by Greg Keyes
“It’s a bit of a song,” Neil explained. “A song my father taught me.”
“What’s it mean?”
Neil smiled.
“‘Me, my father, my fathers before. Croak, you ravens, I’ll feed you soon.’”
“Not very cheery,” Edhmon said.
“It’s a death song,” Neil said.
“You believe you’re going to die?”
“Oh, I’m going to die; that one thing is certain,” Neil said. “It’s the when, where, and how I’m not so clear on. But my fah always said it was best to go into battle thinking of yourself as already dead.”
“You can do that?”
Neil shrugged. “Not always. Sometimes I’m afraid, and sometimes the rage comes on me. But now and then the saints allow me the death calm, and I like that best.”
Edhmon flushed a little. “This is my first battle,” he admitted. “I hope I’m ready for it.”
“You’re ready for it,” Neil said.
“I’m just so tired of waiting.”
Even as he said that, he flinched as one of the ballistae behind them released with a booming twang, and a fifty-pound stone flung in a flat arc over their heads, smiting the outer bailey of Thornrath and sending a shatter of granite in every direction.
“You won’t be waiting much longer,” Neil assured him. “That wall’s coming down within a bell. They’re mustering their horse behind the waerd already.”
“Why? Why not take them up into the wall? Why risk them against us?”
Neil considered his reply for a few minutes, hoping to find an answer that wouldn’t frighten Edhmon too much.
“Thornrath has never been taken,” he said at last. “From the sea, it’s probably impossible. It’s too thick, too tall, and ships are completely vulnerable to bombardment from above. Likewise, the cliffs of the cape aren’t easily scaled from the seaside. A few defenders can keep any number of men from climbing up there, especially if the attackers are trying to bring up horses and siege engines. And without engines, they face the waerd, which can’t be taken without them.”
He pointed south down the spit of land that separated them from the wall, a ridge just ten kingsyards wide that plunged in cliffs to Foam-breaker Bay on the right and the Ensae on the left. It went that way for forty kingsyards and then widened enough for the waerd, a wedge-shaped fortress with its sharp end pointed at them and gates hidden around behind it. It had three towers and stood separated from the great wall behind it by about ten yards.
“We can’t just ride around the waerd, or they’d pelt us right off the cliffs with whatever they’ve got: stones, boiling oil, molten lead, all of that sort of thing. We’d never make it around to even give the gate a go. So we have to break the waerd from this side, and preferably from a distance. Out here we have a never-ending supply of missiles, though we don’t have a flat wall to hit. More often than not, our stones just skip right off.”
“I can see all of that,” Sir Edhmon said. “But I still don’t see what that’s got to do with the cavalry.”
“Well, when the wall comes down, we still have to cross this causeway and get through the breach before we can capture the castle. And we can only go a few at a time, about six or seven abreast. Then the horse will come to meet us before the ridge widens there.
“Meanwhile, they’ve been saving their missiles for when we come into their shorter range, about ten paces down the causeway. While their cavalry hold us, they’ll keep launching rocks or whatnot into those of us who are queued up behind. And if they do it right, four or five of us will die for every one of them. Maybe more. If the knights stayed in the waerd, they wouldn’t be much more use than any footman. Riding against us, they can do real damage.
“We’ll lose some men to the engines while we’re rushing the breach, but we’ll get in, move our own artillery up, and start battering the gates of Thornrath itself. Before that happens, though, they might kill enough of us to make us think twice about the whole endeavor. At worst they will have cut our numbers greatly.” He slapped the young knight on the shoulder. “Besides, they’re knights. Knights ride into battle. How do you think they’d feel on the wall, throwing rocks at us?”
“But there must be an easier way in,” Edhmon said.
“This is the easy way in,” Neil said. “To get to this approach, an army invading Crotheny would have to either land fifty leagues north of here and fight their way past the sea fortresses or cross the border with Hansa and make their way through Newland, which as you’ve seen can be flooded. According to Duke Artwair, this is the first time Thornrath has had to be defended from land. The southern approach, I’m told, makes this look easy.”
“But you make it sound so hopeless,” Edhmon said. “We might as well be riding off a cliff, and those of us in front will surely die.”
“Only if things go the way they want,” Neil said, nodding at the waerd.
“How else can things go?”
“Our way. Our first charge hits them so hard, we cut right through their horse and plunge into the breach. If they don’t hold us, they can’t bombard us, at least not for long.”
“But that would take a miracle, wouldn’t it?”
Neil shook his head. “When I first saw Thornrath, I thought it must be the work of giants or demons. But it was built by men, men like us. It didn’t take a miracle to build it; it won’t take one to capture it. But it will take men. Do you understand?”
“That’s it, Sir Neil. You tell ’im how it is!” Neil was startled by the shout and found that it was Sir Fell Hemmington who had spoken. “You hear that, lads? One charge or nothing!”
Suddenly, to Neil’s utter surprise, the whole column took up that refrain.
“One charge or nothing!”
He’d been talking to Edhmon without realizing that anyone else had been listening. But he was the leader, wasn’t he? He probably was supposed to have given some sort of speech, anyway.
The shouting doubled in fury as another stone struck the waerd and with a low rumble the wall finally collapsed, leaving a gap some five kingsyards in width. At the same moment, the enemy cavalry began to appear around either side of the fortification.
“Lances!” Neil shouted, couching his own long spear. All along the front rank, the others dropped level on both sides of him.
“One charge!” he shouted, spurring his mount, still feeling calm as the horse broke into a dead run.
The sea, as always, was beautiful.
“WHAT’S THAT LOOK?” Zemlé asked from the back of her kalbok, a few kingsyards away. “It’s not guilt starting to gnaw you, is it?”
Stephen glanced at her. In the buttery light of the morning sun her face was fresh and very young, and for an instant Stephen imagined her as a little girl wandering the highland meadows, fussing at goats and combing through clover in search of a lucky one.
“Should I be?” Stephen asked. “Even if you consider what we did to be, ah—”
Her arched brows stopped him in the middle of his sophistry.
He scratched his chin and began again. “I never took a vow of chastity,” he said, “and I’m not a follower of Saint Elspeth.”
“But you were planning on being a Decmanian,” she reminded him. “You would have taken the vow.”
“Can I tell you a secret?” Stephen asked.
She smiled. “It wouldn’t be the first one.”
He felt his face go warm.
“Come on,” she prompted.
“It was never my idea to enter the priesthood. It was my father who wanted that. Now, don’t get me wrong; you know my interests. I could never have followed them without some attachment to z’Irbina, so I was willing. But I wasn’t much looking forward to that vow of chastity. I suppose I comforted myself with the thought that I was likely to remain mostly chaste whether I took the vow or not.”
“That’s silly,” she said. “You’re not what I would call ugly. A little inept, perhaps…”
“Oh,” Stephen sa
id. “Sorry about that.”
“But perfectly trainable,” she finished. “A tafleis anscrifteis.”
Now his ears were burning.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I suppose I had vaguely hoped I might somehow move on to one of the less…stringent orders. And as things are, there’s not much chance of me taking the Decmanian vows now. Or even of living much longer, really. We should have gotten up earlier.”
“This pass is too dangerous without daylight,” she replied. “We started as soon as made sense. As for the other, I’m sure you feel you could die happy right now. But I promise you, there’s still plenty to live for.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Stephen replied. “But Hespero is still back there, and then there’s the woorm. Of course, we haven’t seen it lately. Maybe it’s given up the chase.”
“I doubt that,” Zemlé said.
“Why?”
“I told you—because the prophecy says it’s the waurm will drive you to the Alq,” she replied.
“But what if I’m not the one spoken of in the prophecy? Aren’t we making a rather large assumption?”
“It followed you to d’Ef, and from d’Ef at least as far as the Then River. Why would you begin to doubt now that it’s following you?”
“But why would it follow me?”
“Because you’re the one who will find the Alq,” she said, her voice hinting at exasperation.
“That’s a ‘catel turistat suus caudam’ argument,” he objected.
“Yes,” she agreed. “It goes round and round. Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
“Well, is it supposed to kill m—Kauron’s heir?”
“I’ve already told you what I know,” she said.
Stephen remembered the monster’s glance as it found him from half a league away and shivered.
“Is it that bad?” she asked.
“I hope you don’t ever have to find out, no matter what the prophecy says,” Stephen replied.
“I’m kind of curious, actually. But set all that aside; you did have a look on your face. If it wasn’t guilt, then what was it?”
“Oh. That.”
Her eyes narrowed. “What do you mean, ‘that’? Don’t you dare tell me you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I—” He sighed. “I was wondering what would happen if we simply forgot this whole prophecy business and just went off into the mountains someplace. Maybe Hespero and the woorm would kill each other and everyone would forget the Alq.”
Her brows leapt up. “Go off together? You and me? You mean, like husband and wife?”
“Ah, well, I suppose I did mean that, yes.”
“That’s all well and good, but I hardly know you, Stephen.”
“But we—”
“Yes, didn’t we? And I enjoyed it. I like you, but what have either of us to offer the other? I’ve no dowry. Do you think your family would take to me under those conditions?”
Stephen didn’t have to think about that for long.
“No,” he admitted.
“And without your family, what do you have to offer me? Love?”
“Maybe,” he said cautiously.
“Maybe. That’s exactly right. Maybe.
“You wouldn’t be the first to confuse sex with love, Stephen. It’s a silly confusion, too. Anyway, a day ago you were desperately in love with someone else. Can a few well-placed kisses change that so easily? If so, how can I trust in any constancy from you?”
“Now you’re making fun of me,” Stephen said.
“Yes, I am, and no, I’m not. Because if I didn’t laugh at you, I might get angry, and neither of us needs that right now. If you want to run off into the mountains, you’ll have to do it alone. I’ll go on to the Witchhorn and try to find the Alq myself. Because even if the praifec and the waurm do destroy each other, there are others looking, and someone will find it eventually.”
“How do you know all this?” Stephen asked.
“The Book of Return—”
“But you’ve never seen the book,” Stephen snapped, cutting her off. “Everything you know is based on a thousand-year-old rumor about a book no one has seen except Hespero, if even that is true. So how do you know any of this is true?”
She started to answer, but he cut her off again.
“Have you ever read the Lay of Walker?”
“I’ve heard of it,” she said. “It’s about the Virgenyan warrior who fought off the demon fleet of Thiuzan Hraiw, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But here’s the thing: Historically, Walker lived a century or so before the start of the Warlock Wars, a hundred and fifty years before Thiuzan Hraiw even began to build his fleet.
“Chetter Walker fought off a fleet, all right, if you call ten ships a fleet. And they were from Ihnsgan, an ancient Iron Sea kingdom. But the epic, you see, was written down five hundred years later, after the chaos of the Warlock Wars, when Virgenya’s new enemy was Hansa.
“Thiuzan Hraiw was from Hansa, and his name has a very typically Hanzish sound to it. So the bards—sworn as they are to keep the songs exactly the way they heard them on pain of being cursed by Saint Rosemary—nevertheless have Walker living in the wrong century, fighting the wrong enemy, with weapons that hadn’t been invented yet. Oral tradition always promises it’s kept history straight, and it never does. So what makes you think your ancestors kept their little saga faithfully?”
“Because,” she replied stubbornly, “I have seen the actual book, or at least part of it, the part about you.”
That brought him up short. “Have you? And how did you manage that?”
She closed her eyes, and he saw her jaw tighten.
“I was Hespero’s lover,” she said.
That afternoon Zemlé pointed out the top of the Witchhorn. Stephen supposed he’d been envisioning something shaped like an ox horn, curving up into the sky, surrounded by storm clouds, lightning, and the distant black shapes of evil spirits whirling about its peak.
Instead, aside from being perhaps a bit taller than its neighbors, it was—to him, at least—indistinguishable from any other mountain in the Bairghs.
“We’ll reach the base of it by tomorrow noon,” she said.
He nodded but didn’t answer.
“You haven’t spoken since this morning,” she said. “I’m beginning to feel annoyed. Surely you understood that you weren’t my first lover.”
“But Hespero?” he burst out. “Oh, I think you might have mentioned that before I followed you up here, before I put all my trust in you.”
“Well, the point was rather to have you trust me,” she pointed out.
“Right. And I did. Until now, anyway, when I have no choice.”
“I’m not proud of it, Stephen, but the saints hate a liar. You asked, and I told you. It’s more important that you believe the prophecy than think well of me.”
“How old were you when this happened? Ten?”
“No,” she said patiently. “I was twenty-five.”
“You said he left your village years ago,” Stephen snapped. “You can’t be much older than twenty-five now.”
“Flatterer. I’m exactly twenty-five, as of last week.”
“You mean—”
“Since he returned, yes,” she said.
“Saints, that’s even worse!”
She glared at him from her kalbok across about three kingsyards of broken ground.
“If I were close enough,” she said, “I would slap you. I did what I had to. I’m not a fool, you know. I had the same doubts about the prophecy as you. Now I don’t.”
“Did you enjoy it?” he asked.
“He was a good deal more experienced than you,” she shot back.
“Ah. No tafleis anscrifteis there, eh?” he responded sarcastically.
Her face contorted, and she began a retort but then closed her eyes and took a few deep breaths. When she opened her eyes, she was more composed.
“This is my fault,” she said at last, evenly. “I knew you
were young and lacking experience. I should have known it would do this to you.”
“Do what?”
“Make you stupid with jealousy. You’re jealous of a man I slept with before I ever met you. Does that make any sense to you at all?”
“Well, it’s just that—”
“Yes?” she asked patiently enough to make him feel once more that he was a little boy.
“—he’s evil,” he finished weakly.
“Is he?” she asked. “I don’t know. Certainly he’s our enemy in that he wants the same thing we do. But I haven’t betrayed you to him; indeed, I betrayed him to you. So stop being such a boy and try to be a man for once. You don’t need experience for that, just courage.”
That night saw no reprise of the night before. Stephen lay awake for long bells, excruciatingly aware of Zemlé’s every breath and movement. His mind moved downward toward sleep in fits, but a strong breath or turn of her body would snap him back.
She’s awake. She’s forgiven me…
But he wasn’t sure he needed forgiveness. She’d slept with a praifec. Surely that was a sin even if Hespero was a Skaslos reincarnated. And just before—
He sighed. That wasn’t the real problem, was it?
Hespero’s touch was the shadow under his own. The touch of a man who knew how to please a woman.
He cycled through ever smaller orbits of remorse and anger until the stone floor parted like tissue and something pulled him through.
Suddenly he was sticky and wet, and his flesh and bone ached as from a high fever. Panic sent him grasping for something, anything, but he was in a void—not falling but floating, surrounded on all sides by terrors he could not see.
He tried to scream, but something clotted in his mouth.
He was on the verge of madness when a soothing voice murmured to him in words he didn’t understand but which reassured him nevertheless. Then, gently, a band of color drew across his eyes, and his heart calmed.
His vision cleared, and he saw the Witchhorn, much as it had looked in the light of sunset, albeit with more snow. He floated down toward it like a bird, over a valley, over a village, and then, with a touch of vertigo, up its slopes, along a winding trail, to a house in a tree. A face appeared, pale, copper-eyed, a Hadivar face, and he knew now that Zemlé was right, it just meant Sefry.