by David Drake
You’ve changed your tune in the years since we met, Garric thought. He didn’t let the words reach his lips, but a smile did. If this stiff-necked old Ornifal nobleman had come to respect him, then Garric had gained something more important than the cheers of city rabble who’d turn out for any spectacle.
Aloud he said, “Milord, how long would it take you to reduce this city? Using the troops assembled outside.”
Waldron frowned but glanced about him in assessment. The interior of the Place was a mass of separate wicker compounds; each circular wall enclosed a number of huts belonging to a single clan. There were no streets, just pathways; not infrequently the compounds pushed against one another like lily pads struggling for space on the surface of a pond. Cat men peered through gaps in the walls to watch their human conquerors march past.
“A day to circle the town with earthworks and raise nets on top of them so the beasts can’t run,” Waldron said. “At first light, pile brushwood on the upwind side of the walls and set fire to it. Go in when the flames burn down and finish off any still alive.”
He pursed his lips, then added hopefully, “Though we wouldn’t really have to wait for the earthworks—the males don’t like to run, and the females won’t leave their kits. Is that what you intend to do, Your Highness?”
“It is not,” Garric said sharply while the ghost in his mind guffawed. “But can I take it as a given that if you and I were killed, the officers remaining outside the walls would be able to put that plan into effect?”
“You’re bloody well told they would!” Waldron snapped. “There isn’t a soldier in the army who wouldn’t know how to do that. We’ve burnt half a dozen keeps already when they wouldn’t surrender, and this place would burn even better.”
“Right,” said Garric. “And the Coerli know the same thing. They won’t kill me for that reason alone, even if you don’t trust their honor. Which I assure you, milord, is just as highly developed as your own.”
Garric smiled to make his words friendlier than they otherwise might’ve been taken. In all truth, there was very little to choose between the ways a Corl chieftain and a nobleman from northern Ornifal viewed the world. Garric had to hope that in the long run that’d make it easier to bring human and Coerli society together, but there’d be many sparks struck before that happened.
“And first survive today, lad,” said Carus. His image toyed with the hilt of its imaginary sword.
Garric assumed the Council of Elders was leading the delegation by the broadest way possible, but that became extremely narrow as they neared the center of the town. When Garric paused to let Waldron go ahead of him between compounds whose walls were masses of gray fungus, he heard someone retch violently behind him.
He turned: the youngest of Lord Tadai’s aides was on his knees, vomiting helplessly. Between spasms he whimpered, “Oh Lady, help me, the smell. The smell!”
“Get up, Master Loras,” Tadai said harshly. “We have our duty.”
He held out his hand to Loras, but the younger man struggled to his feet. “I’m all right,” he said hoarsely, but his eyes were closed. He opened them to slits and stumbled forward with the rest of them.
Waldron had paused because Garric did. He went on with a snort.
“I’ve seen young soldiers do the same on their first battlefield, milord,” Garric said mildly when they had room to walk side by side again. “And he didn’t drop the document case he was carrying.”
“Aye, that’s so,” said the old soldier. With a half-smile—or at least the closest thing to a smile Garric had seen on his lips since they entered the Corl town—he added, “And the place has got a pong, I’ll admit. They’re cats, that’s sure, these beasts.”
“Yes,” agreed Garric. “They are.”
He’d had too many other things on his mind to be conscious of the smell, but the clerk was probably the son of a Valles merchant rather than a rural peasant. Now that Master Loras had called his attention to it, Garric realized that the stink was worse than the occasional summer day in Barca’s Hamlet when the breeze blew from the direction of the tanyard.
Lord Attaper at the head of the procession shouted orders to deploy his troops. Three paces on, Garric and Waldron arrived at the Gathering Field, a round of bare clay a furlong in diameter. Coerli crowded the outer edges, but a broad path remained open to the center, where nine undressed rocks waited in a circle.
The Corl Elders sprang onto eight of the rocks and squatted, facing inward. Garric put his left boot on the last, then hopped up to stand on it. His head was well above that of anyone else in the field, able to see and be seen by all.
“Coerli, whom I have conquered!” he said. “Hear my commands and obey!”
As Garric spoke, he turned around slowly so that all the watching cat men had a direct view of him. He towered above them, his face framed by the silvered helm and its flaring, golden wings. His words had drawn a dull growl; as his gaze swept each segment of the crowd, the timbre of the sound shifted higher.
The Blood Eagles were in an outward-facing circle, their shields flush against the chieftains of the cat men, each of whom stood with his chosen warriors at the head of the males of his clan. The human soldiers were a black-armored wall, bulkier than the Coerli and taller even without the horsehair plumes pinned to their helmets.
But the cat men could move the way lightning dances between summer clouds. If it came to a fight, Garric and his whole entourage would be massacred … but there wouldn’t be a fight.
The ghost in his head was silent; smiling faintly, seeing through Garric’s eyes but making different calculations. The cat men were quick, to be sure; there was no defense against their speed. But a man doesn’t die the instant he takes a fatal wound. He can keep hacking at his enemies for a minute and more if he’s the sort who doesn’t mind dying so long as he takes as many of his enemies as possible with him to the Sister. King Carus, the foremost warrior in the history of the Isles, would be directing Garric’s sword if—
But that wouldn’t happen.
Garric completed his eyes’ circuit of the crowd, returning to the Council of Elders. Early in the cat men’s history, a chieftain must’ve held power only so long as he could defeat the strongest of his warriors. If their society had never evolved beyond that, the Coerli would still live in scattered hunting bands and be animals hunting other animals.
Greater numbers and settled communities had required a different sort of organization, leadership based on wisdom and experience instead of merely strength. Even so, the Elders facing Garric now were all former chieftains. They had the heavy bodies and shaggy manes of sexually mature males who’d lived for years on a diet of red meat rather than the fish and legumes of ordinary warriors.
They glared balefully back at Garric; but the eldest, the Corl who’d addressed Garric from the gateway, said, “We are here for you to command, Chief of Animals.”
“Then hear me,” said Garric. “First, you will send all the men from the Place to my camp. From this day forth, no man will serve a Corl!”
The problems the freed humans would cause for the kingdom were staggering. They hadn’t been slaves, they’d been domesticated animals for hundreds of generations. But there wasn’t any other choice that Garric was willing to accept.
“I am Barog!” snarled a chief outside the circle of guards. “Shall a Corl chieftain eat fish?”
The Elder who’d been speaking rose to his feet on his rock and pointed to Barog. His mane, silvery but still streaked with pure black, flared out at twice its previous length. “Kill the oathbreaker!” he said.
“How dare—” Barog shouted.
The chieftain to his left grabbed him by the shoulder. Barog spun, baring his fangs in defiance; the chieftain to his right, now behind him, dashed out his brains with a ball-headed wooden mace. The chief already holding Barog sank teeth into his throat. Victim and killers dropped to the ground, the latter worrying the former like dogs with a rabbit.
Warrior
s whom Barog had led moments before joined in tearing the dead chieftain to bits. At a command from Attaper, the Blood Eagles at that side of the circle dropped to one knee, butting their shields on the ground; otherwise the maddened Coerli would’ve clawed and bitten the men’s ankles as they thrashed.
Garric kept his face set in grim lines, but he smiled in his heart. Perhaps Waldron’ll believe what I’ve told him about Corl honor now.
“My government will deal justly with all members of the kingdom, human and Corl,” Garric said when the deep-throated growling had subsided enough for him to speak over it. “We’ll provide you with hogs to raise for meat, as we’ve done with keeps who’ve already accepted my authority.”
Something warm was sticking to the back of Garric’s wrist; he glanced down, then flicked away a gobbet of skin and hair. In a melee like that, it might not have come from Barog’s body. The Coerli really are beasts.
“I’ve seen men do the same, lad,” King Carus murmured. “But not all men, not that.”
“From this day …,” Garric said. What he’d just seen had brought a new harshness to his voice. “Any Corl who eats human flesh will be killed. Any town or keep or roving band which harbors a man-eater will be destroyed to the last kit. There will be no exceptions and no mercy!”
The lips of several Elders drew back to bare their fangs. There was a fresh chorus of growls from the audience, but this time no Corl protested verbally. An Elder snarled in an angry undertone to the one who’d acted as spokesman. That Corl nodded and fixed Garric with his eyes.
“Chief of Animals,” he said, “we have given our oath and we will keep it. But our young warriors—who can control the young, when the blood runs hot and passion rules? Are your young any different?”
“There will be attacks on humans, I know that,” Garric said. “And I know also that you Coerli will hunt the attackers down yourselves and slay them, though they be the children of your own blood. You will do this because of your oath, and because the kingdom’s vengeance will be absolute and implacable if you do not. Is it not so, Leader of the Coerli?”
The Corl spokesman had settled back on his rock after ordering Barog’s slaughter. Now he looked first left, then right, meeting the eyes of his fellows in silence. At last he rose to his feet again.
“I am Elphas, the Chosen of the Elders!” he said. His voice cracked when he raised it to make himself heard over the uncomfortable whine of the crowd. “Does anyone challenge my right to speak?”
The whine grew louder, but no Corl dared put his dissatisfaction into words. Garric felt the hair on his neck and wrists rising instinctively at the sound.
“Then I say this, Leader of the Animals!” Elphas continued. “We do not fear your threats, but we will keep our oath because we are Coerli!”
“Aren’t they afraid, do you think?” Carus mused. “I think I was as brave as most men, but I didn’t want to die.”
The chieftains at least would rather die than back down, Garric decided after a moment’s consideration. But they’re afraid of their clans and their whole race dying. They know that’ll happen if they don’t accept my terms.
“Very well,” he said aloud to the Coerli. “Send six of your clerks—”
The Corl word was closer to “counter” than “clerk” but the concept was the same. A city of ten thousand couldn’t exist without some sort of administration, though the Coerli version was crude by the standards of a human village.
“—into my camp to meet with Lord Tadai—”
Garric paused. Tadai bowed. He’d heard his name though all the rest of Garric’s oration was gibberish to him.
“—and the clerks under his direction. They will explain what the kingdom requires of the Coerli and will arrange delivery of the kingdom’s gifts to its new Corl subjects.”
He grinned. The cat men were more aware than humans of subtle shifts in expression and body language. By now all the Elders would understand the meaning of a smile. They weren’t as good at making verbal connections as humans, however.
“For example,” Garric said, making his point explicit, “they will determine how and where we should begin delivering hogs to you.”
The sound of the assembled Coerli changed again, this time to a hopeful keening. It was just as unpleasant to a human’s ears as the threatening growl.
Tadai already employed Coerli from keeps that’d surrendered earlier. They and the human clerks they worked with were trying desperately to learn each other’s languages, but at present only Garric could address and understand the cat men clearly. That was a last gift from a friend, an ageless crystalline Bird, in the instants before the Change; and it had come to Garric alone.
The Shepherd knew that bringing the cat men into the kingdom was going to be hugely difficult even with the best will on both sides. Garric didn’t expect exceptional goodwill, knowing the Coerli and knowing men even better.
“Aye, lad, but as scouts and skirmishers for the army …,” Carus said. The king’s image set its fists on its hipbones and laughed openly. “There’ve never been humans to match them for that. Maybe your Lady Tenoctris is right.”
“Coerli, you have heard my commands,” Garric said. “There will be further decrees in coming days, not because of my whim but because they are necessary. Men and Coerli must stand together against the dangers that will otherwise destroy us all. Remember that!”
Garric poised to step down. He’d told the truth when he said he didn’t think the cat men would attack him and his companions … but the sound and smell and sight of thousands of angry warriors pressed close would’ve made a rock uncomfortable.
“Or a dead man …,” said the ghost of Carus, smiling in knowledge as well as humor.
“Leader of the Animals!” said the Elder to Garric’s immediate left. His fur had originally been beige but age had sloughed much of it away; the skin beneath was the clammy white of a salamander in a deep cave. “I am Keeger. Elphas speaks for me and for all, because he is the Chosen—but may I ask you a question?”
“Speak, Keeger,” Garric said, looking down at the Corl. Keeger hadn’t risen, perhaps knowing that doing so would’ve further emphasized the bulk of the tall, armored human.
“You talk of right and the good of all,” Keeger said. “But tell me, animal: do you dictate to the Coerli by any right save that which steel and fire give you?”
“In a thousand years they might get enough discipline to face a human army with sticks and nets,” Carus said with a snort. “Maybe in a thousand years; not less.”
Garric drew his long horseman’s sword and held it high; the pattern-welded blade danced in the sun like a snake writhing. “Do you wish to bow to a conqueror rather than work with an ally, Keeger?” he said. “So be it! And Keeger?”
The ancient cat man stared up at him, his lips drawn back.
“Never doubt that if the Coerli break their oath, they will have men for conquerors,” Garric said. “But those conquerors will have no more mercy than the Coerli themselves would have. There will be nothing left of your keeps but ashes drifting over the bones of your dead!”
“Garric and the kingdom!” Waldron shouted, drawing his own sword and holding it aloft.
“Garric and the kingdom!” cried the Blood Eagles, clashing their spears against the bronze bosses of their shields. “Garric and the kingdom!”
Garric stepped down. “Lord Attaper,” he said, putting his lips close to the guard commander’s earflap. “March us out!”
The massed Coerli warriors stood in sullen silence, but no one objected as the human delegation stamped and splashed its way through the muck of the cat men’s only city. Garric sheathed his sword as he stepped out of the Gathering Field, but the Blood Eagles continued to cheer and rattle their weapons all the way to the gate.
“BIG FELLA, ISN’T he?” Karpos said, straightening and backing against a pilaster. He hadn’t drawn his bow, but the broad point of his arrow was pointed at the spine of the man on the floor.
The stranger groaned again. His face was turned slightly toward her; his mustache quivered as he breathed, and he had a short black beard as well. She’d guess he was about forty—old enough for a peasant, but this one hadn’t been a peasant. His hair and nails were neatly trimmed, and his skin was smooth except for the scars—a cut above the right eye, a trough in the right forearm that could’ve been made either by a blade or a claw, and a puckering from a sharp point below the left shoulder blade.
A hard smile touched Ilna’s mouth: this one was a warrior. She guessed that if she rolled him over, she’d find the mate to the pucker somewhere in his upper chest where the point’d gone in. Why he lay here naked and unconscious while the priests outside had died fighting the cat men was a question to ask as soon as the fellow could speak.
“Karpos, get some water,” Ilna said. “I don’t see any injury but there’s something wrong with him.”
“Asion!” Karpos shouted to his partner. “We found somebody! Fetch us water!”
Ilna frowned but didn’t object. The hunters were her companions, not servants. Karpos was afraid to leave her alone with the stranger. His concern was misplaced, but it was a harmless mistake.
Ilna only wished that her own mistakes had all been so harmless. If she hadn’t made a particularly bad mistake, she’d have a better reason to exist now than the hope of killing every cat man in the world; though killing cat men seemed to be enough.
The floor of this temple was of simple stone flags instead of the designs in tile or mosaic that she’d seen elsewhere. The stranger brushed them with his palms, feeling for a purchase. His eyes remained closed.
“Here!” said Asion, striding swiftly out of the sunlight with a dripping mass in his left hand; the knife in his right pointed toward the ground, not a threat but assuredly ready for any trouble that arose. “I didn’t see a gourd around so I soaked some cloth in the fountain.”
