"This Forsaken Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kearney Paul)

PART TWO

KING OF THIEVES

Eleven

They led better than five thousand men out of Gallitras, and pointed them south across the bitter snowbound countryside toward the siege-lines about Myconn, almost two hundred miles away. Their campfires were left burning, the tents left standing, and the army sidled out of its lines along the river in the dead hours of the night, the hooves of the horses wrapped in sacking and the wagons manhandled inch by creaking inch through frost-sharp snow that cracked and shattered under the metal-rimmed wheels. Canker was leaving a skeleton garrison to man the Ruthe crossings, gambling that the costly failed assault of days before would keep the loyalists in camp for a while. That, and the increasingly bitter weather.

Five thousand men, most of them infantry, trudging in column of fours along the broken stones of the Myconn Road. Along with the wagons of the baggage train, they formed a column over a mile long. Rol rode near the head of the army, beside Canker. Gallico was still confined to a wagon by his wounds, and Giffon and Creed had chosen to keep him company rather than chance the back of a horse again.

The Council of War the night before had not deserved the name. Canker gave orders, and they were obeyed. Moerus, governor of Gallitras, had raised a few murmuring objections to being stripped of half his command, but all in all it would seem that the Thief-King’s word was not to be gainsaid in this part of the world. Rol had still not become accustomed to Canker’s lofty status. He remembered the derelict filth of the Guildhouse in Ascari which had been Canker’s headquarters when last he knew him, and could not equate it with this current man of power, this politician, this general who marshaled armies and gave orders to thousands on a whim.

“What is it?” Rol asked his companion. “Chamberlain or chancellor? I have heard you called both.”

“That is because I am both,” Canker told him gaily. The sun was breaking through gaps in the sullen slate cloud overhead, lighting up the morning snow on the fields around them, and spreading a little cheer along the thousands who sweated upon the road. Once again, the Thief-King had changed his wardrobe. His leather cuirass was now swamped by a scarlet cloak, and a feather protruded jauntily from his headgear.

“The chamberlain is the master of the Queen’s Court, and the chancellor is the keeper of the Treasury-such as it is-and the Queen’s right hand, as it were, in any capacity she sees fit for him to undertake. I am a jack-of-all-trades, Rol, always have been.” And Canker laughed. It was mid-morning by now, and they were five miles out of Gallitras, leaving behind them the scorched and bloody battlefield of the Ruthe crossings. The Thief-King seemed glad to be on the move again, and so was Rol. Never in his life had he been so far from the sea. He felt that he was remote from his natural element, and the changing horizons of a journey made that knowledge easier to bear, left him less time to dwell on things.

I am sick of dwelling on things, Rol thought. Give me back myRevenant and my ship’s company, and I would be well content.

It was not entirely true, but he would not bring himself to admit it.

“You met Phrynius,” Canker said casually.

“He met me first. Did you tell him to seek me out?”

“Yes. He was interested, of course, but it took a prod to get him away from his damn books. I’m glad. He’s a good man, though not long for this world. I don’t suppose you thought to…” Canker hesitated, an odd thing for him. “No, I suppose not.”

“What?”

“As I said, he’s not long for this world. A few swallows of your blood would have given him another five or ten years of being a bookworm.” And Canker laughed unpleasantly.

Rol stared at the backs of the troops ahead, their breath and heat misting up the frigid air above them. “It never occurred to me.”

“I thought as much. It may become more important when we reach Myconn. It is the ultimate in incentives, you might say; the best bribe in the world.”

“It’s how Rowen first gained support, isn’t it?”

“Partly, yes. She bleeds herself each week, and it goes out to all the brave, the loyal, the best of the army. A man will do much for an extra decade or two of life. Look at me!”

Rol did. “It had struck me that you’ve changed little with the years.” He felt a growing disgust, but kept it out of his face. Canker knew, though.

“I got my first taste in Ascari, as you should remember. A gift from Psellos,” Canker said. His voice was not so jovial now. “If a loyalist bullet does not find me before my time, I’ll see out a century with ease. Now, there’s power for you, Rol-the ability to give that to a man. Not all the gold in the world can match it.”

“And yet Bar Asfal is bribing your cities away from you.”

A small puncture in the balloon of Canker’s smugness.

“Not everyone can have it for the asking; they must prove themselves worthy first. Some are too impatient to wait, and some fools reject the whole idea, preferring to keep their blood their own. And besides,” he added irritably, “there’s not enough of the damn stuff to go around.”

Rol smiled. “Is that why I’m here, Canker, another cow to be milked dry?”

Canker tugged at the brim of his hat. He looked annoyed with himself. “That’s certainly part of it, yes. Don’t look so outraged, boy! This is the way the world works.”

Rol did not look outraged; he was perfectly composed. “It’s a smaller world than we give it credit for, it’s true. You and I, Phrynius, Psellos, Rowen. I sometimes wonder if there is more than chance to all these many meetings.”

“If there were still a God to direct the world, perhaps there might be. But it’s more likely to be humdrum coincidence.” Canker cocked his head at Rol. The brim of his extravagant headgear cast one bright eye in shadow. “Then again, we live in interesting times. Phrynius certainly thinks there’s more to the tale of your life than meets the eye.”

“He’s lived too long with books for his only company. He reads things between the lines that are not there.”

“Well. Well, we shall see, I suppose. Rowen has become something of a reader lately also-hardly surprising when she has the greatest library in the world within her grasp.”

“Let me guess; she has secrets to tell me. You need a new line of patter, Canker.”

The Thief-King, chamberlain and chancellor of Eastern Bionar, guffawed. He doffed his feathered hat to Rol with elaborate courtesy. “You may be right at that.”

The column made four leagues that day, slowed by the grinding progress of the baggage train. So pitted and frost-broken were the roads that a whole regiment of infantry had to be assigned to keeping the heavy-axled wagons on the move.

The Embrun River was on their right, hidden in a line of snow-clad trees scarcely a mile away. On their left the Myconians glowered, their peaks hidden in cloud. Still a hundred miles away, the mountains dominated the horizon all the same, like sullen titans brought to earth. Their lower slopes were tinted pink as the sun set in the west and kindled the gray waters of the Embrun into a glorious few minutes of molten light. Tentless and fireless-for campfires were forbidden this close to Gallitras-the men of the army rolled themselves in their blankets and lay in the snow as the sun died in a glowing bar of flame-limned cloud. As darkness fell the sky cleared, and above them the welkin blazed with frost-bright constellations, and shooting stars streaked in showers. Five thousand men lying silent in that starlit desolation, their weapons beside them under the blankets to keep them from the frost, the patient horses standing in hobbled lines with their heads drooping. The cold night air tightened the rims of the wagon-wheels so that the vehicles creaked and groaned like tired beasts all night long.

Gallico, Creed, and Giffon had found themselves a quiet hollow on the fringe of the camp, and huddled together there like a mother hen and her chicks. The halftroll was coughing: loud, savage barks that rent the quiet clarity of the night and set nearby horses to neighing.

“I heal slower in the cold,” he explained to Rol. “Damned air gets in the chest and lies there like a chilled knife.”

“Giffon?” Rol asked.

The boy’s face was pallid and blue-lipped. He spoke through shivers. “His wounds are closed already, but there’s an infection in the lung, or else the lung has cleaved to a rib as it healed. I’ve seen it before, only I’ve never seen the process work so quick.”

“I’ll be fine,” Gallico grated. He was breathing in harsh, shallow pants and his eyes glittered dangerously. “I’ve lived through worse.”

“Can anything be done?” Rol asked Giffon.

“He needs to be in the warm, and out of this snow.”

“Don’t we all,” Elias Creed muttered. The dark man’s beard was white with frost and he had a doubled blanket wrapped about his shoulders like a shawl. “It reminds me of nights in the damned stone-quarries, but at least there it warmed up during the day, and the ground under my arse was dry.”

Rol looked at him quickly. It was the most information Elias had ever volunteered about his years in Keutta.

“Canker says that we should reach the lines about Myconn in less than a fortnight. And tomorrow night we can light fires again.”

“What are you now, Canker’s errand-boy?” Gallico asked. When Rol glared at him, the halftroll smiled, two long fangs poking from his lower lip. “The more I see of Canker and his war, Rol, the more I think you are merely here to be used in some way.”

“Fuck Canker and his Queen and their bloody empire,” Elias growled. “I’m with Gallico. Let’s take off for the coast and get back to the ship. We don’t belong here; we’re just little cogs in their machine.”

“What is this?” Rol asked softly. “A mutiny?”

Giffon stared at him wide-eyed as a startled rabbit.

“This is your friends telling you not to walk blindfolded into trouble,” Elias snapped. He rubbed a hand over his crackling beard. “We’re with you to the end-you know that. But the end may not be what you think. Be careful, Rol. Canker is not a good man.”

“We are none of us good men, Elias. We agreed on that once before.”

“We’ve done our share of killing, I grant you, but we’ve not made an industry out of it. Will Bionar be a better place with Canker and this Queen in charge? The ordinary folk will have a new landlord, is all.”

“I don’t care who rules Bionar either, but it may be that with Canker and Rowen in power, Ganesh Ka will be left alone at last, whereas with Bar Asfal on the throne, Bionese ships will never stop hunting us. We’re in it together now, all of us, whether we like it or not. You can thank Artimion’s politicking for that. If Rowen wins, we secure the Ka’s future, and are the ally of a great power. There’s one thing at least that will be for the better.”

“You may be right,” Gallico conceded. The four of them sat in silence for a while, and the starlight silvered the snow about them and raised a billion lesser stars from its crisp carpet. Rol felt a helpless sense of loss. Something was fraying among them, some kind of brotherhood. These three were the people he loved best in all the world (Rowen, his heart added, cackling), and he realized he was losing them.

No, he was drawing away.

Gallico’s helpless coughing broke the quiet at last. They had sewn four blankets together and he hitched these higher over his shoulders. “I should feel at home here anyway,” he puffed. “I was born in the mountains, the Northern Golorons. My people were herders in the high pastures of Perilar, but it’s been a century or more since I was last this far from the sea.”

The sea. At once, Rol had an overwhelming desire to gaze once more upon it, to feel salt in the air and taste it in his mouth, to hear the hiss of the waves moving in his head. The sea was freedom, refuge. The sea was home.

“You’ll stand upon a ship’s deck again, Gallico, that I swear. We all will.”

But looking at his friends’ faces as they turned toward him in the night, Rol could see that they did not believe him.

They passed through the town of Corbie five days later, though it was little more than a tattered, teeming encampment in the midst of a wilderness of rubble. They picked up three batteries of artillery there, appropriated by Canker with his usual aplomb. Eighteen heavy culverins drawn by long teams of bad-tempered mules, the three hundred-odd men who crewed them looking as though they would rather have been left where they were. Apart from soldiers and the teamsters and muleteers and others who serviced the needs of the army, the countryside seemed deserted of all ordinary, unregimented humanity.

“I thought you said Bionar was a rich, settled country,” Rol told Canker as they trooped out of Corbie and passed the endless lines of supply wagons being loaded and unloaded for garrisons to the north and south.

“It was,” the Thief-King responded. “But it’s taken a bit of a battering of late. Most of the civilian population has fled either to Myconn itself or to the towns nearer the coast. No point squatting in the middle of a battlefield, especially when your crops have been trampled and your house put to the torch. It’s better this way. The men no longer worry about fighting with their own people in the line of fire. Southeast Bionar has become a vast, brightly lit stage upon which we act out our play without need or desire for an audience.” He held up a gloved hand and panned it like an actor expressing a theatrical point, grinning.

Rol watched Canker and remembered him fighting Psellos. When it came to skill in pure murder, he did not believe the Thief-King was a match for Rowen, and at one time he himself had been close to besting her-but that was a long time ago. He was not sure he would be able to kill Canker if the need arose, not unless the thing within him decided to come roaring out at the world again at just the right moment. His own training had been too brief, and it was too long ago. He did not doubt that both Canker and Rowen kept their skills perfectly honed, but his own were mere cobwebbed memories-despite his prowess on the bridge at Ruthe.

He recalled Psellos’s contempt for the ordinary run of humanity. Cattle, he had called them, as though folk of the Blood were the only rational creatures in the world. He had tried to inculcate that attitude in Rol, too, and though he had largely failed, it still reared its ugly little head at times. But Rol did not truly believe it. Deep down, he knew that he craved acceptance and respect-and yes, love-from those he sometimes affected to despise. He hated himself for craving it, and he hated himself for his contempt of them. That was part of Psellos’s legacy which had sunk deep.

“When you talk,” he told Canker, “you remind me of Michal Psellos.”

“Perhaps I will take that as a compliment.”

“You can take it any way you like.”

“Psellos was a mighty man, though not, strictly speaking, a man at all. He was a colleague of mine in many ventures on Gascar-as you know. He betrayed me, or tried to, and yet I bear his memory no ill will. Make of that what you like.”

“A man who does not resent betrayal will not find it far to stoop to become a betrayer in his turn.”

“Possibly. I will do whatever is necessary to survive in this life, without evasion or contrition. All else is hypocrisy. We are animals, Rol, and in the end, all we care about is the worthless carcass in which our spirit finds itself imprisoned.” Canker turned in the saddle to bring the full regard of his rat-bright eyes to bear. “Life is cheap-the lives of men. There is nothing cheaper or more tawdry. I am at bottom an ordinary man myself, so I should know. But if it is in you to refashion these lives by the thousand-by the hundreds of thousands-then there is some meaning there. The only meaning in a world abandoned by God.” His attention drifted. He stared out over his horse’s ears, frowning. Then, collecting himself, he made a smile; a false note.

“Thus, I serve Rowen, and I will do anything she deems necessary to put her at the head of the greatest nation on earth. Why? Because I believe she is worthy of that position, and I am not. I also believe that you have a place there beside her. I believe-truly, Rol-that you and she are greater than I, in the very essence of your humanity-or in your lack of it. So don’t lose sleep at night, worrying about betrayal. It is not part of this man’s plans.”

“What in hell are you, then, Canker; have you become converted to the worship of the goddess Rowen?”

“I am willing to acknowledge reality,” Canker said, gazing off into the distance again. “A man needs some kind of truth at the foundation of his life. I have found that I am a formidable man.” He smiled wryly. “But it would seem I am not the stuff of which kings are made. Kings of Thieves perhaps, but not kings who make a mark on history.”

Something in Canker’s voice, his words, made the blood run cold about Rol’s heart. “Canker, what has Rowen become?”

The Thief-King shrugged. “Give it a few days, my lad. A few days and a little carnage, and you shall find out.”

The days were relatively few indeed, but they seemed long. Endless days of marching along the same road, watching the column of men and mules and guns proceed south with a kind of sullen stubbornness. Nights of freezing cold, where the campfires petered out long before the dawn through lack of firewood, the countryside around them picked clean as a desert carcass and forsaken by anyone who did not bear arms, or who did not in some way service those who did.

There was the odd, isolated inn still doing business and serving as a waystation for messengers of Canker and Rowen’s new empire. Usually it was the only inhabited building within a skew of ruined streets, though sometimes enterprising folk set up bordellos in the less broken houses nearby; and tired though the troops were, when the army halted for the night in the vicinity of these establishments there was a steady trickle of grimy men willing to spend their money there and have their needs seen to by a motley crowd of sad-eyed girls.

A week after leaving Gallitras, they found the Embrun River arcing round across their line of march again, flowing southeast to northwest. It was a narrower water here, and faster flowing, but still enough of an obstacle that the bridges over it were important militarily. Another smashed town, this one named Forminon, and another host of many thousands dug in along the banks and in the ruined houses, artillery emplaced in gabion-walled revetments, and the land all around them cratered and shell-scabbed under its merciful covering of snow. The army entrenched at Forminon was huge-to Rol’s eyes, at least. Its tented city, butting onto the river, covered many acres, and the streets between the encampments had roads of corduroyed logs to keep the ubiquitous supply-wains from plunging axle-deep in the mud below. Fifteen thousand men, Canker said, garrisoned Forminon-for this was now more or less the front line. The land beyond was contested by both sides right up to the siege-lines about Myconn itself.

Once again, Canker requisitioned troops right and left, though this time the local commander protested with more spine than Moerus had shown at Gallitras. They stayed in Forminon two days, mostly to rest the animals of the baggage train and refill the wagons they drew. When they set off again they were more than ten thousand strong, and one of the new regiments was mounted: a thousand armored men on tall, half-starved horses. It took the better part of a day to merely clear the bridges, and once on the southern bank the army sent out flanking companies, whilst the cavalry rode ahead some half a league of the main body, sniffing for trouble. Ahead of them, the mountains loomed up closer than ever, and the ground rose steadily under their feet. They thought they had become accustomed to the cold, but now it deepened around them, a raw, dry chill that no blanket or campfire could keep out of their marrow.

Hitherto, Rol had viewed the army as a kind of snake. The column it made was defined by the road upon which it traveled. But now that changed. The snake grew legs, antennae. The formations opened up, and spread out over the blasted land, undulating with the rise and fall of the terrain, clotting at ruined farmsteads, trickling over drystone walls like lines of ants. In the rear of each company fire-bearers carried thick-walled clay pots that housed the embers of the nightly fires, so that their comrades would quickly be able to light the match of the arquebuses if the enemy should hove into view. When Rol remarked on the multiplicity of formations, Canker only grinned, doffing his feathered hat. “March divided, fight concentrated,” he said. “I got that out of a book.”

When they were ten leagues from Myconn the order was passed down the line that there would be no more campfires, no cooking of food. They would chew on raw salt-beef and biscuit, and shiver in their inadequate blankets through the long, frost-sharp nights. By day the army spread out still farther. Only the wheeled traffic kept to the roads, the wagons and the guns. The infantry advanced over the empty, low-hedged fields in broad-fronted field-columns. These moved in shadowed masses upon the white vividness of the snow, except when a gleam of sunlight passed over them and set all the thousands of metal accoutrements the soldiers carried to winking brilliance.

And still, there was no sign of the enemy. The countryside about them was as unpeopled as a wilderness. They were marching across the Vale of Myconn, which Rol had heard of in stories and songs all his life. It had been a densely populated, fertile, well-watered and well-tilled region, but now it was a snow-blasted waste.

Gallico had been here before. Rol joined him on the wagon, along with Giffon and Creed, and the quartet watched the world creep by around them as the army drew ever closer to Bionar’s capital. The halftroll’s skin was a paler shade of green now, and flesh had melted from his huge frame so that the bones were more pronounced, but the awful rasp and wheeze of his breathing had subsided. His eyes had regained some of their old mischief. He stared about himself with acute interest as the mountains came closer.

“See that gray smudge off to the northwest? That’s Widnell, or what’s left of it. I worked there for a while in a traveling carnival, lifting and breaking things and snarling like a maniac for crowds of farmers. There’s roads under this snow, besides the one we’re traveling on, but the blizzards have covered them and no one must be using them anymore. Those ruins? That’s a town as well; I forget the name now. The mill still has a sail on it. It’s maybe fifteen decades since I was in this part of the world, and nothing but the mountains looks the same.”

They listened to him talk, glad to hear him sound like his old self again. That night they shared a skin of army wine and traded stories and memories all had heard recited a dozen times before. Many of the Bionese soldiers drifted over to them, bringing their own wine and losing some of their habitual reticence. One sang a song, and they joined in though they did not know the words. The soldiers were hard-bitten men, veterans of many battles who had followed their officers and leaders up and down an increasingly devastated country getting on for three years now. Though they had traveled together all this time, Rol had never had so much as a conversation with one of them.

Gray-eyed and dark-haired for the most part, they were a grave, stolid bunch who listened more than they spoke. Perhaps it was the proximity of the capital, and the inevitability of the battle they would be fighting before it, but they traded jokes and anecdotes now with the easiness of men who have been laboring together through a long day’s toil. Only when Canker arrived did the soldiers’ faces close again. They stood up as one, saluted him with real respect, and trooped off to their lines without another word, taking their wineskins with them. The Thief-King nodded at them with a crooked smile upon his face, and then gathering his cloak he turned away again, but gestured Rol to follow him.

Elias Creed came, too, weaving a little from the wine, and the three of them trudged up a low rise beyond the bivouacs of the army. There were clouds scudding across the face of the stars, and a sliver of a new moon. The mountains hung like phantom gods on the horizon, and under their feet the snow crunched like glass in the aching cold.

“I hope this is worth it.” Creed hiccuped, and Rol steadied him with one arm. They stood on the brow of the hill sharing each other’s warmth while Canker stood a little apart, smothered in his scarlet cloak, which hung black in the starlight.

“Canker-” Rol began irritably.

“Hush.” Canker held up a gloved hand. “Do you hear that? Listen.”

They did so. The snow creaked under their feet, a sound very like that a ship’s rigging made when under sail. Somewhere in the woods beyond the road an owl hooted, as forlorn a sound as could be imagined below the frozen emptiness of that black sky. But there was something else also.

Rol caught it first. A faint rumbling off at the edge of the world. Thunder, or the sound of an avalanche in the mountains-though they were still too distant for it to be that.

“Do you hear it?” Canker asked, rapt. “That sound?”

“What is it?” Creed asked, frowning.

“The guns of Myconn.”

Twelve