Love and War

TWO

It was Breca's answer we awaited, there on the road to the tower, the landscape white on white and blending into a faraway whiteness, only the thin dark lines of the trees and the shapes among them giving us any idea of distance, of measure. And the answer, though it lay nowhere within the rules set down by chivalry, not a thee or a thou or an elegant challenge, could not draw complaint from even the most strict of the knights — after all, he was not one of them, and after all, the footmen listened and applauded, their backs to the rising wind.

Every dead Solamnic Knight I've seen, Breca shouted, Had about a dozen of your lizard boys on his dance card. We find them around the bodies, all statued and pretty like a damn rock garden.

The footmen laughed, but most of the knights sat uneasily atop their uneasy horses, who pawed and snorted as though they had crossed into a country of leopards. Sturm and Lord Alfred smiled. But Sturm had traveled with outlandish folk

he had, after all, served with dwarves.

But what even Sturm and Lord Alfred knew, what most of them knew, and Breca especially, was that the dragonsoldier was not finished with Breca, that this attack was as fierce and as lethal as any with a bow or with those terrible curved swords I still see in sleep until the welcome darkness of morning comes again. For the heart of the battle was at stake before the arrows flew, before the swords clashed, at least in the eyes of the knights, who thought in terms of spirit and morale, of a high game which begins not when the first piece is taken nor even the first pawn moved, but when the players sit before the chessboard.

Breca, on the other hand, was past strategy and morale, safe for now in another world I came to witness in the weeks that followed, in the tower and in the waiting. He was a swordsman, any thrust the same as any other, to be deflected or parried if he were still to call himself a swordsman. The snow settled on his helmet until I feared that soon it would cover him, cover him entirely in the face of his enemies, and then cover all of us — on foot, on horseback, on mule-back — until what remained was a pitiful series of drifts in the country of the enemy.

And the dragonsoldier called once more out of the vallenwoods. You aren't dressed well for such bravery, footman. even from here i can see the dents in the armor. i can tell where your breastplate is crumpled and useless, where my sword would do the most damage. Your feet are probably wrapped in rags. Though the snow is too heavy to tell for certain. Yet I suppose that such is the finery that knights issue their footmen.

And they retreated into the thick boles and branches of the woods, so that they probably did not hear Breca's retort, which we heard nonetheless, which the footmen heard, which rode in my ears with its flat and furious blessing as we approached the gates of the tower:

You think we dress up to kill hogs?

Inside the tower gates, dismounting, the breathing and steam from the horses misting the air, but not as densely as the snow had misted the air outside, I remember most of all my sense of relief. Of course we were to learn of the frailties later, that in its endurance without change and restoration the tower had become indefensible, but at the time the walls seemed tall and strong, the fortress unbreachable. I would imagine, Bayard, that you have heard the stories, and that in the hearing you have imagined walls of your own, more vividly than the ones I could describe, down to the stone upon stone, to the mortar and to the tightly arranged masonry that permits no mortar, and perhaps your walls are as accurate, as real as the ones I saw, because I knew no more of fortresses and their construction than I did the songs of birds.

Now we fight from defense, I thought. Now we fight at advantage. But more than that, we fight from warmth, on the leeward side of the walls. That warmth, that comfort, was most important then, and the chambers to which Heros and I were escorted, as damp and drafty as an old attic, were a palace, were more than enough. I am spoiled now in the hospital, for there is a fire here and curtains, curtains that for all I can tell may be sackcloth, a plain burlap, but nonetheless do what curtains were intended to do in that time before we saw fit to embroider and adorn them.

If Heros had known what I was thinking, he would have said I thought like a footman. He would have been right, for they were talking when I went to tend to the horses, most of them wrapped in blankets and standing, sitting, lying around the banked fires that spangled the dark inner courtyards, a few others, the older veterans, crouched and circled around Breca, who sat upon his helmet, cupping his enormous red hands as he lit his pipe, the glow arising from the bowl spreading over his face in a light both saintly and violent.

I nodded to Breca, receiving a nod in return as he singled me out from the darkness. He had what Heros called The Ingrained Politeness To His Betters, not as common as you might imagine among footmen, but a quality all were urged to adopt and cultivate. Still, I liked to think — and DO think — this initial politeness to me was something more, stood for something. After all, he remembered the boots on the trail to the tower, and perhaps in that soldier's mind used to self-preservation and necessity, small gestures of decency counted for more than the horse and elaborate armor. Then again, he may have thought only that I was foolish, or felt sorry for me because of my youth, or he may have thought all of these things and not have been wrong in the thinking.

His face glowed above the pipe like a signal fire, or it could have been from the reflected light of his audience. For there were twenty or thirty men around him, some of them Lord Alfred's age, several nearly as young as I, but most in between — as I have said, the veterans. All of them were like children in the presence of a storyteller, but instead of awaiting the tales of high deeds and magic we heard and you still hear in the spacious courts of Solamnia, they were questioning, all questions amounting to one: what chance do we have to hold this fort?

Nor did he coddle them, assure them, as the storytellers do at Mother's — so it is elves you want, young master? Then you shall hear of elves. None of that for footmen. Breca was honest, or pretended honesty in a way that came closer to the truth than simple honesty, which sometimes allows for dishonest imaginings.

I expect, he said, that a centaur designed this tower.I expect he done so after a celebration of victory, on account of the building speaks more of wine than of tactics. I count four gates in the fortress, which is three more than you need, four more than i'd fancy now that we've got inside.

And what is worse than four gates I will tell you is four wide gates, gates where a half a dozen centaurs might gallop in abreast. The dragonarmies don't mind spending men, and even seem to favor spending draconians, seeing as they have so many of them. What is more, they're liable to send dragons or some terrible machinery right through our doors. And he sat back, the smoke curling like snow or a morning fog, like the mist from the horses, around his enormous, ragged head. The footmen waited, not for the quick and easy answer, the inspiring speech that would tell them that despite all these things, we would win by tactics and by bravery, that one man in the service of Solamnia could defeat a dozen draconians. They awaited his judgment on the walls.

Which are not of your best material or design. I am not a stone mason, nor am I a betting man — this last drawing laughter from some of the older soldiers — but if I was, I would wager that a fat man at a healthy trot could cause structural damage to this mighty fortress.

More laughter followed, and I drew nearer the group, curry-comb in hand, the horses forgotten. If what he was saying were indeed true — and I had no cause to doubt him — we were cornered, backed into a shoddy and vulnerable place where the walls stood not between us and the dragonarmies, but between us and our own escape. And the footmen sat here joking and spinning stories.

Look around you, Breca muttered as the laughter died again, as some of the men looked up uneasily, skeptically, looking into the rose embroidered on my doublet as if it were an orb of prophecy, looking at me as though I were a messenger from another planet.

Look around you.Soon enough you'll see the birds no longer light here. The news has a way of spreading amongst the animals, and not just from kind to kind. Soon enough you'll see the rats leaving. The horses have the same instincts, but they're tethered and stabled and — he glanced at me, smiled briefly, and stared at his pipe — and curried. all that keeps any of us here is the knights, who think they can hold this place with honor alone. Honor is well and good, but it don't stop a spear, boys. Best it can do is leave a cleaner wound.

But don't fret, boys, he concluded, looking directly at me with those huge gray eyes that the folk tales say are the sign of marksmen or madmen, I forget which. don't fret, for at least you've found yourself a warm place to die.

Not a comforting philosophy to take with you back into the upper chambers, where there were swords and armor to be polished, and wine and a warmer hearth, and where the truth muttered below you, scarcely heard for the crackling of the fire, like a ghost in the stables or the barracks.

Marksmen, she tells me. gray eyes for the marksman. Then was it green for the lunatic or for the poet?

Instead of the legends of eyes let me talk of monotony, of the boredom in waiting for battle. It is no quick thing, no gap between lightning and thunder, but a long waiting in which breastplate and sword shimmer uselessly, in which you worry the horses into a sleek and healthy gloss, in which you watch the sky and speculate on wonders. No time to be slow-witted, this waiting for battle, but a time to attend to tasks, to trivial duties, until the duties become reflex and you return to your thoughts alone.

But even among the thoughtful and the imaginative, there were great dangers. After all, dear brother, there was an enemy approaching, an enemy magnified by his absence. The dragonarmies grew larger, their atrocities greater, as we waited and imagined. A story passed through the ranks that the slaughter of Plainsmen had been even more horrible than first reported, that the draconians had found a way, in the dark recesses of lore and intricate magic, to breed more of their kind upon the Plainswomen — a hardier strain, maturing quickly and able to withstand extremes of climate

and that on the plains these children grew, feeding first

upon what little provision the country offered, then turning upon themselves in a frenzy like sharks, until only the largest and most hardy of the brood survived. Survived to be armed with the black bow and the terrible curved knife, which they would carry over the miles and the snow to the Tower of the High Clerist.

And in addition to the rumors of war, a nightmare closer to home, for the second night in the tower the wine ceased to flow in the quarters of the knights, and we turned to water and to mare's milk, knowing that those, too, would dry in the long weeks of waiting. We were fortunate, then, that it was cold, for the food did not spoil as readily, but even the youngest eye could pass over the stores in the larders and see there was less today, would be less tomorrow. Soon it would be biscuit, parched corn. Then horses, and some of the older footmen talked ironically of rats, providing they are stupid enough to still be here when the time comes down to them.

So you occupied your time upon other thoughts, in other pursuits. The footmen wagered, exchanging coins over the strange, many-sided dice from the east. None wagered against Sturm's friend the kender, who eagerly sought to join each game, standing on tiptoe to peer over the shoulders of the crouching footmen, once climbing the back of a rather tall archer for a closer look at the proceedings, only to be shaken off like a dog shakes off water. On that occasion I asked Breca if it would hurt to let the little fellow play, and he told me that I had yet to learn the difference between disdain and respect. Told me that compassion toward a kender was the ruin of fortunes, or some such rural proverb I scorned until later that night, when I had lost a substantial amount of money to the little creature, trying to guess under which of three walnut shells he had placed a piece of dried corn.

Indeed, I was no gambler, but I was drawn by the kender, by the sense of childhood and of play, by the sense that he felt distracted from his true business by the preparations for siege. It reminded me of how things stood with me ten years ago, when I was six and put away childish things in the service of Solamnia, and perhaps those memories lost me even more money at dice, for I challenged the kender at gaming often, trying to decide whether I pitied him or envied him.

The other outlandish folk were more distant, in keeping with the customs of their people. The dwarf was impatient for battle, at the ramparts often, wrapped in metal and furs and a sullen quiet, brandishing his wicked-looking axe and staring out over the expanse of snow for dragons, armies, movement. I had little to say to him, and suspected he preferred it that way.

Nor had I much to say to the elf maiden, exotic, distant, and a little frightening in her shining and most unfeminine armor. Golden hair, green eyes — the legend that their women are more beautiful than ours cannot be proved true or false by one example, one woman, but if it could, no doubt the elves would have sent this one for comparison.

Yet unlike many of the girls of our country, posing, giggling, bearing garlands and gloves for the knight of their fancy, for any boy at the borders of knighthood, this one, this Laurana, was not caught up in her own beauty. Indeed, she seemed to have forgotten or be forgetting such things, rapt in a story of lances and of high battle, the like of which I could not know, with all my imagining, with all my waiting. And forgive me, kind lady who copies my words to an absent brother, but now it seems that flowers and scarves, the tedious attention to hair, to the slope of a dress on the shoulders — it seems that such things are distant now, the meaningless steps to a dance I have left early, no longer able to see my partner. More important now is the memory of the elf maiden, kneeling and glittering perhaps less brightly than I remember but as brightly as I saw her at the time, above the lances she had brought for the defense of the tower, offering to instruct us in their use, had we not been so rigid and scornful and dazzled as to refuse her teaching.

For the lances were the great mystery as we waited, what Breca might have called the wild card in the deck, the painted shard of lead that served as the spot on the die. But not at all like a die so loaded, the lances seemed larger and heavier than they were, lying in the courtyard of the fortress

larger and heavier because of the legends around them.

For you remember the Song of Huma, that he took up the dragonlance, he took up the story, and the story, whatever it was, lay somewhere upon each of the weapons, so at times you might imagine that they gleamed with some light beyond polishing, beyond tricks of reflected sun or moonlight.

But I had grown up among legends, and though I had to admire the workmanship of the lances, had handled several of them in the long days of waiting, like the most Measured of our knights I believed this light, this mystery, was the play of wishes and dreams over an exquisite but finally quite ordinary weapon. And believing this I refused the instructions of elf and female in the use of the lances.

Instead of instructions, I listened to the laughter of gamblers and the songs, songs which, if not invented in secret by Breca, were invented in secret by one much like him:

Oh where the north wall is crumbling,

let us put mortar and brick,

let us stack limestone on limestone

laid down with a promise and lick,

And wherever limestone will fail us

and mortar and brick give way,

Let us stack footman on footman

laid down with the promise of pay.

And listened to the politics from on high, to the speculations of Heros and the grumbling of the foot soldiers. For something was clearly afoot, and Heros described it as a bitter dance of moons, Derek's on the wane and Sturm's waxing, power flowing like light away from one man into another.

Heros championed neither of the factions: both were, as he would say, too variable. There was Sturm on the rise, once dishonored, once the companion of dwarves and kender and elves and the vagabond mage with the hourglass eyes whom nobody had trusted or quite mistrusted, and could the road back to honor lie in the company of such a patchwork crew? Heros did not have the answer, and without certain answers it was his nature to disapprove.

Derek, on the other hand, had ceased to be an option, his armor too bright from polishing too much and too long, his eyes too bright from something far more unsettling than wine or the fever of approaching battle. He had taken to winding a horn in imitation of Huma, and at all hours of the night the footmen were called on alert, equipped and assembled to find only that the alarm had been raised by Lord Derek himself, alarmed by what he considered the unnatural closeness — or sometimes distance — of the red moon and the silver. And the men did not complain loudly, nor comment too loudly when Lord Derek wore the horns of a stag on his helmet, as if in recalling the old divine contest between the hero and the quarry, he had chosen to play both the hunter and the hunted.

It was one night, not long before his riding forth, pursuing a disaster of which you have no doubt heard, that I was awakened once again by the sound of the horn winding. I armed myself, thinking continually,perhaps this time, perhaps he will not cry wolf forever, and moved through a courtyard as silent as if nothing had happened, the footmen crouched around the fires sleeping or drinking or dicing, or drinking and dicing themselves to sleep, all as if the night were soundless and as safe as any other. And of all these, only Breca watched the battlements where, outlined in red and silver, a glittering figure all metal and antler sounded a lonely horn.

I stood beside Breca, who never took his eyes from thesolitary figure as he leaned on the pommel of his two handed sword, chuckling a dry laugh as desolate as the winter outside the fortress and, glancing sideways at me, murmuring, that one has a thousand deaths on him. he has been dismounted by the winter and the ice and the waiting and there is not a thing in the measure to cover this, so they will do nothing.

And when I ventured that perhaps Lord Derek had lost some faculties, but that the most brilliant of generals often seemed at sea in the times of peace and waiting, Breca asked me where I had read such things, for you must have read them.

This one is not only at sea but capsized, he said. For they all are at sea, crown, sword, or rose, and this one at his best had not enough sense to pour piss from a boot if the directions was on the heel. and this, he said, pausing to light his pipe, the sword still upright beneath his elbow, point to the ground, this is the one they will surely pick to lead us.

And so in the early days of the siege, before Lord Derek unraveled completely and rode off into death and the horrible oblivion of legends, we spent our time watching the battlements and the dwindling food, looking for smoke on the horizon and listening to the sound of the horn by night and the rumor by day that somewhere, forgotten within the bowels of the fortress, lay something the kender had stumbled upon in his curious wanderings, something that could — if time and place and desperation were to meet — alter the course of the siege.

It is tiring to remember this all, Bayard, for already I grow unaccustomed to the old habit of seeing, and though it would seem that the memory of vision would be that much more strongly burned into the thoughts of the newly blind, when you lose the habits of seeing you often lose the memories of sight, for the motions of the eyes and the mind grow rusty and with them the thoughts established before through those motions.

And what is more, the light must be fading, night must be approaching, for the warmth that settles upon the sill of my window is fading now and I smell smoke and burning tallow as I face into the room. Some things there are for which the night should have no ear, and among those are the ride of Lord Derek and the disasters that followed. So again in the morning, if my nurse will only remain patient — patient and undeniably kind — I shall recount the darkest leg of the journey.