Come Armageddon Read online

  They walked in the forest by day, Almerid grinning as they stood alone under trees that towered to a leaden sky, the men’s feet silent on fallen needles centuries deep.

  “Gets cold,” Almerid said on the first day, looking around, knowing Sardriel had lost all sense of direction, as he had intended him to. “The bears sleep in the winter, but the wolves don’t.”

  “Then I imagine you don’t either,” Sardriel replied wryly. As long as no bargain was made he was safe and they both knew it, but Almerid was enjoying himself. Every added skill, everything for which Sardriel was dependent upon him could be an extra expense.

  “Only with one eye closed!” Almerid acknowledged. He walked over to a small, scruffy-looking sapling and picked a handful of dark berries. He stuffed them into his mouth, then picked more and offered them to Sardriel. It was a tacit way of pointing out that he knew what was edible, and Sardriel did not. The berries were surprisingly sweet.

  In the evenings the hall was filled with laughter and the sounds of eating and drinking. Cider flowed freely and was extremely powerful, as Sardriel learned to his cost the first morning. He felt as if the horns and drums of the previous night were still sounding in his head.

  Almerid was immensely amused, but he quickly realised he could not pull such a trick twice. He showed a good-natured contempt for a man who could not hold his ale, but Sardriel was thereafter abstemious and his host did not refer to the subject again.

  He tried offering Sardriel one of the best-looking women, but smartly withdrew the offer when he saw the anticipation of pleasure in the woman’s eyes, and this time left Sardriel the laughter, even if it was silent, and well concealed.

  In the end they reached an agreement in which both were satisfied. A messenger was sent with a letter bearing Sardriel’s seal in order that the first two-thirds of the treasure might be brought. The final third awaited their successful return.

  It took seventeen days for the army to assemble, so huge a force was it. Of course the mercenaries’ reward was not only the huge treasure Sardriel had brought from Tyrn Vawr, but also all the booty they could take from the barbarian they conquered in the course of war.

  Sardriel watched with growing awe as the bands of soldiers arrived, although he hid it behind an impassive face. Some came only a dozen at a time, others nearly fifty strong, but all were weather-burned, though by sun, wind or ice he could not tell. And all wore armour slashed by sword, pitted by arrows and spears, and stained by long-shed blood. They were every kind and colouring of man: yellow-haired, black-haired, bearded and clean-shaven, short and tall, lean and heavy. But all had in common a curious, confident way of moving, a slight roll to the step, and a wariness, as if forever ready to attack the instant of threat.

  They asked neither food nor shelter, only the terms of payment. They did not even seem greatly concerned as to who the enemy might be, nor where they would have to travel to find him. War was their trade, and if the price was right all else was only the ordinary risks and chances of life. Sardriel never heard the justice of the cause questioned. Either it was assumed, or they did not care.

  On the eighteenth day just short of fifty thousand armed men, with horses and wagons of supplies, moved out on the long trek east. They went five hundred at a time, and it took them until the twentieth day before the final battalion entered into the forest, walking upright, swords at their sides, broad-bladed knives at their waists, helmets and armour glistening in the last of the sun.

  Sardriel felt a moment’s awe, wondering what force he had unleashed. How would its skill and precision decimate the primitive barbarian and change the balance of the world? And when the barbarian was crushed, perhaps even destroyed, what would Asmodeus do next?

  Then another more corroding thought entered his mind. If they exterminated the barbarians as a race, was that perhaps a sin great enough to have played into Asmodeus’ hands? Could it be his purpose to lure them into such an act, barbarous of soul, using their higher civilisation to meet a threat with infinitely greater force than was necessary to protect themselves, and thus commit a greater evil?

  But it was far too late to prevent it now, or even to curb it. Sardriel could do nothing but set out with the rearguard and begin the long march eastwards, hoping his own strength and endurance would equal theirs and his battle skills match those of the barbarians.

  For nearly sixty days they marched relentlessly from shortly after dawn until just before nightfall. The forest did not change character: mile after mile it stretched in perpetual, whispering green shadows, centuries of fallen needles making the floor silent even to the footfall of tens of thousands of men weaving their way through its density.

  Sardriel walked beside Almerid or close behind him, learning from his skills at survival. He, like the men, knew where to find the roots and berries to eat and could trap small or large animals and use every portion of them.

  They spoke little, travelling widespread across twenty miles or more, so as to be able to forage over a greater terrain. They went single file because of the closeness of the trees, and saved their strength.

  But sometimes over the low campfires at night, sufficient only to cook their meat, baked rather than roasted in the open, Almerid allowed his curiosity to surface.

  “What does the King of the Island at the Edge of the World owe to the Irria-Kanders that he spends his Treasury to defend them?” he said, picking at the last of a rib-bone and throwing it away over his shoulder. It landed soundlessly on the needles behind him. “You don’t trade with them. There are no roads through this forest, and no sea lanes around it.”

  “We owe nothing to the Irria-Kanders,” Sardriel admitted. “But their enemies are our enemies, and are moving west as never before.”

  Almerid raised scarred eyebrows, giving his face an exaggerated quizzical look in the under-lit glow of the embers. “Leave it alone, and we might beat them for you,” he said sceptically. “Then you could keep your treasure! Not that I’m not happy to have it, of course!”

  Sardriel leaned back, relaxing in the warmth. He was learning to become accustomed to roots. He tried not to remember fish and crusty bread, and apples. “Of course!” he agreed with a smile, although he still saw doubt in Almerid’s eyes. He was not sure how much he should trust him, or even how much he would understand, but it was not in him to prevaricate. “When barbarism threatens to overtake the world, where do you stand against it? When it has conquered everything else and reaches your own door?”

  Sudden appreciation flared in Almerid’s dark eyes. For a moment he sat perfectly still, looking back at Sardriel.

  “Too late,” he said succinctly. It might have been a military answer rather than a moral one, but he perceived the crux of it. Then he grinned. “On the other hand, Irria-Kand is a little early, don’t you think? All the plains could fall, the barbarians aren’t likely to come through the forest to find Caeva, let alone the Island. They’ve never seen the sea, still less sailed on it!”

  “How long would it take them to learn?” Sardriel asked, more for the argument than because it mattered. He wanted Almerid’s respect; he did not seek or expect his understanding. He would not tell him of the dark Lords who walked the earth and stirred the armies of destruction for the final war, and that at the head of the barbarian hordes they might find not an untutored man of the wilderness, but a creature loosed from hell.

  Almerid shrugged. “It won’t happen,” he said with confidence. “We’ll stop them where they are now.” He spoke quite casually and stood up to find his place for the night. As far as he was concerned there was no more to say.

  Finally they emerged quite suddenly into open land. They stood blinking after the perpetual gloom of the forest. Sardriel shielded his eyes and stared ahead at the wind-scarred plains rising to sheer escarpments, outcrops of rocks and high, barrier ridges. The sharpest of them were already dusted with snow, and the wind smelled cold and clean, utterly different from the rich, pungent scent of the trees.


  He glanced at Almerid beside him and saw amazement widen his eyes. There was no sign that human traffic had ever passed this way, let alone settled and built anything or cultivated the land.

  Then the moment after, he started to order the men into companies and battalions, and began to march forward in disciplined order. Scathingly he silenced their grumbling. They were paid whatever the outcome, but they wanted booty as well. They fought for the love of battle, the testing of strength and skill. There was no satisfaction in a march like this if there were no meeting with the enemy in the end, no victory. Where was the excitement, the achievement? What was there to boast of afterwards?

  But no one defied Almerid, and they continued forward, ill-temper concealed for the moment.

  One of the most extraordinary sights greeted them as they breasted the rise of a long slope which must at its crest have been three or four hundred feet high. They stood gazing ahead, relief at the respite obliterated by the hundred thousand beasts that darkened the plain ahead of them.

  Almerid let out his breath in a long, wordless sigh. Nothing in his life had prepared him for such a thing and Sardriel saw the wonder in his eyes. It was endless food, it was also a force of nature that could destroy them if it stampeded. There was nowhere to hide, no possibility of outrunning them. Calculation raced through Almerid’s mind, reflected in his face, the concentration, the tightening of his mouth, the steady, slow breathing in spite of the climb.

  Sardriel stared also. The beasts, a form of wild cattle, stretched as far as he could see. They cropped the grass and must keep moving to find more.

  “We’ll cut out a few,” Almerid said at last. “We’ll have to plan well. They look swift.”

  Then he turned and began to give orders, strict, careful. If the herd were to turn on the mercenaries and move the wrong way half the army could be trampled to death in an hour.

  The cull was achieved in a few, excellent manoeuvres, and the soldiers all ate to their fill that night, and saved for days to come, smoking the meat to carry with them. Only a dozen men were hurt, and they not badly.

  Almerid grinned at Sardriel. “Perhaps you are right to stop the barbarian here! This place has promise!”

  After a further five days the soldiers spread out, one or two thousand to a group, and continued to advance across the land. They passed several highly fortified encampments and a couple of walled towns, still occupied by Irria-Kanders, but there was still no sight of the enemy.

  Then on the tenth day out of the forest, just before dawn, the barbarians struck. It was as if they had been watching, and caught the mercenaries at their most vulnerable. Naturally a watch had been posted, but since they had seen no sign of barbarians, they had sunk into a sense of invincibility, and they stood at the posts, rather than send out any scouts to watch and warn.

  It was still dark. Sardriel was jerked wide awake by a roar of anger and amazement, then another and another. The screaming started, and the clash of steel on leather and the whistle and thud of arrows.

  He snatched his sword and scrambled to his feet. All around him men were struggling to find shields and helmets; breastplates were too cumbersome to put on when the fighting was already under way on every side and the darkness was full of cries and groans.

  Every step lurched into someone else lashing out blindly, or tripped over a fallen body. There was dangerous, terrible chaos. Arrows came out of the night, invisible until they struck with searing pain, and often death. There was no enemy to see, none within reach to strike back at.

  When dawn spread glaring white across the northeast sky and lit the rolling grass, there were over four hundred men dead or wounded and nothing to see of the barbarians but the churned hoof-prints of their horses.

  Almerid was consumed in a black rage of hatred and self-contempt. He retreated within himself, speaking to no one but the lieutenants of the two thousand in his own division. Messengers were sent with terse words of warning to left and right of them.

  Sardriel offered no comfort. Death was too bitter to be softened with speech, especially when it could contain no truth.

  Almerid met his eyes just once, and that was to make clear he had understood the lesson, and that it would never happen again. Then he turned on his heel, and walked with his easy, slightly swaggering gait, and started to snarl orders to his men.

  They buried their dead and treated their wounded as well as they could, but there was little hope for the survival of most of them. They were more than a thousand miles from home and this was a harsh land, with winter coming. Suddenly war was very real. Pain and possibly death lay in the future for many of those who now gathered their armour and their packs and began again to march forward. Sardriel understood what courage they needed, and how dearly they earned the treasure he had paid them.

  The next skirmish was different. The mercenaries were not caught off guard, and when it was over there were barbarians dead and wounded on the ground as well as their own men. Shields were pitted by arrow points, but far less flesh was pierced. The barbarians had had to ride closer in to stab with swords and spears, which weapons they were less skilled with than the mercenaries. To add to the success, over a score of horses were taken, and they proved priceless for moving the wounded. In future every time they could take a horse they would do so.

  The barbarian dead and wounded were left for their own people to bury or treat as they would, and the mercenaries moved on.

  They passed more vast herds of beasts, but none quite as staggering to the mind as that first one. They also stumbled on the remains of refugee camps of Irria-Kanders fleeing westwards from cities the barbarians had raided. They must have been dead for days. Their bones were picked clean by the wild dogs that hunted in packs, and the carrion birds had taken what was left.

  Sardriel was sickened by it. Almerid said nothing, but there was a tightening in his body and his hand was never far from his sword hilt. They marched in close order, and there were always scouts before, behind, and on both flanks.

  More skirmishes followed through the weeks as they moved eastwards, of generally increasing success, although there were occasional sharp, ugly failures as well. The weather grew harsher. Savage winds drove across the open land from the north and east, razor-edged, bruising the unprotected skin with freezing pellets. Hail rattled on the shields and fell, coating the ground with white. The grass was withered by it and pools of water were shaded with thin, solid films of ice. The sun rose late, obscured by palls of grey cloud, arched low to the south, and set early in scarlet as if the land below the horizon were on fire.

  Never once did Almerid complain, even as the wind raked the uplands, scouring the land bare, and snow piled murderously deep in the valleys, drowning, suffocating, so neither man nor beast could make their way through.

  For a while the barbarians left their invaders for nature to kill the weak. But the mercenaries were forged of grim metal, and their own forests of the north had taught them to adapt and survive.

  They pressed forward, and the barbarians retreated before them. By mid-winter they were deep in Irria-Kand, and the days had already begun to lengthen again when they fought their first major pitched battle. It was savage and bloody, and afterwards they laid siege to the magnificent walled city to which the barbarian leader had retreated, having months since slaughtered the few remaining Irria-Kanders and made the place his own.

  For eight days the barbarians defended, but their warfare was to strike and run; they had no knowledge of the arts of mining and sapping, and now they paid the price. On the ninth day the mercenaries stormed the walls and by sundown the city was taken. They poured over the battlements and down into the streets.

  For three more days the fighting raged on until at last the few barbarians left were cornered and slain. Finally Almerid and Sardriel were at the head of the score of men who burst into the last stronghold and faced the startlingly young man who stood to meet his death, no more than a dozen soldiers with him. He was obviously the leader
, and yet he seemed barely twenty.

  Almerid grinned. “Ah!” he said with enormous satisfaction. “Our warlord’s son, I think. Send his head to his father. That will be a message he will not fail to understand!” He raised his sword arm as he spoke.

  “No!” Sardriel grasped it and held it hard, feeling the weight of the blow that would have fallen, and the anger at being stopped.

  Almerid looked at him narrowly, fury in his eyes. He was thinking of his own dead men lying unburied on the ice—hard ground five hundred miles along the bitter march eastward, and perhaps of the wounded he knew in his heart would yet die. Sardriel was thinking of the future, and the stakes of honour in the battle far wider than this one field—the final war where the weapons were of the spirit infinitely more than the flesh.

  Almerid attempted to yank his arm free, but Sardriel held it with all his strength. “Wait!” he commanded. “This is our battle. We are deep in their territory and have a war ahead of us. There is a better use for him.”

  “Trade?” Almerid said derisively. “They have nothing we want, except their lives, and what use would it be for us to have a score of them in exchange for this one? There are thousands of them out there. I’m sure one way or the other makes no difference. Anyway, we have no common tongue. How do we tell them what we want? And like as not they’d be willing to sacrifice him anyway. They’re barbarians—little more than animals.”

  “Animals have their own honour,” Sardriel answered. “And certainly their loyalties.” Almerid’s arm was still pulling against his hand, the muscles straining.

  Sardriel met his eyes in an unflinching stare. “I pay you. You do as I decide. The booty is yours—I make no claim on any of that—but the prisoners are mine, unless they are a danger to your men. That is your right to decide.”

  Almerid’s face was still a mask of contempt. The hardships they had faced together were a bond not strong enough to hold where the conduct of war was in question.