But at last the Dragon awakened, and so did a mysterious darkness deep within the heart of Acadu. The Forest Kings, attuned to the songs of angels of the woods, no less the Law of the One, began to hear other voices. They quareled with each other and called up armies to battle to the death. Then warlords overthrew the kings, and tribal chieftains rebelled against the warlords; clan opposed clan, until the only safety was to be found in one's family or village, and anarchy spread. During the Dark Years, Tarmond told us, Acadian killed Acadian until a land rich in people and goodness became poor.
And then, under the guise of helping this torn realm, the Red Dragon began sending missions to Acadu: mine masters to search for new veins of gold; moneylenders to give out coin and restore a long-ruined trade; soldiers to protect whatever village or demesne requested their aid. And he sent in as well the Red Priests, to minister to the spirits of the miners, moneylenders and soldiers, and to any Acadian who desired instruction in the Way of the Dragon.
'It was the accursed Red Priests,' Tarmond told us as we walked through the woods, 'who brought these evil times upon us. They promised that if we Acadians followed the Way of the Dragon, we would gain riches, even immortality. But it is the Law of the One that immortality is the province of the Elijin and Galadin.'
Here I looked at Kane, but my silent friend only glared at me with his black, ancient eyes.
'Some there were,' Tarmond continued, 'who said that the word of the Priests was abomination, and that they should be put to death. The Keepers of the Forest, they called themselves: the greatest huntsmen of Acadu. They began hunting down the priests as they would stags or boar. But the Priests are no easy prey. Morjin sent in more soldiers to protect them, along with the moneylenders and miners. And he sent the Shadow Men, who have neither eyes nor hearts. It's said that they can freeze a man's blood with the whisper of their breath and suck out his soul before they eat him alive.'
At the mention of these demon-like men who could only be the dreaded Grays, Maram shuddered and wiped the sweat from his neck. And he said to Tarmond, 'And did no other Acadians join in this rebellion?'
Tarmond smiled sadly and said, 'Many did - of course we did. We still do. But the fiercer we fight, the more bestial the Crucifiers become and the more terrible their deeds.'
'But is there no one of royal lineage,' I asked, 'who might rally an army against your invaders?'
Tarmond shook his massive head. 'In Varkeva, Urwin the Lame calls himself Waldgrave but he is under the spell of Arch Yatin, the reddest of the Red Priests, if you know what I mean. Any leaders of true heart and stout bows, the Priests find out and murder as they come forth.'
'But how?' I persisted. 'The Priests are few and your people are many.'
'Not so many as you might hope,' Tarmond said. He rubbed the deep creases cut into his weather-beaten skin. 'And they are afraid. And
not
of just the Red Priests, but of each other. You see, no Acadian can know who has joined the Order of the Dragon, and who has not.'
With a heavy sigh, as he drove the tip of his bow into the forest floor in rhythm with his heavy steps., Tarmond told us of this secret society of men and women who had given their allegiance to the Red Dragon. They were the deluded and the depraved, Tarmond said, who believed the Red Dragon's lies. They participated in the Priests' secret rites of sacrificing innocents and drinking their blood; some aspired to be anointed as acolytes and even become Priests themselves. As Tarmond spoke of the elevation of one Edric, a man of his district, to this exalted if vile rank, I thought of Salmelu, my fellow Valari who had betrayed his own people and nearly murdered me with an arrow tipped with kirax.
'It is fear that undoes us,' Tarmond said. He suggested that we stop by a stream and take a bit of lunch, and so we did. He shared with us a loaf of bread and a mutton joint stowed in his pack; we cut wedges of cheese for him from a fresh wheel sealed in red wax, and gave him handfuls of raspberries, too. 'A man's own brother might be a spy for the Order of the Dragon; a woman might surrender up her own daughter if pressed hard enough. Few there are who can face the Red Priests' fire-irons or being mounted on a cross.'
I chewed at the tough mutton as I regarded Tarmond's worn yew bow; although he bore no sword, there was steel inside him. I said, 'And yet you fight the Priests, don't you?'
'What else is there to do?' he said, brushing crumbs from his beard. 'We fight, but too late and too few. And we do not fight as one. I, myself, was chosen to journey to Riversong, Greenwood and other villages, in order to speak in favor of electing a true Waldgrave to raise an army. But these days, no one will trust anyone from another village, and few enough from their own.'
He stood up and shouldered on his pack again. 'We're good people, we Acadians, with good hearts. But too afraid.'
After that we began walking through the forest again. We passed by farms whose occupants might have known Tarmond, but they called out no greeting to him. With each rebuff or stare of shamed silence, with every suspicious look these freeholders cast at us, I heard Tarmond mutter to himself: 'We're a good people, we are -at heart, a good, strong people.'
Soon we neared Gladwater, at the juncture of the Tir and a much smaller river that ran into it. It was tiny village, as Tarmond described it, with a mill, a granary, a dock for a handful of fishing boats, a couple of dozen houses and little else. Its largest building was the longhouse, built of great oak logs, at the edge of the woods. In good times, the villagers of Gladwater used it as a meeting place where they might take ale and good company together; in bad times, they might take shelter behind its thick timbers and throw open the shutters of the longhouse's arrow ports.
'We're almost there,' Tarmond said to us as we pushed through the rather thick bracken in this pan of the forest. He pointed through what seemed an endless expanse of trees ahead of us. 'Through these maples and over a rise, and we'll come upon the longhouse. I'll stand you all to a glass of good ale, the children excepted, of course.'
At this offer, Maram's eyes gleamed, and a new strength seemed to course through his legs. He breathed in deeply and said, 'We must be close - I can hear the river.'
So could I. Through the green wall of trees before us came the sound of rushing water. I smelled the moistness in the air. And then the wind shifted and I smelled something else, too, which pleased me less well: the reek of death. Altaru let loose a terrible whinny, and I had to grip his reins to keep him from rearing up and striking out with his hooves.
'Ho, friend,' I said to him, stroking his neck. 'Quiet now, quiet.'
Tarmond, I saw, had frozen like a piece of stone as he stared into the woods. And then he said, 'I'm old and my senses have dulled, but there's a foulness in the air.'
Upon the wind came a high, faint keening, as of a child calling out to his mother. I closed my eyes as waves of pain and fear broke inside my chest.
Tarmond placed his hand on my shoulder and asked me, 'Would you climb to the top of this hill with me?'
I nodded my head. Then Kane and Atara came forward with bows in hand, and the four of us hiked up the easy slope to the top of the rise. We stood behind the trees looking down at the muddy brown Tir and the little village built on its banks. It was much as Tarmond had described. But the smoldering ruins of two of the houses sent up plumes of dark smoke, and carrion birds circled in the air above.
The great timbers of the longhouse were the cured trunks of trees, and its three stone chimneys sent up curls of smoke. Men surrounded it. Although their round shields showed a repeating motif of small, painted red dragons, these were surely no Ikurian knights or Dragon Guard or any of Morjin's best soldiers. Mercenaries, they must be, I thought. Their leader, was a stout man wearing full armor, gripping a broadsword in his hand. A yellow surcoat, emblazoned with a rather small dragon, draped from his shoulders to his knees.
'It is Harwell the Burner!' Tarmond gasped out in a fierce whisper. 'From Silver Glade, five leagues from here. He was one of the first of us to join the Order of the Dragon. It is said that Arch Yatin himself knighted him in reward.'
Without another word, Tarmond strung his bow, whipped an arrow from his quiver and fitted its feathered shaft to his bowstring. He stared down at Harwell as he made ready to draw his bow.
'Hold!' I whispered to him. 'This is no way to protect your people!'
'What other way is there?' he whispered back. 'Do you
pilgrims
intend to take part in our fight?'
Kane's dark eyes fairly shouted out a great 'no' as he stared at me. Then Daj came running up from behind us, distracting our attention from the longhouse. His slight form bounded over branches and fallen trees with all the grace of a young buck. He gasped out, 'I want to
see.'
He knelt beside me in the bracken and looked down at the men besieging the longhouse. Four of the soldiers stood guard by a wagon bearing black-coated buckets and two barrels of what looked to be pitch. The other soldiers were busy with axes and hammers, nailing wooden planks together. One of their constructions was nearly finished: a sort of small wall of wood, three feet wide and six feet high, with handles nailed into its back and struts near its base to keep it from falling over.
'What is it?' Daj whispered to me.
'It's a mantelet,' I told him. I explained how a soldier might stand behind it and work it closer to his objective, using it as a shield against arrows or other missiles. 'It would seem that they intend to fire the house.'
Toward this end, one of the archers suddenly ignited a cloth wrapped around the tip of one of his arrows. He loosed it in a low, flaming arc that found its terminus at the longhouse's roof. The arrow buried itself in the roof and continued to bum. But the wooden shingles, moist from the recent rains, were not so easy to set on fire.
From one of the dark crosses cut into the house, an arrow hissed forth. It struck into the bark of one of the trees that Harwell's archers stood behind.
'When the mantelets are completed,' I said to Daj, 'the soldiers will go forward and soak the house in pitch.'
And then. I thought, the house's timbers would bum like match-sticks.
'Back!' I whispered. 'Let us hold council.'
I laid my hand on Tarmond's shoulder and urged him back down the hill a few dozen yards. Liljana and Maram came up to join us. I quickly explained to them what was about to befall on the other side of the hill.
'I don't like what we saw of that house,' Kane growled out. His black eyes drilled into mine. 'And I like what I see now even less.'
Just then the breeze died to a whisper, and from below our hill the muffled wail of a baby filled the air,
'We can't just leave those people to the Crucifiers!' I said to Kane.
'People die!' Kane snarled. 'That's the way of the world! There are only four of us. Five, if we count this old man.'
The look on Tarmond's face told me that I could indeed count on him to fire his arrows straight and true.
For the hundredth time, I thought of King Mohan's words to me: that no one could see the results of a deed and thereby judge its virtue. A deed, I thought, was either right or wrong. I said to Kane, 'We might not live even to reach the Red Desert. But we are alive now to help these people.'
'It's not our fight!' Kane growled at me. 'Would you risk everything for the sake of strangers?'
The acridness of smoke recalled the ruins of my father's castle and all those who had been butchered or burnt inside. I said to Kane, 'It
is
our fight! And these villagers
are
our people - all people are!'
Kane was not a man easily to accept defeat, but he stared at me for a few long moments, then finally bowed his head,
I looked at Maram then, and the fire in my heart leaped into his. He said, 'Ah, I suppose that if I
do
flee, I'll be the only one?' He drew his sword in a burst of bravura and ringing steel that I prayed no one would hear. His smile warmed me like a draught of brandy.
Atara had strung her bow and stood with an arrow in her hand. She said that she had 'seen' four archers on the far side of the longhouse, hiding in a grove of trees.
I sent Kane on a long flanking manuever: through the woods around the house and into the grove of trees sheltering the archers that Atara had descried. Tarmond walked beside me as Maram, Atara and I led our horses up to the top of the rise. I stationed Tarmond behind a stout maple. Maram and I drew forth our longbows and strung them. And then we waited.
A coldness burned through my belly as if I had drunk a gallon of ice-water.
'My hands are sweating!' Maram whispered to me. 'I'm no good at this!'
'You took a third at the tournament,' I reminded him. 'You're one of the finest archers in the Morning Mountains!'
'But we're not
in
the Morning Mountains. And this is different - we're shooting at
men.
They can shoot back!'
When enough time had passed to allow Kane to reach the grove of trees on the far side of the longhouse and deal with the four archers there as only Kane could, at last I hissed, 'Ready! Targets!'
Atara could work her recurved bow from a kneeling position, but Maram and I had to stand along with Tarmond to draw arrows and sight upon our targets below. These were four archers standing behind trees with their backs to us
.
I whispered, 'Draw!'
As one, we held stiff our left arms as we drew the feathered shafts of our arrows to our ears.
'Loose!'
The crack of our four bowstrings seemed as loud as a thunderclap; our four arrows shot out through the air. Tarmond's and Atara's struck dead true at the center of two of the mercenary archers' backs. They cried out in their death agony. My man, perhaps sensing my murderous intent, moved just as I loosed my arrow, which drove through his armor oft center and perhaps pierced a lung. He, too, cried out a hideous, bubbling scream. Maram's arrow missed altogether, thudding into the trunk of a tree.