by Dragon Lance
“Everyone, stand fast,” he said, easing his horse forward out of line. Kiya followed him. He opened his mouth to tell her to remain, and she said flatly, “I’m not everyone. I’m your wife.”
The two of them advanced slowly. The Tarsans stopped, and the fifer ceased his tune. The foremost horseman held up a hand in greeting.
“Hail, Ergoth!”
Tol reined up, resting his hands across the pommel of his saddle. Empty hands were a gesture of peace, but Number Six’s grip was close, just in case.
“Hail to you, Tarsis,” he replied. “Who are you, and what brings you to imperial land?”
The rider removed the heavy polished helmet. She was a young woman, with yellow hair cut boyishly short. In each earlobe she wore several tiny gold rings. Her face was familiar; in memory, Tol heard a girl’s high voice saying, “Most call me Val.”
“Valderra.”
She smiled briefly. “My lord flatters me by remembering.”
Valderra was the personal herald of Hanira, Syndic of Tarsis. Years ago, she had led Tol to the Golden House for his meeting with Hanira after the fall of the city.
She added, “You see before you the Free Company of the Golden House. We are here at the bidding of my mistress.”
At Valderra’s nod, the fifer played a lively trill. In response, a trio of riders emerged from the poplar woods at the rear of the Tarsan troop. Although Tol could hardly believe it, Syndic Hanira was one of the three. Flanking her were two bodyguards. She headed directly to Tol and bestowed a radiant smile on her conqueror.
“My Lord Tolandruth,” she said. “It has been a long time.”
She was dressed in gray leather. Her night-black hair was pulled forward over one shoulder, in a single, loose braid. A gray leather hat with narrow brim shaded her face. Some seven years had passed since Tol had last seen her, but Hanira looked exactly as he remembered – elegant, sophisticated, and beautiful – even here in the sunbaked hills of the Eastern Hundred.
Kiya cleared her throat, and Tol straightened in the saddle, recollecting his somewhat scattered thoughts.
“Why are you here, Syndic?” he asked tersely. “And with armed troops? This violates the treaty between Tarsis and Ergoth.”
Hanira lost her pleasant smile, and her tone grew cool. “Syndic I am, but you could spare a kind word to greet a friend.”
“Are you a friend?” asked Kiya bluntly.
“I am. No treaty has been broken, my lord. This is not Tarsis before you now, only the House of Lux.”
Hanira’s guild had hired three hundred twenty veteran mercenaries and equipped them with surplus Tarsan arms. Hanira herself assumed command, although the day-to-day running of the Free Company was left to a professional warrior, Captain Tindyll Anovenax, son of Tol’s former foe Admiral Anovenax. Captain Anovenax rode one of the other horses, but stayed silent behind Hanira.
“We come to offer our help in your time of need,” the syndic said. “My men are at your disposal, my lord.”
Three hundred well-trained mercenaries were a modest but welcome addition to his army. Yet Tol was astonished that Hanira should have paid the cost herself, through the wealthy guild she controlled. Even more amazing, she had accompanied her troops into the field.
Kiya, ever distrustful, asked, “What’s it going to cost us?”
“Nothing. Everything. In politics, as in trade, personal relationships matter most. I am here – we are here – to preserve our longstanding friendship with Lord Tolandruth.”
The Free Company had left Tarsis before the fall of Juramona, sailing west to the Gulf of Ergoth and disembarking at the mouth of the Caer River. They had traveled east to avoid the imperial hordes and bakali hovering around Daltigoth. Hanira had intended to reach Juramona, Tol’s hometown, before the new phase of Solin, but captured nomads had told of the town’s destruction and the plainsmen’s subsequent defeat at the hands of a new Ergothian army.
“I knew it must be you,” she said simply. “We followed the trail of panicked tribesmen, and here you are.”
Tol maneuvered his horse closer to hers, and extended a hand. “Then accept my apology – and my welcome to Ergoth, Syndic.”
Bypassing the hand, she grasped his forearm warrior fashion. Clever Hanira had turned the simple gesture of friendship into a declaration of equality.
She called her captain forward. With his dark hair and olive skin, young Tindyll Anovenax seemed at first glance little like his choleric father, but his face, like the admiral’s, bore the lines carved by wind and sun. He also proved to have the voice of one accustomed to bellowing orders at sea.
Captain Anovenax agreed to follow Tol’s command – it was his syndic’s will, after all. He agreed, too, with Tol’s reasons for ordering him and his men to the rear of the Ergothian formation. More than a few warlords would attack on sight should they spot Tarsans leading a charge.
The Tarsan troopers and their small caravan of supply wagons took their place in the rearguard. Hanira, Valderra, and one of the syndic’s bodyguards remained with Tol. The guard’s high cheekbones, long jaw, and somber expression gave him the look of an ascetic priest. Hanira introduced him as Fenj, the finest swordsman in Tarsis. Fenj’s complete disinterest in conversation wasn’t mere stoicism. His tongue had been cut out when he was captured by pirates as a boy.
The Army of the East and their new allies continued the eastward journey to join up with Egrin’s hordes. Before nightfall, the dark edge of the Great Green was visible on the eastern horizon. Small groups of plains folk, mounted and on foot, could be seen hurrying northward, parallel to the forest edge.
Tol dispatched Lord Trudo to bring back prisoners for questioning. In the gathering dusk, three companies of Trudo’s horde galloped out to seize a band of nomads fleeing on foot. Mounted plainsmen turned back to defend their comrades, and a sharp conflict ensued. Numbers prevailed, however, and soon the Ergothians were herding a line of ragged, frightened captives back to Tol.
Looking down at them from horseback, he asked about their tribe, wanting to know if any were from Tokasin’s Fire-path tribe. No one answered. Trudo offered to behead a few, to encourage the rest to talk. Tol ignored him.
“We’ve not much time!” he told them. “Where is Tokasin? Speak, and you all will be spared!”
A woman clutching a small child spat, “Liar! We know you’ll kill us once you find out what you want to know!”
He couldn’t blame her for thinking so. Any other warlord would do just that.
“My word as Lord Tolandruth, you will not be harmed.”
The woman turned away in stubborn silence, but an older nomad, his gray beard spattered with blood, shouted, “Many here are Firepathers! They’re trying to reach their chief at the Isle of Elms!”
This was a large grove of elm trees, a half-league from the Great Green. The closely growing trees, sited atop a slight rise, would make an excellent defense against imperial horsemen.
Shoving broke out among the prisoners as Firepathers vented their anger against the old fellow for speaking, but other tribesmen, young and old, defended him. The alliance between tribes obviously was wearing thin. Ergothians moved in to quell the disturbance.
“Why didn’t the savages just run for the forest?” Hanira said, gesturing at the Great Green in the distance.
Kiya said tartly, “These ‘savages’ are no more at home in the greenwood than you are, Syndic. They’re plainsmen, riders. The people of the forest would treat them as invaders!”
As he had vowed, Tol released the captives once they’d been disarmed. Some of his horde commanders protested, but he had no intention of burdening his army with prisoners. The freed nomads scattered rapidly as the ten thousand Ergothians veered north toward the Isle of Elms. Sunset was nearly upon them, but Tol would not delay. He was certain Chief Tokasin was the true leader of the nomad invasion. Mattohoc and the other chiefs, however great their hatred of the empire, were not charismatic enough to forge their disparate tribes
into a single army. Tokasin had done that.
They rode through the night. Darkness made it impossible to hold formation. By daybreak Tol’s ten hordes were strung out over four leagues.
When the sun rose, its light revealed the Isle of Elms ahead. Towering trees, on a low hill, were isolated from the primeval growth of the Great Green by a half-league of rolling field. Morning light also picked out the iron blades and helmets of the hordes under Egrin’s command. Their numbers had not been sufficient to surround the Isle. The arrival of Tol’s hordes would remedy that situation.
The trumpeters sounded assembly. Tol needed to bring his straggling hordes together, and quickly. Egrin’s men were engaged. If Tokasin was smart as well as fierce, this would be no more than a rear guard, a small force left to hold off Egrin’s hordes while Tokasin and the main body slipped away.
At Hanira’s suggestion, Tol sent her Free Company on a wide sweep around the Isle of Elms, to prevent such an escape. The Tarsans, on fresher mounts than the hard-riding Ergothians, could move fast. Captain Anovenax vowed that not a single nomad would get through, then his disciplined company galloped away.
Valderra begged the syndic for permission to go with them. This request obviously surprised Hanira. Her herald was no soldier.
“I can fight,” the young woman insisted. She drew the slim saber from her gilded scabbard. “Let me go, mistress. I will do you honor!”
The syndic hesitated, then gave her leave to go. Valderra twisted her horse’s head around, and Hanira added, “But mind you come back, Val! It’s very hard to get good heralds these days!”
Smiling under her heavy helmet, Valderra galloped after her comrades.
“Your herald shows a warrior’s pride,” Kiya commented.
Hanira sighed. “She and Tindyll hope to wed. She doesn’t want to be parted from him, even in battle.”
Half the morning had gone before Tol’s scattered force had regrouped into fighting formation. Nerves and the day’s heat conspired to drench them all in sweat by the time he gave the order to advance.
Ranks of horsemen trotted through the trampled, brown grass. Any sounds of the fighting ahead were lost in the thunder of their own horses’ hooves. Veteran of many battles, Tol felt the old tightness in his throat, the hot tension forming in the pit of his stomach. Battle was never routine. It remained a hard, bloody business to which no sane person ever grew accustomed.
At his command, horns blared from the leading hordes. Answering blasts came from Egrin’s men. Arrows were flying, and riders surged back and forth along the edge of the elm grove. Some nomads had taken up positions among a tangle of windfall trees.
A messenger rode up and saluted.
“Lord Egrin requests Lord Tolandruth lead his men into the gap between the Isle of Elms and the Great Green, to cut off any escape attempt by the enemy,” he panted. This was the very route Anovenax’s Tarsans had taken.
“Tell Lord Egrin we will deploy as he suggests,” Tol replied. He added a warning about the Tarsans’ presence. It wouldn’t do for Egrin’s men to attack their new allies.
Horns blared commands right and left. The Ergothians drew their sabers, resting the dull edge against their ironclad shoulders. Surveying the lofty elms, Tol regretted sending Tylocost and the Juramona Militia on to Caergoth. Riders would never be able to get at the nomads hidden among the lofty trees, but the militia might.
Denser clouds of dust rose in front of them. Captain Anovenax’s force was already engaged. It wouldn’t do to let hired Tarsans have all the glory.
“Forward, at the canter!” Tol ordered.
He glanced once at Hanira. She was keeping pace, with Fenj a few steps ahead of her. He carried an oversized shield to defend her, if need be. It was astonishing that anyone as rich and powerful as a syndic of Tarsis would risk her life in someone else’s battle, but Hanira was no ordinary woman. Even so, Tol knew she wasn’t motivated by loyalty or love. She expected to profit from her deeds in some way.
The Free Company, a streak of brass amidst the gray and brown mass of nomads, was fighting furiously against a far larger band of plainsmen. Tol ordered the pace increased to a gallop, and with a roar his Ergothians charged forward. They were echeloned to the right to cut off any attempt by the nomads to reach the Great Green.
The last few paces before the clash, all sounds seemed to still. There was only the drum beat in Tol’s head, the sound of his own heart. Although loud, it was steady, not racing. He held Number Six high, point out. He might have been bellowing, but at that moment he could hear nothing.
— and then he collided with a nomad, horse to horse, blade to blade. His opponent wielded a captured Ergothian saber, and they traded several cuts until Tol shifted around and brought his saber down hard on the nomad’s wrist. Steel hissed through the man’s buckskins, and beyond. His hand, still gripping its stolen sword, fell and was lost amid the churning horses.
Tol slashed at the next nearest foe, a plainsman with a straight sword and leather-covered buckler. The nomad attacked, his point scoring a bloody line along Tol’s jaw, before Tol drove Number Six through the man’s small shield and into his chest. The fellow slid off his horse, eyes wide in astonishment.
The weight of Tol’s hordes washed over the enemy like high tide over a lonely rock. Pinched between the Tarsans and the Ergothians, the nomads were pushed back, half their number driven toward the Isle of Elms and the other half to the distant Great Green. Still they did not break, for these were Tokasin’s Firepath warriors, considered by all to be the fiercest fighters among the nomadic plainsmen. Their buckskin shirts bore a design, worked in red beads, of a stylized thunderbolt. Red beads likewise decorated their long hair, in imitation of their chief’s fiery hair.
The melee separated Hanira and Fenj from Tol, but Kiya remained by him, protecting his back. She took a hard knock from the hilt of a nomad sword and reeled in the saddle, blood welling in her mouth. Dazed, she found herself staring up at the summer sky. It was filled with towering clouds, sculpted white shapes against the hazy blue. As she grappled with her reins and fought to stay atop her tough plains pony, she was amazed to see the clouds changing shape. The white columns flowed into definite forms: separate individuals standing shoulder to shoulder and gazing down onto the battlefield with cloud-white eyes. The image was so clear Kiya froze, head thrown back, staring up.
The clang of blade meeting blade in front of her face shocked her out of her stupor. Tol had leaned over and fended off an attack by a black-bearded nomad.
“Kiya!” Tol roared. “Kiya, are you hurt?”
She shook her head and squeezed her eyelids shut so tightly her vision was blurred when she opened them again, but the cloud-people remained, staring implacably down on the enormous field of battle. This was no time to mention such a thing. The black-bearded plainsman was aiming another cut at her, so she brought up her sword and slashed him from neck to waist.
“I’m all right!” she shouted, pushing Tol away.
The nomads who had been cut off on the Great Green side of the meadow were annihilated. The remainder rode hard for the Isle of Elms. Whooping with victory, the Ergothians spurred after them, but when they neared the trees the pursuers faced a new attack.
Nomads on foot – women, children, and wounded warriors – concealed within the safety of the elms launched arrows, as well as deadly accurate stones from slings. Too many Ergothian saddles were emptied before Tol could make his jubilant men withdraw. The hordes moved out of range and mustered on the plain in full view of the shattered, exhausted nomads hiding in the trees.
A call sounded from the high-pitched Tarsan trumpets. Not knowing what the signal meant, Tol ordered his men to hold their places while he went to see what the Tarsans wanted.
The mercenaries were drawn up in a hollow square when Tol reached them. Captain Anovenax and several others knelt in the center of the square. The Tarsans parted ranks to allow Tol and Kiya to ride in.
“A brisk fight!” Tol dec
lared. “Well done, Captain!”
At that moment, Hanira’s bodyguard Fenj stepped aside and Tol realized the focus of the kneeling group was a supine figure: Valderra. Her gilded breastplate was pierced through and stained red, her young face waxen in the harsh sunshine. Helmetless, her short golden hair was sweat-slicked and filthy. Captain Anovenax gently closed her staring eyes, his expression eloquent. He wept silently, but without shame.
Tol murmured, “I’m sorry, Syndic. What happened?”
“Too many foes, too little skill.” Hanira looked up, and her face seemed to have aged a decade.
A whirlwind of dust announced the arrival of a quartet of Ergothians. The lead Rider brought Egrin’s greetings, and the news that Tol was needed for a council of battle.
Tol acknowledged the message, and finally noticed Kiya. Her chin was stained with dried blood from a lower lip cut and growing puffy. More blood sprinkled her buckskin shirt. She was looking up at the sky dazedly.
He asked if she was well, and she assured him she was. Still concerned, Tol told her to remain here. Surprisingly, she agreed without argument.
Once Tol had ridden away to join the war council, Kiya glanced again at the sky, but the clouds were only clouds now. The images she had seen during the battle were gone.
When she looked down again, Kiya saw Hanira and her bodyguard had gone. Captain Anovenax had covered Valderra with his own golden mantle and was still kneeling beside her, holding her hand. His unembarrassed emotion surprised her. Ergothian warlords prided themselves on their hardened feelings, as did Dom-shu warriors. Apparently, Tarsans did not. Dismounting, she led her pony over to the grieving man.
“I sorrow for your loss,” she said. “The syndic has departed?”
“She had to take her leave.” Tindyll’s voice was hoarse, freighted with terrible sadness. “Her sorrow is very great.”
Kiya had never much liked Hanira. She muttered, “Off to hire a new herald, I suppose.”
The captain gave her a dark-eyed glare. “You don’t understand,” he said, choking. “Valderra was not merely her herald. She was Hanira’s daughter.”
