‘I see that, but the general asks you to hold your current position.’

‘Hold, by all means, but on the road? Did he not mean for us to cross the river? Or at least arrange ourselves on the bank? I have lost one battalion across a bog and now the other is in everyone’s way!’ Vallimir pointed out a dust-covered captain whose company was stalled in grumbling column further down the road. Possibly one of the companies the regiments on the hill were missing. Or not. The captain was not offering the information and no one was seeking it out. ‘The general cannot have meant for us to sit here, surely you see that!’

‘I do see that,’ droned the messenger, ‘but the general asks you to hold your current position.’

Only the usual random incompetence. A team of bearded diggers tramped past in perfect unison, shovels shouldered and faces stern. The most organised body of men I’ve seen today, and probably his Majesty’s most valuable soldiers too. The army’s appetite for holes was insatiable. Fire-pits, grave-pits, latrine-pits, dugouts and dig-ins, ramparts and revetments, ditches and trenches of every shape, depth and purpose imaginable and some that would never come to you in a month of thinking. Truly the spade is mightier than the sword. Perhaps, instead of blades, generals should wear gilded trowels as the badge of their vocation. So much for excitement.

Gorst turned his attention back to his letter, wrinkled his lip as he realised he had made an unsightly inkblot and crumpled it angrily in his fist.

Then the wind wafted up again and carried more shouts to his ear. Do I truly hear it? Or do I only want to so badly that I am imagining it? But a few of the troopers around him were frowning up towards the hill as well. Gorst’s heart was suddenly thumping, his mouth dry. He stood and walked towards the water like a man under a spell, eyes fixed on the Heroes. He thought he could see men moving there now, tiny figures on the hill’s grassy flank.

He crunched down the shingle to where Vallimir was standing, still arguing pointlessly over which side of the river his men should be doing nothing on. I suspect that might soon be irrelevant. He prayed it would be.

‘… But surely the general does not—’

‘Colonel Vallimir.’

‘What?’

‘You should ready your men.’

‘I should?’

Gorst did not for a moment take his eyes from the Heroes. From the silhouettes of soldiers on the eastern slope. A considerable body of them. No messengers had crossed the shallows from Marshal Kroy. Which meant the only reason he could see for so many men to be leaving the hill was … an attack by the Northmen elsewhere. An attack, an attack, an attack …

He realised he was still gripping his half-finished letter white-knuckle hard. He let the crumpled paper flutter down into the river, to be carried spinning away by the current. More voices came, even more shrill than before, no question now that they were real.