Grooming was difficult in an army fighting one battle after another. All of Arne’s one-name women had been letting their hair grow, and the men were becoming shaggy. Now Deline’s blond hair streamed behind her as she rode recklessly toward the waiting Lantiff.
Arne, too far away to come to her assistance, could only watch with horror. She seemed intent on a suicidal collision with the leveled lances, but suddenly, at the last moment, she swerved and rode down the long line of Lantiff, turning one of Egarn’s weapons on them.
They were too astonished to retaliate. The awesome power sliced their front ranks to pieces and terrified and mutilated those behind. The lantiff that survived wheeled and fled without firing back. Deline’s magnificent audacity had saved both herself and the battle.
“Don’t do that again,” Arne said severely when he had overtaken her.
“Why not? It worked!”
“It worked once. Next time they won’t hold their fire—and I need you.”
That night Deline came to his bed—as audacious in love as she had been in battle. She was still caught up in the exuberance of her wild ride, and her passion seemed unquenchable. Their love affair resumed as though there had been no interruption. Each night they lay together on Arne’s narrow sleeping pad—on hard ground or a bed of leaves, sheltered or in the open, wherever the vagaries of war took them.
Deline felt no compunction at all about sleeping with her sister’s consort. For a time Arne’s conscience bothered him, and that amused her. She pointed out that the other one-namers who had come to war with Arne, both men and women, also had mates at home, but they hadn’t hesitated to take lovers.
“What do the stay-at-homes matter?” she asked derisively. “We are all going to die—we will fall in battle and they will be slaughtered in their beds when the Lantiff break through, so why worry about them? We can’t possibly win. I thought the weapon would make a difference, but now I can see that it doesn’t. The Lantiff are being sacrificed in hundreds and thousands to keep us occupied. When their generals find a weak place, they will pour more thousands through it. Let’s enjoy what life remains to us. We haven’t lived until we have lived dangerously. I never realized that.”
Arne was stubbornly committed to fighting cautious battles that killed as many Lantiff as possible. As soon as one was finished, he left a token force to guard that valley and rushed everyone else westward in an attempt keep ahead of the encircling enemy. He still hoped to win, hoped that eventually the attacks would become too costly to be pursued, but it gradually became evident that Deline understood war far better than he did.
She exulted in combat; Arne quickly came to hate it. He loathed performing meaningless butchery on brain-damaged lashers who probably had only a dim awareness of where they were and what they did. Deline laughed at his scrupples. “Maybe they don’t know what they are doing,” she said, “but if we don’t kill them, they will kill us just as thoroughly as if they knew.”
With Inskor’s approval, Arne devoted more and more of his time to feeding the army and moving reinforcements where they were needed. This quickly became as important as winning battles. Without it, there soon would have been no battles.
Deline assumed more and more of Arne’s command responsibilities. She continued to revel in battle, but when the Lantiff began knocking horses from under her, she learned to restrain her most rampagant urges. She would halt a charge just beyond the range of their weapon—but well within the range of Egarn’s—and decimate them. They came to fear her. Their front ranks would have fled when she approached if the ranks behind them had permitted it.
Inskor overtook Arne’s westward push with a small army of his own. The old scout agreed with Deline on the nature of the war, and he had decided to rush west with all the troops that could be spared.
“My scouts have lost touch with Lant’s main army,” he said. “It is circling more widely than I had thought possible. Gather as large a force as you can and follow me.”
His insight came too late. While the Lantiff were making their trivial feints, their main army remained far to the south, wheeling to attack the Weslon frontier from the west. Hutter arrived in a panic to report disaster. Everyone had been caught by surprise, and both the Weslon and the Midlow courts had been overrun as Lantiff poured into the middle peerdoms.
Chang was making a defense and needed all the help available. Arne numbly sent out orders to withdraw his forces from the various valleys they were guarding, assemble them, start them north. Then he placed Deline in charge and rode westward as fast as his horse could take him. He had to see for himself what had happened to Midlow Court and who might have survived.
He found a burned-out ruin encircling the once picturesque hill, and on the parade was the strangest scene he could have imagined: orderly rows of corpses covered by clouds of insects. He tried to ride up the spiraling road to the hilltop on the forlorn chance that survivors might have found refuge in the castle ruins, but the way was blocked by fallen and charred walls and roofs. The intense heat of the conflagration had even brought down the castle’s old stone walls. Anyone who sought shelter there would have been crushed or burned, but apparently no one had.
He returned to the parade and tried to imagine what had impelled the entire population of the court, peeragers, servers, and guards, to arrange itself in orderly ranks as though awaiting execution.
He dismounted and picked his way through the dead. A platform stood in the center of the parade, and the prince, the land warden, and several of the peer’s advisors had been standing before it when they were struck down. On the platform was a coffin containing the peer’s body.
So the peer had died, and her funeral had been in progress at the moment the Lantiff arrived. No other event would have left the court so totally helpless. The abrupt appearance of fierce horsemen had frozen everyone in terror. At least the peer had not lived long enough to see her world collapse.
The prince’s body had been hacked cruelly, but her face was untouched. Arne smoothed back her hair and straightened her clothing. She had the same serious look in death that she’d had in life. He stood for a long time, looking down at her. Finally he turned away. There was nothing left for him to do but rejoin the war and kill Lantiff, and kill, and kill while his own life lasted.
Suddenly he noticed an oddity, probably because his thoughts were on his own unborn child. There were no bodies of young children among the dead. The peeragers certainly would have brought them to the peer’s funeral. Contrary to all expectations, perhaps the Lantiff did have a streak of mercy in their brutal natures—but what had been done with them?
A chilling premonition about Midd Village seized him, and he hurried back to his horse. He had taken everyone to war who had been trained to fight, leaving Midlow virtually defenseless, but probably it didn’t matter. Even if he had kept his little army at home, the hordes of Lantiff would have quickly overwhelmed it in spite of Egarn’s weapon. In military matters, everyone in the Ten Peerdoms, even Inskor, was a fumbling beginner. The Peer of Lant had taught them a severe lesson. Unfortunately, those defeated by Lant had no opportunity to learn from the experience.
A short distance from the court, he met several lashers leading a full company of no-namers carrying picks and shovels. He sought out the leader. “Where are you going?” he demanded.
“To the court,” the lasher said. “To bury the dead.” He recognized Arne, and he added defiantly, “The Lantiff ordered it.”
“Do that,” Arne said. “Bury all of the dead.”
He rode on. At Midd Village, nothing but smouldering debris remained. Houses and mills lay in ruins. The no-namers had been at work there, and the garden common was marked with freshly turned dirt where trenches had been dug to dispose of the bodies. Arne was about to turn away when he saw a man approaching on foot.
It was old Marof. Arne dismounted; the old man threw his arms around him and wept unashamedly.
“What has happened to Egarn?” Arne demanded.
“The Lantiff never went near the ruins,” Marof said. “No reason why they should. No one except us knows what is there. So everyone is safe.”
“Wiltzon?”
“Dead. He was at home. Everyone in the village died. A few may have been away on chores, but I don’t know who or what’s happened to them.”
“Does Egarn know what happened?”
“Aya. I took word to him myself.”
