Paul Kearney: The Iron Wars

The man’s eyes lit with anger. “I’m a Fimbrian soldier, priest, and this is a Fimbrian army you’re in the midst of, so I’d be watchful of words like ‘mercenary’ if I were you.”

Albrec’s astonishment must have showed in his face, because the soldier went on less brusquely: “It’s four days since we picked you up-you and the other cleric-and saved you from wolves and frostbite. He’s in the cart behind me. He was less beaten up than you. He still has a face, at all events, just lost a few toes and the tips of his ears.”

“Avila!” Albrec exclaimed in joy. He began to scramble down from the cart again, but Joshelin’s hard palm on his chest halted him.

“He’s asleep, like you were. Let him come to himself in his own time.”

“Where are we going, if not to Charibon? Why are Fimbrians on the march again?” Albrec had heard rumours in Charibon of such things, but he had dismissed them as novices’ fancies.

“We’re to relieve Ormann Dyke, it seems,” Joshelin said curtly, and spat into the snow. “The fortress we built ourselves. We’re to take up the buckler where we set it down all those years ago. And scant gratitude we’ll get for it, I shouldn’t wonder. We’re about as well trusted as Inceptines in this world. Still, it’s a chance to fight the heathen again.” He clamped his mouth shut, as if he thought he had begun to babble.

“Ormann Dyke,” Albrec said aloud. The name was one out of history and legend. The great eastern fortress which had never fallen to assault. It was in Northern Torunna. They were marching to Torunna.

“I have to speak to someone,” he said. “I have to know what was done with our belongings. It’s important.”

“Lost something, have you, priest?”

“Yes. It’s important, I tell you. You can’t guess how important.”

Joshelin shrugged. “I know nothing about that. Siward and I were told to look after the pair of you, that’s all. I think they burned your habits-they weren’t worth keeping.”

“Oh God,” Albrec groaned.

“What is it, a reliquary or something? Were there gems sewn into your robes?”

“It was a story,” Albrec said, his eyes stinging and dry. “It was just a story.”

He crawled back into the darkness of the shrouded cart.

The Fimbrians marched far into the night, and when they halted they deployed in a hollow square with the baggage wagons and mules in the middle. Sharpened stakes were hammered into the ground to make a bristling fence about the camp, and details were ordered out of the perimeter to collect firewood. Albrec was given a soldier’s cloak and boots-both much too large for him-and was sat in front of a fire. Joshelin threw him cracker-bread, hard cheese and a wineskin, and then went off to do his stint as sentry.

The wind was getting up, flattening the flames of the fire. Around in the darkness other fires stitched a fiery quilt upon the snow-girt earth, and the loom of the mountains could be felt on every horizon, an awesome presence through whose peaks the clouds scudded and ripped like rolling rags. The Fimbrian camp was eerily quiet, save for the occasional bray of a mule. The men at the fires talked in low voices as they passed their rations out, but most of them simply ate, rolled themselves in their heavy cloaks and fell asleep. Albrec wondered how they endured it: the heavy marching, the short commons, the snatches of sleep on the frozen earth with no covering for their heads. Their hardiness half frightened him. He had seen soldiers before, of course, the Almarkan garrison of Charibon, and the Knights Militant. But these Fimbrians were something more. There was almost something monastic in their asceticism. He could not begin to imagine what they would be like in battle.

“Hogging the wineskin as usual, I see,” a voice said, and Albrec turned from the fire.

“Avila!”

His friend had once been the most handsome Inceptine in Charibon. There was still a fineness to his features, but his face was gaunt and drawn now, even with a smile upon it. Something had been stripped from him, some flamboyance or facet of youth. He limped forward like an old man and half collapsed beside his friend, wrapped in a soldier’s greatcloak like Albrec, his feet swathed in bandages.

“Well met, Albrec.” And then as the firelight fell on the little monk’s face: “Sweet God in heaven! What happened?”

Albrec shrugged. “Frostbite. You were luckier than I, it seems. Only a few toes.”

“My God!”

“It’s not important. It’s not like we have a wife or a sweetheart. Avila, do you know where we are and whom we are with?”

Avila was still staring at him. Albrec could not meet his eyes. He felt an overpowering urge to put his hand over his face, but mastered it and instead gave his friend the wineskin. “Here. You look as though you need it.”

“I’m sorry, Albrec.” Avila took a long swig from the skin, crushing in its sides so that the wine squirted deep down his throat. He drank until the dark liquid brimmed out of his mouth, and then he squirted down more. Finally he wiped his lips.

“Fimbrians. It would seem our saviours are Fimbrians. And they march to Ormann Dyke.”

“Yes. But I’ve lost it, Avila. They took it, the document. Nothing else matters now.”

Avila studied his hands where they were gripped about the wine-skin. The flesh on them had peeled in places, and there were sores on the backs of them.

“Cold,” he muttered. “I had no idea. It’s like what we were told of leprosy.”

“Avila!” Albrec hissed at him.

“The document, I know. Well, it’s gone. But we are alive, Albrec, and we may yet remain unburned. Give thanks to God for that at least.”

“And the truth will remain buried.”

“I’d rather it were buried than me, to be frank.”

Avila would not meet his friend’s glare. Something in him seemed cowed by what they had been through. Albrec felt like shaking him.

“It’s all right,” the Inceptine said with a crooked smile. “I’m sure I’ll get over it, this desire to live.”

There were soldiers around them at the fire, ignoring them as if they did not exist. Most were asleep, but in the next moment those that were awake scrambled to their feet and stood stiff as statues. Albrec and Avila looked up to see a man with a scarlet sash about his middle standing there in a simple soldier’s tunic. He had a moustache which arced around his mouth and glinted red-gold in the firelight.

“At ease,” he said to his men, and they collapsed to the ground again. The newcomer then sat himself cross-legged at the fire beside the two monks.

“Might I trouble you for a drink of the wine?” he asked.

They gazed at him at a loss for words. Finally Avila bestirred himself and in his best frosty aristocratic tone said: “By all means, soldier. Perhaps then you will leave us alone. My friend and I have important matters to discuss.”

The man drank deeply from the proffered wineskin and pinched the drops from his moustache. “How are you both feeling?”

“We’ve been better,” Avila said, still haughty, every inch the Inceptine addressing a lowly man-at-arms. “Might I ask who you are?”

“You might,” the man said, unruffled. “But then again I might not choose to tell you. As it happens, my name is Barbius, Barbius of Neyr.”

“Then perchance, Barbius of Neyr, you will leave us, now that you’ve had your drink of wine.” Avila’s haughtiness was becoming brittle. He was beginning to sound shrill. The man only looked at him with one eyebrow raised.

“Are you an officer?” Albrec asked, staring at the man’s scarlet sash.

“You could say that.” Off in the darkness an invisible soldier uttered a half-smothered guffaw.