Larken, on the high ground a thousand yards away, saw the boy drop from the saddle, a shiny streak of red spreading from his throat onto the sand.
The drum head felt cold and alien beneath her fin shy;gers, and her hands trailed off into soft, mournful sounds.
* * * * *
The flanking attack of the rebels demolished the hapless Istarian infantry. By early evening, when the air had cleared and the sand resettled, General Josef Monoculus, his right eye heavily bandaged, stood propped between wounded Istarian regulars as he handed his sword to Fordus Firesoul. No more than two hundred of the Istarians survived; the prisoners would be taken to the desert's edge and set free, forced to travel the thirty miles to Istar unarmed and on foot. The sand from the storm had already cov shy;ered the dead.
Stormlight thought of the harsh trek across the grasslands and looked toward the defeated soldiers. Some of the Istarians would not survive; hunger and thirst and exhaustion would dispatch a small num shy;ber, and wild animals and bandits would seize a few more. But even a safe return to Istar did not mean that their ordeal was over. Many would fall prey to the grashaunts, the strange insanity that came from too long a stay in level and wide places. These wretches suffered from the delusion that the world around them was expanding, that if they strayed too long out of sight of home or friends, the distances would increase, and they might never find their way back. Such madmen would return to Istar, never again leaving the close confinements of barrack or cubicle or cell. They would waste away by their win shy;dows as they stared fearfully out into an uncertain world that was always receding.
It was true: Fordus treated his prisoners sternly. The road ahead of the defeated legionnaires was the most perilous one.
But not unfair. Indeed, the plains might treat them better than would the comrades and leaders who awaited their return to the city.
Istar brooked no failure, no weakness, and what was defeat but failure and weakness?
Rubbing his arm, bruised in dispatching a rather large and thickly armored Solamnic, a concerned Stormlight watched his commander.
Fordus stared beyond the sullen Solamnic, beyond the assembled, defeated Istarians … to a point on the horizon no man could see.
Stormlight shivered. Fordus had gone again to that place where none of them-not even the bard Larken with her voice and drum-could reach him. When the sea-blue eyes fixed pale in the distance, sometimes all life would seem to flee from them. They glittered, then, like ice, like cut glass, like the salt crystals rising from the desert flats, and there was no warmth in their light, no heart behind the eyes' brilliance. What Fordus wanted, what he looked toward, Stormlight did not know.
"I accept the surrender of General Josef Monocu-lus," Fordus intoned by habit, the eyes of all resting rapt upon his windburnt, impassive face. "And I accept the surrender of his legions."
He waved his hand dramatically over the atten shy;dant rebels.
"And let those who lost dear friends," he pro shy;nounced, "console themselves that the losses were few and in my just and glorious cause."
For a moment his voice faded away, caught on a high northerly wind and carried into the mountains to lose itself in thin air and desolation.
Stormlight looked at his commander sharply. Con shy;sole themselves with few losses?
His just and glorious cause?
Now Fordus rose to his full height above the wounded Josef Monoculus and his trembling Istar-ian supporters.
"And at this hour tomorrow," Fordus continued, "I shall grant these men unconditional freedom." The sea-blue eyes descended to the general, regarded him softly, warmly.
There! Stormlight thought with a strange and sud shy;den relief. Fordus is back among us.
"Your arms will be … confiscated, sir," Fordus explained, quietly and kindly. "You will be allowed to keep your armor and your provisions. Steer by Chislev and the sunrise."
"I know how to find my way across this damned wasteland!" the Solamnic growled.
"Then find it with my blessing," Fordus replied. He smiled absently, and Larken's drum began a slow, somber march. The Istarian troopers guided their commander back into the circle of his men, and mournfully, the defeated legion stacked its arms before the inconsolable general.
It would be the Games for him back in Istar. The doomed gladiatorial struggle against barbarian, dwarf, and Irda. The fortunes of Josef Monoculus had risen, had fallen.
There was some moral here, some fable for the devout, the scholarly. But being neither bard nor cleric, Stormlight climbed to the top of the rise and merely watched the sun set, his thoughts lulled by the warm light on his face and by the steady report of Larken's drum.
Fordus sat in the shadows as the sun descended.
A barbarian youth, schooled for a year as the com-mander's orderly, untied his boots, and Fordus reclined broodingly, his big hands interlaced behind his head.
A song to cheer you? Larken signed. There was a verse she had saved for this day, this victory, and she wanted the last of the sun for its singing.
"No cheerful songs this evening, Larken," Fordus murmured.
The melancholy had come upon him after the armored rider had fallen. He had watched the dead boy for a moment, the blood-matted blond hair wav shy;ing forlornly in the whistling, hot wind, the horse wandering lazily off down the dry creek bed.
As Lunitari rose over the grasslands, purpling the waving grain with a slanted, bizarre light, Fordus brought himself back to the present. "I am tired of too easy," he said aloud, and the bard cocked her head alertly, reaching for the drum.
"No songs about Fordus Firesoul tonight," he said.
Larken nodded.
"Sing of Huma," Fordus urged. "He had someone to fight. Someone to test him, heart and wit and hand. Sing of Huma."
Her small hands tapping the rim of her precious drum, the bard began:
Out of the village, out of the thatched and clutching shires,
Out of the grave and furrow, furrow and grave,
Where his sword first tried the last cruel dances of childhood . . .
Larken's was a soaring voice, a firm and powerful instrument that erased time and space. Fordus closed his eyes and settled into the old story, which ran its course under the bard's skillful rendering.
"Those were the times," he said, the song ended and the drum silent after a last, fading roll. "The times and the great adventures. When the shape of the story was larger than the lives of men.
"We have fallen on meaner times, Larken. The great villains are gone, and the great heroes. Who will stand against me now?"
They both fell silent as the rising red moon streaked the tents of the Plainsmen. Overhead, in a last circling- flight before evening, Lucas called and banked in the light westering sun, amber rays still dancing over the tips of his wings like mastfire.
"Josef Monoculus was a fool," Fordus declared. "So are all the Istarian generals, all the fabled and fine Solamnic commanders. But perhaps the King-priest …"
He propped himself on his elbows, stared eagerly at Larken.
"Perhaps the Kingpriest!" he said again. "For he is a mystery who stands at the head of a great army. He is not only a man-he is a great and wondrous idea.
"And he speaks with the gods, as do I. Or so the starians say."
Fordus stroked his red beard thoughtfully.
"I pray that he is worthy of me. A man must have great enemies when his friends are small. If he has neither enemy nor friend to match his noble spirit, he is straitened, imprisoned. Forced to grow crooked in confinement.
"Without a worthy enemy, the world is a damnable wasteland."