Crossing Over - Anna Kendall [60]
And more.
And more.
They formed double lines down the room, triple lines, four abreast. The noise was deafening. The queen’s advisors glanced sideways at each other. And still they came.
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
Bee-la kor-so tarel ah!
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
Now the room was full of men pounding their cudgels on the floor, singing their wild rough song. Only an aisle remained, stretching from throne to door, and down it came six more boys with crowns of twigs and red-tattooed foreheads. Three beat drums and three played string instruments that sounded like cats being strangled. Behind them walked more men, two abreast, with short capes made of gray feathers. These wore their knives in elaborately beaded belts, with more beads braided into their long hair. The musicians—if you could call them that—joined the singer beside the queen’s courtiers, and the warrior captains parted to join their men. The singing grew in intensity, the cat-strangling lutes were plucked faster, the cudgels beat in double time on the stone.
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
Sol-ek see-ma taryn ah!
Ay-la ay-la mechel ah!
A single figure appeared in the doorway and walked toward the throne. As he advanced, the warriors fell to one knee before him, as they had not knelt to the queen. Lord Robert’s face darkened and his hand moved toward his sword. The chieftain was huge, a giant with sun-leathered skin and dark hair going gray, his braids twined with beads. His cape was made of feathers of every possible bird, of all possible colors. At the exact moment that the chieftain reached the dais, all noise stopped.
He gazed at the queen and went down on one knee. But he did not bow his head, and his gaze met hers with a proud vitality. He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen, as if pieces of sky had been beaded into his head. I couldn’t look away from that fierce blue, and for a long moment, neither could she. Whole rivers flowed between them.
Then he had risen and was saying something in his guttural language. A man stepped from behind the throne. I recognized him: the small, sour-faced man in black velvet that had come to the queen all those weeks ago. He was no less sour-faced now. He knelt, rose, and said, “Your Grace, Solek, son of Taryn, comes to your court, as agreed, to offer the services of his army, for the payment agreed.”
Queen Caroline said, “Tell him he is welcome to the court of The Queendom.”
The small man translated.
She continued, “Lord Solek is—”
“They do not use that title, Your Grace,” the small man said.
He had interrupted the queen. One never interrupted the queen. But she let it pass, her eyes still locked with the stranger’s. “He is in my queendom now, with the title I choose to give him. Tell him that I will have rooms prepared for him and his captains in the palace, but that I deeply regret we are unable to house his entire army.”
After the translation, the stranger gave a great shout of laughter, as startling in that formal room as a rampaging bear, followed by a short speech.
The translator said, “The Chieftain says that, of course, his men will camp beyond the island, and he with them.”
I thought of the villages that surrounded the island, each with its own neat cottages, its little green, its sheep and chickens and pretty girls. These savage warriors—so many of them! and perhaps even more outside—were the roughest-looking men I had ever seen. They scarcely looked like men at all, with their shaggy fur tunics, huge cudgels pounding like hoofs on the floor, feathered capes, and twig-topped helmets. And what were those metal sticks each man wore on his shoulder?
The queen said, her voice now lowered so that even I, closer than anyone except Lord Robert, had to strain to hear. “Eammons . . . is there a polite way to tell him that the village cottages—and the village women—are not available to his men?”
“No,” Eammons said sourly. “There is no way. It would