Lady Cherusay's Daughter, Book I: The People

Phalanxes of black, violet, blue and Sorche-gold advanced westward into the Geillan ranks, great spear-points driven slowly into a vast body. The body flinched back; the Sferiari cheered, Rothesay’s little group cheered and she with them, but Caltern only watched, silent as a mountain in sunset. Now he moved, his slight shrug a summons to them to follow after, off towards the north, following the crest of their slope.

Geillari from the rear, impatient for their chance at glory, spilled out around the flanks, some south towards the river, more northwards. Noticing, Rothesay marvelled at Caltern’s prescience, that clearly anticipated this. And they were not a quarter-mile away when the Geillari noticed them as well—and chose to turn to support their north-flank brothers.

The power of reputation, as Rory had hinted? Caltern turned to give his small command a great, wicked grin. Rothesay laughed, and thumped Tams’ shoulders, needing something to do with the excitement that raged in her. She fumbled for her sword-hilt. Arngas’s sword again: Leoff had tried to interest her in one whose balance he said was better suited to her, but when she found the nerve to tell him that she and it were in this together, his dark eyes flickered with amusement and he conceded.

Suddenly they were engulfed from behind in a mass of purple-clad spearmen. Caltern nodded to himself, snapped his huge fingers for his company’s attention, and pointed further north. Over yet another low wave of this motionless green sea, another horde of wild wool-clad warriors, under yet another banner, came screaming. The spearmen of Andras flowed coolly down to meet them; Rothesay, gulping for air, did not notice her sword now in her hand instead of its sheath as Caltern led them after.

He stopped them partway down the slope, and lifted a finger to point at a hexad of students from Kingscroft: archers, who leaped from their mounts and sent flock after flock of silver-tipped, silver-fletched black arrows over the heads of Andras. Lacie and a gaunt youth, silver-clad, watched their flight with a weird intensity, and the arrows burst into flame as they struck.

The Geillari had archers of their own; their bows had not the reach of the Runedaur weapons, but they were strong enough to rain bitter bronze among the Andreisi ranks, and thick enough to find any gap in the upraised shields: a score of purple spearmen fell before the armies met below in a deafening thunder of wrath.

Caltern charged down, his students flying behind. The Andrasadh who had lingered by their fallen friends surrendered the wounded to the young Runedaur and ran on to rejoin their company. Rothesay sheathed her blade to help gather the fallen; Caltern ordered her and Flick and a Kingscroft boy to keep their weapons drawn and stay horsed, for they looked much too fine to stoop to any such work. “Later,” he growled.

Later came soon: they bore the hurt men carefully back to the healers’ tents and went out for more, wherever the shifting tide of battle ebbed away from their own. Caltern let them do off the fancy helms and tabards in favor of plain ones, another small move in a game of mental tactics, as the Geillari would wonder just where was the lord of the horsetail crest, for example, and where would he strike.

All too soon Rothesay saw plainly that they needed whatever little edge they could gain. As at Feillantir two centuries before, the strength of the Geillari lay in sheer number, and it seemed that every hour brought more marching over the hills from beyond. Three times, the Geillan flood rose to make the Sferan army an island, cut off from the Andrastiri haven; three times the city stemmed it with a sortie of her own. Rothesay helped in one: a force of the Geillari came too close, for her liking, to the healing-tents where her carefully-gathered treasures lay—she had worked so hard in their collection that she felt fiercely proprietary over them, men whose names she did not know, and one woman of the Sisterhood, her bright yellow tunic made more flamelike by her own blood—and in rage she had charged, on foot, with a handful of Carastwyadh just as Andrastir opened her gates. Arngas entirely possessed her in that hour, for she was far beyond thinking.

Caltern seized her by the scruff of her tabard when she would have pursued the retreating Geillari towards the river. She broke free in outrage, but he had slowed her up enough to point out that they were about to be all on their own as Carastwyn and Andrastir both were drawing back. Reluctantly she withdrew with him, and stumbled then, nearly swooning from the heat. Caltern half-carried her back to the shelter of the pavilions and made her take off her helm and drink miontas, a vinegar water steeped with mint and willow bark, and sweetened with honey.

She drank it greedily, then lay on her back in the shade of the Runedaur command tent, and thought she should get up and clean her blade—eventually. As she watched fat puffs of white cloud drift serenely seaward, suddenly the world darkened, as if some mountain of cloud blotted the sun. She leaped to her feet, and stared aghast.

A monster towered over the battlefield, her head where Areolin should have stood in the sky; she had serpents for hair, and four thick tentacles served for arms: each wielded in turn a spear, an axe, a sword and a club. Some strange golden cloth wrapped her round, but left her great pallid breasts bare, and blood flowed from them, dripping onto the field. To her right glided a vaguely female form of ice, and to her left, one of smoke and fire. It was the Aveghar, the Demoness War, and Her handmaidens, Pride and Anger.

Rothesay pointed and gibbered. One of the Runedaur healers tied a last knot in someone’s bandage, and came and took her hand and gently drew her into the tent. Rothesay shoved away the offer of more miontas. “Open your eyes and look at the world around you!” she shouted.

“Not till you drink this,” the old man replied threateningly.

She glared wildly and pulled away, never noticing his surprise at being unable to hold her even with a certain pressuring grip, and stomped back out into plain, bright, overbearing sunlight and the harsh clamor of uninterrupted warfare. She stomped back in, grabbed the cup from him, and poured it down.

“Lie down.” She did. Someone came and laid a wet cloth on her cheek, but she rose again a few minutes later at the sound of more wounded being carried in. She gave the wet cloth to one of them, at last wiped as much as she could off her sword with a fistful of grass—the gore itself hardly troubled her; she was stiff and sticky with enough of it already, and none of it her own—and went back to work.

She fell in with a boy from Rose House and they labored together through the burning afternoon. Too soon she learned the sign for “mortal”, meaning the wound; and also how to curse by gesture. The boy, who gave his name as the first two fingers of his right hand brushed along his right cheek and off the side of his nose—with the thumb extended back towards the ear; he insisted on that—looked often towards the river, and cupped his left hand upward, rocking gently, with a worried look. She could only shrug.

They stood on the slight slope above the fighting, below the Princess and her lieutenants, catching their breath and looking for their next task, when she heard the roar of a familiar voice: Dav’s. She heard him, but she saw Rory first, Rory riding with Ulflaed and some unknown others a little further into the fray. Then Dav leaped to stand up on Winddancer’s saddle, and pointed urgently downslope. Only a few dozen yards from Rory’s band, a mass of Dun Brean’s folk closed on a handful of black-and-silver footmen. Rory wheeled, Ulflaed and the rest hard behind. Rothesay’s heart skipped: one of the threatened footmen was Kahan.

Rory yanked back savagely on his reins, almost throwing his mount into Ulflaed’s, and the others behind scrambled for control. Then they bounded forward again, but in that hesitation Dun Brean engulfed their prey and black-and-silver vanished from view.

Three Geillari gleefully availed themselves of the fine target Dav presented for flung spears. Almost casually, he ducked one, snatched the other two from the air, dropped back into his seat as he whipped them about to serve himself, and charged after Rory. Rothesay danced helplessly on the trampled turf, grabbed her sword—Cheek-nose whistled sharply in her ear just as a great cry went up riverward, and pointed.

A long ship, black as a finger of night glided up as silently, her great black sail gravid with the wind from the gulf. Rothesay had seen her before, or her own sister, off the Harrowater headland now and again; a sure omen of misfortune, men said—and doubly if she was no ghost but living Runedaur. She certainly had not the sense to put ashore when night fell, or she held some letter of marque from the laws of darkness best left unchallenged. But Cheek-nose thrust out a rocking, cupped palm and whistled a wild exultation.

Her sail dropped, her black oars shipped out smartly and drove her for the beach. She seemed omen evil enough for the Brean’s forces, who began to draw back; and then they saw a good dozen of bright Sferan sails following her down the wind. Geillan horns blared a retreat. Rothesay spun and chased after Dav.

Black-clad men lay on bloody turf, glimpsed behind others massed in her way; beyond them, Rory’s half-dozen of cavalry tried to force an equine wall against a horde of dark-red-leather armored wild men, and their unmarried sisters still wilder. From the other side Dav dismounted in a great leap towards the wounded, and Winddancer reared against the retreating Geilladh.

Then, as a parting remark, a bronze-bladed axe wheeled under Winddancer’s flashing hooves and plunged into the belly of one of the fallen. Dav pivoted, darted after; a Geillath screamed, and Dav returned, somersaulting right under his horse, and slid on his knees to the hurt man’s side just as Rothesay broke through.

One-eyed Harlan Grey clutched weakly at the axe half-buried in his body. His face twisted in bitter rictus; Dav bent close and touched his brow, and shuddered, and Harlan’s face cleared. She did not catch Dav’s quiet question, only Harlan’s whispered reply: “Not here.”

A grim glance from Dav was all the command she needed. She approached Harlan, to take him up in her magic-steeled arms, but he stopped her with a frown, and a finger pointing weakly.

“Not that.”

Take off her hauberk? Of course—the bronze rings would make an ungentle cushion. She bent over and let it slither swiftly over her head to the ground. The hurt man gestured again, and layer by layer, leather, padding and all followed till she was down to her sherte, sweat-soaked and clinging but so deliciously cool in the breeze she all but sobbed with relief. Then she gathered up Harlan and stood.

He rolled his one eye at her breast, mounded up against his shoulder and fairly bursting its transparent linen cover, and winked. “‘S better.”

She flushed, to his amusement. But he was going to die; and he had always been kindly in a remote way, and if he wanted to spend his last hour ogling her, then he might and welcome. Through a world glittery in unspent tears, she bore him to the healers’ tent, and not till a fog of physicians closed him from view did she remember Kahan. She whirled, her heart wild.

A thinner fog veiled him, over by one wall: only two bent over his cot. Wounded, then, but not so sorely as Harlan. Resolutely she backed away, out of the way, and went outside to wait.

Cobry came and sat silently beside her, and Lacie a little later; then Juris; Ulflaed; and Arnaf the overeager, his dirty cheeks bearing two clean stripes like not-paint though his empty gaze was dry now. Then a handful of black-clad sailor students drifted up, wordlessly sharing wineskins around. Presently nearly thirty young would-be Runedaur sprawled unspeaking on the grass and watched the sunset redden as though even Areolin’s blood spilled. The wind from the gulf faded to a sigh.

“Well, damnation,” said someone wearily.

Rothesay restrained herself till after supper, before intruding on the healers to check on Kahan. He lay in one of the smaller tents on the hilltop, where the Sferan armies placed their wounded: pavilions with light, loose walls that Lord Kavin might pass easily, but gently, and honor those who had fought in His honor. Kavin always came, aware that men imagined their wars somehow involved Him; through all the ages He had never been able to fathom the connection, but He never failed to try.

Kahan was awake, fidgeting and restless with discomfort, on a cloak tossed over a thick pallet of sweet grass. He greeted her with a radiant smile, and a peremptory command to sit and amuse him, “because my leg hurts like hell and my head’s spinning. Did you bring me any wine?”

She expected him to make light of his wound, or wounds, which he did, after a fashion: “It won’t keep me from sailing with the Jetsam—” the renowned Runedaur humor evidently extended to ships’ names; no Geilla in all the North Coast lands would beard fate like that—“though I’ll have to lie about like a log on the deck, I suppose, bleagh! that’s nasty wine, oh, right, it’s got that healer-wort in it.”

But he made no feint of comfort, instead letting her know quite graphically and not a little petulantly just how and where he hurt.

“Aren’t you supposed to be acting brave, and telling me it’s practically nothing?” she laughed, both amused and bemused.

“Why? So you may know me for a liar, or a lunatic? How are you to know how to fuss over me if I don’t tell you? There, you’re laughing, I feel better already, go get me some good wine and not this doctored stuff and come tell me what’s troubling you, ow, son of a demon-spawned pig—!”

She had no words yet for her first taste of battle; an amorphous, exhilarated horror that massed just over the horizon of her thought. But the other trouble was clear and present, passing in whispers among all the Runedaur students. “Rory,” she said softly.

To her surprise, he had no idea what she meant. He had been in no position on the field to notice anything but the enemy, whom he insisted on calling the “opposition.” She hated breaking the news to him.

When she did, halting and awkward, he covered his face with his long hands. “O all ye gods—why me?”

“I had no idea he hated you so,” she murmured, uncomfortably twisting the tassel end of her belt.

“Oraay’s Blood, I wish he did!”

“What?” Her head snapped up, looking for the sudden fever that crazed him.

“I’ll bet I know exactly when he saw me! Oh, no, it couldn’t have been a moment sooner, or later, could it?” he snarled bitterly.

“What—you’re babbling. Let me get you a cold cloth.”

“Yes, do—and put out that candle, this night’s too beastly hot as it is. Can you do magelight? And I’m not babbling. Shut up for a minute and I’ll tell you about it.”

She crushed her lips on a protest and a laugh, changed the light though the weather was pleasant, and daubed his forehead while he talked.

“It was this big fellow, my height, must’ve been twice my weight—”

“Twice your weight’s still small.”

“Hush. Big, I say. Short sword and buckler. Shoved the buckler at my face and went to cut me like a stalk of wheat. I grabbed the top of his buckler, pushed it down, blocked his sword with his own shield. He wasn’t expecting that at all; I pushed it all the way down,” Kahan straightened his left arm out and what would have been down if he had been standing, “and he went to yank it back up and I used it like the top of a fence, leaped over, smashed my knees into his face. Stupid Runedaur trick, but it worked. Don’t know what his clan gods will say to him about dying by a knee in his windpipe. Why am I telling you this?”

“Rory.”

“Mother of the world,” he swore. “I’ll bet he caught me in mid-jump. I bet he never had a chance all day to do something spectacular. And now he’s gone and done something spectacularly stupid instead and won’t that make him sweeter to live with!”

“The—other students think he betrayed you,” she quavered, unwilling to admit her own doubts.

“So did you. That’s all right; there’s no shame in being young and stupid. What, you think thinking comes naturally, like walking? But people who really know how to walk can do so on a rope a hundred feet in the air, right? Right. There’s an art to thinking really well, too. It’s fun, you’ll like it, your cloth’s gotten all hot again.” He pushed her hand querulously from his face.

“It’s a shame you two can’t be friends,” she soothed, patting his cheeks and brow again with a freshened cloth. “You’re very much alike, you have common likes—” In the close company of the war train, she had seen a great deal of the two of them in the last fortnight, if seldom at the same time.

“No, we don’t,” he grumped. “I have likes: juggling, and butterflies—you didn’t know that, did you? I’m the House expert on mountain butterflies. And even I don’t know where the suns-in-glory go.”

“And women?” she teased, but with a little bite, remembering Lacie’s remarks about ‘the girls of the village.’

“More than you know,” he replied, somberly, but with a finger poking ticklishly at her ribs. “But Rory’s one, sole interest, as far as anyone can make out, is besting me. I wouldn’t mind, except he doesn’t enjoy it even when he succeeds.”

“Er—no?”

“No! He just gets angrier! It’s my fault for losing, or something. I don’t know. I think if he would simply hate me, he could quit measuring himself against me, and find some peace. At least he’d be easier to live with.”

“As an enemy?” she wondered, doubtfully.

“Enemies are easy. Known ones,” he amended. “Friends are easy. But I don’t know what in hell to do with him. He’s better than I, in many ways, and I’ve told him that. By the Holy Moon, I’ve been here six years, he’s been here three and he’s already nearly my match in most things. He is my match with a sword.”

“But your first weapon is a knife, isn’t it?” She herself had not yet chosen her first, or preferred, weapon; Leoff suggested that it might as well be the sword, but that there was no need for haste.

“Don’t remind him. Demons take him: sing me a song. You’ve a beautiful voice and I’ll go to sleep.”

She laughed and obliged, and sat by him for some while after his slow breath assured her that he slept.