. “A lot of innocent people will pay the price.”

“
The Long Winter slaughtered our population too.”

“
I understand.”

Eldain
had uttered nothing more. Adraman had to decide alone what action to take. And he did, not without feeling himself die inside.

The revenge of the infected was no longer opposed. A steady
and unseemly sea of desperate victims began flowing towards Cambria’s borders, mingling with the civilians and concealing themselves in the forests and fields.

Finally came
the news all had been waiting for, be it with joy or pain.

The first
outbreaks had been registered in the Imperial city.

***

Dunwich couldn’t believe his eyes.

The
battalion was advancing towards the main camp near the Rampart, to swell the Imperial Army’s might, now shrunk to a faint glimmer. The provinces were crumbling into chaos, riddled with revolts sparked by hunger and fuelled by the weapons Cambria itself had placed in the farm labourers’ hands, to defend themselves against outlaws and rabid animals. Asaeld had stationed more men in the towns and city in upheaval, but their numbers never seemed to suffice. The front had become one of the least perilous places on the continent, compared to the major roads and the woods around the capital. Loralon had nonetheless stamped his foot in demanding the assaults on Eldain be revived, so Dunwich had received direct orders from the Emperor to gather together as many soldiers as possible and return to guarding the Rampart. It was the first time he found himself in agreement with his ruler, yet this failed to make him feel any better. The Empire’s head was empty and rang out mutely at every chime.

They hadn
’t run into any challenging trouble, except for the odd cluster of refugees who, instead of fleeing, had attacked the back ranks, armed merely with teeth and nails. People driven mad by starvation. If that was the state of the Alliance, then perhaps the Long Winter had achieved the desired effect, he concluded as he sought something tangible to cling to.