Kearney, Paul - The Sea Beggars 02 - This Forsaken Earth by Kearney Paul

Author:Kearney, Paul [Kearney, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2006-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

The column made four leagues that day, slowed by the grinding progress of the baggage train. So pitted and frost-broken were the roads that a whole regiment of infantry had to be assigned to keeping the heavy-axled wagons on the move.

The Embrun River was on their right, hidden in a line of snow-clad trees scarcely a mile away. On their left the Myconians glowered, their peaks hidden in cloud. Still a hundred miles away, the mountains dominated the horizon all the same, like sullen titans brought to earth. Their lower slopes were tinted pink as the sun set in the west and kindled the gray waters of the Embrun into a glorious few minutes of molten light. Tentless and fireless—for campfires were forbidden this close to Gallitras—the men of the army rolled themselves in their blankets and lay in the snow as the sun died in a glowing bar of flame-limned cloud. As darkness fell the sky cleared, and above them the welkin blazed with frost-bright constellations, and shooting stars streaked in showers. Five thousand men lying silent in that starlit desolation, their weapons beside them under the blankets to keep them from the frost, the patient horses standing in hobbled lines with their heads drooping. The cold night air tightened the rims of the wagon-wheels so that the vehicles creaked and groaned like tired beasts all night long.

Gallico, Creed, and Giffon had found themselves a quiet hollow on the fringe of the camp, and huddled together there like a mother hen and her chicks. The halftroll was coughing: loud, savage barks that rent the quiet clarity of the night and set nearby horses to neighing.

“I heal slower in the cold,” he explained to Rol. “Damned air gets in the chest and lies there like a chilled knife.”

“Giffon?” Rol asked.

The boy’s face was pallid and blue-lipped. He spoke through shivers. “His wounds are closed already, but there’s an infection in the lung, or else the lung has cleaved to a rib as it healed. I’ve seen it before, only I’ve never seen the process work so quick.”

“I’ll be fine,” Gallico grated. He was breathing in harsh, shallow pants and his eyes glittered dangerously. “I’ve lived through worse.”

“Can anything be done?” Rol asked Giffon.

“He needs to be in the warm, and out of this snow.”

“Don’t we all,” Elias Creed muttered. The dark man’s beard was white with frost and he had a doubled blanket wrapped about his shoulders like a shawl. “It reminds me of nights in the damned stone-quarries, but at least there it warmed up during the day, and the ground under my arse was dry.”

Rol looked at him quickly. It was the most information Elias had ever volunteered about his years in Keutta.

“Canker says that we should reach the lines about Myconn in less than a fortnight. And tomorrow night we can light fires again.”

“What are you now, Canker’s errand-boy?” Gallico asked. When Rol glared at him, the halftroll smiled, two long fangs poking from his lower lip.

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