“Guelen!” Idrys shouted, then, and there was a movement forward, the Guelen camped around the command tents, who massed toward their standards all in confusion. Idrys shouted angry orders; the standard-bearers took their standards to their respective units, and the Guelen fell into order.
52O
Then, unbidden, but in rivalry, perhaps, not to be left behind, came a tide of Amefin surging forward, who noisily possessed their own standards, but they did not take any orderly form. There was shouting, there was pushing, and a fight broke out as men surged forward and began trying to rescue their standards, and as the Guelen shoved them and made space for the King and his company.
Tristen stared helplessly for that instant, then—understanding the symbol of what these men were struggling for—he knew the only thing the Amefin and Guelen in that press might all see. He seized the Sihhé banner from Andas, who had moved to protect it, and carried it himself to the front of Cefwyn’s tent. The pole had a sharp end; and with a great thrust he planted it in the earth beside Cefwyn’s Dragon, aslant, as it settled the poles touching.
A murmur went up, and the fighting stopped. He was not capable of speech. He went to Cefwyn and they embraced before the army. A cheer went up around them, and Cefwyn laughed and grinned broadly, and embraced him again.
There was a cleaner feeling in the air. Tristen hugged Cefwyn a third time for gladness of that feeling, and Cefwyn’s eyes sparkled with tears, his lips drawn tight.
“To horse!” Idrys shouted, waving his sword. “Districts by order!
Move! We are late, sirs! Move, move, move!”
It seemed to mean everyone. Cefwyn went toward his horse, and he went quickly to the groom that held Petelly, took the reins and swung up. The wagon had not been able to get through. Now it was coming, as men ran for their appropriate places, and Andas reclaimed the Sihhé standard, as the standard-bearers of the Dragon and the Regent’s Tower took up their own.
A breeze lifted them. The morning sun streamed gold through light cloud. The King moved out and Ninévrisé joined him as their standard-bearers got to horse and moved out ahead. Tristen rode to join them and Andas took the Sihhé banner out to the left, where it belonged. Their guards mounted up, the Amefin lords came next, and before they had left the camp grounds, the Guelen Guard, both rival regiments and the regulars, had started up the same marching-song, shouting it out and going along at a brisk pace.
In no little time there was another song from the Amefin ranks behind, and that was the way the troops contended with each other.
He felt quite cheered. He had won something, he saw that, things seemed mended that had been broken, and Cefwyn laughed and joked with him and with Idrys and the lady. The morning lay like a sheen over the road, making their shadows long as they marched toward the west, casting that early-morning glamor on things that made ordinary colors seem different, and more magical. This morning they could do nothing wrong.
But then his eyes lifted to the horizon, toward the north and east, and the morning seemed not so bright there—he was tempted to look with the vision he did have, terribly tempted; but he thought it was exactly what he should not do.
They rode in that direction on a road that could not lose sight of that shadow, and it was impossible to forget it. It distracted him from the light mood the others set, and his distraction seemed at times to make them anxious. But they asked no questions, perhaps fearing the answer he might give.
“Do you see any shadowing on that horizon?” he asked of Uwen when they stopped for rest. He hoped that it might be some natural thing. If autumn could surprise him, then other things still might, and Words might arise he had never met.
But Uwen looked where he looked and said only that he saw a hint of cloud, but that it was not all that black.
He went to Ninévrisé while they were paused, and said, looking at the grass at their feet, “M’lady, if it comes to you today to have a look into that other place, resist it. Resist it with all your might.”
“Why?” Ninévrisé asked in alarm. “What do you see?”
“Nothing imminent,” he said. “Only be prudent.”
Natural men could not see it; and Cefwyn could not; and even Ninévrisé failed. So he rode with the knowledge to himself, alone, as slowly, subtly, to his eyes, a line of shadow began to reach along the horizon, like a smudge of smoke, a presentiment of night. It seemed, to his eye, closer, and wider.
They met the contingents of four more villages. They were, Cefwyn said, approaching an end of Amefel where villages had been once, but where now were far fewer—where forest rimmed the horizon and where roads ran more scarcely.
By Cefwyn’s reckonings they should have begun to pick up the southern lords this morning. And they had not; the levity with which they had begun diminished through the day, and when they saw the sun pass mid-afternoon and they were neither at their campsite nor seeing any sign of their allies either ahead of them or to the south or behind them, concern began to work among them, and Cefwyn and Idrys cast frequent, anxious looks toward the south as he did to the west.
“We might wait a day for them,” Idrys said. “We might well, m’lord King.”
But Ninévrisé said, “Lord Tasien cannot wait,” and Tristen added,
“We dare not,” because that was the truth he could not doubt.
Chapter 33
All about them now were meadows and forest-crowned hills, low rolls of the land that rose toward Althalen—treacherous land, which, like that around Raven’s Knob, could mask an entire army. They had had that message last night that their way was clear—but that condition could have changed ahead at any hour an Elwynim army appeared on the riverside.
Cefwyn shifted his weight in Danvy’s saddle both to ease the throb of his healing wound, and to see whether, by standing a handspan higher, he could see significantly more. They were behind their schedule. He did not want to order the column stopped prematurely, short of their planned camp; but he was beginning to ask himself was it wise not to stop sooner, and whether they had not overestimated their rate of march altogether, which would affect their ability to meet their other contingents and which might turn very serious indeed, if their army was going to move more slowly than their plan all along the march. The heavy horsemen rode today with their shields and weapons, but not in their full battle armor, and the heavy horses all traveled under saddle, in the hands of their grooms, though they as yet carried no riders and did not carry their full armor or caparison. That had been the plan they had made, that once they passed beyond the first encampment and especially as they rode in the vicinity of Althalen, they would count themselves in hostile if not imminently threatening territory. The light horse had carried riders all day, the destriers at least a slight weight all day; the infantry had marched with shields and spears since noon rest instead of having them transported in the baggage—and they might have to revise that plan to make the speed they needed. But going without defense was increasingly a risk, in territory uneasy in more than the sense of Althalen’s haunted precinct. In the rolling land not only was the rear of the train out of sight in the distance, hours behind the front ranks, simply because of the length of the column, but even nearer ranks were often lost to view in the rolls and windings of the road. The wagons for baggage and supply had a small rear guard and the whole line of march, foot as well, was interspersed with horsemen who could ride for help in the event of attack, which could otherwise have cut off the tail of the army without the head even aware an attack was in progress.