Lord Alagrace conferred with siege marshals. They could build a bamboo tower beside the moat, rig chains between the tower and the battlements, and send food and water to their men by means of a flying fox arrangement. But that would take days.
Lord Alagrace ordered the survivors of the first wave to rest, tend their wounded, eat, sleep, then launch a further assault on the gatehouse keep in the afternoon.
From intelligence Haveros had provided, Lord Alagrace knew he still had enough men on the battlements to have a reasonable chance of defeating the enemy absolutely by this all-out assault. If that failed, either his siege marshals would have to find some way of sending reinforcements to the battlements immediately, or some way would have to be found to reopen negotiations with the enemy.
And if that failed, Lord Alagrace could still starve out Castle Vaunting by siege. He might lose all the men of the first wave, but victory would still be his. In the end. But now… he was bone-weary, having been awake all night. Lord Alagrace retired to his tent, leaving orders for his guards to wake him if any fighting started.
Haveros made his own plans. When fighting started again, all eyes would be turned on the castle. Yen Olass took his message to the Princess Quenerain: he would come to her in the afternoon, once fighting started on the battlements. Yen Olass would stand guard while they obtained their satisfaction.
They had waited long enough.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
While the struggle for control of the battlements proceeded, two members of the besieging army seized the opportunity to indulge in some close-quarter tactics of their own. Haveros and the Princess Quenerain had been apart for too long; now, at last, they were together, secluded within the tent set aside for the princess to prepare herself for the Rite of Purification. Nobody would disturb them while the battle raged: nobody would even think of them.
The Princess Quenerain shed her clothing. Haveros stripped naked, and clutched her perfume. She shuddered, panted, gripped him with claws, receiving him into her body.
And then-
The world slurred. He clutched air and held it. 'Cluth?' she said. 'Nabeek
Her eyes widened to peacock iridescence. Light danced across her body. Her breasts enveloping. And then:
The world snapped into hard focus. They gasped for breath, as if they had been swimming underwater.
'What happened?' said the Princess Quenerain, her voice a whisper, terrified.
'Madness. From…’
From what cause? He touched her, lightly, to comfort her fears. And touched her. And touched her. Grease beneath his fingers. Roast meat. He closed, bit. She wrestled him. They lurched, fell. Laughing – her laughter ripped from her lungs like a scream – she fled from the tent. He caught her just outside, and they went down together and-
Realized what they were doing.
She was bleeding. He had bitten her neck, hard, drawing blood. Armed men staggered across the ground, as if driven by heavy wind. One steadied himself, and stared at the naked lovers. He had bitten through his lower lip.
Someone was screaming.
Haveros scrabbled up handfuls of dead grass and mud, plastering it against his nakedness in a vain effort to hide his shame. The Princess Quenerain flinched from the hate in the eyes of the soldiers. Her hands, like damaged butterflies, fluttered at her face. She wanted to see, yet she wanted to hide her face from the world which was about to say-
'Dralkosh!' shouted a soldier. 'No!' bellowed Haveros.
A spear-butt took him from behind, beat him to the ground. As though it was her they were pounding, the Princess Quenerain sank to her knees in the mud. Shuddering. Other soldiers were taking up the cry of 'dralkosh', but one, standing quite near, said in a low and level voice:
'Woman, have you no shame?’
The voice was real. The cold mud was real. And her body – naked in public view. This was not a dream. The Princess Quenerain clutched her hands to her places, knowing that the gesture was futile, since if this was not a dream then she was most certainly dead – or as good or dead.
Out of the corner of her eye, the Princess Quenerain noticed a figure in a battered fur coat skulking away, trying to look inconspicuous. It was Yen Olass Ampadara, who had been standing guard outside the tent. She almost made it – then someone saw who it was, and raised the alarm. Yen Olass tried to sprint away. A man stuck the butt of a spear between her legs. Down she went, face first into the mud. The man leapt onto her back, grabbed her hair and yanked it back. To cut her throat? No: all he did was scream;
'Dralkosh!’
'This,' croaked Haveros, trying to rise, 'has gone too far.’
Then someone hit him on the head, and he was knocked unconscious.
^ % sfc
Lord Alagrace did his best. He quailed at the thought of returning to Tameran and telling the Lord Emperor Khmar that his daughter Quenerain had been stoned to death in the imperial province of Estar.
However, there was little Lord Alagrace could do.
The facts spoke for themselves. The survivors of the first wave had been fighting the enemy on the battlements, when a sudden spasm of communal madness had broken the impetus of the battle. That madness had swept through the entire Collosnon army, causing men to shout or throw themselves to the ground, to attack each other, to mutilate themselves with weapons, to step into the flames of the castle moat or cower down to the ground, terrified of the weight of the sky.
And the madness had caused the lovers Haveros and Quenerain to reveal themselves.
Lord Alagrace blamed wizards, but his soldiers had never seen wizards. They believed in them, certainly – after the evidence of the blazing flames of the castle moat and the lightning used against their comrades on the battlements, they could hardly disbelieve. But the figure of the dralkosh was much more familiar.
If a man was impotent with a woman, that was evidence to suggest she was a dralkosh. If her children were born deformed, or the wrong sex, or dead, or were not born at all, that too meant she could be a dralkosh. If there was flood or famine or plague or a man went mad or a dog turned rabid, someone must be to blame, and often it turned out that a dralkosh was at the root of all the trouble.
Now the army had two dubious women in its ranks. One was the Princess Quenerain, who had already once been the centre of a scandal. The princess, supposedly so pure, so virginal – yet now discovered to have been fornicating with Haveros while a battle was on. Fornicating, while another woman stood guard: Yen Olass Ampadara, known to be an oracle, known to possess occult powers, known to tell fortunes and read the future, known to be a brash and wilful woman, known to have used sorcery to help her disable General Chonjara when she humiliated him in front of the army.
Something had gone seriously wrong: madness had attacked the whole army. Someone had to be blamed: a cloven of shameless dralkosh, their unclean bodies urging and gaplax. They stood condemned.
True, there were dangers in stoning the emperor's daughter to death. However, battering women to pulp was, in the Collosnon Empire, the traditional way of working off public and private frustrations. Here the frustrations were great, for the army was stalled in this deadwater province, stalled outside a strategic castle which they had to take, with fire preventing them from reaching their enemies and tearing them apart. Khmar was far away, and known to be dying. The Princess Quenerain was close at hand, and she, tall, proud and beautiful, was a perfect victim.
That made two.
And Haveros made a third.
Stoning a man to death was unusual. But Haveros was known to have sinned with the princess before. Not everyone believed the story that Khmar had sent him to Estar: some thought him a genuine traitor. And the whole army was offended at a senior commander indulging himself in sexual pleasures while their comrades fought and
