'Truly, he did. He loves you, you know.'
'Yes,' I told him,' Iknow.'
'And Karshur. My second son is so strong, if not possessing the quickest of minds. But he is wise enough to call upon the counsel of others — if he were king, he would need to call upon you.' 'Do not speak so,' I said, gripping his hand. But he didn't listen to me. He smiled to himself as he affirmed the various virtues of my brothers. Jonathay, he said, seemed too full of whimsy to be a king, and yet he had a way of bringing his dreams down to earth and inspiriting people. Mandru was as fierce as a wolverine, and difficult — and in this very irritation at others, he often found the will to be gentle toward them and protect them. As he had protected me from Yarashan's bullying when I was a boy.
'All of my sons,' he said again, 'it's our weaknesses that make us strong — the way we overcome them. The way we overcome ourselves.' He turned toward me then, and eyes were like two stars shining with a deep light.
'But you have no weaknesses!' I said to him. 'You think not?' he said, smiling at me.
'Not as a king. No king has ever given more of himself to his people. You cannot know how they love you. All your warriors — they would die for you.'
'And I would die for them,' he said. 'And I love them as I love the mountains and rivers of my home. And yet…'
'Yes?'
He gripped my hand so hard that it hurt, and I could hardly bear the way that he looked at me.
'And yet, ' he told me, resting his other hand against the castle's great walls, 'if my whole army were lost, it would not be as dear to me as what I know will remain safe inside here.'
'But my brothers,' I said, swallowing back the pain in my throat, 'if they were lost too, then …'
My rather gazed at me for what seemed a thousand years as my heart pounded inside me. And he said to me, 'As long as one of us lives, Valashu, we all live.'
We went back inside the castle after that. An hour later, my father called for his warhorse, Karkhad, to be brought into the west ward. The crowds of women and children there moved aside to make way for this great, snorting beast. Karkhad's face, neck and chest, as well as his hindquarters, had been fitted with curving sweeps of steel plate. And so it was with the mounts of my brothers, for they gathered there, too. They wore their diamond battle armor and black surcoats emblazoned with the silver swan and the stars of the Elahads. Their shields showed identical charges, except that each one bore a distinguishing mark of cadence on its point. Ravar's was a sunburst, and he was the first of my brothers to embrace me and bid me farewell. Then Jonathay laughed as he embraced me to assure me that we would meet again, and soon. Next 1 said goodbye to Mandru, and then Karshur, who nearly squeezed me in half with his thick, hard arms. Yarashan, resplendent in all his polished diamonds and steel, stepped up to me and said, 'It would have been a great contest, wouldn't it, to see who could slay more of the enemy? Well, perhaps in another battle.' Asaru took his leave of me in silence. The hope in his eyes, no less his concern for me, was so strong and bright it made me weep.
For a while, the six of them stood there on the hardpacked dirt saying farewell to my mother and grandmother. Lansar Raasharu and a company of knights assembled behind them, back near the Adami Tower. So did Kane and Atara. Then my father pulled on his helm, crested by a white swan plume, and it was time to go. They all mounted their horses. And my father led them pounding through the gateway and they rode out to war.
Chapter 32
Morjin's army invaded Mesh on the sixth of Ioj. The Galdans, under the Saroch, Radomil Makan, as the high priests of the Kallimun were called, moved a day later, on the seventh. Messengers brought us word of this desecration of our sacred soil. My father saw no point in wasting warriors at the passes, and so he had ordered the garrisons there to remain within the kel keeps, behind their walls. This presented Morjin with a difficult choice: he could lose part of his army besieging the keep, which might take a month, or simply march around it. But if he did that, then his line of supplies would likely be cut, and his army would be forced to live off whatever they could take from Mesh's countryside. And more, in the event of his defeat, his retreat from Mesh might be hindered. So it was with Radomil and the Galdans. It encouraged no one when Morjin decided to march straight down the road to Lashku and across the Lake County. He paused only to ravage the abandoned farms there, and he bypassed Lashku altogether, leaving that walled city inviolate behind him. He clearly desired a showdown with our army as quickly as possible. It seemed that he did not fear defeat.
The Galdans, however, gave sign that they were at least as interested in plundering Mesh's mineral wealth as they were in giving battle. Reports came that the Galdans laid siege to Godhra for half a day before they broke off and resumed their march north. Morjin must have commanded them to leave its despoliation until their return, after our army was destroyed. As it was, the Galdans raided several armories outside Godhra's walls, and made off with many bushels of diamonds. And worse, they slew half a dozen swordmakers and their families, and others.
Most of my people, however, at least for the time, found safety behind thick stone walls or in the fastnesses deep within mountains. They made sure that there was little to feed these two great armies, taking with them as many cattle, sheep and sacks of grain as they could. In revenge, Morjin ordered the burning of their fields. A line of flaming wheat and barley followed the line of his march like the track of a fire-breathing dragon.
On Ioj the twelfth, the Sakayans and Galdans met up outside Hardu and my father finally marched south. There followed a series of threats and maneuvers as my father strove to destroy or at least decimate Morjin's combined forces as they crossed the Arashar River. A small battle was fought at Kinshan Bridge, and the Meshians had much the better of the day, killing some three hundred Caldans and even more of Morjin's mercenaries. But Morjin was a skilled and hardened warlord, and he seemed not to mind spending the lives of his men to achieve his objectives. He used this sacrifice at the bridge to move the main body of his army across the river lower down, toward Lake Waskaw where it was shallow enough in this dry season for his baggage train to cross without being swept away.
My father was forced then to order a retreat back north, for he would not give battle in the mostly flat and open country between Lake Waskaw and Silvassu. There it would be too easy for the Sarni to harry his warriors or even ride around, them and attack his army from the rear. And in a pitched battle, it would be too easy for Morjin's men, with their much greater numbers, to swarm like ants around our army's flanks and push their spears into our backs.
It wasn't hard for my father to outmaneuver this unruly and motley mass of men. Three armies Morjin had to co-ordinate, counting the Sarni, and his problem in this regard was even worse than it seemed, for the Sakayan force was itself composed of disparate elements: nine thousand heavy infantry out of Argattha; three thousand Blues from the mountains of western Sakai; seventeen thousand mercenaries from Hesperu, Karabuk and other realms of Ea; a thousand Ikurian horse and five thousand of Morjin's famed Dragon Guard, decked out in steel armor that had been tinctured bright red. The Galdans, though all of the same realm, did not all appear to be of the same quality. Twenty thousand heavy infantry formed their core, supported by as many light infantry and eight hundred light cavalry. These, it was thought, could not hold up to the deadly strokes of Valari kalamas. The two hundred Galdan heavy horse were too few to withstand the charge of our knights, and the Galdans were weak in archers, as well. No doubt Morjin counted on the Sarin's arrows to rain down death upon us from afar.
I spent those days of waiting in prowling about the castle and discussing the enemy's strengths and weaknesses with Sunjay Naviru and the Guardians, as well as with Sar Vikan, Sar Araj, Sar Jovan and the other captains in charge of the castle's defenses. Five companies of knights and warriors my father had left behind to man the battlements. Some thought that these were too many, that my father could have made better use of them on the field facing the Sakayans spear to spear and shield to shield. Others argued that they were too few. Whenever I walked through the wards and beheld the mothers reassuring their children that everything would be all right, it seemed that ten thousand warriors lined up along the walls could not be enough to protect Mesh's greatest treasure.
On the evening of the fourteenth, I took my dinner in the great hall with my mother and grandmother, and with Lord Rathald and his family, who shared our table. Lord Tomavar's young wife, Vareva, joined us, too. We had
