The officers glanced at one another. Such an army had never been seen before, never imagined.
“How many did they have before the siege began?” one asked harshly.
“A quarter of a million, maybe. We cut them down like straw, but they kept coming. I know that many were also sent back to guard the supply routes over the mountains, but the first snows will be in the passes of the Thurians now. I cannot see how they will keep supplied through the winter.”
“I can,” Martellus said. “Duke Comorin of Kardikia says they are building boats by the hundred on the Ostian river. That will be their new supply route, and it will remain open through the winter. Their advance will continue.”
Martellus bent over the table and examined a map of the land between the Searil and the Ostian rivers.
“Show me the line of their advance,” he said to Corfe.
Corfe got up, but then something occurred to him. “Has Macrobius been seen yet, or his body found?”
“The High Pontiff? Why, no. He died in Aekir.”
“Are you sure? Did anyone see him killed?”
“His palace burned, and just about every priest who was in the city was put to the sword. I have it from civilians and clerics who were there. I do not think the Merduks could have overlooked someone of his eminence.”
“But Mogen had him locked in a storeroom in the palace to stop him fleeing the city.”
Martellus stared, incredulous. “Are you serious?”
“It was a rumour in the city just before its fall. The Knights Militant almost left Mogen’s command over it. Would you know the High Pontiff if you saw him?”
Martellus became exasperated. “I suppose so. I have supped at the same table as him a few times. Why?”
“Then you must send men over to the eastern bank. You will find an old man there near the barbican who lacks eyes, and a young monk with an injured face.”
“What about them?”
“I think the old man may be Macrobius.”
THIRTEEN
Charibon. The oldest monastery in the world, home of the Inceptine Order.
It stood on the shores of the Sea of Tor in the north-west foothills of the wild Cimbric Mountains. Surrounded by the Kingdom of Almark, it was nevertheless autonomous, as Aekir had been, and was governed by the elders of the Church and their head, the High Pontiff.
Some seven thousand clerics lived and worked here, the majority of them in Inceptine black though there were some in the brown of the Antillians and others in the warm saffron of the Mercurians. Very few indeed were robed in the ordinary, undyed wool of the ascetic missionaries, the Friars Mendicant.
Here resided the greatest libraries in Normannia, now those in Aekir were no more, and here were the chief barracks and training grounds of the Knights Militant. They had a citadel of their own higher up in the hills beside Charibon, and there some eight thousand of them were quartered. Usually there were several times that number on hand, but most of them were in the east or had been dispatched to the various Ramusian monarchies to aid in the struggle against heresy. Two thousand were even now riding west, to Hebrion.
Down in the complex of the monastery itself there were the famed Long Cloisters of Charibon, walked by fifteen generations of clerics, roofed over by cedar imported from the Levangore and floored with basalt blocks hewn out of the once-volcanic Cimbrics.
Radiating out from the square of the cloisters and the rich gardens they enclosed were the other structures of the monastery, built in massive stone and roofed with slate from the quarries in the nearby Narian Hills. No humble thatch here.
But the Cathedral of the Saint towered over and dominated the rest. Its outline defined the skyline of Charibon, made it recognizable from leagues away in the hills. A huge, three-sided tower with a horn of granite at each corner formed the apex of the triangle that was the rest of the cathedral. It was the classic Ramusian shape, reminiscent of the Praying Hands but on a scale vaster than anyone had ever envisaged. Only Aekirians might sniff at the cathedral of Charibon, comparing it to their own Carcasson, of which it was a copy.
But Carcasson was no more.
The monastery sprawled out from the twin foci of cloisters and cathedral, the original pure design of the place lost in a welter of later building. There were schools and dormitories, cells of contemplation, gardens restful on the eye and conducive to contemplative thought. Most of the theories which had shaped the Ramusian religion had sprung from here as their authors looked out on the fountain-rich gardens or the green hills beyond.
There were also kitchens and workshops, smithies and tanneries, and, of course, the famed printing presses of the Inceptines. Charibon had its own lands and herds and crops, for there was a secular side to it as well as the spiritual. A town had sprung up around the swelling monastery complexes and a fishing village on the lake’s western shores kept the monks supplied with freshwater halibut, mackerel and even turtle on fast days. Charibon was a self-sufficient little kingdom whose chief exports were the books that the presses ceaselessly turned out and the faith that the Inceptines promulgated and the Knights Militant enforced.
The monastery had been sacked a hundred and fifty years before by a confederation of the savage Cimbric tribes. There had been a war then, with troops from Almark and Torunna sending expeditions into the mountains’ interior along with contingents of the Knights. The tribes had eventually been crushed and brought into the Ramusian fold, finally completing the task which the Fimbrians had attempted and failed to accomplish some four centuries earlier. Since then, a dozen tercios of Almarkan troops had also been stationed at Charibon, even as the Torunnans had garrisoned Aekir further east. Charibon was a jewel, a light to be kept burning no matter how dark the night-especially as the brightness that had been Aekir was now extinguished.
Albrec squinted into the cold, eye-watering wind, looking for all the world like a short-sighted vole peering from its burrow at the close of winter. This high in the hills the winters were bitter, snow lying for four months in the cloisters and the inland sea growing fringes of ice along its shores. His cell then would be like a small cube of gelid air in the mornings, and he would have to break the ice in his washing bowl before spluttering at the coldness of the water on his pointed face.
He wore a habit of Antillian brown, much worn, and the Saint symbol at his breast was of mere wood, carved by himself in the dim, candlelit nights. Though all were clerics alike here in Charibon, some were of a higher order than others. Some indeed were of aristocratic background, the younger sons of noble families whose fathers had nothing to give in the way of inheritance. So they became Inceptines, a different kind of noble. For the commoners, however, there was only the Antillians, the Mercurians, or if one was of a zealous turn of mind, and hardy to boot, the Friars Mendicant.
Albrec’s father had been a fisherman from the shores of northern Almark. A dour man, from a hard country. He had never quite forgiven his son’s fear of the open sea, or his ineptness with the nets and the tiller. Albrec had attached himself to a small monastery of Antillians from a nearby village, and found a place where he was not reviled or beaten, where the work was hard but not frightening as the days on an open boat had been frightening. And where his natural curiosity and inherent stubbornness could be put to good use.
He worked in the library of St. Garaso, his hand not being apt for the rigour of the presses or the finer of the illustrating that went on in the scriptorium. He lived in a dusty, half-subterranean world of books and manuscripts, old scrolls and parchment and vellum. He loved it, and could lay his hands on any tome in the entire library within a few minutes.