"A Song for Arbonne" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kay Guy Gavriel)

CHAPTER 15

On the night appointed there was fog at Garsenc Castle. Rolling in from the east with the darkness at day's end it swallowed up the donjon and the outer watch-towers of the castle like some mist-dragon out of the old tales of the days before Corannos moved the sun.

Alone on the ramparts above the drawbridge Thaune of Garsenc shivered, despite the woolen overshirt and the fur vest he wore in winter. He was thinking about an oath he had sworn three months ago, a vow of fealty that had turned him from a coran of humble birth and modest future into a conspirator with a substantial prospect of dying before this night was over.

He watched his breath make puffs of smoke in the grey cold, adding to the fog; he couldn't see any further than that. The moons were invisible, of course, and the stars. They had chosen a time when both moons should have been bright and high, lending light for the crossing of the pass, but men could not control what the god sent in the way of weather, and more than one campaign of the past—including the not-so-distant past—had been undone by the elements. He remembered the savage cold at Iersen Bridge. He would always remember that. He placed both hands on the stone and peered out into the swirling grey darkness. Nothing. There could have been a hundred men below him outside the walls, and if they were quiet enough not he nor anyone else in Garsenc would have known they were there.

From the small guardhouse beside the portcullis he heard the murmur of voices. There were four men posted at night. They would be playing at dice by firelight. He couldn't even see the light down there through the fog. It didn't matter. He could hear the voices, muffled in the grey ness, and three of them were with him. The fourth would be dealt with, as necessary.

Not killed though. His instructions had been clear. Blaise de Garsenc wanted a minimum of killing in these first days. He seemed to have known exactly what he wanted, even back in the autumn, in the days after his first declaration. He had sent Thaune north among the other corans of Gorhaut to carry word freely of what had been done and said before that challenge at the fair. All the Gorhautians attending the fair had been assembled in an enormous room in Barbentain, Thaune remembered, and after the countess of Arbonne had ordered them out of the country and confiscated their goods Blaise had spoken to them with a cool precision that had been genuinely impressive. Because of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he'd said—a treaty that was a betrayal in itself—King Ademar was about to embroil Gorhaut in another war here in Arbonne. It was a war they did not need, brought on by a treaty that should never have been signed. He invited those assembled to think about his words, and he promised they would be allowed passage north through the mountains unharmed.

They had even contrived a pretended assassination attempt, an arrow landing carefully short of Blaise as he walked out from the castle the next morning. The tournament melee had been cancelled, in the wake of the events at Aubry and in the watch-tower south of the pass: they had found the three maimed guards by then. The court of Signe de Barbentain had collectively attended mourning services in the Temple of Rian, and in their midst—walking beside the countess, in fact—had been Blaise de Garsenc.

Thaune was instructed to claim responsibility for that attempted killing of the pretender, both on the road north through the pass and again when he arrived home at the castle—a Garsenc coran would need such a story, Blaise had told him. Thaune, remembering the fears that had led him to kill the animal-trainer, had acceded gratefully. It was strange, actually, to be working for a leader who thought of so many details concerning his men. Thaune had even, after hesitating, told Blaise about that killing in the alley. He didn't want hidden things between him and this man.

Blaise had looked regretful, but not judgmental. "You were afraid," he'd said, "and doing your duty out of fear. That is how things have always been at Garsenc. I hope you will do what you see as your duty now, but without the fear."

Thaune remembered that. He had done what he could, which, as it turned out, was quite a bit. He'd more of a knack than he would have guessed for such intrigues. There had been only a dozen soldiers in his party on the ride north—Gorhaut corans seldom went south to tournaments in Arbonne, they hadn't done so for years.

There were no rules about such things, but corans of reputation usually waited another month and went east to Aulensburg for the tourney there. Gotzland was seen as better than Arbonne; it was acceptable to fight there. Only the younger ones, and a handful of spies sometimes, went south to Lussan in the autumn with the merchants and entertainers. There were no spies in this small party, though, Thaune was certain of it. The young men listened, a little awed, to his snarling tale of wind pushing a long bowshot short.

They were probably wishing they had tried the same thing, he had mused that first night in the roadside inn among the falling leaves of autumn. Probably even dreaming of having done so, and having succeeded, and riding back to King Ademar in triumph unimaginable. Young men had such dreams.

Two of the corans on that ride, he'd decided, might be thinking, or dreaming, along somewhat different lines. He'd taken a chance and spoken to one of them before they parted ways. Turned out he had judged rightly; taking careful chances was what he'd been sent back to do. Before their roads divided, his to Garsenc, the other coran's towards the palace in Cortil, Thaune had won his first recruit to the cause of Blaise de Garsenc's rebellion. The accent had been what decided him. You could almost always trust a north-land man to be unhappy with King Ademar.

On the ramparts of Garsenc he leaned forward, suddenly tense, peering blindly into the fog. It was thick as the mist was said to be above the river to the land of the dead. He could see nothing, but he thought he'd heard a sound from the grassy space beyond the outer wall and the dry moat.

The sky above another castle, beyond the mountains to the south, was brilliantly clear that same night, the stars like diamonds, the two moons bright enough to lend shadows to the trees bending in the path of the sirnal—the north wind that swept down the Arbonne Valley with the bitter force of winter behind it.

Fires were burning on all the hearths of Barbentain, and Signe had dressed herself in layers of fine-spun wool with fur trim at the collar and sleeves and a fur-lined hat covering her head, even indoors. She hated the winter, she always had, especially when the sirnal blew, making her eyes stream and her fingers ache. Usually she and Guibor had been south by this time, in Carenzo with Ariane and Thierry, or in the winter palace in Tavernel for their sojourn there. It was always milder in the south, the depredations of the sirnal less harrowing, tempered by the shape of the land and the influence of the sea.

This year was different. She needed to be in Barbentain because this winter would not be the customary time of sheltering behind castle and village walls while the wind whipped down the valleys and empty roads. Events were taking place this season that were going to define the future for all of them, one way or another. In fact, they were taking place tonight, beneath the brightness of these two moons beyond the mountains, in Gorhaut. She wondered what Vidonne and blue Riannon were seeing there as they looked down.

Almost unbearably anxious, unable to keep still, she paced back and forth from one fire to another in her sitting room. She was disturbing her waiting-women she knew, and almost certainly doing the same to Rosala, who sat calmly nonetheless, hands busy at needlework in her chair drawn close to one fire. She wondered how the woman could be so placid, knowing—as indeed she did know—what was at stake tonight in the north.

It had come down to Blaise de Garsenc, as Beatritz had said it might almost a year ago when they'd first become aware that the new coran in Baude Castle was rather more than he seemed. Rather more. A very great deal more, in fact. The countess wished, again, that Beatritz was with her now, instead of on the island so far to the south in the sea. Images of the past year had been with her all evening, dancing in the flicker of the fires. It sometimes seemed to her that she spent half her life now walking with images of the past. But she wasn't thinking of Guibor now. She was remembering Bertran at the challenge ground as the northerner stood before the Portezzan pavilion offering a red rose:

We may have all found more than we bargained for in this man, Bertran had said.

Another image rose up then, a memory from within this castle, in autumn as well, when they had summoned all the merchants and corans of Gorhaut the morning after Aubry and told them they were confiscating their trade goods and sending them home from the fair.

Urté de Miraval had wanted to execute them all, and Signe, a hard rage running through her, had had to resist the same desire. There were even precedents for such a thing. Every citizen of a country was personally responsible for the truce-breaking of their lords. It had been Blaise who had requested, insisted actually, that the merchants be let go, and had given cause why this should be so.

"I have nothing at all to offer in Gorhaut just yet," he'd said, speaking earnestly in this very room before they had all gone down to deal with those assembled. "They must go home knowing I've saved their lives—lives put in hazard by Ademar's truce-breaking. They must go home and talk about that. Will you give me that much?" He'd paused. "Or are we no better than what we are trying to fight?"

She'd been genuinely angry with him then, a Gorhautian speaking so to her on the morning after so many of her people had been slain. But she was a countess of a land in peril, and she had always been able to master her emotions when it was time to advise Guibor on his decisions, or to make them herself. Blaise was speaking truth, she finally decided, and she gave him what he asked.

In the room below when she came before the merchants one of them had protested loudly at the announced seizure of their goods, astonishingly oblivious to how close all of them had been to being executed that same morning: no more innocent than the villagers and priestesses of Aubry. The man complained furiously a second time, and then a third, speaking with choler and no respect, interjecting while she was still addressing them. In an odd, unsettling way, she had actually been glad of it. She had nodded at Urté, who had been looking at her expectantly, only waiting for a signal. The duke of Miraval had calmly declared the merchant's life to be forfeit. The man had begun shouting then, and the palace corans had moved in quickly to take him from the room.

Blaise had looked as if he wanted to object even to that, but had held himself in check as the struggling merchant was dragged away by the guards. There was another message that had to be sent here, and Signe knew it; she had been governing a nation for some time, after all, with Guibor and now alone. Images of power mattered: in Gorhaut they could not be allowed to think they were so weak and soft here in woman-ruled Arbonne. They already had that impression, Signe knew. They could not be allowed to indulge in it. She had looked at Blaise, her expression forbidding, and had waited for him to nod his head.

"I cannot save a fool," he'd said to the merchants and corans of Gorhaut. The right thing to say; it would be remembered by the others. He was learning quickly. Later that morning they executed the man, though cleanly, without branding or breaking him; he was a symbol, not a truce-breaker himself. Here in Arbonne they were not the same as those they were now to fight. She would defend that assertion to the last of her days.

That had all been back in the autumn, with the grape harvest in and the leaves turning. Now, in the cold, clear glitter of a winter's night, she listened to the sirnal rattle the windows like a spirit of the dead and sipped at her mulled, spiced wine, holding the goblet in both hands, its warmth comforting her as much as the scent and taste of the wine. The two girls were sitting on their benches near the door, their hands cupped around hollow silver balls with burning coals inside them. Bertran had brought that idea back, years ago she remembered, from a journey into the wild places east of Gotzland. He had done a great deal of such dangerous travelling in the years after Aelis died. "He is blaming himself," Guibor had said patiently. "There is nothing we can do about it."

Looking more closely at the two girls, Signe saw that Perrette, the younger one, was shivering. Impatiently, she shook her head. "In Rian's name, come nearer the fire, both of you," she said, sounding more irritated than she meant to. "You'll be no use to me at all if you catch a chill and die."

This was wrong, of course, she shouldn't be taking out anxieties on those around her. But what was there for her to do, otherwise? She was an old woman in a cold castle in winter. She could only sit or stand by a fireside now and wait to see if the goddess and the god would allow them to throw successfully at dice with so many lives and two nations' destinies.

Nervously, the girls hastened to obey her. Rosala glanced up from her work and smiled.

"How are you so calm?" Signe demanded abruptly. "How can you sit there so easily?"

The smile faded. Mutely Rosala held up her work, and the countess saw, for the first time, the raddled, spoiled stitching and the visibly trembling hands that were lifting it for her to see.

The fog made things horrendously difficult. Thaune still couldn't see a thing down below, though he kept straining his eyes into the thick, grey gloom. There was to have been a single torch lit briefly at the edge of the woods and then doused. He couldn't have seen a torch from these ramparts tonight if it was directly below where he stood.

Even sounds were muffled, but not so much that—just there! — he could not make out, finally, the jingle of a horse's harness and then the same sound a second time, not far away. They had come. It was time. With an awareness of all that might turn on this in the next moments, and with the fear that came—that had to come—hand-in-glove with that, Thaune went quickly along the rampart walk to the stairwell and started down to the guardhouse, one hand on the wall for balance in the murk.

When he appeared in the doorway all four guards jumped up from the table. He nodded his head briefly.

"It is time," he said.

"Time for what?" said Erthon, just before Girart brought the hilt of his knife smartly down on the back of his fellow guard's head. Erthon, whom Thaune hadn't been able to decide whether or not to trust, slumped forward, and Thaune had to be quick to catch him before he knocked over the table and sent the dice rattling.

"My luck," said Girart. "I was about to win for the first time all night." Thaune was able to smile; the other two guards, younger, visibly nervous, were not.

"We're in a bigger game now," Thaune said. "Say your prayers and open the gate and the bridge." He went out to stand behind the iron portcullis as it began rolling up. There was a noise, of course, as the chains turned, but for once the fog was useful and Thaune doubted anyone would hear the muffled sound from across the courtyard inside the castle.

When the bars were high enough he stepped forward, ducking to pass under the lowest spikes, and waited again, staring out into the cold mist of the night. No torches yet, nothing at all to be seen, only the sound of horses again, faintly, through the low, drifting fog. Then another noise behind him as the portcullis slotted with a clang into its niche at the top of the gate and the guards began quickly winding down the drawbridge over the dry moat.

When the bridge was down, Garsenc Castle lay open to those waiting in the fog, and the first part of what Thaune had come home to do was accomplished. The easy part.

He stepped out onto the wooden bridge and felt more than he heard the simultaneous tread of someone approaching from the other end. He still could not see. The mist redoubled his anxiety, inducing primitive, irrational feelings of dread. He couldn't even make out the planks of the bridge beneath his boots. He stopped walking. "Light your torch," he said, his tone as calm as he could make it. The sound of his voice went out feebly into the enveloping darkness and was swallowed up.

There was silence as the approaching footsteps also came to a halt. Thaune felt as if he were wrapped in a grey shroud, ready for burial. He shuddered at the thought.

"Light your torch," he said again to the silent figures on the bridge with him.

Finally he heard the scraping sound of flint being struck, and a moment later the resinous scent of a torch catching came to him. In the fog the light spun out only a little way, a small circle, a tenuous island of illumination on the bridge.

Bright enough to reveal Galbert de Garsenc, the High Elder of Gorhaut, huge and unmistakable, standing directly in front of him with two corans on either hand.

"I am most happy to oblige you," said the High Elder in his unforgettable voice. "To illuminate the first of the traitors we will now be pleased to burn. I will light your own pyre with the torch you requested."

Thaune felt as if the world had dropped away beneath his feet, as if the final darkness at the end of time had come.

His breath was snatched away in horror. He couldn't move. He was actually afraid he was going to fall down.

"Do not even think about fleeing," Galbert added, the deep tones conveying infinite contempt. "There are four archers behind me with their bows trained on you, and this light is more than good enough for them."

Another tread resounded on the far side of the bridge, approaching from behind the Elder, just beyond the spill of light. "It would be good enough, I agree," said a lighter, cooler voice. "If they were still conscious and therefore still holding their bows. It is all right, Thaune," said Blaise de Garsenc, "we have this under control."

There came another sound, twice in quick succession, and the corans beside Galbert grunted and slid to the planks, their swords rattling on the wood. The torch was dropped but then seized by an invisible hand before it could go out.

"Do tell me, father," said Blaise, coming forward into the light, "what is it that makes you so anxious to burn people alive?" His words were flippant but Thaune could hear the stiff tension running beneath them. He wondered when father and son had last seen each other. Galbert said nothing at all; the rage in his eyes was genuinely frightening in the torchlight.

"Blaise," came a Portezzan accent from the murk beyond, "it seems your brother is here too."

"How splendid! A reunion!" said Blaise, again with that forced gaiety. "Bring him, Rudel, let me see those dear, kind features again."

Galbert still had not spoken. Thaune was unable to look at the High Elder's face. He heard footsteps again, and two men brought forward a third between them.

"We have dealt with all the others," said a voice Thaune remembered from Arbonne, "About fifteen of them, as you guessed." They were lighting more torches now; by their light Thaune recognized Bertran de Talair.

"Nicely done, Thaune," Blaise said, not taking his eyes from his father and the handsome figure of Ranald de Garsenc beside him. "We had to make the assumption that there would be an informer though, that you would need to trust too many people for them all to be reliable. We were here two days earlier than I told you, and I had men watching the roads east to see who might be coming. I thought my father might want to do the honours himself. After all," he added, with sudden, corrosive irony, "it has been months since he had anyone burned, and that hardly counts because he wasn't able to be at Aubry himself. Tell me, dear brother, did you enjoy it there? Was it a fine hunt? Did the women scream amusingly?" Ranald de Garsenc shifted his feet but made no reply.

Men were walking up now, passing Thaune on either side, entering the castle. The big Arbonnais coran named Valery stopped beside him. "Well done," he said quietly. "Now tell me the numbers inside. Do we have a fight on our hands?"

"How many of you are there?"

"Only fifty. Trained mercenaries, though, from Portezza and Gotzland. This isn't an invasion of Gorhaut from Arbonne. This is a rising from within. We hope."

Thaune cleared his throat. "I think about half the castle will be with us." He reached for his belt and unhooked a large key ring. "This unlocks the weapons room—to the right across the courtyard, the double doors with the arch. Girart, who is just behind me, will show you. You may trust him with anything. There might be a hundred, perhaps more, who resist, but they will not be well armed." He cleared his throat again. "I think if En Blaise lets them know he is here there may be fewer who fight."

Blaise heard that. "Let them know?" he echoed in mock indignation. "Of course I'll let them know. I'm the wayward son come home to his father's open arms. There ought to be music, a feast, wine and burning women for my delight. Perhaps that is why you came, father? To surprise me with the warmth of your welcome?" His tone was brittle, febrile. Beside Thaune, Valery of Talair made a small sound but said nothing.

Thaune became aware that the High Elder had now begun murmuring softly, but not to any of them. Somehow the quality of the man's voice, his inward, intense manner, shaped a silence on the bridge in the mist, and gradually, with a growing horror that bit deeper than the cold, Thaune became aware that the High Elder was intoning the denunciation of the god.

"… to the infinite cold that was before the world was or the moons were spoken, before the sun was moved and the stars allowed their light. O, most holy Corannos of ice and all the sacred tongues of fire, unworthy as I surely am in your sight, I beseech thee, in the name of your own ancient gifts to us, that there shall be for this man torments without number to the ending of time. Maggots beneath the skin and worms in his heart, the rotting sickness and the black blood that cannot be stanched. I pray that you send down upon this man who is my son no longer—"

"That is enough." A second voice, cold with distaste. Bertran de Talair. Blaise himself was silent, immobile in the face of what his rather was doing.

"— foul madness and a twisting agony in his bowels, blindness, boils, the stinking corruption of his flesh—"

"I said that is enough!"

"— all of these and more, I most holy Corannos. I pray that he be stricken also with the pestilence that—"

Bertran came around in front of Galbert and, in the midst of this pronunciation of the blackest curse known to the Elders of Corannos, struck him full in the face with an open palm, the way one might slap a servant. Galbert stopped, out of genuine shock as much as anything else. Blaise still hadn't moved. He opened his mouth to speak, and then closed it wordlessly. Ranald de Garsenc looked pale and unsteady beside his father.

"You will be silent," Bertran said savagely. "Ten more words and an archer will shoot. Your son may be unwilling to give such an order, for reasons that escape me, but he assured that I am not. Do not put this, I beg you, to the test."

"Who are you?" Galbert snarled, through gritted teeth.

En Bertran laughed aloud then, as strange a sound in the fog as Thaune had heard all night. "That is three words," he said. "Seven left. Hoard your store. I am sorely offended, though, I would have thought you would surely know the appearance of a man you paid so much to kill last summer."

"Bertran de Talair," said Ranald de Garsenc, his first words. "I remember you from the tournaments."

Galbert's eyes narrowed to slits, but he kept silent, his body rigid with anger. His gloved hands, Thaune saw, were ceaselessly working, opening and closing at his sides, as if longing for someone's throat.

Ranald turned from the duke of Talair to stare at his brother. "What have you done? Turned traitor entirely? Invaded with Arbonne?"

"Hardly," said Blaise, beginning to regain his composure but carefully not looking at his father. "Bertran is here as a friend. My men are mercenaries recruited by Rudel Correze for me, you'll very likely know a number of them—mostly from Gotzland. This is a seizing of Garsenc Castle from you, brother. I am sorry, but it seems a necessary first step, since you yourself are doing nothing at all. Worse than nothing, actually. I intend to take Gorhaut from Ademar with my own countrymen, and without burning women, either."

"I had no choice about that," Ranald said fiercely.

"Not so." It was, surprisingly, Valery of Talair, behind Thaune by the portcullis. He was invisible in the fog, his disembodied voice flat and final as that of some judge at the iron gates of the afterworld. "We can say no and die. It is a choice, my lord of Garsenc. In the face of some things asked of us it is the only choice."

No one spoke in reply. There was silence on the bridge, heavy as the fog. Thaune heard only quick footsteps and saw cloaked and hurrying shapes as Blaise's mercenaries went by him into the forecourt. There had been no alarm raised within Garsenc; the world was wrapped in mist like a creation of dream.

And it was in that stillness, as if it were a part of such a dreaming, that Thaune then heard the rumble of hoof beats to the east. A great many, as if the horsemen of the Night Ride were come down among them from the sky, from the train of the god, to ride over the fog-shrouded earth and destroy.

"What is that?" Valery took two steps forward and stopped.

"Get the men inside!" said Blaise sharply. "We have to control the castle. They did send an army! Thaune, have the portcullis lowered, quickly!"

Thaune was already moving, shouting a command to his two guardsmen. From beyond, in the fog, the drum roll of unseen hooves grew louder. There were torches visible now, and shadowy horses, and from the distance between the first and the last of those carried flames, Thaune realized that an army had indeed come.

It had always been likely they would fail. He had not made his choice last autumn because of any measured assessment of the chances of success. He did not want to die on a pyre, though. His only prayer in that moment was that so much mercy might be allowed. He wondered if, when he crossed to the god, he would be allowed to walk with his father again, in the wide meadows of Corannos, in the gentle light.

"I shall set the torch to your burning myself," said Galbert de Garsenc, speaking to his son, as if giving voice to Thaune's own terror. He was smiling again now, a glittering triumph in his eyes, reflecting the torches' glow.

"That," said Bertran de Talair, "is two words too many."

"Bertran!" said Blaise quickly.

"Valery," said the duke of Talair in the same moment. And simultaneous with the two names spoken something sang past Thaune in the fog and he heard the High Elder of Corannos cry out as an arrow embedded itself in his shoulder through the links of the mail he wore.

"Ten more," said Bertran de Talair calmly, "and we will twin that in your other arm. Tell me—in less than ten words, mind you—do you think these horsemen will attack us at risk of your life, my lord High Elder? Why don't we wait for them here and consider the question at leisure?"

He was, thought Thaune, unbelievably calm.

The hoofbeats had been a rolling as of thunder but gradually stopped now beyond the end of the bridge in the wide, clear space before the woods. There were a great many torches; Thaune could see the outline of horses and riders, bulky figures heavily armed.

"We have the High Elder here, and the duke of Garsenc," Blaise called out, his voice knifing into the fog. "Have a care for their lives. Will you declare yourselves?"

His father, clutching at his left arm, laughed then. A harsh, ugly sound, at odds with the effortless beauty of his voice. "Who do you think it is?" he snarled.

"Six words," said Bertran quietly.

From amid the mist and the weaving torches a voice called back, cold and austere, "There is no hostage you could name who will stay my hand or those of my men if we are minded to strike. Is it Blaise de Garsenc to whom I speak?"

"Careful!" said Rudel Correze sharply, under his breath.

"No point denying it," Thaune heard Blaise reply softly. "Our only hope is the hostages, whatever he says. He might be bluffing. He must be bluffing."

There was a sound of horses approaching the far end of the bridge, and then the creak of an armoured rider dismounting. From behind, Thaune finally heard the rattle and the clang of the portcullis as the guards finished lowering it. Valery of Talair was beside him, another arrow to his bow. Thaune drew his sword.

"I am Blaise de Garsenc," said the tall coran Thaune had sworn an oath to serve and to have for his king.

"I thought it might be so," said the unseen man in a voice crisp with resolution. "I had hoped my information was correct, that I would find you here tonight."

And into the torchlight, heavily cloaked against the cold, strode Fulk de Savaric, to kneel on the planks of the bridge before Blaise.

He looked up, and the hovering torchlight fell upon the square, fair-haired, intelligent features he shared with all his family. Thaune, catching his breath, taking an involuntary step forward, saw that the duke of Savaric was not smiling. "My lord, will you accept my sworn homage and the hand of a friend? Can you make use of a thousand men from Savaric and the lands of the north who share your feelings about the Treaty of Iersen Bridge and the men who rule us now?"

Long afterwards, Thaune remembered looking up then, almost expecting to see the moons appear like beacons in the fog, as if the heavens and the dark earth around them must somehow mirror the glow that seemed to be emanating from this bridge. It was still thick as river mud overhead, though, the sky lost to sight in the fog and only the nearest torches lending their light to the tableau before him as he looked back down to see En Blaise take Fulk de Savaric's offered hands formally between his own.

It was in his heart, not in the sky, Thaune realized, that the moons were beginning to shine again. The cold of the long night seemed lessened by the warmth of that inner light. He wondered, after, if the others on the bridge had had such an illusion, if they had all looked up to see if the sky had truly changed.

That might have been an explanation, though not, by any means, an excuse for what happened.

What happened was that Galbert de Garsenc, in the very moment his younger son was formally accepting the homage of the most powerful lord of the northern marches of Gor-haut, rammed one burly shoulder into the coran on his right, hammered a muscled forearm into the face of his other guard and leaped off the bridge, an arrow still quivering in his left

winter

399

arm, to disappear into the shrouded darkness of the dry moat.

After a frozen moment there was a babble of sound on the bridge. Valery of Talair and Rudel Correze hurtled into the moat after him. Thaune heard a snarled Portezzan obscenity as the latter landed badly on the uneven, rock-strewn surface below.

"He won't get far," said Fulk de Savaric as Blaise helped him to his feet. Over his shoulder, de Savaric snapped commands in the darkness. A moment later Thaune heard horses galloping and saw torches moving again in the mist.

Of all of them it was Blaise who seemed least surprised. "If he makes the woods," he said, almost musingly, "I doubt we'll find him."

"He has to get out of the moat first," said Bertran de Talair, "and he's got a wounded arm."

"Not badly wounded," Blaise said, shaking his head, still with that detached air about him, as if he had almost anticipated this. "He wears heavy mail, double-linked. I doubt the arrow went deep. Ring the moat, though," he said to Fulk de Savaric. "There's at least a chance your men might see him climbing out."

There came the sound of laughter then, laced with mockery, with something else in it that Thaune could not quite identify. "He won't be climbing out," said Ranald, duke of Garsenc, to his brother. "He's under the castle already, and will be out from it and gone before morning. There's a tunnel in from the moat that no one knows about, and another from the dungeon level that leads away. A long distance away. You won't find him, brother." In silence the two men looked at each other.

"Blaise, quickly, do you know where it leads? We can get to the exit before him." It was Bertran, speaking with urgency for the first time. Galbert de Garsenc, Thaune abruptly remembered, had offered two hundred and fifty thousand in gold last summer for the death of de Talair.

Blaise was shaking his head though, looking at his brother. "This was done after I left." His mouth twisted slightly. "Ranald wouldn't have mentioned it otherwise."

"We could make you tell us where the tunnels are," said En Bertran to Ranald de Garsenc very quietly. There was something frightening in his voice now. Thaune wondered how he could ever have arrived at the notion that the Arbonnais men were soft.

The duke of Garsenc was still a handsome man, tall and well built, the image of what a lord should be. He looked down upon the slight, unprepossessing figure of the duke of Talair and said contemptuously, "Really, my lord? What will you do? Set me on fire?"

Blaise said something then that Thaune could not hear. His brother did hear it though, and turned quickly back to him, his arrogance fading.

"Go ahead," Blaise said, more loudly. "I mean it. If you want to go with him you will not be stopped or followed." Ranald's expression had become confused, hesitant. He looked like a man who wanted a drink, thought Thaune. A cruel thought, he knew, but it was there. He had lived in this castle long enough. He knew the duke.

"If you want to, though, you can stay," Blaise added. "I will trust you among us if you give me your oath. I have never known you to lie, Ranald. I will not assume you would do so now. If you can see anything clearly tonight you must surely realize that this is the chance of your life. Probably the last chance, brother. Do you want to free yourself from him or not? He is gone, down that tunnel, away from both of us, back to Ademar. You don't have to follow him, Ranald, and I will not make you stay. You have the first free choice you've had in a long time."

"If I kneel and swear fealty to a younger brother who ought to have been a cleric of Corannos? Is that my choice?"

"Is it so evil a course? Does it matter what he was supposed to become all those years ago?" It was Fulk de Savaric who spoke, as Blaise remained silent looking at his brother by the wan light of the torches in the mist.

Beyond the bridge, Thaune could hear men shouting and the galloping horses as corans raced to surround the moat. He shared Ranald's certainty: they were not going to find Galbert de Garsenc, not in the mists of this night, not in the morning, even if the sun returned. At the back of his mind, behind his awareness of the miracle of their triumph and Fulk de Savaric's sworn allegiance, he felt a flicker of fear, like a tongue of flame.

Blaise cleared his throat, oddly tentative with his brother, as he had been with the father. "I do not request that you kneel before me, only that you follow my lead, Ranald." He hesitated. "I think you know, if the roles were reversed I would have been proud to swear homage to you." He stopped again, visibly struggling for words, as if wrestling with something difficult. "I also think you know there was a time I would have followed you to the end of the earth had you asked me to."

"But why," said Duke Ranald de Garsenc, after a silence, "would I ever have wanted to go to such a place? Or to have you there with me?"

Blaise said nothing at all to that. He lowered his head.

"You are a greater fool than I even guessed," said Bertran de Talair, but softly now, almost with regret. "Bring my lord Ranald his horse," he called out to the invisible corans beyond the end of the bridge. "The most puissant duke of Garsenc is leaving our poor company for the pleasure of his father's and the high grace of Ademar's court."

Blaise was still silent. Thaune, behind him, could not see his face. In a way he was glad of that. Even after years in this castle he found that what lay between the three men of Garsenc—like a thicket of spear shafts in the earth, iron heads angled to kill—was too much for him sometimes. Tonight, suddenly, had become one of those times, as if the destiny of nations was bound up in the darkness of this castle, a darkness that went far deeper than the mist and fog of a winter's night. They heard a horse being led up onto the bridge.

"Someone help the duke to mount," Bertran said, with the same grim courtesy.

"No need," said Ranald shortly, and he mounted in one smooth motion. He curvetted his horse and looked down upon his brother. "Are you expecting me to thank you now?" he asked. Again there was that note in his voice, the one Thaune could not quite identify.

Blaise looked up. He shook his head. "I thought you might ask about your son though." A cruel question, though perhaps not cruelly meant. Thaune wasn't sure; he didn't understand the younger son either. He saw Ranald's jaw tighten. Blaise added, in a flat voice, "I am proposing to name him my heir in Gorhaut, with Fulk as regent, should I die in this war. Does that interest you at all?"

He had to be quick, Thaune thought, he had to be very fast to have thought of this already. He turned to look at Fulk de Savaric, but there was nothing to be read there at all, nor in the features of Bertran de Talair beside Fulk. These were men used to the play of power, and to hiding their responses to it.

Ranald de Garsenc was less able to mask his feelings. "How touching," he shot back, as if firing a crossbow bolt. "How wonderful to see that everyone in my family has plans for my son. It does free me of a father's anxiety, I must say."

Blaise said, still gravely, "Given that you haven't even cared to ask of his condition or even his name, it ill behooves you to take such a tone, brother."

There was a silence. The very calmness of the words made the lash of them bite harder. Thaune felt that he and the others on the bridge had become extraneous, mere hangers-on at the edges of this long, bitter struggle within the de Garsenc family.

"Well?" said Ranald finally, as if that one word cost him a great effort. "Tell me."

From behind, Thaune saw Blaise lower his head again for a long moment, and then lift it once more. "He is well. A handsome, healthy child. He looks like a Garsenc. His name is Cadar, for his grandfather of Savaric."

Ranald laughed then, the same quick, bitter, corrosive sound as before, when his father had escaped. "Of course it is," he said. "She would do that."

"Can you blame her?"

Surprisingly, Ranald de Garsenc's laughter ended. He shook his head. He said, "You will not believe me, but I told father and the king both that I was prepared to let her go if she sent back the child. Neither would agree, not that she would have done so in any case." He paused. "I faced summary execution if I did not ride with Ademar to Aubry last autumn. Ask the duke of Savaric, your brave new ally. He was at that burning too, for the same reason."

It was Blaise's turn to be silent. "I know he was," he said at length. "I know why you were there, Ranald. But Fulk de Savaric has made his response to that tonight. He is with us now. You are about to ride back to Cortil. To the ugliness there. I don't understand. I can't understand. Ranald, will you not tell me why?" There was pain in the question. Every man on the bridge heard it.

Slowly Ranald de Garsenc shook his head again. "No," he said finally. "I do not owe you that much." He paused, seeming more composed than his younger brother on the ground now. "Nor will I thank you for not torturing me to find the location of the tunnel. I will say this much—" he turned to the duke of Talair, " — I am not going back to Cortil. Forget not, in your urge to mock and diminish your foes, who and what it is you are dealing with. I never forget it, not ever, during any day or night of my life."

He turned back to his brother. "Farewell, little Blaise, who would be king of all of us. I can recall teaching you to use that sword you carry. I wonder if you remember?"

He turned then, and was gone into night and fog, only the drumming of his horse's hooves in the mist telling them he was riding east.

"Of course I remember," said Blaise, to no one in particular.

He turned then and began walking up the bridge towards the castle, past the two dukes and all the corans, who quickly made way for him. He stood motionless before the portcullis bars until they had been rolled up again, allowing him to pass within, into his ancestral home.

Feeling buffeted by the speed of events, Thaune of Garsenc was more than a little eased to note heightened colour and hints of bemusement in the expressions of others when they gathered in the great hall.

There had been no resistance in the end. The announced arrival of Blaise de Garsenc, coupled with the even more tangible presence of nearly a thousand armed men with the duke of Savaric, induced any corans of Garsenc who might have been otherwise inclined to make their peace with the current situation.

That wasn't the problem. The problem emerged when the explanations began, while the castle servants scurried to provide wine and food and sleeping arrangements, not only for those in the hall but for the northern soldiers, and for the farmers who had also come with Fulk, carrying a variety of arms.

It was the presence of the farmers Fulk had been ordered to bring that raised the issue. It was winter, after all. Corans often followed their lord wherever he went, and it was not unusual for a duke to bring part of his household with him if he travelled to Cortil to spend the cold months drinking and brawling among the retinue of the king. It was a custom of long standing. That, they had assumed, was why Garsenc Castle was unlikely be heavily defended. But if the ordinary men of the land were being ordered by Ademar to take up arms in the dead of winter something else was afoot.

Fulk de Savaric knew that. He didn't know what was unfolding, though, because he hadn't yet reached Cortil when his instructions had been changed. His tale was simple. He had been instructed to bring as many men south as he could. Given the mood of the king since autumn, Fulk had not regarded these orders as being the sort he could comfortably ignore. They were mobilizing early for an attack in the spring, he had concluded; it had always been the most likely course of events.

Halfway to Cortil he had been met by a messenger from the High Elder, changing his orders, instructing him to turn west to Garsenc Castle, and meet Galbert there. There was a threat from the south, the messenger reported, treachery abroad in the wintry heartland of Gorhaut. Fulk knew, as most of Gorhaut had known by then, that Blaise de Garsenc had claimed the throne last autumn.

Duke Fulk was his own man, if he lacked his father's flamboyance or the confidence of the monarch that Cadar de Savaric had had. He'd turned his thousand men as ordered, riding along a valley path laced with snow, but he had stopped them by a frozen river bed two days later, a half day's ride still from Garsenc Castle. And there, under grey skies, he had made a speech.

He was not a man for speeches, nor were the men of the north greatly inclined to listen to orations, especially in the cold. What he said was as terse and clear as he could make it, and the words marked a changing of his life. He would have denied that Aubry had led him to that moment, but he wouldn't have said it had nothing to do with it, either.

He had never liked the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he told his assembled men, shouting the words into the rising wind. He had never liked the authority the High Elder of Corannos had over an increasingly self-indulgent king. He felt contempt and real anger for the way in which a quarter of the people of Gorhaut had been dispossessed of their land and ordered to find shelter somewhere, anywhere, while the king and his High Elder plotted a conquest in the south. Fulk de Savaric did not think they could hold any lands they took south of the passes; they wouldn't be allowed to, he said, by the other countries of their world. The balance would be too greatly shifted. They would only trade a border war with Valensa for an enormous combat against all the other nations, and the Arbonnais, he said, would die before they lay quiet under a Gorhaut yoke of occupation. They would be forced out of Arbonne, he told his men, leaving ruin and ashes and legions of the dead behind them.

That, said Fulk, probably didn't even matter to the High Elder, whose war this was. The real point of what was happening now had little to do with land for the dispossessed of the north. Galbert wanted only to destroy Arbonne and its goddess, and the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been the first devious step towards that. Fulk de Savaric didn't much care either way about Arbonne's goddess; she had never bothered him, he said by that frozen river. What did bother him, what enraged him, he said, were the uprooted people of the northlands. Their king had sold them to Valensa for silver and gold, to raise an army for burning women in Arbonne.

There were others, he told his silent company, who felt the same way as he. Blaise de Garsenc, the younger son of the High Elder was probably known to many of them. He wasn't even a northlander, but he had left Gorhaut entirely rather than live with the terms of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge. He was very likely coming home now, perhaps even tonight, leading a rising against these very wrongs Fulk was speaking of. The duke proposed to join him, for the honour of the northland and in memory of his father and King Duergar who had truly loved and served Gorhaut. He invited those of his army who thought the same thing and who trusted his judgment to come with him. Those who felt otherwise were free to leave, with his honest gratitude for their service in the past.

That was all he said. Wind blew down the valley, sliding snow into mounds on the banks of the frozen river, shaking it down from the branches of bare trees.

Eighteen men left, from a company of almost a thousand.

The men of the northland had their own hard creed, always, and the lords of Savaric had seldom played them false, whatever the kings in Cortil might have done. Duke Cadar de Savaric had died defending their lands and his own at Iersen Bridge. His son had shepherded the interests of the north with a cautious diligence in the upheavals that followed King Ademar's accession and the treaty he had signed. If the time for caution now had ended, the time for loyalty had not, and loyalty to the north was the first law of the north.

Not a man prone to the sweep of powerful emotions, Fulk de Savaric had nonetheless been moved by what had followed his words on that wintry afternoon. He was speaking treason, after all.

There was no shouting when he ended, no cries of approval or swift cheers raised in his name. That was not their way. There was only the grim, stern silence that had always defined the north, as six horsemen and twelve men on foot detached themselves from the company, to proceed east from that icy stream towards Cortil and King Ademar, who was still, when all else was said and done, the anointed of the god.

The rest had followed him here to Garsenc Castle and would follow him now, he said soberly to Blaise and Bertran and the others gathered in the great hall, wherever he asked them to go.

"That last," said Blaise, "is the real question, I fear." He seemed to have gradually recovered his composure after the encounters with his father and brother. "We had planned to take this castle, use it as a winter base, a rallying point, for any men who might join our cause, and then see what the spring brought us, in numbers and possibilities. I didn't propose to fight a war in winter."

"We did once, in the time leading up to Iersen Bridge," said Fulk de Savaric.

"I know that. I was there. That was against an invader, with no choice offered us. There's another thing: I don't want to begin attacking across the countryside myself, ruining castles or towns. If I possibly can I want this to end up as one battle against Ademar and only one. My army—if I have one—against his on a field somewhere. If I am to come home as the saviour of Gorhaut—the man who takes us back to the god and our true destiny—I can't begin by killing my own people and destroying their homes and fields. I won't do that, Fulk, for the same reason I won't invade with an army from Arbonne."

"Did they offer you one?" Fulk de Savaric asked.

Blaise turned to Bertran de Talair. The duke's expression was oddly inward, Thaune saw, as if he hadn't been closely following the last part of the conversation. And a moment later, Thaune realized that this, in fact, was so.

"Do you remember," Bertran asked Blaise softly, not answering the question, "what your brother said just before he left? His last words to me?" There was something strange in his voice, something that made the room feel cold again, despite the fires now burning on all the hearths. Thaune, by the doorway to the corridor, tried to remember what it was that Ranald de Garsenc had said.

"He said he wasn't going back to Cortil." Blaise had been standing by the largest of the fires. Now he took two steps towards the duke of Talair and stopped.

"Would he have been telling you something?" asked Rudel Correze sharply. He rose from his seat. "Because if he was…»

"If he was," Duke Bertran finished flatly, "then we know why Fulk was ordered to bring all the men he could. And why your brother wasn't going to Cortil. Ademar isn't at Cortil."

"How did you come through the mountains?" Fulk de Savaric asked abruptly. He, too, had now risen from his chair.

"Lesser Gaillard Pass to the west," said Blaise. "There were only fifty of us, no wagons or goods. We didn't want to be seen. We might have been spotted had we gone through the High Road Pass."

"Of course," said Fulk. "But if En Bertran is right about this then Ademar and his army were moving south from Cortil towards the High Road Pass even while we were coming north." Bertran de Talair had put down his wine glass. His face, Thaune saw, was very white, an old scar showing in sharp relief. "That is what has happened, I am certain of it. It fits what we know. They decided not to wait for spring, after all. This is a winter war, my friends. In Arbonne. They might even be there already."

"And what do we do here with a thousand men? Capture Cortil? Raise the country in revolt?" Rudel Correze's eyes were bright in the firelight. Blaise said nothing; his eyes were on the duke of Talair.

"There is no country to raise," said Fulk de Savaric slowly. "All of the men who can fight will be with the king. I think I see what he is thinking: he doesn't care what you do here. If he takes Arbonne quickly enough—and it will probably

408 A SONG FOR ARBONNE

be wide open to him now in winter, however many men he loses to the mountains—he can come home with an army in triumph from the sack of that land and deal with us in spring, wherever Blaise is."

"That isn't Ademar thinking, you do realize," said Blaise finally. You could hear the bitterness. "This is my father's cunning, and his dream. He has always wanted Arbonne destroyed. Always. He told me stories as a boy of how the temples of Rian had to be brought down to save the whole world from their corruption. And he knows me. He knew I would not bring an army here, that Ademar would be safe to leave Gorhaut almost undefended, and then come back, as Fulk says, to deal with whatever happens while he's gone." He turned to Bertran. "You know what he's going to do, don't you?"

The other man's expression was bleak as the winter night. Slowly he nodded his head. "He won't bother with the castles or the cities. He won't try sieges in winter. He's going to force our corans out by making war on the villages and the temples. As he did at Aubry."

"As he did at Aubry," echoed Blaise.

"Shall we ride, then?" asked Fulk de Savaric. "You wanted one battle, Blaise. It looks as if you might get it, but it will be in Arbonne."

"Of course it will," said the duke of Talair with savage irony. "It is warmer there, isn't it? The sun shines, even in winter. If you go far enough south there's no snow at all. You can even catch the scent of the sea."

"Through the smoke," said Blaise shortly. "Let's go."

They left two hundred of Fulk's men to hold Garsenc Castle and to spread word as best they could that they were there. The rest of their company set out that same night in the fog and the cold on the long road back to the mountains. At one point during the night the mist finally began to lift and they caught a glimpse through tattered windblown clouds of white Vidonne low in the west before morning came.