Even Captain Rutherford, known as much for his imperturbable nature as his bushy muttonchops, appeared impatient, and after taking a long sip from his flask—filled with rum and water—leaned across his saddle and offered it to Sinclair. “It may be another long day,” he said.
Sinclair had taken it and drunk deeply. Ever since the 17th Lancers had set sail, the war had been a vast, costly anticlimax—a violent journey across pitching seas that had killed off countless horses, followed by endless marches through narrow gorges and empty plains, all the while leaving bodies in their wake, food for vultures and vermin…and the strange, scuttling creatures that they glimpsed only at night, lurking just beyond the pickets at their posts. Sinclair had asked one of the Turkish scouts what they were, and, after superstitiously spitting over his own left shoulder, the man had muttered, “Kara-kondjiolos.”
“But what does it mean?”
“Bloodsuckers,” the scout replied, with disgust. “They bite the dead.”
“Like jackals?”
“Worse,” he said, searching for the right word. “Like…the cursed.”
Whenever one had been spotted—never as anything more than a hunched-over shape clinging to the shadows or crawling close to the ground—Sinclair had noted that the Catholic recruits ostentatiously crossed themselves and everyone, regardless of faith, sidled closer to the campfires.
It was a far cry, the foreign land he was traveling through, from his home. And though he had seen nothing so stirring ever since, he remembered well the flags and bunting, the brass bands and fluttering handkerchiefs, when the army had first boarded the ships in England. Even the town of Balaclava, once an idyllic little seaport, had been rendered unrecognizable. Before the British troops had arrived, the town had been a favorite retreat of the residents of Sebastopol, its pretty little villas famous for their green-tiled roofs and neatly cultivated gardens. From all reports, every cottage and fence post had been adorned with roses, clematis, and honeysuckle, and light green Muscatel grapes, ripe for the picking, hung in great clumps from the vines. Orchards carpeted the hillsides, and the pristine waters of the bay sparkled like crystal.
And then the Agamemnon, the British navy’s most powerful man-of-war, had steamed into the harbor, and the army—twenty-five thousand strong at that landing point alone—had made the town its base of operations. The villas were overrun, the gardens churned to mud, the vines trampled underfoot. With many of the soldiers sick or dying from diarrhea, the tiny landlocked harbor had become an immense and reeking latrine, foul with waste and refuse. Lord Cardigan, no fool, had elected to stay several miles away, on board his private yacht, the Dryad. There, his meals were prepared by his French chef, while a flock of orderlies and aides rode their weary horses up and down the steep hills to the harbor, carrying his dispatches. Among the troops, when out of earshot of an officer, he had come to be called “The Noble Yachtsman.”
“Any word of Frenchie?” Rutherford had asked, but Sinclair shook his head. No letters had reached the front for weeks, nor any word from the field hospitals. Sinclair had seen his friend’s leg after the horse had fallen over on it, and he knew that even if he did see him alive again, Frenchie would not be the man he once was.
Would any of them be?
It was a beautiful day, clear and bright, and Ajax pawed the ground, eager to move. Sinclair stroked his long, chestnut neck, and tugged gently on the black mane. “One day, my boy, one day…” he said, reconciling himself to many more hours of listening to the sounds of a skirmish somewhere off in the distance, or the faraway boom of Russian cannons. For so much of the campaign he had felt like someone stranded just outside a theater, hearing the tumult and voices inside, but unable to get in the door. He wondered what Eleanor was doing, and whether she was safe, and if his own letters had ever made it back to her in London.
Rutherford grunted and pointed his chin to Sinclair’s right. An aide-de-camp had just left the commander’s side, and was riding pell-mell down the almost vertical hillside. The track was barely there, and many times the horse nearly lost its footing, but the rider was always able at the last second to regain control and continue his mad descent.
“Only one man that I know of can ride like that,” Sergeant Hatch observed from his own mount.
“And who might that be?” Rutherford asked.
“Captain Nolan, of course,” Sinclair put in. The same Captain Nolan whose equitation techniques were sweeping the Continent.