Tigana (51 page)

Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio’s lead. Elena and Donar went with them. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that they were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of this place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his mind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight. They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.

He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked, and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even willingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground again and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a keen whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had grown as sharp as any blade he’d ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.

He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the hills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon.
This is not a dream,
he told himself. Not a dream.

Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate defiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around, and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the same: stern and resolute and unafraid.

‘Shall we go?’ Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. ‘Shall we go and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now to the Ember war?’

‘For the fields!’ the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords aloft to the sky.

What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in his hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.

When the Others fell, scaly and grey, blind and crawling with maggots, there was never any blood. Elena understood why that was so, Donar had told her years ago: blood meant life, and their foes tonight were the enemies, the opposite, of any kind of life. When they fell to the corn swords nothing flowed from them, nothing seeped away into the earth.

There were so many of them. There always were, swirling in a grey mass like slugs, pouring down out of the hills and swarming into the stream where Donar and Mattio and Baerd had come to make their stand.

Elena prepared herself to fight, amid the loud, whirling, green-tinted chaos of the night. She was frightened, but she knew she could deal with that. She remembered how deathly afraid she’d been in her first Ember war, wondering how she—she who could scarcely have even lifted a sword in the daytime world—could possibly battle such hideous creatures as the nightmare ones she saw.

But Donar and Verzar had assuaged her fears: here in this green night of magic it was the soul and the spirit that mattered, here it was courage and desire that shaped and drove the bodies in which they found themselves. Elena felt so much stronger on the Ember Nights, so much more lithe and quick. That had frightened her, too, the first time and even afterwards: under this green moon she was someone who could kill. It was a realization she had to deal with, an adjustment to be made. They all did, to one degree or another. None of them were exactly what they were under
the sun or the two moons of home. Donar’s body on this night of war reached backwards, further every year, towards a lost image of what he once had been.

Just as Baerd’s, very clearly, reached back as well, more than one might have guessed or expected. Fifteen, he had said. Not fourteen, or he would not have been allowed. She didn’t understand that, but she had no time to puzzle such things out. Not now. The Others were in the stream, and now they were trying to clamber out, clad in the hideous shapes her mind gave them.

She dodged a scything axe-blow from a creature dripping with water as it scrambled up the bank towards her, and as she did she gritted her teeth and slashed downward with an instinctive deadliness she never would have known was hers. She felt her blade, her living sword, crunch hard through scaly armour and bury itself in the maggot-infested body of her foe.

She pulled the weapon free with an effort, hating what she had done, but hating the Others more, infinitely more. She turned—barely in time to block another ascending blow and withdraw a step before two new, gape-jawed assailants on her right. She lifted her blade in a desperate attempt to ward.

Then suddenly only one of the Others was standing there. Then neither of them.

She lowered her sword and looked at Baerd. At her stranger on the road, her promise given by the night. He smiled grimly at her, tight-lipped, standing over the bodies of the Others he had just killed. He smiled, and he had saved her life, but he said nothing to her at all. He turned and went forward to the edge of the river. She watched him go, saw his boy’s body stride into the thickness of battle, and she wasn’t sure whether to give way to a rush of hope because of his deadly skill or to grieve for the look in his too-young eyes.

Again, no time for such thoughts. The river seethed and boiled now with the churning of the Others as they waded into it. Screams of pain, cries of rage and fury cut the green night like blades of sound. She saw Donar along the bank to the south swinging his sword two-handed in wheeling circles of denial. Saw Mattio beside him, slashing and stabbing, neat-footed among the fallen bodies, absolute in his courage. All about her the Night Walkers of Certando plunged into the cauldron of their war.

She saw a woman fall, then another, swarmed over and hacked down by the creatures from the west. She cried out herself then, in fury and revulsion, and she moved back up to the edge of the river, running to where Carenna was, her sword swinging forward, her blood—her blood which was life, and the promise of life—raging with the need to drive them back. Back now, tonight, and then again a year from now, and after that, and again and again on each of these Ember Nights, that the spring sowing might be fruitful, that the earth be allowed to bear its bounty in the fall. This year and the next year, and the next.

In the midst of that chaos of noise and motion, Elena glanced up. She checked the height of the still-climbing moon, and then—she could not stop herself—she looked to the nearest of the devastated hills beyond the stream, apprehension clutching at her heart. There was no one there. Not yet.

There would be, though. She was almost certain there would be. And then? She pulled herself back from that. What would happen would happen. Around her there was war, here and now, and more than enough terror in the Others massed before her, surging up out of the river on either side.

She tore her thoughts from the hill and struck downwards, hard, feeling her blade bite into a scabrous shoulder. She heard the Other make a wet, bubbly sound. She jerked
her sword free and spun left barely in time to block a sideways blow, scrambling to keep her footing. Carenna’s free hand braced her from behind; she didn’t even have time to look but she knew who it was.

It was wild under the unknown stars, under the green light of that moon, it was frenzy and chaos; there was screaming and shouting everywhere now, and the riverbank was muddy, slippery and treacherous. Elena’s Others were wet and grey, dark with their parasites and open sores. She clenched her teeth and fought, letting this Ember Night body’s grace be guided by her soul, the stalk that was her sword dancing with a life that seemed to come from within itself as much as it did from her. She was splashed with mud and water, and she was sure there must be blood, but there was no time to check, no time now to do anything at all but parry and hammer and slash, and fight to keep one’s footing on the slope of the riverbank, for to fall would be to die.

She was aware, in scattered, hallucinatory flashes, of Donar beside her and Carenna for a time. Then she saw him stride away with a handful of others to quell a movement to the south. Baerd came up on her left at one point, guarding her open side, but when she glanced over again—and now the moon was very high—she saw he was gone.

Then she saw where. He was in the river, not waiting for the Others to come to him. He was attacking them in the water, screaming incoherent words she could not understand. He was slim and young and very beautiful, and deadly. She saw bodies of the Others piling before his feet like grey sludge blocking the stream. He would be seeing them differently, she knew. He had told them what he saw: he would be seeing soldiers of Ygrath, of Brandin, the Tyrant in the west.

His blade seemed almost to vanish in a blur, it moved so fast. Knee-deep in the stream he stood rooted like a tree and
they could not force him back, or survive in front of him. The Others were falling back from him there, scrambling to withdraw, trying to work their way around their own dead to get further down the stream. He was driving them away, battling alone in the water, the moonlight strange on his face and strange on the living stalk that was his sword, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Only that. Elena’s heart ached for him, even as she fought an overwhelming weariness.

She willed herself to hold her own ground, north of where he was, up on the muddy bank. Carenna was further south along the river now, fighting beside Donar. Two men and a woman from another village came up beside Elena, and together the four of them fought for their stretch of slippery ground, trying to move in concert, to be of one mind.

They were not fighters, not trained for battle. They were farmers and farmers’ wives, millers and blacksmiths and weavers, masons and serving-girls, goatherds in the hills of the Braccio Range. But each and every one of them had been born with a caul in the highlands and named in childhood for Carlozzi’s teachings and for the Ember war. And under the green moon—which had passed its apex and would be setting now—the passion of their souls taught their hands to speak for life with the blades the tall grain had become.

So the Night Walkers of Certando did battle by that river, fighting for the deepest, oldest dream of the wide-spreading country fields beyond all the high city walls. A dream of Earth, of the life-giving soil, rich and moist and flourishing in its cycle of seasons and years; a dream of the Others driven back, and farther back, and finally away, one bright year none of them would live to see.

And there came a time, amid the tumult and the frenzy, the loud, blurred, spinning violence by the river, when Elena and her three companions forged a respite for themselves. She had a moment to look up and she saw that the stream
was thinning of foes. That the Others were milling about, disorganized and confused west of the river. She saw Baerd splash further into the water, hip-deep now, crying for the enemy to come to him, cursing them in a voice so tormented it was scarcely knowable as his own.

Elena could barely stand. She leaned on her sword, sucking in air with heaving sobs, utterly spent. She looked over and saw that one of the men who had fought beside her was down on one knee, clutching his right shoulder. He bled from an ugly, ragged wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing for a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.

He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the stream. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again. And in that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest hill was not empty any more. That there was something standing there.

‘Look!’
a man cried just then, from further down the river. ‘He is with them again! We are undone!’

Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and cold fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Within the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.

Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though never before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full, just when—so much of the time—it seemed as if they might have a chance to force the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog and mist as in a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.

And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of their defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who would step on
to the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and claim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he passed, wherever he walked upon the earth.

He stood now on the neatest of the wasted hills west of the river, clouds of obscuring mist rising and flowing all around him. Elena could not discern his face—none of them ever had—but from within that smoke and darkness she saw him raise his hands and stretch them out towards them, reaching, reaching for the Walkers on the riverbank. And as he did Elena felt a sudden shaft of coldness come into her heart, a terrible, numbing chill. Her legs began to tremble. She saw that her hands were shaking and it seemed that there was nothing she could do, nothing at all, to hold her courage to her.

Across the stream the Others, his army or his allies or the amorphous projections of his spirit, saw him stretch his arms towards the battlefield. Elena heard a sudden savage exultation in their cries; she saw them massing west of the river to come at them again. And she remembered, weary and spent, with a grim despair reaching into her heart, that this was exactly how it had been last year, and the spring before that, and the spring before as well. Her spirit ached with the knowledge of loss to come, even as she fought to find a way to ready her exhausted body to face another charge.

Mattio was beside her. ‘No!’ she heard him gasp, with a dull, hopeless insistence, blindly fighting the power of that figure on the hill. ‘Not this time! Not! Let them kill me! Not retreat again!’