He said, “Your feelings have been remarkable of late, have they not, Lady Mienthe? Both in their strength and
then in their direction. We are assured that you are not a mage. However, even so, I think it very likely that you perceive the turn and tilt of the world.” He paused.
Mienthe stared at him blankly. She clearly had no idea what it would be like to perceive forces, balances and events pivoting, and just as clearly doubted that she felt any such thing.
But Beguchren was confident of it.
He turned gravely toward the Arobern. “Lord King,” he said formally, “I must advise against your suggestion, reasonable and wise as it seems. I believe the honored Lady Mienthe should return to Tiefenauer with the honored Tan, with all reasonable alacrity.”
“Huh. I thought only to keep you safe—” the Arobern said to Mienthe. He glanced at Beguchren and shrugged. “But very well! You will assuredly go west, honored lady.”
Beguchren said to his king, “I will speak for you to Iaor Safiad. I swear to you, I will not permit any harm to come to your son.”
“I depend upon it,” the Arobern growled. “I cannot give you many men, nor can I give you Gereint Enseichen. I will leave you—hah!—I will leave you Lady Tehre.
She
will make the Safiad listen to your voice. You must make him understand he must not press carelessly forward, that I have not set myself against him, that he must not interfere with me.” The king paused.
“I understand you very well,” Lord Beguchren said gently.
“Of course you do,” agreed the Arobern, and swung around, waving for his officers to come hear his commands.
* * *
Iaor Safiad, if he left Lord Bertaud in Tihannad to find such accommodation with the griffins as he might—and Beguchren wished the Feierabianden lord joy of the effort—would very likely race south to meet the Linularinan offense. Beguchren remained convinced that the Safiad would come down the Nejeied. From Minas Ford, he could angle west toward Kames and from there strike directly toward Tiefenauer, exactly the route the Arobern had taken. True, there were poor roads and farmer’s tracks all the way. But going that way, whatever Linularinan troops one might meet would lack support from across the river. This was what Beguchren thought the Safiad would do, thus driving straight against the rear of the Casmantian army, quite possibly leading to a very unfortunate outcome. Thus the urgent necessity of preventing him from pursuing any such course.
But if Iaor Safiad chose to ride south along the Nejeied at all, he would certainly have in mind the broad, open countryside west of Minas Spring, where the little Sepes divided from the larger Nejeied. This was the ideal place to rest his men and the fine Feierabianden horses.
Thus, this was where Beguchren set his own men, just past dawn on the day following their arrival in Feierabiand. He arranged them right across the middle of the open land, where the last of the precipitous hills leveled out to gentle pasturelands before reaching the river. It was a stupid position if he had meant to offer serious battle, especially with so few men. If he had actually intended to fight the Safiad, he would have wanted to arrange his men a fraction more northerly, where the narrow road lay between woodlands on the east and the river on the
west. He would have set archers in the woods, so that Iaor Safiad would have been forced to bring his men through withering fire in order to come at his lines of spearmen. So his officers—two captains, each with a half-strength company—earnestly told him, unnecessarily. They and Lady Tehre had joined Beguchren under the awning of his tent, to look over the lines once more and review the plan.
“The point is not to fight,” Beguchren said gently, “but to hold Iaor Safiad from pursuing the Arobern in error. Or committing other acts in error.” Lady Tehre looked blank, which probably indicated that she was considering something entirely unrelated to what Beguchren had just said. But both the captains nodded, even more earnestly than they had explained how their men should be arranged. They were not stupid men. They knew very well the possible error to which Beguchren referred.
“But how are we to hold the Safiad if we cannot fight him?” the senior captain asked. “And should we not
prepare
to fight wholeheartedly, in case all else fails? Or, if all else fails, are we to prepare to yield this ground and our men and allow the Safiad through?” He plainly did not much care for this idea.
“We would much prefer not to yield,” Beguchren conceded. “One fears that events in the Delta may become altogether too delicate to allow even the best-intentioned interference from without. Possibly Iaor Safiad will give me his word to allow our king a free hand, but I think that unlikely.”
Both captains nodded; one of them laughed grimly.
Beguchren barely smiled. “Just so. So we shall prefer to delay Iaor Safiad past the likelihood of any great
interference. We should prefer to hold him entirely. But we will first show him a face that may make him pause to reflect, rather than merely gather his forces for an assault. We shall assuredly not draw the first bow.” He glanced from one man to the other and added without emphasis, “Indeed, you may warn your men that I will personally see to it that any man who shoots without the command is bound under the
geas
.”
Lady Tehre looked up at that, suddenly attentive, frowning. Both captains paled. “No one will draw without leave,” the senior said earnestly. “We assure you, my lord.”
“Indeed, I am certain of it,” murmured Beguchren. “Now, if we should be
compelled
to fight, we shall hope Lady Tehre may compensate for our poor disposition of forces.”
The captains glanced at each other and then, with the greatest respect, at Lady Tehre. They were northern men; that was one reason the Arobern had left them with Beguchren. They had seen the Great Wall.
“Well, but,” said Lady Tehre, worried, “there is no stone here to break; the mountains are a great distance away. I think too far.”
The lady was perched on a camp chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap, a few strands of her dark hair curling down beside her face. She looked fragile and feminine and markedly more beautiful than she had six years ago. Marriage to Gereint had suited her very well.
She said now, “I can tear up the road under their horses, to be sure, my lord, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop them, do you think, if they are determined? This soft black soil is very deep here along the river. I don’t
know what I could do with it.” A tiny crease appeared between her fine eyebrows as she slipped into a maker’s reverie. “Soft earth might actually
flow
, in a sense, rather like very thick molasses,” she murmured. “I wonder…”
Beguchren left the lady to consider how deep soil might flow like a liquid and said to the captains, without the slightest fear he would distract her, “I expect the Safiad to make his appearance, in considerable force, quite soon. Today, tomorrow, most likely not so late as the day after. Suppose he approaches this very afternoon. If we cannot halt him entirely, I think we must delay him at least three days.” After that, if the Wall had held so long, it would probably break. At that point Iaor Safiad would have to forget about the Delta and set his men against the griffins. If that happened, Beguchren intended to support the Feierabianden king with his own men. Provided he had any left, which he would not if he had been forced to use them in battle. He did not intend to have events come to that.
He said merely, “We do not wish our king to find himself pressed from the rear when he has urgent matters to which he must attend elsewhere. We most particularly do not wish him forced to engage Iaor Safiad personally. Given the possibility of unfortunate errors attending that sort of engagement, even if they had been previously avoided.”
Again, both captains nodded. One of them murmured, “No, indeed, my lord,” in a fervent tone that made Beguchren suspect the man had young sons of his own, and sufficient imagination to flinch from the picture this statement called to mind.
“We shall hope, however, to persuade the Safiad to
hold using nothing more forceful than moral suasion,” Beguchren said firmly, and dismissed the captains. As they drew away, he overheard one of them murmur to the other, “Well, my lord is the man for moral suasion, if anyone is,” and the other answer, “He might bid the river flow backward and have it comply, but an offended king is likely to prove harder to turn than a river.”
This summed the situation up tolerably well. Beguchren, too, would have much preferred not to be forced to depend wholly on his own personal persuasiveness. Lady Tehre was a weapon, but it was not weapons that would win this particular argument—not if it could be won at all.
He could not help but recall, as sometimes he did rather too vividly, that once his usefulness to his king had not been limited to the fluency of his tongue and the persuasiveness of his arguments. Sighing, he rose—stiffly, for he was no longer a young man—and, leaving Lady Tehre to contemplate the possibilities inherent in this gentle pastureland, went to once more look over the arrangements he had made.
The King of Feierabiand rode south along the river road and out into the broad pastureland just after noon. Scouts had warned Beguchren, so he had his men properly drawn up. The formality of their disposal made the thinness of their lines all the more apparent, which was not accidental. Nevertheless, they made a fine, aggressive display, with all their neat uniforms and their helms polished and their spears neatly parallel. The spear-and-falcon banner of the Casmantian king flew over their heads, sapphire and purple.
Only the officers were on horseback, and they would dismount if the Feierabianden troops rode forward, for there were certain to be horse-callers among the Feierabianden ranks. No Casmantian, whether soldier or officer, could possibly trust himself to even the best-trained horse. The long Casmantian spears, made by the best weaponsmiths in the world, were meant to compensate for this Feierabianden advantage. Ordinarily they might do so, though today, with so few men, and those arranged in long lines rather than a powerful defensive block, they would never compensate sufficiently if it came to battle.
Iaor Safiad had clearly had scouts of his own out ahead of his main force, for he did not seem surprised by what he found in the open country along the river. His men filed off the road and formed up in their own lines, broader and far thicker than the Casmantian lines, for this was the Safiad’s main force, all that could be gathered hastily. Feierabiand was accustomed to having an uneasy neighbor on either side, and so that was a large proportion of all the male population, townsmen and farmers alike. The Feierabianden army might possess relatively few professional soldiers, but its militia was large, experienced, and swiftly available. And mounted. Feierabiand was proud of its horses and knew very well what a powerful advantage they possessed in their mounted companies. They rode to battle with other creatures as well: Hawks and even eagles perched on more than one shoulder, and the birds were greatly outnumbered by mastiffs with powerful shoulders and even more powerful jaws.
To be sure, though Beguchren might lack horses and dogs, he did have Lady Tehre by his side, and she was a weapon more to be valued than any number of spears.
He asked her, “How much are we outnumbered, do you think?”
“Hmm?” The lady was mounted on a pretty bay mare. She wore a practical traveling dress with split skirts, a set of copper bangles around one wrist, and an abstracted expression. “Not much above four to one,” she said, glancing casually across the field. “Four and a fraction, I believe. About four and a tenth. You know, I don’t believe there’s much to do with all this deep soil after all.”
“Oh?” said Beguchren.
“No, I think the thing to do is snap all their bows. Or perhaps their arrows. The bows themselves are quite resilient to breaking, you know, especially at these cool temperatures, but they will very likely break if the arrows are broken just as their strings are released.”
“Ah,” said Beguchren.
“Although the timing in that case would certainly need to be very precise, even if they shoot in volley,” Lady Tehre added reflectively. “Perhaps it would be better to think about—”
“Please do nothing at all until it is quite clear that the Feierabianden force is actually attacking,” said Beguchren. “And I would greatly prefer it if, in that case, you do as little as seems consistent with a reasonable possibility of success.”
The lady’s gaze sharpened. After a moment, she smiled. “I understand,” she said.
Beguchren returned a small smile of his own, confident that for all her apparent absentmindedness, she did.
He rode out alone across the field toward the Feierabianden lines—rode, because it showed both confidence and peaceable intent to ride a horse within distance of the
Feierabianden horse-callers, and because the Casmantian commander could hardly walk on foot across the mud and grasses, and most of all because he needed the horse’s height and beauty to make a proper show. The horse was a particularly fine white mare, not large, but pretty and elegant, with blue ribbons braided into her mane and tail for the occasion. Beguchren wore white to match her, embroidered with blue and set about with pearls. Together they would make a brilliant show, which was one skill Beguchren still owned, for all he had lost.
Iaor Safiad sat his own horse, a plain bay with good shoulders and powerful quarters and not a single ribbon, in the center of the Feierabianden lines. He did not ride out to meet Beguchren. Nor, which might have been more likely, did he send any man of his to ride out. He brought his horse forward only a few paces and then waited, compelling Beguchren to come all the way to him.