Page 14

ELO brEATHED IN THE SCENTS OF WAR.

They had been a week marching through the greening boughs and soft mud of early summer.

Across the fields, bright with crops, the aroma of bodies, animals, leather, oil, incense, meat, and bread followed them like a shroud.

They moved at pace, travelling as light as they dared, resting in great encampments through the night in whichever noble’s lands they passed through.

Elo had only Legs for companionship, steady and sure beneath him, amongst the whispers, the curious glances, some foul, some fair. Everywhere he went, soldiers seemed desperate to get a look at him, to prove to themselves that he was here.

‘Good lad,’ he whispered to Legs. Kissen was right, the horse was steady, carefully negotiating the press of numbers he must be unused to as a mercenary’s steed.

‘Fine hay for you tonight.’ The horse whinnied in response, as if to say he had withstood gods and a thousand leagues, this was nothing to him.

Even this small army Arren had mustered was a beast with many mouths, shifting and swelling as it gained hangers-on, bloating the mass beyond structure and discipline into contingents based on fealty or locality.

The king gathered banners from the great and lower Houses they passed, each adding a few to the melting pot.

The mood was tense, uncertain. The bursts of bravado and singing were short-lived, and quickly disintegrated into trudging chatter. With summer came big winds and heavy rainstorms, soaking them through before brightening suddenly with a sun that seared them all raw.

They were going to Gefyrton. That at least was common knowledge, now they had passed the southern canals and the river Arrenon and turned north.

The king’s greater army remained south, defending Daesmouth.

Though the news from there was grim. Arren was putting his faith in the leadership of the Yethers and Knight Commander Peta, that they would hold long enough for them to stop the invasion from the cold and treacherous peaks of the Bennites.

If they could keep the Talicians on the east side of the river Daes, they might survive this war long enough to work out how to beat their god.

Gefyrton was key. It was the largest crossing point over the river, connecting the rugged crofting slopes of the western Bennites to the rich farmlands in the central basin, where the Talicians would no longer need whatever supplies they had managed to maintain.

Whoever controlled the belly of Middren would control the war.

They could not lose this fight.

‘Lion of Lesscia—’

‘—joined the rebels.’

‘He killed Lord Yether.’

Elo turned to stare at a cluster nearby who had their heads bent together in gossip.

His look silenced them, and they scattered, muttering about grinding their wheat for the evening’s bread.

This night, the eighth since leaving Sakre, the army’s encampment had sprawled into the shadows beneath one of the fortresses Arren had renovated to protect the merchants on the trade roads.

Most of the nobility stayed within the stone walls, while the army set up tents in whichever fallow fields were outside.

Wheat, milk and broths were supplied from makeshift tents raised around the carrying ponies, to supplement what the soldiers carried, foraged and made themselves.

No one went hungry, yet, but fights often broke out amongst the common recruits as they squabbled for the largest bags.

Only hope and fear held this rabble together.

Elo could feel it. When recruiting for Blenraden he had bards and brazen promises, as well as powerful gods and foreign allies on their side.

No god would help them now, not if they sacrificed a thousand horses.

Even if they might be bought, there were no great gods in Middren any more.

So, Elo stayed on watch, wearing the general’s sash delivered to him by one of Arren’s runners. They had come also with invitations, to join the war council, to sleep in the fortresses rather than on the ground. By the fifth day they had ceased coming.

‘Ser Elogast?’

Elo turned in the saddle, and Legs let out a small huff of complaint. He was ready to be de-clad of his gear and brushed free of the road’s muck. Generals’ horses received good treatment, and Legs was among the best-liked in the stable, if not the most impressive.

‘Sorry, friend, soon,’ said Elo, patting the horse’s neck and looking for who had spoken.

So few addressed him directly; Elo made his own meals, slept alone in a narrow tent Legs carried and he erected himself.

It felt strange, amid the familiarity of an army, the creeping nostalgia of a Middrenite war, to be in such solitude of his own making.

And the person who had spoken was the last man Elo would have expected to break it.

‘Ben,’ said Elo, surprised, then remembered himself. ‘Captain Benjen.’

His old squire was holding a bowl of yellowy dough, and was leaning towards one leg.

The one Elo had not injured when they fought in Blenraden.

The relief Elo felt at seeing him well was quickly dampened.

Like Elo, he had Irisian and Usican heritage, and no blood ties to Middrenite nobility.

They had been close, once. He had shown enough promise for Elo to squire him rather than keep him a common soldier, and in return Benjen had loyally watched his back throughout the worst terrors of the gods.

But last they had met they had tried to kill each other.

‘I heard you were back,’ said Benjen stiffly. He stood in captain’s colours as if he had been born in them. Despite the coldness of his greeting, and the pain of their last parting, Elo couldn’t help a little burst of pride.

‘I have no love of the Talician fire god,’ said Elo.

Benjen glanced towards Elo’s chest, but the lapis-studded lion of his breastplate hid the hand-shaped scar that had been fresh burned when they fought. The captain’s jaw worked, and Elo waited for an insult, a curse, a challenge.

But then Benjen sighed. ‘That’s a rangy looking horse for a general,’ he commented.

Elo raised his eyebrows and rubbed Legs’s nose, and received a cross nudge in return. The horse was as impatient as Kissen. ‘His name is Legs,’ said Elo.

‘“Legs”?’

‘It’s a long story.’

Silence stretched between them, heavy with things unsaid. Then, at last, ‘You look hungry. Have you eaten?’

Elo felt his throat tighten. That was something their Irisian mothers would say. Something they would greet each other with when they survived a battle. A glimmer of an old life where they had shared heritage, shared food, shared beliefs.

‘Not yet,’ he admitted.

‘You can join us.’

The camp was a constellation of cooking fires, flickering as the sky grew dark and groups clustered around them in the orange light, chattering over simmering pots. A hazy veil of smoke hung low against the slopes, cast into the air by too-damp wood.

Singing bubbled out of the dark, soft and unsure of itself, but growing louder as they reached areas where folk had already eaten and begun to drink, or were wandering from fire to fire looking for people to gossip or bed with.

One song, Elo recognised as popular from Blenraden, sung by an older group of veterans who lounged beneath a bower of trees.

‘ I love the tips of the tits

of the Usic god of wine

And I’d make grog of all her grapes

If she’d offer to be mine

And I love the balls of the god of squalls

With his asses to the wind

And should he fall into my stall

I’d quiver to kiss his rim. ’

Elo followed Benjen, having left Legs with a girl to feed, brush and stable him.

Someone spotted the two of them passing by, a general and a captain, and punched one of the singers.

They all fell quiet, though not quiet enough to suppress their giggles and the splutter of one woman who had choked on her pipe.

Elo smiled. Gods were not so serious once, beings of foolishness and vanity, as well as gifts and divine rage.

‘Don’t encourage them,’ said Benjen quietly. He walked with a significant limp, though he mentioned nothing about it, and refused Elo’s help with the things he was carrying. ‘If a different general caught them they’d be shovelling shit.’

He wasn’t wrong. And there was something in his tone, a heavy weight of meaning that he had yet to speak.

This, Elo thought, was probably a mistake.

Benjen’s camp was up a slope. As they arrived, the scent of groundnuts was an earthy welcome, that and some kind of lean, smoky meat stew.

‘Where the fuck have you been, Benj?’ said a tall woman with short-cropped blonde hair, seeing them first.

‘A fine welcome, Elseber,’ said Benjen wryly. ‘I lent Commander Safidah the oil we needed for the mtabga.’

Mtabga. That explained the interesting consistency of Benjen’s prepared flour: a west Irisian bread stuffed with meats and spices, even older in style than Elo’s favoured nameen.

‘Has old Safi moved to Fellic-Farne?’ said Elseber. ‘Who’s your friend …’ She tapered off, either recognising Elo, his blue-lion armour, or his general’s sash. With her silence, the others around the fire turned to see what had quieted her.

‘This is General Elogast,’ said Benjen.

‘Don’t! Per—’ At Elo’s name, a man sitting between the legs of another at the fire, having his hair braided, whipped around. He was now wincing, his braid kinked.

‘Lotta, Perin, you remember Elo,’ said Benjen, sitting down with a half-apologetic nod.

Elo swallowed. He had been at Lotta and Perin’s wedding. Others in the group, Elo realised, he had known from the God War.

Definitely a mistake.