Derek, on the other hand, had ceased to be an option, his armor too bright from polishing too much and too long, his eyes too bright from something far more unsettling than wine or the fever of approaching battle. He had taken to winding a horn in imitation of Huma, and at all hours of the night the footmen were called on alert, equipped and assembled to find only that the alarm had been raised by Lord Derek himself, alarmed by what he considered the unnatural closeness — or sometimes distance — of the red moon and the silver. And the men did not complain loudly, nor comment too loudly when Lord Derek wore the horns of a stag on his helmet, as if in recalling the old divine contest between the hero and the quarry, he had chosen to play both the hunter and the hunted.
It was one night, not long before his riding forth, pursuing a disaster of which you have no doubt heard, that I was awakened once again by the sound of the horn winding. I armed myself, thinking continually,perhaps this time, perhaps he will not cry wolf forever, and moved through a courtyard as silent as if nothing had happened, the footmen crouched around the fires sleeping or drinking or dicing, or drinking and dicing themselves to sleep, all as if the night were soundless and as safe as any other. And of all these, only Breca watched the battlements where, outlined in red and silver, a glittering figure all metal and antler sounded a lonely horn.
I stood beside Breca, who never took his eyes from thesolitary figure as he leaned on the pommel of his two handed sword, chuckling a dry laugh as desolate as the winter outside the fortress and, glancing sideways at me, murmuring, that one has a thousand deaths on him. he has been dismounted by the winter and the ice and the waiting and there is not a thing in the measure to cover this, so they will do nothing.
And when I ventured that perhaps Lord Derek had lost some faculties, but that the most brilliant of generals often seemed at sea in the times of peace and waiting, Breca asked me where I had read such things, for you must have read them.
This one is not only at sea but capsized, he said. For they all are at sea, crown, sword, or rose, and this one at his best had not enough sense to pour piss from a boot if the directions was on the heel. and this, he said, pausing to light his pipe, the sword still upright beneath his elbow, point to the ground, this is the one they will surely pick to lead us.
And so in the early days of the siege, before Lord Derek unraveled completely and rode off into death and the horrible oblivion of legends, we spent our time watching the battlements and the dwindling food, looking for smoke on the horizon and listening to the sound of the horn by night and the rumor by day that somewhere, forgotten within the bowels of the fortress, lay something the kender had stumbled upon in his curious wanderings, something that could — if time and place and desperation were to meet — alter the course of the siege.
It is tiring to remember this all, Bayard, for already I grow unaccustomed to the old habit of seeing, and though it would seem that the memory of vision would be that much more strongly burned into the thoughts of the newly blind, when you lose the habits of seeing you often lose the memories of sight, for the motions of the eyes and the mind grow rusty and with them the thoughts established before through those motions.
And what is more, the light must be fading, night must be approaching, for the warmth that settles upon the sill of my window is fading now and I smell smoke and burning tallow as I face into the room. Some things there are for which the night should have no ear, and among those are the ride of Lord Derek and the disasters that followed. So again in the morning, if my nurse will only remain patient — patient and undeniably kind — I shall recount the darkest leg of the journey.
THREE
It was rumor that passed among us once more, rumor again of movement and of battle, but this time there seemed more substance to it, for on the battlements and in the chambers the knights were silent, the only storm arising from a conference room high in the tower, where Alfred and Derek and Sturm waged a war of words and of rising voices, an occasional shout or a fragment of speech caught when the wind died and the sound descended to the courtyards and the barracks of the fortress.
We could make nothing of this debate above us, these loud quarrels like the distant cries of predatory birds, but it was different from the nights of the winding horn, the sudden preparations for the false alarms, for now we did nothing but wait — no preparations, no rumors of what was taking place beyond something is taking place — and the fortress incredibly silent, as though the horses were lost in thought and the vermin had quit the rafters and the middens by instinct, going Huma knows where into the winter darkness.
I awoke on the second night to the jostling of Heros. He was fully armed, having dressed himself while I slept, as though there was no time to waken a squire (or as I came to see later, as though somehow in arming himself he took part in a strange penance, having last performed the task on the night of vigil before his knighthood ceremonies).
Derek is riding out, he said flatly, averting his eyes as my thoughts rose out of sleep, constructing once again from the bare walls and the damp cold of the chamber just where it was I had awakened, at first thinking that Heros was announcing retreat, surrender, abandonment, then realizing it was none of these and all of these at the same time — that an attack too monstrous to be ill-advised and too foolish to be heroic was set to begin, and that in the courtyards of the fortress the footmen were marshalling.
There was nothing to be said, nothing to be asked except, and you?
His eyes still avoided me. sturm feels that the defense of the fortress remains the defense of Palanthas.I agree with Sturm.
But not agreement, I thought. Nothing more than sheer and deliberate survival, if not a lasting survival then the weeks, the days, or even the hours that staying behind will give us. That is why you have armed yourself without recourse to squire and to ceremony. That is why you are glad that the room is dark, Sir Heros, Solamnic Knight of the sword. But there was no blame in this, Bayard, no blame except for the old and honored folly that would make a man ashamed to breathe when his companions breathed no longer, and with that blame what the blame could not banish — a pride in Sir Heros that he could feel the shame, that such folly was both old and honored.
From the window of the corridor they looked diminished, frail in their armor and swords and pikes as they assembled, stamped the cold from their feet, and fell into line behind the mounted knights. I could single out Breca in the foremost column, standing a head taller than those around him, and once I believe he glanced up at the window to where I was standing, the flatness of his eyes apparent even from a distance, even through the shadows of the wall and the dark air of the morning. And perhaps because of that darkness there was no expression I could see on his face, but there is an expression I remember, may have imagined in this permanent and greater darkness from which I speak to you.
For if an expression could be featureless, void of fear and of dread and finally of hope, containing if anything only a sort of resignation and resolve, that was Breca's expression and those of his companions, saying (if such a blankness, a nothing can say anything), this is not as bad as I imagined but worse than I expected, and nothing more than that when the doomed gates opened — the very gates he had called indefensible a short week before he marched out onto the plains and into the lifting darkness.