This Forsaken Earth (26 page)

Rol stood in the doorway of the place, felt the welcome heat of it soak into his bones, and sucked in the smells, savoring them. This beat any palace. In places such as this, he felt he could almost be himself, and leave behind the sneering little doppelganger of Michal Psellos, which sat on his shoulder ever more often these days.

“If you two are going to stay here, then you’d best sit down and loosen those tight collars,” Rol told his escorts. Sweat was trickling down their faces already. One shrugged, and they did as he suggested. They were served bowls of food without comment, and tucked in with a will, supping the watery porridge with horn spoons.

Looking around at the growing bustle of the kitchens, the low, buttressed ceilings, the hanging hams and onion-strings, Rol wondered that his friends had been accommodated down here, treated like folk of a lower order than himself, but he decided not to dwell on it.

“Oatmeal gruel, is that all we have for supper?” he asked Gallico. The halftroll sat cross-legged on the floor but his eyes were still on a level with the maids’. They seemed unabashed by his appearance and flirted outrageously with Creed and Giffon as they prepared food around them; more results of the siege perhaps. Creed was grinning but Giffon had his nose almost in his gruel, and his ears were scarlet.

“We had a decent feed earlier, but most of the good stuff goes upstairs, it seems,” Gallico told him, wiping his mouth. “Almost four months they’ve been blockaded, but the cooks tell me that a great deal of foodstuff still makes its way in through the hills on pack-mules by night. Merchants from the west pay Bar Asfal’s soldiers to look the other way, and are recompensed by the great and the good here in Myconn, in gold, silver, family heirlooms, whatever they’ll take. You can pay a silver minim for a chicken, they tell me. The poor, they live on lentils and oatmeal and horsemeat. They’ll be skinning cats soon.”

“We’ve eaten worse,” Rol said. Like most mariners, he was fairly indifferent to what he put in his mouth as long as it did not poison him. He joined his shipmates and the two guardsmen at the table and leaned his elbows on the smooth wood. A knot of the kitchen staff gathered in the corner and whispered and peered at him, and whispered again. He still felt too sick to eat, and pushed away the steaming bowl that was set down in front of him, but smiled at the girl who set it there. She looked like a rabbit made to wait on a fox. Rol sighed, and rubbed his face with the palms of his hands, squeezing bursting patterns of amorphous light behind his eyelids. The heat of the long room was soporific, tempting him to lay his head down on the table.

“Still some sleep to catch up on, I see,” the voice said, and he jerked open his eyes to see Rowen seated in front of him. The two guardsmen had risen to their feet in wooden alarm, but all the rest of the folk in the kitchen, Rol’s friends included, seemed wholly unfazed.

Rowen took Rol’s untested porridge and began to eat it with every appearance of appetite. She jerked her head at the guardsmen. “Off you go, back to Mirkady. Cortishane has no further need of you.” The men bowed deep and left, tugging close their loosened collars and smoothing down their tunics as they went. Rowen went on eating her porridge composedly. She was dressed in dun-colored peasant clothes, and her long hair hung free down her back, a raven mane that shone in the firelight. A slim throwing knife hung from her waist in a wooden scabbard. She looked very young.

Rol leaned back on his long bench. Creed glanced at him. “What’s up—you seen a ghost?”

“Elias, this lady here—”

“She served us our food last night, after we got in,” Creed interrupted. He winked at Rowen. “A handsome lass. But girl, you could do with a little more meat on your bones.”

“I’ll bear that in mind,” Rowen said dryly.

“Do you often slum it down here with the lower orders?” Rol asked her.

“I like it here,” she said. “The staff are used to seeing me. I like the heat, the smell. I always did like kitchens. You should know that, Rol.”

“I remember.”

“What’s this?” Gallico said archly. “You know this wench, Rol—what is she, an old flame?”

“In a manner of speaking.” A smile went between their eyes as Rol and Rowen stared at each other. She set her hand on the tabletop, and he placed his own down next to it so that their fingers touched. A moment, no more.

“This is Rowen Bar Hethrun, Gallico. Some call her Queen of Bionar.”

“And I’m the Queen of the May. Don’t let him mock you, lass.”

“I won’t,” Rowen said. “And if he lacks the manners of his friends, I will not hold it against him. Some folk are not so well brought up as others.”

“Aye.” Gallico grinned. “You must watch this one. He’ll have you on your back given half a chance, and then walk away afterward with nothing more than a wink and a fare-thee-well.”

“See? Now you’ve been warned,” Rol told Rowen.

“I will keep it in mind,” she said. She stood up, and seemed to hesitate a second. Then, leaning over the table, she took Rol’s face in her cold hands and kissed him, a feather touch, no more. “I must go. They want me upstairs.”

Giffon was staring at her in open adoration, porridge dripping from his forgotten spoon. Rol knew now why she had billeted his friends down here. It was a place she felt comfortable.

“They will want to talk to you later,” she said. The weariness was slipping back into her face now.

“Who?”

“The nobles. My officers. I’m sending couriers to Canker through the hills. In two days, we make our move.”

Rol’s momentary happiness was snuffed out. He wanted her to stay there in the busy warmth of the kitchens, and exchange banter with his friends, and be an ordinary woman who touched his fingers with her own.

“Until later, then.”

“I see you got your sword back,” Rowen said, and with that she left. No fanfare, no roll of drums. Just another serving-maid.

Gallico was sucking his teeth thoughtfully. “She was, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, Gallico, she was. Elias, you just told the Queen of Bionar she needs fattening up.”

Creed picked soggy oatmeal out of his beard. “Well, she does.”

It was late, but Abel Harkenn was an insistent man, and Rol was too tired to argue with his deeply held conviction that a fellow invited to the Queen’s Council Chamber must look the part. So when the breathless page-boy came to fetch him, he found a tall man with pale eyes and a neatly trimmed beard, dressed in sable doublet and hose and bearing a light scimitar on a baldric of black leather. Buckled halfboots completed the attire. The clothes were a little musty from long storage, but the doublet had panels of dyed leather stitched in the shoulders and back, which supported Rol’s torso agreeably as he made his way through the bewildering passageways and corridors of the Bar Madivar Palace, steadily gaining height by way of staircase after staircase, until he stood before towering teak double-doors. Two guardsmen with silver-pointed halberds asked him his name and his business. The Queen of the May, he almost answered, here to steal away a serving-maid. But he took his tongue out of his cheek and told them.

He had a couple of copper minims for the page-boy, who scampered off brim-full of gossip and bursting to spread it, and the doors opened before him on soundless hinges, though they must have weighed a half ton apiece.

Imperial Bionar, eldest of the Kingdoms of Men. Well, here it was, in all the pomp and finery it could muster.

Tall windows, looking out onto darkness. Some were broken and boarded up, but enough remained to give a sense of the night looming beyond the glass. The snow was falling again, in the blue dark, and down at the walls men would still be trying to kill one another across a shell-holed purgatory of beaten ground.

In here, the high ceiling was corniced and painted and hung with three tremendous chandeliers, fifty candles burning in each and reflecting off an infinity of faceted crystal. Three large fireplaces covered the length of the room. The fragrant tang of the flames within them caught at Rol’s memory. Peat, like that he had once burned in a cottage on Dennifrey. He had not known there were peat-bogs around Myconn.

There was a long table, as long as the one he had sat at in the kitchens, but finer, and instead of benches there were twoscore gilt chairs with scarlet leather upholstery and a coat of arms painted on the back of every one. More candles, set at random in a forest of candelabras, and sheaves of paper, light-catching decanters, brass dividers, maps, inkwells of cut glass with silver rims, quills, and the knives for trimming them. The stuff of committees, of decision-making, of discussion. He wondered how much of it all was really necessary.

The nobility of Bionar. Some two dozen men sat the length of the table, their eyes turning toward him as he entered. Rowen sat at the head. The serving-maid had disappeared, and in her place there was a severely elegant woman all in black, no ornament save a silver fillet in her hair. He knew now the reason for his new wardrobe; it matched Rowen’s perfectly. They were an exercise in sable.

“Beside me, Rol,” she said, and patted the chair to her left. Rol took his seat, and found Gideon Mirkady’s handsome face opposite him. The Guard commander smiled and inclined his head slightly. Rol did likewise. He felt he had just walked onstage, and the curtain had risen.

“Continue, gentlemen,” Rowen said. “Introductions can wait. In any case, you all know this man is my brother, Rol Cortishane. Lord Brage, you had the table.”

A florid-faced man with a heavy nose, Lord Brage looked like a soldier who had fallen in love with the bottle. His stare outdid courtesy. For a naked moment, Rol sat at the end of the endless table, and the great men of this old, broken empire feasted the greed of their eyes upon him without shame.

Collecting himself, Brage peered at a leaf of paper before him, eyes watering.

“Yes, Majesty. To continue, I must report that we lost thirty-eight men today, fourteen of those killed and only half a dozen of the remainder ever likely to fight again. That leaves our current strength at just over six and a half thousand, all told.” He looked up the table at Rowen. “The dysentery that plagued the sections around the Palestrinon Gate has been contained, for now. We filled in two wells, which seems to have done the trick.”

“Very good, my lord. Gideon, how many of the garrison would you recommend we could take out without exposing the city completely?”

Mirkady’s face was bleak. “We can barely maintain a defense of the circuit as it is, Majesty.” His hand flapped helplessly on the table. “If we left a bare minimum—a dangerous minimum—to man the barbicans and, say, one in four of the wall-guns, then we could sortie with some four and a half to five thousand.”

The table murmured at this. Rowen’s face was unmoved. Her steel-gray eyes looked them up and down, and the murmuring ceased instantly.

“Very good. We shall take out five thousand. Cavalry?”

“Two hundred at most, Majesty. We’ve lost heavily in horses these last months.”

“Ammunition?”

“No shortage of that, or arquebuses either. We’ll outfit every man of the sortie with half armor and fifty rounds.”

“Field artillery?”

“Plenty of demi-culverins, twelve-pounders, but nothing to haul them with, Majesty. The wall-guns will support us.”

“Very well; we will do without. As you say, the wall—”

“Men can draw guns,” Rol said. Up and down the table, the assembled officers stared at him in astonishment. Because he had interrupted Rowen.

The Queen’s eyes were cold as glass. “Explain.”

“A dozen men can move a twelve-pounder as fast as any mule-team, if it’s over broken ground—and that ground beyond the walls is shot up all to hell. Charge them with canister, park them hub to hub, and you could stand off an army.”

There was a somewhat chilly silence.

“My men are not draft animals,” Mirkady said with a curl of his lip.

“They are not,” Rowen said softly. “They are soldiers, and as such will obey orders. You will ready as many batteries as you see fit, Gideon, and assign men to move them as well as crew them.”

Mirkady bowed his head in answer.

“Your Majesty,” another man said, a broad, blue-jawed fellow with a broken nose and the look of one who would whip his dogs, “how many men does Lord Canker have with him?”

“He has enough, Blayloc, and all of them veterans from the northern commands, hard fighters who have held the line of the Embrun these six months. What’s more, he will have surprise on his side, and a thousand cavalry to guard our flanks. Bar Asfal’s host in the Gallitran camps numbers some eighteen thousand. If we can break them before his forces in the Destrir and Palestrinon encampments can come up, then the battle will be already won. Gentlemen, these next few days will see the culmination of all our efforts. I mean to make this the end of it; Bionar has suffered enough.”

A silence met this last remark. The assembled officers lowered their eyes, or in a few cases exchanged discreet glances with one another. Looking up and down the table, Rol realized that Rowen’s hold on these men was fraying. If this adventure failed, they would desert her, seek terms with the loyalists. If she did not die in battle, these men would be among her executioners.

He caught her eye with this knowledge still in his own, and she nodded fractionally. She knew also.

“What about timings?” Blayloc asked.

It was Mirkady who spoke up. “We take out the army at dawn, two days from now. Blayloc, your regiments will be in the van. Cassidus, your brigade will follow. Remion, yours will bring up the rear. We sally forth from the Warder, at the double, and do not begin to deploy until halfway to the enemy lines.”

“Their guns will tear up our columns before we’ve even shaken into line,” someone protested.

“We need to cover that ground quickly, Remius; and more importantly, all regiments must clear the gate as swiftly as possible. We stay in column for the first quarter-mile.” Mirkady looked somewhat dogged as he said this. Rol guessed that he was of two minds about it himself.

“If we do haul out artillery with us, it shall be at the rear.” Mirkady looked at Rowen, and she inclined her head.