Each night before retiring they signalled with a flashlight, using the code Egarn had taught them, but they received no sign at all that he was still watching. As the daez passed, they became tormented by fear that the Lantiff had returned to butcher everyone in the ruins as they had those at court and in the villages, leaving them completely on their own with a world to save.
16. ARNEAND DELINE
One-namers from the western peerdoms were devastated by the news Arne brought, but fate of Midlow Court affected Deline hardly at all. She had resented her mother, she had hardly known her sister, and—she remarked with a toss of her head—most of the peeragers weren’t worth bothering about anyway.
Only the ravaging of Midd Village distressed her. Midlow’s one-namers had been kind to her, and she wept for them, but her eyes were dry with anger. “The trouble with this war is that we aren’t killing enough Lantiff,” she said. “Let’s get on with it.”
It was a different war, now. The little army was no longer defending the Ten Peerdoms. Half of these were gone; others were crumbling. Easlon, with its brilliant peer and prince, still stood, and both peerager and one-namer refugees who’d had the good fortune to escape the Lantiff circled far around the armies of Lant and arrived exhausted and starving. The one-namers, at least, were fiercely determined to sell their lives dearly and take as many Lantiff with them as possible. Like Arne, they joined Inskor’s army. Even the lashers of the Ten Peerdoms, impaired though their minds were, dimly perceived that their lives under the Peer of Lant would be far worse than anything they had experienced, and some of them, too, took the long trek around the war to reach Easlon where they could fight for their survival.
The fighting was a brutal repetition of all that Arne had experienced, but in that, too, he quickly noticed differences. For one, the Lantiff had a new weapon. It sent out beams of light that looked similar to those produced by Egarn’s weapon but were silent and harmless. They lit up a battlefield spectacularly, but if the object was to frighten the enemy, Inskor’s army scorned it.
The Lantiff also began to use new tactics. When their vanguard was ambushed, the following ranks, instead of riding furiously into the same trap, dismounted, left their horses, and took to the wooded hills on foot. Trees provided cover for them and made Egarn’s weapon less effective. The Lantiff tried to work close enough to use their weapon, the one that stunned the enemy, and the defenders, always outnumbered, had to withdraw before that could happen. The diminutive army of the Ten Peerdoms continued to kill enormous numbers of Lantiff, but fewer than before, and dae by dae it was forced backward.
Arne’s relationship with Deline also was changing. The war had brought them together; now it began to tear them apart.
He already had learned he was no warrior. He was a far more efficient commander than Inskor—he ran a battle the same way he had run the Peerdom of Midlow, methodically mastering every detail, overlooking nothing, anticipating the enemy’s moves for that dae, and the next, and for tenites to come—but he had none of Inskor’s craftiness, nor did he have Deline’s elan. She was still the magnificent warrior, and she quickly became Inskor’s valued deputy. There was no battlefield crisis she could not master, and she blunted every Lantian breakthrough, rallying the defenders and terrifying the enemy. The two of them, Inskor and Deline, gradually divided the army’s command between them, leaving Arne with no role at all in the fighting.
This did not disturb him. He moved easily into the position of first server to the Peer of Easlon. He organized and managed food supplies, took charge of transport, sent foraging parties into the conquered territories to bring out loads of food from hidden storage bins the Lantiff had overlooked, and ran a scouting system that located refugees, guided them around the army of Lant to safety, and trained them as reserve troops.
It was when the press of work began to keep him from the battlefront that his estrangement from Deline became serious. She expected him to continue the war at her side, fighting as they had before—under her command, now, since he had none of his own. She seemed unable to comprehend that managing an army’s supplies and training new troops required the same dedicated efficiency as managing a battle. Arne’s talents were uniquely valuable—as the Peer of Easlon remarked, there were many who could fight, and several who could lead an army, but only Arne knew how to keep an army fighting—but Deline had nothing but contempt for one who fought his battles in the rear.
She had formed her own guard of twenty carefully-chosen lashers. They had no distinguishing uniform, but neither did anyone else in this war except the Lantiff. She emphasized severe discipline and bold action, and she pleaded with Arne to organize a similar guard and join her in battle. Their meetings were spent in argument rather than love until she stopped her nightly visits to him and began to denounce him publically as a coward who hid far from the battlefield while pretending to assist with the war.
She also resented the fact that he, a non-fighter, conferred regularly with Inskor and with the peer and prince about tactics and strategy, while she, who fought brilliantly, was allowed no voice at all in the war’s planning. She thought the other commanders—most of them grim scouts who had been fighting Lant all of their adult lives—kept her out of a battle until their own stupid plans and leadership went amiss, at which time they came pleading to her to save them. Otherwise, they ignored her suggestions and gave her no credit for her achievements.
Because Arne was in charge of so many things, she began to bring all of these complaints to him, as though every problem she encountered was his responsibility, and he listened patiently and did whatever could be done. Often that was nothing at all. He couldn’t furnish special uniforms for her guard. He had difficulties enough finding clothing for the refugees. The food was often as bad as she alleged it to be, but Arne’s resourcefulness was taxed to the utmost in ensuring that army, refugees, and the civilian population of Easlon were adequately fed, and in hording sufficient reserves so the war could continue. He couldn’t supply the weather-proof shelters she wanted for her troops. There was nothing to build them with and no point in elaborate constructions when their lines of defense had to be abandoned almost as soon as they were occupied. A battle was nothing more than a slow retreat as the Lantiff steadily pushed the war eastward.
He did what he could, resignedly accepted her incessant complaining about things that could not be changed, and tried to keep keep her discontent from affecting the rest of the army. Rumors of it finally reached Inskor, and he came to Arne for suggestions.
“There is nothing that can be done,” Arne said.
“I suppose former princes make very poor subordinates,” Inskor said resignedly.
Arne shook his head. “No, that can’t be the reason. She was an excellent subordinate when she was my assistant in Midlow. Whatever the cause, if we need her—and we do—we must put up with her.”
Her private life became a public scandal. It was rumored that young Hutter, who accompanied her everywhere, shared her bed as well. It was also rumored that she had recruited the husky lashers of her personal guard for their sexual prowess and that it required all twenty of them to satisfy her insatiable appetite. All of that may have been true, or none of it, but in the chaos of war, no one except Arne really cared what her private life was. The rumors gave the army something to gossip about.
In battle, she was invaluable. With the faithful Hutter at her side and her ferocious guard following, she appeared where least expected, rallied defenders, put attackers to flight. Her very recklessness inspired terror in the Lantiff. A glimpse of her on the skyline—erect on a tall white horse that the Peer of Easlon had given to her, hair flying, black and white uniform flashing—brought the most relentless Lantian attack to a halt.