Damned puffed-up messenger-boy. ‘When did you last ride to battle?’
She saw him flinch.
‘If you were my son,’ she said, ‘I would’ve dragged you out of the women’s huts long ago. I’ve got no problem with you wearing whatever it is you wear under that armour, it’s the fact that Gall cast a soft eye on you, Jarabb, and that’s not served you well. We are at war, you simpering coodle-ape.’ She turned as her six sub-wing captains rode up. ‘Hanab,’ she called to one, a veteran warrior whose bronze helm was a stylized crow’s head, ‘tell me what you see?’
‘An old border is what I see,’ the man said. ‘But the forts got dismantled everywhere but on those tels there. So long as the army stays where they are, they’re stuck like a knuckle under a rug. All we need to do is keep them put.’
Shelemasa looked to another captain, a tall, hunch-shouldered man with a vulpine face. ‘And how, Kastra, do we do that?’
The man slowly blinked. ‘We scare them so badly the hills they’re on start running brown.’
‘Draw up the horse-archers,’ Shelemasa ordered. ‘On to the slopes. Start bristling the fools. We’ll spend the day harrying them and piling up wounded-until those forts are nothing more than hospitals. Come the night, we send raids into their baggage camps, and maybe a few to fire the forts since those roofs I see inside are thatched.’ She scanned her officers. ‘Is anyone here satisfied with just pinning the idiots in place?’
Jarabb cleared his throat. ‘The Warleader wants the threat delayed long enough to stop being a threat, Commander.’
‘Half the army up there are levies,’ said Hanab. ‘Skirmishers. Deploying them against light cavalry would be suicide. Yet,’ he added with a sneer, ‘look at how they’re arrayed-five deep in front of the precious heavy infantry.’
‘To absorb our arrows, yes,’ Shelemasa said.
Kastra snorted. ‘The heavies don’t want to dirty their pretty armour.’
‘Bloody those skirmishers enough and they’ll break,’ Hanab predicted. ‘Then we can chew and nip the heavies for as long as we like.’
Shelemasa turned to regard Jarabb. ‘You stay at my side. When we return to the Warleader, you will be carrying the Bolkando commander’s head on your spear.’
Jarabb managed a sickly smile.
‘Look down there,’ Hanab pointed.
Sliming up from the ditch and on to the raised track was a yellow and black banded centipede, wide as a hand and as long as a sword. They watched it snake to the other side of the track and then vanish into the stand of bamboo.
Shelemasa spat and then said, ‘Hood take this hole and shit in it.’ After a moment she added, ‘But only after we leave.’
A thousand warriors at his back, and Vedith did not want to lose a single one of them. Memories of the garrison attack still dogged him. A triumphant victory, yes, but now he had but a handful of companions left with whom he’d shared it, every blistering moment-and even now, should he meet the eyes of one of those warriors, he would see in them the perfect reflection of his own faint disbelief, his own sense of guilt.
The crows alone chose who lived and who fell. Prayers meant nothing, deeds and vows, honour and dignity, not one weighed more than a mote of dust on fate’s scales. He even had his doubts about courage. Friends had fallen, one moment in his life and the next out of it, reduced to what memories he could conjure, all the incidental moments that had held little meaning until now.
Vedith didn’t know what to make of it. But he now knew one thing. The warrior’s life was in its essence a lonely one, and the loneliness only got worse, as one came to realize that it was best to hold back, to never draw too close to a companion. Yes, he would still give his life to save any one of them, whether he knew that warrior’s face or not, but he would also simply walk away should one fall. He would move on, and in his eyes the barest hint of lost worlds.
A thousand warriors behind him. He would send them into battle, and some would die, and he hated that knowledge, he railed against it, but for all that he knew he would not hesitate. Among all warriors, the commander was the loneliest by far, and he could feel that isolation thickening around him, hard as armour, cold as iron.
Gall. Adjunct Tavore. Coltaine of the Crow Clan. Even that Bolkando fool leading his or her unsuspecting column towards an afternoon of nightmarish horror. This is what we share. And it tastes bitter as blood on the tongue.
He wondered if the Bolkando King now regretted inviting this war. He wondered if the bastard even cared that his subjects were dying. Or was it just the wound of lost revenues from wasted farms, devoured livestock and the stolen hoards of wealth that stung him now? And the next strangers to camp on his borders? Would he treat them any differently? Would his successor heed the lessons carved out here in bone and flesh?