Days of Air and Darkness

by Katharine Kerr

  “If you brought me here to badger me, I’m leaving right now.”

  “Is it badgering to ask a man I haven’t seen in four years where he’s been?”

  Yraen allowed himself a brief smile. She waited, saying nothing, her head cocked a little to one side.

  “Marro, please?” she said at last.

  “There’s not much to tell. I rode away from Dun Deverry because I was sick in my gut of court life. I became a silver dagger because a man’s got to eat along the road, and what else did I know but sword craft?”

  “But a prince turning into a silver dagger?”

  “A very minor prince, my lady. Let’s not forget that. The younger son of a younger son, and I could have died of boredom, waiting round for my turn to carry the king’s falcon on my wrist and little duties such as that.”

  Utterly bewildered, she stared.

  “No one ever did understand you, Maryn,” she said at last. “You were always such a strange lad.”

  “Stop calling me that! The only name I have is Yraen.”

  She sighed, running both hands through her hair to push it back from her face.

  “I’m glad I’ve seen you again,” she said. “I’m glad to know you’re alive and well.” She looked up, her eyes glinting tears. “For now, anyway. This war—”

  “I won’t lie to you, my lady. Things bode ill. Very ill. When were you planning on returning to your husband’s dun?”

  “In a few days. Why?”

  “Don’t. Stay here. If we fail, if we can’t turn this besieging army back, they’ll be riding south, and Trev Hael’s in their path.”

  She lay back in the chair and laid a trembling hand at her throat.

  “I’m sorry, but you deserve to know the truth.”

  “I’ve got children there, Mar—, well, Yraen. Three of them.”

  “Send for them.”

  “I will, on the morrow.” She rose, tossing her head in the familiar gesture of women of her rank, who reminded themselves many times over a lifetime that they were a warrior’s daughter and a warrior’s wife. “That reminds me. Drwmyc sent messengers to the king about this siege, well over an eightnight ago.”

  “Did he? Good. Grandfather needs to know. How is he, by the by?”

  “Doing splendidly for a man his age. Your mother’s well. I don’t suppose you care about your father.”

  Yraen smiled, a bare twitch of his mouth, then rose.

  “I won’t take up my lady’s time any longer. I need to find a place to sleep.”

  She laughed, then covered her mouth with one hand.

  “Oh, ye gods, don’t be daft!” Yraen snapped. “If someone finds out—”

  “I’ve sent my maid away, and bribed the page, and besides, if things are as grim as you say, then who’s to care where either of us sleep tonight?” She ran her hand along his arm. “I’m in no mood to be alone.”

  “Well, truly, I’m not either.”

  Yraen caught her by the shoulders and kissed her, her mouth still familiar, despite the years between them, and as greedy as he remembered it as well.

  • • •

  The Horsekin camp lay bound in apathy and hot sun, while it tended those things that even the most glorious army must deal with here on earth. Every tenth man had been detailed to go fill in the old privy ditches near the edge of the camp and dig new ones. Others led horses round to the river that ran west of their camp and watered them. Out in the parade ground, where the food wagons were drawn up in a long line, Ddary was distributing rations to the warband, handing each man wrapped packets of flat-bread and cheese, each stamped with the army seal, then slicing up the haunch of cooked beef they’d been allotted as evenly as he could. Tren himself handed out salt twisted in bits of cloth. When they were finished, and the men on their way back to their camp, Tren gave the rations officer a special wooden stick, which the Horsekin solemnly notched and returned. Tren bowed; the rations officer bowed. Tren moved aside to let the next captain take his place.

  “Ye gods,” Ddary muttered. “They do like their little ways, don’t they?”

  Lord and captain walked back to the camp together, but slowly, finding more privacy there in the mob that spoke not a word of Deverrian than they would have among their own men. A gaggle of Horsekin in gold-threaded surcoats came stomping by, knocking anyone in their path out of it.

  “Ah, my fellow officers,” Tren said. “Ye gods! We have the Overseers and the Keepers of Discipline and the rakzanir—officers everywhere you look. A wretched lot of extra mouths to feed!”

  “Well, the Overseers do fight, my lord. Just to be fair.”

  “True. They’re not all useless.”

  Some yards away across the parade ground, a fight broke out, a quick swirl of brawl like a dust devil. Yelling at the tops of their lungs, a handful of Horsekin swung and slugged one another. Tren saw a knife flash; the shouting changed to urgency. Red surcoats flapping, the Keepers shoved their way through the crowds and grabbed the brawlers, pulling them apart.

  “Not precisely useless, my lord,” Ddary said, sighing. “I wish the Goddess would show herself again. It’s the only thing that keeps them happy, like.”

  “Well, that and an attack. Expect one soon, captain. And this time we’re going to be in the thick of it. The high priestess herself has requested it.”

  Ddary swore, looking round him with bleak eyes.

  “We’d best comport ourselves well, too.” Tren dropped his voice. “There’s more than one way for a man to die in battle.”

  “I take your meaning, my lord. I’ll pass the word on to the lads, well, the ones I can be sure of, anyway.”

  “Let the ones you’re not sure of lead our part of the charge.”

  They exchanged a fast smile. Tren would have said more, but by then they were walking too close to human slaves, some of whom spoke a dialect of Deverrian, to risk more honesty.

  Every morning, like a warrior laying out his armor, Meer prepared himself for the next attack on Cengarn. On the carved chest in the chamber that he and Jahdo shared, he would lay out his small goatskin drum and its padded stick and his buckskin tunic with the charms and talismans studded all over it. Jahdo would fill a leather water bottle with fresh water, too, and put it next to the drum. When the alarum finally sounded, then, early on a sunny morning, they were ready. Meer had just told Jahdo to take the remains of breakfast away when they heard silver horns blow and a great shout go up from the dun walls.

  “To arms! To arms!”

  The sound of distant screaming from the town drifted in through the sunny window. Jahdo leapt to his feet, his heart pounding in time to the calling horns. More slowly, Meer rose, lifting his arms high.

  “May the gods be with us, lad. It is time for me to join the fight as a bard’s calling demands.”

  With Jahdo’s help, Meer stripped off his cloth shirt and put on the ceremonial tunic that marked his rank as bard and loremaster. He picked up the drum, gave it an experimental thwack, and pronounced it sound. Jahdo led him down the staircase and into the great hall, where a last few warriors were settling pot helms over their padded caps and grabbing swords.

  “What’s this?” young Draudd called out. “Is the bard going to come sing to us while we fight?”

  “Hold your tongue, you arrogant young colt,” Meer snarled. “I am a true bard marked out by the gods, and my words carry some force with the savages at our gates.”

  In the company of Draudd’s squad, they hurried down through the swirling panic of the town. Since word reached them, passed along from militiaman to townsman, that the fighting was once again heaviest at the east gate, Draudd ran his men there with Meer and Jahdo scrambling to keep up. The captain of the town guard, Mallo, was standing at the foot of the ladders up to the catwalk, yelling orders.

  “Ye gods!” he snarled at Meer. “I’ve no time to waste worrying about you, good sir, nor your lad neither.”

  Meer drew himself up to his full height and boomed.

&n
bsp; “The gods themselves have sent me here to curse those who would profane these walls. Will you stand in my way and theirs?”

  Mallo growled under his breath, but he gave way. Getting Meer up the ladder wasn’t easy. He had to feel his way up each rung, and at the top, two warriors had to haul him onto the catwalk. With the drum strap slung round his neck, Jahdo scurried up after. Mallo found them a place a good ways away from the heavy fighting round the gate itself, where Meer could stand on a wide stretch of catwalk and Jahdo could crouch down behind the wall and watch in relative safety.

  In a swirl of men and horses, the attack was coming in two prongs, one toward the east gate, one toward the south. Down below Jahdo’s position, the Horsekin cavalry were driving their infantry toward the walls like cattle. As he peered out between the merlons, Jahdo could see sabers flash among the leather cuirasses of the foot soldiers. Here and there an infantryman screamed; once a man fell, blood streaming from a head wound. At a shouted order, the foot soldiers swung their ladders up and lifted them over their heads, then broke into a trot. A rain of stones and flaming pitch greeted them.

  Meer stepped forward. The wind caught his huge mane of hair and swelled it out behind him; his multitude of charms and talismans glittered like stars. He held his drum high over his head and began to strike, and with every stroke he boomed out a word, a sharp bark in the Horsekin tongue. Jahdo was sure that over the shouting and hoofbeats, the pounding of the rams and the cursing of the defenders, no one would hear him, but it seemed that out among the cavalry someone saw him. A new kind of cry went up from the attacking regiment, a shriek of alarum and—though perhaps Jahdo just imagined it—shame.

  Meer was breathing in time to the drumbeats. Each huge breath he drew seemed to be pulled down from the sky to heave and swell his chest. Each time he breathed out, he sent a curse over the attackers. Jahdo had never dreamt that anyone could call out so loudly, so piercingly, could send a voice so far on such an enormous wave of sound. The defenders round the east gate began to fall silent; the attacking regiment held their place, moving neither forward nor back for a few moments of relative quiet.

  In those, the curses began to be heard. Jahdo could see a horseman here or there suddenly toss up his head and start backing his mount or trying to turn out of line. The foot soldiers began to mill around and lose their forward thrust. One unit, off to the north edge, dropped its ladder and shamelessly ran. Meer chanted on and on, as if his voice were a stormy sea, pounding on a beach to tear the sand away and break down some puny seawall. The front of the Horsekin line began to eddy and swirl, moving sideways, not forward. The men in the other prong of the attack off to the south started to turn, to peer at what might be happening and to listen. On and on, Meer cursed and howled, calling down the wrath of every god in the sky or under the earth.

  Out among the cavalry Jahdo saw a shove of movement—a single man riding fast, forcing his gray horse through the paralyzed line. Round him they rallied and began to move, yelling at each other, yelling at the infantry, pushing a squad forward with this new rider in their midst. The defenders on the walls began to shout in answer. Meer’s voice was lost as the fighting picked up to the south, but at the east gate the infantry still milled aimlessly. Jahdo kept watching the attack and this new commander, or so he thought him then, on his easily visible gray horse, pushing a slow way forward, surrounded by a box, as it were, of four horsemen to clear his path and protect him.

  Somewhere between fifty and a hundred yards away—Jahdo could guess it well out of sling-stone range—the riders in the box formation drew their horses to a halt. As the leader dismounted in the safety of his men’s array, Jahdo thought he might be a human being just from the supple way he moved and the proportion of his legs to his upper body. The fellow began fiddling with some long thing tied beside his saddle—Jahdo couldn’t see what, because the dust plumed as the cavalry pressed forward, parting round the four riders and the dismounted man like water round a rock. Meer paused for breath, lowering the drum to rest his arms.

  “Meer, I do see some odd thing out there. There’s a tall man at the back of the cavalry, like, and he’s got some kind of long pole or suchlike in his hands.”

  “As long as he be not another bard to challenge my cry to the gods, I care not. Hand me that water bottle, lad.”

  Jahdo unstoppered it and put it into Meer’s hands, then retrieved it when the bard was finished. Meer wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, then picked up his drum and raised it high again. Down below the walls, the infantry saw him and raised a cry, more despair than battle lust. Meer took one of those amazing breaths, pounded the drum, and began to chant. Jahdo scrunched down behind a merlon and looked out. It took him a moment to find the strange man and his gray horse. The battle line had moved up past him; except for one other fellow, mounted and holding the gray’s reins, he now stood alone.

  And he had strung the bow.

  “Meer!” Jahdo shrieked. “Not a pole. It be a longbow! Meer! Get down!”

  In his trance of chant, the bard never heard him. Jahdo sprang up and grabbed his arm—too late. An arrow fell, silent in the shouting, and struck Meer full in the chest. The bard cried out a death shriek, delivered with all the force of his chant-trance, to ring out over the battlefield. Another arrow sped to its target and knocked Meer back. The bard twisted, shoving Jahdo behind the safety of the merlons with his last bit of life, then fell, his back arching, his arms flung out, his drum falling before him into the city as he seemed to sail down and hit the cobbles, a broken twisted thing.

  Down on the battlefield, the Horsekin screamed in raw terror. The line broke, infantry churning and pulling back, horsemen turning to gallop away from the impious sight of the murder of a bard. Jahdo never knew what happened to the archer, any more than he could ever remember climbing down the ladder to the ground. Suddenly, he was running to Meer’s body, falling to his knees into a pool of blood to stare into the bard’s dead face.

  “Meer!” He heard his voice wail like a stranger’s. “Meer, Meer, Meer!”

  Men came running. Mallo grabbed Jahdo’s arm and hauled him up.

  “Lad, lad, there’s naught you can do for him. Help me pull him away from the walls. You’ll both be trampled, staying here.”

  Choking and gagging on his own tears, Jahdo followed orders. Once Meer’s body lay under the relative safety of a wagon, he fell across it and keened, sobbing out a long wordless litany of grief. Draudd and the squad from the dun ran to join him. The young warrior was sick-pale and shaking as he knelt by Meer’s corpse.

  “Forgive me my jest,” he stammered. “Never did I think you’d come to harm, good bard, or I never would have mocked. Forgive me in the Otherlands tonight, when you reach them.”

  As soon as he saw Meer fall, Tren slung the bow over his back and mounted, yelling at Ddary to do the same. They turned their horses and fled the field just ahead of the general rout from the east gate. Tren let his horse run where it would, following Ddary; he was weeping too hard to see or care where their retreat would take them. He had slain a bard. That the bard was a foreigner made the crime no more tolerable. He had murdered a sacrosanct man—at his Goddess’s bidding, truly, but still he had committed the worst crime in Deverry, worse even than murdering your blood kin.

  “They gave me no choice.” He was howling out the words, not that anyone could hear him. “She gave me no choice.”

  But his honor screamed back that he’d had a choice, that he’d taken the cursed bow and promised its price, and all for his own revenge.

  When the eastern attack crumbled, the men in the southern drive found their flank unprotected and were forced to retreat as well. Cengarn’s defenders yelled and jeered as the Horsekin pulled back, screaming curses at walls and warriors alike. From her place on the catwalk near the southern gate, Jill studied the retreat. This Horsekin army was of a kind new to her. Although she’d seen organized legions down in Bardek, those were all infantry, and citizen volunteers at that
. An army with two kinds of slaves in its rank, some willing recruits rather than mere servants, lay beyond her experience.

  “Your Grace?” she said. “The men with those long red coats? I’d say they’re the truly important leaders. They carry whips, and I notice that the men listen to them, no matter what the captains in gold may be doing.”

  “Good point,” Cadmar said. “I’ll see that our men know who to pick for targets. We don’t have a wretched lot of arrows and javelins in the dun. We have to get a high price for each one we loose.”

  “Truly. Well, you didn’t need my dweomer for the fight today. I wonder what made them break so soon?”

  They learned, of course, as soon as they returned to the dun. Since Cadmar stayed at the walls until the field was deserted—in case the Horsekin retreat was a trick—it was several hours before Jill rode back in his company. As she was dismounting in the ward, Dallandra came hurrying out.

  “Jill, horrible news! Meer is dead.”

  Jill tried to speak and failed. She tossed her reins to a waiting page and rushed inside.

  By then, the women in the dun had washed the bard’s body and laid him out on an improvised bier in the great hall, where he would lie overnight before they buried him on the temple hill in town. A few at a time, the men came to pay their respects, then all stood round, drinking and shaking their heads, that they were facing an enemy heinous enough to murder a bard. Carra was sobbing over Meer’s body, and the sight of her made Jill come close to weeping herself, for the first time in a great many years. Since she refused to indulge herself, she listened instead, finally piecing out the story from Draudd and the men in his squad.

  “An elven longbow?” Jill said at last. “Here? You’re sure?”

  “I am, my lady. I’ll swear it on any god you like.”

  “That bodes ill.”

  “Doesn’t it?” Draudd rolled his eyes heavenward. “Ye gods, my lady, the size of these creatures! Can you imagine just how heavy a bow one of them could pull?”