A Hero's Tale (24 page)

At midday we reached a hill a little higher than the rest, and Bru and I ascended it while the others waited out of sight. From its top we had our first view of the battlefield. It was a landscape from a nightmare. No armies fought there now. Only the dead remained. At first they were all that I could see.

Though I knew better, my heart began to hope that these men were all asleep and that any moment they would wake and spring up again. I waited for these dead men to spring up.

Then someone did. It was a living man, plundering the dead. A mist blew by him, hid him for a moment. Not mist. Smoke. For no apparent reason, other living men had lit a bonfire, with logs stacked up into piles almost as tall as they were. In the distance I saw two more. Where they found so much wood to burn here in the wilderness I could not imagine, until I saw that they were not burning wood. They burned the dead.

The sight horrified me more than any I had yet seen on that dreadful day. At home we would have opened up the earth to place our dead within it, within the Mother's womb, so that she would take their bodies back into herself.

As living plants spring up from the dead seed, so their spirits would spring up again in time, clothed with living flesh. These dead would suffer a fate more cruel than they had met the day they died. Burning would release their spirits into the air, where they would wander, lost in a shadow world, longing for a house of flesh. Then they would seek out the living, and this battlefield would become a haunting.

I must have made a sound that told Bru of my dismay. I felt him watching me, and because he had before mistaken my regret for cowardice, I said, "My people would not dare to burn the dead."

"Nor mine," said Bru, "but the battlefield is a place unto itself. The mighty say the spirits of warriors killed in battle fly at once to the halls of their god of war, where they will be rewarded for their valor."

"Words are only air," I said, remembering an old saying whose ending was not spoken but understood, that it was one's deeds that mattered. Yet a deeper truth lay within it. How easy to speak such things to the innocent and gullible. How joyfully might a man go to his death if he believed such empty promises. This was a wickedness that baffled me.

"And how else could they dispose of them all?" said Bru.

If they wouldn't place them in the Mother's womb, they could at least leave them lying on her breast, I thought. And they did indeed leave many. When I asked Bru why some were burned and some were left, he said, "They only burn their own."

I would have preferred the mighty to treat me as the enemy, until I saw the ravens, plucking out their eyes.

I turned away, leaving Bru to read the battlefield. Elen had won the day, he told me. That was why her men now plundered the enemy dead and honored, according to their strange beliefs, their own. Bru reckoned that Elen had lost at least a hundred, and the northerners more than twice as many.

"Then it's over," I said. "Their hearts have been defeated. Now they will go home."

He shook his head. "Their chieftains will return for the negotiations."

"To make a treaty?"

Bru smiled at my ignorance. "No one treats with the defeated," he said. "They will come to negotiate a ransom for the prisoners."

Of course. Elen's army would have taken prisoners. But what did the northerners have to offer? Was I the only one who understood their poverty?

"How can they ransom them?" I asked. "Other than their arms, they have little of value."

Bru frowned. "Elen will take those first, before she takes their lives."

"What?"

"She won't leave any who might come back to threaten her again."

"Will she murder them all?"

"Some she will," he said. "The chieftains first, when they come to her tent under a banner of trust. Then she will pursue the remnant of their army until they scatter leaderless back into the hills they came from."

"Why would she do such a thing?"

"Because she can."

"Will she also kill the prisoners?"

"If they are troublesome, she may. If they behave themselves, she will enslave them."

He seemed so certain of Elen's plans that I wondered if he had some experience of her dealings with her foes. He answered my unspoken question.

"I have heard many stories of her ruthlessness," he said, "but I also have a story of my own. Many years ago, before Elen became a queen, her mother sent her to deal with a troublesome band of outlaws, bandits who robbed the caravans of her trade goods. When Elen learned from her spies that they were, as she called them, only a ragamuffin army, she disguised her band of warriors as a caravan and tricked the bandits into attacking them. Once defeated, they would not have been a threat to her again, but she murdered their chieftain and made the rest her prisoners. They were too fierce to serve as slaves, so she put them in cages and displayed them, as she would have displayed savage beasts, until they all died of shame and grief."

"Who were these men to you?" I asked him.

"My father's brother," he replied, "the man who fostered me."

There were scores to settle here, I thought to myself, and more to Bru than a man who saw his kinsmen in peril.

We had been on the hilltop for so long that the rest of the men came up to join us. We let them satisfy their curiosity. Then we went back down the hill, to take counsel together.

"When will the northern chieftains come to parley?" I asked Bru.

"Elen will have already sent an envoy," he replied. "They should return tonight, and the enemy come in the morning."

"So Elen's army will remain encamped another night?"

He nodded.

"Now that they've had their victory, will the sentries be less watchful?"

"Do you mean to try to slip into her camp unseen?"

"How else can I discover where they're keeping Maara?"

"Well," he said, "we could just join the army."

"How can we do that?"

"You forget. We are latecomers. The men we traveled with will be there by now. They will know us, and greet us as comrades in arms. And I think we may find other friends of ours among them."

So we determined that we would hide ourselves until after dark. Then we would join Elen's camp as if that had been our intention all along.

We put a few hills between ourselves and the battlefield before we settled down to wait. Bru handed out all that remained of our rations, and we ate a good meal that filled our stomachs and cheered our hearts. He made certain that each of us slept for several hours. We had a long night before us.

I did sleep for an hour or two, but for most of that day I lay awake, pondering what might happen. If we were accepted as part of Elen's army, we would have the freedom of the camp, but getting Maara out of it would not be easy. Elen would keep Maara close to her. That meant I would have to deal with Elen's guard, men chosen for their loyalty. And once I had succeeded in freeing her from Elen, how would I take her from the camp?

I could not think past the difficulty of the task that I had set myself. To find Maara and bring her out of Elen's camp to safety was as far as I allowed my mind to go. I made no other plans and gave no thought to the time when we would find ourselves together. What I would say to her, what she would say to me, did not concern me then. I kept my attention in that day alone. That was my shield.

We waited through the twilight, until we could bear to wait no longer. I thought we might have trouble finding the encampment, but Bru knew exactly where it was. He knew this land so well that he hardly had to guess where an army the size of Elen's would choose to stop.

By the time we got there it was almost dark. I could just make out how the camp lay within the landscape, as we looked down upon it from the crest of a hill. In a large open space, sheltered on all sides by low hills and hidden from the battlefield, we saw the campfires. I lost count after reaching four score, and I had counted less than half. At least a dozen men gathered around each one. I could not begin to think how many men there might be.

Behind the army on a hillside I saw a few tents, pitched close together. A little below them were the baggage wagons, set in a line, as if to guard the approach to the tents, or to form a barrier between the tents and the army. The oxen had been taken from their yokes, hobbled, and set out to graze. Red cattle were scattered in among them, meat on the hoof for Elen's warriors.

The camp even had a source of water. On the far side a change in the color of the vegetation told me the land was wet there. Perhaps there was a spring, or perhaps a stream drained into it. In addition to providing water, the boggy ground would prevent an enemy from approaching Elen's army on that side.

"How many are there, do you think?" I asked Bru.

"Many hundreds," he replied. He took a few minutes more to make a better guess. "At least a score of hundreds."

We stayed where we were, hidden in a patch of gorse, until the darkness was complete. The smells of cooking drifted up to us, along with the murmur of many conversations.

At last Bru said, "I'll go first. Keep me in sight. If I'm not well received, you must each do as you think best, but if you see me set my shield down, come and join me."

We watched him stumble over the rough ground beyond the reach of firelight. Then a sentry challenged him, and we heard him even at a distance complaining loudly that a man had come all that way to fight and no one so much as offered him a crust of bread. The sentry escorted him into camp. Bru was looking all around, as if for his long-lost companions. He must have found them, because he waved at a group of men around a distant fire and held his shield up, so that they would recognize him. Its device was so faded that I had never been able to discover what it was, but these men knew it. They stood up to greet him, and the sentry let him go. When Bru reached their campfire, he set his shield down.

The rest of us now straggled into camp, trying to look as if we had come to the end of a long and exhausting march. No one challenged us. Bru must have told the sentry to expect us.

The men who had welcomed Bru were not the men we had traveled with. Before long I understood that these men were his kinsmen. Finn knew many of them too, as did some of the other men. For half an hour each man recited his lineage to the others, until they had worked out who was whose second cousin twice removed. Then the clansmen all sat down and had their dinner.

I sat close to Bru and a little bit behind him, shielded from the firelight. I wanted to hear the conversation without drawing attention to myself.

We heard first about the battle. The two armies were fairly matched, but Elen took the northerners by surprise. They had begun their march, and when their scouts alerted them, they had to hurry back. They took the field with no time to rest, no time to choose their ground or agree upon a strategy. It was Elen who chose the battlefield and by clever tricks and feints lured the northern army to its doom.

Bru's band of warriors delighted in the tale. They took satisfaction in hearing of the northerners' demise, as if they had some complaint against them and this victory was their revenge. Then I remembered.
Our faithless friends,
they called them. The northerners had once used these man and then abandoned them. I wondered if Bru might not disapprove of the way that Elen planned to deal with them. I set aside a passing thought, that someone should take them a warning.

"Ask them where the northern army came from," I whispered to Bru.

"They approached us from the south," came back the answer.

I thought it not the best time to point out that if the northern army had intended to march on Elen's house, they had been traveling in the wrong direction.

Finn excused himself to use the privy. He made his way through the camp in the direction of the tents. The privy would be located for the convenience of the mighty. I watched his progress, until the conversation distracted me. Bru's kinsmen were speaking of the king's brother.

"He is here with his men-at-arms," said one. "Not as many as he promised, though he insists that more were sent for." The man gestured toward the far side of the camp. "His banner is the eagle."

Not that we could have made it out. It was too dark. Then I noticed the other banners fluttering from their standards in the night breeze. No one had to explain to me their purpose. In an army of this size, how else could a warrior find his fellows? And in battle they would serve to keep the clans together.

Now that we had entered Elen's camp, I should have been more hopeful, but I could not imagine how we would achieve our ends. The half dozen tents where Elen and her captains sheltered lay within a double ring of campfires. The ground around them bristled with spears, set into the earth to form a palisade. The men who would wield them were the same men who had surrounded Elen in her great hall. Even if we might against all odds succeed in getting in, getting out would be something else again.

When Finn returned from the privy, he tugged at my sleeve and drew me away from the others. Then he sat down beside me and said in a low voice, "They hold the prisoners in a hollow in the hills, not far from the tents."

I looked, but the hillside was in darkness.

"They have no fires," said Finn. "No supper either."

"How many are there?"

"Many," he replied. "More than the dead they left lying on the battlefield. There may be twice as many." Before I could ask my next question, he answered it. "Your friend is not among them."

Though I had hoped, I did not expect that Maara would be with the other prisoners. "She will be close to Elen," I said.

"I fear so."

"Are the prisoners well guarded?"

"Well enough. Why?"

"If I can hide myself among them, perhaps I can approach the tents from behind."

"What good would that do? Are we invisible?"

"One way or another, I must get into Elen's tent."

"Then let's be a little clever," he replied, "and consider how we may make ourselves invisible."

How would I be able to walk into Elen's tent unchallenged? Who would be granted entrance there? Only her captains and her scouts, no one unknown to her. But in the morning the northerners would arrive.