Love and War

THREE

It was rumor that passed among us once more, rumor again of movement and of battle, but this time there seemed more substance to it, for on the battlements and in the chambers the knights were silent, the only storm arising from a conference room high in the tower, where Alfred and Derek and Sturm waged a war of words and of rising voices, an occasional shout or a fragment of speech caught when the wind died and the sound descended to the courtyards and the barracks of the fortress.

We could make nothing of this debate above us, these loud quarrels like the distant cries of predatory birds, but it was different from the nights of the winding horn, the sudden preparations for the false alarms, for now we did nothing but wait — no preparations, no rumors of what was taking place beyond something is taking place — and the fortress incredibly silent, as though the horses were lost in thought and the vermin had quit the rafters and the middens by instinct, going Huma knows where into the winter darkness.

I awoke on the second night to the jostling of Heros. He was fully armed, having dressed himself while I slept, as though there was no time to waken a squire (or as I came to see later, as though somehow in arming himself he took part in a strange penance, having last performed the task on the night of vigil before his knighthood ceremonies).

Derek is riding out, he said flatly, averting his eyes as my thoughts rose out of sleep, constructing once again from the bare walls and the damp cold of the chamber just where it was I had awakened, at first thinking that Heros was announcing retreat, surrender, abandonment, then realizing it was none of these and all of these at the same time — that an attack too monstrous to be ill-advised and too foolish to be heroic was set to begin, and that in the courtyards of the fortress the footmen were marshalling.

There was nothing to be said, nothing to be asked except, and you?

His eyes still avoided me. sturm feels that the defense of the fortress remains the defense of Palanthas.I agree with Sturm.

But not agreement, I thought. Nothing more than sheer and deliberate survival, if not a lasting survival then the weeks, the days, or even the hours that staying behind will give us. That is why you have armed yourself without recourse to squire and to ceremony. That is why you are glad that the room is dark, Sir Heros, Solamnic Knight of the sword. But there was no blame in this, Bayard, no blame except for the old and honored folly that would make a man ashamed to breathe when his companions breathed no longer, and with that blame what the blame could not banish — a pride in Sir Heros that he could feel the shame, that such folly was both old and honored.

From the window of the corridor they looked diminished, frail in their armor and swords and pikes as they assembled, stamped the cold from their feet, and fell into line behind the mounted knights. I could single out Breca in the foremost column, standing a head taller than those around him, and once I believe he glanced up at the window to where I was standing, the flatness of his eyes apparent even from a distance, even through the shadows of the wall and the dark air of the morning. And perhaps because of that darkness there was no expression I could see on his face, but there is an expression I remember, may have imagined in this permanent and greater darkness from which I speak to you.

For if an expression could be featureless, void of fear and of dread and finally of hope, containing if anything only a sort of resignation and resolve, that was Breca's expression and those of his companions, saying (if such a blankness, a nothing can say anything), this is not as bad as I imagined but worse than I expected, and nothing more than that when the doomed gates opened — the very gates he had called indefensible a short week before he marched out onto the plains and into the lifting darkness.

And then again it was the waiting, the waiting no chronicler records in accounts of this or of any battle. You have heard, certainly, how the news of Derek's defeat was brought to us, of the bodies draped over the red-eyed horses and of the soft threats of the Dragon Highlord. Of knights so ruled by the Measure that they let the enemy speak, let him taunt, until one among us (the elfmaiden it was), not ruled by an old and wasted chivalry but by something more profound and ancient — an instinct for survival underlined by anger — wounded him with a well-placed green arrow. Of listening to the birds who remained by night as they sang their songs of bereavement, their songs perhaps of Heros and of Sturm.

Again it was the waiting, until they attacked and breached the walls.

And how can I explain to you, Bayard, what it was like when the waiting ended, how the draconians charged from a place beyond vision, growing in size and in number as they covered the miles from their camp unto the foot of the walls, sidling like crabs from the path of our arrows, rushing through the rain of oil and pitch we set down before them, clutching the walls with a fierce suction of the hands and climbing like chameleons, like salamanders (for some of them were pitch-covered, burning as they climbed) up to the crest of the battlements, where the sound of metal on metal, of metal on flesh, rose up around me and banished thought.

And you do not stop to reflect on the drawing of blood in anger. All the preparation in swordsmanship, in tactical combat and even in the vows of bravery and steadfastness adds up to nothing like the Measure tells you, none of these fanciful promises to live your life so that the death of your enemy is made worthy by your living, for who knew how long the living would last after your enemy — or even the last of the enemies — had fallen. But the preparing led only to the surprisingly heavy lunge of the sword and the small resistance of armor and skin and gristle and finally bone against it, when the training tells you, I suppose this one is dead and where is the next one nearest, and as though in a corridor of dreams the voice of the dwarf beside you echoing, draw forth your sword, son, before he hardens into stone, and another before you all green scales and arms, who is falling then over the parapet, head and metallic jaw collapsed beneath the swift rising hammer of the dwarf, and the thought clears for a moment again to discover three more of them crouched in a file on the battlements, small red eyes flickering behind the bristle of curved weapons like some horrible boars in a thicket you are supposed to remember but cannot, so you let the thought alone and try the sword again, one of them falling and two of them trampled in a flood of knights which in turn is bearing you like baggage or a fallen comrade down the steps from the battlements so quickly that for a moment you feel you are falling, assuring yourself that this cannot be, for a fall would take place much more slowly, but then in the final fall who was to say how time would collapse or how the mind would suspend the fragment of years, trying to remember everything, but then, on your feet and buoyed by your own heavy running, you see the doors of the tower and within them the elf maiden shining, and you think, So this is death which is more than I expected but everything I imagined, but then you are inside the tower with the last of them, the heavy doors closing behind you and the sound of bolt upon bolt upon bolt staying them fast.

No, it is not pretty to write, and be sure it is not pretty to tell. But there is more, and soon I will speak from recollection of sound and rumor only. Soon the story continues without eyes, and the ugliness passes. Bear with me, my dear, my nurturing one, the last hour of the telling.

The magic of the tower was sealed for the last time, and there for the first time I knew what it was that the kender had discovered in a deep chamber. No larger than a dove, than the heart of a child, the orb was glowing with a light and whiteness surpassing the downpour of sun on the snow we had ridden through days on end, we had watched from the walls in our waiting. And it seemed fitting that before the darkness all things should resolve once more into white, as the elf maiden Laurana began to instruct us, quietly and urgently, in the final dance we were too stubborn, to noble to learn when the dance would avail us. The lances, surprisingly light, we placed at arrest, in the noble absurd salute to the thing we knew was coming because we heard from beyond the walls the stuttering thunder of heavy wings, the breathing, and though we could not guess through which wall, which aperture it would drive its ancient and sinuous head, it was coming, we knew.

And the mortar and stones of the northern wall shook and flaked, and Laurana seized the orb (though never again would I see her as I turned northwards, lifting the flange of the lance to my shoulder, its butt secure beneath my arm that was stronger now, having something to do at last after all the cold and the waiting and the loss of Breca and of Heros, it seemed, who was not among us and somehow forgiven by his absence and the meaning of his absence) and a great sweetness fell upon me, whether from the orb itself, as the legends say, or from that moment of repose in the mind when, pushed past all endurance, you can sayat least there is no more of this, nothing left but a brief pain and then peace surpassing. We proffered the lances: the Solamnic salute, the prayer that our lives henceforth be worthy of the taking of lives, and again I offered the prayer with the others, thinking of Heros, of Breca, that through all the silliness of the prayer their wounds somehow were made cleaner.

And there was confusion, a shrapnel of walls, for a moment those dull reptilian eyes glowing a red that was lifeless in its ancient light, and I thought of Breca's eyes and what the poet says of foxfire, and there was heat unsurpassed like the Cataclysm had come again, then complete and abiding dark.

And from there, dear Bayard, and dear woman whose patience has been long, has been stalwart, it came to me as it came to you, by report and by rumor. How as we brought the lances to arrest, Sturm was upon the battlements, trading his death for our time in an impossible stand, how the lance of the Dragon Highlord rode through him cleanly and finally, how the sun burst. How Laurana spoke to the Dragon Highlord Kitiara over his remains, with the fortress, the countryside, with all of Krynn watching or listening as the future turned on her heart's sounding. All of this having everything and nothing to do with all of us.

And I heard, as they drew me to the window, through the bandages and the pain and the fading smell of my flesh and the flesh of others, Sturm's funeral begin in what must have been sunlight, and of the many words spoken over the body only these last in recollection, vivid and fathomless as the coded song of the birds I am hearing once more through the windows of the hospital, saying:

Free from the smothering clouds of war

As he once rose in infancy,

The long world possible and bright before him,

Lord Huma, deliver him.

Upon the torches of the stars

Was mapped the immaculate glory of childhood;

From that wronged and nestling country,

Lord Huma deliver him.

Lord Huma, deliver us all. And deliver especially you, my brother, for last night my nurse and I spoke briefly, spoke quietly of the world remaining after Sturm, after Breca, after Heros, after the passage of my eyes. And with the gift of the sighted for prophecy, she ran down the lists of light, describing the world made possible at the cost of despair, at the cost of the smell of the corpse fires lingering under the herbs and the metal and the fragrance of flowers and clean bedding, at the cost of the sun diminished to warmth only.

And within those lists lie the armies of the Dragon Highlord driven away, as Mother says, once again from our land and from those things we are honor bound to defend by the measure and the code, of Takhisis back into the void and somewhere unraveling in a dark I can only dream through my darkness, in a story that remains unimaginable because I cannot see its ending. Of the freedom to do what we want, of the wronged and nestling country made right as we raise our children in prosperity and peace, as we commit the young men not to the study of swords but to a study of lore and of history, a study finally of themselves.

She finds comfort in this. She writes the final page in this comfort. But I shall tell you, Bayard, no doubt frustrated by your brother and by history as you dance with the sword in our home. I shall tell you that when these studies commence, when once again young men begin to study themselves, that your training, your ardor, will not go without issue.

For when the time comes, we shall take up arms again.