The axes had been ringing in the woods for weeks, and still there had been no sign of Gelert and his men since that first encounter in the sandhills near the shore. Because of that, the Prytenek lord had lost whatever chance he might have had to rid his land of this invasion, and the land itself was being pulled out bit by bit from between his fingers. With every stroke of an axe-blade, with every crash of a newly-felled tree, with every clank of an adze as it shaped and squared the joints of the great timber fortresses that thirty generations of campaigning had taught the Albans how to build, Gelert’s grasp was slipping.
For more than half a thousand years, whether fighting on their own behalf or in the pay of others, the techniques of becoming secure in hostile territory had been raised almost to an art. First, the picket line that ensured against surprise attack; then the study of terrain: where to find water, food, fodder for the horses, where would be best for defence, where for attack, where for ambush – and where for the building of walls to keep the enemy at bay. These new fortifications were not merely the ditch-faced ramparts topped with a palisade that had been flung up so hastily along the beach. With such an ample supply of timber as the nearby woods had provided – they had taken to calling it the Forest of Guelerd, not knowing just how correct their use of that name might be, and not caring – both imagination and years of practice could be put to use.
Some were simple, squat and purposeful, their walls built of a double or triple thickness of logs with rammed earth packed between; others, perhaps echoing a more high-flown architecture, sprouted towers of lesser or greater height at intervals along their perimeters. But each and every one was another nail securing Alban possession of the land they held. With the exception of the very highmost of the high-clan lords, who merely directed, everyone worked. Men and women stood watch together, wielded felling-axes and shaping tools together, and even the children scurried to and fro with sheaves of willow-withies or baskets of mud with which to plaster those same withies once they had been woven together into wall-panels. Well fed and well motivated, untroubled by the raids which all had been expecting and which never happened, they prospered.
And with prosperity came rivalry.
At first it might be no more than an amiable race between neighbouring clans to see which of them would be first to complete their fortress, or which could add more splendid features than the other – perhaps a taller tower to be their lord’s citadel, or water run from a convenient river so that a dry ditch became a moated defence. By Bayrd ar’Talvlyn’s reckoning, the amiability lasted just over a month. Clan ar’Kelayr was the first to take exception, declaring in open council that when clan ar’Menez began taking the great logs down from their fortress walls and facing the flint and rubble packing with stone and mortar, it was less in defence against the Pryteneks than as a threat against their fellow Albans and, by its very permanence, a claim set on the land on which the fortress stood.
It was only a matter of time before this, and the competition both for the best building materials and the best building land, led right back to where such discussions always seemed to end: two groups of kailinin snarling at each other to the exclusion of all else. Even the common enemy, when that enemy was so obliging as to let himself be forgotten.
But two days later there was a reminder of his presence, when a hunting-party came galloping back from the deep woods. There were three empty saddles and two more nearly so, their riders pierced with arrows, swaying and barely conscious. The Prytenek lords’-men who had ambushed them came swirling in a loose gaggle like fog passing between the trees, reined in to study the fortress which was their quarry’s nearest refuge – then shot half a dozen fire-arrows at the timber ramparts just to see what would happen.
And the day after that, everyone who had protested against the ar’Menez’r use of stone walls were building such walls of their own. For a time at least, the clan-strife fell silent again.
That the Pryteneks had known what to expect, and had thus come prepared with incendiary materials suitable for firing wooden buildings, suggested that their spies were still able to creep unseen through the Alban pickets. That they had come back at all suggested that whatever had drawn Lord Gelert’s attention away from his new and unwanted neighbours was now no longer a concern. Bayrd, seconded by Gerin ar’Diskan, believed that he had been trying to make an alliance with the various other Prytenek and Elthanek lords against whom he had been making intermittent war, and that the alliance had come to nothing. At least, for the time being. Gelert’s reputation was probably such that none of them would have believed him had he told them it was raining and they had been getting wet, though how long that fortunate state of affairs might last was anyone’s guess. But the forest was no longer as safe as it had been.
If it had ever been truly safe at all.
* * * *
There were no more battles, if that first skirmish in the hills could be dignified with the term. Instead there were ambushes, like that which had slaughtered the hunting-party, and silent stalking among the shadows of the trees, and sniping with arrows and slingstones and thrown spears, and covert murders with knife and with cord and with hatchet. It began and it did not end, neither in open conflict or in reasoned discussion of terms. Lord Gelert and his people had found a new sport.
The Albans, plainsfolk for all the generations of their memory, and still so even though they had spent so many years in the cities of Drosul and Kalitz, were at severe disadvantage for the first few months, months when the summer waxed and waned and died in the glories of such an autumn as they had never seen before. The pines remained unchanging, sombre green, but the birch and maple, the oak and lime and chestnut, flared gold and red and orange as the first frosts bit and their leaves died.
Careless Albans died too, the ones who failed to react at once to a sound where no sound should be, the ones who stared instead of ducking out of sight, the ones who wandered that little bit too far from the bowshot’s width of cleared ground that surrounded their clan’s stronghold. Not many died at any one time – there were no great massacres worthy of a song or a story or a special entry in the Books of Years – but they died in a steady stream, flaring red at throat or chest or belly where a harder edge than frost had bitten them.
Without honour, without glory, without even a visible enemy for the most part, it was a filthy little war.
Taught in that hard school, educated by brutal tutors, they learned not to forget but to set aside the years upon years of drilled formation, the tactics of a set-piece battle where the general moved his units with the precision of carved pieces on a gaming-board. They learned instead what it meant to fight in the forest. The despised hatchet became as worthy a weapon as the taiken longsword; a mailshirt and uncovered ears attuned to the noises of the woodland became more important than the splendour of tsalaer and plumed helmet; and the bow came into its own, whether it was the short cased weapon every kailin wore on his weaponbelt, or the classic seven-foot asymmetrical Great-bow of older times with its long, heavy arrows.
Bayrd nailed a man to a tree with one of those, on a fine still winter’s day at a range later paced out at three hundred and twenty yards. He had been behind a thick-boled elm when his target emerged from the shelter of a birch and paused there for a few seconds too long. This was the first Prytenek he had seen in four weeks, for all that there had been a murder every two or three days of those weeks, and because of that he did not intend to miss. This Prytenek’s intention had also been more than just sightseeing, if the cord in his belt was any indication. It was a cord with a wooden handle at each end and a thick knot at its midpoint, just where it could best crush against a throat, and as Bayrd ran the ugly thing through his fingers he wondered just how many throats it had crushed in its time.
The Prytenek was unable to say. Bayrd’s lucky long-range arrow had hit him above one eyebrow at a steep descending angle, popping the eyeball messily out of its socket, and whatever havoc it had wreaked inside the man’s skull
had left him incapable of speech – or breath, or even bleeding more copiously than the matching thin trickles from entry and exit points. Before the ar’Diskan retainers who had accompanied Bayrd could bring the arrow back, they had been forced to lever the Prytenek’s head away from the split slender treetrunk with a pry-bar. Had it not been a particularly good, straight, well-fletched arrow, Bayrd would have been inclined to leave it in place as a warning to any other unpleasant skulking assassins with garrotting-nooses in their belts.
Furtive noises, stealthy movements, patient waiting and an occasional choked-off scream. That was the war in the woods. And as the winter crawled on, and firewood was bought with blood, it became worse even than that.
* * * *
“The common people of this country don’t hate us,” said Goel ar’Diskan, in a tone that invited anyone to dispute his opinion – if they dared.
None did. There were drifts of snow outside, three and four and even five feet deep, but the fire was warm, the food had been good, and this was as close to a proper evening in hall as Bayrd or any of the others could remember for a long time. What it lacked music, except for the mother’s voice somewhere in the warm shadows as she crooned a lullaby to her baby, and what if the place smelt of the singed tallow that fuelled its lamps instead of herb-scented oil or honeyed beeswax? It was home, of a sort; a home in the Land. A part of Alba. If old Goel wanted a disagreement just so that he could bring down the full weight of his years and accumulated wisdom in defence of whatever theory he was riding tonight, he could go somewhere else and do it. The people in this hall just wanted to sit by the fire.
It had needed eight men this afternoon, eight men with bows, to guard four so that they could gather sufficient wood for a single day. Bayrd had thought it hardly a task suited to a clan-lord’s Companion and Bannerman, but none of his other duties within the fortress walls had been as urgent as ensuring there was fuel to cook and keep warm. Of course, they had seen no-one.
And equally of course, if they had skimped on the guards then not one of the fuelling party would have come back alive.
That was the way of it, this first winter of the forest war. He drank hot spruce-beer flavoured with honey and spices of dubious provenance – the stores of wine were long since gone – and wondered idly how many more winters like this there would be. How long before someone lost patience, or made a mistake, or saw sense. At least in a real war, and he grinned to himself at his wide personal familiarity with the subject, it was all over and done with in the course of a few battles. Either you won or you lost; either you or the enemy couldn’t or wouldn’t continue; but it wasn’t like this, going on and on with never an end to the killing in sight.
“I said, the common people don’t hate us at all,” persisted Goel ar’Diskan.
“Uncle, I don’t disagree with you,” said Lord Gerin. “Nobody does. That’s why you can’t start an argument about it.”
Whether clan-lord or not, Goel gave his nephew an exasperated look. “What make you think I want an argument?”
Gerin touched one hand to brow and chest in a salute that ran with easy grace into a shrug. “Mostly previous experience, I think.”
A quiet chuckle ran around the hall, the sound of listeners grateful that someone of high enough rank to do so had said what they had all been thinking. Goel’s view of a scholarly dialogue on any subject was that he proposed, someone else expressed any view whatsoever, whether it was agreement, disagreement or no more than an observation on the state of the weather, and then he lectured them at whatever length he had been intending all along. Sometimes the old man took the hint of their heavy silence, but in the seven months that Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had been Bannerman to Clan-Lord ar’Diskan, that had been the exception rather than the rule.
“Sir, on what do you base this assumption?” he asked, and as Goel swung round on him, he heard the same people who had chuckled now groan in sympathy. “And from where do you gain your information?”
“Hah! It needs the hlensyarl Companion to show courtesy to an old man. Disgrace to the rest of you.”
Bayrd bowed slightly. Though he didn’t much care for that Droselan borrowing ‘outlander’, having heard it too many times before, the rest of Goel’s words added up to more of a compliment than an insult. “Sir, no discredit to the rest. They have doubtless heard your views many times, while I… I am as you say: outclan, unfamiliar – and curious.”
“As well as a damned smooth diplomat,” muttered Marc ar’Dru from behind him. Ar’Dru and as many of the rest of Bayrd’s Thousand as wished to had come with him when he became clan ar’Diskan’s chiefmost retainer, and had proved their loyalty to their new House more than once. Several of them had died in the proving.
Marc had escaped lightly enough, even though he had lost some of his perfect good looks in favour of a not-too-badly broken nose and a scar running through his left eyebrow. The combination gave him a sleepy, cynical air that had kept his social calendar for most of the winter months filled with the attentions of various admirers of both sexes. If Bayrd remembered correctly, he was currently in the throes of what gossip suggested was a torrid romance with Vitya ar’Diskan, the clan-lord’s second-from-youngest niece. Or had that been last week? It was hard to keep track any more.
Though Bayrd was still outwardly unmarked, inwardly he was more and more inclined to question everything he heard, and especially everything he was told. Hence his interest, however mild, in Goel’s utterances about the Prytenek peasantry.
“I base the assumption on the differing ways in which we and the Prytenek lords’-men conduct war,” said the old man. “Consider: we do not raid indiscriminately, and they do, even among their own people. We do not seek out and murder non-combatants, and they do – also even among their own people, and especially if they suspect any form of collaboration. They—”
“Collaboration, sir? Pryteneks working with us?” Bayrd glanced from side to side and saw the nods of approval at his interruption of so sweeping a statement. “Sir, I’ve neither seen nor heard of such a thing.”
“Just so!” said Goel ar’Diskan contentedly. “Nor will you. They’re too afraid of their own lords. But since we have not yet been starved into submission or retreat, then rather than admit their inept blockade is a failure, those lords prefer to believe that we are receiving some sort of assistance. And where else but from their own people? So they… persuade them otherwise.”
“Your sources, sir?”
Goel hesitated for a moment, long enough for Bayrd to raise one dubious eyebrow at the old man and wonder what differences lay between his answer and the truth. “Personal observation,” he said finally. “The reports of scouting parties. The condition of some villages which are known not to have been approached by our Alban warriors, but which nonetheless have been ravaged by armed men. All for nothing. Though the ordinary vassals won’t help us, they won’t hinder us either. This war is none of their concern, except that we the enemy are inclined to treat them more fairly than their own side. And Guelerd, unless he’s completely blind, can see… Can see…”
Goel ar’Diskan’s voice trailed off, and a vaguely puzzled expression crossed his face while he stared into thin air as if he, like Lord Gelert, could see something peculiar. Then he stood up so suddenly that his chair crashed over backwards and his mug of beer splashed hissing into the fireplace. Goel paid no heed to the mess. He blinked, shaking his head, then uttered a small, moaning cry, clutched at his temples with both hands and toppled sideways to the floor.
Both Bayrd and Marc had seen several people fall that way before, held in what the older folk called The Grip of the Father of Fires. Some had been paralyzed, or lost their faculties for a greater or lesser time, before death or recovery released them from their prison of crippled flesh. Others, perhaps the luckiest of all, had been quickly, cleanly dead before their soul-flown bodies hit the ground.
Goel ar’Diskan fell like that.
And more than that. Though many of the ot
her people in the hall ran uselessly to Goel’s aid, Bayrd did not. Instead the clan-lord’s Companion and Bannerman clenched his teeth against the stabbing pains behind his eyes and the sudden gurgling nausea rising past the good food and ale in his belly, and stared at the slumped body in the vain hope that he had not seen what his aching eyes were telling him was there.
In the instant that the old man had cried out, in the moment just before his hands went to his head, sizzling tongues of vivid green flame had jetted from ears and nose and mouth. The flames had eaten him: his brain, his mind, all that he was. Bayrd had seen the light go out of Goel’s eyes like the flame of a snuffed candle, and knew it would be a long time before the sight would cease to haunt his dreams. The flames had eaten his life as easily and speedily as a leaf dropped into a furnace. Everything had been consumed in that single whirl of emerald fire, and nothing had fallen down save empty meat. Now only coils of grey smoke dwelt in the charred holes of its skull where once organs of sense had given appreciation of the world, and a thick stench of burning clogged the air.
But Bayrd ar’Talvlyn could say nothing. From their very actions, no-one else had seen it, heard it – or smelt it – and the explanations, if they were even believed, would be worse for the living than what had happened to the dead.
And as always, the first question was not how? but why?
Goel ar’Diskan had been an old man, past his fighting years except perhaps for a last stand in a burning, conquered citadel. He had been – Forgive me, thought Bayrd – of no use any more. So why had he died? How had he died? That it had been through sorcery or the Art Magic was plain enough for those with the eyes to see it, and as Bayrd looked from face to face in clan ar’Diskan’s hall, he could see a scattering of other people hastily schooling their features to display acceptable shock and grief, for all that they had shown other emotions and understandings a few seconds before. Even though they were high-clan and would die before admitting it to such as him, Bayrd was not alone.
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