Guy Kay - A Song for Arbonne

"Do it!" he cried, and knew that Rudel understood. His friend turned to a mercenary beside him and spoke a one word command.

A moment later there came a fierce, ragged shout from Fulk's men of Savaric as over their heads, gripped by that coran beside Rudel, the banner of the kings of Gorhaut rose up to fly beside the standard of Arbonne. Two of us under the same banner, Blaise thought. Will it matter?

A moment later he realized, with a quickening of his heart, that it might.

"Look!" Fulk shouted, pointing.

Blaise had already seen.

"To me!" he roared, pulling at his horse's reins, driving towards the standard Rudel had raised. " In the name of Gorhaut, to me, men of Garsenc!"

And as he screamed it at the top of his voice, he saw that there were indeed corans of his family estate, from the company behind his father and Ademar, pulling back from the fight in the centre and making their way, swords uplifted in salute, towards him.

Ranald's last shouted words had been heard, Blaise realized. And these men would have watched one of their own, Bergen of Garsenc, felled by a Portezzan as he prepared to ride back to them. And sure, surely, there would be those among the corans he had grown up among who had not been filled with joy at the prospect of burning women and mutilating helpless men.

He saw his father turn, alerted by a change in the sounds behind him. Galbert visibly checked at what he saw, then his own magnificent, stentorian voice rang out over the battlefield like the voice of doom, of a god, "Stop those men!" he trumpeted. "There are traitors among us!"

Confusion reigned. Some corans turned obediently in the Gorhaut ranks and began slashing at others who, moments before, had been fighting beside them. In front of Blaise the warriors of Gorhaut turned towards the centre to see what was happening, and in the respite shaped by that brief hesitation the men of Arbonne pushed forward beside Rudel's hard-bitten mercenaries, fighting now beneath the incongruous banner of the kings of Gorhaut. Blaise saw Mallin de Baude drive forward, first man into the gap.

"Go quickly now!" he cried over his shoulder to Fulk. "We have a chance!"

With no more words spoken, Fulk de Savaric barked orders to his captains and moments later—more swiftly than Blaise could have hoped—the men of Savaric had peeled back and begun swinging south towards the lake in a desperate attempt at flanking around.

It was going to have to be swift, Blaise realized grimly, as nearly half the men in their sector melted away. Rudel looked back at him, grasped what was happening and, improbably, grinned.

"It this some sort of vengeance upon me?" he cried, leaning over in his saddle towards Blaise. "For youthful sins I have long forgotten?"

"What else could possibly be guiding me now?" Blaise shouted back, moving his horse up beside his friend. Rudel laughed aloud. Then he stopped laughing, for the warriors of Gorhaut, seeing empty space open up before them and the numbers of their foes suddenly diminished, returned, with a collective cry and a new urgency, to their own assault.

After that there was little chance to do so much as look up, let alone assert leadership on any grand scale. Battles were always like this at their peak, breaking down into islands of desperately close combat, the screams and the sweaty press of men and horses, the living and dying and dead, preventing any chance at grasping an overall picture. Blaise lost sight of Mallin. He knew Bertran must be holding in the centre, or they would by now have been under hopeless pressure from that side. He knew this had to be true, but he couldn't spare a moment to look up and see.

The world shrank to the smallest, bloodiest dimensions, to a sword lifting and falling, the scream of a dying horse, the jarring impact of his blade on armour or the different sucking feel as it bit into flesh, an awareness of Rudel on his left side and another man, a mercenary he didn't know beside him on the right. When that man fell, moments later, another coran pushed forward to take his place. It was Hirnan of Baude, and Blaise belatedly understood that they were guarding him. That he was no longer just one of the captains here. He was the man in whose name the banner above them was flying.

That was the moment, really, when Blaise was made aware of what being a king might entail. The knowledge came to him on that desperate battlefield as a weight and an exaltation, both. The rash folly he had begun in Tavernel last summer and then continued in the fall—claiming a crown at the Lussan Fair—became, in that valley north of Talair, something tangible and fully incarnate for him.

A man with an axe appeared in front of him on a dark grey horse; Rudel Correze, with an elegant, almost casual movement in the saddle, slid his sword into the man's throat between armour and helm and Blaise watched him fall. Hirnan immediately drove his horse forward to cut off the space in front of Blaise.

They were guarding him, he understood, at risk of their own lives.

In that instant, utterly calm in the midst of wild battle, with a dead man trampled into the ground at his feet, Blaise de Garsenc came into his true awareness of power. On a field of death, fighting his countrymen on the day his father had killed his brother, Blaise realized that he really did know what he wanted for Gorhaut, and that he thought he could achieve it if given but half a chance.

He did not expect, pushing forward between Rudel and Hirnan, feeling his horse's hooves unavoidably trample the body below, to live long enough to do anything about it.

Later he would remember how that last bleak thought had come to him even before he heard Rudel, his companion on so many battlefields, speak a malediction of bitter ferocity, and Blaise, looking over to the west, saw what his friend had seen and felt something colder than winter enter his heart with the awareness of treachery and of the final, inexorable revenge of the past.

On the forested ridge of land west of the valleys a company of men could be seen at the edge of the trees. A very large company, arrayed in precise rows, well armed and armoured. Above their heads were flying not one but two banners. One was a green device Blaise had come to know well in Arbonne. The other was that of the kings of Gorhaut.

Urté de Miraval had come to war, and their worst nightmares were made real as those grim, meticulous ranks began to move down the slope. Fulk de Savaric, Blaise saw, had somehow managed to fight his way around by the shore of the lake. He and his men had turned north and were even now poised to turn and strike at Ademar's centre from behind.

It didn't matter any more. They were going to be annihilated, their backs completely exposed to the men of Miraval, who were gathering speed now as they swept into the valley. If Fulk turned to face Urté they would be equally helpless before Ademar's corans. Blaise had sent those men to the worst sort of death.

With their own soon to follow. Blaise looked a long way over then—there seemed to be a respite here on their flank as men in both armies turned to see what was happening—and he picked out the fiercely battling figure of Bertran de Talair. Once he had thought the man no more than a lord who debased his rank by consorting with singers and frivolously pursuing any woman who came under his blue gaze. These things were true, there was no gainsaying them, but there was nothing in the man he saw just then that could have been called less than lordly as Bertran fought for his land in the face of betrayal and what would have to be the knowledge, bitter as poison, that Urté de Miraval was the source of their undoing.

With a horrified fascination—the way one watches a coiled snake before it strikes—Blaise saw the corans of Miraval, fifteen hundred of them, sweep down from their ridge behind the majestic figure of the duke. He saw them come up beside the first of Fulk's wheeling, scrambling men, swords and spears and axes uplifted and levelled and poised.