The Spirit Stone - Katharine Kerr [178]
‘I be coming with you,’ she said, ‘to ensure that someone attends who does speak the Gel da’ Thae tongue. Prince Voran did decide to send a Lijik herald, you see, to do the speaking. Indar be his name.’
‘He’s a grand choice,’ Salamander said. ‘He’s already talked one of Alshandra’s lords into letting his women leave a siege.’
Together they rode out of camp and trotted the mile or so to the army’s emplacement. Servants took their horses and brought them to the commanders, who were talking with Indar at the edge of the empty ground between them and the fort. They stood, however, well out of bow range. Indar acknowledged his reinforcements with a nod and a tight smile.
‘Shall we go?’ Indar said. ‘Let’s hope the commanders of this fort are Gel da’ Thae, not Horsekin. I’ve no desire to be spitted on an arrow before I open my mouth.’
As their small party approached the gates of the fortress, the two heralds held their staves high to let the wind catch the ribands and flutter them, an invitation to parley all across Deverry and the Westlands. Salamander was praying that the custom held in Gel da’ Thae lands as well. When he looked up at the dark wooden walls, he could see the longbows in the hands of the guards. The four of them stopped walking some thirty yards from the gates, well within bow range. Helmets gleamed at the top of the palisade, looking oddly like shiny beetles scuttling back and forth as the men wearing them trotted from one position to another on the catwalks.
Inside the fortress a horn called out. The little door next to the main gates creaked open. Salamander beat a quick tattoo on his drum to cover the pounding of his heart. Two Horsekin, one carrying a riband-bound staff, stepped out. They were barely clear of the door when it slammed shut behind them. The herald, an enormous man with a coarse mane of bleachedred hair, decorated with charms and little scrolls, wore the common brown brigga and tan shirt of the Gel da’ Thae infantry. A welter of blue and purple tattoos covered his face and neck.
The other, slender and young, wore a long leather shirt, fringed along the sleeves and yokes and painted in a variety of designs, over plain grey brigga. Under a short black thatch of hair, his milk-pale face sported only a single tattoo, Alshandra’s bow and arrow on his left cheek. He carried a hand drum, wound round with blue ribands like the herald’s staff. Scar tissue filled his eye sockets.
Grallezar murmured, ‘The law says go meet them’, and led her little delegation forward as the others approached. The Gel da’ Thae herald stared at her, then bowed his head briefly and spoke in the Horsekin tongue. She answered in the same, then returned to Deverrian.
‘Do you still ken the Lijik tongue, Minaz?’ she asked him. ‘Or do you scorn it by the laws of your false goddess?’
The herald’s upper lip curled, and he made a growling sound deep in his throat. ‘I do, Grallezar, and should you say to, I shall use it here. If, that be, you restrain your mockery of things you ken not.’
Grallezar snorted, then motioned to Indar. ‘Do tell him, good herald, what the commanders wish him to hear.’
Indar stepped forward, as lean and bony as Minaz was stout.
‘I come from the army of the two princes,’ he began, ‘to ask you in the name of mercy to set free the women you hold in your fortress. We see no need for them to suffer, and we promise them safe conduct and succour. They shall be free to return with us to Deverry should they wish or to return to your cities should they wish that.’
‘Well and good, then,’ Minaz said. ‘What will you offer us in return?’
‘We hold over seventy of their men, mostly Gel da’ Thae spearmen. Some are wounded, but most can