A Time of Exile (21 page)

“I said turn off!”

The second horseman did just that, dodging back the way he came, only to meet elven riders as Halaberiel led his swordsmen, mounted now, into camp. Dust plumed with
the battle cries as the last few Bearsmen fled, screaming and cursing as they headed south. Aderyn’s rescuer turned his horse to follow, then pulled his blowing horse to a stop and slumped in the saddle. Aderyn ran to him just in time to catch him as he slid to the ground in a welling of blood. An arrow had pierced his mail just at the armpit, where the arteries were pumping his life away. Aderyn pulled off his pot helm and eased the padding back from his death-pale face: Cinvan.

“A councillor and an unarmed man,” the lad whispered. “Couldn’t let my lord disgrace himself a second time.”

Then he died with a stiffening and a shake of his whole body.

“Are you all right?” It was Halaberiel, rushing over, bloody sword in one hand, helm in the other, blood flecking his face and pale hair.

“I am. Are we retreating?”

“Retreating?” Halaberiel howled with laughter. “We’ve carried the day, man! We slaughtered the ugly lot of them!”

Aderyn wept like a child, but as he looked into Cinvan’s glazed eyes, he wasn’t sure if his tears were joy or grief.

In that last battle in the camp, fought against men sworn in their hearts to die and put an end to shame, the elven forces took casualties, but with only nine elven dead and some twenty wounded against the hideous human losses, Halaberiel was right enough to claim a complete victory. All that day Aderyn and Dallandra worked over the wounded with a swarm of volunteers to help them until the two of them were as gory as corpses themselves. By moonlight they swam in the lake shallows to wash themselves clean, then returned to the camp to find the dead laid out, ready for cremating on the morrow. Dallandra was so weary and heartsick that she crept into her tent to sleep without even a bite to eat, but Aderyn, who was used to battle wounds from his apprenticeship, joined in the victory feast. Since in honor of the battle Halaberiel decided that they could squander seasoned wood and build a proper bonfire, light blazed and danced through the camp along with music from drum and harp. Drunk and howling, the banadar’s own warband ran from group to group of celebrating elves, while Halaberiel himself sat off to one side on a pile of cushions and merely watched. When Aderyn joined him,
Halaberiel handed him a skin of mead. Aderyn had a few cautious sips to ease his aching muscles.

“Over a hundred Round-ears escaped,” Halaberiel said abruptly. “All men from the rear of the line, so they were probably Melaudd’s allies rather than Bearsmen. Think they’ll raise an army and come back for revenge?”

“I don’t. Melaudd’s other son will rage and bluster and try to call in alliances, but who’s going to join him after this? And he himself can’t have more than a handful of men left—the ones that stayed behind on fort guard, no more.”

“Good. We’ll leave marking the death-ground for later, then. I want to ride before the winter rains come in earnest.”

“Indeed? Ride where?”

“South.” Halaberiel gave him a tight and terrifying smile. “To wipe out that settlement west of Cannobaen.”

Aderyn stared in helpless confusion.

“I’ve learned somewhat today,” Halaberiel went on. “These bows of ours are good for bringing down more than the gray deer. Never again am I going to creep around and humble myself to the dog-vomit Round-ear lords. Eldidd they may have, but no more.” He threw back his head and laughed aloud. “Not one stinking cursed inch more, by every god of both our peoples!” Then he let his face soften. “My apologies, Aderyn. I forget that I’m talking about your folk. There’s no reason for you to ride south with us when we go. You and Dallandra can just rejoin the alar and wait for us there.”

Aderyn rose, staring blankly into the leaping fire.

“Unless you’ll be leaving us?” Halaberiel got up to join him. “Never would any man of the People nor a woman either stop you if you choose to ride away, even if you go right to our enemies and warn them.”

Aderyn turned and walked off, heading blindly for the meadow beyond the campground, only to stop abruptly when he reached it. Out on the flat the warbands were dancing, winding in long lines through a scatter of tiny fires. The People danced single-file, arms held rigid shoulder-high, heads tossed back while their feet skipped and stamped through intricate measures in time to the drum and harp. Over the music wailed voices, half a keen of grief
tonight, yet half a cry of triumph. When the revelers drew close he could see sweaty, impassive faces bob by in a surge of quarter tones, wavering and rising like the firelight; then with a sway and shudder the dancers spun past and were gone. Halaberiel came up behind him and laid a paternal hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” the warleader said. “But that dun has to be destroyed. We’ll spare the women and children, of course, and every man’s life that we can.”

“I know.” Aderyn found his voice at last. “What can I say? I’ve already seen my people muster an army to attack you, haven’t I? If it weren’t for your longbows, they would have slaughtered you like cattle.”

“Just so. But you didn’t ride west to watch men die, either. Do you want to go back to Eldidd? I’ll give you an escort if you do.”

For a moment Aderyn wavered. Even though he’d promised Nananna that he’d stay, he knew that she never would have held him to the promise under these circumstances, when the action at Cannobaen might lead to a full-fledged war. If it did, he belonged with his own kind, he supposed. His revulsion welled up, almost physical: his own kind, who broke their word and murdered and swaggered and enslaved and stole other men’s land all in the name of honor? He saw then that he could never go back to Deverry and take up some sort of community life, not even as a healer and herbman. But what else was left for him? The life of a hermit on the edge of the wilderness? He could see himself turning into a recluse, hoarding his secret knowledge for its own sake until the knowledge turned bitter and drove him mad. Halaberiel waited patiently, his eyes shadowed in the flickering light.

“You’re my people now,” Aderyn said. “Here I stay.”

Then he strode forward and took a place at the end of a line of dancers. Although the only steps he knew were from Deverry ring dances, they fit in well enough as the line swept him away across the meadow. All through the long fire-shot night he swayed and bobbed to the wail and the pounding of the music until it seemed in his exhaustion that he had no body left at all, that he floated with the elven warriors far above the grassy meadow and the dark. Yet toward dawn, when he was stumbling toward his tent,
Aderyn realized that he would stay behind when the warband rode south. There were other healers among the elves; one of them would have to take his place for the slaughter out west of Cannobaen.

Everyone slept late that day, then woke, cursing and weeping, to the grim task of burning their own dead and giving Melaudd’s army a decent burial in long trenches—after the bodies of men and horse alike had been stripped of every bit of metal, whether armor or tool. Out of respect for the prejudices of the noble-born, Halaberiel ordered Melaudd, his son Dovyn, and the two allied lords who’d died with them buried in a separate grave, though he did make sharp remarks about the foolishness of men who worried about their corpses. They packed and sodded a shallow mound over all the burials, too, and chipped the story of the battle onto a rough stone plaque. The job took days, and all during it, scouts rode out to the south and east to keep an eye on the Round-ears. Aderyn and Dallandra worked from dawn to dusk and then worked some more by torchlight as they tried to save the wounded horses as well as the wounded men. The elven casualties would mend fast, especially compared with the human beings, and without a trace of infection in all but the worst cases. The riders who had once ridden for Tieryn Melaudd were another matter entirely. Their worst cases all died; the rest were as sullen and misery-wrapped as only defeated men living on the charity of the enemy can be. Aderyn tended them alone to spare Dallandra the job.

“And I appreciate it, too,” she remarked one morning. “But what are we going to do with them? They’re prisoners, I suppose. Is Halaberiel going to use them to bargain terms or suchlike?”

“There’s naught he wants to bargain for, he says, so he’ll just release them.” Aderyn hesitated, studying her pale face and the dark shadows smudging under her eyes. “How do you fare, Dalla? You’ve been working yourself blind.”

“It keeps me from missing Nananna. And if I’m tired enough, I don’t have bad dreams.”

“Dreams about her, you mean?”

“Not truly.” She turned away and seemed to be studying the white clouds billowing up from the south. “I hope we leave here soon. Winter’s on the way, sure enough.”

Aderyn saw that he’d been shut out of some mental chamber as surely as if she’d slammed a door in his face.

When the camp did break, Halaberiel divided his forces. The least-skilled warriors escorted the prisoners south to the Eldidd border, where they’d leave them before turning west to rejoin their alarli. The best of the fighters went with the banadar on a forced march for the treaty-breaking dun beyond Cannobaen. Aderyn, Dallandra, the elven wounded, the injured horses saved from the battle, and a small escort of those archers who were simply sick of fighting headed back west to the place where they’d left the rest of the alarli—left them years ago, or so it seemed to Aderyn, back in some other lifetime. The day they marched, it rained, and it kept raining, too, a good long period of drizzle every day as wave after wave of clouds swept in, dropped their burden, then rolled on. Since with so many injured people and animals along, their small column moved a scant twelve miles a day, by the time that they did rejoin the alarli, those waiting for them were frantic for news. When they rode up, in fact, a huge wail of grief went up from the camp, because everyone assumed that they were the only survivors of some horrible defeat. Once the truth went round, everyone was as much furious as relieved.

“Isn’t that just like the wretched banadar!” Enabrilia snapped. “He never even sent them a message!”

“My apologies, truly,” Aderyn said. “If I’d known, I would have sent someone on ahead. We just assumed—”

“That Halaberiel had thought to tell them. I know, I know. Not your fault. The grazing’s getting really poor around here, by the way.”

“Well, we’ll move out tomorrow. The banadar wanted everyone to head for the winter camps. He said he’d find us there.”

“Good. With this rotten weather we’ve been having, winter can’t be far away.”

At that point Aderyn realized that she and the others in the camp were treating him as Halaberiel’s second-in-command and taking his orders without question, just as they took Dallandra’s. Whether he felt himself worthy or not, these people now considered him a Wise One.

•  •  •

Far to the west of Cannobaen the seacoast turns jagged, rising into precarious cliffs, reaching long fingers of hill out into the ocean, and sinking into deep canyons where the winter rains flow into rocky riverbeds. These canyons provide some shelter from the constant wet winds, and here, at the time of which we speak, the People set up their semipermanent winter tents, even though changing shifts of horsemen still had to ride guard on the grazing herds up in the exposed grasslands, because the fodder in the canyons themselves was sparse. Aderyn and Dallandra got their people settled safely in one of these camps some four nights before Halaberiel and the warband caught up with them. Exhausted men and horses both dragged into camp late on a day turned foul and dark by a slantwise drizzle. Although there were eight fewer swordsmen than had ridden out, and some twenty wounded archers, even in their weariness they crowed with victory: in a surprise attack they’d wiped out the lord and his warband, then forced the dun to surrender. Aderyn was kept so busy tending the wounded that he didn’t see the banadar until late that night, when Halaberiel summoned him to a council in his tent. Although six elven leaders sat round the fire, Halaberiel spoke in Deverrian for Aderyn’s sake.

“We need your advice. Do you think the prince is going to send an army against us in the spring?”

“I doubt it very much. I suspect that Addryc is pouring vinegar into his vassals’ wounds right now, pointing out what happens to men who disobey their prince’s decrees. You’ve punished his rebels for him, and on top of that, you’ve gotten rid of that dun. Do you think he liked having men loyal to another overlord out on his western flank?”

“But that overlord was Addryc’s own father.”

“Among the noble-born that kind of sentiment counts for very little.”

Halaberiel considered for a long moment.

“Well and good, then,” he said at last. “I’ll send him some kind of formal apology the next time we meet a Round-ear merchant—I don’t trust the Eldidd lords enough to send them a messenger. And when spring comes we’ll ride to the lake and mark the death-ground. After all, it was part of the settlement I made with the prince, that I’d make sure the Round-ears saw me on my land.”

“Just so, and I’m willing to bet that it’ll settle the matter.”

“Good. I did send Addryc one message. I gave it to the refugees who were going to Cannobaen. Just a little note, truly, asking him what he thinks of the Westfolk’s style of justice.” He smiled gently. “It seems to be a good bit more rigorous than his own.”