"Fifteen hundred, somewhat more. Almost all of them trained." Thierry de Carenzu, who had been the only man to try to stay Urté's departure, gave the answer. It was a very large number and Rosala had been in Arbonne long enough to know why: two decades of clashes between Talair and Miraval had led both dukes to gather around them substantial armies of fighting men. And this morning those same bone-deep hostilities had just cost them half those men.
"I see," said Fulk quietly. Her brother was not a man prone to elaboration of his thoughts. They were not needed here; every man and woman in the room knew the implications of Urté's leaving them. "Are you going to have him arrested?" Fulk asked.
No one answered him. Bertran was staring out the window, visibly shaken. Rosala saw the chancellor, Roban. leaning against the wall, as if for desperately needed support; he was white as a bone. So were most of the others in the room, she saw. Only the countess, small, rigidly erect, seemed to have retained her composure.
Rosala cleared her throat. "Will he really stay away?" she asked. It seemed incredible to her, and yet somehow, in some terrifying way, predestined at the same time. For some reason she found herself turning to Ariane de Carenzu as she spoke.
Ariane's face was also pale. In a thin voice far removed from her customary crisp authority, she said, "I'm afraid he will. If he doesn't do even more than that."
"That is unfair!" her husband said quickly, gesturing sharply. Thierry de Carenzu shook his head. "He is not a traitor."
"No?" It was Blaise again. Still with that slight unsettling new control in his tone. "What would you call a man who does what he just did, regardless of what course he takes afterwards?"
It was a fair question, if a harsh one. It was what Fulk had been asking. The answer was easy enough: you called such a man a traitor.
Rosala looked at her brother and saw that he was gazing steadily back at her for the first time that morning. In his eyes, identical to her own, she read the same answer. Were this Gorhaut, she thought suddenly, Urté de Miraval would never have been allowed to leave this room alive.
There was something genuinely frightening about that thought. She was beginning to glimpse a part of the price Arbonne paid for its freedoms and its subtle graces.
She wondered how much of that price was yet to be paid.
And it was at that precise moment, Rosala remembered afterwards, that the knocking came at the door and the guards opened it to admit two exhausted, travel-stained troubadours, one fair-haired, one dark, with a message from Rian's Island in the sea: a message that the High Priestess had had a vision from the goddess of a battle by Lake Dierne.
CHAPTER 17
The identical message by a different messenger came to the lake isle that same morning. Lisseut, who, wisely or otherwise, had not gone home for the winter to her mother after all, heard the tidings when she came across the green towards the dining hall for breakfast.
It was not a great surprise. They had known that the army of Gorhaut was likely to be coming to them. This isle was the holiest sanctuary of Rian in the north of Arbonne and by now everyone knew that the warriors of Gorhaut were on a crusade in the name of the god. It didn't matter that Corannos was worshipped here as well. Had such things mattered, Lisseut thought bitterly, then priestesses and children and those who had tried to defend them would not now be lying charred and dead.
She moved a little distance away from the knot of anxiously talking priests and priestesses. It was not easy to find privacy within the narrow confines of the isle and, perhaps surprisingly for someone who had come to adulthood within the intensely social world of the troubadours, she seemed to be drawn to solitude of late. More precisely, since the night she'd sung Blaise de Garsenc to sleep with lullabies of childhood and then left his room to walk back with Alain to their inn. There was no fierce turmoil in her any more, however, no sharp pain. That seemed to be behind her now that winter had come. A stone makes a splash when it strikes the water, Lisseut had thought, standing by this same shore on the day she'd arrived near the end of autumn, but no sound at all as it sinks down to the lake's deep bed. That was how she felt, she had decided—or how she had been feeling, until war came with the harrowing reports of deaths and burnings and thoughts of such private matters were trivialized and driven far away.
She looked out across the choppy waters of Lake Dierne, past the honey-coloured stones of Talair on the northern shore and up beyond the grass of the valley to the winter vineyards and the forest rising in the distance. Somewhere out there an army was coming, axes and swords and brands, severed heads dancing on pikes above them. The survivors, fleeing south before the fury of Gorhaut, had brought tales of such horrors with them.
Lisseut plunged her hands into the folds of the vest she'd been given by Ariane in Carenzu. It was a cold morning, diamond-bright, the stiff wind pushing the three plumes of smoke almost due south. The air was fresh and clean and she could see a long way. To the west, when she turned, the massive stones of the Arch of the Ancients showed clearly at the end of the row of marching elms. Lisseut hated that arch. She had from the moment she'd first seen it years ago: there was too much oppressive power stamped upon it, the sculptor's undeniable art wholly given over to the brutally explicit message. The arch reminded her now, every day, of what was coming.
She would have been safer at home, she knew. Vezét couldn't be reached by an invading army for a long time yet and, if it came to that, a well-known joglar could take ship from the coast and find a ready welcome in Portezza or Arimonda.
That last thought hadn't even lingered long enough to be seriously considered. Even when it had become clear that the flattering invitation she and Alain had accepted—to winter on Rian's Isle—had brought them squarely into the path of death, Lisseut knew she would not leave.
There was a reason she could have offered if anyone had asked, but no one did ask. It had been Ramir's song though, in Lussan at the Autumn Fair that, more than any other single thing, had shaped her feelings now. If there was a role, any role at all for her to play in this appalling time it would not lie in hiding away south by the sea or fleeing across the water. The imagined presence of that stone inside her, sinking silently down as through dark, still lake waters, might have had something to do with it, too. She would have admitted that; she was usually honest with herself, and the worst part of that pain seemed to be gone now. It had been months since the Lussan Fair; she didn't even know where Blaise was. She called him by his name in her mind now. Surely that much could be allowed?
Alain had stayed on the isle as well. She had thought he would. Her affection for the little troubadour had grown with each passing day. He had even begun practising with a sword, rowing across to join the corans of Talair every afternoon. He was not very good. Lisseut had gone to watch him one day, and foreboding had lain within her like a different kind of weight.
That grim sense of premonition was with her again now as she gazed out across the whitecaps at the stones of the arch beyond the western shore, trying to deal with the tidings that had come with the messenger from the High Priestess.
"Will they build their own arch, do you think, if they destroy us all?"
She hadn't heard Rinette approaching. Not entirely happy, for she still hadn't worked out her feelings about the coolly arrogant young priestess, she turned and regarded the other woman.
As always, it was the owl that gave her pause. Only the High Priestess at each temple, or those named and being trained as their successors, carried the birds. Rinette, no older than Lisseut herself, was very young to be marked as heir to the High Priestess of Rian's Isle. Once she'd ascended to that rank she would be second only to Beatritz de Barbentain herself among the hierarchy of the goddess in Arbonne. Lisseut had even heard talk among the priests and priestesses of the isle that Rinette intended to follow Beatritz down the paths of blindness when that day came.
Lisseut of Vezét, child of this world, finding her pleasures and griefs among men and women, had found herself
unsettled by the very thought. If Rinette had been older, a dour, pious zealot, it might have been easier to deal with, but the brown-haired priestess was beautiful and drily clever, and she seemed to know and enjoy the troubadours' repertoire of songs almost as well as Lisseut and Alain did themselves. Once she had even corrected Alain on a line-reading during his recitation of one of the old speak-pieces of Count Folquet. Lisseut, genuinely shocked by the interjection, had quickly searched her own recollection and realized that the priestess was right. Not that this made her any happier to have heard an audience member interrupt a troubadour.
What, she remembered thinking, was the world coming to?
A remarkably inconsequential issue that seemed since the winter invasion and now this morning's news. She was made aware, looking at the tall, slender woman beside her, that Rinette's fate if Gorhaut conquered was even more brutally clear than her own, and the priestess, by her sworn oat to the goddess, lacked even the options of flight south or overseas. Given that, given the darkness of the time, it suddenly seemed profoundly ungracious to be carrying a grievance against the woman for correcting the misreading of a verse.
The world had greatly changed since Ademar of Gorhaut had led an army through the mountains into the green hills and valleys of Arbonne.
"A second arch?" she said quietly, addressing the question asked. "I wonder. Do they build anything, these northerners?»
"Of course they do. They are not inhuman, they are not really so different from us," Rinette replied calmly. "You know that. They are badly taught, that is all."
"There seems a great deal of difference to me," Lisseut said sharply, "if they burn women alive and cut the heads and sexual parts off dead men."
"Badly taught," Rinette repeated. "Think of how much of the mystery and the power of life they have lost by denying Rian."
"You'll forgive me, but I can't spare a great deal of time just now for pitying them that. I'm surprised you can."
Rinette gave a small, graceful shrug, looking out at the western shore and the arch beyond. "We are trained to think that way. The times are evil," she said. "Mortal men and women are what they have always been. Five hundred years from now we will all be dust and forgotten, and our fates, but Rian and Corannos will still steer the course of the world."
It was rather too much for Lisseut, this holy posturing. "I wonder," she said harshly, good intentions forgotten, "if you will take such a long view when we see the army of Gorhaut coming across the lake with torches in their hands."
And regretted the words the moment they were spoken.
Rinette turned to her, and Lisseut saw then in the clear light of morning that the other woman's eyes were not nearly so tranquil as her voice and words might have suggested. She recognized, belatedly, that what she had been hearing was an attempt to master fear.
"I do not welcome the prospect of being burned alive, if that is what you mean," Rinette of the Isle said. "If that isn't what you mean, perhaps you'll tell me what you are trying to say."
And after that of course there was nothing for Lisseut to do but apologize as best she could, and then carry on through the day, and the next two, wrapped in her vest against the wind and the coldness of her own deep fears. Alain rowed across the whitecaps of the lake to Talair each day, carrying a borrowed sword. He came back the second afternoon with a vivid red contusion on his forehead. He made a small joke about deceiving people with a show of clumsiness, but Lisseut had seen that his hands were trembling.
On the fourth day the armies came.
It was, in fact, a near thing. High on the ramparts of Talair at midday after the brutal, forced march from Barbentain and Lussan, Blaise looked down at their exhausted men in the open space below, and then north in the clear light for the first sign of those they were to fight. He was uneasily aware that besides the eerie precognition of the High Priestess, the only thing that had given them even a chance to reach Lake Dierne with an army in time had been the disciplined, prudent caution of Thierry de Carenzu.
The stupefying surprise of a winter invasion through the mountains would have caught Arbonne hopelessly unprepared—no one risked the passes in large numbers in winter—had the duke of Carenzu not issued orders at the end of the Lussan Fair in the countess's name for a gradual assembling of the armies of Arbonne under the barons and dukes. The idea was to have them armed and trained in the castles over the winter months, in preparation for the spring assault they all expected.
Blaise had never been comfortable with men who preferred their own sex in bed, and his nights with Ariane had rather complicated this particular issue, but he had to acknowledge a rapidly growing respect for the duke of Carenzu. Thierry was sober and pragmatic and conspicuously reliable. In a country where the two other most important noblemen were the dukes of Talair and Miraval these were not, Blaise concluded, inconsiderable virtues.
Because of these preparations, when word had come that Gorhaut was actually through the pass and coming down from the mountains, the men of Arbonne had been far more prepared than they otherwise would have been. They were able to move with order and some speed—though the southern roads were muddy with the winter rains—north towards Barbentain, and from there, when Beatritz's message came, here to Talair and the lake.
Bertran's own corans had been waiting for them and Blaise knew the soldiers of Miraval were not far away, but these were lost to their army now, if not worse.
For the hundredth time since that meeting in Barbentain four days ago Blaise found himself wrestling with the wisdom of the countess's decision to name Bertran to lead the armies. She had to have known that Urté would react as he had. Even Blaise, an oblivious stranger to that bitter tale only a year ago, could have guessed how Urté would bridle at submitting to Bertran's authority. Granting that de Talair was the obvious man to lead Arbonne, was that worth fifteen hundred men? Would Thierry de Carenzu have been so terrible a choice?
Or was it possible that Signe had expected Urté to rise above what lay between Talair and Miraval, with so much at stake now? With everything, really, in the balance. If so, she had been wrong, and Blaise was well-enough versed in the histories of war to know that Arbonne would not be the first country to fall to an invader because it could not set aside its own internal wars.
On Bertran's castle ramparts in the brilliant sunlight he shook his head but kept grimly silent, as he had in the council chamber and ever since. In some ways it might all be purely a matter for historians and dry philosophers to come: the men who picked over the bones of dead years like the scavengers who came out at night after a battle to despoil the slain and dying.
The stark reality today was that even with the corans of Miraval they would have needed an enormous number of mercenaries to have had any real chance of defending themselves, and the winter invasion had eliminated that possibility. They were brutally outnumbered by the army Ademar of Gorhaut had brought safely through the mountains. Ademar, and Galbert: Blaise knew, as surely as he knew anything in the world, that this winter war was his father's stratagem—cunning and long planning mingled with a sublime, unwavering certainty that the god would see him through the pass. And the frightening thing, of course, was that Corannos had. The army of Gorhaut, which was the army of the god, was in Arbonne, and Blaise, looking north from the ramparts with Bertran and Fulk de Savaric and others, felt fear like a hard object lodge against his heart.
Only fools and madmen do not know fear before a battle. His first captain had told him that, and Blaise had offered the same reassurance over the years to young men under his command. He was positive, though, that his father had no fear just now, riding here in pursuit of his life's long dream. What that meant, he really didn't know.
"We'll array ourselves at the south-east end of the valley," he heard Bertran explaining to the three men who had just joined them. Barons from the south. One of them was Mallin de Baude. He and Blaise had had time for no more than a quick greeting and an exchange of glances. There might never be time for
more. "The castle and the lake," Bertran went on, "will be behind us so they can't flank around. There is a slight slope downward—if you look closely you can see it—in the valley to the west that will help. It'll give the archers a little more distance if nothing else." Bertran, Blaise thought, knew this land like a melody from his childhood. He surprised himself with the image. Perhaps, he thought, he should start being less surprised: he was among the army of Arbonne, after all.
"What about Rian's Isle?" one of the new barons asked. "Can they reach it from the western shore of the lake if we're leaving them access to that side?"
"No boats. We've brought them all to our wharf or across to the isle itself. I don't think they'll be thinking about that in any case until they're done with us." Bertran's voice was calm. Blaise was impressed, though not especially surprised: he'd had some time now to take the measure of this man. He trusted him and he liked him, and only a year ago he wouldn't have expected either to ever be true.
Bertran was bareheaded as always, and without armour, clad in his usual outdoor garb of unassuming brown hues. When Blaise had first seen him riding up to Baude Castle last spring those rough-spun clothes had seemed a perverse affectation on the part of a lord of such immense power and wealth; now, in a curious fashion, Bertran's appearance seemed entirely apt to a war-leader on the eve of a battle. It was as if, in some inexplicable manner, de Talair had always been readying himself for this. Blaise wondered if that might actually be true: he remembered—another image crowding in—the biting, sardonic verses the duke had sung in Baude Castle about Ademar and Galbert and Daufridi of Valensa. The man who had written those words might well have anticipated a response to them. The first response had been an arrow dipped in syvaren, Blaise recalled, glancing at Rudel a little further along the wall walk. The second response seemed to be war.