“When you asked the peer, what did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. It is painful for her to talk. She nodded, and the land warden gave me my horse.”
Arne extended his army as far west as possible, sent scouts far into the wilds to detect any encircling movement, and turned east again. Along the way he conducted training sessions with each valley’s defense unit, and this introduced Deline to something she had never seen before or even imagined: Egarn’s weapon.
She was astonished. Then, as she began to understand the destructive power of the small tubes, she was elated. “I thought we here helpless against the might of Lant,” she said wonderingly. “It is the Lantiff who will be helpless. Does the peer know about this?”
“No peerager knows,” Arne said shortly. “Peeragers would use the weapon on each other.”
Deline was silent for a time. “You are right,” she said finally. “No peerager should know. I’m glad I didn’t know. I would have been worse than the others.”
When they passed south of the Peerdom of Chang, Deline volunteered to persuade peer and prince—former friends of hers—to furnish more lashers and no-namers so Arne and Inskor could hold a few units in reserve. Chang gave her everything that could be spared, and she trained this force on the march. It arrived in fine fettle and eager to fight the Lantiff.
So was she. The Prince of Chang had presented her with a uniform designed for the prince’s private guard—the same she had modeled her own guard’s uniforms on—and she arrived resplendent in black and white. She looked magnificent. Unfortunately, this was the wrong war for the heroics that went with her costume, and Arne quietly pointed out to her how a conspicuous dress could give away a battle plan.
“I didn’t come here to hide,” she said. “I’m going to fight.”
The long, narrow columns of Lantiff continued to seep northward. Finally one of them encountered the defenses Arne had planned so carefully and erected with so much labor. A barricade of upright logs completely spanned the valley. At intervals there were other barricades where Arne’s lashers waited.
The Lantiff paused while their officers rode forward a few yards to study these obstacles. Then they aimed their weapons, the weapons of Lant. The logs of each barricade were sent flying. Huge gaps opened up, Arne’s lashers fled, and the Lantiff pressed forward, still moving in leisurely fashion.
A defense that Inskor had devised proved more effective. A wide stripe of burnooze, a black substance found in the mountains where severe land upheaval had taken place, had been laid down across the valley. When ignited, it burned furiously, and it could be touched off from a distance with Egarn’s weapon. When the Lantiff’s vanguard was almost upon one of these strips, the ground at their horses’ feet erupted in flame. The head of column halted; the Lantiff behind continued to press forward until the valley was crammed with them. Then a scout on the hillside touched off another wall of flame behind them, and Egarn’s weapon systematically cut the Lantiff to pieces. The valley was piled thickly with corpses and with pathetically screaming wounded men and horses, but still the Lantiff tried to surge forward.
It was Arne’s first close view of the Lantiff. Squat, muscular, with dark faces and misshapen eyes, their appearance was completely different from that of the Ten Peerdoms lashers. They had no conception of defeat, and their attacks ceased only when there were no more of them to be killed. Fire might stop them momentarily, but when the leaders shouted their shrill commands, they charged through the wall of flames. The crashing lightning of Egarn’s weapon gave them pause, but the next command sent them blindly forward, crushing their own dead under foot, and they kept charging until they were annihilated. Inskor had expected them to flee in panic the moment the crashing beams of Egarn’s weapon stabbed among them, but they were superbly disciplined—or too stupid to understand what was happening.
Day after day Arne’s forces decimated the Lantiff in battle after battle in westward succeeding valleys. Finally the Lantiff happened onto a valley that was broader than the others, and their commanders mounted a massive attack. This time they kept charging until Egarn’s weapons exhausted their stored energy. The weapons recharged automatically, but they had to be rested for a short time, and while they were silent, the Lantiff suddenly spurred their horses forward and burst through the last of the defenses into gently rolling terrain where there was little cover for Inskor’s scouts.
Suddenly a lone rider appeared in their path, a rider clothed in black and white who galloped directly toward the menacing line of lances and swords. The Lantiff reined in their horses and watched this apparent suicide attempt with puzzlement. As the rider drew nearer, it proved to be a woman with blonde hair flying, which magnified their confusion.
Grooming was difficult in an army fighting one battle after another. All of Arne’s one-name women had been letting their hair grow, and the men were becoming shaggy. Now Deline’s blond hair streamed behind her as she rode recklessly toward the waiting Lantiff.
Arne, too far away to come to her assistance, could only watch with horror. She seemed intent on a suicidal collision with the leveled lances, but suddenly, at the last moment, she swerved and rode down the long line of Lantiff, turning one of Egarn’s weapons on them.
They were too astonished to retaliate. The awesome power sliced their front ranks to pieces and terrified and mutilated those behind. The lantiff that survived wheeled and fled without firing back. Deline’s magnificent audacity had saved both herself and the battle.
“Don’t do that again,” Arne said severely when he had overtaken her.
“Why not? It worked!”
“It worked once. Next time they won’t hold their fire—and I need you.”
That night Deline came to his bed—as audacious in love as she had been in battle. She was still caught up in the exuberance of her wild ride, and her passion seemed unquenchable. Their love affair resumed as though there had been no interruption. Each night they lay together on Arne’s narrow sleeping pad—on hard ground or a bed of leaves, sheltered or in the open, wherever the vagaries of war took them.
Deline felt no compunction at all about sleeping with her sister’s consort. For a time Arne’s conscience bothered him, and that amused her. She pointed out that the other one-namers who had come to war with Arne, both men and women, also had mates at home, but they hadn’t hesitated to take lovers.
“What do the stay-at-homes matter?” she asked derisively. “We are all going to die—we will fall in battle and they will be slaughtered in their beds when the Lantiff break through, so why worry about them? We can’t possibly win. I thought the weapon would make a difference, but now I can see that it doesn’t. The Lantiff are being sacrificed in hundreds and thousands to keep us occupied. When their generals find a weak place, they will pour more thousands through it. Let’s enjoy what life remains to us. We haven’t lived until we have lived dangerously. I never realized that.”
Arne was stubbornly committed to fighting cautious battles that killed as many Lantiff as possible. As soon as one was finished, he left a token force to guard that valley and rushed everyone else westward in an attempt keep ahead of the encircling enemy. He still hoped to win, hoped that eventually the attacks would become too costly to be pursued, but it gradually became evident that Deline understood war far better than he did.
She exulted in combat; Arne quickly came to hate it. He loathed performing meaningless butchery on brain-damaged lashers who probably had only a dim awareness of where they were and what they did. Deline laughed at his scrupples. “Maybe they don’t know what they are doing,” she said, “but if we don’t kill them, they will kill us just as thoroughly as if they knew.”