by Greylady
Almost all the cargo had been unloaded; it made a fascinating collection of booty, and a demonstration of just how much a people trained for generations in the art of pillaging could make off with in a hurry. But while there was a great deal of food – battle rations of the salty, smoky sort he was trying to gnaw through, for the most part – and a vast quantity of wines and spirits, there was less water than he liked to see. It had been a hot day’s work, especially for the kailinin wearing armour such as himself, and Bayrd knew if everyone else had been drinking as much water as he had, the supplies were even lower than they had been when the first ship’s prow drove into the sand.
There was water somewhere, the greenery inland said as much; but what else might be inland, what spears and arrows might be concealed in the thick shadows of the distant forest, had prevented the Lord Albanak from sending out a watering-party until everything was off the ships and his people had made at least a start on building themselves a fortified camp. It was practical advice, if Albanak-arluth – and the sailors who crewed them – accepted that the only sturdy building material anywhere on this beach was the timber of the ships. But Bayrd could see that the very act of building such a camp might lead to trouble: simply by the builders consuming the last few barrels of water.
He got to his feet, shaded his eyes and looked up and down the wide, flat beach. They were all here. All that remained of the Alban people. There had been losses: people washed overboard or crushed to death by shifting cargo, ships that had left harbour and not been seen again. Thirteen thousand men, women and children had left Kalitz and Drosul. There were maybe eleven thousand here. It had been brutal, but not a disaster; not yet.
A dousing with salt seawater last night; a long day’s work in the hot sun with only salt-preserved meats and pickled vegetables with which to break their fast; and soon only wine to quench their thirst. To Bayrd’s mind, unrestricted by the needs of lordly high command, that was where disaster lay. The rich vintages of Briej, Hauverne, and Seurandec were all very well as plunder, but sliding into a drunken slumber on a potentially hostile shore – even behind whatever wood and sand fortifications could be built on a beach and withstand the turning tide – would likely be a sleep from which these people would not awaken.
Bayrd took a few deep breaths in an attempt to calm himself down, because he knew from experience that if he went to the Lord Albanak in this mood, he would end up shouting. One did not shout at the Overlord; it was…inadvisable. More than just discourteous, dishonourable, and a guarantee of being ignored more certain even than the usual sin of being too obviously clever, it might draw much more of Albanak’s often-irritable attention than any man of a lesser clan could hope to survive. There were more diplomatic ways in which to convey urgency – if he could just think of one.
Yarak nudged him in the back. The mare had been ambling about, pausing now and then to munch wisps of hay from her fodder-net, or slurp some of that precious water from Bayrd’s upturned helmet. Now she wanted the hobble off her leg, because she wanted to run.
“All right,” said Bayrd, fishing in his belt-pouch for a couple of dried apples he had put there earlier. “Here. Eat this, pushy one, and then you’ll get to stretch your legs. Believe me.”
Since the Lord Albanak was notoriously strict in his regard for protocol, he buckled his full weaponbelt around his waist – longsword, shortsword, dagger and all – and arranged a blue elyu-dlas Colour-Robe over his armour. When he looked down at it to admire the effect, Bayrd swore under his breath and tried without much success to smooth out the worst creases. He dried the last few drops of water from the inside of the helmet with its padded liner, then clapped liner and helmet on his head, secured the cords of its warmask under his chin, and swung up into Yarak’s saddle before the mare had even finished crunching her second apple.
Once there, he scanned the beach until he saw what he had expected: the banner of a green tree on blue, and a glittering assemblage of armed and armoured men standing beneath it. That was Overlord Albanak all right: yes indeed, even after a storm at sea and on the frantic first day of an invasion, he was always one for observing all the social niceties. As if he was more important than even he thought he was. Bayrd allowed himself the sardonic smile that would be most unwise when close enough for the Overlord to see it, then put heels to Yarak’s flanks and took off at an easy canter down the beach.
Farren huddled lower and watched. Knowing what was going on, and what he was expected to do about it, were completely different things. He was only a thief and a poacher, his sole claim to fame the amount of money he owed to people, and none of that equipped him to do anything but stare.
There were many horsemen milling about on the beach; not as many as he had seen when Lord Gelert summoned his vassals to make war on the lords of Elthan or Cerenau, but enough that he preferred to watch from the safety of cover. They wore armour and carried weapons with an extravagance that shocked him to the bottom of his thrifty soul. One man came riding along the flat sand – Farren automatically tried to put a price on the handsome grey horse – and he was wearing or carrying enough iron and steel about his person to have made spearheads for a hundred Prytenek warriors. But not one of those warriors would have demeaned themselves or their courage by wearing so much protective armour. It was as if this man and the others like him were afraid to die.
His spear was unlike those of Lord Gelert’s men: it was long, light and slender, and ended in a wicked tapering point. Had Farren known as much about the use and function of weapons as he did about their potential value, he would have kept his head further down instead of raising it for a better look. Long spear, long sword, long-hafted axe and a cased bow small enough to be a child’s toy; they were all weapons with a long reach, horseman’s weapons, to be used from the saddle.
Farren had his first lesson in just how those weapons could be used a few seconds later. The grey horse slackened its pace and the spearhead flashed once in the sunlight as it twirled around to slip into a scabbard behind the rider’s right knee. Then the horse exploded forward into a full gallop – straight for where the poacher lay concealed.
Before Farren realized that the little toy bow was even out of its case, an arrow kicked sand in his face and went snaking off through the grass. Another followed the first, coming close enough that its fletching scraped a hot line across his face.
Farren the poacher scrambled to his feet just as a third arrow ripped through the sleeve of his hunting-coat as if the heavy leather garment wasn’t there. He felt a sting that was no sand-flea, clapped a hand to his arm, and saw the most unpleasant sight possible: his own blood. On any ordinary day Farren would have tumbled like a shot rabbit from the shock alone, but this was no ordinary day, these unerring arrows were no ordinary threat, and fear of the foreign horseman who was shooting at him put the spurs into his flanks as even Lord Gelert in full cry on his heels had never done. He tripped in the matted bracken at the crest of the next line of dunes and rolled downhill in a shower of sand, but was on his feet and running again before he even hit the bottom, listening in terror for a sound of pursuing hoofbeats that never came.
Yarak’s hoofs went crashing through the band of shingle that edged the long beach, and the grey put herself at the first dune as though taking a jump on an assault course. She shot over it with feet to spare and would have charged up the next one with equal ease had Bayrd not reined her in. The Ferhana mare reared back, squealing and pawing the air like the most ferocious stallion ever foaled; she wanted to go, was determined to go, and only the pressure of the bit on her soft mouth was holding her back.
Bayrd ar’Talvlyn rose in his stirrups and sent a third arrow whirring after the running figure. That one probably missed too – though the man fell out of sight, Bayrd knew a stumble when he saw one – and he cursed venomously at his own poor marksmanship. He was doing a lot of swearing today, what with one thing and another, and this was adding insult to injury. Three clean misses at two hundred yards on a
still day would have been enough to earn loss-of-privilege penalties had he seen any of his own Hundred shoot so badly.
But he wasn’t going to let his horse go charging off over unknown ground, especially unknown ground like this. Sand dunes meant rabbits; rabbits meant burrows; and burrows at a gallop meant a mount with a broken leg. He wasn’t risking five thousand crowns’ worth of Ferhana horseflesh with a pedigree almost as long as his own for some scruffy peasant who with luck wouldn’t stop running for the rest of the day. Bayrd smiled thinly at that thought, because it wasn’t strictly true. He wouldn’t have risked even the meanest of his riding-horses without a much better reason than this. A kailin has six legs, so the saying went, and is responsible for keeping them all healthy.
At least it had proven something that he could use as reasoned argument for a watering-patrol when he finally spoke to the Lord Albanak. There was nothing out among the dunes except for a single man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing threatening. Otherwise he would have known about it by now. There was already a fourth arrow on the string of his bow, but it wouldn’t be needed now, and—
Bayrd took one look, yelped, and dropped it. The arrow went end-for-end to the ground and drove a little way in under its own weight, then toppled slowly sideways and lay there.
It was sizzling.
Wreathed from nock to point in a slowly fluttering scarf of blue flame, it was making a sound absolutely like that of frying bacon. Every now and then the barbed head spat fat white sparks that went dancing across the sand, as though it was still red-hot under the hammer of the smith who had forged it eight months before. And yet the wooden shaft wasn’t charred, the blue and white feathers of the fletching weren’t shrivelled by the flames. It just lay there.
Sizzling…
This time Bayrd ar’Talvlyn didn’t swear. There were some things for which mere obscenity was inadequate, and this was one of those things. He blinked at the finger and reinforced thumb of his leather shooting-glove. Nothing; no scorch-marks, not even a smell of burning – and he had certainly felt no heat. But when he looked down again at the arrow lying on the dune, he could see how the sand on which it lay had puddled into crude glass, a thick green honey that flowed sluggishly for a few inches until it cooled and cracked like dirty ice.
He shivered so that the hair on his forearms stood on end, and at the same time felt sweat-beads forming on the hollow of his back beneath his armour. The fright came more from knowing what had happened, and the shock from discovering that he was capable of such a thing. He had been told – warned, almost – that the Art Magic was not as difficult as it appeared. In its manifestations of raw power, it derived as much from the personal force of the wielder as from words written in an ancient book or circles drawn in chalk or stranger things. Some people, all unknowing, possessed more Talent than others, and needed only the right burst of passion to release their potential. Skarpeya had told him that.
Skarpeya had been right.
Bayrd dismounted and bent down to stare, moving gingerly because even though the arrow itself seemed cool, the half-melted sand in which it lay was still hot enough to throw off a shimmering haze of heat. Drawing his taipan shortsword, he poked with the blade until it could be lifted free. Even then he was wary, first dabbing at the arrow with outstretched fingertips like a cat at a spider before risking his skin by picking it up. And against all reason, it was cool indeed. More than that: it was cold, as cold as a bar of ice. In a sudden spasm he gripped the arrow in both hands, broke it in half and flung the pieces far away, then straightened up, trying to convince himself that it was the coldness which had made him shiver all along.
When he swung up into the saddle and turned Yarak’s head towards the beach, he did not look back.
Like most of the other kailinin moving to and fro along the shoreline, Overlord Albanak was wearing armour; however, unlike the drab, workaday mail of lesser warriors, he was encased in an-moyya-tsalaer, a Great Harness of the old style. It was a spectacular full battle armour; gilded scales were laced together with dark blue leather thongs into rigid flat boards of metal, their very inflexibility a demonstration that the man who wore this harness had no need to run about a battlefield, but merely commanded others to do so. His helmet was plumed with a spray of white egret feathers that had evidently suffered less harm during the voyage than many of his retainers, and its peak and wide neck-guard, thought Bayrd sourly, looked to make a fine sunshade.
However, since the clan-lord was a stoutly-built man in what was normally called his vigorous middle years, the effect of that four-panelled cuirass and the broad helmet on top was to make him look like a richly-dressed cube. Sitting boxlike on the box his harness had been packed in, itself draped and padded with a handsome bolt of green silk, Albanak-arluth had all the easy assurance of a man whose rank and station in life was high enough that all he needed to do was watch others work. Even if he did look like something a child had built from blocks.
As he cantered closer, Bayrd was impressed despite himself and his own worried thoughts. None too fond of the Overlord, for various reasons of his own that had little to do with the man’s abilities, it was as well for the sake of morale that someone should have been able to trick themselves out handsomely and not spoil the effect by sweaty labours in the hot sun. Even though he hoped some colour had come back into his face, he was uncomfortably aware that beneath his crest-coat he probably looked – and smelled – less than good.
“Bayrd-an.” Albanak swung one arm across his chest and then out in a lazy salute. “I greet you.”
He always tried to address his retainers by name, as if to make them feel known and somehow important. The gesture would have carried more weight with Bayrd had he not seen the clan-lord turn quickly to one of his retinue and ask who was approaching. Still, even if it rang a little false, the effort had been made.
“I greet you, Albanak-arluth.” His own salute was crisp and precise, parade-ground perfect. “You came to no harm in the storm. It pleases me to see you well.”
So much for small-talk. The forms of speech between a high-clan lord and a low-clan retainer were cumbersome and stilted, very much in the manner of a Kalitzak vassal addressing a superior nobleman. It had developed among successive Overlords of the Alban clans, and the warriors who seven generations past were their equals, but so slowly that it had become accepted. As men rose and fell in rank, it became difficult to find points of common interest to talk about until finally no-one made the effort any more. Only one or two clans, the ar’Talvlyn among them, found anything wrong in it – and that, the other clan-lords said, was no more than simple envy that they were low rather than high.
Whatever the reason, Bayrd didn’t care for it. Nor had his father, or his father before him. But today was not the time to make experiments in social change. Today was for reporting the presence of a possible spy, or at the very least a pair of unwanted eyes. Eyes, moreover, in a head that Bayrd had signally failed to bring back with him, despite – what had happened.
“…and shot at him three times.” Bayrd made no mention of the fourth arrow. He had still not quite come to terms with the incident himself, and until then it was nobody’s business but his own. If Mahaut had been alive there would have been someone else to talk to, but as it was…
He did his best to conceal his annoyance at letting the man in the sand-dunes get away, since none of the others seemed especially worried. “But I missed. When I last caught sight of him he was still running, and at such a speed that whoever rules in this land will know about our presence soon enough.” The reaction was still less than he had expected. “Lord, I said…”
“I heard what you said.” Albanak not only looked unconcerned, he sounded so as well.
It was enough to raise a small niggle of suspicion in the back of Bayrd’s mind. There had been a great many ships in the harbours of Drosul and Kalitz just at a time when they were needed. The treasure-barge had been there too, just when Albanak needed enough g
old to pay the crews of his fleet. And this shore was more than just the first landfall the storm-driven fleet had reached. Everything had been planned in advance, and the only variable in the equation was King Daykin’s decision to throw his mercenaries out.
“We – all of us, and perhaps our families as well – we are expected here,” he said, a flat statement rather than a question, offering the Lord Albanak an opportunity to deny it. Or ignore it, as more usually happened when someone lower than kailin-eir put forward a controversial view in the hearing of high-clan lords. For his own part Bayrd felt certain; just as he felt equally certain that as a low-clan kailin he would never be told the truth of it all. In that at least he was mistaken. Keo ar’Lerutz leaned forward and muttered behind his armoured hand into the Overlord’s ear, and was answered after a few seconds consideration with a nod of agreement – the unexpected sight of which sent Bayrd’s eyebrows up.
“Get down off your high horse,” said Albanak-arluth, the inflection of his voice neutral enough that he might have meant only, or a great deal more, than the simple content of the words. Bayrd did so at once, and went on his knees to offer the Overlord proper obeisance rather than a military salute. “No.” Albanak gestured for him to straighten up. “Nothing so obvious. I take the intent for the action. Now listen and be still. Gyras, tell him.”
“There is no room for us in Kalitz any more,” said Lord Gyras ar’Dakkur. “Nor in Drosul, or even Yuvan. There are too many alliances between those little lords for us to find one willing to defy the rest. Not through any lack of living-space, but because we, and what we represent, no longer fit. Our presence has become a reminder to the so-cultured people of those lands that once, and not long ago, they were less cultured than they would have the world believe. That once they needed us. Now – now they’d prefer to forget we ever existed.
