Love and War

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