The City (20 page)

It was a cliché of war that the man who feared to lose would always fall victim to the man with the will to win. But Fell’s calculated approach to each battle, factoring in the potential survival of his troops, made him a rarity among commanders, popular among his men and unpopular with rivals. Although he had now outlived any rivals, he guessed.

He thought again about Indaro and wondered if she survived.

Constantly on alert as he walked, he found it easy to avoid the small groups of enemy soldiers he encountered. Once he lay flat on his stomach in the poor shelter of a prickly bush as a troop of Blues, cheerful in victory, marched straight past him. He slept deeply that night in the lee of a low outcrop of rock, and in the morning light he started refreshed, though his stomach complained from lack of food.

He was beginning to believe he would soon see the City walls, and wondering if he should ditch the Blue uniform, when he heard the sound of boots marching hard from the south. Suddenly, over a low rise, he saw a small band of soldiers heading straight towards him. He readied himself to prove his identity as a loyal soldier of the City if necessary.

But it was a Blueskin platoon of seven, with an officer on horseback. As they approached he put a pleased expression on his face and walked briskly towards them. The officer was a sour-faced man, probably Fkeni, his leathery face marked by deep tribal scars, his ears notched.

‘Where have you strayed from, soldier?’ the officer asked him, scowling down.

‘The Tenth,’ Fell grunted. After a year at Salaba he knew the enemy companies almost as well as his own. These were infantrymen and would have no knowledge of cavalry personnel. He was not sure about the officer, though.

‘I thought the Tenth were lost in the flood?’ The rider’s long dark face gave nothing away, but this was a test.

‘No, sir!’ Fell frowned as if puzzled by the comment. ‘We lost a few
horses, but the men survived. No, we were chasing the City Rats and walked into an ambush. I got hit by a sword hilt, I think, and when I came to I was alone. Good to see you. I thought for a moment you were poxy Rats.’

‘Who was your commander?’

‘Marloe.’

‘Your name, soldier?’

‘Peiter Edo, sir.’

The officer nodded and gestured him to join the company. Fell took his place at the rear of the group, nodding to the man next to him. But the officer turned in his saddle to question him again. ‘Do you know Aldous Edo, your namesake?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But he’s second in command of your company, man.’

‘No, sir,’ Fell replied stolidly, ‘not in my time.’

He had no clue if his answer had satisfied. He knew the names of several officers of the Tenth, which is why he’d chosen the company, but he had not heard of an Aldous Edo. The officer gazed at him for a long moment, then turned back in his saddle and walked his horse on. Was he fooled or not? Fell had no idea.

‘Good boots?’ asked the man next to him, a tall young soldier with old eyes and a bandaged neck. He was looking down at Fell’s feet.

Fell confided in a low voice, ‘Ten times better than ours. Always get the best pair of boots you can. Others, they look for gold teeth. I look for boots. I can march twelve hours a day in these.’

‘Friend of mine lost both feet because of bad boots,’ the other man told him. His eyes were red-rimmed and he blinked constantly.

‘Quartermaster’s in the pay of the enemy,’ Fell asserted, nodding.

The man looked at him, surprised. ‘You think so too?’

‘Stands to reason,’ Fell said.

The man in front, hearing their conversation, chipped in with a complaint about the fit of his helm, and Fell grinned to himself. Soldiers are the same the world over, he thought.

‘What’s this officer like?’ he asked his new comrade, nodding at the man on the horse.

The red-eyed soldier hawked and spat in the dust. ‘Don’t know him,’ he said finally. ‘Not even sure he’s an officer. He’s just the one with the horse.’

They were marching towards the south-east and once again Fell
wondered what had become of the bulk of the City army. His troops had been at the far right flank, so when they were hit by the flood they were cut off. But the rest of the army must still be intact. He had walked north then west and now south-east, and he was starting to wonder if he had walked all the way round it.

He was reluctant to call attention to his ignorance, but at last he asked, ‘What are our orders?’

The red-eyed man looked at him curiously. ‘Mop up survivors,’ he answered slowly, as if speaking to a child.

Fell shook his head. ‘I must have been out longer than I thought,’ he said, coldness creeping through his body. ‘Survivors from the flood?’

‘No, lackbrain,’ the soldier said, grinning. ‘Survivors from the battle. Salaba, the greatest victory the world has ever known. Twenty thousand Rats dead in one day.’

The stalemate at Salaba, which had endured for more than a year, had been broken, Fell learned, by the devastating flood. It was not just his company that was cut off and destroyed; the entire Maritime army had been overwhelmed. Even some of the generals had been killed, forced, perhaps for the first time in decades, to take up the sword in defence of themselves and the City. Many had been captured, it was said, and tortured to give up the secrets of the City’s defences. Fell wondered if Randell Kerr had been compelled to fight for his life. He remembered the tall tower with the generals gulping wine on top and visualized it surrounded by enemy soldiers, on fire perhaps. He felt no sympathy for them.

He thought of Indaro again. He had not seen her body among the corpses. He hoped she was dead rather than captive. It was said the Blues would torment women soldiers before killing them, although he had never seen evidence of it.

It was twenty years before when, the City running dangerously low on manpower after so many years of war, it had been decided to press women to fight. Fell was a young infantryman himself then and he cheerfully joined in the sneering contempt for the frightened girls sent to the front line. The generals, forced into a plan they had no faith in, acted typically. They made the girls fight but did not train them or equip them properly. So they died in their thousands, fulfilling the men’s predictions. But the male soldiers with wives and sisters and sweethearts at home found compassion in their hearts and
took it on themselves to train the women, to equip them in dead men’s breastplates and helms. Nevertheless, an entire generation of City women had been wiped out before the generals conceded that if they were to fight they had to receive the same training and equipment as men.

Indaro was part of the third wave of women warriors. By then the sixteen-year-old girls were treated as well – or badly – as the boys were. When Fell first met the woman, in his tent on that golden night, he knew well who she was – the daughter of a suspect politician, sister of a runaway, and a deserter herself, working with the woman Archange. When she walked into his tent at midnight he had not decided what to do with her.

She was tall and painfully thin, her cheekbones like blades stretching the skin of her face. She was dirty and clearly exhausted, yet she held herself with a grace that instantly excited him. Her dark red hair was the glory of the sunset after storm, and her violet eyes, on a level with his, were flecked with grey under dark brows. He found himself lost for words.

The silence lengthened, and all he could think of to say was, ‘I knew your father.’

She stared at him, her eyes widening a little. He realized she thought he was challenging her with her father’s past, so he amended, ‘I never believed them when they said he raised a family of deserters.’ A family of deserters? What was he saying? Could he
be
more insulting?

Indaro’s voice was dry and distant as she stared over his head. ‘He knew nothing of my … absence. He has disowned me, sir.’

It was a lie and Fell knew it. But she was not defending herself; she was defending her father.

‘My job is to win battles,’ he told her, wondering as he spoke why he was explaining himself to her. ‘I need all the resources I can get. I’m told you are an excellent swordswoman. I cannot afford to waste you.’

After that he kept her in his sights. He agreed to her petition to have her servant with her. The request amused him. Indaro clearly felt no need to fit in with her comrades. While the rest of his troops, himself included, wore old leather jerkins, once red, faded to pink or grey by the sun and rain, Indaro was always clad in bright red body armour, supplied regularly from the gods knew where. Word
came back to him that she was arrogant and unpopular. Fell was not surprised.

Then came the battle of Copper Creek when, wounded herself and armed with two swords, she had held back a platoon of enemy soldiers so her injured comrade Maccus Odarin could escape to safety. Maccus
was
popular, and after that Fell heard no more criticisms of Indaro.

He found himself watching her obsessively, and after each engagement he assured himself that she was still alive. He was constantly pushing her from his thoughts, yet at the most awkward moments he could smell the scent of her hair, visualize the fluid graceful line of her back as she turned away from him.

But he had barely spoken to her again until, entrenched at Salaba, he had received orders to despatch a troop of veterans to serve with the emperor’s bodyguard. He chose to misunderstand the messages. He could not afford to lose the warriors. But he had been waiting for a chance to send Indaro away. And Evan Quin. The situation at Salaba had deteriorated steadily over the last six months, and Fell feared the eventual outcome. Still, he was reluctant, torn between the desire to send Indaro to comparative safety and the wish to keep her close. When he made his decision it was, at least in part, because he would have an excuse to speak to her again.

When he found her and Evan together at the mess hall, it seemed like a gods-given opportunity. She had volunteered instantly, as he had known she would. So did the others at the table – Doon, Evan, the young blond lad whose name he could never remember. He had returned to his tent satisfied, believing he was sending the pair to safety, not into an ambush. Yet somehow she survived it, as she always did.

The barren land to the east of the City was formally named the Plain of Defiant Endeavour, but people called it the Treeless Plain. And it was not a plain at all, but a series of steppes, rising from the bed of the great river Kercheval to the City. It was arid and at first glance appeared lifeless, but in fact it teemed with small creatures. Lying at the lip of a small hollow, Indaro had been watching the east for hours, feeling as dusty and dry as the land in front of her. No enemy soldiers had marched into sight, but battalions of rabbits had entertained her as they scurried around the unpromising scrub seeking food. She
wondered how so many beasts could survive on sparse windswept scraps of grass and brushwood. Indaro was on her stomach, chin resting on folded arms, head covered with a ragged piece of cloth to guard her from the sun. The rabbits would come closer and closer to her, big eyes watchful, until one would spot her and suddenly bolt. Then scores of them would run, their white scuts bobbing, until they all suddenly stopped again and sat up on their haunches. She wondered what they were so fearful of; what predators fed on rabbits in this unwelcoming land. She glanced at the bright white sky, but there was nothing up there, wheeling and watching, ready to take a skinny coney for its young.

The comical creatures took her mind off the ache in her stomach and the incessant, tormenting thirst. It also took her mind off the injured soldiers lying in the dip behind her. After the massacre, she and Doon had limped to the west, moving through the night until at dawn they had come across a small group of Reds who had also escaped the carnage. Two were mortally injured and had died on the first night. On the second night another died. Now they were five. She and Doon, whose wound was healing well, and Garret, who was unhurt of course. Stalker, the red-braided northlander, had a shallow wound in his side and a broken ankle but he could move on a makeshift crutch. It was Queza who was the problem. The small woman had a stomach wound, probably from a spear. It had stopped bleeding but was leaking pale fluid and it stank, and Queza was now semi-conscious, muttering feverishly. They expected her to die on the first night, but she was holding on, and Indaro could not bring herself to leave her. Queza could survive if she was brought to the City, and she could be brought to the City if relief came. So Indaro watched the east, for the enemy, while Garret watched the west for City troops.

It was the middle of the afternoon and Indaro was close to dropping off to sleep when she heard a sound of scrambling and Stalker lay down awkwardly beside her.

‘We should try to make a move tonight,’ he said. His face was grey with pain.

Indaro knew he was right, but she said nothing.

‘That girl of yours is going to die. There’s no point us dying with her.’ It was an argument he’d made before.

‘We can make a litter. Garret and I will carry her.’

‘You can scarcely carry yourself, woman. We’re all as weak as one-day pups.’

‘She’s tiny. She weighs no more than a knapsack.’

He shrugged. ‘Suit yourself. Garret’s a fool for you. He’ll do anything you say.’

With an effort, Indaro sat up and swung her knees round, ready to stand. The movement made her head spin. They had to get water soon or they would all be dead.

‘Don’t worry about us,’ she told the northlander. ‘Try to keep up.’

He grinned and started to shuffle on his backside back towards the others. Indaro glanced once more to the east – and saw movement. She shielded her eyes and squinted. A distinct moving dark blur.

‘Incoming,’ she said quietly.

Yantou Tesserian, the Fkeni rider, felt the newcomer’s eyes boring into his back, piercing his leather armour and tickling his backbone. He didn’t like the man. He didn’t like him and he didn’t trust him. The Tenth? He didn’t believe a word. Yantou knew this tall man with his blue eyes and arrogant walk was either a deserter or a dunghill Rat. Probably a Rat, probably an officer. But for the moment the man was walking unknowing towards the Seventeenth Eastern, Yantou’s own company, which, by the Fkeni’s reckoning, was less than a half-day’s hike to the south. The newcomer was saving them the bother of tying him up and dragging him along. Officers were always kept for interrogation, although most of them were ignorant bastards, kept in the dark by their generals, even in battle.