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“Thank you, Captain. You mustn’t mind my men. They’re new to the river, and to ships.”
“Aye, well I’ll not pretend that I wouldn’t prefer to be shipping a hold full of grain instead of a bunch of seasick soldiers and screaming horses, but we must take what comes I suppose. There, we’re past the last of the river-batteries and the Royal naval yards.”
Corfe looked out towards the eastern bank. The shore—the river was big enough to warrant that name for its banks—was some to two cables away. The walls of Toru
“How far is it to the sea?” Corfe asked, peering aft over the taffrail. Behind the Seahorse the remainder of the expedition’s vessels were in line astern, the foam flying from their bows as they fought upstream against the current.
“Some five leagues,” Mirio told him. “In times of storm the Torrin is brackish here, and sometimes ships are blown clear up the estuary from the Kardian.”
“So close? I had no idea.” Corfe had always thought of Toru
T HE wind freshened through the day, and Mirio was able to report with visible satisfaction that they were making five knots. The capital had long disappeared, and the transports were moving through the heavily populated country which lay to its west. Farmers here reared cattle, planted crops and fished from the river in equal measure. But while the southern shore seemed prosperous and untouched by war, many houses and hamlets to the north were obviously deserted. Corfe saw livestock ru
The freighters always moored for the night, for the risk of ru
F OUR days went by. The Torrin arced in a curve until it began to flow almost directly north to south, and then it turned north-west towards its headwaters in the Thurian Mountains. They could see the Thurians on the northern horizon, still blanketed by snow. And to their left, or to larboard, the stern white peaks of the Cimbrics reared up, their heads lost in grey cloud. There were no more farms on the riverbank; this region had been sparsely settled even before the war. Now it seemed utterly deserted, a wilderness hemmed in by frowning mountains and bisected by the surging course of the young river.
The Torrin was barely two cables wide here, and occasionally during the fourth day they had felt the keel of the heavily laden freighter scrape on sunken sandbanks. In addition, the current had become stronger and they averaged barely two knots. On the morning of the fifth day Corfe finally decided to leave the ships behind, to the obvious relief of both soldiers and watermen, and the sixteen huge craft spent an anxious morning edging and nudging their way to the eastern bank before dropping every anchor they possessed in order to hold fast against the efforts of the river to shove them downstream.
What followed was a prolonged nightmare of mud and water and thrashing, cursing men and panicky animals. Each of the freighters possessed floating jetties which could be winched over the side to provide a fairly stable pathway to the shore, but they had not been designed for the offloading of two thousand horses and mules. The animals were hoisted out of the holds by tackles to the yardarms and set down wild-eyed and struggling upon the pitching jetties, with predictable results. By the time the last mule and man was ashore, and the army’s supplies were piled in long rows on dry land, it was far into the night. Two men had drowned and six horses had been lost, but Corfe counted himself lucky not to have lost more. The eastern bank was a sucking quagmire of mud and horse-shit for almost a mile, and the troops were hollow-eyed ghosts which staggered with weariness. But they were ashore and essentially intact, having covered over eighty leagues in five days.
T HE last of the horses had been settled down for the night and the army’s campfires were scattered about the dark earth like some poor counterfeit of the stars overhead. The ground was hard as stone here, a mile from the riverbank, which would make for easy marching, but the cold was difficult to keep at bay with a single blanket, even with one’s feet in the very embers of the fire. Strangely, Corfe felt less tyred than at any time since the King’s Battle, for all that he had snatched barely four hours’ sleep a night on the voyage upriver. It was the freedom of being out in the field with his own command. No more conferences or councils or scribbling scribes, just a host of exhausted, chilled men and animals encamped in the frozen wilds of the north.
The men had meshed together well. They had fought shoulder to shoulder in the King’s Battle, guzzled beer together in the taverns of Toru
Andruw picked his way through the fires towards him, then dug into his saddlebags. He handed his general a wooden flask.
“Have a snort, Corfe. It’ll keep the cold out. Compliments of Captain Mirio.”
Corfe unstoppered the neck and had a good swallow. The stuff seemed to burn his mouth, and blazed a fiery path all the way down his gullet. His eyes watered and he found himself gasping for air.
“I swear, Andruw, you’ll go blind one of these days.”
“Not me. I’ve the constitution of a horse.”
“And about as much sense. What about the powder?”
Andruw looked back across the camp. “We lost six barrels, and another eight are wet through. God knows when we’ll have a chance to dry them.”
“Damn. That eats into our reserves. Well, we’ve enough to fight a couple of good-sized engagements, but I want Ranafast’s men made aware that they can’t go firing it off like it’s free.”
“No problem.”
Two more figures came picking their way out of the flickering dark towards them. When they drew closer Corfe saw that it was the unlikely duo of Marsch and Formio. Formio looked as slight as an adolescent beside the bulk of the towering tribesman, his once dapper sable uniform now a harlequin chequer of mud. Marsch was clad in a greasy leather gambeson. He looked happier than he had for days.