PROLOGUE (6 page)

Certain of the camp followers had set up stalls or brought wares from nearby villages to sell. Indeed, the army's camp resembled a large disorganized autumn market more than it did any other army Liath had ever seen.

In Arethousa, a precise order of march prevailed and every tent had its specific site rated in order of proximity to the emperor.

In Andalla, the Kalif had his own compound made of manteletlike frames draped with bright fabric. Only the favored few were allowed inside this compound, and the Kalif himself from his place of seclusion ordered the generals who led his troops into battle.

In that almost fatal passage across the deserts west of Kartiako, so many years ago now, she remembered a silent and deadly army whose robes were the color of sand and who seemed to move as with the wind's speed and sudden gusting shifts of direction. She and Da and a dozen others were all that had survived of the one hundred souls who had started the trek in a vast caravan. She had been so hungry, and too young truly to understand why there had been no food toward the end of that terrible journey.

Now she stared, caught by the enticing smell of a rack of pig meat roasting over a fire. The robust woman tending it looked her over.

"Any coin?" she demanded. Her accent had the broad Varren lilt. "What do you have to trade?"

Liath shrugged and made to move on. She had nothing, only her status as a King's Eagle.

"Here, friend." A Lion halted beside her. Ragged around the edges of his well-worn tunic, still, he had a friendly smile. "Don't just walk away. We serve the king, and such as her must feed the king's servants."

The woman spit on the ground. "If I feed the king's servants all that I have, for no return, then I'll have nothing to feed my own kin."

"You came to take coin off of us, good woman," said the Lion with a laugh, "so don't complain if you must feed those of us who have no coin. We only came heje because your Varren lords rebelled against the king's" authority. Otherwise we'd not have been graced with the vision of your beautiful face."

This was too much. She smiled at his smooth flattery, then recalled her irritation. "It isn't
my
fault the nobles quarrel. And it wasn't Lady Svanhilde that followed the king's sister, it was her reckless eldest son, Lord Charles. Poor woman. She had only boy children and loved them too well."

"My mother had only boys," retorted the Lion, "but we none of us gave her reason to be ashamed. Come now, give this loyal Eagle something to eat."

Grudgingly, the woman did so, a fresh piece of pork spitted on a twig. The Lion handed her a round of flat bread, coarse flour mixed with a paste of dried berries, their usual rations when all else was gone. It was still warm from baking.

"Thank you," she said, not quite knowing how to respond to his kindness except to identify herself. "I'm called Liath."

"I'm known as Thiadbold. You're the Eagle who rode in from Gent," he added. "We remember you. Those of us who serve the king, and who don't have noble kin
—" Here he grinned. He had a shock of red hair and part of one ear missing, the lobe sliced cleanly off and healed now into a white dimple. "—must watch out for each other as we may. Will you drink with us?"

The camp of Lions, sited near the king's tent, was much reduced. The first King Henry .had commissioned ten centuries of Lions. In these days, at least five of those centuries served in the eastern marchlands, protecting market cities and key forts from the incursions of the barbarians. Two Lion banners flew at this camp, marking the two centuries who marched with the king. But even considering those men who stood watch at this hour, Liath could not imagine that more than sixty men out of two hundred had survived the final battle with Lady Sabella.

"I can't," she said with some regret. She was not used to sitting and chatting in the company of soldiers
—or anyone else, for that matter. Even some of the other Eagles thought her aloof and had told her so, being by nature an independent group of souls who had no reluctance to speak their minds when in the company of their own kind. "I stand watch tonight."

He nodded and let her go.

In the woods beyond she heard the bleating and lowing of livestock, kept well away from the tempting fields. Some soldiers, too, had been commandeered from those recalcitrant Varren lords who had fled home after Sabella's defeat and hoped to avoid the king's notice. These sat sullen in their own camps, watched by the king's men. A few brace of young noble lordlings and a handful of their rashest sisters had come along as well, some as hostages, some for the hope of war and booty at Gent or farther east in the marchlands. At least some of these had gear and horses but, all in all, Henry's army had lost much of its strength.

By the time she got back to the king's tent, she had licked every last spot of grease off her fingers. The king had gone to his bed and his noble companions had retired to their own tents.

Hathui handed her a skin filled with ale. "You'll want this," she said. "If we don't take this damned city by tomorrow, we'll be forced to drink water. Now I'm to bed." As the king's favored Eagle, she slept just inside the entrance to his tent, along with his other personal servants.

Liath got the night watch because she could see so well in the dark, but she also liked it because it left her alone with her thoughts. Some nights, though, her thoughts were no fit companion.

Gent.

She could not bear to think of Gent and what had happened there. Sometimes, at night, she still dreamed of the Eika dogs. It was better to remain awake at night, if she could.

With the sky overcast, she could not observe the heavens. Instead, she walked through her city of memory. Only standing alone through the night, freed from Hugh and no longer under the eye of Wolfhere, dared she risk the intense concentration it took to order her city and remember.

The city stands on a hill that is also an island. Seven walls ring the city, each one pierced by a gate. At the height, on a plateau, stands the tower.

But on this journey into the city, she crosses under the threshold of the third gate, which is surmounted by the Cup of Boundless Waters. She enters the fourth house to the left, passing under an archway of horn.

Here resides her recollection of Artemisia's
Dreams,
and here she walks into the first hall and enters the second chamber, first book, second chapter. Why do these dreams of the Eika dogs torment her? Do they mean something she ought to interpret, or are they just the memory of that awful last day in Gent?

But Artemisia gives her no respite, once she has read the various symbols installed in the little chamber, each one a trigger for some portion of the words written in the book.

"
'Let me tell you that if you want to make sense of your dream, it must be remembered from beginning to end, or you cannot interpret it. Only if you remember it completely, can you explore the point to which the vision leads.'
'

But she never recalled beginning or end to the dreams, only the sudden madness of the dogs feeding among the pale tombs of the dead, in the darkness of the crypt at the cathedral in Gent.

Wind soughed through the trees. She shook herself and shifted. Her knees ached from standing so stiffly. Down by the siege engines several campfires burned. Figures shifted, a change of guard. She watched as a man's figure stooped, adding wood, then straightened and moved out of her sight into darkness. Drizzle started up, pattered for a little while, and gave way to a weighty night's stillness, more sticky than hot. One of the servants emerged from the tent, staggering with sleep, relieved himself, and went in again.

Slowly the clouds began to break up. Stars shone here and there through the rents, ragged patterns formed and concealed as quickly as she could recognize them. The waning crescent moon appeared in a gap, then vanished. Above, the wheel of the heavens turned and winter's sky rose
—the sky seen in the late autumn and early winter evenings, here marking the advent of late summer's dawn. The first hint of light colored the tents and palisade wall a
murky gray, gaining tone as, above, the faintest stars faded from view.

A man's figure moved down by the siege engines, scurrying along the wall of mantelets. One of the campfires was doused. She started forward in surprise, then saw half a dozen shadowy figures heave themselves over the mantelets and drop to the ground behind.

Raiders from the fortress.

"Hathui!" she cried, then drew her sword and dashed down the slope, shouting the alarm as she ran.

A horn sounded, and men began to yell. "To arms! To arms!"

As she ran through the foremost tents, soldiers fell in beside her or hurried before, all running to protect the front line. Below, a man screamed in pain. Swords rang, the clash of arms and the pound of blade against shield. A sudden fire bloomed at the base of the leftmost siege engine and by its unruly light she saw the skirmish unfold and spread as men leaped forward to beat down the flames while others took up blazing brands to look for their enemy
—or start new fires.

Dawn grayed the horizon. As if in answer to the call to arms now ringing through camp, the gates of the fortress swung open. More than a score of mounted riders, pennants held high upon their upraised spears, galloped through the yawning gate and drove down toward the engines.

Liath saw them coming, heard voices beyond her shout warnings, heard the shrill of horns from King Henry's camp as they blared a warning, but she had more pressing matters before her.

The raiders had put one ballista to the torch with a flaming pitch that refused to yield to water or blanket. A solitary Lion
—one she didn't recognize except by his tabard—defended another ballista from three of the raiders. With torch and sword he held them at bay. Another raider lay dead, nearly decapitated, at his feet. They had not yet trapped the Lion against the ballista, but they would in a moment.

"Eagles don't fight, they witness."
So Hathui always said. But he would die without her help.

She plunged in, parrying blows, and took up a position to his left. He greeted her with a slurred "gud morn'n." Despite the odds, she sensed he was smiling. The raiders hesitated, faced with two where there had been one. She shifted, feinting to attack, when the Lion changed position beside her and his face fell within her view. His cheek had been split by a slash; a permanent toothy grin showed through the rivulets of blood. For an instant too long the ghastly grin caught her eye. One of the raiders rushed her from the left. She turned, catching his blow on her quillons, but the weight of his charge drove her to her knees. She strained up, locked in a test of strength as the man tried to force her down. The injured Lion thrust his lit torch into a second raider's face, stunning him, and then two more Lions ran up.

One was Thiadbold. She recognized him by his red hair; he had not had time to put on a helmet. That fast, he drove his sword to its hilt through the abdomen of the raider who grappled with her. They stood embraced above her, the impaled man flushing and twitching, his sword arm pinned to his side by the body of the man who killed him. Thiadbold had wrapped his free arm tight around his prey, holding him as he would a shield, until he was sure that all of the fight had drained from the body. The raider's sword fell from his limp hand. Thiadbold stepped back to let the corpse fall, twisting his own sword free.

Liath rolled out of the way of the body, then jumped to her feet as the two remaining raiders gave ground
—but not fast enough. Cut down, they dropped, screaming, and lay still.

The injured Lion turned to beat again at the fire that scorched the ballista. Blood dripped down his tabard.

"Fall back!" cried Thiadbold, his words underscored by a heavy drumming throb, the pound of hooves and the ominous call of a low-pitched horn. "To the camp! To the king!"

She saw at once what the ruse had been. The raid on the siege engines had diverted their attention from the picket of stakes that protected the flanks of the camp. The horsemen from the fortress pressed forward at full charge and with spears lowered. With the stakes now uprooted or cut down, they had a clear sweep into camp.

"We have too few to repel the charge!" cried Thiadbold "Eagle! Fall back!"

She obeyed, and they made room for her behind them, for of all the men hacking around at the remains of the raiding force, falling back to set a position against the charge of heavy horse, she was the only one without some kind of armor.

The injured Lion had salvaged bolts from the ballista and these he handed to his fellows. "Brace with these," he shouted, his voice heavily slurred. "It's our only chance to stop the charge. Eagle!" He nodded toward her, his sliced cheek still seeping blood. "Shoot into the faces of the horses. That might hurt their charge."