Lenae wrung her hands. “We’ll be dead and lost,” she said, “if he dies now.”
“We will,” said Naillil. Tears running down her cheeks. “Gods, Amrath and Eltheia, our new young king, his beauty, what he’s done for us.”
They’d set the shrine up on a hillock, a green mound topped with a grove of sweetwood trees, looking down over the plain, close to where the Army of Amrath had sat to watch the dragons break the city open before the army sacked it. From the top of the hill you could see the city clearly, the scorch marks, the shattered buildings, the charred ruins of towers and houses. The massive bloody walls. It was still, seemed to be largely deserted. Most of the inhabitants gone to join the huge army waiting further south. The river was very clear, and there was the bridge, currently surely the most famous bridge in all Irlast. Gods, if Marith was dying, that bridge’d be sung about for a thousand thousand years.
“What’s the bridge called?” Tobias asked. “Anyone know?”
“The Turain Bridge,” the answer eventually came back.
Epic name.
On a rise in the middle of the camp, a scaffold had been set up. Ten heads staring out. Neatly arranged facing forwards and backwards alternately, someone had put some thought into it. Tobias was in perfect time to watch a crow peck a woman’s eyeball out.
Dumb sods who had said Marith was behind the night attack. Everyone had thought it, even if only briefly. Logical thing to think. But the sheer stupidity of anyone saying it was enough to make your eyeballs bleed.
Boom boom. You’re on form today, Tobias, mate.
The shrine itself was kind of… don’t know what the word is, “earnest” might be one way of describing it. Couple of stakes looking remarkably like the stakes with heads on them he’d just been admiring; ribbons and leafy branches and flowers woven around them; couple of strings of bells and stones and bones rattling in the wind. A branch of a willow tree, which might be a tad insensitive. A pile of objects building up at the base of it—coins, knives, arm-rings, necklaces. Splashes of wine and milk and honey and blood. Lenae bent down to place a posy of red flowers. Rovi snorted loudly. Tobias wondered if pissing on it could count as a libation.
“My life for his, oh gods and demons, all you powers, my life for his, my life, my life.” A young soldier, probably Marith’s own age at most, kneeling, his face creased up with grief. Slashed the palm of his right hand with his sword, splattered blood. “My life for his.” A much older man, older than Tobias, his knees creaking alarmingly as he knelt down but still dressed as a soldier. Placed a crude carved image of a horse beside the blood. “My life for his.” A very young girl in a white dress, long dark hair falling down her back, her eyes puffy with tears. “He cannot die, he cannot be harmed, oh gods and demons, oh gods, he cannot be harmed, my life for his.”
Lenae took out her knife, cut a lock of her hair, twisted it around a sprig of green stuff. “There.”
A shadow. The dragons came down low over the shrine. Cried out, and Tobias could almost, almost understand what they were saying. Felt the wind of their wing beats on his face.
In the camp of the Army of Amrath, trumpets began to blow. Over and over, loud, calm but urgent. Silver music. Voices shouting, soldiers moving, the people of the camp churning, flowing, pulling themselves into place. The army moving into ranks for war. A voice shouted, “March!” The dragons shot up into the air screaming, spewing fire. The drums began to beat. Voices howled, “Vengeance for the king! Vengeance!”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Marith Altrersyr the King, the Lord of the World, the greatest conqueror in the history of Irlast
His camp
Opened his eyes. A woman’s voice was whispering around the tent: “You lost, Marith Altrersyr.” Thalia’s voice whispered in his ear: “A kindness. But I didn’t do it.” The sound of leaves shivering in the wind. He sat up. Screamed in pain. Brychan was beside him suddenly, holding him. The pain in his body was the worst thing he had ever felt.
“You need to lie down,” Brychan said. “You shouldn’t try to move, My Lord King.”
Brychan held a cup to his mouth. He gulped down water. It was cold and sweet, tasted of mint. His mouth was full of dirt and soil. He choked as he swallowed.
His shoulder was hurting him. It felt very heavy. He tried to move his head, to see. The bed beneath him felt gritty, rough on his skin. He was naked, his left shoulder and his left thigh were bandaged. There was blood spreading over the bandages. Like spider webs.
Wounded. He’d been wounded. He couldn’t be wounded. He couldn’t lose.
“He’s awake, My Lord,” Brychan called. Alis Nymen came in, sat down by the bed.
“My Lord King,” Alis said.
“What’s happening?”
Alis said, “Nothing of importance.”
“No. Where’s Thalia? And Osen? What’s happening, Alis? Tell me.” He tried to sit up again. His body screamed again. White pain. Blind and dumb. Gasped and breathed, tried tried to make it go away. I cannot be harmed. I saw a knife cut my skin and crumble away to rust. I have fought and won a hundred battles. I have fought gods. I cannot be harmed, so I cannot be in pain. “Tell me. I need to get up, I need to know. I need to lead my army.” He tried to stand. Fell down. The pain screamed through him. He vomited up water soiled with blood.
“Where’s Thalia? Where’s Osen? I have to get up.”
“Lie down, Marith,” said Alis. “Please.”
“Marith? Am I not king any more? Where’s Thalia?”
“Later,” said Alis.
“I’ll die,” Marith screamed, “if I have to lie in this bed in the dark not knowing what’s happening.” The tent was very dim: I want to be in a room with windows, he thought, I want to look out and see the sky, see trees and houses and clouds and the sea, I want to see the sunrise, the moonlight, the stars, I want to feel the breeze, I hate this tent. Tried again to get up, got himself on his feet leaning on the bed, his body howling at him in pain, red lines scrolling over his bandages. Brychan came to help him.
In the distance, he heard a ring of trumpets.
“What is going on, Alis? Tell me now.”
Brychan said, “You’ve been unconscious for most of the day, My Lord King. Lord Fiolt is leading the men into battle against the army of Turain and the Mountains of Pain. The queen is with them.”
Battle? Without me to lead them? The men, my army, fighting beneath another’s command. No. No. They cannot. They must not. He tried to walk to the doorway, looked around for his sword. Turning his head made his shoulder hurt. He had almost forgotten what it felt like, physical pain like this. He cried out in pain; Brychan and Alis took his arms, helped him back into bed. Brychan held the cup of water to his lips.
“Rest, My Lord King,” Alis said. “Please.”
“They attacked us, then, the enemy, the Queen of Turain and her soldiers? She did betray us, then, as Lady Sabryya feared?”
Alis fidgeted with his robe. Brychan didn’t say anything. Coughed.
“Brychan?”
“Lord Fiolt… Lord Durith… The men… The men were desperate, My Lord King. Half the camp thought you were dead, the state you were brought back in. The witch woman, the demoness, who murdered you… The men were mad to fight. So Lord Durith announced he would lead them out to attack the enemy.”
“What? What gave him…? The queen and Lord Fiolt: they command, in my absence. Not Alleen Durith.”
Alis said after a little while, “Lord Mathen tried to reason with Lord Durith. Told him it was too dangerous. Lord Mathen knows the mountain men, how they fight. But Lord Fiolt could see, in the end… I could see… We had to attack them, My Lord King. If we hadn’t… the men were going mad, knowing you were harmed.”
Alleen Durith. Gods. But a sweet shameful pleasure at the men’s grief for him.
“And… Thalia?” He was unsure what he wanted them to say.
Alis said, “She agreed with Lord Durith. She told them to attack the enemy in al
l strength, My Lord King. She has gone with them.”
No. Thalia, encourage this? She would, I suppose, he thought then. She is their queen. She will want to lead them.
Marith said, “Help me to get up.”
“You need to rest now,” said Alis. “Please, My Lord King, Marith.”
“I have to know what’s happening.”
“I don’t know,” said Brychan. “They marched an hour or so ago. We have not heard anything yet.”
Osen might die, he thought, without me there. Osen, Alleen, Ryn Mathen, Kiana—and what if Thalia has gone too close, what if she is caught up in it? She followed the men into battle once. Or what if she despairs, thinks that I am dead? I have to go to them.
These are lies, of course. The real reason they must not march without him… he cannot face himself if he speaks it, thinks it.
“Leave me,” he shouted at Alis Nymen. “Leave me, now.” Brychan went to go out as well, taking the lamp with him. “Not you, Brychan.”
Thought he heard the sound of metal crashing on metal, voices yelling out the paean. Thus the endless battle is joined again, the Army of Amrath against the men of Turain and the men of the Mountains of Pain, who stood as numberless as the stems in a wheat field. The Army of Amrath mad and raging, half believing their king to be dead. Swords and spears and axes, the music of bronze and iron, the swirling dust kicked up by ten times a thousand feet. Men struggling, stabbing, the voices screaming out “hold” and the voice screaming “forward, go forward,” the voices sobbing as they died. The thunder of horses’ hooves in the charge, the arrows loosed to block out the light of the sun. The dragons, the shadowbeasts, the god things, wrestling.
I have to be there. Struggled to get up, fell down in pain. “Brychan, I have to get up, I have to.”
A long silence, Brychan standing in the bedchamber doorway holding the lamp.
“You swear to me,” Brychan said, “My Lord King, you swear you won’t try to fight.”
“You’re my servant, Brychan.”
“I won’t help you if you don’t swear it, My Lord King.”
Gods, he remembered this man crying in terror when he questioned him, once.
Marith winced and gasped as he finally made it back onto his feet. “I swear I… won’t try to fight.”
“I’m the queen’s servant, as well, My Lord King,” said Brychan. “I have to think of her, also.”
Oh, you do, I’m sure. Often.
Stood up very slowly, Brychan helping him. Together they managed to get him dressed, a knife at his belt, his blood-spattered cloak fastened at his throat. His crown on his head.
“I need my sword,” he said to Brychan.
A pause. “You just promised me you wouldn’t fight, My Lord King.”
“I need my sword, Brychan. Now.” He looked at the bed he had been lying in, the sheets soiled with sweat and blood, they looked dirty, as though the bed had been made up unwashed. He brushed his hand over them: they felt rough with dirt.
Black sand, he thought. He gagged and gasped for breath.
His sword was fetched. His horse was ready, waiting beside the tent. Brychan gave him a cup of firewine. Helped him walk to his horse, lifted him into the saddle. His hands shook when he tried to take up the reins. The world spun and he thought he was going to faint; Brychan had to grab at him, hold him upright, to stop him falling. But when the people in the camp saw him mounted they shrieked for joy.
Brychan took the horse on a lead-rein. As they went through the camp people came rushing up trying to kiss his boots, the hem of his cloak. A woman threw flowers over him, one caught in the horse’s mane. A white flower, in the white horse-hair: he shuddered at it. Reached out to flick it off. Why, he thought, why should I do that? It’s a flower a pretty woman threw at me in delight. Another woman grabbed at Brychan’s arm, gave Brychan a posy of white flowers. The pleasure of it flushed through him again.
And a new feeling. Something like grief. Not a new feeling. He looked at Brychan, looking ahead smiling as a girl blew kisses, dropped a pretty scarf in the dust before Brychan’s horse; head nodding as a trumpet blew and a voice shouted, “The king! The king!”; sitting up so proud as a burst of sunlight came down on them and the camp people cheering around them. A familiar feeling. Grief and pity, Marith thought, for all of them. Fools, all of them.
They rode through the foothills of the mountains, skirting high above the burned plain where the enemy sat. A rich, golden evening, very warm: it should be pleasant. Night-flowering lilies, gardenia, glasspetals, their scent drawing the first moths. Groves of wild peach trees in blossom. Birds circling, calling, swirling in the darkening sky, drifts of lace. The melancholy of them, the grief of them. And he himself with a few guards around him, no one speaking to him, no one to think about, gazing at the sky and the trees, seeing patterns in the birds’ flight. Washed away in it, dreaming. He stared at the sky and the longer he looked the more colours he saw there, shifting into one another, he saw them changing, the sky changing colour, becoming huge and every colour in his eyes. Blue as Thalia’s eyes. This is peace, he thought. A memory of something, peace like this… and the pain and the shame came rushing back, wearying, because he remembered walking in the dawn, in the silence, feeling this, and then feeling grief. Riding in the dust, feeling this, with Carin. Standing by his window in Malth Elelane, in the dusk, alone, feeling this, a few days before Carin… before Carin was dead. His heart in his chest singing. Long caressing fingers of sorrow and pain. Knowing, feeling, hoping it would come.
They have betrayed me, he thought. It has come. He looked around at the guards: Brychan, the others whose names he did not know. Expected to see the swords coming for him, blades trying to cut him down, stabbing at him, forcing him from his horse. So clear. He could see them doing it. See the evening light flashing on the swords and in their eyes. Hear the horse scream beneath him, maddened, the crashing of birds overhead. And he would lie in the earth, in the evening flowers, in the silence, breathing in the flowers’ perfume, listening to the birds calling overhead. And he would lie there until he died, or if he could not die he would lie there alone until the world ends.
The guards on their horses kept going. Did not look at him, or speak to him. A horse whinnied, another tossed its head hard, made its trappings ring. The lovely creak of the leather, the smell of the leather, the jangle of the bronze bit. The ground became stony, a patch of white rock thrusting bare through the black earth, so that the horses’ hooves rang with a good hollow sound. It was almost dark now. The glow of the sky in the far west. The stars rising. An owl called. The men did not speak. They were not going to kill him. The creak of leather saddles. The sound of horses’ hooves. The jangle of a bronze bit. The last plaintive song of a bird. They came around a shoulder of land, looked down into the plain, and they saw his men dying.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The Army of Amrath draws up in long rows stretching away into the horizon. Rank upon rank of them. Gleaming armour, gilded bronze over fine white cloth. They carry the sarriss, the long spear, its barbed point a thing to rip flesh going in and coming out. A short wide-bladed sword that will stab and hack and tear. A broad cruel knife. Their helmets cover their eyes. They wear red horsehair plumes that nod in the wind. Seen from above, standing on the walls of a city looking down at them, they must look like a great field of flowers. Like the Rose Forest of Chathe must have looked, before we burned it. They stand in perfect silence, still as standing stones, still as teeth in a dead mouth. Perfect order. Perfect discipline.
The infantry have the centre. The men in close formation, shoulder to shoulder, tight-packed, a wall of bronze. A solid block. A hammer. A single, deadly blade. On the left wing, the light cavalry under Faseem Meerak and Alleen Durith. There also, the magelord Ynthe Kimek and two war machines hurling banefire. On the right wing, the heavy cavalry under Osen Fiolt.
The enemy fill the plain like an ocean. A surging tide of men and horses, black horses, black-temper
ed iron axes, black armour that sucks down the light. Black antlers on their helmets, reaching like clawing fingers. Like dead bone hands clawing out. Above them, circling, golden eagles with wing spans wider than a man. Snakes in the horses’ manes. Blue fire in the horses’ mouths and beneath their hooves. Gold fire flickering around the eagles’ wings. Rank upon rank of them moving, swirling, no order to them, the horses buck and rear, the infantry twine around them, the mass of them is like the ocean, restless, formless, a dance that is blurring to the mind, soothing almost to the eye as I watch them. One of the great pleasures of my life now, to watch the sea. They do not have drums or trumpets, as we do, the men of the Mountains of Pain and the men of Turain. The snakes in their demon horses’ manes hiss, the snakes’ scales rasp together, the eagles above them shriek. They fly pennants of gold silk hung with horse tails, and there are whistles set in the pennants to catch the wind. They make a low moaning sound, like the sound of a cold wind. It reminds me of the silence of the Small Chamber, the breath of the victim waiting there for my knife.
A good omen, then, surely, I try to think.
The Queen of Turain rides at the head of them. Her face is bruised, a red wound runs from her mouth to her forehead. Her right arm hangs limp at her side. The willow leaves in her crown are brown and withered. Her golden hair is ragged and stained black.
“Like a field of ripe wheat after the blight,” Osen Fiolt says. There is the same desperate kind of hope in his voice. He looks at me. I look back at him. We will do this, our eyes say. We must. Curse Marith, our eyes say. All the trust we placed in him. The world, he promised us. We did not, any of us, we did not think that he could simply lose.
“We are outnumbered,” says Ryn Mathen.
“We have been outnumbered before,” Alleen Durith says. “The Army of Amrath was outnumbered ten to one on the plain of Geremela, as I recall.”
“Let’s hope someone gets the same brilliant idea as you did, then,” says Dansa Arual, “and changes sides early.”
The House of Sacrifice Page 21