Child of Flame (Page 220)

It wasn’t true after all, what the church folk sometimes preached: as inside, so outside.

Let no one know she was weeping inside. She was the King’s Eagle. It was her duty to witness, to save what she could. She picked out two more girls, both about the same age as the girl with the torn sleeve. Old enough to survive if they were left on their own. Old enough to be raped and taken as concubines if they were left with the Quman.

Boso cursed at her, having had his eye on one of them. Bulkezu finally stopped chuckling. With shuttered eyes, he watched Hanna, not the chosen ten being herded back to burning Echstatt. A captain called out the advance. A horn blew. Weeping and wailing, the rest of Echstatt’s survivors were goaded and lashed toward the waiting army.

The captives stumbled along. One toddler, falling behind, was killed where it lay sobbing, a prod for the rest. Riding with the command group, Hanna soon outdistanced them, but their cries and grief stayed with her anyway, melding soon enough into the morass of sorrow that attended the Quman army: the mob of prisoners driven along with livestock and extra horses.

Late that afternoon the scene was repeated again when the vanguard reached a village. Soldiers drove a crowd of prisoners forward to take the brunt of the initial assault. When the first flurry of arrows trailed off, the Quman troops attacked, burned the palisade and houses, and rounded up prisoners. Bulkezu brought her forward again, to grant mercy to ten.

“I won’t do it,” she said. “You’re only playing a game with me. You don’t care about mercy.”

Bulkezu laughed. As he spoke, Boso translated. “Then I will choose, and leave ten behind for the crows.”

This time a woman spat on her, calling her worse names than “slave” and “traitor”, and was murdered for her disrespect. But Hanna chose ten while the others huddled in hopeless silence or stared at her accusingly.

“Mercy is a waste of time,” said Bulkezu as Boso translated. “People despise the ones who show them mercy.”

“They feel I have betrayed them,” said Hanna, “and maybe I have.”

The vanguard set up camp an arrow’s flight from the ruined village, upwind from the mass of the army and, more particularly, from the stinking mass of livestock and prisoners. But Bulkezu liked to survey his riches. He liked his luxuries, his silk robes, handsome gold trinkets, sweet-smelling women he did not treat badly as long as they did not resist him. Yet these were all things he could give up and leave behind without a moment’s thought. What he enjoyed most of all, as far as Hanna could tell, was the misery he left in his wake.

With his night guard in attendance and Hanna perforce at his side, he rode back along the lines, weaving in and out through his troops, stopping at campfires, inspecting tents, until he reached the bloated crowd of prisoners mixed together with stolen livestock, cattle and goats and sheep bleating and lowing, chickens and ducks fluttering and squawking in cages, and every variety of donkey and horse, from scrawny asses to sturdy work ponies to an aged warhorse now ridden by four small children. Even cowed as the prisoners were by their fear of their masters, they still made noise enough to wake the dead. She could not count them all; in the last few days the numbers had swelled alarmingly as the Quman army swept into more densely inhabited areas. By now, she guessed there were twice as many prisoners as soldiers.

Winter had become spring, although here and there snow lingered on the rooftops or in the northern shadow of trees. Cold and wet made conditions wretched even for those who traveled in some comfort. For the prisoners, most barefoot and half without even a cloak to warm them, spring was deadly. Every night some lay down who would not get up again in the morning. Children too weak to cry whimpered. A man scratched the festering sores on his legs. A mother clutched an emaciated child to her breast, but she had no milk. Here and there knots of people huddled together, protecting precious stores of food gained from relatives who had by one means or another come under the protection of a man in the Quman army—a young woman to be his concubine, her mother to cook his meat and gruel or to mend his shirts, a boy to groom his horses or polish his armor.

While Hanna watched, a dozen soldiers rode up to look over the new captives. The guards rounded them up—easy to mark out the new ones because their look of terror hadn’t yet been subsumed by numb despair—and prodded them forward. Bulkezu watched with that irritating half smile on his face. Other villages had been overrun today. Hanna saw prisoners who had not been among those she had seen taken, chief among them a pretty young woman who had just the kind of pleasingly plump figure that Quman men found attractive. Soldiers jostled each other to get close to her, to poke and pinch her, to check her teeth and test the strength of her hair; soon enough she was crying openly, so afraid that she wet herself. One man shoved another to get him out of his way. Curses flew fast and furious.