Days of Air and Darkness - Katharine Kerr [149]
“My apologies, my lord.”
“You’re forgiven.” Erddyr wiped his forehead with the side of his hand. “You’d best go draw your rations. The sun’s getting itself up in the blasted sky and all that.”
“So it is. Think they’ll attack today?”
“Who knows? I wouldn’t if I were them. But ye gods, they’re not even human. Who knows what they’ll do?”
“Just so, my lord. Well, then. I think me we’d best decide what we want them to do, and make them do it. We’d best settle this affair soon, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“I know that, we all do. The countryside’s been stripped bare for this war as it is. Once these supplies are gone, well, there we are. But if they decide to sit on their behinds back of those earthworks, I don’t know what we’re going to do about it.”
“Drive them out, my lord.”
“What? Are you daft? How—” All at once, Erddyr grinned. “How, indeed? Send a ferret into the hole to drive the rats out, eh?”
“Just that, my lord.”
Both men turned to look at Arzosah, stretching luxuriously in the morning sun.
“I’ll just go have a bit of a talk with the gwerbret,” Erddyr said. “Come with me, Silver Dagger. We’ll just work out the details, like.”
Although Tren was expecting a full council of war that morning, none was ever called. The Keepers of Discipline hurried through a suddenly crowded and undersupplied camp to estimate the amount of food left, while the captains themselves were pressed into service to keep order at the three small wells. Tren wondered how long it would be before they ran dry. The stream that flowed from Cengarn’s walls now lay just outside their camp, and the good-sized river to the west might as well have been on the moon for all the good it would do them.
A couple of hours after sunrise, Rakzan Hir-li had Tren summoned. With a squad of guards trailing at a discreet distance in case of a Deverry attack from some unexpected direction, they walked up the east ridge and climbed the flank of the hill.
“We cannot stay here like this long,” Hir-li remarked. “We Horsekin cannot endure it.”
The general swept his arm in the direction of the camp, a jumble of tents and horses—mostly horses, it seemed, tied on short tethers in every available space.
“Endure what, my lord?” Tren said. “Thirst?”
“Nah, nah, nah, this shoving together, this crowd, this mob, this feeling of cattle all crammed into a pen. We live on the plains, we ride free on the plains. Only slaves live in packs, smelling each other’s stink.”
Tren was tempted to sarcasm. Instead, he mugged a thoughtful look.
“Well, my lord,” he said at last, “maybe we should attack then. Once we retake the ground to the west—”
“Do you truly think we can, with that creature overhead?”
“Imph, well.”
“I suspected that they would enlist bowmen. Those are a difficulty, but we could, in the end, ride them down. But if we cannot ride—”
Tren nodded, looking out over the Deverry army. Yesterday’s battle and the subsequent panic had lost the Horsekin a fair number of warriors, mostly trampled by their own mounts, but still the Deverry men were outnumbered. With the dragon on their side, numbers didn’t matter.
“I asked you to walk with me aways for some reason,” Hir-li said. “You are favored by the priestess, are you not?”
“I suppose you could call it that.”
“All men here would call it that.”
An odd hesitancy in the warleader’s voice caused Tren to swing round to face him. Hir-li was staring at the ground in a way that would have meant embarrassment in a human being.
“One wonders if her holiness has honored you by revealing how she means to defeat the dragon,” Hir-li said. “Surely she must have a plan.”
“She does, my lord. I thought she would have told you, or I would have mentioned it.”
“Blessed be she for whom we fight and die, that she has inspired her priestess!” Hir-li looked up with a smile that showed fang. “And blessed be the sacred raven as well!