This Forsaken Earth (34 page)

Rowen looked up quickly. “The sword hated me.”

It took a few seconds to digest this. Then Rol asked, “Why?”

“I don’t know. I was not meant to have it, I think. Nor was Psellos, or else he’d have kept such a weapon for himself. There’s something alive in that blade, Rol, something trapped there that’s been waiting a long time.”

“Waiting for what?”

“For you.”

Another place, the years whipping backward like the leaves of a book. Michal Psellos cradling a glass of wine between both hands, the white fingers vivid against the scarlet, he sniffing the fragrance of the liquid and smiling with lupine humor.

“You must try this, Rol. Bionese—Palestrinan, in fact. A little far north for fruitiness. This is dry, a thing to roll along the teeth. Come, boy, drink.”

Rol did as he was bidden. All along the heavy table, bottles stood glowing in the light from the tall windows beyond. Spring rain thrashed at the glass, shot through with sunshine. The wine warmed him, a sour thing in the mouth, a taste he had not yet become accustomed to.

“It’s bitter.”

“To begin with, yes. You must learn to savor the taste, Rol; the best wines demand a little patience, a little knowledge. One does not swill them as though they were beer. They are like life itself; one cannot have sweetness all the time, else it would become cloying.” Psellos set down his glass. He ranged up and down the other bottles on the table, a lean figure all in black. His silver eyeteeth gleamed. He looked like a great sable spider done up in velvet and satin and silk. Rol’s attention drifted. He edged closer to the great windows, and looked down. In the cobbled yard fifty feet below, Rowen was saddling her black mare. She had thrown back the hood of her cloak, and the rain was shining in her hair so that it was slick as a seal’s back. Rol watched her lips move as she talked to the horse.

“A gentleman,” Psellos went on, “must have discrimination when it comes to wine; his tastes betray him as surely as do the contents of his library, or the quality of his women. There is the stuff of everyday use”—he lifted a bottle and held it up a moment—“and then there are the finer vintages, to be enjoyed sparingly.” He caressed the neck of a bottle whose label was darkened with dust, yellow with age. He strolled to the windows, looked down a second, and smiled. “One cannot expect to continually enjoy the best of what life has to offer. That would be stultifying. There must be bitterness amid the bliss. A man must learn that, if he is to become much of a man at all.”

Psellos’s curious eyes darkened. “Drink the wine, Rol. Savor the taste. And when you are served up something inferior in your glass, drink it also. Taste everything, but do not forget those times when what you have tasted has been sublime.”

When Rol came to himself again he found that tears had run in frozen tracks down the sides of his head, and his eyelashes crackled as he blinked. Daylight again. They were still on the move, the handcart trundling stubbornly onward beneath him, the air thin and cold. A mist hung heavy about him, and out of it shrouded shapes appeared and disappeared like wayward ghosts.

One of those ghosts walked by the side of the handcart, muffled and hooded. A gloved hand gripped his. “You’re back! Can you speak?” The shape dropped a scarf from around its face, and it was a girl under all those ragged folds, dark-eyed and sallow-skinned.

“I know you,” he said, the cold air clicking in his throat.

Her fingers tightened around his. “The night of the ball; we spent it together.” Some color crept into her face. “You don’t remember.”

“Your name is Rafa. I remember. Why are you here?”

“I did not want to be a slave anymore.”

“You were going to be freed. I remember.”

“The Queen was going to free me, but she’s dead now. This new King will do different things.”

Elias Creed appeared out of the mist like an old memory. His badger-striped head was more white than black now. He used a spear as a staff. “You decided to rejoin us, then.”

The handcart halted, and Gallico was there, too, a looming giant with green lights that blinked in the mist. “How do you feel?”

“I feel—I—” Rol sat up. Relinquishing Rafa’s hand he began picking at the massive bandage on his own. It was loose now, hanging flaccid as a cobweb. He was able to rip it off without undoing any of Giffon’s neat knots. Below the stained linen there was his own flesh, yellow-white and smelling of old cheese. He flexed his fingers and studied in some wonder the stump where the ring-finger had been. It was closed over, a ripple of scar—but he could still feel the missing digit move as he opened and closed his fist.

“I knew it!” This was Giffon. He barged between Creed and Gallico and took Rol’s hand in his own, face shining. “I knew you could do it, skipper. You’re healed. You’re going to live.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Rol said mildly. He felt slightly absurd sitting there on the handcart, one hand gripped again by the girl Rafa, the other by the boy Giffon. Creed and Gallico beamed at him like a pair of simpletons.

“Get me off this damned cart. My legs need a stretch.”

“It’s been five days,” Elias Creed said. “You’ve been raving for three of them, a fever like I’ve never seen. We were all set to dig you a hole here amid the rocks, but Giffon never lost hope. He and the chambermaid—that lovely dark wench—they’ve been fussing round you day and night, doing things a mother would quail at.”

“Rafa can wipe my arse anytime she likes,” Gallico said.

“We’re maybe eighteen leagues from Myconn, up in the high foothills to the northeast of the Fornivo Pass. There’s been no pursuit that I can see.”

“Canker is busy with other things,” Gallico said.

“Indeed. And just as well. We’ve gathered quite a mob around us. The column stretches two or three miles; thousands of people, many of them noble. Where in hell they think they’re going is anyone’s guess.”

“We must get back to Ganesh Ka,” Rol said. He was leaning on Creed’s arm, his legs still rubbery, still remembering what it was to bear his weight. The thin air had him gasping. “How high up are we?”

“Some ten thousand feet,” the halftroll said. “The Fornivan Hills rear up pretty steep to the north, but then come together in a kind of plateau—we’re on the lip of it now. There’s a wide, broken plain of sorts to the south and east of us, until you hit the Myconians themselves; they rise up like a wall, another five thousand feet.”

The breath plumed out of his wide nostrils in two jets, and in his chest it rattled through mucus: an awful sound.

“Gallico, I thought you were healed.”

“So did I. I told you, it’s the cold.” The halftroll frowned.

“How far are we from the Ka, you think?”

Gallico’s bright eyes narrowed. “As the crow flies, I’d put it at some seventy-five leagues, but not even crows fly over the Myconians in winter. There’s the pass at Fornivo, some forty miles southwest of us. It leads through to the Goliad, and is studded with Bionese fortresses. It’s the only way across the mountains that I know of—in this part of the world, at least.”

“Canker will have thought of that. I’ll bet the Fornivo garrison has already come over to him. That’s why there’s no pursuit; he thinks us trapped.”

They trudged along in silence for some time after this, until at last Elias Creed said, “Then what are we to do?”

Rol raised his head, but could see nothing through the caul of mist. “We must find another way through the mountains,” he said.

“One cannot simply put one’s head down and charge blindly at the Myconians like a bull at a gate,” Gallico said.

“Can’t one? It’s what one will have to do, all the same. Gallico, there must be a way.”

“Not for these people.” The halftroll gestured to the disparate throng that disappeared into the mist behind them.

“If they were desperate enough to follow your lead out of Myconn, then they’re desperate enough to attempt the mountains.”

Desperate indeed. At night the straggling column coalesced into an amorphous huddle, like that of herd animals seeking protection amid their fellows. While Gallico and Elias Creed went through the crowds, noting their names and station and physical capabilities, Rol gave a series of little speeches. Short and to the point, they informed the refugees of his plans and gave them three choices. They could follow him over the mountains, they could turn back for Myconn, or they could break off for the southwest and attempt the Fornivan passes, hoping that the garrisons there would not be against them.

As choices went, none of them were particularly appealing, and Rol did not try very hard to woo anyone to his own course. Those who followed him would walk the hardest road, and they would either come to Ganesh Ka in the end, or they would perish along the way. There would be no turning back, and the weak would be abandoned. He made this very clear, and saw blank fear in the faces of all who listened to him. His wounds had made him less pretty than he had been. He was short a finger and part of an ear, and had a white scar that wriggled from one eyebrow into his hairline. He looked older, a fearsome captain of privateers every bit as ruthless as rumor had made him. And his eyes were colder than the white mountains ahead. Many looked upon that face and found themselves quitting the host for fear of what was in those eyes as much as the dangers of the road they would follow.

The host began breaking up the next morning, in small groups and large, by dozens and scores and finally hundreds. They trekked away in solemn companies through the snow, heading southwest, or north. Rol and his friends remained encamped all that day while the desertions went on, and as the night swooped in on them again, there were barely four hundred left out of all those who had followed them into the hills.

“We keep to the valleys, so far as we can,” Rol said, warming his hands at the guttering campfire. “We stay as low as the terrain allows. There’s forests on the flanks of the mountains, and scrub higher up still; we’ll need firewood if we’re to survive the nights. The main worry is food. We’re still a fair crowd. Did anyone bring provisions out of Myconn with them?”

“All eaten a day or two back,” Elias Creed said. “These are city-dwellers. They brought gold and trinkets when they should have packed warm clothing and food.”

“There are reindeer herds in the high valleys, or so I’ve been told,” Gallico said. “We have quite a few firearms among us. We must hunt every chance we get, anything from deer to foxes. And if we run short, we’ll eat the dead.”

He was half smiling, but the group around the campfire looked at him in grim silence. Giffon’s eyes were wide as plums in his pinched face, and Rafa had buried her head in her knees. Rol touched her black hair.

“So be it,” he said. “Gallico, what’s our course?”

“South-southeast.”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Even here, Rol, I know in which direction lies the sea. There are times, when the wind is in the east, that I think I can even smell it.”

“Then your nose is our compass, Gallico, and may it be as sharp as you say it is.”

Their daily marches were short, by necessity, as part of each day had to be given over to gathering firewood and hunting for game. Within a few days the company fell into a routine, and within it each of them found some niche to fill. Some preferred to gather firewood, others to trek out from the main body in small groups to hunt, while yet more grubbed for other forms of food in the frozen landscape around them. In the twilit hours after each day’s march they foraged like their flint-using ancestors, desperate to recoup some of the day’s expended energy. They collected tens of thousands of pinecones, roasted them in the embers of their fires, and ate the nuts within. They tapped silver birch, while those still grew about them, and heated the sap with water to make a sweet, hot drink for the weaker among them. They dug under the snow for any form of tuber they could find, and all went in the communal pots. They set overnight snares for rabbits and martens and any other beast with warm blood that might chance by, and the hunting-parties brought down a family of elk, which fed them all for three days.

But it was not enough to keep the pinch of hunger out of their bellies. The flesh began to melt from them, and the cold dug deeper into their marrow. Within a week, they had the first deaths, from cold and exposure. They stripped the dead of all their clothing, though they were not yet hungry enough to prey on the meat of the corpses themselves.

The company began to ascend the flanks of the mountains proper, and around them the thick pine woods receded like the ebbing tide of a quiet sea. Firewood became harder to come by, and often the campfires puttered out in the dark hours whilst around them hundreds lay in chaste embraces and shared their body’s warmth for want of something better.

Two weeks. Every morning there were more stiffened corpses amid the huddled crowd. The cold intensified, though mercifully the days remained calm and clear, snow blowing in powdery banners from the peaks of the mountains, but down below a windless silence, an abeyance of life. They began to dream about food, and it was discussed endlessly round the fragile campfires. The splendor of past dinners, the constitution of ideal menus, the listing of favorite delicacies. Their mouths watered on memories.

Some went blind from the glare of the sunlit snow. They tore strips of cloth from their thinner clothing and tied them about their eyes, staring out at that terrible whiteness through frayed silk or cotton or linen, stumbling myopically on numb feet. Those among them who prided themselves on their skill at stalking no longer had the strength to fare far afield in search of game. Gallico alone continued to hunt most nights, and it was rare he did not bring in a deer in the morning, its neck broken and dangling. As they climbed higher they dared not shoot the arquebuses anyway for fear of bringing down an avalanche on their heads. Some resisted this stricture, until Gallico rounded on them, eyes blazing amethyst, gaunt flesh drawn back from his great fangs. What game he brought back was sliced up and shared out with the meticulous care a miser might show to his hoard of gold. If they had no wood, the meat was eaten raw, bloody gobbets washed down with handfuls of snow.