Fortress in the Eye of Time (78 page)

Except finding a standard-bearer. And the standard was important, even if he had only seventeen soldiers, counting Uwen, in all his company, who needed to find it on the field. He knew Cefwyn intended it be carried conspicuously, because of what it was—and someone had to carry it, which was not far different from a death sentence. Aséyneddin would want to bring it down early.

“The standard,” he said on a deep breath. And Uwen said, with his ordinary calm, “Not your trouble, m'lord. We'll find somebody. Is that the order?”

“We
are
going, my lord?” Tassand asked—the servants had come into the bedchamber doorway, following the page, and stood there, four solemn faces, as gentle, as modest, as kindhearted a set of men as he had ever dealt with. “Is it now?”

“Yes,” he said. It seemed that the floor dropped away from under him, as, with that one word—he ordered everything into motion, and every choice that he had, or imagined he had had—was gone.

Or begun. He was not certain.

“No sleep for us tonight,” Uwen said cheerfully. “Doze in the wagon, we will, or ahorse, or wherever, tomorrow. I'll tell Lusin he can go down in the cold and the wind and rouse out the drivers. This damn little courtyard, we'll have wagons atop each other if we don't move fast. Tassand, let's get it moving.—Lad,” he said to the page, who still waited, “I don't think m'lord has a reply, except he's ready and we're going.”

The fires are lit, the note had said, because Idrys had told Cefwyn his fears regarding Orien—and on that surmise the message to summon the lords and the villages was flaring across the land not as quickly as wizards could warn one another, but still as fast as men could light fires, and as fast as the lords could turn around and come back again, only scarcely arrived and with no time to prepare—but this time traveling without wagons.

At least, he said to himself, at least and in spite of his tardiness even to think what assumptions must change once he knew what Orien had done—Cefwyn had implicitly believed him. But wizardry had failed him, or he had failed, perhaps because of failing with the Book, perhaps simply that the wizardry working against them was stronger, he had no idea.

I
t was a night impossible to sleep, the courtyard rumbling with heavy wheels—and on a short and fitful rest, Tristen rose well before daylight, with the whole Zeide awake at that unaccustomed hour. He took a cold breakfast while the servants gathered up the leather bag of armor, which he would not have to wear until things were more dangerous than Henas'amef's streets. A wagon was supposedly in the courtyard, at the west stairs, and it and three others made such trips with whatever of the lords' baggage had to be gotten down the hill in the dark. His servants and his guards took turn about carrying items down the stairs: one of the guards already on horseback and Tassand, who did read, at least as far as lists, would ride the wagon down and check everything against the tally-tablet, being sure the men helping loaded it off into the right wagon in the line.

It was their last load, his personal equipment and Uwen's. He put on his mail, and a padded black coat, new, since the night at Althalen—gathered up his Book with the mirror tucked into it, put it where he reckoned it most safe, next his belt, and laced up the coat. He took the sword from beside the fireplace, where it had rested since he had brought it home, except Uwen had taken its measure and the armory had sent a sheath for it, with a good leather belt, which he buckled on.

Last of all he slung a heavy cloak about his shoulders, and put on his riding-gloves, of which Uwen had said he would be very glad in the chill air.

There was nothing to do, then, but to watch the servants put out all the candles and put out the fire, and for all of them to take a last look at a home no one knew if they would see again, in a gathering that might never come together again.

Then it was down the stairs amongst the servants with Uwen and Lusin, one of the guards who had been with him longest, to the courtyard, where they were bringing horses up, by precedence.

Outside the town walls, on the lords' former campground, was where their personal wagon and their drivers would be waiting, also in their order of precedence—a long line, since the Guelen guard and the Amefin contingent had not only their own baggage, but also the baggage train of the absent lords and their armies under their escort.

Their wagon was already loaded with the gear and trappings from the pasture-stable, which Aswys himself had accounted for, and seen loaded—at least that was the prearrangement, if Aswys had been able to get to the wagon.

“He'll be there,” Uwen said. “He's a King's man. They'll let him through. Hain't no trouble at all, m'lord, compared with the ranks tryin' to find their gear in a thunderstorm.”

Heavy-axled wagons had been rolling for half the night, as anyone trying to sleep could attest, the most of them loading once, at the granary, as they understood, and not to unload again until they reached their final encampment: a certain number would distribute grain to the individual wagons at the first camp, and immediately turn back to Henas'amef, to reload and go out again. Supply for that many horses when the hazard of attack precluded letting the horses out to graze was a very great difficulty; and feeding that number of men over the same number of days, plus the supply of firewood when foraging might be dangerous made necessary another number of wagons—and heavy wagons traveled at the same speed as a man could leisurely walk, no faster, often slower. That meant that the ground a man on a light horse could cover in a day was three to five times the rate at which loaded wagons would travel, and if an experienced rider on a well-conditioned horse needed make the distance only once rather than three or four days' sustained effort, the rider might push it to six times the distance a wagon might cover over a number of days, granted the day-after-day
wear on the wagon teams, the wheels, and the axles did not create further delays.

The supply had to be there: it was no good for scattered units of horse to arrive and run into battle without the infantry, or for the infantry without their weapons or food to eat or shelter from the chilling rains. It was, Cefwyn had said it, and the words had made absolute sense, not a skirmish, but full-scale war: and that was right, in his own thinking.

So the Guelen and the Amefin went necessarily at the speed of the baggage train and the Amefin foot. With the signal fires flaring out across the land, they counted on Amefin villages coming to the muster, and all of them counted for their very lives on the southern light horse in particular being able to use their speed—counting that each lighthorseman had two horses. Umanon, with the other heavy horse contingent, would not make Cevulirn's speed overland, but the Imorim heavy horse had good roads, and Lanfarnesse, which had primarily infantry and longbowmen, had the shortest distance to come.

That, at least, was the reckoning they had made in their session with Cefwyn as late as yesterday, with a detailed list of every wagon, with the wagon-bed measured and the wagons and their teams rated as heavy or light, horse or ox. They had hoped for dry roads. They did not have them—but the rains had been light.

But if he was right,
if
he was right, the faster they could reach the river, the greater were Lord Tasien's chances of survival and of their holding the bridge. They had already reinforced Tasien's garrison; and if they could hold the bridge, as Lady Ninévrisë had said in council, the greater were the chances her partisans across the river might rise against Aséyneddin and make it a civil war, not a war between Elwynor and Ylesuin: that was their best hope, the one that shed the least blood on either side and ended the war before winter set in. Those were Cefwyn's hopes, at least, and Ninévrisë's.

But Tristen did not, himself, believe that they had that
chance—not with the likelihood that Hasufin had found more than Aséyneddin to listen to him; one did not know that there were no wizards in Elwynor—there very likely were.

Orien would have told their enemy everything, by means he should have days ago accounted of. And that meant there could be far worse happening: Sovrag's nephew had escorted lord Haurydd into Elwynor—and possibly Aséyneddin had discovered that indirectly from Orien. Aséyneddin could locate Haurydd and discover the names of those people Haurydd had relied on meeting.

In that event, there would be no chance of Ninévrisë's friends inside Elwynor laying any sort of plans before Aséyneddin came against them. And there might be no help for Cefwyn from that quarter, if ever there might have been.

The wagons rumbled on iron-shod wheels over the cobbles, and dogs yapped and men shouted at each other.

Uwen was in his own. He was able to sort out the horses for Lady Ninévrisë's borrowed staff, two young Amefin ladies of good reputation and their fathers, very minor nobles, who had been given good horses of the King's stable, to bear the four of them—the King's servants managed the lady's tents, baggage, and provisions, and the ladies and their fathers, who would, with Ninévrisë's four guards, take charge of her establishment in the camp, had no staff to manage and very little to do but find the horses—with which none of the four, town gentry, had any skill whatsoever, the ladies being there for Ninévrisë's reputation and the ladies' fathers being there to set the seal of noble propriety on the household.

Banners were being uncased and unfurled, with the least hint of light in the sky. The grooms began to lead the horses out. Uwen went off with one of the servants and came back with his horse and Petelly, ahead of a scar-faced man who, bearing a furled banner, also led a horse up. That man said, in a voice low and somewhat shy, “I'm Andas Andas'-son, m'lord. I'm to bear your standard, His Majesty said. I served eleven years in His Majesty's Dragons. The sergeant there knows me.”

“He's a good man,” Uwen said under his breath. “A fine man. I know 'im those eleven years. He'll keep matters straight.”

“Then thank you,” he said, “Andas Andas'-son.” He knew—he all but knew that this man would not leave the field; and did the man not know it?

No more would Uwen leave him. No more would his servants. Or the others. He did not understand. Least of all could he understand the determination it took to take that post, for a lord who was not his own. He made up his mind if Andas'-son lived and ever he could do good for him, he would do it. But it was no favor Andas'-son had been granted.

The groom brought Petelly and he rubbed Petelly's nose and patted his neck as Petelly cast a white-rimmed eye about the proceedings and cocked ears toward the racket. The steam of their breaths commingled in the light of a lantern a man carried past. He felt calmer himself with Petelly under his hands. He climbed up and from that higher vantage, out of the shadows of wagons and horses and men and the flare of lanterns, saw the dawn well begun, a faint glow about the peaked roofs of the Zeide, and above the high walls.

At that moment a shout went up. Cefwyn and Efanor had appeared in the doorway, held up joined hands in the lantern-light, embraced with more than formal warmth, then parted at the steps. Efanor was staying as defender of the town, taking command of the Guard that stayed, and Cefwyn was moving to take horse, as Idrys rode close to the base of the steps.

Then Ninévrisë and her ladies came down, and grooms brought those horses up; Cefwyn mounted up on bay Danvy, and Idrys joined him as Ninévrisë and her ladies were assisted into the saddles. The Dragon banner unfurled, red and shadow and gold, transparent where it crossed the lantern-light. Cheers went up all about. The Tower of the Regent billowed out, and cheers went up at that, too.

Petelly was growing excited, working the bit and looking about at this and that movement. Tristen kept him as close to
his place in line as he could manage until Uwen had mounted up; the grooms, Aswys' lads, handed them up their shields, which they would carry through the town.

Then the two of them rode over to the place he was assigned, with the King. He could not see Cefwyn, but he saw Ninevrisë, and saw Cefwyn's personal guard. Erion Netha and Denyn Kei's-son were with them, Erion carrying the short lance the Ivanim favored; and Denyn with the curved sword and small buckler common among Sovrag's rivermen. The several Guelen guard with them were armored as they were, as light cavalry, but bearing heavy horsemen's shields.

Of a sudden another cheer went up. He had no idea why, until he saw the Tower and Star billow out, eerily pale in the light that broke above the walls—his own banner had unfurled.

A horn brayed across the din, and the three standard-bearers began to move out the gates, down through the town, no mad haste in this ride, but solemn deliberation. The bells of the town began to peal, ringing from every town gate and from the citadel, a clangor that started every bird still drowsing in the towers.

Townsfolk that gathered along the street waved and shouted. Boys broke from the crowd as the banners passed, and ran along beside them—boys too young to have been mustered to the Amefin lords, boys clutching bows and carrying old swords, boys some of them with no weapons at all. The young lads coursed their route and stayed with them, though he saw mothers and fathers shout at them to come back. Tristen saw a band of them break from the crowd as the banners passed, and as they rode under the gate and turned to the right, along the long, long line of wagons, the boys burst forth from outside the gates and ran alongside the foremost riders.

Dogs joined the chase. Several stray sheep wandered through, among the wagons, right across the path of the horses, and, with the dogs behind, jogged back through the line in front of them.

Outside the town gates, the nearby rural and town levies mustered in the dark, and there came a flood of Amefin infantry behind a few horsed lords. The Eagle standard of the Amefin swept in just behind their rank, with the several earls and their separate standards, and behind those the pennons of the various sections with their lieutenants and sergeants in command.

They passed their wagon in line near the head of the column: Dys and Cass were with it, along with Aswys and two of his boys on horseback, and Tassand and the other servants. Lusin and the other fifteen Guelen guards, the four shifts that had stood at his door, all on horseback, rode in to their assigned place behind the King's guard, the King's Dragon Guard being under Gwywyn, who rode behind the leaders. But Lusin and the rest were directly under Uwen's command, since Uwen's armoring and commission as a Guelen officer and, at least by honor, as Tristen now understood, a captain over the almost nonexistent forces of Ynefel and Althalen.

Uwen had said when Cefwyn had given him the horses that he could not figure how he had gotten to such a station, being a man of the villages, not of the court, and seemed quite overwhelmed by it. Now he had a command.

But Tristen thought most of any honor he simply wanted Uwen and all his folk to come through alive—and Uwen's rise to fortune occasioned him a guilt he himself did not understand, not because the wish to have Uwen safe was wrong, he decided, but because he had so much he should be thinking about and understanding rather than worry, as he could not help but do, about a household and the men who depended on him.

He was not the same as the lords of the south, he told himself, as he rode beside Cefwyn and Ninévrisë in the rank of Kings, with their three banners snapping and cracking in the dawn wind ahead of them. He was not the same as Cefwyn, who was born to be a king; he had no attachments for good or for ill the same as they. He had stolen them, he
had borrowed them, he had put up the pretense of being a Man, even though he had had but one thing to do from the hour that Mauryl had called him into the world, a dangerous thing, and he had no justification for allowing Men to form such attachments to him, where their dangers were more than they could know. Uwen—had been so confident, had known so well where things ought to be, and what had to be done to move men and horses: he was a calming presence this morning for all the household, and yet Uwen with all his common sense was only giving orders that someone once had given to him, and that the soldiers knew how to obey, anyway.