"I'll have you back on my brother's estate if you don't learn to hold your tongue till you're a man, Wardway!" Lord Waldron snapped. "I'd rather have your
sister
here than a babbling boy!"
The army commander was a hawk-faced man in his sixties with an obvious family resemblance to the youth. Age had neither weakened nor mellowed him from the hot-tempered cornet of horse he must've been when he was eighteen, but for all his punctilious concern for his honor, Waldron was a skilled general. His courage went without saying.
The aides stepped back. Garric shrugged to loosen the cuirass over his shoulders.
"All right," he called to Lord Attaper, who'd taken personal command of the detachment of the bodyguard regiment accompanying Garric today. "We'll march to the Gathering Field in the center of town. That's the Council of Elders; they'll guide us. Oh—have four men carry Klagan. That's their champion."
"
Their late champion
," Carus said reflectively.
The weight of the helmet made Garric's head throb. He'd pulled a neck muscle at some point while fighting Klagan. He wore the armor for show, not because he expected battle. Cowing the catmen with the sheen and hardness of metal was just as important now as it'd been when Garric'd planned the glittering display at leisure.
The ghost in his mind chuckled. "
Pain just means you're alive, lad
," Carus said. "
I haven't felt pain since the afternoon I drowned
."
In a mental whisper he added, "
It's the one thing I miss, not having a body. The only thing
."
"I'm ready, your highness," said Lord Tadai, a plump, perfectly groomed man and one of the richest nobles in the kingdom. He'd become—by being present, willing, and able—the head of the civil bureaucracy accompanying Garric in the field while Chancellor Royhas had charge of the administration in Valles.
Garric grinned at him. "I never doubted it, milord," he said as the Blood Eagles clashed forward on the left foot.
Three aides walked behind Tadai, carrying files that might be required during negotiations with the Coerli. They looked terrified, but the nobleman himself seemed as unconcerned about walking into a city of man-eating catmen as he would've been if the meeting place were an assembly room within the palace. Though he barely knew which end of a sword to hold, Tadai gave the lie to the notion that soldiers had a monopoly on physical courage.
The leading guards reached the Coerli delegation filling the gateway. "Chieftains!" Garric called in the catmen's snarling language. "Lead us to the Gathering Field, where you will receive my commands!"
"We will keep our oath, Chief of Animals," an age-bent Corl replied. "We will accept your commands."
Six human males stood at each gate leaf, ready to push them closed when ordered to. They stared at Garric without comprehension as he tramped through the gate. They were from the Coerli's own period, domestic animals from whom ruthless culling had eliminated all initiative and courage. In all truth they were more like sheep than men . . . but they'd be freed regardless as one of the first acts of the new administration.
Beasts wouldn't rule men while Garric was king. Not even if the men had ceased to be human except in form.
"You realize this could be a trap, your highness," Waldron said. The words were respectful enough, but the tone added, "You stupid puppy!"
"Yes, milord," Garric said, "as we've discussed. But I don't think it is. Nor do I think the sun will rise in the west tomorrow, which I consider equally probable."
He was taking only fifty soldiers into the Corl stronghold, an escort but not a threat. Attaper had of course wanted to bring the whole regiment—though that was under three hundred men: guarding Prince Garric was an extremely dangerous job, and there hadn't been time to induct sufficient volunteer replacements from the line regiments.
Three hundred soldiers wouldn't have made any difference if it came to fighting. Though none of his advisors really believed it, Garric knew that the war had ended when he broke Klagan's neck.
He marched under the gate arch, keeping step with his guards. The walls of the Place were timber. They'd been built with undressed tree boles, but in the ages since then the bark had sloughed away to leave the wood beneath a silky gray with black streaks. It was tinder dry and splashed with shelves of orange fungus.
"Do you think we could fight our way out?" Waldron snapped. "I don't care about myself—I'm a soldier; it's my duty to die for my prince. But what happens to the kingdom if
you're
killed?"
You've changed your tune in the years since we met
, Garric thought. He didn't let the words reach his lips, but a smile did. If this stiff-necked old Ornifal nobleman had come to respect him, then Garric had gained something more important than the cheers of city rabble who'd turn out for any spectacle.
Aloud he said, "Milord, how long would it take you to reduce this city? Using the troops assembled outside."
Waldron frowned but glanced about him in assessment. The interior of the Place was a mass of separate wicker compounds, each circular wall enclosed a number of huts belonging to a single clan. There were no streets, just pathways; not infrequently the compounds pushed against one another like lily pads struggling for space on the surface of a pond. Catmen peered through gaps in the walls to watch their human conquerors march past.
"A day to circle the town with earthworks and raise nets on top of them so the beasts can't run," Waldron said. "At first light, pile brushwood on the upwind side of the walls and set fire to it. Go in when the flames burn down and finish off any still alive."
He pursed his lips, then added hopefully, "Though we wouldn't really have to wait for the earthworks—the males don't like to run, and the females won't leave their kits. Is that what you intend to do, your highness?"
"It is not," Garric said sharply while the ghost in his mind guffawed. "But can I take it as a given that if you and I were killed, the officers remaining outside the walls would be able to put that plan into effect?"
"You're bloody well told they would!" Waldron snapped. "There isn't a soldier in the army who wouldn't know how to do that. We've burnt half a dozen keeps already when they wouldn't surrender, and this place would burn even better."
"Right," said Garric. "And the Coerli know the same thing. They won't kill me for that reason alone, even if you don't trust their honor. Which I assure you, milord, is just as highly developed as your own."
Garric smiled to make his words friendlier than they otherwise might've been taken. In all truth, there was very little to choose between the ways a Corl chieftain and a nobleman from Northern Ornifal viewed the world. Garric had to hope that in the long run that'd make it easier to bring human and Coerli society together, but there'd be many sparks struck before that happened.
"
And first survive today, lad
," said Carus. His image toyed with the hilt of its imaginary sword.
Garric assumed the Council of Elders was leading the delegation by the broadest way possible, but that became extremely narrow as they neared the center of the town. When Garric paused to let Waldron go ahead of him between compounds whose walls were masses of gray fungus, he heard someone retch violently behind him.
He turned: the youngest of Lord Tadai's aides was on his knees, vomiting helplessly. Between spasms he whimpered, "Oh Lady help me, the smell. The smell!"
"Get up, Master Loras," Tadai said harshly. "We have our duty."
He held out his hand to Loras, but the younger man struggled to his feet. "I'm all right," he said hoarsely, but his eyes were closed. He opened them to slits and stumbled forward with the rest of them.
Waldron had paused because Garric did. He went on with a snort.
"I've seen young soldiers do the same on their first battlefield, milord," Garric said mildly when they had room to walk side by side again. "And he didn't drop the document case he was carrying."
"Aye, that's so," said the old soldier. With a half smile—or at least the closest thing to a smile Garric had seen on his lips since they entered the Corl town—he added, "And the place
has
got a pong, I'll admit. They're cats, that's sure, these beasts."
"Yes," agreed Garric. "They are."
He'd had too many other things on his mind to be conscious of the smell, but the clerk was probably the son of a Valles merchant rather than a rural peasant. Now that Master Loras had called his attention to it, Garric realized that the stink was worse than the occasional summer day in Barca's Hamlet when the breeze blew from the direction of the tanyard.
Lord Attaper at the head of the procession shouted orders to deploy his troops. Three paces on, Garric and Waldron arrived at the Gathering Field, a round of bare clay a furlong in diameter. Coerli crowded the outer edges, but a broad path remained open to the center where nine undressed rocks waited in a circle.
The Corl Elders sprang onto eight of the rocks and squatted, facing inward. Garric put his left boot on the last, then hopped up to stand on it. His head was well above that of anyone else in the field, able to see and be seen by all.
"Coerli whom I have conquered!" he said. "Hear my commands and obey!"
As Garric spoke, he turned around slowly so that all the watching catmen had a direct view of him. He towered above them, his face was framed by the silvered helm and its flaring, golden wings. His words had drawn a dull growl; as his gaze swept each segment of the crowd, the timbre of the sound shifted higher.
The Blood Eagles were in an outward-facing circle, their shields flush against the chieftains of the catmen, each of whom stood with his chosen warriors at the head of the males of his clan. The human soldiers were a black-armored wall, bulkier than the Coerli and taller even without the horsehair plumes pinned to their helmets.
But the catmen could move the way lightning dances between summer clouds. If it came to a fight, Garric and his whole entourage would be massacred . . . but there wouldn't be a fight.
The ghost in his head was silent; smiling faintly, seeing through Garric's eyes but making different calculations. The catmen were quick, to be sure; there was no defense against their speed. But a man doesn't die the instant he takes a fatal wound. He can keep hacking at his enemies for a minute and more if he's the sort who doesn't mind dying so long as he takes as many of his enemies as possible with him to the Sister. King Carus, the foremost warrior in the history of the Isles, would be directing Garric's sword if—
But that wouldn't happen.
Garric completed his eyes' circuit of the crowd, returning to the Council of Elders. Early in the catmen's history, a chieftain must've held power only so long as he could defeat the strongest of his warriors. If their society had never evolved beyond that, the Coerli would still live in scattered hunting bands and been animals hunting other animals.
Greater numbers and settled communities had required a different sort of organization, leadership based on wisdom and experience instead of merely strength. Even so, the Elders facing Garric now were all former chieftains. They had the heavy bodies and shaggy manes of sexually mature males who'd lived for years on a diet of red meat rather than the fish and legumes of ordinary warriors.
They glared balefully back at Garric; but the eldest, the Corl who'd addressed Garric from the gateway, said, "We are here for you to command, chief of the animals."
"Then hear me," said Garric. "First, you will send all the men from the Place to my camp. From this day forth, no man will serve a Corl!"
The problems the freed humans would cause for the kingdom were staggering. They hadn't been slaves, they'd been domesticated animals for hundreds of generations. But there wasn't any other choice that Garric was willing to accept.
"I am Barog!" snarled a chief outside the circle of guards. "Shall a Corl chieftain eat fish?"
The Elder who'd been speaking rose to his feet on his rock and pointed to Barog. His mane, silvery but still streaked with pure black, flared out at twice its previous length. "Kill the oathbreaker!" he said.
"How dare—" Barog shouted.
The chieftain to his left grabbed him by the shoulder. Barog spun, baring his fangs in defiance; the chieftain to his right, now behind him, dashed out his brains with a ball-headed wooden mace. The chief already holding Barog sank teeth into his throat. Victim and killers dropped to the ground, the latter worrying the former like dogs with a rabbit.
Warriors whom Barog had led moments before joined in tearing the dead chieftain to bits. At a command from Attaper, the Blood Eagles at that side of the circle dropped to one knee, butting their shields on the ground; otherwise the maddened Coerli would've clawed and bitten the men's ankles as they thrashed.
Garric kept his face set in grim lines, but he smiled in his heart.
Perhaps Waldron'll believe what I've told him about Corl honor now
.
"My government will deal justly with all members of the kingdom, human and Corl," Garric said when the deep-throated growling had subsided enough for him to speak over it. "We'll provide you with hogs to raise for meat, as we've done with keeps who've already accepted my authority."
Something warm was sticking to the back of Garric's wrist; he glanced down, then flicked away a gobbet of skin and hair. In a melee like that, it may not have come from Barog's body.
The Coerli really
are
beasts
.
"
I've seen men do the same, lad
," King Carus murmured. "
But not all men, not that
."
"From this day . . .," Garric said. What he'd just seen had brought a new harshness to his voice. "Any Corl who eats human flesh will be killed. Any town or keep or roving band which harbors a man-eater will be destroyed to the last kit. There will be no exceptions and no mercy!"
The lips of several Elders drew back to bare their fangs. There was a fresh chorus of growls from the audience, but this time no Corl protested verbally. An Elder snarled in an angry undertone to the one who'd acted as spokesman. That Corl nodded and fixed Garric with his eyes.