Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
King Rudof frowned. “Kausan, you are mistaken, for I watched the affair. We took most of them alive, if not intact. I need one rider to interrogate, and it must be now.”
The artilleryman was gray-faced and glistening with sweat. He ventured to suggest that the barbarians had killed one another upon capture, and the king, by law of opposites, flushed a stunning red color beneath his orange eyebrows as he inquired whether they had been suffered to accomplish this deed while under military guard.
The officer struggled to reply, and his expression was pitiable, for his career was tumbling to ruin about his head. King Rudof put his hand on the man’s lapel, whether to shake him or thrust him aside I do not know, for at that moment came three staccato barks of a bugle, and the king flung himself past the artilleryman and into the mass of soldiers between himself and the exposed flank.
From where I stood I could see nothing but other men’s heads, and the signal meant nothing to me. I floundered in the king’s wake, and everyone let me by.
The throat of the valley had been pocked and trampled by Velonyan troops, and untidy heaps of kitchen equipment and rolls of canvas batting had been abandoned on the path that hugged the climbing ridge to the west. Where I had seen antlike processions bearing their burdens were now cantering riders, moving loosely but in perfect control, in circles some four hundred feet away from our line. These were not ants, but dragonflies: creatures with wings.
I spied all this from the tiny elevation that the king had claimed for his headquarters. Five marshals stood awaiting him as his long legs thrust him up the outcrop of stone. He was panting not with effort but excitement.
“Too far, sir,” said Marshal Garman. “They don’t seem to be ready to engage us yet. There only seem to be sixty or so, and I imagine this sight of us has cooled their ardor for battle.”
The Red Whips had known our numbers twenty-four hours before and certainly had suffered no shocks at the vision before them. I kept my mouth shut, however, for the king knew all this, and knew besides what destruction that distant line of dragonflies could work on trained soldiery. I was standing behind the assembled command officers, happily unnoticed and hopping from one foot to another to see over their heads.
“We must not ignore the other end of this bottle,” said Leoue. “Their dance out there could be merely a distraction.”
“There are sixty riders in sight and we… disposed of… twenty-five an hour ago, Leoue,” answered the king. “That leaves only ten at the most to be playing tricks. As long as we have men on the ridgetops we are secure.”
“Sir, we cannot say there are only about ninety brutes opposing us. I think we should distribute guns and horses more evenly.”
King Rudof put his arm behind his field marshal’s back, as he had with me. “Too late, old friend. Look, they’re coming. Now my trick will work or it won’t.”
The riders did not turn and charge our guns but instead wove their circles closer and closer. The ponies, so rude in build and trapping, were working by leg signal as finely as any lady’s town hack, while the reins were slipped over their pommels and each rider had in his hands the little lacquered bow with its shape like rosebud lips, ready to pucker and kiss death at all of us. I noticed red-lacquered quivers, also, each filled with a dozen arrows.
“Those bows are no use to them yet. It’s when they get within two hundred feet of us,” murmured the king to Leoue as the other officers strode off to their commands.
“Sir! My king. let me correct you!” I heard myself shouting, to everyone’s surprise. “It’s when they get within three hundred feet of us they will begin to fire, and by the time they reach two hundred, unless we do something, our front lines will be flat as cut hay!”
The king looked back over his shoulder in amazement. “Three hundred feet?” His field marshal snorted.
“I should know. My horse was hit at about two-eighty, and Arlin at slightly less. You cannot judge their bows by ours, nor their archers…”
The king had left me and the duke alone on our prominence, and a moment later had wrested from his bugler the signal horn and was blasting a sharp retreat. At that same moment I heard cries as the Red Whips let loose the first of their volleys. They were slightly less than three hundred feet from our front lines, and they knew their distance to an inch. Gunners went down, horses rose up, and there was much screaming. The front line of harquebus uttered their terrifying blast almost together and then shouldered the weapon and stoodto follow the direction of the bugle.
The ground was moving with men following the retreat, but I wanted nothing so much as to find the battlefront. I clambered up the hill on my hands and feet, skidding and scrabbling forward against the great traffic until I could see what was happening on the field.
There were perhaps five ponies down before our gunfire and another few cantering riderless, but the harquebuses were far less accurate at this distance than the little, wasp-buzzing arrows. The sweeps of the enemy had taken down two or three of our gunners for every one of them lost. The artillerymen could not retreat and fire at the same time, and our cavalry in their blue and white could do little more at this distance than rattle sabers and hold their panicked horses.
Without warning the shot-catapult was released, its twenty-foot arm rising like a sprung sapling into the air. Its load of ball spread and vanished into the gray air and another few riders went down, but it, too, was aimed too close to do major damage. A shrill cry reached me from across the distance, and more arrows hurried the retreat as men and guns and horses fell over one another.
If the king had a secret weapon, he had better deploy it.
Now the arc of riders had reached the first of the abandoned piles, and one reached down, still cantering, and grabbed the steel handle of a stockpot and swung it into the air. The heap clattered and fell into itself, and then a man was running over the ground—a man not in nomad dress nor in cook’s uniform but in the sky blue of Velonya, and the rider was after him. It was pitiful and horrifying, but the end was preordained, and I saw the hiding soldier opened across the chest by the touch of Rezhmian steel.
There came a bellow of fury from the valley below me. It was the king, and his face was not good to see. His hand was in his mouth, and he had drawn blood from it.
In a moment I understood both the plan and its misfire. I scrabbled forward on the side of the hill, and when I came even with the rearmost of the retreating gunners I let gravity carry me down. I hit the man with my shoulder and took him down, and while I was atop him I stole both his flint and the canvas gun shroud, which I put over my head as I ran, hugging the ridge of stone, toward the advancing enemy.
From in front I had one brief, perfect view of the destruction. At least a dozen Velonyans lay motionless, while more were carried or dragged back with the retreat. It was a retreat, and not the rout I had feared. I heard the shout of the king, though I don’t know what it was he said, and then I turned my eyes ahead.
The nomads were only thirty yards from me: a rumble in my ears and a shaking of the stony earth. Down on my hands and knees, at badger height, I could clearly see the mounds and the divots, the gouges and the streaks in the dirt our Velonyan assemblage had left in preparing their positions. It was obvious to me that there was meaning in the placement of three areas of disturbed earth and piled rubble, but the Red Whips had not overheard what I had overheard from the lips of King Rudof, and nomadic riders have no reason to be awake to the possibilities of black powder.
The crude brown canvas was threatening to slip off behind, revealing my attire of brilliant white. None of the riders appeared to have seen me yet, so I grabbed the gun shroud in my teeth and kept crawling. Ahead of me, flat against the ground, the saber-broken soldier lay in a hump, his blue jacket maroon with his spreading blood.
I heard the riders again, crying the name of their tribe totem. They brandished their delicate little bows, and the circle slid closer to King Rudof’s new front line. Closer to me, as well. I pulled from my pocket the flint striker and crawled faster. There were arrows again, and the riders had flawless eyes for distance.
The fallen soldier was not where I expected to find him, and in confusion my eyes followed a smear like a snail’s track, but bloody. He was not dead after all, and as I watched he inched himself back into the blind of pots and canvases, digging his way with a clatter unheard amid the sounds of hooves and killing.
I could not imagine a fellow as badly hurt as that succeeding in lighting any fuse, so I scurried behind him, losing my covering on a new sprung thistle. To my right I saw the wall of riders wheeling around, and one detached himself from the rest. It was the man who had discovered the spy before, and he aimed his pony like a weapon at us. I stood and ran for the collapsed blind, knowing it was too late already, but I hadn’t covered more than five feet when burned air stung my nose, I saw smoke and heard a hissing like water on fire, and then the world to my right blew up and buried me in a storm of very heavy cookpans.
There was a taste of iron in my mouth, and I believed I was back in time half a year, fighting a werewolf and being crowned with a frying pan by his wife. This danger kept me from passing out entirely, and my eyes focused on a field of smoke, flames, and bodies. What remained of the Red Whip force was riding in panic toward the ranks of their enemies, but as I watched, the ground went up twice more, even nearer to myself than the first charge, and I was flung hard into the hard side of the ridge. I had a glimpse of the Rezhmian nomads lit in orange fire, I saw a horse lifted as I had been lifted by the booming air, and then I did go down into the black.
I came to in a wagon, one of a line of wounded men, less hurt than most. I sat up amid great dizziness and found blood wet on my face and head; it seemed to be coming from my ears.
Outside (it took me long minutes to get out and down the stairs), the camp of the king seemed to be packing up. I heard a man singing, or surmised the sound had that source. My hearing was as greatly disturbed as my balance.
A fellow in civilian clothing rushed at me, babbling something, and he tried to force me back into the makeshift hospital coach. Not understanding and unable to gather my own thoughts, I was forced to pin him against the ground before continuing, and I found it unusually difficult work.
I went to find Arlin, for he had some special need of me, I couldn’t remember what. I would remember when I saw him, I thought, and I staggered on.
The little shelter I had created for him had collapsed and been trampled when the entire camp had plunged to the rear. I lifted the grimy canvas and looked under it stupidly, as though he might still be hiding beneath. Two well-intentioned soldiers came to me then with the same intention as the doctor previously. One let himself be waved away, and one had to be hit.
I did not find Arlin, but the king found me. He stood before me, talking energetically, and this time he clapped me on the shoulder rather than the back. Though I could not hear, I could talk, and I told him I was looking for Arlin, who was badly injured and now had disappeared. Perhaps I was shouting.
King Rudof gave me a searching look, then called for an aide, who brought him pen and paper. Against the man’s back he wrote to me, “He is not among the dead, nor the wounded. I will have him cried through the camp.”
I waited, dizzy and with a roaring of battle in my ears that would not cease. The King of Velonya was drawn away by councillors with their multitudinous needs, but he returned to me in a few minutes.
“Arlin was seen in the hospital wagon before you woke. Looking for you. Immediately after, he took his horse and rode north. No one challenged him.”
I read this twice over, and the second time it was no better news. Only then did I notice that the king had written to me in Allec. A piece of cleverness, perhaps? A prying at my past?
Or a prying at my friend’s past? I decided that was the case. “Sir,” I said to the king, trying not to bellow, “do not fear that Arlin my friend is the traitor who has served you so badly. He had good reason to flee the camp when he did, and none of it is disloyalty. Indeed, I know of his remarkable faithfulness in certain matters… and of his ability to keep his own council, unfortunately. I only fear he will die on the downs somewhere, with no company save that council.”
“I can have him tracked,” wrote the king, and I rejected that idea—rudely, I fear.
“Not in this hard country, and with him on that horse. I doubt I can track him myself.”
The king took my shoulders in his hands and so very clearly spoke that I could read his lips. “Why has he fled? What can this man you describe have to fear in my company?” he demanded of me.
How could I tell the king, bright and magnetic as he was, and willing to forgive my own lawless eccentricity, what I had discovered that very morning, when the lean swordsman hauled me behind him onto his horse—that Arlin had to fear
kindness most terribly: kindness, touch, and hence the discovery that he was no sort of man at all, but a woman living all her life in masquerade?
What a game she had played with me, starting on the road above Sordaling almost one year earlier. Arlin or Charlan, daughter of Howdl, certainly my old friend, as she had claimed. It was I who had taught her rapierwork, and to spin a dull