“I am pleased to hear it,” said Mistress Keel.
“It would be easy for you to find out the name and estate of this man,” said Aidris, “but I must beg you not to do it and to keep your own counsel.”
“She has your friendship . . .”
“Forever!”
“Delbin was a soldier,” said Mistress Keel suddenly, “and married to a farmer’s daughter. I never told her that I found this out. She liked to think that they were finer. But they were a pair of young country folk, alone in the world, without family. They died when their cart overturned crossing the Ringist. The baby was rescued, floating, and brought to the Moon Sisters. The trick of fate was that she was beautiful, lovely as a princess, and turned out upon the world alone at sixteen. It might have gone much worse for her in Lien . . .”
For an instant Aidris was tempted to ask the woman about dark matters, about Hurne the Harrier and his master, but she would not get in deeper.
“Will you keep this letter?” she asked warily.
For answer the woman reached out and took it from her hand. She smoothed it out and held a corner of the paper to the last coals of the fire. They both watched in silence as the letter burned to ashes.
“Thank you, Mistress Keel.”
“The Goddess is kind,” said the innkeeper’s wife. “My prayers have been answered.”
“You and your husband will be well rewarded for the use of your inn and for your good service.”
“My Queen . . .”
The woman curtsied low and went away again. Aidris, in the few moments alone that were left to her, pondered, on this special day, on the lives of women. Her own life seemed to her hardly a woman’s life at all, with none of the softness that women were supposed to enjoy and, thank the Goddess, not much of the Shame and violence to which they were subjected. She drew out the scrying stone and saw the Lady at once, looking out with a fierce expression.
She said, “Is it well? Do you know our purpose?”
For answer there was only a whisper.
“Go swiftly!”
A hand held up a snake very tightly, behind its head, as if to squeeze the creature to death. The sign was plain: Adderneck. So from this lady, whom she thought of as having been “a true woman,” loving and being loved and fighting for those she loved with “a woman’s weapons,” including magic, she received, on this day, only a call to battle.
Then it was time. Yvand, dressed for the journey, came in with Aidris’s fur cloak, and, shining-eyed, slipped around the queen’s wrist a wreath of ivy leaves, wet from the rain. They went down the stairs, and Telavel waited with the escort. She took some time to visit Tamir in his stall and bid him farewell. Then they rode to the South Ride in the steady rain, and there she parted with some of the escort, chosen by lot, for they would all have ridden with the queen.
The South Ride was packed with mounted troops, eerily silent, riding off by companies into the forest, with order kept by a few drumbeats and muffled shouts. There was a shelter, hardly a tent, set up on the right of the broad field, under a large oak tree. Bajan stood waiting with a tall woman, his sister Ambré, whose husband led one of the companies of the Morrigar. There was a Shaman, a holy man, brought from the camp of the Nureshen, and Lord Lingrit and Nenad Am Charn to see that all was done well.
So, in the rain, with the movement of the army all about them, she took Bajan’s hand and they spoke to the priest and were married. The Shaman, a mild-eyed man, not impossibly old, with a long braid of hair looped over his shoulder, invoked the blessing of the Goddess. Bajan gave her a heavy silver ring with a fire opal, and she gave him a gold ring. They kissed. She was numb and cold and wished they were in bed at the inn, or in some mountain camp, in the bridal tent, where none came except to leave food at the door.
She tried to smile for his sake, but when she embraced Ambré, her new sister, they both shed tears. Lord Lingrit had one of his servants stand forth with a stirrup cup for the whole party, of strong fine brandywine out of Lien. So they gulped or sipped the fiery spirit and healths were drunk to the queen and to Danu Bajan, the new consort. Then Gerr of Kerrick, Count Zerrah, was there, mounted upon Firedrake, ready to ride with the queen. She kissed Bajan once more and mounted and rode off in the midst of the kedran company with Lord Lingrit on one side and Gerr on the other; so they entered the forest. There was a bird call from the mustering tent, and Akaranok swung himself up on to the front of the queen’s saddle.
“Straight on for two leagues, my Queen,” he said, “then we turn southeast for Aldero.”
The pace was fast for the whole of the first day. The six hundred riders of the Morrigar swept down upon Aldero, drank it dry and swept on again, by smaller trails, bearing always southeast. The way was downhill; the kedran company, with the queen among them, camped in a clearing that the Tulgai called Six Ways. Megan Brock, wearing a hood to protect her stitched cheek, went about inspecting the horses, trying to cheer the women in their cramped quarters. There was one fire for twenty riders that night, and they knew they must soon turn to cold food as they came nearer to the pass.
Aidris broke off her dice game with Lingrit and Gerr and walked out to find some air. The crowded camp reeked of damp horses and burnt broth. Not far off she heard other riders passing by; an owl called, a true owl, not one of the Tulgai. She managed to sleep a few hours on this first night and in the dawn rose up with the wakers going about.
The going became harder. They rode uphill, the forest trails were narrow, the rain and cold unceasing. There was casting about and cursing when the company of the Nureshen failed at a meeting point. Aidris became aware that many of the kedran, whether from Athron or the Chameln lands, did not love the Tulgai, hated to be directed by a dwarfish creature that swung down whistling from a tree. Yet Megan Brock held them together, and the little men did their work marvellously well. After the long day riding, with her legs ready to fold under her and her body aching, she groomed Telavel as she had always done and fell into an exhausted sleep.
Akaranok said, breaking into the difficult morning hour before they rode off, “There is one who follows, my queen. He catches up in the night. He runs the trails like a wild beast. He cannot come out of the forest.”
“Can he be caught, Akaranok?”
“Only by the longshanks,” he said. “These warrior women could hold him, but it would take many of our Tulgai to do it, and they are needed to show the way.”
“I will give you a detail one night.”
Time was pressing. The forest had swallowed them up. Were they more than a day’s ride from the pass? Zabrandor appeared at midday bristling and alert while she and Lingrit and Gerr felt themselves very grey and downcast.
“We make good time,” he said. “My Tulgai have flown ahead and spied out the hundreds.”
So they rode on, down a gentler slope, packed with the loose, green pine that told them they were approaching the Adderneck.
Gerr of Kerrick, at least, had his second wind. “An adventure,” he panted, “a great saga, my Queen. The Forest Ride of the Morrigar. The Great Ambush.”
She spoke at last to Lingrit about the one who followed. He was grey with fatigue; she knew that his joints ached in the damp.
“Hurne?” he echoed. “Hurne of Balufir? No wonder he disappeared from his city haunts!”
“He was so well-known, then, in the city?”
“He became well-known through his disappearance. Rosmer set up a search for him . . . made it an excuse to bring down some of his enemies with talk of corruption and murder.”
“Yet Rosmer keeps him here in the forest!”
Lingrit rode on in silence, then spoke to her most seriously.
“My Queen, this is a great enterprise. We must come through. Even if the ambush fails for any reason, you must be brought to safety with your cousin the king. We have no time for diversions. Let Hurne run or have him swiftly dealt with.”
“What could we learn from him about his master?”
&
nbsp; “Why would you spare him . . . if this is a man who tried to capture or kill you?”
“He has paid for this,” she said. “I think I can break the spell that holds him.”
“But what then?” he demanded. “Add him to your train? Send him back into Lien or some other land to do deeds of villainy?”
She shook her head. When it was night, they halted not twenty miles from the Adderneck Pass and made their final camp. She fumbled about with a handkerchief and then said to Yvand, privately, “Make me a poppet, Yvand. I have need of one.”
So Yvand, with a sidelong glance, took the piece of cloth and, with sticks and a pine cone and thread from her pack, quickly made an excellent poppet. They wrapped it in a piece of dark blue silk and blacked its cloth legs for boots. Aidris drew out at last the handful of red hair that had been brought to her, and Yvand stitched it on to the creature. They stared at the thing in the half light and smiled squeamishly. Aidris thought it already had a look of Hurne.
She did not summon Akaranok or her escort or make any move to take Hurne, if indeed he followed them, but went off behind the tent where the faint light of the Huntress Moon, an extra moon edging into the calendar, came down through the pines. She knew the words very well, and added new ones of her own. She named the poppet Hurne and kept it by her and bade it come out of the forest when she told it to. It was a working that she might not have done with much conviction at any other time, but the long way riding had told on her. She was lightheaded. She could not sleep for a long time and then slept too deep and woke unrefreshed.
For the first time on that day she saw the whole troop, rippling a stand of young pine, where a fire had gone through four summers past. Standing on a low bluff with Gerr, she could also look back and see a part of the long way they had come. Now was a time of waiting. They must time it just right and be silent and wait for the news brought back by the Tulgai and the mounted scouts. So she was allowed to ride through all the troops, greeting the tribesfolk, showing that the queen had kept them company.
They rode then across a plateau, a high shelf thickly covered with pines that dropped suddenly into the gorge. The way down was steep, but there were good trails. A special hundred, drawn from all the Morrigar, had ridden on ahead with their guides. They would go down in daylight and cross the Adderneck. It was hazardous. No one lived in or near the pass, but patrols from Mel’Nir might be about. If it was watched or guarded, the orders were for them to stand firm and send word back. By midday they had not returned.
The weather, here in the southeast, was clear at last. Aidris longed for rain and mist; the pine woods were too open. At any moment a troop of Melniros, come by chance to the plateau to hunt, might see the riders among the trees and give warning. At dusk of the long day, the scouts from the southern road returned, and there was a last quickening of the pace. Riders poured through the pines and spilled down the side of the pass. Aidris went to a point where she could look down and see the Adderneck spread out before her in the twilight. The broad road flowed in from the south into a valley with high wooded sides, then for half a mile the valley narrowed and was clamped between high rocks. The road flowed out again and wound off another mile or so to the plain, still between high bluffs. Word had come from the northern scouts: a camp of Mel’Nir was just visible by a village called Folgry, due north on the plain.
There was nothing to do but wait, in darkness. Aidris put her head down on a folded blanket on the pine needles to rest her eyes for a few moments, then Yvand was shaking her. She had slept deeply; it was time.
She mounted up and came with part of her escort to the place that had been chosen for the leaders to watch the ambush. Presently Batro of the Nureshen came up and promised that the wait would not be long. She soothed Telavel and gave her pieces of apple to keep her quiet. The place where they stood was narrow; the escort and a whole troop of the Durgashen pressed closely round about. Megan Brock came up, and then Old Zabrandor himself squeezed his tall horse through to the queen’s side. Aidris looked down into the blackness of the pass and felt the wind blow cold.
Old Zabrandor said, “You’ll hear their scouts soon, my Queen. They are coming on in full array, these hundreds, but it will not serve the poor devils!”
Megan Brock gave a soft laugh and whistled the riding song of the kedran:
“The Men of Mel’Nir are tall as trees,
They will lie dead on the plain.”
The night was not silent but full of movement: a cough, the creak of leather. Then she heard it: hoofbeats in the pass, one rider, then another. The outriders of Mel’Nir came through and hard on their heels grew a mighty metallic wave of sound. The Red Hundreds, the crack troops of the Great King, the scourge of the warlords, the pride of Mel’Nir, rode boldly into the pass, talking, laughing and singing their own bouncing saddle-songs. They wore their white surcoats, and on their helmets were yellow and white plumes, clearly visible in the night. They came on, invincible and proud, and Zabrandor had gone to begin the work.
When the narrowest part of the way was full, the mounted archers of the tribes shot from ambush at those following, still in the broader part of the valley. They uttered no battle cry, only the arrows came whirring out of the dark, and the men of Mel’Nir fell down, shouted, died. Those in the narrows, pressed ahead in terror, three, four, six abreast through the gap, and were struck down with axe and spear by those lying in wait. Still they pressed through, roaring and hacking with their broadswords, but the narrow way was slippery with blood and packed with dying men and horses, and they could not pass.
Behind them, in the broader way, the hundreds following quickened their pace to help their comrades and were soon all in the pass. Fires sprang up behind them on the Nesbath road, and the remaining forces of the queen rushed upon them, howling their battlecries. In the narrows and elsewhere companies of the giant warriors packed together, against a rock wall or a rampart of baggage wagons and were steadily cut down by the lighter warriors, riding out of the dark or shooting arrows from ambush. Many of the braver spirits . . . and indeed all the men of Mel’Nir were brave . . . tried to ride up the cliff trails and come out of the deathtrap, but their horses could hardly do it. They fought their way up to the plateau on foot, and those who were not overwhelmed or dashed to death upon the rocks, a very few, ran off into the pine woods.
Too late the General of the Hundreds, Kirris Hanran, known as the Lynx, who had ridden at the head of the last cohort, the honor guard of fifty picked men, saw that nothing would serve and called the retreat. He hacked himself from the pass with a handful of men, came past the bonfires and fled back along the road towards Nesbath.
After the silence of the forest, the din of battle split the night like thunder. The clash of arms, the cries of men and of horses, all echoed from the walls of the pass. It seemed impossible to Aidris that these desperate sounds could not reach across the plain to the sleeping village of Folgry. Yet the pass enclosed the sounds, and the troopers of Mel’Nir, in their camp, slept sound while the Red Hundreds died.
The magnitude of the disaster for Mel’Nir was so great that legends sprang up making it greater still or explaining it away. So it was given out that many of the giant warriors fell upon their swords or did to death their own horses, but this was not the truth. Then it was claimed that all the Morrigar, the Giant-killers, were kedran, a thousand female warriors, and that they were aided by the hosts of the Goddess, in particular the pack of savage spectral hounds that the Dark Huntress leads across the sky.
The truth was grim enough; men had died in curious ways, trampled to death by their horses or suffocated under the press of the dead and dying in the narrows. Booty was taken, not only in the form of horses, weapons and armor but gold coin to pay the warriors of the Great King and the mercenaries of Lien who fought for him.
When the fires had been lit the whole length of the pass, the gleaners of the tribes went to work and counted. For one hundred and sixty dead of the Morrigar, the men and women of
the Great Ambush, more than a thousand men of Mel’Nir had died. They were laid out in the pass, unhallowed, in the cold of the approaching winter, for the tribes and the kedran could care only for their own dead, who were buried in the forest round about.
Before morning broke, while the gleaners were still at work, Aidris was brought down a long, easy trail to the head of the pass, where it met the plain. She rode with Lingrit and Yvand and her own escort; the Morrigar would be mustered at first light and follow to the east. Their meeting place was Radroch Keep, a hunting lodge of Lord Zabrandor on the plain by the town of the same name, now within easy reach of the army of Sharn Am Zor, if it had not already been taken.
So she took her leave of the forest and of the warriors of the Tulgai, without whose craft the Great Ambush would never have been planned or carried out. She could hardly reward these allies; all that they wished in the way of booty was theirs. She sent word to Tagnaran, the Balg of the Tulgai, that his tribute to the Daindru had been paid forever and that every year in the first days of the Aldermoon gifts would be sent to his people.
“My Queen,” said Akaranok, “we are rewarded. The giant warriors were no friends to our people or to our blood brothers of the Kelshin.”
So she bade farewell to them all, and they took to the treetops, eager to bring the news of the victory to their own people and to the waiting tribes at Vigrund. Aidris and her little party of riders stepped out cautiously upon the plain. She turned Telavel aside and stared at the slopes of the forest and the plateau, then took the poppet from under her cloak and let it fall gently into the grass. “Come then,” she said in her mind, “come out. Go free. Trouble me no more. You have had no luck hunting in the Chameln lands.” Then, with this act of mercy, if that was what it was, she rode away from the scene of what would be accounted her greatest triumph.
A soft hail came through the morning mist, and Gerr of Kerrick rode out of the pass and joined them. Her own feelings for the thing that they had done were reflected upon the young knight’s face. He had a look of acceptance, even of satisfaction, but could not hide the weariness and horror that accompanied the art of war.
A Princess of the Chameln Page 29