He seemed to be looking down at his brother again, as if trying to memorize Ranald's features, so like and yet unlike his own. "You had best get up," he heard Rosala say, as if from a distance. She herself had risen again. He looked up at her. She had never appeared to him to so much resemble one of the spear-maidens of Corannos, straight-backed and proud, a figure from a chapel frieze, her face seeming as if sculptured in stone. Her level gaze met his. "He died as a man with mourning," said Rosala de Savaric de Garsenc, "but it seems that this battle has begun."
It seemed that it had.
He slipped his hands under Ranald's head and lifted it so he could slide himself free, then he laid his brother down again on the grass. Rising, he looked at Ademar and said formally, over the growing clamour to the north, "As his brother I lay claim to this body. Do you challenge me for it?"
Ademar shook his head. "Believe me, I do not want it."
Blaise nodded. "Very well." He felt very calm now, almost eerily so. A kind of numbness was setting in. "I will look for you at sunset if we are both alive."
Ademar's eyes flicked over to where Ranald lay but then came back to meet Blaise's. He had never been a coward, whatever else might be said of him. "I shall not be hard to find," he said, and wheeled his horse north towards the battlefield.
Only then did Blaise turn to his father.
Galbert, watching the others leave, seemed to have been waiting for him. The large, smooth features were a little flushed perhaps, but otherwise unruffled. Blaise said, choosing his words with care, "I will not be the man that kills you, for I would not want a father-slaying marked against my soul, but there is a journey to the god that awaits you, whether it comes today or soon or late and Corannos will know how to judge you for this deed." He paused. "And so will Rian, for a parley and a challenge breached, for a son's murder here."
Galbert gave a bark of laughter and opened his mouth to reply.
"Be gone from this place," said Bertran de Talair before the High Elder could speak. "I have never slain a man in the presence of heralds in my life, but I could do so now."
"What?" said Galbert mockingly. "And face the same judgment as me?" And saying so he turned his horse and began riding away. The nearest companies of the armies were now engaging each other, banners whipped by the wind, in that valley north of Talair.
Blaise looked over his dead brother on the ground, and then back to his father riding north, a huge, bulky man, yet easy and even graceful in the saddle. There was something deeply unreal about the two images for him, as if his mind were somehow refusing to accept this conjunction. But there were men battling now and he reached out towards that single hard truth, the urgency of it, as a pathway out of the numbness that seemed to be trying to claim him.
He heard a grating sound behind him and turned to see two boats being pulled up on the stony strand. The women began boarding them. In one of the boats he recognized, without surprise, the tall, slender young priestess he had met beside this lake when he first came here. There had been dead men on the ground then, too, he remembered. She looked at him, but only briefly and without expression, then she reached out a hand to the countess and helped her into the boat.
The other women were quickly on board and the boats were pushed back out into the choppy water. Sails were run up that the north wind might take them away. As he watched, hesitating beside that stony strand, Blaise saw Ariane turn back to look for him, her dark hair blown out behind her by the wind. Their glances held for a beat of time before she turned away. A moment later, in the other boat, Blaise saw that Lisseut of Vezét who had also lost men she loved this day, had turned to look back as well. She began, awkwardly, to lift one hand, but then let it fall to her side. He could see that she was crying.
Rosala did not turn around at all, and so he did not see her face at the end. He only saw her from behind, sitting straight-backed beside the small, delicate figure of the countess of Arbonne as the two boats swept back across Lake Dierne towards the isle, leaving behind the grassy space by the stones of the northern shore where her husband's body lay.
Blaise drew a slow breath, and then another. He turned away from the women in the boats. Bertran de Talair came up to him.
"Are you all right?" the duke asked quietly. Blaise saw Fulk de Savaric behind Bertran, the same question in his eyes.
There was a third boat being pulled up even now on the strand, grating on the stones. They had come for Ranald, he realized. He would have to let them deal with him, and trust the clergy of Rian to do his brother honour. He had no choice in this, no time. Time was what had been taken away. His task was elsewhere now, among the living, and those he meant to kill.
"It doesn't matter how I am," he said to the duke of Talair, a little frightened by the sound of his own voice. "It really doesn't matter. Let's go."
CHAPTER 18
The battle that ended Gorhaut and Arbonne as the world had known them started a day too soon. In the tumultuous wake of the aborted parley by the lake the nearest companies of the two armies engaged, and once that happened there was nothing, short of an actual manifestation of a goddess or a god in the sky above, that could have separated them. Whatever advantages of tactics and knowledge of the terrain that Bertran de Talair might have been able to call into play, given time to prepare, were swept away in the tumult of spontaneously begun fighting that turned, almost immediately, into headlong, screaming chaos.
In such a battle, Blaise knew, enmeshed in the fighting nearest the lake, sheer numbers would almost always tell. The smaller army could only have a chance if the larger one was cowardly, or poorly led, or composed of mercenaries who might be prone to cut their losses early.
None of these things were true in the valley by Lake Dierne. He had learned, in most of a year here south of the mountain passes, that the men of Arbonne were never to be lightly dismissed—and they were fighting now for their country and on their own land. Even so, the warriors of Gorhaut had been raised and trained in a single-minded purity that exalted Corannos of Battles as the highest incarnation of the god, squarely in the tradition of the Ancients who had come to conquer, and whose arch loomed west of this valley like a brooding presence.
It had always been that way in the nations of the north, in Gorhaut, Valensa, Gotzland. The southern countries had no such fixed, warlike obsession in their make-up, and Arbonne worshipped a goddess above the god. All of these things involved nuances and subtleties to which he would have been oblivious a year ago, Blaise knew—but the primal inferno of a battlefield was no place for subtleties. They didn't matter here. Weapons mattered, and training, and the will of the men who wielded them. And, in the end, the numbers on either side.
It would take a miracle, he thought, immersing himself in battle that winter afternoon like a man with a bitter thirst to slake. Blaise had always given Corannos his faith and he was coming, amazingly, to have some sense of the very different power of Rian, but he still didn't believe in miracles. The men and women he knew—and he included himself in this—were simply not deserving of such holy intercession. He hewed and slashed with his sword, a mortal man dealing in death, knowing that he was killing men he'd fought beside at Iersen Bridge and many times before. It was only with an effort of will that he was able to keep the meaning of that from breaking through to undo him entirely.
Square on in that windswept valley the armies of two countries crashed into each other in the clear light of midwinter in Arbonne and Blaise knew that the weight of numbers was going to push them back. Back to the lake, to the edge of the castle moat, to the ending of their lives. Courage and skill and the rightness of a cause were sometimes not enough. They were seldom enough, he thought, tasting that truth like poison in his mouth: Corannos and Rian had shaped a world in which this was so. He was aware of death hovering in the blue brightness of the sky, preparing to descend, to cloak the world in darkness.
He had a sudden, searing image in his mind of night fires on Rian's Isle when their army was destroyed.
He saw Signe de Barbentain, small, elegant, proud, bound and burning on one of his father's pyres, her mouth open in a soundless scream, her white hair in flames. A rage rose up in him then, a fury of denial, and the numbness that had fallen upon him like a blanket of fog when Ranald died was finally pushed away.
Blaise looked around, as if seeing the field clearly for the first time and in doing so he pushed past his inward griefs and accepted the role that lay waiting for him, the burden that had been his from the moment he'd claimed a crown.
He was commanding the left flank; with him were Rudel and Fulk and the barons and corans of southern Arbonne, including Mallin de Baude. Bertran and Valery held the centre, mostly with the men of Talair, and Thierry de Carenzu, with the corans of the east, was on the right. As best he could tell—eyes narrowed in the sunlight—they were still holding ground on all fronts. He could see Ademar in the forefront of the Gorhaut army, not far from Bertran in fact, though there were hundreds of men between them. Galbert was beside the king, a black mace in his right hand. Even as Blaise watched, his father leaned over in his saddle, huge, powerful, to hammer the mace into the skull of an Arbonnais pikeman. The man didn't even have a chance to scream as his head was crushed. He crumpled to the earth like so much spilled grain.
Men died in battle. People one had known and loved died in battles. You could not let that make you falter. They were holding ground, but they were not going to do so for much longer. Blaise, in the grip of a sudden clarity, made his decision.
And that same swift clear-headedness made him understand that this, too, was one of the things that came with the role on the world's stage that he'd claimed for himself: one gave orders in a battle such as this that could shape the destinies of nations.
It was true, it was about to be made true even now, and Blaise realized that he would have to accept that weight because his only other alternative was to withdraw into the shadows and die, betraying all those who believed in him. He made his choice then, and prepared himself to answer for it before the god when his hour came.
Drawing back sharply from the crush at the front of the lines he wheeled his horse over towards Fulk de Savaric, gesturing urgently. Fulk saw him coming and drew back as well.
"We can't do this much longer!" Rosala's brother shouted over the roar of combat. A man beside them fell, dropping his sword, clutching with both hands at an arrow in his throat.
"I know! Listen to me! Pull your men back and try to flank around. We'll hold as best we can. Get in behind Ademar if you can! Drive towards Bertran."
"You can't hold here without us!" Fulk screamed. There was blood on his face, dripping into his yellow beard. Blaise couldn't tell if it was Fulk's own blood or someone else's.
"Have to try!" he shouted. "Nothing else is going to break this up, and we can't keep fighting twice our numbers face to face."
He had another thought then and looked away from Fulk towards the front again. He saw that Rudel was looking back at him, waiting. They had fought beside each other often enough; it wasn't really a great surprise. He saw his friend arch his eyebrows in silent enquiry, and Blaise nodded his head.
"Do it!" he cried, and knew that Rudel understood. His friend turned to a mercenary beside him and spoke a one word command.
A moment later there came a fierce, ragged shout from Fulk's men of Savaric as over their heads, gripped by that coran beside Rudel, the banner of the kings of Gorhaut rose up to fly beside the standard of Arbonne. Two of us under the same banner, Blaise thought. Will it matter?
A moment later he realized, with a quickening of his heart, that it might.
"Look!" Fulk shouted, pointing.
Blaise had already seen.
"To me!" he roared, pulling at his horse's reins, driving towards the standard Rudel had raised. "In the name of Gorhaut, to me, men of Garsenc!"
And as he screamed it at the top of his voice, he saw that there were indeed corans of his family estate, from the company behind his father and Ademar, pulling back from the fight in the centre and making their way, swords uplifted in salute, towards him.
Ranald's last shouted words had been heard, Blaise realized. And these men would have watched one of their own, Bergen of Garsenc, felled by a Portezzan as he prepared to ride back to them. And sure, surely, there would be those among the corans he had grown up among who had not been filled with joy at the prospect of burning women and mutilating helpless men.
He saw his father turn, alerted by a change in the sounds behind him. Galbert visibly checked at what he saw, then his own magnificent, stentorian voice rang out over the battlefield like the voice of doom, of a god, "Stop those men!" he trumpeted. "There are traitors among us!"
Confusion reigned. Some corans turned obediently in the Gorhaut ranks and began slashing at others who, moments before, had been fighting beside them. In front of Blaise the warriors of Gorhaut turned towards the centre to see what was happening, and in the respite shaped by that brief hesitation the men of Arbonne pushed forward beside Rudel's hard-bitten mercenaries, fighting now beneath the incongruous banner of the kings of Gorhaut. Blaise saw Mallin de Baude drive forward, first man into the gap.
"Go quickly now!" he cried over his shoulder to Fulk. "We have a chance!"
With no more words spoken, Fulk de Savaric barked orders to his captains and moments later—more swiftly than Blaise could have hoped—the men of Savaric had peeled back and begun swinging south towards the lake in a desperate attempt at flanking around.
It was going to have to be swift, Blaise realized grimly, as nearly half the men in their sector melted away. Rudel looked back at him, grasped what was happening and, improbably, grinned.
"It this some sort of vengeance upon me?" he cried, leaning over in his saddle towards Blaise. "For youthful sins I have long forgotten?"
"What else could possibly be guiding me now?" Blaise shouted back, moving his horse up beside his friend. Rudel laughed aloud. Then he stopped laughing, for the warriors of Gorhaut, seeing empty space open up before them and the numbers of their foes suddenly diminished, returned, with a collective cry and a new urgency, to their own assault.
After that there was little chance to do so much as look up, let alone assert leadership on any grand scale. Battles were always like this at their peak, breaking down into islands of desperately close combat, the screams and the sweaty press of men and horses, the living and dying and dead, preventing any chance at grasping an overall picture. Blaise lost sight of Mallin. He knew Bertran must be holding in the centre, or they would by now have been under hopeless pressure from that side. He knew this had to be true, but he couldn't spare a moment to look up and see.
The world shrank to the smallest, bloodiest dimensions, to a sword lifting and falling, the scream of a dying horse, the jarring impact of his blade on armour or the different sucking feel as it bit into flesh, an awareness of Rudel on his left side and another man, a mercenary he didn't know beside him on the right. When that man fell, moments later, another coran pushed forward to take his place. It was Hirnan of Baude, and Blaise belatedly understood that they were guarding him. That he was no longer just one of the captains here. He was the man in whose name the banner above them was flying.
That was the moment, really, when Blaise was made aware of what being a king might entail. The knowledge came to him on that desperate battlefield as a weight and an exaltation, both. The rash folly he had begun in Tavernel last summer and then continued in the fall—claiming a crown at the Lussan Fair—became, in that valley north of Talair, something tangible and fully incarnate for him.
A man with an axe appeared in front of him on a dark grey horse; Rudel Correze, with an elegant, almost casual movement in the saddle, slid his sword into the man's throat between armour and helm and Blaise watched him fall. Hirnan immediately drove his horse forward to cut off the space in front of Blaise.
They were guarding him, he understood, at risk of their own lives.
In that instant, utterly calm
in the midst of wild battle, with a dead man trampled into the ground at his feet, Blaise de Garsenc came into his true awareness of power. On a field of death, fighting his countrymen on the day his father had killed his brother, Blaise realized that he really did know what he wanted for Gorhaut, and that he thought he could achieve it if given but half a chance.
He did not expect, pushing forward between Rudel and Hirnan, feeling his horse's hooves unavoidably trample the body below, to live long enough to do anything about it.
Later he would remember how that last bleak thought had come to him even before he heard Rudel, his companion on so many battlefields, speak a malediction of bitter ferocity, and Blaise, looking over to the west, saw what his friend had seen and felt something colder than winter enter his heart with the awareness of treachery and of the final, inexorable revenge of the past.
On the forested ridge of land west of the valleys a company of men could be seen at the edge of the trees. A very large company, arrayed in precise rows, well armed and armoured. Above their heads were flying not one but two banners. One was a green device Blaise had come to know well in Arbonne. The other was that of the kings of Gorhaut.
Urté de Miraval had come to war, and their worst nightmares were made real as those grim, meticulous ranks began to move down the slope. Fulk de Savaric, Blaise saw, had somehow managed to fight his way around by the shore of the lake. He and his men had turned north and were even now poised to turn and strike at Ademar's centre from behind.
It didn't matter any more. They were going to be annihilated, their backs completely exposed to the men of Miraval, who were gathering speed now as they swept into the valley. If Fulk turned to face Urté they would be equally helpless before Ademar's corans. Blaise had sent those men to the worst sort of death.