A Time of Omens - Katharine Kerr [127]
“It’s Erddyr, all right! Open those gates!”
The servants came pouring into the ward to help the night watch pull open the heavy iron-bound gates. Torchlight flared in the ward as the army filed in, the horses stumbling blindly toward shelter. Wrapped in a cloak over her night dress, Lady Melynda rushed out of the broch just as Lord Erddyr dismounted and threw his reins to a groom.
“Your husband’s come home defeated and dishonored,” Erddyr said. “But the war’s not over yet.”
“Well and good, my lord,” Melynda said calmly. “Where are the wounded?”
“Back in Degedd’s dun, but get the servants to feeding these men, will you?”
Yraen found Rhodry down at the gates. He’d dismounted to lead his horse inside and spare it his weight for the last few yards. When Yraen caught his arm, all the silver dagger could do was turn toward him with a blind, almost drunken smile.
“I’ll tend that horse,” Yraen said. “Go get something to eat.”
When he finished with the horse, Yraen went back into the great hall, filled with men—some still eating, most asleep. At the table of honor the noble lords ate silently while Lady Melynda watched them with frightened eyes. Yraen picked his way through and joined Rhodry, sitting on the floor in the curve of the wall with Renydd, who was slowly eating a piece of bread as if the effort were too much for him.
“Why did you lose?” Yraen said to Rhodry.
“What a comfort my friend is,” Rhodry said. “From his mouth no excuses or blustering to lift a man’s shame, only the nastiest of truths.” He paused to yawn. “We lost because there were more of them than us, that’s all.”
“Well and good, then. I’m cursed glad to see you alive, you bastard.”
Rhodry grinned and leaned back against the wall.
“We comported ourselves brilliantly on the field,” Rhodry said. “Renydd and me slew seventy men each, but there were thousands ranged against us.”
“Horseshit,” Renydd said with his mouth full.
“It’s not horseshit.” Rhodry yawned violently. “There were rivers of blood on the field, and corpses piled up like mountains. Never will that grass grow green again, but it’ll come up scarlet, all for grief at that slaughter.”
Yraen leaned forward and grabbed his arm: he was beginning to realize what it meant when Rhodry babbled this way.
“And the clash and clang was like thunder,” Rhodry went on. “We swept in like ravens and none could stand before us. We trampled them like grass—”
“That’s enough!” Yraen gave his arm a hard shake. “Rhodry, hold your tongue! You’re half-mad with the defeat.”
Rhodry stared at him, his eyes half-filled with tears.
“My apologies,” Rhodry said. “You’re right enough.”
He curled up on the straw like a dog and fell asleep straightaway, without even another yawn.
All that day, the army slept wherever it could find room, scattered through the dun. Before he went to his bed, Erddyr sent men from the fort guard out with messages to the duns of the various allies, warning their fort guards to be ready to join their lords. Other men rode out to scout and keep a watch for Adry’s army on the road. The servants went through the stored supplies. The army had lost all its carts, blankets, provisions, and, worst of all, its extra weapons. Not all the scrounging in the world could produce more than twenty javelins for the entire army. Yraen, of course, still had a pair, those he’d brought with him when he’d left home, but he gave one to Rhodry and hoarded the other.
“Here’s your saddlebags, too,” Yraen said. “I had no trouble with them.”
“Good. Huh. I’d say our enemy can’t track the whistle by dweomer then, but if that’s true, how by the hells did he know I had the ugly thing in the first place?”
“Well, was there someone else who could have told him?”
Rhodry swore under his breath.
“There was, at that, and I’ll wager it was our lovely Alshandra, all right,