Tigana (91 page)

Their vantage point had been chosen by Alessan a week before with a sure prediction of where the two sorcerers would base themselves. And both had done exactly as he judged they would. From this sloping ridge less than half a mile south of the higher, broader rise of land where Brandin was, Devin gazed down over the valley and saw two armies knotted together in a pitiless sending of souls to Morian.

‘The Ygrathen chose his field well,’ Sandre had said with an almost detached admiration earlier that morning as the cries of horses and men began. ‘The plain is wide enough to allow him room to manoeuvre, but not so broad as to let the Barbadians flank around him without serious trouble in the hills. They would have to climb out of the valley, and then along the exposed slopes and back down again.’

‘And if you look, you will see,’ Ducas di Tregea had added, ‘that Brandin has most of his archers on his own right flank, towards the south, in case they do try that. They could pick the Barbadians off like deer among the olives on the slopes if they attempt to go around.’

One contingent of Barbadians had, in fact, tried just that an hour ago. They had been slaughtered and driven back by a rain of arrows from the archers of the Western Palm. Devin had felt a quick surge of excitement, but then that congealed within him into turmoil and confusion. The Barbadians were tyranny, yes, and all that it meant, yet how could he possibly exult in any kind of triumph for Brandin of Ygrath?

But should he then desire the death of men of the Palm at the hands of Alberico’s mercenaries? He didn’t know
what
to think or feel. He felt as though his soul was being stripped raw and exposed here, laid out for burning under the Senzian sky.

Catriana was standing just ahead of him, next to the Prince. Devin didn’t think he’d seen them apart from each other since
Erlein had brought her back from the garden. He’d spent a disoriented, difficult hour the morning after that, struggling to adjust to the shining thing that had so clearly overtaken them. Alessan had looked as he did when he made music, as if he’d found a hearthstone in the world. When Devin had glanced over at Alais it was to find her watching him with a curious, very private smile on her face; it left him even more confused than before. He had a sense that he wasn’t even keeping up with himself, let alone with the changes around him. He also knew that there wasn’t going to be any time to deal with such things, not with what was coming to Senzio.

In the next two days, the armies had arrived from north and south bringing with them a bone-deep awareness of destiny hanging before them all as if suspended on some balance scale of gods in the summer air.

On their ridge above the battle Devin looked back and saw Alais offering water to Rinaldo in the partial shade of a twisted olive-tree that clung to the slope of their ridge. The Healer had insisted on coming with them instead of remaining hidden with Solinghi in town.
If lives are at risk then my place is there as well,
was all he’d said, and he’d carried his eagle-headed staff up here with all of them before sunrise.

Devin glanced beyond them to where Rovigo stood with Baerd. He should probably be with those two, he knew. His own responsibility here was the same as theirs: to guard this hill if either sorcerer or both should send troops after them. They had sixty men: Ducas’s band, Rovigo’s brave handful of mariners, and those carefully chosen men who had made their solitary way north to Senzio in response to the messages scattered across the provinces. Sixty men. It would have to be enough.

‘Sandre! Ducas!’ Alessan said sharply, snapping Devin out of reverie. ‘Look now, and tell me.’

‘I was about to,’ Sandre said with an emerging note of excitement in his voice. ‘It is as we guessed: with his own presence on the hill Brandin is not outnumbered after all. His power is ‘too much stronger than Alberico’s. More so than I guessed, even. If you are asking my reading right now, I would say that the Ygrathen is on the edge of breaking through in the centre before the hour is out.’

‘Sooner than that,’ Ducas said in his deep voice. ‘When such things begin they happen very fast.’

Devin moved forward to see more clearly. The seething centre of the valley was as choked with men and horses as before, many of them dead and fallen. But if he used the banners as his frame of reference, it seemed, even to his untutored eye, that Brandin’s men were pushing their front lines forward now, though the Barbadians were still more numerous by far.

‘How?’ he muttered, almost to himself.

‘He weakens them with his sorcery,’ a voice to his right said. He looked over at Erlein. ‘The same way they conquered us years ago. I can feel Alberico trying to defend them, but I think Sandre has it right: the Barbadian is weakening as we speak.’

Baerd and Rovigo came quickly up from where they too had been looking down.

‘Alessan?’ Baerd said. Only the name, no more.

The Prince turned and looked at him. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘We were just thinking the same thing. I think it is time. I think it has come.’ He held Baerd’s gaze for another moment; neither of them spoke. Then Alessan looked away, past the friend of his life, to the three wizards.

‘Erlein,’ he said softly. ‘You know what must be done.’

‘I do,’ said the Senzian. He hesitated. ‘Pray for the Triad’s blessing upon the three of us. Upon all of us.’

‘Whatever you’re going to do, you had better hurry,’ Ducas said bluntly. ‘The Barbadian centre is starting to give.’

‘We are in your hands,’ Alessan said to Erlein. He seemed about to say something more, but did not. Erlein turned to Sandre and Sertino who had moved nearer to him. All of the others stepped back a little, to leave the three of them alone.

‘Link!’
said Erlein di Senzio.

On the plain at the back of his army, but near to them and in their midst—because distance mattered in magic—Alberico of Barbadior had spent the morning wondering if the gods of the Empire had abandoned him at last. Even the dark-horned god of sorcerers and the night-riding Queen on her Mare. His thoughts, such thoughts as he could manage to coherently form under the ceaseless, mind-pounding onslaught of the Ygrathen, were black with awareness of ruin; it seemed to him as if there were ashes in his heart choking his throat.

It had seemed so simple once. All that would be needed were planning and patience and discipline, and if he had any qualities, any virtues at all, they were those. Twenty years’ worth of each of them here in the service of his long ambition.

But now, as the merciless bronze sun reached its zenith and slipped past and began its descent towards the sea, Alberico knew with finality that he had been right at the first and wrong at the last. Winning the whole of the Palm had
never
mattered, but losing it meant losing everything. Including his life. For there was nowhere to run, or hide.

The Ygrathen was brutally, stupefyingly strong. He had
known
it, he had always known it. Had feared the man not as a coward does, but as one who has taken the measure of something and knows exactly what it is.

At dawn, after that crimson beacon had flamed from Brandin’s hand on his hill in the west, Alberico had allowed himself to hope, even briefly to exult. He had only to defend his men. His armies were almost three times as strong and
they were facing only a small number of the trained soldiers of Ygrath. The rest of the army of the Western Palm was a flung-together mélange of artisans and traders, fishermen and farmers and scarcely bearded boys from the provinces.

He had only to blunt the thrust of Brandin’s sorcery from the hill and let his soldiers do their work. He had no need to push his own powers outward against his foe. Only to resist. Only defend.

If only he could. For as the morning wore on and gathered heat to itself like a smothering cloak, Alberico felt his mind-wall begin, by grudging, agonizing degrees, to flatten and bend under the passionate, steady, numbing insistence of Brandin’s attack. Endlessly the Ygrathen’s waves of fatigue and weakness flowed down from his hill upon the Barbadian army. Wave after wave after wave, tireless as the surf.

And Alberico had to block them, to absorb and screen those waves, so his soldiers could fight on, unafraid, unsapped in their courage and strength save by the sweltering heat of the sun—which was blazing down upon the enemy too.

Well before noon some of the Ygrathen’s spell began to leak through. Alberico couldn’t
hold
it all. It just kept coming and coming, monotonous as rain or surf, without alteration in rhythm or degree. Simple power, hugely pouring forth.

Soon—far too soon, too early in the day—the Barbadians began to feel as if they were fighting uphill, even on a level plain, as if the sun actually was fiercer above their heads than on the men they fought, as if their confidence and courage were seeping away with the sweat that poured from them, soaking through their clothing and armour.

Only the sheer weight of numbers kept them level, kept that Senzian plain in balance all morning long. His eyes closed, sitting in the great, canopied chair they had brought for him, Alberico mopped at his face and hair continuously with water-soaked cloths and he fought Brandin of Ygrath
through that morning with all his power and all the courage to which he could lay claim.

But shortly after noon, cursing himself, cursing the maggot-eaten soul of Scalvaia d’Astibar who had so nearly killed him nine months ago—and who had weakened him enough, after all, to be killing him now—cursing his Emperor for living too long as a useless, senescent, emaciated shell, Alberico of Barbadior confronted the bleak, pitiless reality that all his gods were indeed leaving him here under the burning sun of this faroff land. As the messages began streaming back from the crumbling front ranks of his army, he began preparing himself, in the way of his people, for death.

Then the miracle happened.

At first, his mind too punishingly battered, he couldn’t even grasp what was taking place. Only that the colossal weight of magic pouring down from the hill was suddenly, inexplicably, lightening. It was a fraction, a
half
of what it had been only a moment before. Alberico could sustain it. Easily! That level of magic was less than his own, even weakened as he was now. He could even push
forward
against that, instead of only defending. He could attack! If that was all that Brandin had left, if the Ygrathen had suddenly reached the end of his reserves.

Wildly mind-scanning the valley and the hills around for a clue, Alberico suddenly came upon the third matrix of magic, and abruptly realized—with a glory flowering out of the morning’s ashes in his heart—that the horned god was with him yet after all, and the Night Queen in her riding.

There were wizards of the Palm here, and they were helping him! They hated the Ygrathen as much as he! Somehow, for whatever incomprehensible reason, they were on
his
side against the man who was King of Ygrath, whatever he might pretend to call himself now.

‘I am winning!’ he shouted to his messengers. ‘Tell the captains at the front, revive their spirits. Tell them I am beating the Ygrathen back!’

He heard sudden glad cries around him. Opened his eyes to see messengers sprinting forward across the valley. He reached out towards those wizards—four or five, he judged, by their strength, perhaps six of them—seeking to merge with their minds and their power.

But in that he was balked. He knew exactly where they were. He could even
see
where they were—a ridge of land just south of the Ygrathen’s hill—but they would not let him join with them or know who they were. They must still be afraid of what he did to wizards when he found them.

What he did to wizards? He would
glory
in them! He would give them land and wealth and power, honour here and in Barbadior. Riches beyond their starved, pinched dreams. They would see!

No matter that they did not open to him! It truly mattered not. So long as they stayed, and lent their powers to his defence there was no need to merge. Together they were a match for Brandin. And all they had to do was be a match: Alberico knew he still had more than twice the army in the field that the other had.

But even as hope was pouring back into his soul with these thoughts, he felt the weight beginning to return. Unbelievably, the Ygrathen’s power growing again. Frantically he checked: the wizards on their ridge were still with him. Yet Brandin was still pushing forward. He was so strong! So accursedly, unimaginably
strong
. Even against all of them he was exerting his might, tapping deeper into his wellspring of sorcery. How deep could he go? How much more did he have?

Alberico realized, the knowledge like ice amid the inferno of war, the savage heat of the day, that he had no idea. None
at all. Which left him only the one course. The only one he’d ever had from the moment the battle had begun.

He closed his eyes again, the better to focus and concentrate, and he set himself, with all the power in him, to resist again. To resist, to hold, to keep the wall intact.