‘Two of my “fat friends”, as you call them, are prisoners of the Tsurani this day,’ Father Corwin replied, and there was checked anger in his voice. ‘I volunteered to serve with the army as a healer. I just pray I don’t have to work on you some day. Stitching together flesh that has no soul is bitter work.’
The priest turned and stalked away. The middle part of the column, made up of the stretcher-bearers was starting off and Corwin joined them.
Gregory chuckled softly.
‘What the hell is so funny?’ Dennis snapped.
‘I think he got you on that one. You did go a bit too hard on the boy.’
‘I don’t think so. He almost got us all killed.’
‘He made no mistakes, I was but ten feet from him. I made sure he was well concealed.’ As if thinking of something, Gregory added, ‘That priest has unusually sharp eyes.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes back.’
‘Is that what Jurgen would have done?’
Dennis turned, eyes filled with bitterness. ‘Don’t talk to me about Jurgen.’
‘Someone has to. There’s not a man in your company that doesn’t share your pain. Not just over losing a man they respected, but because they bear a love for you as well, and now carry your burden of sorrow.’
‘Sorrow? How do you know what I feel?’
‘I know,’ Gregory announced softly. ‘I saw what happened too. Jurgen made his choice, he left himself open in order to save the boy. I would have done it, so would you.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You and your Marauders have become hard men over the years, Dennis, but not soulless ones. You would have tried to save him, even at the cost of your own life, as Jurgen did. The lad has promise. You might not have noticed, and I’m not even sure he remembers it, but he did kill the first Tsurani that closed on him. The one that almost got him came up from behind.’
‘Nevertheless, the boy goes.’
‘It’ll kill him. We both know the type. Next battle he’ll do something stupid to regain his honour and die doing it.’
‘That’s his problem, not mine.’
‘And what if he gets a half-dozen others killed as well? What would Jurgen say of that?’
‘Jurgen is dead, damn you,’ Dennis hissed. ‘Never speak to me of him again.’
Gregory stepped back, raised his hands, then shook his head sadly, and walked over to the grave. Looking down at the rich brown earth being covered by the falling snow, he whispered, ‘Until we stand together again in the light.’
Then he went to join the company. Tinuva fell in by his side and the two of them headed up the trail in the opposite direction, double-checking to make sure that nothing was following the unit.
Dennis was left alone as the last of his men abandoned the clearing.
The heavy flakes swirled down, striking his face, melting into icy rivulets that dripped off a golden beard which was beginning to show the first greys of middle age.
When all were gone, and he knew no one was watching he walked up to the grave, reached down and picked up a clump of frozen earth.
‘Damn you,’ he sighed, ‘why did you leave me like this, Jurgen?’
Now there was no one left. Nothing but a flood of memories.
The holdings of the Hartrafts were not much to boast about; forest lands lying between Tyr-Sog and Yabon. A scattering of frontier villages on the border marches, a rural squire’s estates that the high-blood earls, barons, and dukes of the south and of the east would have scoffed at, or tossed aside as a trifle in a game of dice. But it had been his home, the home of his father and his father’s father.
Jurgen had been a young soldier for Dennis’s grandfather, old Angus Hartraft, called ‘Forkbeard’, who had first been granted the lands on the border for his stalwart service against the dark things that lived to the north. Jurgen had also been his father’s closest friend. And when his father died on the first day of the Riftwar, when the Tsurani flooded into their lands, it was Jurgen who had saved his life the night their keep was taken.
Dennis stared at the grave.
Better I had died that night, he thought, and there was a flash of resentment for old Jurgen.
Malena, his bride of barely six hours, died that night. His father had ordered him to take her through the secret passage out of the burning chaos of the estate’s central keep. He had fought his own desire to stay with his father and had taken Malena through the tunnel. Then outside the escape tunnel, just as freedom had been in reach, a crossbow bolt had stilled her heart forever. He had briefly glimpsed the assassin in the flickering light from the burning keep, and the image of the man as he turned and fled burned in Dennis’s memory. Jurgen had found him kneeling in the mud, clutching her lifeless body. He had fought to stay with her, until Jurgen knocked him out with the flat of his sword, then carried him down the river to safety.
Fifteen men from the garrison, including Jurgen and Dennis, survived that night. Carlin, the next to last had died just a month earlier from a wasting of the lungs. Now, of those fifteen men, only Dennis was left.
So now you’re dead old man. Died because of a damn stupid boy and a fat old priest. It would be like you to die for that, he thought, a sad smile creasing his features.
The ‘Luck of the Hartrafts’, it was called. No glory, no money, no fame. Just a retainer of a family with a minor title and nothing else. And then, in the end, you get a spear in your back because of a clumsy boy.
Yet, he knew that Jurgen, old smiling, laughing Jurgen, would not have wanted it any other way, that he had been more likely to die for the sake of a stupid squire than for any king. In fact, if it had been the mad king in far Rillanon, he most likely would have leaned on his sword and done nothing, figuring that such high and mighty types should take care of themselves.
A breeze stirred, the wind moaning softly through the rustling tree branches. The snow was coming down hard now, hissing, forcing him to lower his head.
Opening his hand, he let the clump of earth fall onto the grave. There was nothing left now of the past except a half-forgotten name and a sword strapped to his side. His father, Jurgen, Malena; all of them were in their graves, and the graves were all returning to the uncaring forest.
‘Dennis?’
He looked up. It was Gregory.
‘Nothing behind us, but we’d better move.’
Darkness was closing in. Tinuva was barely visible but a dozen paces away, waiting where the trail plunged back into the forest.
He looked around the clearing for a final time. Eventually the forest would reclaim all of this. The wind gusted around him and he shivered from the cold.
‘You still have the Marauders,’ Gregory whispered.
Dennis nodded and looked down at the Tsurani bodies scattered about the clearing. All that they have taken from me, he thought. He glanced up the trail where the men waited and while none of them was from Valinar, he saw faces that had become as familiar to him as those from his home. The Marauders still lived, and he had a responsibility to them.
He nodded. ‘And the war,’ he replied coldly, ‘I still have the war.’
Without a backward glance Captain Dennis Hartraft turned from the grave and left the clearing, disappearing into the darkness.
Gregory watched him and sadly shook his head, then followed him on to the path to Brendan’s Stockade.
It was cold.
Force Leader Asayaga threw a handful of charcoal on the warming brazier, pulled off his gloves and rubbed his hands over the fire.
‘Damnable country,’ he sighed.
He picked up the orders addressed to him and studied the attached map.
Madness. The first heavy snow of the season was falling from the skies and yet he was expected to start out at once with his command to reinforce a column which would strike a Kingdom outpost at dawn.
Why now? A day march would have been easy, but now darkness was closing in. Outside his tent the wind was stirring, the frozen ca
nvas cracking and rattling, and he could hear the heavy snow falling from branches in the woods surrounding the camp.
The Game, always it was the Great Game, he realized with a detached fatalism. He knew with certainty he was being sent on a futile mission so that shame might be attached to one of his clan cousins. His House, the Kodeko, was not significant enough to warrant attention on its own, but it was related to those who were in the Kanazawai Clan. He put down the orders and sat back in his small canvas chair, wishing not for the first time that it had some sort of back support. Even more, he wished the frozen ground was covered in the soft lounging cushions that provided such comfort in his home. He ran his hand over his face, shaking his head. He was growing too suspicious. This was not necessarily part of another Minwanabi ploy to embarrass a political enemy back home; it could simply be a well-intentioned, badly-planned attack. Either way, his duty was clear.
Asayaga called for Sugama, his newly-appointed second-in-command.
‘Order the men to form. Full marching gear, five days’ rations. Make sure they have on those new furs and footwraps. We march before sunset.’
‘Where, Captain?’
He handed over the map and Sugama studied it intently.
Asayaga said nothing. Sugama, without a doubt, didn’t know a damned thing about what he was looking at on the parchment, but nevertheless he was staring at it determinedly, acting as if he were a scholar thinking profound thoughts.
‘Kingdom outpost. We were to take it today but the commander, in his brilliance, decided he needed more men first, and thus we are volunteered.’
‘It is an honour then that our commander selected us.’
Asayaga snorted.
‘Yes, an honour. In the Kingdom’s tongue our destination is called “Brendan’s Stockade”.’
Asayaga stumbled over the last two words, dropping the ‘s’.
‘Then it shall be a name of glory for the Empire.’
‘But of course,’ Asayaga said, features frozen in a mask that revealed nothing. ‘Another act of glory in a glorious war.’
• Chapter Two •
Discovery
ICY RAIN LASHED DOWN.
Carefully, silently, Dennis Hartraft slipped through the column of weary troops. In the early morning down-pours, his men crouched motionless, many with arrows nocked to their bows. In their dirty grey cloaks they were one with the forest. Even so, he could sense their tension; something was wrong. Their eyes followed him as he darted from tree to tree, staying low. During the night the snow had changing to a mix of sleet and icy rain. It had made the night march a misery, but some inner sense had compelled Dennis to push on, a decision that Gregory and Tinuva had fully endorsed. Swinging east of Mad Wayne’s Fort, which had fallen to the Tsurani the previous spring, they followed a path little more than a game trail back to Brendan’s Stockade, approaching from the north-east.
They were less than a quarter of a mile from Brendan’s when Alwin Barry, leading the advance squad, ordered a halt. A keen anticipation of downing pints of hot buttered mead and cold ale in a cosy tavern at the fort, instantly gave way to a grim foreboding.
Raised in these woods, Hartraft knew them intuitively. More than once that intuition had kept him alive, where sound logic would have got him killed.
Jurgen had taught him long ago truly to listen to the rhythm of the ancient woods, to be completely still, so quiet that eventually you became one with the forest and could sense the beating of its heart. That sense told him to be ready for the worst.
Jurgen … He pushed the thought away as he passed the head of the column and cautiously followed the tracks of the advance squad. Looking over his shoulder he saw Gregory stealthily moving opposite him on the trail to his right.
The two pressed forward as the rain began to let up.
Dennis heard the chatter of a squirrel, looked up and caught a glimpse of Alwin, crouched behind a fallen tree just back from the top of a low rise. He made for him, crawling the last fifty feet to stay concealed from whatever might be on the other side of the ridge.
Alwin didn’t talk, he simply pointed to Dennis, then pointed with two fingers to his own eyes and gestured towards the top of the rise, the hand signal for Dennis to go forward and see for himself.
Dennis nodded, crawling under the fallen tree and followed Alwin’s track on the slushy ground, trying to ignore the icy dampness seeping through his clothing.
As he moved slowly, he suddenly became aware of the scent of smoke hanging heavy in the air. It had been masked by the rain. On a clear day, he would have smelled it a half-mile farther back. There was more than wood scent to it, something else – cooking meat, perhaps?
He reached the crest, picking a spot between two boulders, crawled up between them, then cautiously raised his head.
Smoke concealed most of the clearing. The smoke was thick, clinging to the ground, and there was far too much of it to have come only from morning cooking fires. He knew what it meant even before an errant breeze blew the smoke away for a moment. The entire clearing, several hundred yards across, was revealed. In the centre, on top of a low ridge, Brendan’s Stockade was nothing but a flame-scorched, still-smouldering ruin. With a cold chill he realized that the scent of cooking meat was the stench of burned bodies.
What had happened?
His eyes darted back and forth, trying to soak up information, to evaluate if there was an immediate threat to his men, to see if they had just walked into a trap.
Nothing moved on the far ridge.
The wooden stockade had been breached at the gate with a battering ram mounted on rough wooden wheels. Scaling ladders leaned drunkenly against the wall to either side of the gate.
The moat had never been much, really nothing more than a ditch full of water that stank in the summer and froze over in the winter. He could see where the ice had been broken and had yet to refreeze. The fort must have been attacked late yesterday evening or during the night.
The open slopes around the fort were carpeted with Tsurani dead, perhaps a hundred or more. He stared at them for a moment. Curiously, many were lying facing downslope, as if killed while running away – and Dennis knew the Tsurani never ran away; a knot of them were clustered in the south-west corner of the clearing, piled on top of each other. Obviously they had made a last stand there, but against whom? Had the garrison been strong enough to sally forth and attack the Tsurani downhill, the walls and gates would still be standing and Hartraft’s Marauders would be inside at this very moment eating a warm meal.
If Brendan’s Stockade had fallen, where were the Tsurani? Dennis had been fighting them for the entire war, and they never left their dead to rot unless killed to the last man. Either way, the winners should now be putting out the fires and repairing the gate, for either side would hold this stockade once taken.
Nothing moved. It was a stockade of the dead.
‘There’s nothing right in this.’
Gregory had slipped up so silently that his whispered voice gave Dennis a start. Damn him, he enjoyed doing that, sneaking up and thus showing his skill, but Dennis didn’t let his flash of anger show.
‘Brendan and his lads are finished,’ Gregory whispered, ‘but so are the Tsurani.’
Dennis said nothing. In spite of the snow vultures were already circling in. A mile or more back he had noticed an absence of crows and ravens in the forest – inactive at night, they were usually noisy and busy first thing in the morning – now he knew where they were … enjoying a feast. A vulture dropped down inside the smoking ruins of the fort and did not come back out, yet another indicator that no one was left alive inside.
Could it be that the Tsurani had retreated at his approach?
No. If there were enough of them to take Brendan, they would stay and make a fight of it. The fall of this stockade, along with the Tsurani holding Mad Wayne’s to the north-west, made a hole twenty miles wide in the picket chain that covered the northern front. Why take this crucial point only to
abandon it?
Ambush?
He looked back over his shoulder. Gregory was carefully looking about as well, and Dennis realized that the Natalese scout had been scanning the woods to either side, looking for any indicators that a trap was closing in.
Nothing. The crows and ravens were all down in the clearing, feasting, so there was none of their noisy cackling in the forest. The other sounds were normal: the ice-covered trees creaking in the breeze, the tinkling sound of now-light rain, the calls of other birds, and nothing else.
There was no ambush: it would already have been sprung.
Their eyes met and both had reached the same conclusion.
‘Dark Brothers,’ Dennis whispered.
Gregory nodded an agreement. ‘Unless the last Tsurani and the last Kingdom soldier conspired to kill one another at the same moment, that’s my guess.’
What he saw started to fit together. A Tsurani force had besieged the fort. Ringing the edge of the clearing he could see where the snow had been trampled down, and the torn remains of a dozen of their tents littered the ground, bits of canvas sticking out of the icy slush. Their besieging camp was at the edge of the forest less than a hundred yards away. Cooking pots still hung over cold fire-pits, and a battle pennant leaned against a half-collapsed tent covered with ice. He could even make out the spot where they had forged together their rough-hewn battering ram, for the stump of the freshly-cut tree was coated with melting ice.
Perhaps the Tsurani had just taken the fort, or were venturing an attack when the Dark Brothers had hit them, pressing right through to finish off Brendan’s defenders as well. The pattern of bodies indicated that the Tsurani had tried to break out, heading towards the south-west corner of the clearing and the trail that ran straight back to territory they held. The piled-up knot of dead were stopped a good hundred yards short of the main trail which headed into the heart of Tsurani-held territory.
He stared at the trail for a moment, feeling a knot in his stomach. He had walked it often enough as a boy; it was the trail back to his family’s estates … He forced his attention away from bitter memory and back to the present.