Firethorn by Sarah Micklem

Author:Sarah Micklem
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2004-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

Honor

ivine Xyster was true to his word, sending Sire Galan home to his tent on the morrow. Those who’d wagered on Sire Galan dying paid up and made new wagers on whether he’d go home or go to war. A few fools bet that the Crux would relent and let him ride. A race was on between Sire Galan’s mending and the war beginning.

The king’s men had finished cutting their road to the sea, leaving a wide white scar behind them, paved with chalky rubble. The sledgehammers were silent. But down by the boatworks, the thump of caulkers pounding tow between the cracks with heavy mallets echoed off the cliffs; the armories in the market sent up a thudding, ringing, clanging, tapping, rasping, hissing din from the various hammers, large and small, and from the files, chisels, bellows, and hot metal doused in cold water. All that would go on until we departed, and after; such work was never finished.

Why, then, did the king dally in the Marchfield with winter coming on? At night our breath clouded the air and some mornings there was a rime of frost on the gorse bushes. It was not the cold alone that people feared, but the damp that came with it; those two companions roamed the encampment, spreading ague and other ills, making mischief. From our own tents a two-day fever called the burning carried off Sire Limen and left the Crux with the unlucky number of sixteen cataphracts; it also took Sire Erial’s jack, Ware, and five foot soldiers. One of them was Dag, from my village. The carnifex bled the sick in the tents and dosed them with some kind of fever-soothe, and left the foot soldiers to fend as best they could. They said Divine Xyster could tell a man was likely to die by the color of his blood, for it would be nearer black than red. Most who got the burning recovered from it as swiftly as it had come, whether Divine Xyster bled them or not. As for the others, the soldiers shrugged and said Chance wanted their bones for dice.

But restlessness too was catching. “Sow out of time and reap a poor harvest,” the drudges said, meaning war had its seasons and winter was not one of them. The longer King Thyrse waited, the more we’d suffer for it, food and fodder and shelter all harder to come by. The rumormongers claimed he had a reason for delay, but no two agreed on what it might be, or when we might leave. The Crux, who spent hours closeted with the king, said nothing, and time proved rumors to be lies.

Once I asked Mai why the king tarried. She shrugged and told me I must learn to love the waiting. She said it was a soldier’s lot to wait and wait and never know why, and the rest was dust and mud and a hard slog followed by a sudden sharp poke in the eye, and if a man lived through that, there’d be more of the same.

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