The Red Wyvern - Katharine Kerr [86]
Caradoc swore.
“Although—” Nevyn was struck by a sudden thought. “I don’t know if I can drive them off, but I’ll wager I can make them cursed uncomfortable and in no mood to fight.”
“I’ll take that, my lord. Gladly.”
“I think I can even justify it to my delicate conscience. After all, the fewer the men that fight, the fewer that will die.” Nevyn rubbed his hands together. “Now let me just think for a bit.”
Now that he was recognized as a bard, Maddyn no longer rode to battle with the silver daggers. Besides composing praise songs and death songs, he acted as the troop’s champion in quarrels with chamberlains, provisioners, and other such servitors who might skimp on their food and quartering. Early on the morning of the battle, Maddyn was complaining to Oggyn about the oats issued for the troop’s mounts when Nevyn came strolling up to them, leading his horse.
“Feel like riding with me, Maddo?” Nevyn said. “Those weevils can wait till the battle’s over.”
“What’s this, my lord?” Maddyn said. “Don’t tell me you’re going to join the fighting.”
“Not precisely. Go get your horse.”
When the army rode out, Maddyn and Nevyn rode a little ways behind them. They’d gone no more than a mile when Nevyn gestured to Maddyn to follow, then took out cross-country. They jogged across a pasture, ducked down a narrow lane between fallow fields, then walked their horses up a long low rise where beech trees grew at the crest. From this shelter they could look out across the rolling downs.
“I spotted this ridge while I was scrying,” Nevyn said. “It’s more of a proper hill, and we’ll have a good view.”
They stood indeed on ground a good bit higher than the farther rise where Burcan’s army waited. From this distance the army seemed to be one solid mass, glittering with metal, as if an enormous snake lay stretched out on the crest, or so Maddyn remarked, to sun itself.
“Indeed,” Nevyn said, grinning. “It’s a lovely day, isn’t it? Not a cloud in the sky.”
“It is.”
“Does it look to you like it’s going to rain?”
“It doesn’t.”
“No chance of a sudden freak storm in this country?”
“There’s not. Uh, here, my lord, what—”
“You’ll see.” Nevyn was wearing one of his slyest smiles. “Now, I’m about to go into a trance, and I’ll need you to guard my body. That’s why I asked you to come along, just in case some enemy should find me by accident. We’d best slack the horses’ bits and let them rest. This will take a while.”
“Oh ye gods!” the prince snarled. “Burcan’s got his spearmen up there!”
“So he does,” Caradoc said. “Clever fellow, isn’t he?”
“Clever?” Gwerbret Daeryc snorted. “Impious, that’s what I call it. Battle’s for the noble-born, not a pack of shoemakers’ sons!”
Daeryc shook his fist in the general direction of the regent, then peeled out of line and trotted off to join his warband. In the fallow fields below the rise, the army was in the long process of halting and spreading out behind the prince and his silver daggers. From where they sat on horseback, Caradoc and Maryn could look up the long slope and see Burcan’s position clearly. Branoic, riding as usual at the prince’s right flank, shaded his eyes with one hand and tried to estimate the distance.
The slope stretched maybe as much as a quarter mile to rise some hundred yards above the flat, not steep, no, but any charge to the top would arrive on winded horses. At the center of the regent’s line, directly across the disputed road, stood a shield-wall—a double line of spearmen standing so close that one man’s shield protected half the man next to him as well as his own left side. To either flank stood contingents of mounted men, ready to close like a pair of jaws if the Red Wyvern sent a wedge to try to break the wall.
“I’d wager that Burcan has a good reserve,” the prince was saying, “behind that shield-wall.”
“He’d be a fool if he didn’t, Your Highness,” Caradoc said. “And I’ve never seen him play the fool.”
“So then. We hold our position here and wait. Send a couple of your men along the line and