Lord of the Changing Winds (40 page)

Casmantian horns called, called again, and mounted Casmantian soldiers swept around from the other side of Minas Ford since they could not go through, rushing to reinforce their lines. From Minas Ford itself, a small force surged forward suddenly, trying to weaken the Casmantian line so the Feierabiand horse could break it. Rain fell, harder now, and colder.

The Arobern himself, marked by his sheer presence as much as by his banner, flung forward to meet the Feierabiand charge, and suddenly Bertaud was battling madly, his sword crashing against defending swords—he cut at a man on foot, did not know whether he hit the man or not—cut at a horse, which reared, screaming—fended off a spear that might have taken him in the side and sent his horse leaping to cover Iaor’s side, where another spear threatened the king. He had lost sight of the Arobern. He tossed his head to clear rain from his eyes and pressed his horse sideways to stay with Iaor, and they were no longer moving forward; they were halted, or nearly, and that was not good—an open space appeared before them, and he shouted and sent his horse for it, Iaor right beside him—and they were jolting forward again, men at their backs—Feierabiand men, Bertaud fervently hoped—and men before them, and Iaor shouted and flung up his sword, and everyone swept sideways and forward again, and the hooves of the horses rang suddenly on cobbles.

They were
in
Minas Ford, on its one street. They had gone right through the Casmantian line—Bertaud understood suddenly that the Arobern had let them through, the better to have all his opponents bottled up in one trap. Iaor, he saw, had understood this at once; beside him, the king was cursing steadily.

“He let you through,” Eles snapped at Iaor, coming suddenly from among the defenders of Minas Ford to set a hand on the bridle of the king’s horse. He and all his men, guardsmen and soldiers and townsfolk alike, looked as hollow-eyed and desperate as though they’d been under siege for a week rather than, at very most, a few hours. And those who had meant to be their saviors looked very nearly as badly off.

“I know it,” Iaor agreed, and gave up cursing in favor of a swift examination of the village and its defenders. A dismayingly small number, they seemed to Bertaud, to hold ground against the Casmantian army outside the village. And too many of them wounded already, and all of them exhausted. Soldiers and guardsmen had quietly gathered around Iaor, rivalry forgotten in this moment, looking to the king to come up with some miraculous deliverance for them all. A village woman with a hunting bow and a drawn expression had a place with archers in the uniform of regular soldiers; men in rough-spun village clothing had found swords and filled out ranks of infantry. Bertaud spotted Enned son of Lakas among the rest and was absurdly pleased the boy yet lived. Though that was no guarantee he, or any of them, would see the coming dusk or the dawn that followed it.

“Well, well… Minas Ford may be a trap, but it may still close in both directions,” said the king. “He daren’t leave this town unsecured at his rear. With the men I brought, we can hold it a while yet, I should think, and I’ve sent men to raise the south. Eles, man… you did very well to pin him down here.”

The guard captain gave him a dour nod. “I sent men west to Sihannas and Eheniand. And Keoun of Sihannas does have a brain. He’ll have a thousand men on the road by tomorrow afternoon at the latest. Much good it will do
us
,” he added, with a glance back toward the Casmantian lines.

“In the end, the Arobern will have to come to terms. And he’ll have to do it with me, and he must know that by this time. He won’t take Terabiand with three thousand men, and we may thank the griffins he so kindly sent us he does not have more. For all the griffins’ absence now, they have saved us by what they did in the desert.” Iaor, too, sat back in his saddle, stretched, and turned to study the Casmantians.

“How about… more nearly seven, perhaps?” Bertaud asked, and jerked his head toward a great dark mass moving slowly down the distant slopes of the mountains. It was hard to see through the rain-hazed air… but the glitter of thousands of spear points was unmistakable.

Eles drew a slow breath between his teeth. Iaor did not make a sound, but his face, grimly satisfied a moment earlier, went still.

The Casmantians, too, had seen that force: Their shouts rang like horns, hailing their victory.

“He knew he would need more than five thousand men to take Terabiand, of course,” the king said after a moment. “And so kept his force divided. To keep some of his people out of the desert, perhaps. Or to get me to underestimate him and commit myself to an indefensible position. Either way… well. How long, do you suppose, for him to get those men around the desert?”

“If they force the pace… they will be here before dawn, certainly.”

“They won’t stop here,” said Adries, riding up and drawing rein near them. He looked perfectly disgusted. His wet hair stuck to his neck and clung to his mail. He stripped off his helmet and rubbed a hand impatiently across his face. “They’ll go straight south, while the force already here holds us in place. I would lay odds. They could be in Bered by midnight, and in Terabiand by noon the next day, long before anyone there expects them. Meanwhile, the Arobern will finish us off this afternoon, rest tonight in Minas Ford, and take his men with him, come the new dawn, to meet any men coming east from Sihannas or Eheniand. Or so I would do, in his place.”

The king looked at Bertaud. “We must have the griffins. And that girl to keep them flying.”

“Yes,” said Bertaud. He thought,
no.
He had made his decision earlier, and he kept to it now, desperately: There was no possible way to demand that of them. He said after a moment, “Only, outside their desert, my king… I think they will find themselves unable to be the weapon that turns this tide for us. And I can’t think why they should fly to their own deaths in an attempt to protect us. Especially when they must ultimately fail.”

“They could take word for us south to Terabiand. They could take word all across the south and the west. Would they do that for us?” Iaor asked. He glanced around as though half expecting Kairaithin or Opailikiita to suddenly loom up out of the rain and then glanced, frustrated, at Bertaud. “Or they could, if they would and if they were
here
. But we have no way to even ask them to do this for us.”

Bertaud said nothing. He could call Kairaithin, breaking his word; he would even have done that, in this extremity. Except he knew, he was
sure
that this rain had been brought by the cold mages—by Beguchren. If he called Kairaithin into this mage-crafted rain, the griffin would surely fall to the cold mage, and what would be the good of that to any of them? Under these conditions, he could not,
must
not call. He thought, briefly, of trying to set a compulsion on all the griffins to fight Casmantian forces, not here at Minas Ford, but rather as and where they could… only he knew
exactly
how compulsion would ruin them, and in any case the compulsion would cease at his death. So he could not do that, either. Which was, in its way, a vast relief.

“Then if we have no help from the griffins, we are lost,” Adries summed up, eerily as though he had been listening to Bertaud’s thoughts. But the general went on with heavy decisiveness. “And I cannot imagine we will have such aid. That second Casmantian force will stay well clear of the desert, depend upon it, and I think we may be sure that there will be more cold mages accompanying it.” He looked to the king. “Your majesty… despite everything we have done here, I doubt we can weaken this force enough to give the griffins a chance against that one, even if they should trouble themselves for our sake. Nevertheless, we could fight here as long as we can stand to battle. If you ask it. Or we could break a path through the Casmantian lines for you. You could get out and away toward Eheniand and so keep out of Casmantian hands yourself. Or,” he added, his voice dropping, “you could ask the Arobern for terms. You will have to deal with him in the end, and he’ll know that you will know that by this time.”

Iaor’s hands had tightened on the reins; his horse twitched its ears back and mouthed the bit uncomfortably. The king’s grip eased, and he patted its neck in absent thought. Rain blew through the air, cold against their faces.

“Form up the men,” Iaor said to Adries. And to Eles, “Integrate yours with his, if you please, my friend. Wounded… we have no earth mages with us here. Have you?”

“No,” Eles said quietly.

“Casmantium is a civilized nation, at least,” said Iaor. “And the Arobern, by all accounts, a generous man.” He, too, took off his helm and ran a hand through his wet hair. His look was bleak. “Well, Bertaud? Shall I break out toward the west and run like a stag before the hunters’ horns? Or form up the men and bravely make a stand? Or go out to face the Arobern of Casmantium and see what terms he will give me?”

The secret Bertaud was concealing seemed in this moment an enormity. He wanted to drop his own gaze; he wanted to blurt out,
I have an affinity for griffins, I can call them whether they will or no, and even now we may turn back the Arobern.
But he knew, he
knew
that summoning the griffins would do nothing but destroy them, and without saving anything from the wreckage of this day. He met Iaor’s eyes steadily and, unable to find any honest advice to offer, said nothing. He wondered what the king was thinking: of his own pride, and failure? Of Feierabiand, which all the Safiad kings had always kept safe and independent, and a large piece of which he might be losing at last to Casmantium? With a sudden startling pang, Bertaud thought of the pretty young queen waiting with confidence in Tihannad. It seemed incredible now that he had ever been in the least jealous of her. Looking into the king’s set face, he wondered whether Iaor was thinking of her, too.

He wanted to say,
Go, get out. How can you think of surrender? How do we know what the Arobern will do with a Safiad king once he gets one in his hands?
If Bertaud could not lay a victory at Iaor’s feet, he might furnish at least momentary hope. But what he said, at last, was, “I certainly… can desire nothing but what you desire. My king.”

“Yes,” said Iaor, and tried to smile. He took a deep breath. He started to speak again, and stopped. He asked instead, “The griffins will not come, you think? They can do nothing for us?”

“I don’t see how they possibly could, my king.”

“No,” said Iaor, and sighed again. “Well—” he said, and turned his horse toward the end of Minas Ford’s one street.

The Arobern of Casmantium had drawn most of his men up in close order there, barely out of bowshot from the houses. He was there himself. Not inclined to press an attack, evidently. Waiting, rather. Bertaud could see him, sitting a big bay horse before his men, the banner at his side limp in the rain his mage had made. His face was turned toward Minas Ford. His whole attitude, even from this distance, was clearly one of patience.

Iaor rode as far as the last house and halted his horse there. Bertaud rode at his side, and Adries at the other. They halted with him.

“Well?” said the king to them.

“The decision,” his general said without looking at the king, “is yours, your majesty.”

“Bertaud?”

“I will bear your word to him, Iaor. Whether that is a gauntlet flung into his face, or… or the other.”

“Yes,” said the king, and let his breath out slowly. He straightened his back. “Tell him… tell him… My friend, you must tell him that I understand that continuing this battle now will do nothing but spend all the lives of my men, and to no purpose. Ask him… ask him for—”

The rain stopped. It did not slow or taper gently to a halt, but stopped all at once.

The wind turned. It had been blowing in ragged gusts from the west, a heavy moisture-laden wind. It turned now to come from the south, and it carried with it scents of sand and fire. This wind was so dry that it sucked moisture from the air and from the slick cobbles and from the very clothing men wore. Bertaud lifted a suddenly unsteady hand to touch his hair, which, cropped short, was already dry.

The clouds shredded on that wind, not blowing away so much as simply disappearing. The sky turned a deep sweet blue… then paled, and paled further, taking on a hard metallic tone. Heat came down across Minas Ford like a hammer dropping on an anvil; Bertaud almost thought he could hear the ringing blow as it struck.

And the griffins came. They rode their desert wind out of the south, their wings flashing gold or copper or bronze. The Lord of Fire and Air led them, fire falling from the wind of his wings; on one side of the griffin king flew white Tastairiane and on the other the blazing copper-and-gold Eskainiane. Bertaud looked for Kairaithin among that host, but could not find him. Men shouted, with joy in Minas Ford and with dismay among the ranks of the Casmantian army. Bertaud, too much stunned for words, made no sound. He could not imagine the power it had taken the griffins to force their desert through the rain and the cold. He could not imagine the cost they had taken on themselves to bring it here to this field of battle.

And then he found he could indeed imagine that cost. Because, as the griffins approached, it became possible to see the increasing raggedness of their flight. Where a formation of five griffins flew, fiercely splendid, one and then perhaps another would suddenly rip apart into a blast of fire and red sand. The desert wind came from this, Bertaud understood. They made the desert out of themselves. He had never before realized that if a griffin gave too much strength to the desert, it might unmake itself. But that was what they were doing. He could not bear to watch, but equally he could not look away.