The War, page 37
Captain Murray shrugged loose and looked at him with surprise and scarcely veiled disgust, but Captain Rhodes dropped his arm and merely looked at the older, taller man.
“You hate me.”
Captain Murray’s grim brows raised in wonderment. “What have you ever done that I should love you?”
The younger man looked at him blankly, in silenced helplessness, and the conversation seemed like to end there, an empty wall rearing up higher and higher between them while neither spoke.
“You sneered at my speech and my past,” said Captain Murray harshly and with such suddenness that Captain Rhodes started. “You saw me as uncouth—you all but said it. And the general favors you above me, aye, he always has. You, the spoiled, mewlish weakling, have his trust and goodwill. But I suppose that a spoiled child is better than a traitor. That is what you called me, do you forget it? And if you have not forgotten, then it is not a wonder that the general still thinks it of me, too. And you—you speak of my hatred as if it were astonishing?”
“Dunstan Murray,” said Captain Rhodes hoarsely, “do not speak those words to my remembrance. A traitor, I called you, yes, a traitorous wretch. It is true; I do not forget it. And in that moment I did hate you, too, for I believed it. But not now! I have rued it years, and if you can, I beg you to forgive me for it. It was the lies that led me to believe such evil—yet nay, I admit there was already jealousy in my heart for you that lent my ear to Captain Rhinehart’s tales.”
“Captain Rhinehart,” Murray muttered. He stared distantly over Captain Rhodes’ shoulder as if he had not heard.
“I am ashamed to have thought that you would ever take part in Rhinehart’s treachery. But heed me, Captain Murray, you speak riddling words. Do not attribute my unkind thoughts to the general! He could not believe such things of you, he never has. And not always does he place me in precedence over you; what of the dragon battle? Captain Murray, he values your cool head, your strategic abilities, your composure in danger and battle. Would he so readily place one in command whom he did not trust?”
“You speak strangely, as though you would indeed encourage me,” said Captain Murray, now staring directly at him. “What has come over you, that you speak thus?”
Captain Rhodes bent his head, and he spoke falteringly, feeling his way through the words. “I have come to know a young man—Mordred Kenhelm is his name. He is valiant-hearted, full of compassion, and dear to me, even as a brother. Yet there is anger, deep-struck, deadly anger between him and another man. It grieves me to see the bitterness gnawing at him, and I would that he did not become even as we are, with bitterness of years between us and not merely months. I counseled him to put his grievance aside.
“But he was angered with me, and rightly so. For how can I counsel a man to make peace, when I have not made peace myself? Therefore . . . I will no longer uphold my end of our hatred, Captain Murray, and I will not seek to be a rival to you or scorn you for what I perceived as lack. And I beg your forgiveness again for all the wrongs that I did you in the past; I confess that all you said of me is true, and well do you despise me. I will not wonder if—if you still despise me.”
“Mordred Kenhelm,” said Captain Murray slowly. “That name is known to me as a young man who gave me smiles such as scarce a man has given me save for the general. It is because of him that you did this?”
Captain Rhodes nodded.
“It is in my mind that I owe him much,” said Captain Murray.
Captain Rhodes looked still at the ground.
“Lift up your head, you foolish child,” said Captain Murray, and yet there was a rough kindness in his tone, strained from disuse. “I know deceit and falsehood, and they are not in your face. Am I such a beast that you think I will disregard your confession and sorrow as naught?”
Captain Rhodes lifted his head. “I must beg your forgiveness again, for I was indeed unsure of your answer. And . . . I thank you that you have answered as you did. For though you may not believe it, I have longed for your approval and often sought it. If you had turned your back on me now after I bared my confession, that would have been a sore wound.”
Captain Murray looked at him with ever-increasing wonder and shook his head. “I have learned more of you in these few moments than in the ten years I knew you before. You yearned for my good favor? A small way you had of showing it.”
“I yearned for it more than any other’s, if only because I could not have it,” answered Captain Rhodes with a certain weariness. “But no, I could never express it openly. What strange, tangled creatures we are.”
“I pardon you fully for your fear that I would despise you,” said Captain Murray gruffly. “It was well-founded. I fear that I often was the very boor you believed me to be. And my silent hatred and cold words to you were themselves cruel; if you, being true-hearted enough to confess your own wrongs to me, can also forgive me mine, I beg that you would do so.”
“I forgive them willingly,” said Captain Rhodes, and tears were in his eyes. Yet he smiled. “Nor will I lift them up again. They are forgotten between us.”
“As are yours, Finley Rhodes,” said Captain Murray with a stern, true weight in his words. His face was grim as he said it, but the care and lines upon it seemed less than they ever had. “Listen, when you first poured out your heart, it seemed to me that you were offering me more than confession; you were offering me friendship, I who have no friend, save perhaps the general. Nay, I will not claim even that; I am too hard for him.”
“The general loves every soul of Orden,” exclaimed Captain Rhodes firmly, “and do you think to make yourself an exception? No man is too hard for his love. But as for me, you were not wrong. I will gladly be your friend, Dunstan Murray. I have been your unwilling enemy too long.”
Captain Murray was very silent, but his jaw clenched sporadically as though he were repressing some great emotion.
“Captain Rhinehart called himself my friend,” he said at last as one recalling an old and evil memory. “And I regarded him as such. I had no reason to doubt him. And for that, I was called his consort and ally in the day of his betrayal.” He breathed in with a thick sound. “When he seized the power, he did not turn on me or seek to imprison me; I think he believed that because of my earlier trust in him I would not oppose him, and perhaps he thought to persuade me easily if he had lasted longer on the throne than he did. He called himself my friend,” he repeated with a strange, tired incredulity.
Captain Rhodes listened silently. He understood, with a quiet sureness, that Captain Murray was recounting this not to cast doubt on the friendship offered him, but to unburden a dark hurt. That he told it at all was, indeed, a gesture of trust. “So it was all a lie? Even his leniency in the time of his betrayal?”
“He craved only power,” said Captain Murray bitterly. “He was mad for it. When I confronted him about the lies to my name, after he had been imprisoned, he laughed at me and cursed me to his own fate. I almost laid hands on him and slew him in that moment.”
He cut himself short. “It is not good to think on, or speak of. There are better things before us.”
Captain Rhodes nodded. “Someone comes,” he said, lifting his head toward the sound of footsteps. The general appeared out of the intersecting corridor beyond them.
He halted, and his dark eyes swept them both. “Captain Murray,” he said, inclining his head toward the older man. “You are wanted.”
“My general,” said Captain Murray, coming forward, and they disappeared together down the hall.
~
“Here she comes again!” The young soldier on the floor laughed, but not rudely. One side of his face was wrapped in bandages; his cheek had been slashed open and he had lost the sight in that eye. “You are on time, as always, fira luithra; but he has been waiting for your coming.”
Fiona sent a smile his way and continued to the bed. Lady of Mercy, they called her, all throughout the hospice now. “Why?” she had asked Fred, touched and humbled. “I only do what is asked of me; nothing great, nothing extraordinary that they should give me such a tender name.”
Fred looked on her with his most intensely loving look, and said, “Indeed, why would they not?” as though that were an answer in itself.
Each day he grew better, and even if it were by the most infinitesimal of measures Fiona saw it and marked it with ever-rising joy. Though he still spoke slowly, the words no longer came with effort and long pauses. When she sat at his side, his hand would tighten in a rhythmic way on hers; and at times he reached up to touch her face with his gentle gesture. Yesterday, seventeen days since the battle and his wounding, he had raised himself up to sit on his own. He did not remember the battle, nor what had happened to him. Neither of them expected he ever would.
Here, strangely, to Fiona the war seemed both very near and quite far away. Near, for she tended its casualties every day, and every day there were more. Far away, for she had her betrothed near to her and it would be a long time before the war approached to take him away again. She even told herself that the war might end first, and she was willing to believe it.
~
Jedediah Crayes perched on the edge of the wide-open window, swinging his legs. “How mends the little fool today?”
He saw the perturbed look that the boy’s spitfire sister flung him, and grinned in satisfaction.
The boy himself looked better than he had—better in certain ways, at least. Jedediah Crayes did not like the oddly haunted, defensive look in his eyes and the apathetic way he smiled in answer to the question.
“Talk to me,” he growled, standing up and bracing his arms against the frame of the window.
“I’m—” Mordred broke off, the defensive look growing stronger as he eyed Jedediah Crayes.
“That’s right,” said Jedediah Crayes. “I’m not going to take ‘fine’ for an answer. Very good. What are you tearing yourself up over?”
“I won’t tell you,” said Mordred with a stiffness that made Jedediah Crayes’ brows snap together and an odd sense of hurt tug at his heart.
“Mordred,” said his sister with tired sternness, placing her hand on his shoulder.
He flinched away. “Don’t touch me.”
Jedediah Crayes released a loud grunt of exasperation. “Talk to me. Is it the werevulture business? Is it the leader? Is it bed rest?”
Laufeia’s eyes met his, startled. She came across to him in a flash and stretched up to whisper in his ear. “You know about the werevulture?”
“I know everything,” retorted Jedediah Crayes, and repented with a sigh. After all, the woman was being serious. “Yes, I know; he told me.”
“Then you know about the Inspector.”
Jedediah Crayes’ brow arched. “Indeed. Is he what’s causing trouble?”
“He is here, helping the surgeons, like I am.” She put her face in her hands in a gesture of weariness. “I managed to keep them apart, but it does not seem to make a difference in him.”
“Little fool,” Jedediah Crayes muttered. “If I can’t cheer his mood, then who’s going to do it?”
The door opened and Jedediah Crayes edged uncomfortably away from Laufeia, aware of the concerned and affectionate nature of his tone, face, and posture.
But it was only a thin boy whose dark forelock of hair was stuck to his face with the sweat of his hurry there. “Mordred,” he said, soft voice anxious as he came into the room, and he did not pay the slightest mind to the other two.
Mordred sat up, a glint of life coming into his face. “Fenris.”
Laufeia took Jedediah Crayes’ arm and jerked him towards the door. Jedediah Crayes, taken aback, shook her loose. “What do you want?” he hissed.
“We’re going to leave them alone,” said Laufeia firmly. “That is what he needs.”
Jedediah Crayes scowled and thought of arguing. Instead, he yielded and let the slight girl drag him out of the room with a grip that felt like an iron cuff about his wrist. He shut the door and leaned against it with a resigned sigh. After all, she was probably right.
He sighed again. Monitoring someone’s problems, and trying to fix them, required an astonishing drain on mental resources.
It seemed slightly unfair that behind the door that stripling one-third of his age was probably bending everything into shape without even breaking a sweat.
~
Papers fluttered under the hard, sure fingers as the words rang out. “Nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two. That is all?”
“All.” The man shifted wearily, but the Paraki never sat, and certainly no-one would sit while in the Paraki’s standing presence. There had been a respite from that while he was gone, over a fortnight it had been, laid low in the healing tents with his leg sliced open and a head wound, but now he was back.
“And the statistics in the north?” demanded Cern Dersturi. The messenger handed him a second sheaf of papers.
When they first brought him back unconscious, there had been near panic in the army, for they feared his death. But he had recovered fully, though his officers marked at this time or that a strange wandering light, or dullness as it were, in his eyes.
“The advancements have been slow in my absence,” observed Cern Dersturi now. “Are all my captains blind beggars, that I must lead them by the hand to show them how war is done?” He turned aside and kicked a chair. “Am I to return at last to the king of Runnicor with empty hands and a depleted army? Will he be pleased that his choicest general has failed him?”
He flung the papers aside onto his writing table, settling them into a squared stack. “And what of the spies? Has the latest infiltration succeeded?”
The messenger smiled suddenly. He stepped forward and uttered several sentences low in Cern Dersturi’s ear.
The leader’s eyes grew narrow and bright. He held still, his head tilted to the side as though still receiving the tidings; but his hand stirred at his side and closed with a dark precision upon the hilt of his sword. “At last,” he murmured, anticipation quivering his nostrils and burning on the edges of his tone, “we have an opening.”
CHAPTER 36
MID-JULY SUN POURED INTO the tent. A map was spread out on the long, inlaid table; a long, blunt forefinger was resting on the western edge of the Elerien Mountains.
Cern Dersturi traced a swift line across the parchment south, and through the West Gate until his finger halted forcefully upon the black circle of Orden City.
“It is time to break them. The reports from the north are fair, but they are not gaining ground quickly enough. We have dawdled long in the west, pressing here, testing there; at last, we shall turn the tide in our favor and join forces with them here.” The finger tapped the parchment on the Zarethir River near to Grinaz Hall.
“Lieutenant Dovurti Atta?”
“Paraki,” said the leader’s close confidante.
“The Western Gate of Orden will be open tonight at the setting of the sun. There is a man who will see to that. Storm it, spare no-one. Let no word be carried on, for you will march on to Orden City with three thousands, and take them by surprise. Orden will fear us before the night is past.”
“Aye, Paraki.”
“The rest of you lieutenants, you are under him. Cir Harrik, take a thousand cavalry archers and lead them around the city secretly—so—and come at them from the east; open fire without mercy, and let none escape. They will be caught in the pincer jaws of a trap.”
“Aye, Paraki,” answered the lieutenant.
Cern Dersturi sent a sweeping glance around the tent, holding one by one the eyes of every man.
“Enter the city. Overrun it. Pillage and burn.”
~
Fenris stood before the open window. A thick blue twilight was gathering in the eastern sky, but over Orden City the lingering sun cast a dusky, pinkish haze shot with rays of gold. “It is so beautiful,” he whispered.
He looked to Mordred. “Is it time your bandages were changed?”
Mordred nodded.
“I will go find someone,” said Fenris. He left the room.
But Mordred stared at the window after he was gone, his eyes riveted by the rosy scape, so beautiful, so quiet—so very quiet . . .
“It is like the quiet before a storm,” he murmured.
Then he shook his head. The sky was clear; there would be no storms tonight.
The shuffling of footsteps came to his ear, and grew louder, and the door swung wide as someone entered. But it was not Priscilla. It was not any surgeon at all.
“What are you doing here?” hissed Mordred, voice low and throbbing with anger. His storm of fury beat inside him like the wings of a panicked bird, to and fro, back and forth, not knowing what to do with itself. His ribs began to hurt with the strain of his quick, labored breathing. “What are you doing here?”
“Everyone else is busy,” said Inspector Dickson coolly.
“You could have waited,” Mordred spat.
Inspector Dickson ignored him and strode to the bed with indifferent exterior and twitching jaw to loose Mordred’s shirt and unwind the bandage on his arm.
“Where is Fenris?” demanded Mordred harshly, contriving to make it sound as if Inspector Dickson were responsible in some malicious way for his brother’s absence.
Inspector Dickson’s hands stiffened and he glared at Mordred. “I would not know. Maybe he went back to the army. His leave cannot last forever.”
Mordred laughed in derision. “He has till tomorrow. He will not depart until he has to.” But his heart misgave his scornful words, and he wondered if Fenris had thought it better to go back that night after all. Well, that was all right—he did not want Fenris to come in here, anyway, and see them.
The ugly silence dragged out as he waited for Inspector Dickson to finish, refusing to assist him by the slightest movement. “Incompetent,” he flung at him, relishing the momentary discomfiture the insult brought.
“Lazy,” Inspector Dickson gritted, struggling to fit Mordred’s rigid arm back into the sleeve.
