CHAPTER 21

THEY STAYED HIDDEN behind a twisted hedge of thorns while the army passed by. Va lay on his stomach, perfectly still, the hood over his head arranged in such a way that he could see out with one eye. Elenya sat at his feet, facing out into the field and away from the road. Her grey cloak and hunched shoulders made her look like a boundary stone, unmoved for years.

Peering through the slit between brown soil and black wood, Va had watched the horses go by, the infantry go by, and finally the cattle-drawn carts laden with supplies. It had taken half the morning, and now there were the followers that tagged along behind every army. Wives, whores, thieves, cooks, musicians; some of them all those roles in one.

The last pair of feet disappeared from view, and Va turned onto his back. ‘It’s only a small army. A thousand fighting men, a hundred horse.’

‘But none of them landless peasants being led to their slaughter by some crazed mercenary sick with love.’

Va swallowed hard. ‘No, I suppose not. But it looks like High King Cormac is going back for another try.’

Elenya stood up and stretched. ‘Who isn’t the real High King at all, just some upstart from Mumhan.’ She slung her bag over her shoulder and started for the gap in the hedge. ‘This isn’t going to be easy, you know,’ she said.

‘It still has to be done.’

‘You can’t just march in and demand the book back.’

‘macShiel said this Ardhal is an honourable man. Honourable men don’t like the idea of owning stolen property. So, yes, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

‘Except you’ll need me to translate for you, or did you think he spoke Rus? I could tell him that you’re some odious tree-worshipper from the far south holding me hostage, and that I’m throwing myself on his mercy if only he’d free me from your cruel ownership. And you wouldn’t be able to tell until they fetched the rope to hang you.’

‘You wouldn’t do that.’ He frowned at her slight. ‘I do know some World.’

‘Va, when you commanded your vast armies, how did you manage to tell them what you wanted them to do?’

‘I had people.’

‘It’s a good job you still do. Now it looks like An Cobh is going to be under siege again, you’ll have to work out a way of getting in and out without being killed by either side as a spy.’

Va knocked a stone out of his sandals. ‘God will provide.’

‘Whenever you say that, I know you’re going to do something stupid and trust to luck.’ Elenya searched her bag for the hard yellow cheese macShiel’s wife had given her. ‘The problem is, it always works, doesn’t it?’

She twisted the lump of cheese this way and that until it broke into two unequal portions. She kept the smaller and gave Va the larger.

They trailed the army until noon, when they stopped at the top of the hill overlooking An Cobh. The soldiers marched on and started to arrange themselves in the valley below, slowly working their way round to cut the promontory off from the land. The horsemen darted this way and that, issuing orders and rounding up the livestock that hadn’t been withdrawn inside An Cobh’s stone walls.

‘This is a rubbish siege,’ said Elenya. ‘They can still get supplies in by boat. They’ll give up in a week and go home.’

‘If they had any boats. Didn’t macShiel say Cormac burned them all last time?’

‘True. But they can always make more.’

‘They don’t seem too worried.’ Va stood as tall as he could, his hand shading his eyes. ‘Ah. They’ve got a couple of galleys coming into the bay.’

‘So it’s not so rubbish.’ Elenya watched the valley as the soldiers put up tents and built fires at intervals around the walls. ‘This rabble seems quite organized. Bit of a setback for you.’

‘Something will turn up.’

The gates of An Cobh were closed. The walls were crowded with figures, going this way and that, all too far away to tell what they were doing. Wood smoke started to obscure the scene further.

‘All this for just one book,’ said Elenya.

‘I know. But you said the thieves were led by a black man.’

‘I said a man in black. I couldn’t tell the colour of his skin.’

Va looked at the way the sentries were arrayed. ‘I should be able to slip through the picket during the night. The walls are climbable. I might need some rope.’

‘And what about me? How do you propose to get me in?’

Va tutted. ‘That’s up to you.’

‘You won’t leave me behind.’ She put her hand lightly on his arm.

He flinched and put his own hand to cover where she had touched him, as if burned. ‘I need to check on the defences on the far side of town.’

‘Then we’ll walk together.’

They were halfway round the horseshoe curve of the surrounding hills when fresh black smoke rose in two pillars behind An Cobh. Va tried to make out what had happened, but the rock on which the town sat hid the shore from view.

‘They must be firing the port.’

‘Who, Cormac or the king?’

‘I can’t tell. It doesn’t make sense, either way. Cormac will want to take the town; the King of Coirc will want to keep it. There’s no sense in burning it all to the ground.’

Then one of the boats hove into view. Its rigging was alight, along with most of the foredeck. It was abandoned, and it heeled over to starboard without check. The crew were tiny white splashes in the choppy sea.

Pushed by the wind, the hull turned towards the shore, the flames whipping up along the deck in great roiling tongues. The mast tilted, wobbled and fell hissing into the water.

‘What happened to that?’ said Va. He took a faltering step back, then steadied himself. It reminded him too much of the other fire, the other boats.

He started down the hill. He had to conquer his fear.

‘Va! Va! Stop.’ Elenya jumped at him, took him around the waist with both her arms and dragged him down onto the scrubby emerald grass.

He tried to push her away without touching her, and twisted his body so that she was forced to let go. By the time he looked up again, the sky was cut with a dozen smoky lines, arcing out from the town walls and aiming high over the encamping army.

The first trail stopped with a sharp cracking sound and a puff of white smoke. Instantly all the other trails bar one did the same, the noise blending into barrages of noise that echoed down the valley.

The High King’s men turned from the stricken boat to look upwards.

The first few to be hit simply couldn’t believe it. They grasped the sharp metal flights suddenly protruding from their bodies and tried to pull them free. The ground bristled with spikes, and finally one man raised his shield in time as his comrade next to him sank to the ground, his open mouth neatly skewered.

Va tried to get up, and again Elenya pulled him down. Another section of the wall had loosed burning fingers of smoke that reached up and out. The horsemen in the line of fire wheeled about, uncertain what was happening to them, undecided which direction to run. Those who dithered were cut down by the hard rain.

A new tactic: more smoke and fire, this time aimed directly at the reeling foot soldiers. The streaks hit the soft earth at a shallow angle. Some buried themselves, others skidded across the sheep-cropped grass. All paused for breath, then vanished in a flash of light, a snap of thunder. Anyone close by fell down as if dead.

‘Think about the book,’ said Elenya in Va’s ear. ‘Think of what I’d have to tell the patriarch – that you threw your life away.’

‘But they’re dying,’ he groaned.

‘And you can’t save them. Lie still.’

The High King’s tent seemed out of range of the King of Coirc’s devilry. He had to watch his army being massacred before him, yet remain untouched himself. Each section of the wall threw high spikes, followed it with the low-aimed explosions, and those left alive ran from the field screaming and crying.

The King of Coirc had one last trick. A single stripe of sooty smoke burst from a tower, wrote a dark line across the strange-smelling sky and petered out. Then it flashed into life again, falling beyond Cormac’s camp and destroying a blackthorn tree. The would-be High King got the message. He leaped on his horse and fled back over the hill. His abandoned kinsmen kicked over the fluttering banner and rode to the top of the hill. There they stopped and waited for the remnants of the army to straggle their way back to them.

‘Can I get up now?’ said Va.

‘It’s over,’ said Elenya. ‘Yes.’

He got up and brushed himself down, his heavy cross bouncing on his black-clad chest. His hands were trembling.

‘Va?’

‘He’s opened the book.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because,’ he said, pointing towards An Cobh, ‘that’s what’s in the books. The Users put all their secrets in them – the same secrets that destroyed them and Reversed the world. I need to get those books back now, before it all happens again.’ He watched the gates of the town swing open and the king’s men walk slowly out of the shadow of the gatehouse.

‘They look as shocked as anyone else.’

‘So they should. They’ve been set on the road to Hell by their king and this damned Kenyan thief.’ He strode off down the hill.

‘Va, you can’t.’

‘I can and I will. God is on my side.’ He clutched his cross in both hands. ‘He is my shield and my sword.’

He walked on. Not all of Cormac’s men had been killed outright. The injured called out to him in their strange foreign tongue, holding out their hands and pleading with him. Va walked on, even though it was agony for him to do so.

He was back outside the city of Novy Rostov, his bright plates of armour red with blood, his sword arm numb with effort, his helmet battered and jammed on his head, his calf cut and bleeding, his left shoulder a mass of pain and bone fragments. Every step he took, he trod on someone, something: a pool of dashed brains, a coil of intestines, a shattered torso, sightless eyes, unidentifiable human mulch that had once been a daughter or a son.

The dead were lucky. It was the still living who were cursed. They moaned. They cried. They sobbed. The sound of ten thousand voices in agony cut his soul in two.

At the gates of Novy Rostov, where the bodies gathered in drifts like snow, the last Caliphate soldier had raised the stained and ragged crescent standard of his people. He swayed as if drunk, only his spear keeping him upright. And finally Va reached him, wading through the corpses of both their armies.

There was no ceremony, no honour. Va raised his sword, put the broken point of it against the soldier’s throat, and the man just stumbled onto it, glad finally to be free of the torment of seeing and hearing.

He fell, and with him, Va’s sword. He’d not touched it, or another, again. His moment of victory had been shown for the catastrophe it was. He had raised an army, trained it, organized it, led it. It had been his tactics that had crushed the Caliphate’s encircling troops, liberated Novy Rostov and broken the power of the caliph for a decade to come. All for what? Love. He’d been the last man standing, and he’d known in that moment that nothing could possibly be worth that carnage.

That was why, walking through the wounded, battle-torn and bleeding, he could ignore everything. Elenya was right: he couldn’t save these men, but he could prevent a greater calamity by reclaiming the stolen books.

Someone caught his robe and he heard the word for ‘father’. He was calling for a priest: not a true priest of the Orthodox Church, the one true Church that had preserved God’s message inviolate and unchanging for ever. These people’s priests were full of strange doctrines and heretical practices that made his heart burn with indignation.

Two days ago he’d buried one as best he could. He couldn’t bring himself not to call the man Christian.

‘Father.’

Va looked down. The man was burned, hand and face. His left foot had gone. His eyes gazed up wetly from amongst the blackened ruin.

‘I’m not a priest,’ said Va.

The man didn’t understand Rus. But Elenya was there, kneeling beside him, whispering into his ear. He moved his head slightly to see her, this angel who had appeared and provided the gift of tongues.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said in Elenya’s voice, ‘you’re a man of God. Pray for me.’

‘I have God’s greater work to do. I have to go.’

He held on tighter to the hem of Va’s habit. ‘I’m frightened,’ he said.

Shamed, Va sank to ground, furiously wiping tears away with his coarse sleeves. He put his hand on the man’s forehead. ‘There’s no reason to be afraid. We’re soldiers. We go here and there as we’re ordered. You were obedient to your earthly lord because you’re obedient to your heavenly lord. Men betray you because they’re weak or foolish or arrogant and uncaring. God won’t let you down. Trust Him.’

Elenya spoke unfamiliar, hesitant words, then said to Va: ‘He’s dead. He’s gone.’

‘No,’ he gasped. He saw that it was true and tore at his habit. He leaped up, spun round and found the next man still living. He crossed himself, kissed the cross and started to pray for the man’s soul.

He was tapped on the shoulder. When it happened a second time, Va spat out: ‘What?’

A boy from An Cobh stood behind him. He was offering some strips of clean linen as bandages and a skin of water. He was ash-white and looked as if he was about to cry. Va recognized himself in that lost face.

‘Give them to me,’ he said, and gestured. The boy took fright at his foreignness, and it took comforting words from Elenya for him to relinquish his death-grip on the water.

The man on the ground had an iron barb in his thigh, another in his side. His skin was grey and felt clammy to the touch. When Va looked, he realized there was a vast pool of blood soaking into the ground underneath him.

He worked quickly, applying a tourniquet high up on the man’s leg, almost at the groin, and tightened it with one of the spikes that had dug into the turf nearby.

‘This man will die if we can’t get that arrow out and the hole sewn shut. Tell him,’ said Va to Elenya.

The boy looked from the monk to the woman, and ran off back into town.

‘I think he’s going to die anyway,’ she said. ‘But why did you change your mind?’

Va absent-mindedly smeared blood on his forehead. ‘I hate myself. I hate the compromises I make all the time. Life breeds sin, and I’m dirty with it.’

‘There, there. Just sometimes you forget yourself and do what’s right.’

Va sat back on his haunches. Up on the hill, a pitiful few had gathered together. In the valley, at the edges, robbers were at work, killing the wounded and stealing from the dead. Closer to the town, the King of Coirc’s men were moving across the fields, spreading out.

They were as appalled by the manner of their victory as Cormac’s men. Guiltily they picked up those they could save and carried them inside the stone walls.