A Man Rides Through (95 page)

"Oh, you please me!" Abruptly, he swept his gaze around the tent, swung his arms expansively. "You all please me! If we cannot save our world now, it will be because I have failed you, not because any one of you has failed Mordant. You have all given me better than I deserve."

In sheer joy, he kept on laughing; and after a moment Geraden joined him. Then, surprising even himself, Prince Kragen began to chuckle. Elega's smile grew softer and easier as it spread.

Master Barsonage shook his head, laughing as well. Terisa squeezed her eyes hard to keep herself from weeping foolishly; but she didn't start to laugh until she realized that the Tor was snoring as if nothing had happened.

They talked together for a long time, King Joyse and Prince Kragen, Terisa and Elega, Geraden and Master Barsonage, with Castellan Norge looking on as if he would have found a good night's sleep far more interesting. Guards brought supper, cleared it away when it was done. Ribuld helped the physician put the snoring Tor to bed. For the most part, King Joyse and Prince Kragen and Elega listened, asking an occasional question, while Terisa and Geraden and the mediator recounted and explained. Little of what was said was news to the Prince or Elega, but King Joyse listened intently, emitting concern and curiosity and approval like benefactions.

His friends and supporters had done well: he said that repeatedly. His unwilling allies had done well. His smile shone on everyone until the tent was full of warmth; he seemed to take every sad or hurtful thing onto himself, so that no one around him felt blamed or criticized for confusion or distrust or failure. The time passed in a glow, and Terisa understood at last why so many people had loved and served him for so long. She no longer wondered why the Perdon had sacrificed himself and all his men for a King who had abandoned him, or why the Tor had come to her in the dungeon to beg her to save herself for the King's sake, or why the Domne was able to view the destruction of Houseldon without recrimination against his old friend, or why Queen Madin's first reaction on hearing of her husband's peril was to rejoin him. Terisa felt that way herself now, would have done those things herself.

She felt that she had come through hate and defeat to something else, to a kind of settled commitment, a mood in which all things were possible. She wasn't exactly eager to face the coming day—but she wasn't afraid of it, either.

For his part, Geraden was eager. His eyes shone at his King, and he took every occasion he could find to look toward Terisa and smile, as if he wanted to say, See, I told you he's worth serving.

He didn't come down from happiness until the talk turned to battle plans.

Master Barsonage described the Congery's resources, and King Joyse gave him instructions for the Masters. The King and Prince Kragen devised chains of command, ways to convey messages; they made the best arrangements they could to treat the injured and feed the well; they deployed in their minds the forces of horse and foot. And gradually Geraden's expression turned somber.

"What troubles you, Geraden?" asked Prince Kragen eventually.

Geraden shook his head, staring at nothing.

"Say it, Geraden," King Joyse urged mildly. "Words will not hurt us."

"I'm sorry, my lord King, my lord Prince." Geraden tried to force a happier look onto his face, without much success. "Nothing's wrong. I just can't get rid of the feeling that Terisa and I don't belong here."

Oh, good, Terisa thought dimly. This again.

"Why?" inquired the King. "Where else should you be?"

Geraden grimaced in exasperation. "I have no idea." Almost at once, however, he added, "But it's obvious we're useless where we are. The Congery doesn't really have mirrors to spare for us. And if we had mirrors, what could we do? We don't know where Eremis' stronghold is. We don't know"—a more crucial point—"what it looks like. We have all this talent—and Eremis presumably thinks we can hurt him, or why would he try so hard to hurt us?—but there doesn't seem to be anything we can
do."

Prince Kragen frowned studiously; Elega nodded as if she understood the problem. But for some reason King Joyse seemed unable to take Geraden's concern seriously. "Well, Geraden," he said in a tone of confidence, "you can hardly expect advice from
us.
Those talents are yours, not ours. You are the only judge of what you can and cannot do."

"True," put in Master Barsonage. He seemed glad that he wasn't responsible for whatever Geraden and Terisa did.

"You will think of something in good time," concluded the King comfortably.

Before anyone could object, he began to dismiss his companions so that they all could get a few hours of sleep.

Terisa made sure that Geraden came with her when she left the Tor's tent. He wasn't actually reluctant to accompany her, he was simply so caught up in King Joyse that he had trouble tearing himself away. The King insisted, however; and she and Geraden went out into the snow to find their bedroll.

She had no intention of sleeping. In fact, she couldn't imagine sleeping, under the circumstances. She just wanted to have Geraden to herself for a while.

They found their bedroll at the edge of the light cast by the guards' lanterns outside the Tor's tent. The snow was still falling, although less heavily; but the bedroll was wrapped in a waterproof canvas sheet, with one large end propped up by sticks to form a kind of miniature tent, letting air into the bedroll while keeping snow off its occupants. The only trick, Terisa soon discovered, was to get
into
the bedroll without tracking too much snow—

Shivering, she and Geraden swaddled themselves in their blankets and hugged each other for warmth.

"Have you got any ideas?" he asked; his mind was still on King Joyse and battle.

"Yes," she said, "but they don't have anything to do with Imagery."

With her hands and her lips, she persuaded him to think about her instead. She wanted her whole body and her heart to be full of him, as if he were an antidote to Master Eremis and violence.

After that, they found it easier to relax.

Nevertheless they got up a few hours later—a long time before dawn—when King Joyse emerged to begin readying his forces.

The snowfall had stopped. It covered the ground deeply, shrouded the tents and bedrolls of twelve thousand men; it melted off the backs of the horses; it muffled every sound, absorbed even voices, and kept the campfires all across the valley small. King Joyse himself looked small in the face of so much snow and darkness. The way he rubbed his hands together suggested that the cold had brought back his arthritis. Nevertheless his eyes gleamed with blue. Gusting steam into the lantern-light, he demanded of Castellan Norge in feigned vexation, "Where's that slugabed Prince?"

Norge shrugged with so little show of enthusiasm that the King chuckled. "Make an effort to stay awake today, Castellan," he joked. "Our lives may become quite stimulating."

The Castellan allowed himself a wan smile.

Through the light, Prince Kragen appeared with several of his captains and the lady Elega.

Together, he and King Joyse moved away to visit as much of their combined army as possible, ostensibly to explain their plans and reassure their men, but primarily to make King Joyse's presence—and his alliance with Alend—as widely felt as possible; to give every soldier and guard as many reasons for hope as possible.

At the same time, Master Barsonage and the Congery began to unpack mirrors. The Imagers needed time to get into position—and to conceal themselves. Several hundred men went with them to defend them, and their mirrors.

At the tentflaps, Terisa and Geraden learned from Ribuld that the Tor was still sleeping. They left the old lord.

With Elega, they watched the army prepare.

The mediator and his comrades translated more food from Orison. Horsemen delivered supplies throughout the camp and brought bedrolls and tents by the thousands back to the Masters. Huge stacks of hay appeared and were carried away for the mounts. The entire valley seethed with motion—dimly seen by firelight from the higher ground where the Tor's tent had been pitched—as thousands of men visited the brook and the latrines and the cooking fires.

"What do you think our chances are?" Terisa asked to ease the cold anxiety gnawing inside her.

"We're well bottled in this valley," Geraden muttered. "That's bad. On the other hand, it looks like we can only be attacked from one direction. The defile is too narrow. They can't send enough men through it fast enough to hurt us seriously. That's good. So what they'll try to do is drive us toward the walls. If we get too close, they can drop all kinds of things on us."

"If Eremis has a mirror with Esmerel in the Image," Terisa said, "or any part of this valley—"

"Then," Geraden finished for her, "he can attack us any way he wants." Abruptly, he turned and looked at her hard. "But he won't. He won't risk it. He'll be afraid of you. If you shattered his glass, he wouldn't be able to see what's going on. What you did back at the crossroads is going to save us. If you hadn't done that, we'd probably all be dead by now."

She didn't know how true that was. Nevertheless the fact that he said it loosened a knot inside her. "Thanks," she murmured to him privately.

"And there are other hopes," the lady Elega commented. While darkness still filled the valley, her indoor beauty clung to her, and in the lantern-light her eyes seemed luminous with knowledge. "The world is full of strange things, which our enemies do not understand. Master Eremis comprehends only fear and power. He is blinded by his contempt. He does not grasp how far valor may go against him."

Terisa hardly heard the King's daughter. She was thinking,
Choose your risks more carefully.
And she was thinking,
We're useless where we are.
Geraden had the strongest feeling—

Unfortunately, no flash of inspiration came to her.

The sky began to grow pale. Laboring urgently, Master Barsonage and his companions translated unnecessary food and bedding and encumbrances back to Orison. Scouts were sent to watch the foot of the valley. Shifting through the gloom, the army moved into its battle formation: wedged-shaped, like the valley, but reversed, so that an attack from the foot of the valley would meet the point of the wedge and split, be forced against the walls itself; a wedge with mounted troops at the edges for mobility and a core of foot soldiers for strength.

When the sky grew pale enough to cast the valley rim into stark relief, everyone saw that during the night siege engines had been pulled into place.

Catapults: black against the pearl heavens: six, seven—no, nine of them around the valley, ready to pitch rocks or boulders onto the heads of Mordant's defenders.

Terisa groaned uselessly.

A murmur rose from the army. At first, she thought it was a reaction to the catapults. But then she saw King Joyse striding toward her from among the troops, holding his standard high in his fists. On the hillside leading up to the Tor's tent, he fixed his plain purple pennon, drove the butt of the standard into the snow and the ground.

The flag rose and fluttered there as if he had brought it straight from the Masters' augury.

"Here we stand."

Terisa had the impression that King Joyse wasn't shouting. Yet his voice carried as if it could reach every corner of the valley.

"Let them come against us if they dare."

No one cheered. No one got the chance.

Without warning, the beat of a wardrum throbbed in the air. The sound came from far away, down below the foot of the valley; yet like the King's voice it carried, a flat, fatal pulse so visceral that Terisa seemed to hear it with her throat and chest rather than her ears.

And from below the foot of the valley the darkness gathered into motion.

FORTY-EIGHT: THE CONGERY AT WORK

The beat of the drums didn't waver. It continued to labor up the valley like the march of doom.

During the night, the sky had blown clear. Now as the sun rose, the heavens modulated from pearl to an ineffable purple-blue, transforming to vastness the mere scrap of King Joyse's pennon. Although the valley remained in a clenched gloom, enshadowed by its walls, the effect of clear daylight around the ramparts was to make the catapults look smaller, less imposing. According to the sun, those siege engines were only sticks of wood lashed together, as capable as toys of throwing a few rocks at irregular intervals. And the snow gave the ramparts themselves an aspect of enchantment and play.