Ships from the West (11 page)

‘Is that your conclusion, Ensign?’

The young man flushed. ‘Our forces have been brought up thinking of the offensive, sir. It’s how they are trained and equipped.’

‘And yet their greatest victories have been defensive ones.’ ‘The strategic defensive, sir, but always the tactical offensive.’

Corfe smiled. ‘Excellent. Gentlemen, our young friend has hit the nail on the head. We are fighting to defend Torunna, as we once fought to defend it from his forefathers - but we did not win that war by sitting tight behind stone walls. We must keep the enemy off-balance at all times, so that he can never muster his strength sufficiently to land a killer blow. To do that, we must attack.’

‘Where, sir?’ Comillan asked. ‘His outposts are well sited. The Thurian Line could soak up an assault of many thousands.’

‘His outposts should be assaulted if possible, and in some force. But that is not where I intend the heaviest blow to fall.’ Corfe bent his head. ‘Where could we do the most damage, eh? Think.’

The assembled officers were silent. Corfe met Formio’s eyes. The two of them had already discussed this in private, and had violently disagreed, but the Fimbrian was not going to say a word.

‘Charibon,’ Ensign Baraz said at last. ‘You’re going to make for Charibon.’

A collective hiss of indrawn breath. ‘Don’t be absurd, boy,’ Comillan snapped, his black eyes flashing. ‘Sir—’

‘The boy is right, Comillan.’

The commander of the Bodyguard was shocked speechless. ‘It can’t be done,’ someone said.

‘Why not?’ Corfe asked softly. ‘Don’t be shy now, gentlemen. List me the reasons.’

‘First of all,’ Comillan said, ‘the Thurian Line is too strong to be quickly overrun. We would take immense casualties in a general assault, and a battering by artillery would give the enemy enough time to bring up masses of reinforcements, or even build a second line behind the first. And the terrain. As was said earlier, our shock troops need mobility to be most effective. You cannot throw cavalry, or even pikemen, at solid walls, or over broken ground.’

‘Correct. But forget about the Thurian Line for a moment. Let us talk about Charibon itself. What problems does it pose?’

‘A large garrison, sir?’ one of the ensigns ventured.

‘Yes. But don’t forget that most of the troops about the monastery-city will be drawn eastwards to assault Gaderion. Charibon is largely unwalled. What defences it has were built in the second century, before gunpowder. As fortresses go, it is very weak, and could be taken without a large siege train.’

‘But to get to it you would have to force the passage of the Thurian Line anyway,’ Colonel Heyd of the cuirassiers pointed out. ‘And to do that, Charibon’s held armies would have to be destroyed. We have not the men for it.’

‘I had not finished, Heyd. Charibon’s man-made defences may be weak, but her natural ones are formidable. Look here.’ Corfe bent over the map on the table. ‘To the east and north she is shielded by the Sea of Tor. To the south-east, the Cimbrics. Only to the west and north are there easy approaches for an attacking army, and even then the northern approach is crossed by the line of the Saeroth river. Charibon does not need walls. It is guarded by geography. On the other hand, if the city were suddenly attacked, with its forces heavily engaged to the east in the Torrin Gap, then the enemy would have an almost impossible time recalling them to her defence. The problems bedevilling an attacker would suddenly be working against the defender. The only swift way to recall them would be to transport them back across the Sea of Tor in ships. And ships can be burnt’

‘All well and good, sir,’ Comillan said, clearly exasperated, ‘if our troops could fly. But they can’t. There are no passes in the Cimbrics that I know of. How else do you suggest we transport them?’

‘What if there were another way to get to Charibon, bypassing the Thurian Line?’

Dawning wonder on all their faces save Formio’s.

‘Is there such a way, sir?’ Comillan asked harshly.

‘There may be. There may be. The point is, gentlemen, that we cannot afford a war of attrition. We are outnumbered, and as Ensign Baraz pointed out, on the defensive. I do not want to go hacking at the tail of the snake -I intend to cut off its head. If we destroy the Himerian Triumvirate, this continent-wide empire of theirs will fall apart.’

He straightened up from the map and stared at them all intently. ‘I intend to lead an army across the Cimbrics, to assault Charibon from the rear.’

No one spoke. Formio stared at the map, at the line of the Cimbrics drawn in heavy black ink. They were the highest peaks in the world, it was said, and even in spring the snow on them lay yards deep.

‘At the same time,’ Corfe went on calmly, ‘Aras will assault the Thurian Line. He will press the assault with enough vigour to persuade the enemy that it is a genuine attempt to break through to the plains beyond, but what he will actually be doing is drawing off troops from the defence of the monastery-city. A third operation will be a raid on the docks at the eastern end of the Sea of Tor. The enemy transport fleet must be destroyed. That done, and we have him like a bull straddling a gate.’

‘But first the Cimbrics must be crossed,’ Formio said.

‘Yes. And of that I shall say no more at present. But make no mistake, gentlemen, we must win this war quickly. The first battles have already begun. I have communications from the west to the effect that the fleet of the Grand Alliance is about to go into action. A Fimbrian embassy has been reported at ,

Charibon. It is likely that Himerian troops have been granted passage through Fimbria to attack Hebrion, and we know they are massing on the borders of eastern Astarac. We are not alone in this war, but we are the only kingdom with the necessary forces to win it.’

Formio continued to stare at his king and friend. He drew close. ‘No retreat, Corfe,’ he said in a pleading murmur. ‘If you fail in front of Charibon, there is
no retreat.’

‘What of the Fimbrians?’ Heyd, the square, straight-lipped officer who was commander of the Torunnan cuirassiers asked.

‘They are the great unknown quantity in this equation. Clearly, they favour the Empire for the moment, but only because they consider our armies to be the greater threat. I believe they think they can manage Aruan - consider how easy it would be for them to send a host eastwards to sack Charibon. If we are considering it, you may be sure they have. No, they want the Empire to break us down, along with the other members of the Alliance, and then they will strike, thinking to rebuild their ancient hegemony out of the ruins of a war-torn continent. They are mistaken. Once the true scale of this war becomes apparent, I am hoping they will think again.’

‘And if they don’t?’ Formio asked, looking his king in the eye.

‘Then we’ll have to beat them as well.’

Seven

There was a storm, out in the west. For two days now the people of Abrusio had watched it rise up on the horizon until the boiling clouds blotted out fully half the sky. Each evening the sun sank into it like a molten ball of iron sinking into a bed of ash, its descent lit up by the flicker of distant lightning. The clouds seemed unaffected by the west wind that was blowing steadily landwards. They towered like ramparts of tormented stone on the brim of the world, the harbingers of monstrous tidings.

Abrusio was a silent city. For days the wharves had been crowded with people - not dockworkers or mariners or longshoremen, but the common citizenry of the port. They stood in sombre crowds upon the jetties and all along the waterfront, talking in murmurs and staring out past the harbour moles to the troubled horizon beyond. Even at night they remained, lighting fires and standing around them like men hypnotised, watching the lightning. There was little ribaldry or revelry. Wine was passed round and drunk without enjoyment. All eyes were raised again and again to the mole beacons at the end of the Outer Roads. They would be lit to signal the return of the fleet. To signal victory perhaps, in a war none of the people standing there truly understood.

They could be seen from the palace balconies, these waterfront fires. It was as though the docks were silently ablaze. Golophin had reckoned there were a hundred thousand people - a quarter of the city’s population - standing down there with their eyes fixed on the sea.

Isolla, Queen of Hebrion, stood with the old wizard and looked out at the storm-racked western ocean from one of those palace balconies. She was a tall, spare woman in her forties with a strong face and freckled skin. Her wonderful red-glinting hair had been scraped back from that face and was covered by a simple lace hood.

‘What’s happening out there, Golophin? It’s been too long.’

The wizard set a hand lightly on her shoulder. His glabrous face was dark and set and he opened his mouth to speak, then paused. The hand left her shoulder and bunched into a bony fist. Faint around it grew an angry white glimmer. Then it faded again.

‘They’re stopping me from going to him, Isolla. It’s not Aruan, it’s someone or something else. There is a powerful mage out there in that storm, and he has thrown up a barrier that nothing, not ships or wizards or even the elements of the sea and earth itself, can penetrate. I have tried, God knows.’

‘What can cannon and cutlasses do against such magic?’

The wizard’s jaw clenched. ‘I should have been there, it’s true. I should have been there.’

‘Don’t torture yourself. We’ve been over this.’

‘I - I know. He picked his moment well, Isolla. My only hope is that this mage, whoever he is, will have expended himself maintaining this monstrous weather-working spell, and so will not be able to aid in any attack on the ships. They will have to be assaulted using more conventional means, and thus valour, cold steel and gunpowder may yet count for something for those who are trapped out there.’

She did not look at him. ‘And if they do not count for enough? What do we do then?’

‘We make ready to repel an invasion.’

‘An invasion of
what,
Golophin? The country is near panic, not knowing who we war with. The Second Empire, some say. The Fimbrians say others. In the name of God, what exactly is out there?’

The old wizard did not reply, but traced a glowing shape in the air with one long finger. The shape of a glyph flashed for a second and was gone. Nothing. It was like staring at a stone wall.

‘We fight Aruan, and whatever he has brought out of the Uttermost West with him. We know not exactly what we fight Isolla, but we know that it is dedicated to the overthrow of every kingdom in the west. They are out there, in that storm, our enemies, but I cannot tell you what manner of men they are, or if they are men at all. You have heard the stories which have come down through the years, the tales about Hawk-wood’s voyage. Some are fanciful, some are not. We know there are ships, but we do not know what is in them. There is a power, but we are not sure who wields it. But it is coming. And I fear that our last attempt to rebuff it has failed.’ His voice was thick with grief and a strangled fury. ‘It has failed.’

One half of the night sky had been obliterated, but the other was ablaze with stars. It was by these that Richard Hawkwood navigated his little craft. He had found a scrap of canvas that afternoon, barely big enough to cover a nobleman’s table, and he had rigged up a rude mast and yard from broken ships’ timbers. Now the steady west wind was blowing him back towards Hebrion, though the maintop wreckage that formed his raft was awash in a two-foot swell, and he had to keep one end of the knotted stay that kept his little mast erect tied round his pus-oozing and skinless fist.

His companion, hooded and anonymous, squatted unconcernedly on the sodden wood as the swell broke over them both and caked them with salt. Hawkwood wedged himself in place, shivering, and regarded the hooded figure with the burning eyes of a fever victim.

‘So you came back. What is it this time, Bardolin? Another warning of imminent catastrophe? I fear you are talking to the wrong man. I am fish bait now.’

‘And yet, Richard, you strive to survive at every turn. Your actions contradict the brave despair of your words. I have never seen one so determined to live.’

‘It is a weakness of mine, I must confess.’

The hood shook with what might have been a silent chuckle. ‘I have news for you. You will survive. This wind will waft you back into the very port you sailed from.’

‘It’s been arranged, then.’

‘Everything has been arranged, Captain. Nothing is left to chance in this world, not any more.’

Hawkwood frowned. Something about the dark figure seated opposite him made him hesitate. Then he said: ‘Bardolin?’

The hood was thrown back, to reveal a hawk-nosed, autocratic face and a hairless pate. The eyes were black hollows in the night, like the sockets in a skull.

‘Not Bardolin.’

‘Then who in the hell are you?’

‘I have many names, Richard - I may call you Richard? But in the beginning I was Aruan of Garmidalan.’ He bowed his head with mocking courtesy.

Hawkwood tried to move, but the murderous lunge he had attempted turned into a feeble lurch. The rope which belayed his little mast had sunk into the burnt flesh of his palm and could not be released. The pain made him retch emptily. Aruan straightened and levered the mast back into place. The canvas flapped, then drew taut again. The two men sat looking at one another as the raft rose and fell on the waves, their crests glittering in the starlight.

‘Come to finish the job?’ Hawkwood croaked.

‘Yes, but not in the way you think. Compose yourself, Captain. If I wished you dead I would not have permitted Bardolin to visit you, and I would not be here now. Look at you! This suffering could have been avoided had you but followed your friend’s advice of last night. Your sense of honour is admirable, but misguided.’

Hawkwood could not speak. The pain of his salt-soaked burns was a ceaseless shuddering agony, and his tongue rasped like sand against his teeth.

‘You are to be my messenger, Richard. You will return to Abrusio and relay my terms.’