This Forsaken Earth (29 page)

“We are all in the same boat,” he said with a wry smile.

“Yes. We will all go down together, if it comes to that.” She paused. “I’m sorry. The board is being swept far quicker than I had imagined.”

She did not look sorry; she had a light in her eyes he had almost forgotten. That killing-light, bright at the prospect of battle.

“Rowen, if I can find Bar Asfal, I will kill him for you, but a battlefield is a crowded place. Someone may get to him before me.”

“He’ll be under the Bionese Fighting Flag, saffron and black, the Oriflammer. It’s a huge banner, reserved for the King’s use alone. It can’t be mistaken. His face you have seen already, or a decent likeness of it.”

Rol touched her chin. “Then he is a dead man.”

Rowen drew him to one side, to a shadowed alcove beyond reach of candle or firelight. There she pressed herself full length against him and kissed his lips, her tongue slipping in over his teeth. When he tried to bring his arms up around her, she grasped his wrists and pinioned him. Her nails dug into his flesh, hard enough to draw blood.

“Thank you,” she said, releasing him again, leaving him winded. Then she left without another word.

Rol stood there with her spit still on his lip, his mind a storm of bitterness and regret. He could taste her flesh in his mouth, and from his fingers there dripped slow tears of blood. Despite everything he knew about her, she could still dance a minuet on his nerves, pluck on his feelings as though they were strings. He knew this was what she was doing, and was not sure he even cared.

Later that morning Rol, Gallico, Creed, and Giffon stood in the reception chambers of the commander of the Guard, and picked over a dazzling array of garments and armor and weaponry that had been laid out before them on linen-hung tables like some militaristic fetishist’s dream come true. Watched by a trio of palace servitors, a couple of senior guardsmen, and Gideon Mirkady himself, they rooted through the stuff like bargain-hunters at a market. Mirkady laid on wine, and took a cup himself, leaning by the door and watching them with a mixture of amusement and appraisal. Gallico lifted a war-hammer with a head as big as a watermelon and a shaft six feet long, and tested its heft with bloodthirsty relish. “I could do some damage with this.”

“You’re likely to damage whoever’s standing next to you,” Creed retorted. The ex-convict had selected a small ironbound targe and a heavy-bladed cutlass with a basket hilt. There were plenty of pistols and powder-flasks to go around also, modern flintlocks with brass and steel fittings, some with folding blades beneath the barrel.

But it was the armor that fascinated them most. Solid plate, most of it. It clicked and clanked under their eager fingers. Breastplates, vambraces, gorgets, pauldrons, gauntlets, and greaves, and visored helms with absurd crests.

“How does a man fight with an ironmongery stall on his back?” Creed demanded with raised eyebrows.

Mirkady sauntered forward. “You may be glad of some of that ironmongery when the blades begin to fly,” he said.

“Will it keep out a bullet?” Rol asked.

The Guard commander picked out a breastplate and pointed to a hemispherical dent in one corner. “They’re tested at fifty yards with an arquebus. You’ll get bruised, but that’s better than having your guts torn out.”

“And if we’re closer than fifty yards?” Giffon asked. Alone of the four privateers, he did not seem to relish the display.

“Then, boy, you’re at it sword to sword, and you have other things to worry about.” Mirkady slapped Giffon on the shoulder with a hearty hail-fellow-well-met air which fooled none of them.

“I’ve not yet seen armor that can halt a twelve-pound cannonball,” Gallico said with a grin. “What might the dent of that look like on one of these pretty plates?”

The day edged round, and activities in and about the palace bifurcated. On the one hand, the streets had become rivers of men; regiments of infantry in column were leaving their posts to a skeleton remnant and were gathering in the squares and ruins behind the Forminon Gate. There, in the shadow of the formidable double-barbican known as the Warder, they stacked arms and made ready to pass a cold night. Firewood was brought to them by the wagonload, and casks of beer so that they might toast their betters before following them out of the gates in the morning.

Together with these martial preparations, there was more frivolous work afoot. A small army of servants were turning the palace of Bar Madivar upside down in readiness for the ball that night; and in Barbion Square below the palace, the hungry and hopeful of the city’s inhabitants loitered in chattering crowds, to await their share of the largesse.

In the evening, Rol and his three shipmates, dressed in their new finery, found a way up onto the battlements of the palace and managed to evade guardsmen, servants, and sundry hangers-on so that for the first time in what seemed many days they could speak openly to one another. They stared out over the city to where brief flashes and rumbles marked the interminable struggle of guns out on the walls. A fresh breach had been made that afternoon, it was said, and fierce fighting had raged until dark, the loyalists cut to pieces as they withdrew across the open ground to their trenches. If they had pressed their assault a few hours later they would have found little more than a corporal’s guard manning the walls; one of war’s little ironies.

It was still snowing—there was almost a foot of it on the ground, and now many of the crowds in Barbion Square had gone back indoors. The campfires of the enemy could be seen as a vague glow far off in the dark hills of the north.

“The year has turned,” Gallico said, sniffing the air, as was his wont. “It does not seem like it here, in these mountains, but lower down the air will soon start to warm again, and the sun will make its return.”

“Still a long way to go until spring,” Giffon said. He was shivering, and Gallico laid one huge arm on the boy’s shoulder. He looked at Rol, and both knew what the other was thinking. It had been a mistake not to send Giffon back. He was no fighter, though he had a fine heart.

“When we go out tomorrow, I want you three to stick together,” Rol said. “Look out for one another, and try not to be too heroic.”

“I take it that’s your job,” Creed said dryly.

“Stay near the Queen; she’ll be well protected.”

“Even if it means staying in earshot of that prick Mirkady?” Gallico asked.

“Even then. None of us have ever fought in a battle like this before.”

“What about Gallitras?” Creed asked. “Seemed like a battle to me.”

“This is in the open. It’ll be fast-moving, and there will be a lot of artillery and nowhere to hide from it. Until we reach their trenches, they’ll be pounding the life out of us with their siege guns, mortars, field-culverins, anything they can stick a lump of iron in. Until Canker hits them in the rear, it will be rough.”

“When did you become mother hen?” Gallico asked. “I thought that was Elias’s job.”

“By the way, if you ever meet your grandmother, let me know if she needs taught how to suck on an egg,” Creed added.

Rol smiled. “It may be I’ll have to break off and disappear in the middle of it. There’s something I have to do. But you are not to follow, none of you. Do you understand me?”

They looked at him, all humor gone. “What is it, some royal errand?” Gallico asked.

“You could say that. I’m to bring down this Bar Asfal fellow. When he’s gone, the rest of them should fold like a tinker’s shack.”

“That’s a hell of an errand,” Creed said.

“I know. I’ll be all right, though.”

“Was this the Queen’s idea?” Gallico asked with a glint in his eye.

“I suppose so, yes.”

The halftroll shook his head. “She is your sister, you say, and it’s clear to my eyes, at least, that she has real feeling for you. But she’s still a clever woman, used to getting what she wants. Be careful, Rol. These people with titles ahead of their names, they don’t think the way we do. They can convince themselves to believe whatever they like.”

“Rowen needs me to do this thing, Gallico. She would not have asked me else.”

“Perhaps. She may be a fine woman, at heart. It’s just that she has been ruined by her ambitions. You know that, don’t you, Rol?”

“I know it. Yes.” He had known it from the moment he had first set eyes on her again, but he did not like to hear Gallico say it.

They garlanded the ballroom with the limbs of evergreens, and great bunches of shining holly with berries red as wounds. The heat of the candles brought out a fine resinous scent from the decorations—a smell much improved by the tang of mulled wine and cider which sat in wide silver punch-bowls at the ends of the room. Some two hundred of Myconn’s finest and fairest had been invited to the ball, but that took no account of the thousands more who crammed into the palace to take advantage of the free food and drink that was being distributed without thought for the morrow. If the rebels were finally going to lose their war in the morning, they would at least do so on a full belly.

This night, the Bar Madivar Palace was packed to the gills with a host of people who were intent on blotting out the frozen night beyond and the shell-fire down at the walls. There were clots of musicians on every floor with piled plates under their seats and bottles by their toes, and the palace servants had thrown off any sense of formality and were entering into frantic liaisons with any comely stranger who caught their eye. Why not? The dawn would bring a new set of worries, or an end to all of them. For this one night, the palace was given over to anyone who still had an appetite for life in their belly.

The chief generals were all there: Mirkady, Blayloc, Brage, Cassidus, and Remion. The last three of these five had wives on their arms, and small coteries of hangers-on to banish the lull from any conversation. They were all drinking heavily; but then, so was every man and woman in the room who had a mouth, and an arm capable of raising a glass. Except Rowen.

She sat at the far end of the ballroom upon a delicate chair of ebony wood inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She wore black, as always, but her dress was a plunging affair that revealed more of her white flesh than Rol had ever seen in public. With her hair piled up behind her head, and a white-gold crown resting upon it, she looked every inch the Queen, albeit a somewhat ethereal one. The revealing lines of her gown promised much, but the look in her eyes was enough to deter anything but the most formal of gallantries. Mirkady stood behind her like an old man jealous of a young wife, and Rol saw him set a hand once briefly on her bare shoulder. She raised up her own fingers to return the touch. At the sight, Rol felt an odd and ungainly flicker in his chest, a kind of pain, and he poured his wine-filled flute into his mouth until the pale, sparkling stuff trickled into his beard.

“Yon fellow aims higher than commanding the Guard,” Creed said, his eyes following Rol’s, and something of the same expression within them.

“It’s as good a way as any to get on in the world,” Rol said with a mirthless smile. He burped up an acidic bubble of the wine and grimaced. “Damn fizzy piss; don’t they have any real drink in this place, something that hasn’t been heated up or filled with air?”

Gallico was the center of a curious crowd, who were evidently drinking down a few of his taller tales. He had half a dozen glass flutes held in one fist like the barrels of so many guns, and would pour their contents into his gaping maw every so often, to the delight of his listeners. Performing for a crowd in Bionar again. He saw Rol and Elias and winked one lambent eye at them. It was almost as bright as it had always been. His wounds were closed at last and he was intent on enjoying this night to the full, as a privateer should.

Giffon stood nearby in the fragrant throng, exchanging quiet words with a serving-maid who looked no older than he. As Rol watched, she touched his face, but so flushed were his cheeks with the heat and the wine that it was impossible to tell if he blushed or not.

Abel Harkenn was at Rol’s elbow, wax-skinned and gawky as a young heron. “Sirs, I thought you’d rather enjoy this.” He proffered a tray on which squatted two wide-necked mugs of rum, the liquid tawny as a hare’s back. Rol and Creed snapped them up.

“Ship’s rum!” Elias exclaimed. “Ran’s Road, man, but that’s welcome. Where’d you get it?”

“Smuggled in from Arbion, not a week ago, sir. I thought you’d appreciate it.” Harkenn beamed at their incredulous faces, and without another word, he turned and was off again, quickly swallowed by the swirling crowd.

“Enterprising fellow; he’d make a good ship’s steward,” Creed said. Rol sipped his rum reflectively. After the bubbling wine it felt like a punch to the throat.

Music was gathering into a pattern in the hall; there was danger of a dance. He did not relish the thought of prancing about in line, and tugged Creed’s arm until they both stood well back from the middle of the floor, which was clearing rapidly.

“What’s o’clock, Elias?”

“We’re halfway through the first watch, I should think. The night is hardly begun.” The rum was coloring Creed’s face. With his brindled hair and heavy beard, he looked like a gate-crashing vagrant in this smooth-chinned company, though his clothes were as fine as any. The shackle-scars on his wrist were revealed every time he lifted his arm to drink, and Rol saw nearby ladies and noblemen staring at them in some dismay.

The music gathered form, after the interminable screeching of one untuned viola. The hubbub sank down into something near quiet. It seemed insufferably hot in the room, and candlewax from the chandeliers was dripping here and there upon ladies’ coiffures and the polished wood of the floor. The Queen rose, those around her dipping their heads, the ladies curtseying demurely. She strode down the empty dance floor with that mannish stride that not even the most feminine of gowns could conceal, and she stopped before Rol.

“Cortishane, will you join me for the first dance?”

Not even Rol could summon up the churlishness to refuse her. He gave his mug to Creed, bowed slightly, and took Rowen’s fingers in his own. The pair took a stately course out into the wide wooden wastes of the dance floor, and Rol whispered out of the corner of his mouth.