Stands a Shadow

Chapter THIRTEEN

Beachhead



The woman held a mug of chee for him when he woke late the next day. Ash struggled to sit up, his chest feeling tight and sore. Cakes of sand fell from one side of his face as he coughed long and hard into his fist, his eyes watering from the pain of each convulsion.

Through his tears Ash saw that the storm had passed in the night, though a wind still blew strong from the sea. The breeze had dried his clothes and his skin, at least those parts he had not been lying on, and heat too wafted over from the small fire next to him.

When Ash stopped coughing long enough to take a tentative sip of the steaming chee, he found his spirits lifting.

‘My thanks for your help,’ said the woman on the sand next to him. ‘It was timely of you.’ She held out a hand to him. ‘Mistress Cheer.’

Ash shook it. She had a man’s grip, and it was not shy of strength. For a moment the air between them was a passing curtain of smoke, and he peered through it, taking in her features beneath her thick thatch of dark hair. She reminded him of his wife’s mother, of all people – Anisa, possessed of that rare attractiveness that seemed to improve with age and stature.

And then the smoke cleared, and Ash saw the curl of the old scar that clove through her upper lip – like a hair-lip, though running up to her face and across her left eye.

‘Ash,’ he said, somehow still taken by her looks.

She creased her lips with a smile. ‘A pleasure,’ she told him, and appeared to mean it.

Behind her, the young women she had been protecting the previous night were rifling through a collection of clothes chests. It seemed they were putting together outfits for the day.

Mistress Cheer gathered her skirt above her ankles and stretched her stockinged feet out to the fire with a sigh. ‘A fine mess they’ve made of the landing,’ she said with a gesture of her head towards the bay.

‘Where are we?’ Ash asked over the brim of his mug.

‘Khos. In a place called Pearl Bay.’

He’d been right then. Now, no doubt, the army would be heading for Bar-Khos in an attempt to take the city from behind. The boy’s mother lived near there, he recalled.

He kept his thoughts to himself as he drank down the chee. The wonderful sensation of warmth in his belly made him realize how long it had been since he had enjoyed a hot drink or a meal. Mistress Cheer squinted at him, taking in the dark tone of his skin. ‘What are you – a mercenary? You’re a little old for this work, don’t you think?’

‘Bodyguard,’ he said without thinking.

‘Oh? And your employer?’

Ash nodded in the direction of the sea.

She blinked quickly, evaluating his meaning, and said, ‘Then you’re a timely stroke of good fortune, is all I can say. Our own man couldn’t swim, though he thought it too unimportant to mention until we were neck-deep in water. My girls are in need of some protection, as you might have noticed.’

They both looked towards the girls she spoke of. He caught glimpses of them beyond the flames as they were dressing; the stretch of smooth calves and thighs; the sway of a heavy breast; lips being painted; a pair of dark-kohled eyes glancing across at him.

Ash looked away and cleared his throat.

Prostitutes, he realized, feeling thick-headed. Here to follow the army during its campaign.

Ash sipped his chee and considered her offer. It would take time to find his bearings here, and to discover a way through to the Matriarch. It could take days, he knew, if not longer. All the while, he would have to keep up with the army.

Ash could recognize a gift of fate when he came across one.

‘Pay?’ he enquired, though the question was merely for show.

‘Oh, we have money. I can pay you campaign rates of ten marvels a day, and meals on top of that when we get ourselves back on our feet.’

‘Fifteen,’ he said, again for the sake of appearances.

‘Agreed,’ she allowed him with a gracious nod of her head. ‘And thank you, again. Truly. That was a courageous act, stepping in to help us like that in your condition.’

‘It was your fire I was really after,’ he confessed, but she only smiled as though he was joking.

Ash left them to finish their preparations, and, with his sodden boots perched next to the fire, he went for a swim to clean and wake himself.

The beach appeared even more desolate in the light of day. Wreckage lay strewn in heaps amongst frayed cordage and seaweed; bodies too, the early crabs clambering over whitened skin. Birds shrieked in the air, squabbled over scraps on the sand. Ash walked to loosen his limbs, seeing how the beach curved inwards into the bay itself, where the fleet rode at anchor in the choppy waters, barely diminished, for all the battering the storm had given it. He could see rafts and boats bringing in men and supplies; even cannon poking out over the bobbing gunwales.

The invasion force stopped him in his tracks. The imperial army had established a beachhead on the white sands and the system of dunes behind them. Smoke drifted from a thousand campfires and more, and the ground swarmed thick with figures all the way to the first sloping pastures that rose between the tawny hills. A village lay in blackened ruins on a ridge that overlooked the far end of the bay, a bleak counterpoint to the smouldering fort on the opposite side of the beachhead.

Ash looked for any sign of Sasheen, and almost immediately spotted an army standard of a black raven on a white field, flapping on the beach amongst several others. Try as he might, though, he couldn’t see the Matriarch amongst so many.

One step at a time, he thought to himself.

He picked his way through the survivors gathering what they could from the storm wreckage. He stripped at the water’s edge, then waded out into the sea with the waves frothing around his thighs. Scrubbing himself, he noticed the bruises on his arms, the black fingerprints where the sailor had clutched him in the sinking ship.

Ash dived into the water and swam for a while, easing the tensions in his muscles. Now and again, he glanced across the beachhead towards the fluttering standard of Sasheen, squinting for a sight of her.

The wind was whipping the drying grains of sand from the dunes, and the Matriarch strode through the hiss of it with her eyes narrowed down to slits. Ahead, her bodyguards cleared the way ahead of milling soldiers and civilians, while behind her straggled her field aides, hiking up the flanks of the mounds and down into their troughs in a long line of bleached-white robes, a procession that extended all the way back to the churned beach.

Not now, Archgeneral Sparus thought in irritation. I haven’t the time for this now.

Sparus watched her approach from his position on top of a dune, where he sat on a field chair amongst a gathering of his closest officers. The other men were dressed as he was, in their plain imperial armour of hardened leather, their tattoos of rank clearly visible on their temples. They squatted in the sand around him a loose circle. A canvas canopy snapped a few feet above his head, and on the ground lay an unfolded map of the island of Khos, across which scratched particles of blown sand.

‘One last point,’ he continued to his men, hurrying to finish before the Matriarch reached him. ‘We know our enemy. We know that Creed is a natural fighter with a reputation for aggressiveness, of going for the throat. And we know that this trait of recklessness has only been constrained over the years by the Khosian council of Michinè. Now, though, that changes. With our presence here, Creed will be afforded full powers under his role of Lord Protector. We can therefore assume that he will come at us with everything he can muster. We must hope for this, in fact. If he does, we may win this campaign even before we arrive at Bar-Khos.’

His officers nodded, knowing all of this already, though aware too of the importance of stating it once more.

They began to stand as Sparus rose from his chair to receive Sasheen, all of them stooped like age-broken men beneath the low flapping roof of their shelter.

She looked well in her white suit of armour, Sparus had to admit. She wore it like a veteran, and watching her approach him now, confident and relaxed in her stride, Sparus had to remind himself that this was her first campaign in the field, her first martial command. That was her mother’s influence: Kira had insisted Sasheen be trained in the arts of war. Thank kush the old witch wasn’t here with them, though. Kira would have dominated her daughter in that mocking way of hers, and at a time when they needed their Matriarch to be at her strongest. Even worse, campaigns in the field were intimate affairs amongst the officers and leaders of an army. Those around Sasheen would have seen how it truly was: how her mother wished for her to be Matriarch more than Sasheen did herself.

The old general felt his annoyance fade away as he thought of all that; this woman he was fond of, living a life she had been sculpted all her life for, but who, at times, seemed hardly to have the heart for it.

Sasheen shot him a wide smile as she tramped up to their position. ‘How are we doing?’ she panted over the wind with a voice edged by excitement, and Sparus saw that she was sober for once, her eyes clear of drink and narcotics, yet they shone brightly none the less. It seemed Sasheen was enjoying this venture of theirs, even with her left arm bound up in a sling.

‘Please,’ Sparus said, stepping forward to give her a hand up. ‘Sit down. What happened?’

‘It’s only a broken arm, Sparus,’ she chided, though she accepted his vacated chair readily enough. ‘And hardly the only one after last night.’

‘Aye, if only broken bones were the worst of it.’

Sparus remained stooped as the Matriarch turned her head to survey the grassy slopes that rose up from the dunes behind them. The fort up there was still smouldering, where Hanno’s Commandos had stormed it in the night and fired it in their recklessness. On another hilltop, on the opposite side of the small bay where they had landed, a village smoked in ruins too; the work of the Hounds that one, the veteran skirmishers of eastern Ghazni. Beneath the village, Acolytes were constructing a palisade that would surround the Matriarch’s command camp for the night.

When the Matriarch turned back to face him, Sparus finally sat down again, squatting on the sand next to her as his officers did the same.

‘How bad is it?’ she asked him.

The general was holding a twig of driftwood in his hand. He used it now to point at the map. ‘It seems we’ve landed a dozen laqs or so from where we intended to. We think we’re here, in Whittle Bay. The inland approaches are steeper from this position. If we wish to keep to our schedule, we’ll have to push the army even harder than we intended.’

‘But what of our losses?’

Sparus ran a hand across his bald scalp; scratched at the back of his neck. ‘We’re missing at least thirty ships from last night, and one of those is a powder ship. Meaning we have a third less blackpowder than we were hoping for. That isn’t the worst of it. Most of our heavy cavalry have gone, sunk or blown off course – we don’t yet know. And four transports of auxiliary infantry.’

A sudden gust roared through the space, so that they all turned their heads away from the stinging sands. Sparus waited with his one eye closed until it had passed. ‘Also, we’re still waiting for our air support to turn up. After that storm, though, there’s no telling if any of them will.’

Sasheen leaned back and chuckled to herself, a sound wholly incongruous with the tone of his words. ‘You make it sound as though we are already doomed, Sparus. And yet look at us. We are here, sitting on Khosian sands, with an army behind us and a nation awaiting its own downfall.’

Sparus blinked at her, keeping his thoughts to himself. He wasn’t in the habit of looking on the bright side. It did you little good.

Besides, the Coros disaster was fresh on his mind today. Nine years had passed since he had last stood on Mercian soil, yet still the memories were raw within him; the chartassa of the Free Ports cutting through the imperial forces twice their number, their ranks ragged from grape and grenades and missile fire, yet not stopping until they had hewn the invading imperial army in two and broken it.

Sparus had only been a minor general then; as had Creed, leading the small contingent of the feared Khosian chartassa. The islands of the democras had won that day, and Sparus would be damned if he was going to let such a disaster befall him again. To be beaten twice would be unforgivable; better to take a knife to his own heart. Sparus was Archgeneral now; Creed the Lord Protector. To defeat Creed here in Khos would seal Sparus’s reputation as the supreme general of his time.

Sparus would win this campaign he had been so opposed to commanding, but he would do so not with a hopeful complacency, but in the supremacy of their own logistics and might. This time, they had an army large enough for the task at hand, and an army of veterans at that, not nervous recruits. And he was older, wiser, a better general by far. He’d learned from their mistakes. At his own insistence the imperial heavy infantry had developed their own phalanxes of heavy pikemen, capable – he hoped – of taking on the mighty chartassa.

Still, he thought: the loss of so many warzels in the storm was a heavy blow to the campaign, and before it had even truly started.

‘It’s always this way, yes,’ he said to the gathering, though he directed his words mainly to Sasheen. ‘Always you have a carefully prepared plan that falls to shreds the first moment it engages with reality. That’s why we prepare for the worst. And why we will make do with what we have now, as we always make do.’

Sasheen narrowed her kohllined eyes. ‘Surely there must be some good news too? Something to rouse the army’s spirits?’

Sparus looked away for a moment to take in the long stretch of white beach beyond the dunes. It was chaos down there. Half-crazed zels ran amok with their harnesses trailing loose, leaping over scattered boxes of equipment and spilling men out of their way. Squads of infantry wandered around, trying to find their commanding officers; stragglers were still coming in from along the coast, stumbling over the sand like the blind. Sparus had never seen a beachhead in such disarray.

Still, it could have been much worse.

‘Good news?’ he heard himself say to them all, and tossed the stick in his hand into the wind ‘We’re still alive, aren’t we?’