Lord of the Changing Winds (39 page)

Probably no soldiers anywhere had ever been so glad to form up in the rain. Men shouted with the first shock of cold—then adjusted to the coolness that was, after all, no colder than usual for summer rain, and stripped off their helmets to let rain pour down their necks. The awnings on the carts suddenly became useful for keeping rain off the wounded, while Meriemne swept back the curtains of her litter to let the rain fall on her wrinkled face. She was already sending her bearers straight for the carts, and Iaor rode past and dipped to take her hand and kiss it, laughing: one more worry off his mind. Bertaud only hoped the earth mage could help the sunstruck also.

General Adries rode by at a smart pace, causing scattered soldiers to leap to order by his mere presence. The men should have had an hour to rest, hot food, wine—but there was no time, or so Iaor clearly feared. Bertaud feared it too. There were great holes in the ranks. Officers were working hastily to merge tattered companies into solid units; sergeants moved through the lines, taking out a man here or moving one to fill a hole there, making sure bowmen were protecting their strings, issuing orders for the men to sit down right in their ranks and get what rest they could. Baskets of hard bread and dried fruit were being passed down the ranks. It was raining harder now, hard enough for the drops to sting, but no one complained about the rain soaking the food. They were too glad for the extra moisture in their parched mouths.

Bertaud found Iaor speaking with his senior officers at the edge of the small army, all of them looking off down the hill as though they expected to see the Casmantian army right down there.

“Ah, Bertaud,” Iaor said, catching sight of him. “We’ll move out on the quarter hour. We’ll cross through the pastures, come down the hills through that wood over there. If the Arobern has men posted to watch for us, that’s where they’ll be; at least, that’s where I’d put them if it were me, so I’ll want a dozen or so men to go down quietly in front of us and see what there might be waiting. This rain is luck for us.”

Bertaud nodded. The rain would kill alertness, mute sound, restrict visibility.

Iaor frowned in thought. “We’ve got about eight hundred men fit to march—that’ll have to do, no matter if the Arobern has two or even three thousand, as the spy tells us. We can hope Eles has blunted his teeth a little.” He did not put into words what they both knew: that if Eles had put whatever force he had gathered against the Arobern, probably he and all his men had already been butchered.

“So…” Bertaud said instead, “we captured a Casmantian spy?”

“Not captured, precisely. He came with the girl and put himself in our hands—gone over to her side, I gather, if not precisely to ours. I gave him to Emend, you know, one of Moutres’s people.”

“Ah.” Moutres was Iaor’s master of spies. And the man, then, was the Casmantian soldier who had brought Kes out of the Casmantian camp. That he’d been a spy was very believable. That he’d entirely thrown over his own people for Kes… that, also, remembering him with her, was perhaps believable. Though one trusted turned spies not at all, and depended on their information as little as possible—but Iaor would know that, and at least there was little doubt he’d truly turned.

Iaor ran a distracted hand through his wet hair and glanced at the sky. “Luck for us, as this rain is—luck comes in threes, or we shall hope it does. I know what I want from it: quickness and surprise. Time?” he asked one of the officers.

“Twelve minutes, your majesty,” said the man.

Iaor gave a curt nod and strode urgently off with a handful of officers trailing him.

Bertaud watched them go and then walked away, to the edge of the woods and then in among the trees. Rain beat down on the leaves overhead, a comforting sound that quickly muffled the noise of soldiers and horses behind him, until he might almost have been alone in this countryside. His shirt was soaked through… not unpleasant, after the desiccating wind of the desert. He stopped at last, his hand against the bole of a slim tree, and called into the rain, “Kairaithin.”

As though he had been waiting for that call, the griffin mage was there. Maybe he
had
been waiting; he had come so quickly. He stood in the shadows of the trees with his shadow smoldering dimly behind him, as banked coals may glow faintly through thick ash. His eyes, Bertaud fancied, smoldered as well.

Bertaud said, “This rain—”

“My people cannot fly in this wet,” said the griffin harshly. “Do you understand, man?”

Bertaud said nothing.

“You must not call us. If you call, we shall be compelled to come. And in this rain, we shall be helpless against Beguchren—against the cold arrows the Casmantian archers possess. Do you understand?”

The griffin’s tone was abrupt, just short of savage; his face rigid. He was trying, Bertaud thought, to overcome his vast pride enough to plead. He was going to manage it in another moment. Bertaud said quickly, to forestall him, “Do
you
understand what will happen to my people, if yours will not aid us? You are asking me to sacrifice my people for yours—perhaps more: Perhaps my king. Perhaps Feierabiand entire.” His voice fell to a whisper. “How can I fail to use all the weapons I possess, when the alternative is such profound betrayal? Do you deny that your griffins would still be a useful weapon in our need, even pulled out of the desert and weakened by rain? That your people might still help me save mine?”

Kairaithin came forward a step and half lifted a hand, only to let it fall with whatever gesture he had begun unfinished. He said nothing, perhaps because he could not fathom what argument might move a weary human heart in this exigency. Even silent, the griffin’s presence beat against Bertaud like the heat of a great fire, though one banked and dim.

Bertaud ran his hand slowly down the smooth bark of the tree and tried to think, through the distraction of the rain—heavier now—and the fierce pressure of the griffin’s presence so near at hand. He could not.

Distantly, he heard the shouts that told him the Feierabiand soldiers, what poor remnants of them remained, were forming up into ranks and prepared to march. They would move quickly, he knew, coming into this wood: There was not yet any need for stealth. He need not rush back to join the Feierabiand army. It would come here, to him. Indeed, he thought he could already hear the sounds of its approach.

He said harshly, hardly knowing what he said, “I won’t call you.”

Kairaithin met his eyes, waiting, expressionless.

Bertaud thought—knew—that the griffin did not yet believe him. Kairaithin expected some impossible demand to be laid on him, on his people, which they would not be able to refuse and which would destroy them. He repeated simply, not knowing of any complicated oath that would create belief, “I won’t call you.”

The griffin mage tilted his head to one side, a gesture startlingly like that of a bird. He started to speak.

Behind them, a voice called urgently, “My lord!” A young man came through the trees, riding a horse of his own and leading Bertaud’s. “The king is asking for you,” said the man.

Bertaud took the reins and turned back to look for Kairaithin. But the griffin was gone. A sharp sense of loss went through Bertaud like an arrow, and a sense of release; he understood that the griffin mage was gone, indeed, and would not return. This would be a battle between men. There was every chance Feierabiand would lose. But the griffins would not, at least, be pulled down with Feierabiand. Bertaud swung up into the saddle without a word to the young man—he felt wholly unsuited, just now, for speaking to men—and went, as directed, to find his king.

There were Casmantian sentries in the wood. “Three of them,” Adries reported. “I hope that was all there were, for that’s all we found.”

By that time, the sounds of battle were faintly audible even over the sounds of rain and wind coming through the trees.

“Eles is holding?” Iaor wondered aloud. “How?” He sent Bertaud a sharp look. “Could your griffins have come there before us and reinforced him?”

Bertaud shrugged. He could hardly explain why he was certain they had not. So he said nothing, and wondered bleakly how he had come to keep such secrets from his king and his friend.

Minas Ford was not, of course, walled. It was far too small to bother defending, and all its wealth—in land and crops and livestock—would have lain outside any wall anyway. There were no more than a few dozen cottages in the village proper, all made of white stone and dark timber, with a single cobbled street and a broad green in the center. The Arobern’s army pressed close on all sides. But the army had not yet entered the village: It had been stopped at its edges.

Defenders used the cottages themselves to fill out their lines: They had ranked themselves between ready-made walls. Even so, their lines were frighteningly thin, and growing thinner as Bertaud watched. They were mostly using swords, and mostly against spears, a desperately uneven match, especially with the vastly disparate numbers. Grunts of effort were audible, panting cries of anger or pain from both sides, the ring and scrape and crash of metal against metal… Orders, shouted in sharp, high voices to carry above the clamor. The scream, somewhere, of an injured horse, piercing and innocent as the cry of a child. And over all, the constant steady rush of the rain, pouring and pouring out of the heavy sky…

Men also were within the houses, shutters thrown wide so they could shoot out at the Casmantians. At first, Bertaud thought those within the buildings were all soldiers, but then he saw, from the way they cast back the dim watery light, that the arrowheads were the slim copper-tipped ones used for hunting and not war, and after that he saw that many of the defenders shooting from the windows were simply villagers. Of course, the Casmantians were shooting back, though it was harder for them, out in the weather as they were, to keep their bowstrings dry. But some of them were clearly managing the trick. When a defender, struck, cried out, it was a woman’s high voice Bertaud heard. He flinched from the sound of it.

“Eles did well, and does well,” Adries commented, coming up beside Bertaud. “That’s more than a hundred men he has there, I expect—more nearly two, if you count the civilians. Women, too—yes, you heard that, too, did you? He might hold another quarter hour, even half, before the Casmantians break through that line somewhere. Then it’d be all over, of course… Well, we’ll see if we can’t beat that moment.”

Adries did not put into words the obvious, which was that whatever they might do to relieve Eles and his men for a moment or an hour, it would nevertheless not be possible to win. Unless the griffins came in.
Kairaithin
, Bertaud thought, longing for the power of the griffin to reinforce the men of Feierabiand, but he did not call. The rain fell steadily, as though it had always fallen and always would, as though rain was an intrinsic quality of the air on this side of the boundary. Earth magic brought it, he was increasingly certain: the cold earth magic used by Casmantium, utterly antithetical to griffin fire… If he forced the griffins to fight, Bertaud thought, they would only come to be slaughtered, and what good would that do any of them? He did not call.

“We won’t be sounding horns. You’d best take your position, my lord.”

Bertaud, mouth dry despite the rain, nodded and reined his horse back to look for Iaor.

The king, helmed and armored, held a spear across his knee; his sword was sheathed, ready for a quick grab. He held no bow: He would not hang back in the rear to shoot, but ride with the vanguard. As would Bertaud, of course, to guard him as he might during the crush. He said, for Iaor’s ears alone, “If we broke off and pressed hard for Terabiand, we could organize a welcome there that might be more a match for the Arobern than anything we can manage here.”

The king gave him a quick edged smile. “Buying that chance with Minas Ford and the blood of all its defenders? Is that a price you would willingly pay? Or one you would expect me to pay?”

“No,” Bertaud admitted.

“Of course not. I did,” added the king, “send men south. The Arobern will have his welcome even so. If we bleed him heavily enough here, it may even be enough. And your griffins?” the king asked again, not with much hope.

Bertaud shrugged. “In this rain? It’s a mage-crafted rain, I think—meant expressly to keep the griffins away.”

The king smiled again, fierce as a griffin himself. “There can’t be more there than three thousand or so. We need only kill three of them for every one of us that falls.”

“An even match,” Bertaud said, in a deliberately serious tone, finding himself despite everything falling back, at last, into the manner they had always had between them.

“Exactly,” said the king with a brief grin, and turned his horse to ride quickly across the ranks, gathering the attention of all his men. He did not cry out the words of any fine speech: Such would only be heard by the men below and give everything away. He only met the eyes of one man, and another, and another. Then he turned his horse, gathered it, and sent it suddenly racing down the hill straight at the rear of the Casmantian force. Which turned, awkwardly at first but then more smoothly, to face them: The Arobern, clearly, had posted men to watch for such an attack. Or sentries had gotten away from the Feierabiand scouts. Or the Arobern was just that able, and watched all directions at once, rain or no rain.

There might have been a thousand Casmantian soldiers on the east side of Minas Ford: They were strung out more widely than the Feierabiand column, but until the armies should crash together that was an advantage to the Casmantians, who could shoot from both ends of their line into the Feierabiand advance. The arrows did not fall as thickly as they might; the rain thinned the volleys. The hundred or so Feierabiand bowmen who still had both dry strings and arrows fell back, halted their advance, and began to provide covering fire. The rest pressed forward as quickly as they could. The small horse contingent, including the king with Bertaud at his back, went before the foot soldiers, meaning to open a gap in the Casmantian line if they could.