by Kate Elliott
“Hasten! Hasten!” they called. “The time is near! We must hurry.”
“I know you!” cried the young warrior, tense with frustration. “Yet who are you? How do you claim descent from a name that cannot exist? Uapeani-kazonkansi-a-lari is the name my brother’s daughter would have carried had he ever sired a girl child, but he is many lifetimes gone, lost to me. Who are you?”
“Are you dead or are you living?” demanded Sanglant. “To my eyes you are a shade, a ghost. Yet you speak as if others have died while you survived.”
“We are dead and we are living. We are caught in the shadows, torn out of Earth yet not killed when the witch Li’at’dano guided the hands who wove the great spell that exiled our land and our people.”
“I am your kinsman! I am trying to help you—”
“It is too late. What is done cannot be undone. The exiled land will return.”
“Nay. Another cabal of sorcerers seeks to weave that ancient spell a second time, to cast the land back into the aether.”
“Do they still hate us? Does the witchwoman still brood over our ancient war?”
“She aids me. She is no longer your enemy.”
The other man laughed. “If she says so, then she lies to you, or you are foolish enough to believe her. How can she even be alive? We have seen ages pass. No one who lived in the time of the Exile can still be alive!”
“You are alive!”
“I am a shade, but I hope to live once more so that I can take my vengeance. Enough!” His comrades, a dozen masked warriors waiting a bow’s shot away, called again to him. The rest of the procession had vanished into the trees and dawn’s twilit haze. The man followed.
“Heed me!” called Sanglant angrily. “Do not turn your back on me! I do not lie. You know less than you believe you do. I have met the Horse shaman you call Li’at’dano. I have spoken with her. She still lives. She spoke freely of the ancient weaving, which she now regrets. She strives to prevent those who would banish the Lost Ones again. We must act as allies—!”
The warrior heeded him no more than had Lady Wendilgard. From down the path his comrades called to him, but their voices were too faint even for Sanglant to hear.
“I must go,” the warrior said. “The day dawns.” A strange note changed the timbre of his voice. He looked once more, piercingly, at Sanglant, then jogged away on the ancient road to join the others. As light rose to scatter night, they faded into the trees.
Hathui collapsed to the ground in a dead faint, completely limp, and he gaped, taken by surprise, then heard a clamor of voices as his escort fought their way through the forest to reach him. He knelt beside her, and she opened her eyes just as Sergeant Cobbo ran up with a worried expression on his face and a big dent in his helm.
“My lord prince! We’ve been searching for you all night. We thought we’d lost you when that gale blew through! That wasn’t anything natural! What’s amiss with the Eagle? Was she struck down?”
She rubbed her head and groaned, sitting up. “I got hit in the head by hail. I don’t remember anything after that.”
The prince looked toward the path, but he saw only butcher’s-broom and buckthorn beneath a spreading canopy of ivy-covered oak. The trail that had glimmered so clearly last night was invisible, and when he walked over to the bush he believed he had sheltered under, he found no trace of those chalk-white grains nor, when he kicked aside layers of matted leaf litter, did he uncover an old stone roadway. The drought had baked the dirt until it was as hard as rock. “My lord prince?”
They watched him in the manner of folk who are not sure if the dog is crazy or only needs a few moments to relieve itself. Far away they heard a shout. He still held his sword, and with a murmured curse he sheathed it and returned to them.
“Come,” he said. “Best we get back to camp without disturbing Lady Wendilgard’s peace.”
Wichman returned at midday having lost a third of his men. His horse was in a lather, and he dismounted and flung its reins into the face of a waiting groom. The prince stood on a rise looking over the city walls and the coastal shoreline where the retreating sea had uncovered all manner of ancient refuse—slime-covered rocks, bones, an encrusted anchor, the ribs of several boats, as well as what appeared to be the old straight track of a paved road. Evidently when the road had been built what was now the bay had rested above the waterline.
“Cursed bad news!” cried Wichman with a coarse laugh as he strode up. Men scattered from his path as he shoved aside one fellow rather than stepping around him. He halted beside Sanglant, glanced incuriously toward the sea, and turned to regard the men hard at work filling in the gaps in their defenses.
“Why hasn’t Queen Adelheid attacked?” he demanded. “That ring of wagons won’t hold off a determined sally from within the town walls. You haven’t half the ditches dug that’ll be needed.”
“Well met, Cousin,” said Sanglant, changing the ground before Wichman could get started. “What of the river?”
Wichman shook his head. “Drought. Someone tried a diversion of the trickle that was left up above the bluff where there’s a bit of a waterfall, but in truth there’s just no water coming down from the mountains. Fields are drying to nothing. We saw some mighty odd lights in the sky last night, I’m telling you. I lost six men to elfshot.”
“Elfshot!”
“That’s what the sentries said, but I’m thinking it was partisans skulking in the woods, scouts for the army that’s marching right up on us as we speak. We heard shouts and screams in the distance, over to the west of our position.”
Sanglant’s escort turned. Each man and woman there stared at Wichman as though he had sprouted feathers.
“What do you mean?” asked Sanglant softly. “What army?”
“The one whose forward scouts caught a dozen of my men watering their horses at a pond this morning, that’s who. A damned big army, for I saw them myself.”
“I pray you, Wichman, slow down and speak more clearly. Is there an army marching this way? From what direction? How many? Who are they?”
Wichman grinned, enjoying the attention. “It seems you called, Cousin, and Papa heard you. There’s a large army moving this way from the east out of the highlands.”
The sky hadn’t a cloud in it, but a rumbling roar of thunder shook through the heavens at that instant as though Wichman were its herald. The ground shuddered, rocked, and stilled. Men cried out, rushing here and there as if they could find steadier ground a few steps to left or right, but just as the yelling in the camp subsided a new noise arose as sentries pointed to the north above the distant line of trees. The griffins flew toward camp, growing larger; behind them, well into the woodlands to the northwest, a thread of smoke curled up into the sky. Was Lady Wendilgard marking her position for her father?
“What banner does this army fly?” asked Sanglant, voice tight.
“They’re flying the banner of the regnant of Wendar and Varre as well as the crowns of Aosta, and a new flag as well.”
“That of the skopos?” It was difficult not to grab Wichman by the throat and choke the information out of him.
“Nay. I saw no banner bearing the mark of the skopos. Only one I have seen a single time before, in the chapel at Autun: a banner embroidered with Taillefer’s imperial crown.”
Henry had crowned himself emperor!
All around the men whispered: Emperor. The word itself had magic, one that griffin feathers could not dispel.
Their murmuring died as they waited for Sanglant’s response. The day, too, had gone utterly quiet, a strange, hard pressure in the air that made his ears seem full and muted his hearing. No wind stirred the banners in his camp; even Adelheid’s pennants up on the walls of the town hung limp, curls of color. The world seemed to be holding its breath. The blue of the midday sky had faded to an eerie silver cast until he felt he stood on the inside of a drum, waiting for the thump of a stick overhead to wake them up. To shatter the silence.
To bring
Liath and Blessing back to him alive.
From far away, too faint for any man born solely of humankind to hear, a horn’s ringing call caught his ear.
“To arms!” he cried, breaking the spell. “Sound the horn.”
He wore mail at all times, but with battle imminent he allowed his guardsmen to add extra protection, the mark of the heavy cavalry that were his strongest pieces on the chessboard. He stood while Sibold strapped on an iron breastplate over his mail shirt and greaves on his calves. Chustaffus waited, fully armed, with the black dragon banner held in his left hand. The rest of his personal guard clustered behind, mounts saddled and ready. All of them had iron helms and most had greaves and breastplates—his strongest troops. While Sibold armed him, Captain Fulk gave his report.
“Our choices have dried in this heat, my lord prince. We cannot flee without water, nor can we withstand an assault from both town and field with our defense not yet set and the emperor’s army so large.”
As they spoke, stakes were being hastily set in the remaining gaps of the inner defense, between the circling wagons, to prevent a sally out of the town from breaking through their line.
Sanglant looked at Hathui. “Wendilgard’s retreat has cost us. Shall we surrender and beg my father’s mercy? He is renowned for being merciful.”
She lifted her chin. “Truly, Your Highness, if it were King Henry, we might expect mercy. But the man we face will only wear Henry’s face and speak with his voice. I saw what manner of daimone they forced into his body. I heard his voice condemn Villam, but I know King Henry would never have done so. If we surrender, we will be baring our throats to those who will show as little mercy to us as they did to him!” Without leaving him, her gaze shifted focus, seeing onto a scene he could not share: the events which had led her to take refuge with the regnant’s rebellious son.
“So be it.”
Sibold stepped back, having finished, and Sanglant mounted Resuelto and took his lance from Everwin. Raising it, catching the attention of the men making ready to fight, he called out in the voice that would, soon enough, ring above the fray. “Upon every field, there is a victory to be found. Let us find ours.”
Malbert handed up his helm, burnished, trimmed with the figure of a dragon so like the one he had once worn as captain of Henry’s Dragons, back in the days when he had been his father’s obedient son. So he was, still; it was Henry who had changed, not him. Yet did it matter what story he told himself, now that the hour was upon them? Last night, with Wendilgard’s departure, he had felt angry, sullen, worried, irritable. All that sloughed off him now. The decision had been made. He had ridden a long way to reach this moment. Now. At once. The anticipation of battle lightened his heart and lifted his mood. The griffins beat past overhead, heading out over the town.
As he rode with his escort behind him to the southern apex of such siege works as they had had time to throw up, he held his lance so the pennant tied on the shaft could dance in the breeze made by Resuelto’s pace. He was already sweating freely. There wasn’t a breath of wind.
The infantry had dug in to the northeast of the river along a line leading from the bluff where the river left the forest all the way to the shoreline. Because they had wanted to keep a portion of the river within their lines—if this trickle of water over stones still warranted such a noble title—the river split his force. Even over the course of the single day they had camped here the water level had fallen. When he pressed Resuelto down the bank and into the channel, the water came scarcely higher than the gelding’s fetlocks. Companies of Wendish, marchlanders, Quman, and centaurs followed him to the field, muddying what remained of the waters.
The infantry manned the defensive works, such as they were, with some of the ditches only half dug. There were too few soldiers to withstand an attack at multiple points. Still, infantry weren’t the strength of his army. They crossed beyond the defensive works into the dusty open ground where he had room to maneuver, most of it level but crossed by a dry streambed that had once been a tributary of the river. He and a dozen men from his entourage rode up onto a rise from which they could survey the field while his army took their places.
He had thirty centuries of cavalry, more or less. The Quman clans formed up on the left flank and marchlanders on the right. His Wendish cavalry, a motley crew nominally under the command of Wichman but actually controlled by Captain Fulk, held the center—which should have belonged to Wendilgard’s Avarians. What remained as a reserve force spread out as a second rank, broken up in groups of fifty to a hundred riders made up of his marchlanders and renegade Ungrians under Captain Istvan, Waltharia’s picked heavy cavalry under the banner of Lord Druthmar, his own personal guard, and the Bwr. The griffins had flown out over the exposed flats to the water’s edge, where they began to make their ponderous turn to come back in.
Few epics from heroic ages past ever sported such a strange array of beings and peoples. No poets had ever sung of such an army, many kinds joined together against a common foe.
Certainly he had had problems on the march. He had heard mutters against sorcery. He had heard men whispering that it wasn’t right to consort with pagans and heretics, or whether it was right for a child to challenge a parent or a lord to challenge the wisdom of the skopos. But their fear and their doubt was also their strength. They had, most of them, thrown over their old prejudices out of loyalty to him. The Wendishmen might distrust the Quman, but they granted them a measure of respect. And frankly, for the men, there was something heartening about fighting alongside centaurs, that ancient race that had once burned the holy city of Darre. Their inhuman nature was always visible to any man with eyes, yet they had a kind of beauty as well. Now and again Sanglant had seen a man stare dreamily at one of their Bwr allies, and more than a few times he had caught himself admiring their robust figures clad in nothing beside the accoutrements of war and wondering at the mystery of their existence. Now and again he had to remind himself that they weren’t women at all. Now, like the rest of his army, they waited with spears or bows or swords held ready.
It was so damned hot. He prayed that he had not moved too soon, that this wait in the stifling heat would not sap his army, and indeed it was midafternoon before Henry’s army marched into view and began to form up in battle array. Two well ordered contingents of infantry, one wearing the tabard of the King’s Lions and the other Wendish milites out of Saony, flanked a mass of cavalry riding under his father’s banner, the conjoined sigils of Wendar and Varre. The banner displaying the imperial crown flew gloriously above all the rest as a bannerman hauled it back and forth to let the fabric stream.
Henry’s farthest left and right flanks were held by alternating bands of cavalry and infantry belonging to various nobles from Aosta. Missing was the banner of Duchess Liutgard of Fesse. Wichman had noted this force but a few hours ago and now they were gone.
Indeed, Wichman left the center and rode back to inform him of this fact, galloping up onto the rise with a gleeful grin on his face.
“D’ya see that?” he called breathlessly as soon as he came within shouting distance of the prince. “That bitch will have taken a force around our flank. They’ll go north into the woods and swing around to hit our defensive line from the northwest, where we’re thinnest. Best to send the reserve to meet them.”
“Do you think so?” Sanglant shook his head. “Henry will stall to give her time to arrive. He’ll have her attack at the same time he’ll signal Queen Adelheid to sally forth from the walls.” Check, his father would say in a confident way that encouraged one to resign the game right then. “Nay, Wichman. The next move is mine. We’ll not spread ourselves thin. We’ll win this battle before Liutgard can get all the way around our position.”
Wichman snorted. “Henry outnumbers us! That’s just what’s on the field. Who knows how many wait with the queen to attack us from the rear.”
“Numbers aren’t everything. We have winged riders, and Bwr, and griffins. We are bold, not cautious.�
�� He stood in his stirrups, lifting his lance as he gestured toward the imperial banner, then shifted his gaze to stare down his cousin. “I challenge you! Will it be you, or me, that captures the banner bearing the sigil of the crown of stars?”
Wichman laughed outright, outraged and delighted, and reined his horse around before Sanglant could say another word.
“Look there,” called Hathui. A dozen riders rode forward from Henry’s front line bearing the Lion, Eagle, and Dragon flag of Wendar. “They want a parley.”
Sanglant nodded at Chustaffus, who lifted the black dragon banner once, twice, and thrice. They rode down the rise and advanced to the forefront of the host, dust spitting up where hooves struck. As they passed through the Wendish line, a cheer rose and continued until he gestured and Chustaffus raised the banner for silence. They stood at the edge of the tributary stream. Across the cracked and stony bed waited those who spoke for the emperor.
He recognized three of these noble courtiers, two armed and one a cleric.
It was the cleric, one of Henry’s schola, who spoke. “Sanglant, the emperor Henry, your father, begs you to lay down your arms and embrace him as a son should. Have you forsaken God and parent alike? How can you rebel against the one who gave you life? He weeps, wondering what madness possesses his beloved son.”
All suffered under the sun’s hammer. Sweat flowed freely. Resuelto twitched his ears. The heat would drain them long before courage flagged.
Sanglant rode forward four paces and cried out in a voice meant to reach as great a distance as possible. “Know it to be true: Henry is not himself. Those who call themselves his allies have abused his trust and insinuated a daimone into his body, so that he walks and talks to their command. If you do not believe me, then wonder why Henry did not return to Wendar when his Eagles brought him news of troubles in the north. He is a puppet dancing to the command of those who use him to their own ends. I have ridden across months and leagues to save my father, not to fight him. Will he come before me so that I may look into his eyes and know that he is truly himself?”
