intrusive. The all-too-real horrors of the day had driven the strange happenings of recent nights from his mind completely, and now that he was reminded of them in his shallow, twilight slumber, they seemed to have lost any semblance of significance.
'Leave me. No sleeping thoughts can harm me after today.'
'We are here by your father's will, and such a judgement is not yours to make.'
'Leave me!'
Silence.
'Leave me!'
'We cannot. Rest, lord, that we may rest also. This field is a distressing place for my Companions. Human barbarism frightens them at levels far beyond my comforting.'
Anger and disbelief. ‘Wolves, frightened by killing?'
Rasping scorn. ‘We kill to eat, lord. What do you kill for? You'd soon put a spear through my ribs if you found me eating your dead, but you made them thus, and you'd let them rot here.'
Arwain's mind filled with the complex maze of reasoning that he had struggled through during the day, but it foundered in the light of the wolves’ contempt. Not because it was flawed, but because it was human, and could not hope to stand against the deep wisdom and knowledge of these wild creatures.
Gently, Antyr's will stilled the wolves’ fears and they slipped to the boundaries of Arwain's thoughts, beyond even his most sensitive seeing.
Stillness.
Then, in the far, eyeless distance, he sensed the long mournful howl of the two wolves, rich and subtle in harmony and rhythm, rising and falling in accordance with some spirit unknowable by the listener.
In the dark stillness of his mind, Arwain looked at his image in the shining blade of his sword, now cleaned of the day's gore.
'I want to be home, at peace, with my wife, my friends. This is no way to be…'
Hesitation. ‘Yet not for anything would I have been anywhere other than here this day. Standing with my companions and holding the line. Fighting the demons in myself as well as the enemy beyond. Learning.'
The howling drifted further and further away, beautiful, longing, lost.
From under Arwain's closed lids, a tear emerged. It slid down his cheek, a bright, slender strand, cutting its way through the grime of battle that stained his face.
Then, far beyond even the wolves’ howling, he heard a faint, ground-shaking thunder …
He listened. It was important.
But it was gone.
Ivaroth's army moved relentlessly southward. Certain though he was of the absence of most of the Bethlarii menfolk from the northern regions, he did not proceed rashly. The sudden, unexpected, ferocity of Magret had reminded him vividly that these were a stern and warlike people, well steeped in the ways of combat, and that to trifle with them was to risk disaster.
Sooner or later, the knowledge of their arrival in the land would spread faster than they could move, but Ivaroth determined that this would be as late as possible, and that when, finally, major resistance was mounted against him, he would be operating from a territory extensive and secure enough to sustain his army without the need to rely on lines of supply through the mountains.
Accordingly, the land to be passed over was well scouted before the army moved forward. Small communities and isolated farms were destroyed without hesitation, as were lone travellers, or any other potential carriers of news who found themselves in Ivaroth's path.
Thus the city of Navra was taken completely by surprise. ‘It's many times bigger than the villages we've seen so far, with great buildings, taller than the highest trees,’ Ivaroth told his scouts as they prepared to leave. ‘And a great stone wall about the whole of it.’ They looked at him in respectful silence. The Mareth Hai's knowledge of this land and these people was as strange as it was accurate, but this wild oratory provoked some discreet sidelong glances from the scouts as they rode off.
'Ha!’ he laughed grimly as they returned, wide-eyed. ‘You took your Mareth Hai for a rambling storyteller when you left, didn't you? But tell us what you found.'
A flurry of anxious denials met this ominous rebuke, and details of the city with its great buildings and surrounding wall poured out over the amazed listeners.
'It is thus, I tell you. We all saw it. The Mareth Hai's sight is beyond understanding.'
Airily accepting this adulation, Ivaroth turned his officers’ minds to the practical problems of taking such a place.
From his travels through the dreams of the Bethlarii, he had learned a great deal about their art of war, and he knew that while it might be possible to lay siege to a city such as Navra, it would be difficult, and debilitating for his men. Further, it would tie down too much of the army and risk their premature discovery. Despite the ingenuity that had been shown in the passage through the mountains, he also had little faith in the ability of even his cleverest men to build siege towers and rock-throwing catapults.
No. The most effective way to take a city was by surprise, or treachery. He had no friends within the city who would open the gate, so he must ensure surprise.
And he did. A few men, posing as benighted travellers, gained access at one of the smaller gates and, quickly disposing of the unwary guards, threw the gate wide open.
There then followed a night of slaughter and terror as the citizens of Navra were awakened by the crackle and roar of burning buildings, the clatter of hooves galloping through their stone-flagged streets, and the screams of the dying mingling with the triumphant cries of their murderers.
The many men and women who snatched up swords and spear from their bedsides and dashed into the night to face this unheralded and nightmarish invasion, fell like wheat before the scythe under the hooves of Ivaroth's rampaging army. Sluggards and dreamers survived.
Those who managed to reach one of the gates found all of them sealed by these strange and savage mounted men who seemed to be without number.
Dawn came to a crushed people. Some resistance was being offered hither and thither, not least by a company of reservists, but their obliteration was merely a matter of time, and such of the city fathers as had survived the night accepted Ivaroth's terms …
'Kneel or die.'
A proud people, many of the citizens secretly denounced this spineless submission by the city's old men, but it did not take Ivaroth long to demonstrate that he was not only a man of his word, but one of instant execution. To deter opposition to his will, he had ten people chosen at random and then killed publicly, with the announcement that for every one of his men that was attacked, ten more would die.
With the city sealed and the invaders present in such overwhelming numbers, overt resistance ceased almost immediately. The Bethlarii were not a cowardly people but, apart from Ivaroth's ruthlessness, they were shocked almost to stupefaction by the sudden, hammer-blow occupation of their city.
And too, there was a quality about the old man who was Ivaroth's constant companion that chilled utterly those who came near him.
Then, as his forces quelled the immediately surrounding countryside, and the citizens began to recover, Ivaroth splintered any consensus against him by showing unexpected and arbitrary flashes of mercy and kindness: executing some of his own men for rape and for looting, and punishing others in various ways for lesser offences. He appointed a new council of citizens to advise him, and began recompensing some of the citizens who had suffered loss or bereavement during the invasion.
Also, many of the city's most respected priests, those too old to be with the army, began to speak of dreams which revealed to them that this seeming scourge was nothing less than the will of Ar-Hyrdyn and that the Bethlarii's true future lay with those who had the vision to see the true worth of this great and powerful leader from the cold plains beyond the mountains; this Mareth Hai.
'Who could have brought such an army through the mountains without the blessing of Ar-Hyrdyn?'
It was thus a completely subdued Navra that Ivaroth left behind when he set off with an army towards his next goal, the river town of Endir.
Nonetheless, he took a liberal sprinkling of hostages and left a substantial garrison to tend the city.
