Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  The Oyrwyn Mountain flapped listlessly in the cold air as the sun sank, with the Gated Tower of Highgate no livelier beneath it. The Lord of Highgate walked the battlements arm in arm with his wife. Their clothes were a contrast in seasons: his, a simple woolen cloak over black and grey, no hood, light gloves, while she still wore sealskin boots and gloves and had ermine trim and a hooded fur cape draped over her shoulder.

  Garth’s pale face was drawn continually to the horizon, clouded though it was by the lines of mountains that crossed his homelands.

  “If a boy, perhaps my father’s name,” Garth was saying.

  “Ufferth?” Audreyn sniffed. “I think not.”

  “Well, we’re not going to name him Anthelme,” Garth protested.

  Her aquiline noise wrinkled in distaste. “Certainly not,” she agreed. “Besides, it is far too early to know one way or another.”

  Above them, or perhaps right in front of them, a voice softly but unmistakably spoke. “Hello,” it said.

  Garth’s hand fell to his sword, and he took a half-step to place himself in front of Audreyn. “This wall will be swarming with guards if I but give the word,” he said, drawing his sword and holding the blade in a guard across his body, all the while swiveling his head to look for the source.

  “Please,” the voice said, “do not do that. I mean you no harm. It is Gideon.”

  “Gideon?” The tip of Garth’s sword lowered towards the stones at their feet, but he did not move to sheath it.

  “Yes,” the voice said. “Gideon. The Will of the Mother.”

  Audreyn stepped out from behind Garth, placing a hand upon his arm and gently lowering it so that his sword’s point lay against the stones. “Gideon?” She looked from side to side. “Perhaps it would help if we had something to speak to.”

  “Ah.” Almost instantly a pigeon seemed to be sitting on the wall in front of them. “Better?”

  Garth frowned and carefully slid his sword back into its scabbard. “I suppose,” he muttered, “unless anyone sees the Lord of Highgate and his wife speaking to a bird.”

  The pigeon ruffled its wings. “No one will see or hear. But the longer we spend on these trifles, the more effort this will cost me.”

  “I presume you’re carrying a message for us, then,” Audreyn said. “Will we need a scribe?”

  “No. The message I bring is twofold. First, the peace congress at Standing Guard Pass has reached an accord, an agreement brokered largely by Hamadrian Innadan, Allystaire, and Torvul.”

  Audreyn’s smile was wider and more welcoming than the look of polaxed astonishment that had Garth’s mouth agape.

  “How? What are the details?” Audreyn’s rush of questions were cut off by the pigeon’s sudden flapping of its wings.

  “I haven’t the time. An army of Braechsworn threatens Barony Varshyne, and once they destroy it, they mean to turn east.”

  “Braechsworn?” Garth’s turn to speak while Audreyn furrowed her brows.

  If a bird could look exasperated, this one managed, turning its head to the side to regard Garth with one eye. “Yes. Fanatics. Islandmen armed with Barony steel. Holy Berzerkers. Gravekmir and Graveklings. Many priests of Braech as well, led by the Choiron Symod.”

  “What? Why? What brings them together?”

  “Hatred, bloodlust, greed,” the bird said. “I haven’t the time to explain the wider ramifications. Please trust me when I say that this message comes from Allystaire, and that it is entirely true.”

  “We do trust you, Gideon,” Audreyn said. “What must we do?”

  “I am carrying messages from the Barons to their keeps and commanders to assemble what forces they can bring to bear, immediately, to march west and assemble at the outskirts of Varshyne. I have already carried this message to Wind’s Jaw.”

  “How did you deliver it?”

  “I carried a piece of paper,” Gideon said, “and delivered it to the scribe in the tower where the pigeons are kept. As at the other keeps I’ve visited, the scribe was typically too excited by his need to share the news he’d got to notice that the bird delivering it disappeared rather quickly. May we please,” the pigeon with Gideon’s voice said, hopping from one foot to the other, “dispense with unnecessary questions. This is very taxing.”

  “Please go on, then,” Audreyn said, placing her hand once more on Garth’s shoulder, stilling another question that had been forming on his lips.

  “Very well. I already delivered Baron Oyrwyn’s orders to Wind’s Jaw. Nothing was said about men from Coldbourne or Highgate,” the pigeon said. “I thought this was information you should know. The Baron himself is going to be moving north towards Wind’s Jaw to marshal his men. But I do not trust him; alone among the Barons at Standing Guard, he did not agree to work under Allystaire’s command. He said so quite cunningly, but he said it all the same.”

  “Is Allystaire moving with him?”

  “No. Allystaire is moving towards Thornhurst, then north. He is taking charge only of the horsemen, for now, and intends to move up into Varshyne as fast as he can manage in order to engage the Braechsworn there. He is going to send Idgen Marte along with Gilrayan, to look over his shoulder, and I am to coordinate between them.”

  The bird turned its head to regard Audreyn, who was smiling and opening her mouth. “I know that is an excellent step, but I do not trust him even that far. When it comes to it, Allystaire may be sandwiched between the Braechsworn, and whatever hostile force Gilrayan might choose to seize the moment with.”

  “And if he sent no orders to me, then he does not want me there,” Garth said coldly. “All the more reason that I should be.”

  “Precisely,” the bird said. “The faster you can move, the better.”

  Garth looked over his shoulder at the fading sunlight. “If I leave tonight, with a string of horses, I can make Coldbourne Hall in a few days.”

  The pigeon’s small head slumped towards the stones for a moment, then lifted slowly. “I do not doubt you are mighty in your own right, Lord of Highgate,” Gideon said, “but you alone would be of little use.”

  “If you leave with all the knights and horsemen you can rouse this night,” Audreyn said, “you could be there in a week or so. And it is not so far to the Varshyne border from there.”

  “He’ll need more than just horse,” Garth said, frowning darkly. “Though in that country, if he can find the right hills and the right valleys they might be enough.”

  “Those would be matters to work out with him,” the pigeon said. “I am tiring. I wanted to bring you the message, and I did. Now I must go.”

  And to you, Lady of Coldbourne and Highgate, the Shadow sends her regards, and asks that you continue the work you started after your brother wins this war.

  Audreyn was startled, but struggled not to show it, as she quickly realized that the Will’s voice was sounding only in her mind. I have already written to the lady of the Horned Towers, and the wives of several knights with smaller holdings, she thought back, uncertain if Gideon could hear her. They were as tired of war as I, and as ready to do what they could to stop it.

  Good. The pigeon faded and then disappeared altogether, and yet she heard his voice one more time. I could tell you if it is a boy or a girl child, if you like.

  What? How do you? Now Audreyn knew that her expression showed, for Garth turned to her, worry written on his features, hands going to her shoulders.

  I can feel it, Lady of Highgate and Coldbourne Hall, Gideon said. For reasons that do not bear explaining now. I will have to speak to you of it later. In depth. Do you wish to know?

  Audreyn gave her head a slight shake and put her hands to Garth’s.

  Be well, then. The child will be healthy. I can promise you that much.

  Then both the voice and the presence they both realized they could feel was gone. Audreyn turned to her h
usband, set her shoulders, and placed a hand upon his pale-bearded cheek. “You have work to do,” she said quietly.

  “Gilrayan will be suspicious,” he replied, pulling his mouth into a thin line, “when I arrive unbidden by him.”

  “But you’re going to go anyway,” she said.

  “I am,” he said slowly. Searching her face, he finally said, “I could not do otherwise. Not where Ally is concerned.”

  “I know,” Audreyn replied. She took a deep breath. “Go. I want to watch the sun set, but you have no time to waste.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her. Not passionately, for guards or other folk might see, but not entirely chastely, either. Audreyn leaned against him a moment. “You will also come home. With all your limbs and bits attached,” she said firmly.

  “Your brother’ll see to that,” Garth said. “He already has. I know you’re tired of hearing it, but he made the finest knights in the Baronies. I do not say that out of simple pride; I mean it. We will flock to him, exile or no, Audreyn. I won’t be the only one who’ll choose him and even his Goddess over Gilrayan, if it comes to it.”

  “I know,” she said, “and I know you mean that nobly, but a war inside a Barony would be worse than wars on its borders. Promise me,” she said, “that you’ll do everything you can to avoid that. To avoid open revolt.”

  “Everything I can,” he said, “I do promise—but it may not be enough.”

  “Make sure that it is,” she said, clutching his arms tightly. “We cannot trade one war for another. That’s not what Allystaire wants, either.”

  He nodded slowly, pressed his face against her dark coils of hair for a moment, then pulled himself free of her arms and hurried away towards the nearest tower.

  She leaned one arm against the parapet, and draped the other over her stomach, which had the barest hint of swell to it. She watched the sun set, and pondered what it could mean that the Will of the Mother could feel her child.

  Audreyn could find no answer that she liked.

  * * *

  Gideon had been rather drained by the illusion he’d maintained and the conversation he’d had. He found, when he projected his Will in this way, that conversation moved all too slowly for him. It felt like moving through mud, and constantly waiting for everyone to catch up with him to be sure they were not lost.

  Even so, he found that as he soared mentally over Barony Oyrwyn, his strength returned much faster than it ever had before.

  He paused to concentrate, to draw his senses away from the external world of sights, stilled his Will where it hovered over a wide expanse of moor. Very slowly, he realized, and in small pieces, power was simply flowing towards him, like specks of iron drawn to a lodestone. An impossibly large and powerful lodestone, that drew them from miles away.

  The implications, he began to think, then snapped himself back to the task at hand. He forced himself to study the landscape, the lives being led upon it, as he floated over it.

  Lives being whittled from it, really, he thought. The light of the day was waning, nearly gone, and yet laborers were out upon the moors digging turf, their spades and mattocks moving in neat strokes to cut blocks of it and load it onto carts or baskets. The end of the day being near, their children and wives had come from their cottages—too small, Gideon thought, to house so many—to haul the loads back to the drying sheds. Many of those outbuildings were in better repair than the cottages themselves, with stouter walls and better roofs.

  He moved low. There was no reason to imagine himself quite so high in the air as he typically did, not with the mountains well behind him, and floated close enough to study them.

  The men were large, in the same way Allystaire was. Not tall like Joeglan Naswyn, or gracefully muscled like Gilrayan Oyrwyn, but they had stout bodies, broad muscular shoulders, thick hips, tree-trunk legs. The clothes they wore were miserable. Dirty, patched, rough, damp with sweat and mud both. In many cases their shirts were all but shapeless sacks tied around their middles with fraying rope. Many of the children that had come out to haul baskets of turf away were barefoot, though the vapor of their breath could be seen in the air. Some wore little more than pieces of hide wrapped around their feet.

  Gideon was studying their sunburned faces, their rough calloused hands, when he realized that a child, a babe worn in a sling around its mother’s back, had fixed its blue eyes straight upon him, and was extending a stubby arm, as if pointing.

  As he climbed back into the air, Gideon chastised himself.

  They are not objects of study, he thought. It is for these people that I was made. It is for them that my Gifts have been given. And I will see that they have it.

  He soared away, but he fixed the place in his mind, knew that he would remember the newborn child who’d pointed at where his Will had floated invisibly in the air.

  Gideon had little time to think on what that had meant—or on what he had felt from Audreyn and Garth’s daughter in the womb—because what he saw outside Barony Varsyhnne was a horror in the making.

  The keep, the only occupied fortress he’d seen since he crossed the Oyrwyn border, was completely encircled by Braechsworn men. Giants, towering above the others, acted as a ring of watchtowers around their encampments. Crude banners showing devices he was unfamiliar with—crossed axes, ships, and dragons in every possible pose, from flight to recumbent to coiled to pierced with arrows and dying—peppered the camp, but a massive banner of the Sea Dragon, stretched tight between two pine trunks, dominated the central camp.

  He fled for Standing Guard Pass before he could make too much sense of it, for he felt power hovering over the camp. Dozens of priests of Braech were gathered there, and he could feel the accretion of their will. If they could gather it together, all of them at once, they could threaten him, he thought.

  He knew they could feel his presence. He wanted to confront them, to go amongst them and drive their wills from their bodies, to gather to him whatever sparks of power lay within their mortal shells.

  Almost, he turned back, began to form himself into the nearly invisible dragon form he had assumed when he had struggled with priests of Braech before. But deep down he knew that bringing news to Allystaire was more important. He tried to fix in his mind the details of what he had seen as he flew as fast as he could manage—at the speed of thought—to his form on a cot, in a tent, hundreds of miles distant.

  * * *

  Allystaire had left one flap of his tent open, found a flagon of wine and two cups, and was already pouring when Arontis Innadan arrived after night had fallen. In the light of the lantern, the young man’s face was mud-spattered, and he smelled strongly of horse and sweat.

  Allystaire held a cup to him, pressed it into his hands when Arontis stared ahead in a daze for a moment. He sank into the other camp chair without a word, and didn’t notice the slumbering form of Gideon on the other cot.

  “Could you not have healed him?” Arontis’s voice was small in the darkness, but it did not waver.

  “I did what I could,” Allystaire answered gently. “Whatever stories you may have heard, or what folk have told you, or what you hope, there are limits to what the Mother can heal through me.”

  “To die now, today, at the advent of his great hope. It is a tragedy.”

  “Forty years of war is the tragedy, Arontis.”

  Arontis nodded, took a perfunctory sip from the cup Allystaire handed him, slumped in the chair with the cup in both hands.

  “Could you have…have kept him till I returned? Could I not have spoken to him?”

  “Mayhap I could have,” Allystaire said. “Yet every moment would have been an agony.”

  “Why even tell me that? Why not just say no, you couldn’t have?” For all that he was a tired man, slipping into shock and grief, heat crept into Arontis’s voice as he sat up straighter, camp chair creaking beneath him.

  �
�I cannot lie, Arontis,” Allystaire sighed, “not even if a lie would be a comfort.”

  The younger man drank his wine, draining the cup off. Wordlessly, Allystaire reached for the jug and filled it. They sat in silence and drank a moment before Allystaire spoke again.

  “It is a hard day, the day a man loses his father. Mine died while I was on campaign. I arrived just in time to put him in the family tomb.”

  “I will not even be able to do that,” Arontis said. “If I am to leave in the morning with you.”

  Allystaire sighed heavily again. “You are going to think I am a hard man, callous, or cruel. But which would your father rather you do?”

  “Do you think I haven’t already wrestled with that? Of course I’m riding out in the morning. Two hundred Thornriders were mustered outside the Vineyards. I brought all of them, with the remounts, pack horses, grooms. At least it’s spring, so we can forage for most of the fodder.” He emptied his second cup, shifted in the chair. “Cerisia said she will see to funeral rites, but when this is over, I would ask you to offer whatever rites you can.”

  Allystaire winced, and hoped Arontis couldn’t see his face. “I will do what I can. For what it is worth, Arontis, I was able to ease his passing. He did not die in pain or in fear.”

  “Passing to what? To the ground? A next world? The Cold?”

  “I do not know for sure, but I do not believe it is the first, and certainly not the last of those. I thought I had a vision, at the moment. Of him as a younger man, walking with a child, a young boy, barely a toddler, in an endless vineyard.”

  “Dessen,” Arontis said quietly. “He was born ill, and nothing any chirurgeon could do would change it. He lived only a few years. I barely remember him.”