XXII. Winter 784
On the night of 29 January 784, Vivian took her daughters through the passage of the candles and the Arch and went to visit the Lady of the Fountain. She seemed to be suppressing a nervous excitement. The four of them sat on the stone bench, the little girl with the brown ponytails in Vivian's lap. Overhead leaned fragrant black trees, and three stars blinked in the lavender sky.
All of a sudden the lady jumped up and held out her hands to them. Vivian and Susan and Anne found themselves following her out onto the broad avenue. There was something new there: Vivian had to think before she recognized that the wind was blowing, in gusts from various directions. They stood before the mansion feeling the breeze in their hair, then turned and hurried up the path between the bending lilies.
They came to the place where the way to the balustrade ran off on the left, and stopped. Susan and Anne wanted to go on up the avenue, but they gave in, turned and followed Vivian and the Lady, and caught up with them as they were overlooking the city. The bazaar was there again at the foot of the steps, but a fierce wind was blowing in the streets, driving the mysterious celebrants before it until they took refuge in cellars and doorways. The foggy rain had lifted and stars could be seen among the torn clouds.
As they stood far above the city, they beheld a procession pushing through the streets. Soldiers in white frocks, knights in white enameled plate armor mounted on white chargers, women robed in long white dresses and strange hats--and yet on them was a shadow like that of a black storm cloud of mid-afternoon. In their midst walked one man in white, proud and wise and strong but troubled. They came to the market and the vendors scattered.
The man in white walked out into the empty plaza and scanned his surroundings. His eyes lit upon the stair, and up it he surveyed until his view fell upon the women at the balustrade. He made no move, but his gaze froze Vivian to the bone. Her daughters shrank back.
The Lady stood before him. Vivian looked back and forth between the two, and could not help but perceive a kinship. They knew the measure of one another. The man in white stared up with remorseless and implacable hatred, and Vivian thought her tutor would wilt under the glare of it. She turned and found on the Lady's face the last expression she expected. Her beautiful face was proud, without a hint of fear. I have nothing, her eyes said, you have everything, it is you who should be afraid. And he was. Under his power and his pride and his anger and his total control was a gnawing doubt. The Lady almost smiled down upon him. Vivian found an unexpected name for her look. She was gloating over him, and he stood before her weak as a wild creature in a trap.
There was a sudden long peal of thunder, and the rain came down below them, and the fog clothed the city, and the tension of the eyes meeting was released. The plaza below could no longer be seen at all. They went back out onto the avenue.
Can we go look on the other town? the girls whined.
Not quite yet, the lady replied.
They returned to the garden with the fountain. The Lady took Vivian's hands and looked deep into her eyes. You know what is to be done, she told Vivian. You know it must be done now.
Yes, Vivian answered her, but--
You know. You know you will find a way. The last season of the Empire is upon us. It must be now. You will find a way.
I will, of course I will, replied Vivian. Then she led her daughters back to the Arch and they fell through again, fell back into Nikolad nestled against its mountain, fell into their bodies. They blew out the candles and put everything away.
"That was something," said Annie. "Did you see how he looked at us?"
"Did you see how she looked at him?" asked Susan. "I'm glad she's on our side. She is, isn't she, Mom?"
"Oh, I'm sure of that," said Vivian, "but not much else."
The next day the Countess of Clane summoned what was available of her council: Sir Rogier, Thane Sigrith, Sir Francis Weaver and Lady Mirabel, along with her two best scouts and her brewer. Also present were the three highest-ranking commanders of the Farlain rebels who had taken refuge in Nikolad after their oddly total defeat at the hands of the Emperor.
"So," Vivian asked Prince Frenerac, Sir Tylon and a rebel officer named Kalos, "I wasn't paying attention at the time--what exactly did happen last February?"
"To my shame," said Prince Frenerac, "I was not in Farlain at the time, I was here in Nikolad. Never has this beautiful place seemed such a prison to me as it did the day last spring when Sir Tylon brought these men over the High Bridge."
"I too missed the fight," said Sir Tylon, "but only by a day, for I was returning to check on them when I found their remnant coming my way."
"Four hundred," asked Vivian, "out of what?"
"Two thousand, my lady," said Kalos, a North Farlain rebel for twenty-five years. He was now around forty and looked as if he had outgrown the need for morale. "We faced a similar force. In number, anyway."
"Yes," said Vivian. She could read the tale on the heart of Kalos: his comrades lying in rows, an unbeatable cavalry mowing them down, His eyes freezing them in place or sending them, Kalos included, in heedless flight. "The Emperor was there, am I right?"
Kalos blanched. "It seemed so," he said.
"It's what happened in Tithean last summer," said Ellean. "And He was there, too. I thought it strange that the Emperor would go all the way to Tithean, lead his troops in battle. He seems so remote."
"Actually," said Miranda mac Conahay, "the old Emperors often went into battle. The Last Emperor is supposed to have been quite the battlefield leader. At the Countess's bidding, I have been looking at the accounts of his reign--how it started and how it ended. He came from the North and gathered an army as he came, starting with a few dozen Avars and a few score of riders from Farlain and Intror, and he swept aside the Thirty-Second Emperor."
"So how did the Last Emperor ever get beaten?" asked Ellean.
"There were too many foes, at last," Sir Rogier answered. "He defeated each of the Dukes separately, some several times, but he never controlled more than the Grand Duchy, Shadewind and the nearer parts of Farlain, Orzali and Amari. He couldn't defeat all his enemies together."
"There was something else," said Vivian, "but I can't put my finger on it. Somehow his amazing leadership didn't help in the final confrontation. All his powers couldn't keep the Throne under him, and the Empire was lost with him."
"So it was thought," said Sir Rogier.
"This one's a lot stronger," Thane Sigrith pointed out. "Not that I fear him."
"I'm not surprised," replied Vivian, "but I fear him, I promise you. He wields the powers of the old Emperors. He controls the realm of the Tenth Emperor, save only the Samarran archipelago. We're the People of the Darkness, waiting to be crushed."
"Welcome to the moot," said Sigrith.
"Well," said Sir Rogier, "on that note of solidarity, why don't you outline for us the Imperial military posture as it stands today? I understand there have been changes."
"He seems to have lost his faith in large masses of men," Sigrith explained. "He still has the militia, but they are no longer transported to far places to fight. The Imperial Guard has grown and been divided into units of five thousand or so stationed here and there about the Empire. They are formidable and fast, but I would bet on a thousand Cataphracts against five thousand of them in open country. But the Elite--that's what we call them--two thousand cavalry, as disciplined as Weaver's riders, and led by Him Himself. He had them in Tithean, and it was they who destroyed most of the Farlain rebels."
"I saw the result in Tithean," Ellean added. "It wasn't just that they were great soldiers. Maybe they're mediocre. Maybe it's all the Emperor. He took away the foeman's hope for victory. He unplugged their souls and let their spirits drain out."
Weaver sighed, and they all looked his way. "Oh, nothing," he said. "But I don't believe in all that. We've fought so long without hope for victory, I doubt that we need it anymore."
"With respect," said Kalos, "you'll see, if, may the Sun shine on, you meet them yourself."
"Well," said the Countess, "I think Sir Francis is right. I certainly hope he is--because I tell you, my Council, my allies, that the Empire must fall this year. Does that sound strange? Look around: he grows stronger, not weaker. He sits ever more secure on the Throne. He prepares fleets again, in the shelter of the Lavan mouth, for another go at Samarra, and if he fails again, there will be another fleet and another; there are whole forests in Farlain and Amari from which to build new ships. So we must defeat him now, not later."
"But, Countess," said Sir Rogier, "to defeat the Emperor, we must defeat the Elite."
"Oh, certainly. And to defeat the Elite, we must first show him we can defeat the Imperial Guard anywhere, anytime. And we will, my friends. We will find a way to defeat each army He sends against us, though we will need every trick in our book and learn some new ones."
"And then?" asked Mirabel.
"Then He will come, come to Clane, and then we will have him."
"Something to look forward to," said Sir Rogier.
"Trust me. It won't be easy and it won't be pretty, and I can't say whether any of us will survive. I do not see past that battle: I am not stronger than him. But, may the Sun burn down, I am no longer weaker than our foe." She looked around. "But first, we must irritate him, so much that he cannot ignore us. And to do that, we must challenge the Empire on ground that the Emperor now controls."
"You have a plan, of course."
"Yes, Rogier, I do. I will need the Cataphracts, of course, and the Farlain rebels as well."
"My lady," said Prince Frenerac, "they are not ready for a campaign."
"I think they will be," she replied. "May I come see them? I know they've been training on the fields down by the river."
"Yes, Countess, but--well, of course, Countess."
"Tomorrow?"
"Give us a week?" suggested Sir Tylon.
"All right," said Vivian, "I have enough to occupy me for a week."
It was easy to tell the three dozen knights of Farlain and Amari who formed the core of Prince Frenerac's force, and the hundred or so Farlainers who had missed the disaster of last winter, from the four hundred that had been there and escaped. The knights charged, stopped, turned, backed, stepped left, swung right, all as one, all at the gestured commands of Sir Tylon, all despite foot-deep snow on the field. The rebels charged here and there, sometimes under command, but also fell from their horses, fought among themselves, slipped in the snow and wandered off in random directions.
"It's hopeless," said Prince Frenerac. "Whatever they had, they've lost it."
"I don't know what else we can do," said Sir Tylon, riding up the hill to the gathered observers. "It's been a year, but I despair of ever making them fight again."
"I'll tell you what we can do," said Thane Sigrith, grinning. "We can trade them even up for an equal number of Rukh warriors. These rebels might make decent dairy herdsmen."
"I have some cattle myself," put in Sir Rogier, "and I resent what you're implying about dairy herdsmen."
"My lady," said Sir Francis Weaver, "I'm sorry we brought you out here in the snow and cold for this sad demonstration."
"It's no problem," said the Countess. She nudged Flavia forward down the hill until the rebels stopped to see what she was about. She cleared her throat. "Warriors of Farlain!" she cried. "It's time to find your hearts again. Soon you will return to your land, to lift the darkness, and I will go with you. Then we will make an accounting for the death and suffering that the Empire has brought upon Farlain, and we will repay ten times over the sorrows we have endured. You thought you could not stand against Him--I also thought I could not, once--but I tell you, we will not only fight again, we will conquer. Together, my friends, we cannot be defeated."
There was a surprised cheer from five hundred throats. She turned and rode back up to the other observers. Behind her, Major Kalos smiled as he shouted his men, "All right, let's try it again, the first combination!" Then, as the knights and aristocrats watched, the rebels charged a fence, stopped, backed ten paces, then charged again, leapt the fence and rode down to the bank of the Glass River, where the front line set their spears forward while the archers behind them fired two volleys of arrows into the trees on the other shore. Vivian smiled at her ministers, rode on up the hill, bowed her head to Sir Everard's monument, and entered the gate of Nikolad. While the military minds sat on their horses puzzled, Vivian gave up Flavia to Wulf, went up to her room, threw her coat on the chair and lay down in her clothes for a long nap.
"What was that?" asked Sir Rogier that night. He sat down beside Vivian in the dining hall with Miranda, Ellean, Jen and Susan and six full pints of ale.
"What was what?" Vivian gave him a defensive look; he replied with narrow eyes and a stubborn smile. "All right," she said, "if you really want to know--"
"Yes, for once I think I do."
"Well, do you remember how my father led his men?"
"Very capably. I was one of them."
"You could say he was a capable leader. Let's see, he won at least five major battles against larger forces, he retreated in good order against overwhelming odds twice, twice he turned a rout into a victory, four times he force-marched two days or more, then won, and I count ten battles he won, in none of which did he have a numerical advantage. And he never lost a battle."
"My lady," said Sir Rogier, "you no longer have the capacity to surprise me with your knowledge of history. I grant, your father was an excellent commander. His tactical ability was completely natural. He knew how to speak to his men. He had been his father's Lord Consul for several years, so he started out with experience--a good trick if one can manage it."
"Yes, yes, I wish I had started out with some experience. But you say he knew how to speak to his men. I'm rather interested in those speeches."
"Oh, the little talks before battle. Well, he just liked to settle our nerves, and remind us what we were fighting for. They weren't long or flowery. Have you read about them in his diaries?"
"Yes," replied Vivian, pulling out an old book, "but what else was interesting to me was what's in Lord Smeagle's diaries."
"Lord who?" asked Susan.
"Your mother's first Horse Marshal," Jen explained. "He died before you were born."
"Yes," said Vivian, "and he served my father longer than Sir Rogier did. I believe he even fought in the wars of the Emperor."
"He fought under the Last Emperor's banner," Sir Rogier explained, "in one battle, I believe, in the middle years, 725 or so. Count Theodred kept Clane's men from fighting on either side in those rebellions, but a few of the knights couldn't resist. I think Everard did the same. I fear I missed the chance. I didn't miss it much."
"I'm sure," replied Vivian. "You fought plenty against the Avars in the thirties and forties. Oh, I wish we had my grandfather's option of waiting for the Empire to go away. It came back."
"But as to the speeches," Susan put in.
"Well, Smeagle wrote them down as best he could. They were short, to the point, not flowery, just as you say, Rogier. 'Tomorrow we fight again, with our homes behind us. Our foe is fierce and remorseless, but--'"
" 'But we have beaten him before, and tomorrow, my friends, we will deal him so heavy a blow that he will shudder to think of the fields by the Grassy River,'" Sir Rogier finished.
"It says a great deal, doesn't it," Vivian concluded, "that you remember such a speech word for word. Not flowery: I think he spoke off the top of his head. That was before Grassyfields, when he was outnumbered three to one and routed the enemy. The Avars lost thousands of men, and Clane only a couple of dozen. So how did he pull it off?"
"He hid cavalry spikes in the grasses," said Sir Rogier.
"That helped," said Vivian, "but--well, yes, I've been looking at my father's notes, and there was something else."
"Something else?"
"Yes. I don't mean to shatter your illusions, Rogier--he was a great tactical thinker, and he loved his men--but there was something else as well. He had a little, um, thing he did by himself before every battle. A little, um, meditation--then a little speech--then a victory. Over and over. And," she added, looking Susan in the eye, "the night before Grassyfields was the full moon."
They all looked back at her in silence. Sir Rogier smiled, shook his head and looked away: he didn't want to know after all. Miranda said, "Meditation?"
"You used it, didn't you?" Susan accused. "On the rebels!"
"Well, yes. It's quite exhausting. But it worked, more or less."
"Is it--is it what the Big Guy does?"
"Little girl," said Vivian in her coldest voice, "the Big Guy does a lot more than that. But-- when I think of my father, I think sometimes what a good Emperor he would have made. He had power, but he had compassion too."
"Not that I know anything of the subject," said Sir Rogier, "but compassion is hardly an Imperial trait."
"Yes. I know." She took a breath. "And I worry, every time I try to appropriate an Imperial power. But I am no Emperor. I sat on that throne. It wasn't my size."
"My lady!" cried Sir Rogier. "You didn't--really?"
"Well, yeah, I did. I didn't feel much like talking about it afterward."
He shook his head and laughed. "Well, I wondered what you'd really done down there in Avigon that last time. It certainly made Him mad. All right, I'll stop advising you, you're obviously way beyond me."
"No, Rogier--no, seriously, this is important." She fixed him with sad blue eyes. "That's what an Emperor would want. Not me. I still need your wisdom, even when I don't follow it." She looked around. "I'm only human, all right? I'm no Emperor."
"I would fear if you were," said Miranda.
"Well, I'm not, so don't." She looked around the table. "We don't want an Emperor. I got up from that throne, and I never want to be within ten miles of it again."
"Well," said Sir Rogier, "that's a relief. So you'll be staying in Clane after all."
"Um, well, actually not. I, um, have to go to Farlain. To stir up trouble."
"Farlain!" Susan repeated. "Cool!"
"You're not going. You get to wear the Medallion. Ellean, you're coming with me, of course--I guess I'll take Willd and Martin and Annie, meaning your daughter, Rogier, not mine. And of course the Cataphracts and the Rebels."
"My lady," said Sir Rogier, "if I may speak frankly, I think this is a really bad idea. So I'm sure it'll all work out fine. When do you plan on going?"
"Well," said Vivian, "we really can't do anything till the thaw, and the whole of February stretches before us. Even the faintest glimmer of Spring is at least a month away. It's just as well-- speech or no speech, those rebels could use the practice."
A month of training did wonders. The rebels had not forgotten the freezing fear of the Emperor's Elite, but now they had the warm voice of the Lady in Grey to drive back the cold. The freeze in the air was wearing off as well. On the third day of March, the Countess and her captains agreed that they would begin the campaign the next morning. That night, she sat up with Miranda and Susan and Anne and Suzy's inseparable friend Eliza.
"The thaw will go on another week, at least," said Miranda. "Three different sets of signs say so. Not that one can ever be really sure of the weather a week ahead."
"One can't?" asked Susan.
"No, kid, one can't," said Miranda. "Haven't you ever heard of sensitive dependence on initial conditions?"
"That sounds like Count Mattas's language," said Vivian. "Even he couldn't predict the weather, I'll bet. Listen, I expect you two to get some work done in the lab while I'm gone." Miranda and Susan looked at one another. "But that's just another of my suggestions."
"Yes, my lady," they said in chorus.
On 4 March 784, after the required chanting and petal-giving by High Priestess Enjele and her acolytes, the Countess of Clane mounted Flavia and rode out across the High Bridge with her thousand Cataphracts, five hundred Farlain rebels and a few dozen knights. They camped that night and the next in slushy snow in the hills of southern Westdubbik, and then vanished into the pine woods of the borderland.
On the night of 6 March, Vivian sat up in her tent, with her candles and her card, and spread herself out into the dark world. Willd lay sprawled in sleep beside her. It was many miles before she found anything human besides her own company. Then she came upon Sakavis, a pathetic little village in the woods, and Sand Point Inn, a busy town but troubled, watched over by a post of the Imperial Guard. She groped out further, past Calway, and down on the coastal plain, in the great rotting city of Avigon, she brushed against the Emperor and fell back from the touch.
Did he notice? He too peered out into the night. He watched his troops, he plotted his plots, he guarded his thoughts, he counted his strength, he looked abroad, and his gaze returned to Clane with doubt and apprehension.
He wondered where the Countess might be.
She slid sideways from watching into dream, the dream of the good man who slept nearby, and for a while she rode with Willd through a thousand wondrous lands. They met two young women, one sandy-haired and one blond, watching from a window in a mountain keep. Then she came awake, still sitting cross-legged. The candles had both gone out.
She got up and stepped outside. The moon, past full, was caught in the trees on its way up the sky. She found a stick and wrote four symbols, nice and large, in the dirt outside her tent. Then she went back in and soon she walked again beside her lover down the streets of a beautiful impossible city.
Far off, two girls opened their eyes in their room in Nikolad, jumped up and ran to check their mother's dictionary of their great-grandfather Theodred's glyphs.
The next morning, Vivian called a brief meeting of her captains and scouts: Weaver, Valerie de Nikolad, Prince Frenerac, Sir Tylon and Major Kalos, and Ellean, Willd and Annie de Clatu. Then the Farlainers decamped and left, with the Countess, Ellean and Willd; four hours later, the Cataphracts followed them, with Annie scouting to make sure they didn't catch up. Thus separated, the two forces moved south through the woods for a week, the smaller one in front.
The land was waking early from winter's rest, great slabs of grey stone appearing through their icy covers, green shoots sticking up out of rotten snow, the sound of water all around them echoing from streams hidden under the diminishing drifts. To Vivian there came a pattern-defying mix of feelings: starting with the mud smell and the pine sap smell that fought for space in the air. There was a watching sensation that she knew well. There was a feeling of the power in the land that she could just sense now and then, as, when she concentrated, in the little library back home, she could feel the power in the Glass River and in old Mount Nikolad; this was different as two houses might smell different. There were the thoughts of birds and mice and the like, and other sources of thought neither malign nor blessed, neither animal nor human, hidden in the forest. Let them stay hid, she thought, they are no business of mine. Beneath all of it there was something else buried, as if under a century's pine needles: a flavor of something like childhood, but not the memory of any life that had ever been hers.
There was a different watching sensation, one that she had come to know well on nights of small moon in the past few years. There were four eyes watching her now, two minds, whose bodies sat on the floor in the little library in Nikolad.
On the night of 10 March, Vivian sat up in her tent, with Willd stretched out asleep beside her and Ellean watching outside. She arranged the cup and the candles and the card and the book and let her eye wander out into the night, down from the hills, down to the Lavan River by Sand Point Inn. The town was crowded with migrants and militiamen, and around its gates shanty neighborhoods had sprung up. She found, on the sandy point that stuck out into the Lavan, a wooden fort occupied by a unit of the Imperial Guard. She glanced over the garrison, mostly engaged in gambling and drinking. A middle-aged man walked past a group of card players, and they saluted him; she followed this man and found him getting ready for bed. She watched him clean up, absently compared his urinary stance to Willd's, and saw him get into his cot. He was soon asleep. She eagerly plunged into his head.
The officer was not dreaming yet--the mind was still cleaning up in preparation for deep sleep, too busy to notice her standing around. He seemed a good sort. She saw his beloved, a languid aristocrat, and his troublesome teenage son, and she saw how he loved his military profession, and how he believed in his men, and how his hopes and worries were like other people's. Yet there in the top of his brain the Emperor hung in a painting, glaring out from the frame as if it were a window. Vivian went over to the painting and peered into it.
The eyes could not help meeting hers. She fell back from them as if surprised, and to her satisfaction they followed, an Imperial eye pursuing the Countess's eye out into the night. She tried to escape him, but for a while did not try to succeed, and her pursuer did not lose her as she pulled her eye across Farlain toward the camp hidden in the hills.
Vivian dropped sideways into Willd's dreaming mind. She rode with him in the twilight before dawn. They moved across a lightly wooded country, over streams and meadows and low ridges. The shadow figure followed them even here, first a threat at the horizon, then a relentless hunter always appearing where they had just left. He closed in on them as they reached a bare and open hill. Two riders sat on their horses on its crest, women, one with short sandy hair, the other with white blond hair of shoulder length. Vivian and Willd ascended the hill and joined the young women. We were watching you, they said, like hawks, as you asked. The four of them stood there looking down upon the shadow figure, who stood at the foot of the hill glaring up at them. Would he come up? Could they drive him away?
The question remained unanswered as the dawn grew in the twilit sky, and a strange wild music as of flutes came to them on the wind. The figure fell back and vanished. Once more, through some strange luck, he had not quite caught her.
Vivian opened her eyes. The grey light of early morning was filtering into their little tent. Both candles were burned out in their dishes. Willd slept nearby: a brief touch let her see that he was riding on with their daughters in a green land. Sleep was far from Vivian, and her bladder was muttering to her. Yet she thought she could still hear the piping faintly on the air. She rose, pulled a long sweater over her rough shirt and pants, and went outside. Ellean dozed, leaning against a tree, her head back, her mouth open. Nothing moved in the camp but the swish of horses' tails. Vivian slipped out and down to the nearby pond. She listened still to the strange music as she squatted among the brush. Then she went to the pond's edge, washed her face in the freezing water and sat down on a stump. The mist rose from the pond, half free of ice, and poured off the rotting snow. Wild faint music filled the air.
There was a hill on the other side of the pond, the east side, and the growing light framed a low tree on its crest. Now she could make out, above the mists, the silhouette of a person playing a complicated-looking flute. She sat entranced and puzzled. For many minutes the flutist played while the Countess watched from her stump. Then, suddenly, the dawn was too close, the light too strong, and the flutist ended on an uncertain note. The figure stood up, looked this way and that, ran off on light feet--and shaggy legs--and disappeared into the woods.
Vivian sat for another minute pondering the strange figure with its goat legs. Good, or ill? She walked back to camp and woke Ellean.
"Vivian!" said the errand-rider. "Oh, sunspots, I'm so stiff."
"You should've seen yourself sleeping against that tree. It looked most uncomfortable."
"It was most uncomfortable," said Ellean. "Well, if you'll excuse me, now I'm awake I have to go, like, really bad."
"Then you're off to get Francis," said Vivian. "The Big Guy knows we're here."
The next afternoon, 11 March 784, the rebels reached an east-west road, just a cart-track in the woods. They turned east, and in a mile they came to the wooden walls of the town of Sakavis. They entered it to the muted cheers of the residents, while the garrison slipped out the other side of town and headed for Sand Point Inn. The little host was feasted by the townsfolk, who in return were treated to deer and boar hunted by the soldiers. Vivian and Willd and Frenerac and Kalos and the town's old woman talked on over wine after the feast, while in many huts in town, returned rebels and their sweethearts went about conceiving the next generation of Sakavians.
"Things have been hard, lady," said the old woman to Vivian, "but we do all right. Thank the Sun for our boys coming back, and for my sweet lord the Prince, and thank you, my lady, for paying any attention to us at all."
"Clane's no better than North Farlain," said Vivian. "You've fought all these years just like us, but with less comfort."
"We've managed fine," the woman replied, "and now our boys are back safe, we haven't lost much, really. But how much longer can this war go on, I wonder?"
"This is the year," said Vivian.
Once it was fully dark, she sent off Willd and two of the Farlainers to scout east toward Sand Point Inn. An hour later, she sat on the floor of her hut to do her own scouting, and found her beloved and his companions picking their way down a slope toward a lane running eastward. She went on ahead of them, worrying about ambushes, but she need not have concerned herself: they were but three travelers in an empty land. They would come, after some miles, to the Lavan road, and a few miles down the road she found Sand Point Inn. She could tell that already the Imperial Guard prepared to move out. A simulacrum of the Emperor watched from a hill. She pulled her eye back; if he saw her, he showed no sign. Fine, she thought, I know all I need to about THIS cavalry. It's not the Elite.
She turned and roamed northward over the woods, and spent hours searching before she found a blotch of restless shadows lurking under the trees of north Farlain--eating grass. They were the steeds of the Cataphracts.
The next day around noon, Willd and his comrades returned to Sakavis with the news that three thousand of the Imperial Guard had been dispatched from Sand Point Inn. The Guard moved with all deliberate speed, and appeared on schedule, on 13 March, before the wooden east gate of town. Kalos and Frenerac had arrayed their five hundred, mounted, outside the walls, on the inside of a band of pasture a few hundred yards wide, and Vivian, for the moment unnoticed, sat on Flavia in their midst. Annie de Clatu had just whispered in her ear.
Their foes, outnumbering them six to one, came up to within a hundred yards and stopped, filling the clearing on either side of the road and overflowing into the swampy fields. A herald came forth and declaimed, and, for a herald, he was remarkably to the point. "By the order of the Emperor and of his grace the Duke Salvar," said the herald, "you are required to lay down your weapons and give yourselves up to the mercy of the Emperor, or you will all die today."
He was greeted by laughter. "Go home to my brother," shouted Frenerac, "and tell him, if he wants me, he can come himself."
"You leave us no choice," said the herald. "Pursuant to my orders, I condemn you all to death for taking up arms against the Emperor." He turned and rode back to his lines, and the Imperial forces advanced three, four, five paces toward the rebels.
The Countess stood up in her saddle. She had been up late with Count Edmund's book of symbols: now came the test. "Soldiers of Farlain," she called, "you cannot be beaten today. Many things are possible, but it is not possible that your foe should have the victory. I, Vivian, daughter of Edmund, son of Theodred, son of Lenward, son of Tereza declare it before you and your enemy."
A shout rose from up and down the lines of the rebels. They smiled on each other. Then they looked across at the enemy, and even Vivian was surprised to see that they had stopped in their tracks. Well, well, she thought, let's see what else we can do. She stood in her saddle again. "What do you fear, soldiers of the mighty Emperor? A rabble of renegades from Clane and Farlain? An overgrown gang of bandits led by a mere woman?" They looked on her with great apprehension. She laughed at them. "Truly, I think you are overly concerned. There are so few of us, so many of you. But I am impatient with your pace of battle. I'd like to get this thing started before night falls."
At the back of the Imperial force, voices were raised against her, and commanders could be heard shouting at their men, imploring them to continue the advance. Vivian looked at Kalos and he nodded, then waved his hand high in the air. A volley of arrows flew from the defenders into their faltering opponents, and then another.
Then the Cataphracts charged from the woods on the left. They crashed into the flank of the Imperial Guard, which melted before the onslaught, as though the still two-to-one numerical advantage were more than reversed. More arrows turned the rest of the would-be attackers around, and then the Farlain rebels spurred their horses and pursued the foe back into the woods. Many of them did not get that far: some who survived the Cataphracts' arrows and the swords of the rebels turned to flee to the south of the road, only to plunge into unnoticed mires and deep streams, and others were thrown by their horses or trampled by those who had been in front of them before everything got turned around.
In half an hour it was over. Two hundred were captured--among them, the Imperial Guard commander that Vivian had taken such an interest in--and half at least of the three thousand were dead. The road and the field on the right were crowded with corpses. The rest of the Guards fled south through the woods in disarray. The insurgent forces had lost exactly two dead, both Clanish, thrown by their horses in the woods during the pursuit.
By the time the full tale of the victory was known in Sakavis, Vivian was back in bed, physically, mentally and spiritually exhausted beyond anything she knew besides childbirth.
"So," said Vivian to the captured Imperial commander that night, "how many are left in the hold on Sand Point?" He looked her in the eye for a moment, then looked at the ground.
"Let us beat it out of him," suggested Kalos.
"Countess," said Frenerac, "we do have methods, tried and true."
"Not necessary," said Vivian. "I have ways of my own. This man is honorable--he's a good soldier serving a lord, just like you, Kalos. His only fault is in how he chooses his lord, but even in that I can't blame him, for he does just as all our ancestors have done these seven centuries. Anyway, there are less than a thousand left in the fort, and he brought with him here all the men he found reliable. He doesn't expect the rest to even have the wisdom to occupy the town of Sand Point Inn, so it's there for the taking."
Prince Frenerac, Sir Francis and Major Kalos and the four other male commanders, and the captive, exchanged resigned looks, while Ellean and Valerie and Annie de Clatu traded knowing smirks. "So," said Weaver, "we head for Sand Point Inn with all speed?"
"You read my mind."
From Sakavis to Sand Point Inn was a long day. They arrived in the middle of an evening of flurry and drizzle, and found the townsfolk holding the walls. These were not much, a bit of stone and a recent wooden fence, but Vivian didn't want to fight. Appraised of the situation at the front of her army, she rode up and joined Weaver and Kalos, who were engaged in shouted negotiations with the old men at the gate.
"May I say something?" she shouted in her loudest, lowest voice, casting back her hood. The old men gaped. "Yes, yes, it's the Grey Lady herself. Now anyway--"
"You can camp in our square," shouted one of the old men.
"What?"
"Sure," said another. "Lady, we don't want trouble, with you or with Avigon."
"All right," she shouted back, "I won't tell the Big Guy if you don't."
Late that night, Vivian sat drinking an excellent white wine with Ellean and Willd and the Prince. All the other captains had gone to bed, but the seasoned drinkers were just starting on their last bottle for the night.
"So, Avigon?" asked Frenerac.
"It's a thought," Vivian replied.
"Um, if I might ask," Ellean put in, "is there, like, a strategy to all this?"
"We're trying to get His attention. I'm not sure we have it, yet. If we have to fight another battle, we will."
"Another battle like that one?" replied the Prince. "I can tell you, Countess, all the men are ready to fight for you again and yet again. I now see how Clane has fought on all these years."
"Oh, it wasn't just me."
"But what if the next one isn't like the last?" asked Ellean. "Don't we eventually have to fight the Elite?"
"Ellean, the whole idea is to get to fight the Elite. We have to annoy the Big Guy enough that he sends them. Then we defeat them--and only then will He come back to Clane."
"And why is that so important?" asked Ellean. "Oh, wait, it comes back to me. It has something to do with that knife."
"Knife?" the Prince repeated.
"In Angren square," replied Vivian. "He'll be there. I don't know how or when, but--well, in the meantime, we'll just go on defeating his armies. That's nothing new for us."
The little host settled in at Sand Point Inn while they awaited the Emperor's next move. On the fifteenth of March, Annie headed back to Nikolad with letters, and Martin of Auzel came that same evening with more letters. On the sixteenth, they received word that another five thousand Imperial Guards had been dispatched northward from Calway along with two thousand Farlain knights.
Vivian looked out, once the sliver moon had set. She spent some time examining the garrison of the Sand Point hold, and found that they were no threat: they were virtually under siege, with the town held against them and the other side of the river a no-man's-land between rival Avar chiefs. The garrison had no morale whatsoever. She could have them with the slightest effort, but why bother? Shrugging, she turned her Eye toward the south.
It was not hard to find the new army headed her way. It was several times as numerous as her force, but she could see that their morale was little better than that of the trapped garrison. At their head was an Imperial general, an imperturbable old strategist who seemed unlikely to be in the front line of his troops in battle as the captured commander had been. In her room at the Inn, Vivian smiled.
Then she heard a cold familiar voice. I am with them, it said. She scanned the camped force again--no, there was no Imperial bivouac, and it would have been obvious if there had been one. I will be there, little countess, it said. Do not think that I will let you have things your way.
Her eyes shot open. Her cheek stung as if he had slapped her. She blew out the candles and stood up. But what was to be done? She sat back down, drank the rest of the wine in the goblet and refilled it. In the time it took to drink, she didn't think of anything useful. There lay Willd sprawled in sleep, and, taking off her clothes, she joined him, huddling close under the covers, her eyes wide open.
Eventually sleep came. In dream, he pursued her, but not as before. Instead, she saw the fields south of Sand Point Inn filled with men, then a deadly battle with corpses piling higher and higher. She stood on a slope and watched as her men cut down row after row of the enemy, but the foemen kept advancing. There were so many. Then the two sides closed, and the slaughter became general. Would any be left of either side?
She stood in a mire of blood and watched as the rebels and her Cataphracts were cut down, even as they inflicted a terrible carnage on the enemy. At last the field was empty of the living, except for her. But there was another. He stood on the opposite hill, laughing at her. She looked into the distance and saw another army under the white banner, then another and another. His laughter echoed in her ears as she woke.
"Willd, Willd," she called, "what are we to do?" Her lover did not awaken, but reached out and put his arm around her. She lay against his warm body for hours before a dreamless sleep came over her.
"They'll be here in another day," said Ellean. "Do you have a plan?"
"Yes, I do, in fact," said Vivian, trying to think of one. When she came up with one, a few minutes later, she called for Willd and Ellean and Martin, and the errand riders all walked away from the meeting eager for the work ahead.
On 18 March 784, the newest Imperial army camped on the hills south of Sand Point Inn. Vivian sent a lieutenant of the Cataphracts to arrange a parley. In the meantime, Willd and Ellean and Martin of Auzel left for a long ride on borrowed steeds. That evening, the Imperial general and an assortment of officers met the Countess and the Prince and an assortment of rebels in a farm house south of town.
"Countess," said the general, "I presume we are to discuss your withdrawal from Sand Point Inn--unless you intend to surrender."
"No, no," said Vivian. She had spent the previous hour in her room, chanting over her father's book. "No, I just wanted to discuss the situation with you."
"Well," said the general, "I am always ready to discuss the situation, until the time comes for battle. I think the time will come tomorrow."
"No, no," replied the Countess. "You will have the town. Of course you will. But do you think you can really name the day? Do you think that you can actually win in an assault? I mean, if you're wrong, how many men will you have left? How will you explain that to--?""
The general gave her a concerned look. "What are you saying?"
"The fortunes of battle are strange," she said. "The mighty often trip over the smallest of stones, and what a fall! The fog of war, the chaos of the fight. Don't I know it! I've been lucky. Do you think my luck will run out tomorrow? Do you really think tomorrow is the day?"
The general and his aides exchanged glances. "What do you propose?"
"Once you commit your men to that horrible roll of the dice, you cannot call them back. You can always wait for just the right time, just the right weather, for the ground to dry, for every last detail to be thought of, and then you still have time to consider it all again. A battle? You have at least an even chance of losing, wouldn't you say? We do have defensive positions. Again, you will certainly have Sand Point Inn, but it won't be tomorrow."
The general stared at her. "What shall we do?"
"We should meet again tomorrow," she replied. "Talking may save lives. Talking and thinking." She looked into his brown eyes for another fifteen seconds, then her look swept the faces of the other Imperial officers. "There is always time to be careful, and not make a terrible mistake. That's the most important thing, isn't it, really? Not to make that terrible mistake. Battles are lost, not won." She stood up. "Well, shall we meet again tomorrow?"
So for four days, seven thousand men sat in camp before Sand Point Inn while the Countess and their general had nightly parleys. In dream, Vivian still saw piled bodies and pools of gore--but with a slight effort of will she moved herself to the periphery, where she sat on her horse (the venerable Finesse, in her dream) on the edge of a forest. Beside her were Ellean and Angeline. Or were they strangers--a little knot of women dressed in black?
Vivian made sure the Imperial general had similar dreams.
In the hour before dawn on the twentieth, three riders, two men and a woman, entered the city of Calway and made their way to the city center. They walked their horses through the Old City to the plaza before the Palace of the Duke of Farlain. There stood statues of all fifty-one Dukes and Duchesses, and on their tall square pedestals, where Ducal decrees and announcements of all sorts were customarily nailed up, the three went about posting announcements of their own, printed in the print shop of Sand Point Inn.
The sandy-haired man put up signs announcing, "I, Vivian, Countess of Clane, repudiate the Emperor." The man with dark hair and a tangled beard posted signs that said, "Clane lives, the Empire is no more." The woman's signs read, "Emperor, you are called to account for your crimes in the square at Angren."
By the time folk were up and about, the three riders had tied up their tired horses, stolen new ones, and vanished northward.
That night, Vivian, in dream, wandered alone in the woods of Farlain, chased by a black shadow. She ran and it pursued her; she tired and it gained on her; she tried to hide and it closed in. She was trapped at last, and there was no Willd to comfort her, no strange flutist to save her, no daughters to stand with her. She emerged into the light to face the thing that sought her, but she could not look at it.
Repudiate me? it mocked her. I did not give you leave to repudiate me. And with that it rained down blows upon her. She suffered a terrible beating--until she noticed that she suffered not at all. It was as if the blows were gusts of wind.
She laughed in the face of the shadow. You must come closer, she cried, if you want to hurt me. Come to Clane!
The next night, Willd, Ellean and Martin returned, their stolen horses ready to collapse. "It all went according to plan," said Ellean. "No one even seemed to notice what we were doing."
"Oh, someone noticed," Vivian replied.
That night there was no parley. The next morning, 22 March 784, the general, puzzled, sent forth heralds to the gate of Sand Point Inn. In another hour, the general himself stood in the court just inside the gate. The Countess and her army were gone.
By the next night, the Countess and her fifteen hundred riders had come eighty miles into the forest of North Farlain, where they camped among the toppled stones of a ruined castle. The word went out into the army that they could take it easier from here on.
Yet in sleep her spirit did not rest. She wandered the Farlain woods, through winter and spring and summer, through centuries of the leaves turning gold and red and falling. In the twilight of dawn, nymphs and fairies and nature spirits danced half-seen even in dream. Apes chattered in the trees, birds flitted, beasts foraged on the dark ground, pines vied with oaks and maples, thousands of generations of bugs rose toward the light. Eventually people came. They opened great vents in the forest and built houses and farms and became civilized, and less civilized people emerged from the woods and overran them. The forest waxed and waned from the north of Farlain as the light of society waned and waxed from the south. Always just in the shadow of the trees was a shadow of women watching.
She saw the Empire grow outward, saw the people of the darkness withdraw, saw the forest give way again. Battles were fought for a while, and then the imperial peace settled on the land, persisting through long seasons. Then there was storm in the south, and then quiet again, and just then there came some fleeing. Two came, a man and a woman, and power was written in their eyes, but they wanted no more strife, no more danger, they wanted only to live their lives in peace. They found a stretch of woods by a meadow, and they and their friends and servants and children raised a house of the native stone, and there were more children, and grandchildren, and ivy growing over the walls. Vivian even caught a glimpse among them of a coal-haired lady dressed in black, a gold medallion upon her breast.
One of the grandsons grew strong and proud and went south to his doom. But that doom reached back to the house in the dark woods, and on a night of storm, the earth trembled and fire and death fell upon the heirs of the two who had fled there two generations before. A few escaped, but many more died at the point of swords, held down in the flickering light as soldiers from the great cities hacked through their necks, and a black cloud hung over and dripped evil onto the falling roof. Then rain came, and the thunder rolled on.
Now an old woman walked among the ruins, and then her daughter, and her daughter after her, and then her daughter and her daughter after her, wandered about as if looking for the vanished house. There was another, a young man who grew old and sad before Vivian's dreaming eyes. A son walked beside the old man. Now she saw only the son, as he strode among the ruins, and anger was written on his face. She thought his eyes would burn through the years, burn through the false emperors in the south, burn their way into History. Her dreaming mind shied back from him as he walked, from his ire and his pride and his power. But now she perceived another, wandering in memory among the stones, a woman dark of hair and sad, always out of sight of the man with the fiery eyes, and at first Vivian could hardly see her. Then the angry man wandered off into the sunlight of the world, and there was quiet again under the trees.
Vivian's dreaming eye came around a huge foundation stone and found the woman standing by it, her hand upon it, as if trying to perceive its story through her touch. She raised her sad blue eyes to Vivian's, and smiled. It was the Lady of the Fountain.
On the morning of 24 March 784, Vivian awoke to the sun peering through the young leaves, and birds singing and apes calling from the trees. She walked among the old stones in the woods, sat for a while upon a great block of granite meditating, and then hurried back to camp for tea and breakfast and a council.
"My lady," said Sir Francis, "we have defeated the Imperial Guard and humiliated the Emperor. What's next on your list?"
"Well," said Vivian, "I don't want to presume upon our friends from Farlain."
"Countess," said Major Kalos, "I think I speak for all of my comrades when I say that we are ready to do what you will. What do you will?"
"Oh, this is scary. I could say, let's march on Avigon, and you'd all follow?"
Weaver and Frenerac and Valerie and Kalos exchanged glances. Weaver turned his blue eyes on his Countess and said, "My lady, we are ready to ride today, if that's what you say."
"I certainly am," said Frenerac, "though if it wouldn't disrupt the schedule too much, I'd like to stop off at Calway and settle things with my brother a bit."
"Never fear," said Vivian. "I have no desire to return to Avigon. But, to answer you, Major Kalos, if your Prince thinks as you do, I would appreciate a little more of your help."
"Consider us your officers," said Frenerac. "Whom do we challenge next?"
"We challenge the Emperor," she replied, "as always, but we choose our own battlefield. Now He Himself must come to fight us, for he knows his men cannot defeat us without him."
The officers exchanged more glances. "We are ready," said Weaver, "ready to fight against the Emperor himself, even at our deadly peril."
"My lady," said Kalos, "my men are prepared to give our lives--"
"No need for that, I hope," said Vivian quickly. "But we won't take him here. It might be interesting to try, to see what ghosts rose from this particular ground to fight on whose side, but, no. No, this war must return to Clane. There it will end, for us or for him."
Weaver smiled. "Clane it is, then. I would not have it otherwise."
"Yes," said Vivian. "In Clane it started, and in Clane we will finish it. The game is near its end, and our enemy still thinks he will win: I think otherwise. One more stratagem, or two, and we will see who's right."