upriver. Half-lost in the creak of armour, and the jingle of stirrup and bit, a jay squalled in raucous complaint.
Up the valley, a second jay answered. Striped in shadow behind a paling of saplings, charcoal smeared in patterns across his face, Caolle hustled six breathless children past him and on upslope, toward safety. To the runner crouched at his elbow, he whispered a hasty, ‘All clear.’
Soundless in his boots of beaten deerhide, the messenger departed. Branches slithered back into place across the thicket, and through slits between trembling leaves, Caolle measured the advance of Etarra’s thousands as they crashed up the riverbed below his vantage. The last cohort passed, and carefully counted, the last rank.
Two divisions; in line with every hope and plan. The other pair had parted ways from the main troop, to quarter the valleys to either side. Caolle smiled.
A third jay called from the marshes.
‘Now,’ Caolle mouthed. The hand he held raised for the signal dipped and raised and then fell.
The command was seen and relayed upriver by a dozen scouts in concealment, until it reached the head of a dried streambed that sliced like a scar across the hill.
‘Hie!’ yipped a barbarian teamster. His whip fell with a crack like the snap of a quick-broken twig and four horses slammed weight against their collars. Ropes whipped taut through oiled blocks. As the strain transferred, mechanically redoubled, the huge logs which braced a timber dam sucked and shifted in mud settings. Again the clansman urged his draught team. Veins bulged in the necks of the horses and their hooves bit deep as they strained.
A brace gave; others canted and the dam bowed, its log joints streaked black with the first jetting trickles of leaked water. While the structure creaked and gave outward, the clansman slashed his team free and drove them to a canter up the bank.
The dam burst apart on their heels. Timbers flew like splinters, driven by the loosed force of waters held in check through the last weeks of northland spring rains. The torrent reclaimed its balked course with a roar, fanged in its froth by a burden of sharpened stakes. The clansman soothed his draught team to a halt just barely out of reach. While the torrent swept by like a demon, tearing up mats of elder and birch, his pulse leaped in excitement. The thunder of racing waters was answered from five other sites throughout the valley, where other holding ponds in Tal Quorin’s watershed were simultaneously released to rampage through rock-stepped courses by the weight of held gallons and gravity. The plain alongside the riverbank in moments became a gouged maelstrom of boulders and white flood.
On the banks of the river Tal Quorin, the birds in the marshes fled. A herd of deer took bounding flight over mallow and cattails, then veered in fresh panic as they caught wind of the oncoming army. About then, the lead horses began to snort and sidle and shy, while men cursed and spurs dug and Gnudsog raised his chin listening.
Too late, he heard what animals sensed ahead of him: the booming growl of thunder, with no cloud visible overhead. The sound was deep and oncoming and weighty in voice to shake the earth. His fist on his destrier’s reins like iron, even as the forward scout outriders crashed shouting and gesticulating through the brush, Gnudsog spun his horse on its haunches and slammed sideways into the lighter mount of his message-bearer.
‘Ride!’ he screamed. ‘Find Lord Diegan and the prince, and tell them to seek cover on high ground.’ Next, he barked orders for the troops to wheel, though ranks were disordered and broken, and half the war horses were mindless with fear, jammed one on another in herd instinct to bolt.
Locked against motion by the weight of their own vast numbers, the lead ranks saw the flood coming.
It rampaged over a snake-twist curve in the river, a towering, tumbling brown wall jagged with logs, uprooted trees and slashed greenery. The vanguard of Etarra’s proud army was allowed a split second of terror, but no escape.
The water hit.
Men, mounts, and bright pennons crumpled as if struck by the log-mailed fist of doom. Horses screamed, upended, their cries as one with their riders who were crushed, and scythed under, and drowned. The foaming jaws that crested over Tal Quorin’s banks thrashed on in a welter of chaos, to cut down everything standing; to smash living flesh without quarter and to turn the snapped shafts of the lances against those maimed, to impale and gut, and club unconscious with a force more furious than man’s.
The passage of the flood was cataclysmically swift, and it dragged on its course the mangled destriers, the rent and sodden banners and the dismembered, drowned and dying men of all but the extreme flanks of Etarra’s first division.
Given warning by the dispatch of Gnudsog’s staff messenger, Lord Diegan did not turn tail and abandon his second company in a bolt for higher ground. In a rapid-fire string of orders, he commanded four reliable men to escort Lysaer out of danger, then called to muster the ranks behind for a speedy retreat from the riverbank.
The ground was soggy. The suck and splash of many horses and men drawn to a halt in one place foiled the most effective shout; and Diegan lacked Gnudsog’s bull bellow. So that when the soldiers he had dispatched to attend the prince closed instead around his own horse and insistently grasped at the bridle, he thought his first orders had been mistaken.
‘The prince!’ he cracked out in white anger. ‘I said, you escort his Grace, Lysaer.’
The men continued to seem deaf.
Lord Diegan spun in his saddle, suspicion in his eyes as bright as the glint on his jewels.
And Lysaer met him, harder still. ‘Go! This was my error. My fight. Let me save what I can. For I fear the worst still awaits us.’
Enraged and far from willing to desert his post of command, Lord Diegan hauled to wheel his horse. Between his hands, the reins recoiled into slack: his own men had cut the leather at the bit-ring and were traitorously goading his mount to trot away from the river and his troops.
‘Damn your royal effrontery to Sithaer!’ cried Lord Diegan.
Lysaer gave him back an insouciant wave, while he directed cracking strings of directions that effected a miracle of smooth deployment among the troops. As Lord Diegan was dragged up the rise toward the forest, his last, venomous thought was that no man alive should be blessed all at once, with looks, toughness and such surpassing talent for leadership; grudging resignation followed that perhaps this was why the Fellowship had insisted on restoring royal rule to start with.
