The Blood Knight - J. Gregory Keyes [120]
“Who is she? How can you help?”
Too many questions, and the distance is too great. Find me, and I will help you.
“Find you where?”
Here.
She saw Castle Eslen, watched it ripped open like a cadaver to expose its hidden organs and humors, nests of disease and thrones of health, and after a moment she understood.
She awoke screaming, with Neil and Cazio staring down at her. Austra was next to her, holding her hand.
“Majesty?” Neil asked. “Is something wrong?”
For several long heartbeats she wanted to tell him, to reverse what was to come.
But she couldn’t, could she?
“It was a dream, Sir Neil,” she said. “A Black Mary, nothing more.”
The knight looked skeptical, but after a moment he accepted her explanation with a nod.
“Well, then, I hope the rest of your sleep is dreamless,” he said.
“How long until we break camp?”
“Four bells.”
“And today we shall reach Eslen?”
“If the saints will it, Your Majesty,” Neil replied.
“Good,” Anne said. Images of ships—and more terrible things—still burned behind her eyes. Eslen would be the start of it.
The men left, but Austra remained, stroking her forehead until she fell asleep.
Anne had made the trip from Glenchest to Eslen many times. She had ridden there on her horse Faster when she was fourteen, accompanied by a guard of Craftsmen. That had taken her two days, with a stop in the Poel of Wife at her cousin Nod’s estate. By carriage or canal, it might take a day longer.
But it had taken her army a full month, even though most of their supplies were floated downstream on barges.
And a bloody month it had been.
Anne had seen tournaments: jousting, men battering about with swords, that sort of thing. She had seen real combat, too, and slaughter aplenty. But until the day they marched from Glenchest, everything she knew about armies and war she’d had from minstrels, books, and theater. Those had led her to imagine that they would march straightaway to Eslen, blow the horns of battle, and fight it out on the King’s Poel.
The minstrels had left out a thing or two, and Castle Gable had been her first lesson in that.
Armies in songs didn’t have to keep their supply lines open so they didn’t have to stop and “reduce” every unfriendly fortress within five days’ ride of their march. Most of them were unfriendly, it turned out, because Robert had either coerced or cajoled the castle owners to fight for him or had simply occupied them with his own handpicked troops.
Anne had never heard the word “reduce” used to describe the conquering of a castle and the slaughter of its defenders, but she quickly came to the opinion that a better word was needed. The siege of Gable cost them more than a hundred men and almost a week, and when they left it, they had to leave another hundred men behind to garrison it.
Then came Langraeth, Tulg, Fearath…
The old songs also didn’t talk much about women throwing their children over the walls in an insane attempt to save them from the flames or about the smell of a hundred dead men as the morning frost began to thaw. Or how a man could have a spear all the way through him and appear not to feel it, keep talking as if nothing were wrong, right up until the moment his eyes lost sight and his lips went lazy.
She had seen horrible things before, and these were differences in scale rather than in kind.
But scale made a difference. A hundred dead men were more horrific than a single dead man, as unfair as that might seem to the single fellow.
In ballads, women keened in grief over the loss of their beloved ones. In the march to Eslen, no one close to Anne had died. She didn’t keen in grief; instead she lay awake at night, trying to stop the cries of the wounded from her ears, trying not to remember the images of the day. She found that the brandy Aunt Elyoner had sent with her was helpful in that regard.
The minstrels also tended to leave out the drearier aspects of politics: four hours listening to the aithel of Wife drone on about the comparative virtues