Anna Spark - The Court of Broken Knives

The battlefield falls silent. He blinks and sees light.

A figure in silver armour. White, shining, blazing with light like the sun. A red cloak billowing in the wind. Moves through the ranks of the dead and the dying and the light beats onto them, pure and clean.

‘Amrath! Amrath!’ Voices whispering like the wind blowing across salt marsh. Voices calling like birds. Here, walking among us, bright as summer dew.

‘Amrath! Amrath!’ The shadows fall away as the figure passes. Everything is light.

‘Amrath! Amrath!’ The men cheer with one voice. No longer one side or the other, just men gazing and cheering as the figure passes. He cheers until his throat aches. Feels restored, seeing it. No longer tired and wounded and dying. Healed. Strong.

‘Amrath! Amrath!’

The figure halts. Gazes around. Searching. Finds. A dark-clad man leaps forward, swaying into the light. Poised across from the shining figure, yearning towards it. Draws a sword burning with blue flame.

‘Amrath! Amrath!’ Harsh voice like crows, challenging. ‘Amrath!’

He watches joyfully. So beautiful! Watches and nothing in the world matters, except to behold the radiance of his god.

The bright figure draws a sword that shines like all the stars and the moon and the sun. A single dark ruby in its hilt. The dark figure rushes onwards, screeching something. Meets the bright figure with a clash. White light and blue fire. Blue fire and white light. His eyes hurt almost as he watches. But he cannot bear to look away. The two struggle together. Like a candle flame flickering. Like the dawn sun on the sea. The silver sword comes up, throws the dark figure back. Blue fire blazes, engulfing everything, the shining silver armour running with flame. Crash of metal, sparks like a blacksmith’s anvil. The shining figure takes a step back defensively, parries, strikes out. The other blocks it. Roars. Howls. Laughs. The mage blade swings again, slicing, trailing blue fire. Blue arcs in the evening gloom. Shapes and words, written on the air. Death words. Pain words. Words of hope and fear and despair. The shining figure parries again, the silver sword rippling beneath the impact of the other’s blade. So brilliant with light that rainbows dance on the ground around it. Like a woman’s hair throwing out drops of water, tossing back her head in summer rain. Like snow falling. Like coloured stars. The two fighters shifting, stepping in each other’s footprints. Stepping in each other’s shadows. Circling like birds.

The silver sword flashes out and up and downwards and the other falls back, bleeding from the throat. Great spreading gush of red. The blue flame dies.

He cheers and his heart is almost aching, it’s so full of joy.

The shining figure turns. Looks at the men watching. Looks at him. Screams. Things shriek back that make the world tremble. The silver sword rises and falls. Five men. Ten. Twenty. A pile of corpses. He stares mesmerized at the dying. The beauty of it. The most beautiful thing in the world. Killing and killing and such perfect joy. His heart overflowing. His heart singing. This, oh indeed, oh, for this, all men are born. He screams in answer, dying, throws himself against his god’s enemies with knife and sword and nails and teeth.

Why we march and why we die,

And what life means … it’s all a lie.

Death! Death! Death!

‘The Yellow Empire … I can kind of see that. Yeah. Makes sense.’

Dun and yellow desert, scattered with crumbling yellow-grey rocks and scrubby yellow-brown thorns. Bruise-yellow sky, low yellow clouds. Even the men’s skin and clothes turning yellow, stained with sweat and sand. So bloody hot Tobias’s vision seemed yellow. Dry and dusty and yellow as bile and old bones. The Yellow Empire. The famous golden road. The famous golden light.

‘If I spent the rest of my life knee-deep in black mud, I think I’d die happy, right about now,’ said Gulius, and spat into the yellow sand.

Rate sniggered. ‘And you can really see how they made all that money, too. Valuable thing, dust. Though I’m still kind of clinging to it being a refreshing change from cow manure.’

‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about that myself, too. If this is the heart of the richest empire the world has ever known, I’m one of Rate’s dad’s cows.’

‘An empire built on sand … Poetic, like.’

‘’Cause there’s so much bloody money in poetry.’

‘They’re not my dad’s cows. They’re my cousin’s cows. My dad just looks after them.’

‘Magic, I reckon,’ said Alxine. ‘Strange arcane powers. They wave their hands and the dust turns into gold.’

‘Met a bloke in Alborn once, could do that. Turned iron pennies into gold marks.’

Rate’s eyes widened. ‘Yeah?’

‘Oh, yeah. Couldn’t shop at the same place two days running, mind, and had to change his name a lot …’

They reached a small stream bed, stopped to drink, refill their water-skins. Warm and dirty with a distinct aroma of goat shit. After five hours of dry marching, the feel of it against the skin almost as sweet as the taste of it in the mouth.

Running water, some small rocks to sit on, two big rocks providing a bit of shade. What more could a man want in life? Tobias went to consult with Skie.

‘We’ll stop here a while, lads. Have some lunch. Rest up a bit. Sit out the worst of the heat.’ If it got any hotter, their swords would start to melt. The men cheered. Cook pots were filled and scrub gathered; Gulius set to preparing a soupy porridge. New boy Marith was sent off to dig the hole for the latrine. Tobias himself sat down and stretched out his legs. Closed his eyes. Cool dark shadows and the smell of water. Bliss.

‘So how much further do you think we’ve got till we get there?’ Emit asked.

Punch someone, if they asked him that one more time. Tobias opened his eyes again with a sigh. ‘I have no idea. Ask Skie. Couple of days? A week?’

Rate grinned at Emit. ‘Don’t tell me you’re getting bored of sand?’

‘I’ll die of boredom, if I don’t see something soon that isn’t sand and your face.’

‘I saw a goat a couple of hours back. What more do you want? And it was definitely a female goat, before you answer that.’

They had been marching now for almost a month. Forty men, lightly armed and with little armour. No horses, no archers, no mage or whatnot. No doctor, though Tobias considered himself something of a dab hand at field surgery and dosing the clap. Just forty men in the desert, walking west into the setting sun. Nearly there now. Gods only knew what they would find. The richest empire the world had ever known. Yellow sand.

‘Not bad, this,’ Alxine said as he scraped the last of his porridge. ‘The lumps of mud make it taste quite different from the stuff we had at breakfast.’

‘I’m not entirely sure it’s mud …’

‘I’m not entirely sure I care.’

They bore the highly imaginative title The Free Company of the Sword. An old name, if not a famous one. Well enough known in certain select political circles. Tobias had suggested several times they change it.

‘The sand gives it an interesting texture, too. The way it crunches between your teeth.’

‘You said that yesterday.’

‘And I’ll probably say it again tomorrow. And the day after that. I’ll be an old man and still be picking bloody desert out of my gums.’

‘And other places.’

‘That, my friend, is not something I ever want to have to think about.’

Everything reduced to incidentals by the hot yellow earth and the hot yellow air. Water. Food. Water. Rest. Water. Shade. Tobias sat back against a rock listening to his men droning on just as they had yesterday and the day before that and the day before that. Almost rhythmic, like. Musical. A nice predictable pattern to it. Backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards. The same thinking. The same words. Warp and weft of a man’s life.