by David Drake
He slammed his right fist into his left palm. “Crush them!” he repeated. “And then crush Lerdoc, while he's stuck here fighting Waldron.”
“May the Lady cast Her cloak about me!” blurted a regimental commander. Nobody else spoke for a moment.
Sharina felt cold. Crush and slice were metaphors when applied to armies, but they and other words—gut, butcher, tear, and every similar term of violence were literal descriptions of what would happen to thousands of the individuals who made up those armies. Twenty thousand hogs being slaughtered in a morning, squealing and spewing blood on ground already soaked with the blood of others... .
“Your highness,” said Lord Attaper, his expression agonized from the effort of what he felt he had to say for the kingdom's sake. “My prince ... Count Lerdoc is a traitor to you and the Isles, but he's an able general. When he realizes Waldron has only two regiments, he'll bypass them and rush to take the rest of us in the rear.”
“We'll have to hope he doesn't move fast enough to do that," Carus said, his tone dismissive but a dangerous glint in his eyes. “It's hard to get an army moving when it doesn't expect to, you know that.”
“He's got cavalry,” Lord Dowos said, fully animated again. “Maybe not all his infantry at first, but his horse and skirmishers will reach us. They'll hold us long enough for him to get the heavy regiments up too.”
“I'll lead my phalanx against anybody you show me, your highness,” Lord Muchon said forcefully. “But you said yourself that we have to be attacking. We can't defend against somebody behind us while we're already engaged!”
“Silence!” the king said. His right hand gripped his sword hilt, and it was with an obvious effort of will that he managed to release it.
No one spoke. The disbelief of the men around Carus was changing to sullen anger.
“We're going to carry out the plan I've outlined,” Carus said in a tone of quiet, deadly fury. “Because there's no other choice. Do any of you see an alternative that has a chance of success?”
“Given where we are,” said Master Ortron, a commoner and former mercenary leader promoted to command of the other division of the phalanx, “no, there's no chance of anything else working. May the Sister swallow my soul!”
He snorted. With a humor that he might not have been willing to show openly if he'd expected to survive the coming battle, he added, “As she doubtless will.”
“See to it, then!” Carus snapped to his officers. He jabbed his mount into a trot in the direction of the fleet encampment.
“Your highness!” Sharina called, prodding her own horse as well. She wasn't a good rider; the only horses in Barca's Hamlet had been those brought by wealthy visitors.
Carus didn't slow down. Attaper, with a face of grim death, gestured forward the platoon of Blood Eagles who formed the king's immediate escort.
“Brother!” Sharina cried.
Carus looked over his shoulder, then reined back so sharply that the hastening bodyguards almost rode into him. The slope was a mixture of brush and turf, but loose rock was exposed on the trail proper; pebbles danced downhill ahead of the king.
“Let me talk privately with my brother,” Sharina said as she rode past Attaper.
The Blood Eagles' commander eyed her speculatively. He nodded with the hint of a grim smile. “First section, lead his highness by fifty paces!” he ordered. “Second section, we'll follow at the same interval.”
Carus waited for Sharina, then walked his horse down the track beside her. “It isn't what I want, girl,” he said quietly, looking at the camp half a mile ahead instead of meeting her eyes. “But there's no choice, the way things are.”
He grimaced. “The way I've made things, I'll admit.”
The king's eyes swept his surroundings with a sort of wakeful energy that proved to anyone who'd grown up with Garric that some other spirit now animated his form. Garric was an observant youth, but Carus had been a warrior. To him a glint in the forest suggested ambush and slaughter rather than a neighbor cutting wood.
“What's that?” he said, as two Blood Eagles trotted a sedan chair out of the camp. Then, recognizing Tenoctris—who else could it have been?—he added, “If she's found something that couldn't wait till we reached her, then I don't suppose it's good news.”
Four more black-armored Blood Eagles accompanied the two with the chair. The squad leader's helmet was marked with a horsehair crest. He kept a cautious eye on the nearby Blaise forces, but Lord Attaper still snarled a loud, angry curse.
Attaper believed he and his regiment had the duty of keeping safe those they were detailed to guard. The fact that the people they guarded might have other priorities—the kingdom's salvation, for example—didn't matter to Attaper, and he was furious that Tenoctris seemed to have convinced some of his men to take a needless risk.
“Carus,” said Sharina, speaking so that she would be heard before the wizard arrived. “Even if you win the battle, the battles—”
“I will, girl,” the king said in a tone that wouldn't brook argument. “I've watched the phalanx training. It all depends on the phalanx going through the mercenaries without a stumble, then turning and double-timing back to face Lerdoc ... but they'll manage, you watch!”
“Carus, winning that way will be as bad as losing,” Sharina said; her expression calm, her voice clear but not raised. “Even if nobody dies tomorrow but rebels—”
Which was as likely as the sun rising in the west.
“—that'll be enough blood shed to drown the kingdom in it. Slaughter like that will fragment the Isles, as surely as it did in your own time.”
Carus said nothing. His face showed less emotion than the portrait struck on a coin.
Letting a little of the fear she felt tremble in her voice, Sharina added, “Garric wouldn't do it, your highness. My brother wouldn't choose that way!”
“Sister take you, girl!” the king said. “I didn't choose it myself! There is no choice, now that we're here and they're—”
He took his right hand off his sword pommel and swept it through an arc starting with Count Lerdoc's forces and continuing around to point back at the rebel stronghold of Donelle. His face went sour.
“And don't say I should withdraw by sea,” he added. “Lerdoc would attack as soon as I started to do that. I'd sacrifice half the army trying to save the rest, and from the moment I've been chased off Tisamur bloody there'll be no kingdom left.”
Tenoctris in her sedan chair had reached the contingent of Blood Eagles preceding the king. They'd stopped her and her guards—their colleagues—with as little ceremony as they'd have shown a troop of tattooed savages waving bows.
Carus swore and trotted his horse forward. “If you delay my advisor a moment longer, Undercaptain Atonp,” he said pleasantly to the section's commander, “I'll have you mucking out mules for the rest of your life. Which, of course, may not be long, given the circumstances we're in now.”
He dismounted and bowed to Tenoctris, motioning her down into her seat when she started to rise. Sharina reached them and slid from her saddle also. It felt remarkably good not to clamp a horse's ribs with her thighs.
The bodyguards were obviously concerned, but Attaper positioned them at a polite distance from Carus and the two women instead of pressing the king to ride the rest of the way to the camp. They were near enough to reach the earthen walls before Lerdoc could organize a force large enough to be dangerous ... and speaking of dangerous things, the king's mood was obvious to anybody.
“I'm sorry to come rushing to you this way,” Tenoctris said, "but there isn't much time. If I'm correct.”
The old wizard smiled with a self-deprecating shrug. Her face was pale, and her tongue slurred as she spoke. She looked as though she should be in bed with nurses in attendance.
“I think there's a trap being set for you, your highness,” she said. “For all the Isles.”
Carus straightened with a frown. “Aye, there is indeed,” he said, his voice a little colder tha
n it usually was in speaking to Tenoctris. “There's a Blaise army landed this day already. I'm afraid your warning is late.”
His face hardened further. Hatred for wizardry overwhelmed a mind already aflame with frustration. “As you might have seen, were your eyes not so set on your books and spells!”
“What my books and spells have shown me, your highness...” said Tenoctris in a tone that reminded Sharina that the old woman had been raised a noble "is that there are three springs to the trap. The city you came to take; the army brought from the north to confuse you—”
The king's face blanked at the word "confuse." Its possible accuracy had taken him aback.
“—and the third, the most dangerous, which I cannot see.”
Aristocratic pique had animated Tenoctris during the past brief exchange, but now she slumped against the chair. Her eyelids fluttered but did not close, and she managed a weak smile.
“I'm sorry,” she said. “There's a great wizard against us, but that's all I've been able to learn. He or she or it is so powerful that my spells show me nothing beyond the fact that there's something to be seen—were I strong enough.”
There was commotion at the north gate of the fleet encampment, only a long bowshot distant from where Sharina and her friends were talking. Carus looked up, and muttered, “Zettkin's coming out to see me, since I'm not going to him.”
“Not a wizard but all the Children of the Mistress together, Tenoctris?” Sharina said. “Couldn't that be what you're seeing?”
The old woman shook her head. “No, child, there's a single mind behind this,” she said. “One who's weaving a pattern as subtle as anything our friend Ilna could manage. These Children and their Moon Wisdom are only threads. So are the Confederacy and the Count of Blaise. Human threads.”
Carus snorted and put his left foot back in the stirrup, preparing to mount. “I'll bet on Ilna if it's weaving to be done,” he said. “And as for those threads you've named—by this time tomorrow they won't be a danger to us or to anybody else!”
“Gar—” Tenoctris began, showing how very tired she was. “Carus, you mustn't act while the third threat still hides. That's what our enemy wants.”
“I've never been one to sit on my hands and let the other fellow hit first!” Carus said, turning from his horse with a look of cold fury. “I'm not going to try to learn how to waste my time that way now!”
“Garric wouldn't—”
“Your brother wouldn't do a lot of things!” Carus said. “Your brother is a peasant! What do you want me to do? Challenge Lerdoc to a bout with quarterstaves?”
“I want you to be the King of the Isles,” Sharina said, standing straight with her hands clasped behind her back. “Instead of being a petulant boy who throws his book in the fire because he thinks it's too hard for him to understand!”
The Blood Eagles on guard stiffened. They kept their backs to the royal party, but Attaper and the undercaptain turned so they could watch from the corners of their eyes.
Carus could have been carved from an oak tree. Continuing to meet his eyes, her tone still deliberate, Sharina added, “Besides, Lerdoc is old and fat. It wouldn't be a fair bout.”
The king stepped forward and hugged Sharina, then lifted her in the crook of his left arm and snatched up Tenoctris with his right. It reminded Sharina of just how strong her brother really was.
“Well,” Carus said, laughter bright behind his words, “may the Lady forfend that a King of the Isles should be seen to act unfairly.”
He whirled the women in a full circle, then set them down and stepped back so that he could see both together. “The count is a fat old man, as you say, sister,” Carus said with continuing good humor. “But he has a son, Lerdain, a likely enough youth from all accounts. The apple of his father's eye.”
“I've heard that,” Sharina said carefully. “Though Liane is the one who'd have the details.”
“I don't need details,” said the king. “I need a pretty girl who can swim. Can you swim, sister?”
“Like a fish,” said Sharina. She spoke with same flat certainty that she'd have said her hair was blond, if that had been the question.
“Then between us,” King Carus said, “we may be able to save the Isles a battle.”
He handed Tenoctris into her sedan chair and gestured Sharina to her horse. As Carus himself mounted, he began to laugh with the amazed jollity of a prisoner just offered a passage to freedom.
Chapter Nineteen
The chill water clamped the muscles over Ilna's rib cage tightly and dulled her need to breathe. The water-filled tunnel wasn't quite as narrow as the passage between the pool and the outer world, but there wouldn't have been room enough to swim properly even if Ilna had known how. She pulled herself along by her hands with an occasional kick against the walls when her toes found purchase.
She didn't know if Alecto was following. She didn't even know if she hoped Alecto was following. Ilna had given her companion as good a chance at salvation as she herself had, but she couldn't pretend Alecto's death would trouble her any worse than the wild girl's continuing life would.
Ilna's fingers were numb, and her lungs were a rolling fireball that seemed to be devouring everything around it. Eventually the blaze would absorb her brain and everything would stop, but until then she would keep on going. Streaks of light pulsed across her eyes. How long could a salamander stay underwater? For hours, certainly; possibly for days. Ilna wasn't sure if the tunnel was still going down; her body rubbed the slick stone, sometimes with her shoulders, sometimes with her hips. The only direction was forward.
Phosphorescence flooded over her—pinks and greens and yellows, all against a background of sickly blue. Ilna blew her lungs out, scarcely aware of what she was doing, and drew in a deep breath. The air didn't have odors in that first moment: it was life, as simple as that. She'd been good as dead, and now she breathed again.
Alecto surfaced noisily, flinging up a spray of rainbow droplets. “Sister take me!” she cried. Then, “May the Pack grind my bones if I'm not glad to breathe again!”
Ilna dabbed her feet down, touched rock, and felt the panic in her throat subside. While she could appreciate the irony of escaping all manner of dangers only to drown at the point of safety, that wasn't the story she wanted to be remembered for.
She bobbed—once, twice, and again—to reach the edge of the pool. She was smiling. I'm not sure I want to be remembered at all; and if I drowned here, there'd be precious little chance of anybody hearing the story anyhow.
Alecto, who could swim and who'd lost the cape, her only remaining garment, in the tunnel, squirmed up onto the shore with the litheness of a cormorant. She'd gripped her dagger in her teeth as she swam; now, ignoring Ilna's struggle to climb out of the pool, she took the weapon in her hand again as she looked around.
There was plenty of light to see clearly, at least for eyes adapted during the long, dark crawl to reach this place. It was a cave, but it was much larger than the one immediately beyond the temple. Ilna looked up. At some points the curving roof was as high as she could've flung a stone.
Mushrooms and lichens covered the cave floor and ran up the walls and ceiling as well. They glowed in muted shades; to Ilna's trained eye no two were precisely the same hue. The faded yellow of one mushroom lacked the green undertone of the otherwise identical bell sprouting beside it.
“How far back do you suppose this cave goes?” Alecto said, trying to keep concern out of her voice. She tapped a wall with her dagger butt; under a finger-thick coating of fungus, the bronze clacked on stone. “Is there a way out besides the way we came?”
“I have no idea,” Ilna said, keeping her comments to the literal truth. She supposed—as no doubt the wild girl did—that there wasn't another way out; that there was no way at all now that Alecto's rockslide had buried the temple along with the rest of the village.
It wouldn't do any good to state the obvious, though. Besides, while it was superstition to believe the
words might create the grim reality, when Ilna was trapped in a rocky tomb, she found herself closer to superstition than she cared to be.
A cricket scuttled through a grove of knee-high mushrooms, shaking clouds of white spores from the bells. The insect was as big as a mouse; its hind legs were in normal proportion instead of the outsize pair on which its smaller relatives jumped in the world outside the cave.
Ilna ran the coils of the noose through her fingers, squeezing moisture from the silk with firm pressure. She had to decide what to do with her soaked tunics as well. She supposed they'd dry more quickly on her body than if she hung them in the cave's dank atmosphere, but she could speed the process by wringing them out first.
“Well, it doesn't look to me like we're any better off than we were before,” Alecto said in a challenging tone. Her words echoed, softened by repetition and the forest of fungus.
“We're a great deal worse off than we were before you murdered the priest,” Ilna said. “We can't change the past, though, so I'll begin looking for a way out after I've taken time to rest.”
Her voice as she met the wild girl's eyes was very calm, but she held the noose ready to throw. If Alecto chose to attack... Ilna didn't know what she'd do with her companion after disarming her, but she supposed she'd think of something.
“Faugh!” said Alecto. She turned and stalked deeper into the cave. Ilna thought the wild girl was simply walking away, but instead she knelt to examine a clump of ball-headed mushrooms.
Ilna grimaced and resumed her survey of the cave. The fungus forest crawled with insects, all of them much larger than similar forms in the upper world. Ilna wondered if there'd be more salamanders like the God-thing Alecto slew, but there was no sign of such. Perhaps now that the giant was dead his lesser kin would move toward the pool, like rams struggling for the flock's leadership after the bellwether dies.
Well, that would mean meat. The omnipresent fungus must be edible; insects at least were able to live and flourish on it. And Ilna supposed that she could eat giant crickets the way she'd eaten crabs caught off the shore of Barca's Hamlet.