The Black Robe (The Sword and the Spell) (9 page)

Borman stood behind his map table on a small rise on the other side of the river staring down at the activity. He too had read the books on battle tactics, and whilst he had never been outside of the six kingdoms and had not fought in any major conflicts, his father had hired an arms tutor for him from across the Great North Sea. He had been a bear of a man with wild hair and a bushy beard and hands the size of shovels. Borman had felt them a few times as a boy when he didn’t try hard enough or had given his tutor some lip, but he had his revenge, putting shredded sand crawler skin in his tutor’s food and watching him take two days to die in agony. He couldn’t remember the man’s name but he remembered everything he had taught him about battle tactics.

His problem was men, or at least the lack of them. Despite his best efforts and the resources of two kingdoms, he had only been able to gather four thousand men, and they were a motley bunch at best. He had his own troops from Northshield which he had brought south when he took the throne of Leersland. They were well trained and well armed troops, tried and tested against the savage raiders from across the Great North Sea. Unfortunately there weren’t enough of them. The rest were from Leersland, mainly conscripts who hadn’t held a pike before, or Leersland’s guards, or at least those who hadn’t died in the war with Sandstrone or been killed on Tarmin’s battlements.

What were missing were the remnants of Andron’s small army and Malingar’s mercenaries. Together with the troops guarding Northshield’s sea coast and the border with Essenland it would have given him nearly another two thousand men and would have evened the odds. Malingar had gone to find more men, but he wasn’t sure where the other missing men had disappeared to; they had just dribbled away in their ones and twos.

It was Raster’s fault, the idiot; he was in command of the army and should have noticed that the men were missing before it was too late to do anything about it. You only have to castrate a few deserters and everyone suddenly wants to stay. If it hadn’t been for the fact that, just before going off to war isn’t a good time to gut your commander, he would have had Rastor chopped into little pieces and fed to the grunters. As it was the enemy swords might do the chopping for him, if they guessed what was happening and moved troops to Crosslands Bridge before Rastor had crossed it.

He watched the activity below him with some satisfaction. If you were outnumbered two to one you needed to use guile to even the odds and he had plenty of that. The Blue River at this point was wide and shallow enough to wade across which, of course, was why Newn had chosen the wide river bend as his battle ground. It was a natural barrier between the two armies; wide enough to prevent both armies using bolt bows but narrow enough to see what the other army was up to. Newn had tried to hide his army behind a ridge so he couldn’t estimate their numbers or deployment, but he had spies in their camp and knew exactly how many men Newn had, where they had come from and who led them. The boy had problems too; more than half of his army were conscripts and most were on foot. That gave Borman a big advantage.

Unlike Newn he had camped his men in the open where they could be counted, and when it was time to advance, Newn would see them coming and would be confident of an easy victory. Overconfidence was a dangerous thing in a commander; as his old tutor used to say, an over confident commander is dim, dumb and defeated. He was doing his best to nurture that over confidence by giving the impression that his army was a disorganised rabble. It wasn’t difficult, from his position it looked like someone had disturbed a crawler’s nest and the inhabitants were scurrying around mindlessly. It wasn’t like that of course or at least he hoped it wasn’t.

At the front, close by the river’s edge, men were joining planks together to form flat boards. It looked a bit like they were making rafts and he hoped that was what Newn thought too. His men had even tried them out and there had been a lot of splashing about and laughter. He’d made a game of it and had awarded a keg of ale to the team which had managed to stay afloat the longest. They were not rafts though; rafts don’t need hand holds on the underside. His spies had told him that Newn had a large contingent of bowmen and his soldiers favoured short throwing spears rather than pikes. The huge shields would help to get the conscripts across the river and in amongst the bowmen and spear throwers whilst his best troops crossed in safety. It was going to be bloody and the loss of life would be high, but they were only peasants after all.

Behind the shield carriers the rest of the army prepared, cleaning armour, checking weapons and tending to horses. It was chaos but it disguised the fact that around a thousand men did not move at all. He might not have a lot of men but he did have lots of uniforms. They had spent half the night stuffing uniforms with whatever they could find and propping those up on sticks so that when dawn came it would disguise the fact that nearly a thousand men had gone. They wouldn’t march across the river of course but that didn’t matter. By the time Newn realised that something was wrong Rastor would be across Crosslands Bridge and it would be too late for him to do anything about it.

Such a deception would only work if Newn didn’t have spies in his camp, and he had been lucky there. He had put out some bait and two spies had been caught on the first night they had set up camp. Both had talked in exchange for a merciful end to their painful existence and had given an almost identical set of names. As no new names were revealed during the interrogation of the second set of prisoners, he was reasonably certain that he had them all. Just in case he had trebled the perimeter guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to enter or leave the camp.

He looked up from the activity in his camp and smiled to himself as a group of riders appeared on the ridge opposite. It was too far for him to see them clearly, but he didn’t have to, he knew who they would be. Prince Newn, he refused to call him king, was in the centre; an untried boy with no military training and no experience of leading men. When the time came to lead his army into battle, the boy’s inexperience would do much of his work for him. Next to him was the woman; his woman. He had wondered where she had escaped to and had been surprised when she turned up next to Prince Newn. Borman laughed to himself and wondered if she enjoyed being fucked by a beast. When the battle was over he would have to ask her.

The last of the group had to be Commander Gadrin. He was the dangerous one. His spies had told him that Gadrin was in control of the army and that the prince deferred to him. He already knew the man’s reputation as a leader of men and an astute tactician, but was surprised to find that he had experience of commanding an army in a foreign war, which was more than he had done. Still, Gadrin was just one man and not all the men he had placed in Gadrin’s camp were spies.

Tired of studying the enemy he looked up at the sky and tried to estimate the time. The sun was still only half way to its zenith so it had to be at least two candle lengths before noontide; far too early to move yet. Rastor had left as soon as complete darkness had fallen so he wouldn’t be in place yet. He had a thousand men and that would give his enemy a nasty surprise, but would it be enough? What he needed was Malingar and the men he had sent him to gather from Northshield. He wondered where the captain was now.

Sharman rubbed his aching back and for a third time wondered what in hellden’s name he was doing here. They had been riding hard for days and every part of him ached, and his bones felt as if someone had taken them apart and put them back in the wrong order. It could have been worse though; his master had given him a fine, spirited horse with a smooth gait instead of the bad tempered bag of bones he had ridden for the last fifteen summers. He had left the old nag in a lush, green paddock munching grass and had been disappointed when the retired horse hadn’t even raised its head when he went to say goodbye. At that moment he wished that someone would put him out to grass.

That wasn’t likely to happen any time soon though. He hadn’t anyone else to blame but himself of course; he was the one who had persuaded Malingar to leave his new estate and ride all over the north to gather men to save the skin of that treacherous bastard, King Borman. What’s more he had agreed to accompany his master instead of volunteering to manage the estate in his absence. The Goddess knows he needed his head testing for such stupidity.

It wasn’t as if Borman would be grateful, in fact when the king saw him he was likely to order his execution for desertion along with the other men he had led away from Crosslands Gap and into Malingar’s service. He wasn’t certain how his master was going to save his hide but when he mentioned the problem, Malingar just smiled and said leave it to him. He supposed his master was good at that sort of thing; either that or he was going to stick his sword into Borman and get rid of the devious bugger for good. That would be the best outcome of this whole expedition, but it was unlikely to happen. For some inexplicable reason Malingar was still loyal to his king.

Loyalty was an odd thing as Borman had done his utmost to turn the young captain away, but there was revenge too; Rastor would be at Borman’s side and it was the promise of revenge that had persuaded his master to leave his new estate to gather an army. It would have been better if he had kept his mouth shut and let his lord grieve the death of his sister in the peace of their comfortable home. Instead he’d got him all fired up and here they were, in the middle of nowhere, wet, cold and aching in every bone.

Actually, they weren’t in the middle of nowhere, they were half a day’s ride south of the Deeling Pass, camped by the Two Kingdom’s Bridge and recovering from their gruelling ride through the mountains. He had been through the Deeling Pass before as a young man returning from a border skirmish which had turned into a bovine raid deep into Northshield. They had damn near been caught and had only escaped by crossing the river and riding hard for the mountains with their prize stampeding before them. At the time he had wondered why their pursuers had given up at the foot of the pass, but by the time they had reached the other side, minus the bovines and half his men, he knew; the Deeling Pass was a bitch and he had vowed never to return.

Yet here he was, aching, shivering with his horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders and wishing he was back home with his bad tempered old nag for company. On the other hand he wouldn’t have missed this sight for the world. His master was really a remarkable young man. In less than a moon cycle they had travelled the length of Northshield and back gathering men from every part of the kingdom, and had then crossed the Deeling Pass in treacherous conditions without losing more than five men.

It helped of course that Malingar was from Northshield and had travelled the pass several times. He had played his part too, marshalling the troops quietly through the avalanche areas, encouraging them and listening to their fears. His bad jokes had helped a bit not to mention his stories of the more reckless things he had done as a young man. They had particularly liked his tales of rescuing his previous master from his own incompetence. He didn’t like to talk about the dead with so little respect but in Andron’s case he deserved it.

Sharman was still considering the possibilities of becoming a storyteller if he lived long enough to retire, when Malingar walked across the camp towards him carrying a bowl of something hot and steaming. He gratefully took the proffered bowl and sipped at the dark liquid, grimacing at the bitter taste.

“It lacks something,” he muttered as he reached into his leather jerkin and pulled out a small skin. He emptied some of the golden-coloured contents into his bowl and passed the skin of grain spirit to his master who had sat down beside him. Malingar waived the skin away and Sharman shrugged; the boy didn’t know what was good for him.

“Are you all right, old man?”

Sharman sipped his drink feeling the fire of the grain spirit warm him through. “I am now.” He sipped the drink again. “That was some ride.”

Malingar nodded and looked around the camp. Sharman was right, it was some ride, probably the hardest and fastest ride he had ever done. It was as if hellden’s hunters were chasing him, filling him with desperation and overwhelming his caution and common sense. With the speed they had crossed the Deeling Pass it was surprising they hadn’t lost more men. That was largely due to Sharman and now he knew why the man’s small group of followers were so devoted to him. The old man reminded him of his own father, only a bit rougher and more outspoken. He had worked alongside his father right up until the moment he had taken it into his head that he didn’t want to be a merchant any more, but wanted to be the king’s guardcaptain. It was the only time they had argued; perhaps he should have listened to him after all.

“A drac for them.” interrupted Sharman seeing the faraway look in Malingar’s eyes.

“I was thinking about my father, he never wanted me to be a soldier.”

“Fathers don’t usually but he would have been proud of what you have achieved here.”

“He never liked Borman, said he was a treacherous bastard who thought only about himself.”

“I like the sound of your father; I think we would have got on well together.”

Malingar smiled and nodded. “Yes, you would have. He was right though, Borman is treacherous and self-serving but there is something about him that makes you want to be with him, something which commands your loyalty and makes you want to do the impossible to please him.”

Sharman nodded and thought about their first meeting. “Yes, you’re right, I felt it the first time I met him although he rather spoiled the moment by sticking his sword through my master’s brain and slaughtering thirty of my men for the fun of it.”

Malingar gave an ironic laugh. “He does have an unfortunate habit of doing that sort of thing, but despite that, despite everything, I’m still loyal to him.”

“There’s no harm in that as long as your loyalty doesn’t override your common sense or results in the death of those who are loyal to you.”