A Song for Arbonne (64 page)

On Bertran's castle ramparts in the brilliant sunlight he shook his head but kept grimly silent, as he had in the council chamber and ever since. In some ways it might all be purely a matter for historians and dry philosophers to come: the men who picked over the bones of dead years like the scavengers who came out at night after a battle to despoil the slain and dying.

The stark reality today was that even with the corans of Miraval they would have needed an enormous number of mercenaries to have had any real chance of defending themselves, and the winter invasion had eliminated that possibility. They were brutally outnumbered by the army Ademar of Gorhaut had brought safely through the mountains. Ademar, and Galbert: Blaise knew, as surely as he knew anything in the world, that this winter war was his father's stratagem—cunning and long planning mingled with a sublime, unwavering certainty that the god would see him through the pass. And the frightening thing, of course, was that Corannos had. The army of Gorhaut, which was the army of the god, was in Arbonne, and Blaise, looking north from the ramparts with Bertran and Fulk de Savaric and others, felt fear like a hard object lodge against his heart.

Only fools and madmen do not know fear before a battle.
His first captain had told him that, and Blaise had offered the same reassurance over the years to young men under his command. He was positive, though, that his father had no fear just now, riding here in pursuit of his life's long dream. What that meant, he really didn't know.

"We'll array ourselves at the south-east end of the valley," he heard Bertran explaining to the three men who had just joined them. Barons from the south. One of them was Mallin de Baude. He and Blaise had had time for no more than a quick greeting and an exchange of glances. There might never be time for more. "The castle and the lake," Bertran went on, "will be behind us so they can't flank around. There is a slight slope downward—if you look closely you can see it—in the valley to the west that will help. It'll give the archers a little more distance if nothing else." Bertran, Blaise thought, knew this land like a melody from his childhood. He surprised himself with the image. Perhaps, he thought, he should start being less surprised: he was among the army of Arbonne, after all.

"What about Rian's Isle?" one of the new barons asked. "Can they reach it from the western shore of the lake if we're leaving them access to that side?"

"No boats. We've brought them all to our wharf or across to the isle itself. I don't think they'll be thinking about that in any case until they're done with us." Bertran's voice was calm. Blaise was impressed, though not especially surprised: he'd had some time now to take the measure of this man. He trusted him and he liked him, and only a year ago he wouldn't have expected either to ever be true.

Bertran was bareheaded as always, and without armour, clad in his usual outdoor garb of unassuming brown hues. When Blaise had first seen him riding up to Baude Castle last spring those rough-spun clothes had seemed a perverse affectation on the part of a lord of such immense power and wealth; now, in a curious fashion, Bertran's appearance seemed entirely apt to a war-leader on the eve of a battle. It was as if, in some inexplicable manner, de Talair had always been readying himself for this. Blaise wondered if that might actually be true: he remembered—another image crowding in—the biting, sardonic verses the duke had sung in Baude Castle about Ademar and Galbert and Daufridi of Valensa. The man who had written those words might well have anticipated a response to them. The first response had been an arrow dipped in syvaren, Blaise recalled, glancing at Rudel a little further along the wall walk. The second response seemed to be war.

He looked away west. The massive Arch of the Ancients shone in the sunlight at the end of its elms. A little nearer he saw the strand beside the roadway where six corans of Miraval had killed his horse and pack pony and then died by his arrows. He remembered the young priestess from the isle coming to bear him to Talair.
We have been waiting for you,
she had said, assured and arrogant as they all seemed to be. He had never properly understood what they had meant. It was part of the same unsettling web of mystery that had brought them here now in response to Beatritz's warning.

Who knows what the women do when they go out in the woods at night?
His father's words once, before burning another presumed witch on Garsenc lands. He preferred not to remember such things. There would be fires here, though, an almost unimaginable inferno if Galbert conquered. With some effort Blaise forced himself to push that thought away, to think back, instead, to the music that had been playing as he'd entered this castle for the first time beside Valery that day in spring. It seemed a long time ago.

Fulk de Savaric moved closer, resting his elbows on the stone in front of them. Without taking his eyes from the northern end of the valley, he murmured wryly, "Do you have anything extremely clever in mind?"

Blaise's mouth twitched. "Of course I do," he said, matching Fulk's tone. "I intend to challenge Ademar to single combat. When he foolishly accepts I'll kill him, take command of his grateful army and we'll all ride home to Gorhaut in time for spring planting."

Fulk gave a snort of amusement. "Sounds good to me," he said. "Do I get to deal with your father?"

Blaise didn't smile this time. "There are a few people who might want to do that," he said.

"Including you?" Fulk turned to look at him.

"I suppose so." He didn't meet the other man's gaze, and after a moment Fulk de Savaric turned away.

In the distance to the south-west, clearly visible from this height in the windswept winter air, Blaise could see the towers of Miraval. Even now, with all he had learned, and with the image of Duke Urté, on his knees before Signe de Barbentain, then striding from the council chamber, there was a part of him that could not quite believe that fifteen hundred fighting men would stay within those walls if battle came.

Whether that was cause for a sliver of hope or a deeper, colder dread he did not know.

What he did know was that he had spent most of his own life pursuing a dream or a vision of Gorhaut, what it should be, what it once had been, and that vision had had Corannos at the very heart of it. And now, having rashly claimed a crown for himself, he was about to go to battle amongst the men of woman-ruled Arbonne in a goddess's name against his own country and king—and father if it came to that—and against an army marching beneath the banner of the god he had vowed to serve with honour all his days.

How, Blaise thought, did one trace back the line of a life to see where the fork appeared that had led to these ramparts? He couldn't answer that. Perhaps a poet could, or a priestess, but he was a soldier and, yes, a would-be king, and the time—

"There they are," said Rudel quietly, his archer's eyes catching the first far glint of sunlight finding metal among the trees.

— and the time for such thoughts was gone now, like a leaf on the wind, a wave on the stony shore, like all the mornings of the vanished past. The army of Gorhaut had come to Lake Dierne.

Blaise saw them then, moving down the road that wound out of the woods, and their banners were the banners of his home, their voices—they could just hear them now—were lifted in a song he knew, and he could recognize, even from so far because of the clear light that was Arbonne's, the king he had named a traitor, and the father… the father whose long dream this army was. He saw Ranald ride around the curve of the road and, without real surprise, recognized the pennon of Andoria as Borsiard appeared at the head of his company of men. That is a man I will be happy to kill, he thought.

And then, as if mocking such a thought, there came into sight waving, jiggling pikes carried by foot-soldiers, and riding on the top of some of those pikes, spitted like meat for broiling were the severed heads of men.

Bertran de Talair made a sudden harsh gesture and a sound of denial that might have been a name, and a moment later Blaise registered a memorable mane of blond hair and realized that he, too, recognized the foremost of those severed heads. A sickness passed over him, forcing him to grip hard on the stones of the wall for support. A moment later it grew even worse. In the midst of the singing, gesticulating army of Gorhaut a rolling platform came into view, and on it they saw a man bound naked to a pole set in the centre of the platform. His genitals were gone; there was a blackened clotting of blood at his groin. Dead birds—owls, Blaise saw—were slung in mockery from ropes around his bowed, averted neck.

He thought this man, too, was dead, until the head was somehow lifted—in agonized response to what inner message, Blaise never knew—and even from the ramparts they could see the holes where his eyes had been gouged out.

Of course,
Blaise thought with loathing, fighting sickness. It was part of the mockery: the blindness, and the birds of Rian. And then, with deepening horror, Blaise realized that he knew this maimed, dark-haired man as well. He looked over again to the head on the highest of the bobbing pikes and then turned, speechless, to Bertran de Talair. He saw that the duke had lowered his head so as not to have to see.

The landscape and the men on the ramparts grew oddly unfocused, and Blaise became aware that he was near to weeping, he who had killed so many men in war, or beside the shore of this same lake, or in the close darkness of a Portezzan night, and had seen others slain in terrible ways, and had regarded all of it as no more than the coinage of his profession. But he had never burned a helpless old woman naming her a witch, or dragged a priestess screaming from her bed, and he had never maimed or broken men in the way that these had been. This was warfare of a different kind.

He was remembering, almost against his will, Midsummer Night in Tavernel. Remy had been the fair-haired one, with more spirit and art than mature wisdom in him perhaps, and Aurelian was the darker, quieter man. They were musicians, not soldiers, both of them, and both were young. It was these two who had carried Beatritz's tidings to Barbentain from the island; they must have gone north together, Blaise realized, after delivering the High Priestess's message. He didn't know why; they might never know why.

"Look there," he heard someone say. Rudel, his voice strained in the sound of the wind.

Blaise passed a hand across his eyes and looked down again. Following where Rudel was pointing, he saw, among the army of Arbonne spread out below the walls, a dozen archers, crimson-clad, moving neatly forward from the ranks. He did not know who had given this order; perhaps no one had. Perhaps this was simply the instinctive response of some of the best-trained men in the country, those sworn to guard, and to uphold the honour of the queen of the Court of Love—to whom all the troubadours of Arbonne had sworn their life's service and devotion.

Blaise saw the Carenzu archers set themselves in a line, draw back bowstrings together and then let their arrows fly, high into the face of the wind. Among the ranks of Gorhaut a sudden volley of shouts brought the singing to a ragged halt; men flung up shields and hastily lowered their helms.

They need not have done so. The arrows were not an attack. They had been sent out like arching prayers, in grief and passion and rage, in an anguished attempt to put the ruined man on the platform out of pain. Most fell short. Three did not, and one of those arrows pierced him through the heart. The dark-haired man's head was flung sharply back so the holes of his eyes stared blankly up at the bright, lost sun. They saw his mouth open then but no sound came forth. No sound at all as Aurelian died, no last note like a swan, though all his days he had been celebrated for the pure, transcendent beauty of his voice.

"Oh, Lady," whispered Bertran de Talair. "Oh, goddess, heal and shelter them now within the infinite mercy of your arms." Blaise realized that his own hands were shaking. He gripped them together on the stone in front of him.

"You will excuse me," Thierry de Carenzu said, visibly working to maintain his composure. "I think I must go down and tell Ariane. She ought not to learn this from anyone else."

Blaise said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. There was someone else, he thought suddenly, who ought properly to hear of these two deaths from someone who cared for her, but he didn't know where Lisseut was, and he didn't think it was his place, given who had done this thing. He watched his father remove his war helm in the valley below and then his tall, handsome, anointed king did the same. Blaise's eyes were dry and his hands grew steady then as he looked down at the two of them.

In this windy green valley by Lake Dierne, Ademar of Gorhaut is a happy man. The presence of the Arbonnais army here before them is a surprise of sorts, but not an unpleasant one. The High Elder has been telling him from the beginning that this lake will see the battle that ends Arbonne. They had expected things to follow a slightly different sequence, anticipating that it would be their sacking and burning of the Isle of Rian that would bring the goddess-afflicted soldiers of this land out from their walls to battle.

They did not anticipate an army waiting for them, but Ademar turns away from the now-dead singer on the platform—one of the two fools they caught spying on their line of march—and sees his High Elder smiling as well.

"It is well," Galbert says, the deep voice rich with satisfaction. "They are ignorant as well as cowardly. Had they known about our shortage of food they would not be here. As it is, this will be over tomorrow, my liege, and the granaries of Arbonne will lie open to us with everything else. See their numbers? See our own? Look up at the god's sun over us."

"It is well," Ademar says briefly. At times he tires of Galbert's intoned pieties, and even his jaded appetites are nearly sated by now of the High Elder's passion for fire and maiming. Ademar has come to conquer a rich land and to scotch the whiff of rebellion shaped by the younger Garsenc son and Fulk de Savaric. Galbert is here for something else. The god will have his due and more, the king has promised as much. He only hopes it does not last too long, and leaves him some fields to sow and harvest and a country to rule when the last of the burning is done. The numbers are indeed very good though, Galbert speaks truth there, and there are surprises in reserve.