by Widowmaker
And what lay at his feet was definitely a pike.
Less than ten years ago in Drosul, men had been executed for making them, villages had been razed when two or three had been found hidden in the thatch of just one cottage. Now they were in Alba. Rebellion followed the appearance of these crude pikes as morning followed sunrise. But not here, surely? Alba’s troubles were among its lords, not among its people. Marc stared at the ugly, angular chunk of wood and metal and wondered what else it might mean – besides the all too obvious that his mind was trying to avoid.
“You’re a better man than I believed,” said Reth ar’Gyart’s rough voice behind him. Forgetting what his eyes were telling him in the wonder of what his ears had just heard, Marc kneed his horse around to look at the older kailin-eir. Ar’Gyart wasn’t smiling; his face was not one where a smile looked comfortable. But he had pitched his words loudly enough that everyone nearby could hear them plainly.
“You have the look of an eijo, Marc ar’Dru, and we have treated you so. But you are kailin, and honourable. I salute you for it.”
Reth might not have managed a smile, but there was a warmth in his face that Marc had never seen before. He eyed the Bannerman for a moment, suspicious even now that this might be just some sort of ugly joke, some other move in the Game. But there was no trace of any mockery, just the unease of a man who had found himself mistaken in his judgment – and was courageous enough to admit it in the hearing of lesser retainers.
“I will speak well of you when we come to Erdanor, and this error will be set right…”
As Reth spoke, making a sort of clumsy formal speech out of his apology, Marc looked at the other lord’s-men, the ones who had spoken to him cheerfully enough yesterday, and not at all today. They also looked embarrassed, and relieved that matters were sorting themselves out to their leader’s satisfaction. These were just ordinary men, far removed from the politics of feud and clan-war. They served their lord for duty’s sake, as much as for honour; for the roof above their heads and the food they ate in hall, and the respect that a worthy clan-lord’s service brought them. Nothing else. Marc guessed that they would rather have talked to him as not, and were glad this was all over.
“In the meanwhile, we are not far from the gates of Hold ar’Kelayr so you shall ride beside me as a token of respect…”
As for the fighting, and the wounding, and the dying: that was what such men were for. It concerned them far less than the intangibles of forced enmity against a one-time friend. And this time at least, no-one had died. There had been some ugly wounds inflicted by those pikes: they were coarse metal, unable to hold a properly sharp edge, and ripped rather than cut, tore rather than pierced. But for that same reason, the damage was much less than it might have been.
Even the arrows had not killed any—
There was a sound in the air like a pigeon’s wings, and whatever triviality ar’Gyart had been saying stopped abruptly with a loud, fleshy smack.
When Marc’s gaze snapped back towards the sound, Reth’s eyes were slightly crossed as if still trying to focus on what had happened, even though they were already glazing. There was a double trickle of blood running from his nostrils, but little other indication of the destruction done inside his head by the last arrow of all. Its grey-feathered flights rested between his dark eyebrows as though placed there by a careful hand. The rest of the shaft protruding from the nape of his neck like a second warrior’s braid. More blood was dribbling from its point.
Ar’Gyart was already dead. It was just the action of shocked nerves that made him twitch and shudder as he keeled out of his saddle and fell sideways to the ground. At least, Marc hoped so.
If not, the man took a hellish time to die.
And that was all. There was no attempt to resume the attack, no other arrows except that single fatal shot, and not even a trace of the man who had loosed it – though no great attempt was made to find him. Wandering off across the landscape looking for a hidden archer who could shoot as well as that was just another elaborate form of suicide.
At least they heard what he said to me, Marc thought grimly as he watched three of the other retainers strap ar’Gyart’s body across his saddle beside the ashes of his dead lord. All of them heard it. Let them deny it if they dare.
There was no likelihood of that. He was being treated as the little column’s saviour, as some sort of paladin, as everything Marc knew he was not. They even gave him the signal honour of carrying Lord ar’Kelayr’s sword Katen, a blade he wouldn’t have been permitted to so much as touch no more than an hour ago. For all his determined resistance – and given how he had been treated over the past few days – Marc would have been more than human had he not basked in the acclaim just a little, as though it was sunshine after a week of rain. That didn’t mean he had to believe what they were saying. But he did stop correcting it.
And anyway, he reassured himself, they were only lord’s-men. Such gushing praise would hardly convince whichever kailin-eir was now in command at Erdanor that everything they said was true. But he might accept enough of it to offset any unsavoury rumours about this new hero, and that would be reward enough.
To perfectly satisfy the requirements of irony, a scarred and grizzled Bannerman like ar’Gyart should have died in his bed. Even without that, his death was ironic enough. To be killed after the fight was over; to be killed by a chance arrow; to be killed by a peasant rebel who had paused for no more than a moment in his headlong flight…
And the greatest irony of all was that it should have happened so close to home and safety.
Marc had been right when he recognized the country through which they had been travelling: Hold ar’Kelayr and the fortress of Erdanor had been no more than five miles from the spot where Reth ar’Gyart died. They reached it in less than an hour. An hour too long for Reth.
The fortress lay below them as they crested the last rolling sweep of moorland, built on an island in the swift-flowing River Erden from which it took its name. The place was a natural fortification, and there had been an Elthanek castle on the site when Clan ar’Kelayr took seizen of the domain around it, some five years ago.
Part of the old castle’s fortifications had still been plainly visible the last time Marc had ridden here, on official business between the clans Talvalin and ar’Kelayr. Since their domains adjoined each other – if the Debatable Lands between them were ignored – there had been a moderate amount of communication between the two clan-lords. Only moderate, however. Vanek ar’Kelayr had never been able to forget that he, too, had been cheated of the Dunrath holdings by Bayrd’s victory. Their relationship had been polite and stiffly formal, nothing else, and the two had avoided meeting face to face whenever possible. Only retainers and Bannermen shuttled to and fro with messages.
That last time it had been something innocuous; permissions asked and granted for logging and charcoal-burning in the northern part of the forest of Baylen, or some such. It could equally have been to do with hunting rights. Marc couldn’t – or didn’t care to – remember. But whatever his reason then for being away from Dunrath, it hadn’t been like now. The times had changed
And so had Erdanor. But hardly so much, not in just three years…
Marc ar’Dru shook his head. Having seen how much trouble Bayrd Talvalin – no, he thought, keep it ar’Talvlyn, that makes separating then and now so much easier – had gone through during the construction of Dunrath, Marc wouldn’t have thought such extensive building was possible in so short a time.
But then, he was neither an architect nor a master mason – and anyway, there it was. After strange lights in the sky, and sudden fights on the ground, and going from being a clan-lord’s Companion to being an outcast to being a hero, all in the course of four days… It meant that worrying about what had or hadn’t been done to a fortress since he last saw it was very low on Marc’s list of concerns.
Perhaps because of the heat, the River Erden was throwing up some sort of mist. Certainly he
could clearly see the outlines of the old fortress, the ones with which he was familiar. The rest, nearer the river, were vague, shifting images like trees seen through rain, changing their shape depending on whether he was looking straight at them or merely catching them from the corner of one eye. Those walls and towers looked more like something that had grown out of the ground than anything built with stone and mortar, and skill and sweat and muscle. The outer walls were smooth and shiny, a slick gloss that seemed to come from more than moisture in the air.
Marc wondered if ar’Kelayr had started a return to the old Droselan style of building, where they used not raw stone faced with painted plaster but bricks fired with a coloured glaze. Azure blue was the most popular, recalling a summer sky even in the depths of winter; or bright chrome yellow, to give the grimness of a fortress wall a more cheerful look – and also, for the piously-minded, to make a token gesture of patronage towards the Light of Heaven and the Father of Fires. This wall was neither. It was red. And not just any red.
It was vermeil.
That colour was deep scarlet or rich crimson, less bright than vermilion and less sombre than cinnabar. The colours, patterns and crests of Alban banners and standards all had their own individual meanings, attributes for good or ill. It might have been best to avoid any unfortunate colours – certain shades of red, three of the five tones of black, various others – except that clan colours of exclusively fortunate aspect were considered excessively proud, and an invitation to misfortune…
But vermeil was blood-red, redolent with violence without glory, the most unlucky tincture of them all. Marc had never before seen it used alone, without some other colour to blunt its harmful influence. The only suggestion he could read from it was that Clan ar’Kelayr had a great deal more confidence in its own power and prestige than anyone else believed.
They were an old high-clan line, that couldn’t be denied even by their enemies; but they had never been truly important as such things were normally measured. At least, not outside their own minds. But the times were strange, alliances were being forged and broken like the work of an apprentice swordsmith, and there was no knowing what treaty might have been secretly concluded.
Marc ar’Dru managed to keep a smile from his face only from respect for the presence of the dead. A man willing to be a ruthless player of the Game could indeed make his own way in a troubled world. But he could make it so much more quickly in association with a clan whose star was rising.
This time, respect or not, he did smile. A star had fallen last night. A star was rising today. The balance was moving to restore equilibrium, and he intended to move with it when it started to swing upward at last.
As they rode closer, he could see the banners above the walls, floating in the warm, moist air or snapping when an errant breeze caught them. Like the walls and towers of the fortress, they were red for the most part – though unlike the walls, they at least were banded with other colours. Some of them Marc expected: the blue and red of Clan ar’Kelayr was everywhere, as was only right above the Clan-Hold.
But he hadn’t been anticipating the white and red of Clan ar’Diskan. Gerin ar’Diskan and Vanek ar’Kelayr had been the original rivals for the lands and domain that Bayrd ar’Talvlyn now held, and nothing that he had heard this past ten years had done anything to suggest they had grown any more fond of each other. Yet the ar’Diskan banners were there, and could not be denied.
And there was one in particular, a black and red he didn’t recognize.
Then Marc shook his head. No, he had been mistaken. The clan-lord’s long pennon flying above the citadel wasn’t black, just a deeper shade of blue striped with undulant dark shadows. Some odd trick of a mind still confused by the past few hours’ events, or maybe of the wind and the mist and the light, had turned those shadows where they lay across its patterning of red, into the shape of a crimson serpent.
Then the wind shifted, and the light changed, and it was what it had always been, a blue banner striped with scarlet.
They entered through the River Gate, that in any other hold would have been the Great Gate; but here, in a fortress built on an island where there was only one causeway, one bridge and one gate, its name was whatever the Hold-lord pleased. The stone causeway extended only a part of the way out across the river, its span supported on no more than two stone buttresses, sunk into the river-bed and sharply angled to better cut through the force of its current.
All the rest of the bridge, right to the gate itself, was wood; and Marc did not need an especially sensitive nose to smell the oil-filled troughs beneath its surface. No trouble here about axing through supports in the face of enemy arrows, and especially arrows shot as accurately as that last one today. One touch from a torch, and the whole structure would go up in flames, taking any assault with it. The iron-faced liftbridge and its counterweight dropgate seemed almost excessive after that.
Marc eyed the place in the manner he had been taught so very long ago, before Landing, before Alba, when he was just a Captain-of-Ten in the Kalitzak cavalry and expecting the inevitable question that followed seeing any new fortress.
‘How would you command the taking of this place?’
How indeed? Short of damming the river Erden far upstream, waiting for the water to subside – ‘and what, ar’Dru, will the garrison be doing to your siege-force while you wait?’ came the instructor’s voice again, far more sarcastic this time – and then sending in a full-scale assault all around the perimeter, this would be a devilish hard nut to crack.
The knowledge was curiously comforting.
Then Marc’s eyes narrowed a little. There were people standing beneath the arch of the gate, on the fortress side of the threshold, and it was evident they were waiting for him. More: they were waiting for him to cross the threshold into their domain, without invitation and by his own will. It was an entry in the old way, without risk that anyone might be accused of coercion.
If that was how they wanted it, then that was the way they would have it. Marc gave his horse a little touch of the bit and a matching pressure from his heels so that the animal arched its neck and paced haughtily across the last span of bridge. Even though his mount was just a nameless nag – he had refused any of the fine horses that had been his by right as Bannerman to Bayrd – he concealed a quick grin of satisfaction at the way the beast had behaved. None of its fine-bred stable-mates could have done any better.
Still in the saddle, he studied the men who came to greet him and recognized a few: Ivern ar’Diskan, Gerin’s second son, and some of his personal retainers. That explained ar’Diskan’s banners at least, though Marc was looking forward to hearing what had brought him here, into the fortress of a clan who, if they weren’t his father’s enemies, were certainly less than friends.
At least the ar’Diskan’r were looking more pleased to see him than they had done on the last three occasions Marc had met them. There wasn’t a comment about his status, or even a dubious glance at his cropped hair. It was as if they knew what he had done, why it had been done, and appreciated the stand he had taken.
There was one other man, standing a little further back in the shadows of the gate, who seemed a stranger at first. Tall, dark-haired, lean; what little Marc could see of his face suggested he had the sort of angular good looks that went with a carving adzed of oak and left unsmoothed. But when he stepped into the full sunlight, ar’Dru realized he was as wrong about that as he had been about the colour and crest of the citadel’s pennon.
This man wasn’t dark. Far from it: his hair, done up in the three braids of a clan-lord, was as fair as Marc’s own. He was handsome almost to beauty, his eyes blue, his skin clear, his stride confident, and his mouth curving in a smile of welcome that was as honest and open as a child’s. He was everything an Alban kailin-eir should be, everything that should be striven for and everything that, thanks to human nature, was so seldom achieved; for besides an appearance that would make any man envious and any woman sigh, he was c
ourteous and honourable, honest and worthy of respect.
How Marc knew all those things about him only at first sight and when the man hadn’t even spoken yet, he couldn’t have said; but he knew it all the same, and felt his own face breaking almost without volition into a matching smile.
“Welcome, welcome, welcome,” the man said, an outburst that would have sounded effusive from anyone else. But from that face, and warmed by that smile, it was uttermost sincerity.
“I am Kurek ar’Kelayr,” the man said. “My late father’s eldest son, and now Clan-Lord ar’Kelayr.” Marc looked at him blankly. His memory was insisting that Vanek ar’Kelayr had had only the one son, Dyrek, the young reaver who had killed himself in Bayrd ar’Talvlyn’s despite. The memory hovered for a moment, like a butterfly; then like a butterfly it fluttered away.
“You haven’t seen me before, of course,” Kurek continued. “Given your past service, our two clans have scarcely been close, these past years. And then, you’ve guested in Erdanor no more than… How many times was it? Four? Five…?”
“Five times, arluth,” Marc responded automatically. “But…” Blond eyebrows, fine as spun gold, lifted in polite enquiry. “Why haven’t I seen you, in any of those five visits?”
“Because I was in Cerdor, Marc-eir. In Cerdor. Speaking with the Overlord Albanak, and later with his children. Someone had to. I regret that my father had difficulty forgiving Albanak-arluth for that business over the Dunrath domains, and as for my poor brother,” Kurek’s broad shoulders lifted in a shrug more dismissive than regretful, “you saw for yourself how his mind worked. He was a hothead. That was why it sat so loosely on his shoulders.”
