Domes of Fire (25 page)

Mirtai came back along the road late that morning running with an effortless stride. ‘Sparhawk,’ she said quietly when she reached the carriage, ‘Atan Engessa’s scouts report that there are people up ahead.’

‘How many?’ he asked, his tone suddenly all business.

‘We can’t be certain. The scouts didn’t want to be seen. There are soldiers of some kind out there, and they seem to be waiting for us.’

‘Berit,’ Sparhawk said to the young knight, ‘why don’t you ride on ahead and ask Kalten and the others to join us? Don’t run. Try to make it look casual.’

‘Right.’ Berit rode forward at a trot.

‘Mirtai,’ the big knight said, trying to keep his voice calm, ‘is there any kind of defensible position nearby?’

‘I was just coming to that,’ she replied. ‘There’s a kind of hill about a quarter of a mile ahead. It sort of juts up from the floor of the forest – boulders mostly. They’re covered over with moss.’

‘Could we get the carriage up there?’

She shook her head.

‘You get to walk then, my Queen,’ he said to his wife.

‘We don’t
know
that they’re hostile, Sparhawk,’ Ehlana objected.

‘That’s true,’ he conceded, ‘but we don’t know that they aren’t either, and that’s far more important.’

Kalten and the others came back along the column with Kring and Engessa.

‘Are they doing anything at all, Atan Engessa?’ Sparhawk asked.

‘Just watching, Sparhawk-Knight. There are more of them than we thought at first – a thousand at least – probably a lot more.’

‘It’s going to be tricky with all these trees,’ Kalten pointed out.

‘I know,’ Sparhawk grunted. ‘Khalad, how close is it to noon?’

‘About another hour, my Lord,’ Khalad replied from the carriage driver’s seat.

‘Close enough then. There’s a hill just up ahead. We’ll ride on to it and make some show of stopping for our midday meal. Our friends here in the carriage will sort of stroll up to the top. The rest of us will spread out around the base of the hill. We’ll build fires and rattle pots and pans together. Ehlana, be silly. I want you and the baroness to do a lot of laughing up there on that hilltop. Stragen, take some men and erect a pavilion of some kind up there. Try to make it look festive. Move some rocks out of your way and sort of pile them up around the hilltop.

‘A siege again, Sparhawk?’ Ulath said disapprovingly.

‘Have you got a better idea?’

‘Not really, but you know how I feel about sieges.’

‘Nobody said you had to
like
it, Ulath,’ Tynian told him.

‘Spread the word,’ Sparhawk told them, ‘and let’s try to make it all look very casual.’

They were tense as they proceeded along the road at a leisurely-appearing pace. When they rounded a bend and Sparhawk saw the hill, he immediately approved of its strategic potential. It was one of those rock-piles that inexplicably rear up out of forests the world over. It was a conical heap of rounded boulders perhaps forty feet high, green with moss and totally devoid of trees or brush. It stood about two hundred yards to the left of the road. Talen rode to its base, dismounted, scampered up to the top and looked around. ‘It’s perfect, my Queen,’ he shouted back down. ‘You can see for miles up here. It’s just what you were looking for.’

‘That’s a nice touch,’ Bevier noted, ‘assuming that our friends out there speak Elenic, of course.’

Stragen came forward from the line of pack-horses carrying a lute. ‘A little finishing touch, my Queen,’ he smiled to Ehlana.

‘Do you play, Milord?’ she asked him.

‘Any gentleman plays, your Majesty.’

‘Sparhawk doesn’t.’

‘We’re still working on a definition of Sparhawk, Queen Ehlana,’ Stragen replied lightly. ‘We’re not altogether certain that “gentleman” really fits him – no offence intended of course, old boy,’ he hastily assured the black-armoured Pandion.

‘A suggestion, Sparhawk?’ Tynian said.

‘Go ahead.’

‘We don’t know anything about those people out there, but they don’t know anything about us either – or at the most, very, very little.’

‘That’s probably true.’

‘Just because they’re watching doesn’t mean they’re planning an immediate attack – if they’re even planning to attack at all. If they are, they could just sit and wait until we’re back on the road again.’

‘All right.’

‘But we’re travelling with some giddy noblewomen – begging your Majesty’s pardon – and noblewomen don’t really need reasons for the things they do.’

‘Your popularity isn’t growing in certain quarters, Sir Tynian,’ Ehlana said ominously.

‘I’m crushed, but couldn’t your Majesty decide – on a whim – that you absolutely adore this place and that you’re bored with riding in a carriage? Under those circumstances, wouldn’t it be natural for you to order a halt for the day?’

‘It’s not bad, Sparhawk,’ Kalten said. ‘While we’re all lunching, we can sort of unobtrusively fortify that hill a
little better. Then, after a few hours, when it’s obvious that we aren’t going any further today, we can set up the usual evening camp – field fortifications and the like. We’re not on any specific timetable, so a half a day lost isn’t going to put us behind any sort of schedule. The queen’s safety’s a lot more important than speed right now, wouldn’t you say?’

‘You know how I’m going to answer that, Kalten.’

‘I was sure I could count on you.’

‘It’s good, Sparhawk-Knight,’ Engessa approved. ‘Give my scouts one whole night to work with, and we’ll not only know how many are out there, but their names as well.’

‘Break a wheel,’ Ulath added.

‘What was that, Sir Knight?’ Ambassador Oscagne asked, looking perplexed.

‘That would give us another excuse for stopping,’ the Thalesian replied. ‘If the carriage broke down, we’d
have
to stop.’

‘Can you fix a wheel, Sir Ulath?’

‘No, but we can rig some kind of a skid to get us by until we can find a blacksmith.’

‘Wouldn’t a skid make the carriage jolt and bump around a great deal?’ Patriarch Emban asked with a pained look.

‘Probably,’ Ulath shrugged.

‘I’m almost certain we can find some other reason to stop, Sir Knight. Have you any idea of how uncomfortable that would be?’

‘I didn’t really give it much thought, your Grace,’ Ulath replied blandly. ‘But then, I won’t be riding in the carriage, so it wouldn’t bother
me
in the slightest.’

The addition of a dozen female Atans added to the subterfuge of a courtly gathering on the hilltop, although it was difficult to persuade the Atan girls that their faces would not break if they smiled or that the Gods had issued no commandment against laughing. Berit and a number of other youthful knights entertained the ladies while casually clearing inconvenient – and not a few convenient – bushel-basket sized rocks from the kind of natural amphitheatre at the top of the hill. The back-side of the pile of boulders was more precipitous than the front, and the rim of the hilltop on that side formed a naturally defensible wall. The young knights piled up enough rock to form a crude kind of breastwork around the other three sides. It was all very casual, but within an hour some fairly substantial fortifications had been erected.

There were many cooking-fires around the base of the hill, and their smoke laid a kind of blue haze out among the white tree trunks. There was a great deal of clanking and rattling and shouting back and forth as the oddlyassorted force made some show of preparing a meal. Engessa’s Atans gathered up large piles of firewood – mostly in ten-foot lengths – and all of the cooks stated a loud preference for wood chips for their fires rather than chunks. It was therefore necessary to chop at the ends of the birch logs, and there were soon neat piles of sharpened ten-foot poles spaced out at regular intervals around the hill, ready for use either as firewood or a palisade that could be erected in a few minutes. The knights and the Peloi tethered their horses nearby and
lounged around the foot of the hill while the Atans were evenly dispersed a bit further out under the trees. Sparhawk stood at the top of the hill surveying the progress of the work below. The ladies were gathered under a broad canopy erected on poles in the centre of the depressed basin on the hilltop. Stragen was strumming his lute and singing to them in his deep rich voice.

‘How’s it going down there?’ Talen asked, coming up to where Sparhawk stood.

‘It’s about as secure as Khalad can make it without being obvious about it,’ Sparhawk replied.

‘He’s awfully good, isn’t he?’ Talen said with a certain pride.

‘Your brother? Oh, yes. Your father trained him very well.’

‘It might have been nice to grow up with my brothers.’ Talen sounded a bit wistful. He shrugged. ‘But then…’ He peered out at the forest. ‘Any word from Engessa?’

‘Our friends are still out there.’

‘They’re going to attack, aren’t they?’

‘Probably. You don’t gather that many armed men in one place without having something military in mind.’

‘I like your plan here, Sparhawk, but I think it’s got a hole in it.’

‘Oh?’

‘Once they finally realise that we aren’t going to move from this spot, they might decide to wait and then come at us after dark. Fighting at night’s a lot different from doing it in the daytime, isn’t it?’

‘Usually, yes, but we’ll cheat.’

Talen gave him a quizzical look.

‘There are a couple of spells that brighten things up when you need to see.’

‘I keep forgetting about that.’

‘You might as well get used to it, Talen,’ Sparhawk
told him with a faint smile. ‘When we get back home, you’re going to start your novitiate.’

‘When did we decide that?’

‘Just now. You’re old enough, and if you keep on growing the way you have been lately, you’ll be big enough.’

‘Is magic hard to learn?’

‘You have to pay attention. It’s all done in Styric, and Styric’s a tricky language. If you use the wrong word, all sorts of things can go wrong.’

‘Thanks, Sparhawk. That’s all I need – something else to worry about.’

‘We’ll talk with Sephrenia when we get to Sarsos. Maybe she’ll agree to train you. Flute likes you, so she’ll forgive you if you make any mistakes.’

‘What’s Flute got to do with it?’

‘If Sephrenia trains you, you’ll be submitting your requests to Aphrael.’

‘Requests?’

‘That’s what magic is, Talen. You ask a God to do something for you.’

‘Praying?’ the boy asked incredulously.

‘Sort of.’

‘Does Emban know that you’re praying to a Styric Goddess?’

‘More than likely. The Church chooses to ignore the fact, though – for practical reasons.’

‘She’s a hypocrite then.’

‘I wouldn’t mention that to Emban, if I were you.’

‘Let me get this straight. If I get to be a Church Knight, I’ll be worshipping Flute?’

‘Praying to her, Talen. I didn’t say anything about worshipping.’

‘Praying, worshipping, what’s the difference?’

‘Sephrenia will explain it.’

‘She’s in Sarsos, you say?’

‘I didn’t say that.’ Sparhawk silently cursed his careless tongue.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact you did.’

‘All right, but keep it to yourself.’

‘That’s why we came overland, isn’t it?’

‘One of the reasons, yes. Haven’t you got something else to do?’

‘Not really, no.’

‘Go find something – because if you don’t, I will.’

‘You don’t have to get all huffy.’

Sparhawk gave him a steady stare.

‘All right, all right, don’t get excited. I’ll go entertain Danae and her cat.’

Sparhawk stood watching the boy as he returned to the festivities under the canopy. It was obviously time to start being a little careful around Talen. He was dangerously intelligent, and a slip of the tongue might give away things that were supposed to be kept private. The discussion had raised an issue, however. Sparhawk went back to the group gathered on the hilltop and took Berit aside. ‘Go tell the knights that if those people out there decide to wait until after dark to attack,
I’ll
take care of giving us light to work by. If we all try to do it at the same time, we might confuse things.’

Berit nodded.

Sparhawk considered it further. ‘And I’ll go talk with Kring and Engessa,’ he added. ‘We don’t want the Atans and the Peloi going into a panic if the sky suddenly lights up along about midnight tonight.’

‘Is that what you’re going to do?’ Berit asked.

‘It usually works out about the best in cases like this. One big light’s easier to control than several hundred little ones – and it disrupts the enemy’s concentration a lot more.’

Berit grinned. ‘It
would
be a little startling to be
creeping through the bushes and have the sun come back up again, wouldn’t it?’

‘A lot of battles have been averted by lighting up the night, Berit, and a battle averted is sometimes even better than one you win.’

‘I’ll remember that, Sparhawk.’

The afternoon wore on, and the party on the hilltop became a little strained. There were only so many things to laugh at, and only so many jokes to tell. The warriors around the base of the hill either spent their time attending to equipment or pretending to sleep.

Sparhawk met with the others about mid-afternoon out near the road.

‘If they don’t know by now that we aren’t going any farther today, they aren’t very bright,’ Kalten noted.

‘We
do
look a bit settled in, don’t we?’ Ulath agreed.

‘A suggestion, Sparhawk?’ Tynian offered.

‘Why do you always say that?’

‘Habit, I suppose. I was taught to be polite to my elders. Even the best of spells isn’t going to give us the same kind of light we’ll have before the sun goes down. We know they’re out there, we’re in position and we’re rested. Why don’t we push things a bit? If we can force them to attack now, we can fight them in daylight.’

‘How are you going to make somebody attack when he doesn’t want to?’ Patriarch Emban asked.

‘We start making obvious preparations, your Grace,’ Tynian replied. ‘It’s logical to start on the field fortifications about now anyway. Let’s put up the palisade around the foot of the hill, and start digging ditches.’

‘And cutting trees,’ Ulath added. ‘We could clear away some avenues leading out into the woods and pile all the tree trunks up where they’ll hinder anybody trying to come through the forest. If they’re going to
attack, let’s make them attack across open ground.’

It took a surprisingly short time. The logs for the fence around the base of the hill were already sharpened and stacked in neat piles where they were handy. Digging them in was an easy matter. The birch trees in the forest were all no more than ten inches thick at the base, and they fell quickly to the axes of the warriors and were dragged into the surrounding forest to form large, jumbled piles which would be virtually impossible to penetrate, even for men on foot.

Sparhawk and the others went back up to the hilltop to survey their preparations. ‘Why don’t they attack us now, before we’re ready?’ Emban tensely asked the knights.

‘Because it takes time to organise an attack, your Grace,’ Bevier explained. ‘The scouts have to run back and tell the generals what we’re doing; the generals have to sneak through the woods to have a look for themselves; and then they all have to get together and argue about what they’re going to do. They were planning an ambush. They aren’t really ready to attack fortified positions. The business of adjusting one’s thinking to a different tactical situation is what takes the longest.’

‘How long?’

‘It depends entirely on the personality of the man in charge. If his mind was really set on an ambush, it could take him as long as a week.’

‘He’s dead then, Bevier-Knight,’ Engessa told the Cyrinic tersely. ‘As soon as we saw the warriors in the woods I dispatched a dozen of my people to the garrison at Sarsos. If our enemy takes more than two days to make up his mind, he’ll have five thousand Atans climbing his back.’

‘Sound thinking, Atan Engessa,’ Tynian approved. He pondered it. ‘A thought, Sparhawk. If our friend out there gets all caught up in indecision, we can just
continue to strengthen our defences around this hill – ditches, sharpened stakes, the usual encumbrances. Each improvement we add will make him think things over that much longer – which will give us time to add more fortifications, which will make him think all the more. If we can keep him thinking for two days, the Atans from Sarsos will come up behind him and wipe out his force before he ever gets around to using it.’

‘Good point,’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘Let’s get to it.’

‘I thought that being a military person just involved banging on people with axes and swords,’ Emban conceded.

‘There’s a lot of that involved too, your Grace,’ Ulath smiled, ‘but it doesn’t hurt to outsmart your enemy a little too.’ He looked at Bevier. ‘Engines?’ he asked.

Bevier blinked. Ulath’s cryptic questions always took him by surprise for some reason.

‘As long as we have some time on our hands, we could erect some catapults on the hilltop. Attacking through a rain of boulders is always sort of distracting. Getting hit on the head with a fifty pound rock always seems to break a man’s concentration for some reason. If we’re going to set up for a siege, we might as well do it right.’ He looked around at them. ‘I still don’t like sieges though,’ he added. ‘I want everybody to understand that.’

The warriors set to work, and the ladies and the young men attending them renewed their festivities, although their hilarity was even more forced now.

Sparhawk and Kalten were re-enforcing the breastworks atop the hill. Since his wife and daughter were going to be inside those fortifications, their strength was a matter of more than passing interest to the prince consort.

The party under the pavilion had begun to show gaps, and Stragen was increasingly obliged to fill them with his lute.

‘He’s going to wear out his fingers,’ Kalten grunted, lifting another large rock into place.

‘Stragen enjoys attention,’ Sparhawk shrugged. ‘He’ll keep playing until the blood runs out from under his fingernails if there’s anybody around to listen.’

Stragen’s lute took up a very old air, and he began to sing again. Sparhawk didn’t really have much of an ear for music, but he had to admit that the Thalesian thief had a beautiful voice.

And then Baroness Melidere joined in. Her voice was a rich contralto that blended smoothly with Stragen’s baritone. Their duet was perfectly balanced, smooth and rich with the dark tones of their deeper voices. Sparhawk smiled to himself. The baroness was continuing her campaign. Once Aphrael had alerted him to the blonde girl’s designs on Stragen, Sparhawk could see dozens of artful little ploys she was using to keep her intended victim’s attention. He almost felt sorry for Stragen, but he concluded that Melidere would be good for him. The pair concluded their duet to loud applause. Sparhawk glanced toward the pavilion and saw Melidere lay one lingering hand almost caressingly on Stragen’s wrist. Sparhawk knew just how potent those accidental-seeming contacts were. Lillas had explained it to him once, and Lillas had been the world’s champion seductress – as probably half the men in Jiroch could have sworn to.

Then Stragen turned to another traditional air, and a new voice lifted in song. Kalten dropped the rock he had been lifting. It fell onto his foot, but he did not even wince. The voice was that of an angel, high, sweet, and as clear as glass. It soared effortlessly toward the upper reaches of the soprano range. It was a lyric voice,
uncontaminated by the subtle variations of the coloratura, and it seemed as untaught as bird-song.

It was Ehlana’s maid, Alean. The doe-eyed girl, always so quiet and unassuming, stood in the centre of the Pavilion, her face luminous as she sang.

Sparhawk heard Kalten snuffle, and he was astonished to see great tears streaming down his friend’s face as the blond Pandion wept unashamed.

Perhaps his recent conversation with the Child Goddess had alerted Sparhawk to the potentials of intuition, and he suddenly knew, without knowing exactly
how
he knew, that
two
campaigns were in progress – and, moreover, that the one being waged by Baroness Melidere was the more overt and blatant. He carefully concealed a smile behind his hand.

‘Lord, that girl’s got a beautiful voice!’ Kalten said in stunned admiration as Alean concluded her song. ‘God!’ he said then, doubling over to clutch at the foot he had unwittingly injured five minutes earlier.