Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

before the planting-time, or utterly bare and desolate and lost, in the west.

‘They are coming,’ someone said, walking up to them. ‘Look. We had best claim our weapons.’

He recognized Mattio’s voice. Elena released him and stepped back. Baerd wiped his eyes and looked to the west again.

And he saw then that the Ember war was giving him another chance. A chance to make right what had gone so bitterly wrong in the world the summer he was fourteen.

Over the hills from the west, far off yet but unnaturally clear in the unnatural light, the Others were coming: and they were clad, all of them, in the liveryof Ygrath.

‘Oh, Morian!’ he whispered on a sharply taken breath.

‘What do you see?’ Mattio said.

Baerd turned. The man was leaner, and his black beard was differently trimmed, but he was recognizably the same. ‘Ygrathens,’ he said on a rising note of excitement. ‘Soldiers of the King of Ygrath. You may never have seen them here, this far east, but that is exactly what they are, your Others.’

Mattio looked suddenly thoughtful. He shook his head, but it was Donar who spoke.

‘Be not deceived, Baerd. Remember where we are, what I have told you. You are not in our peninsula, this is no battle of the day against your invaders from overseas.’

‘I see them, Donar. I know what I see.’

‘And shall I tell you that what I see out there are hideous shapes in grey and dun, naked and hairless, dancing and coupling with each other as they mock us with their numbers?’

‘And the Others for me are different again,’ Mattio said bluntly, almost angrily. ‘They are large, larger than men, with fur on their spines running down into a tail like the mountain cats. They walk upon two legs but they have claws on their hands, and razored teeth in their mouths.’

Baerd wheeled again, his heart hammering, looking west in the eerily lucid green light of wherever they were. But still, in the middle distance, pouring down out of the hills, he saw soldiers with weapons: swords and pikes and the undulating knives of Ygrath.

He turned to Elena, a little desperate.

‘I do not like to name what I see,’ she murmured, lowering her eyes. ‘They frighten me too much. They are creatures of my childhood fears. But it is not what you are seeing, Baerd. Believe me. Believe us. You may see the Others in the shape of your heart’s hate, but this is not the battle of your daytime world.’

He shook his head in fierce denial. There was a deep surging in his spirit, a rushing of blood in his veins. The Others were nearer now, hundreds of them, streaming out of the hills.

‘I am always fighting the same battle,’ he said to her. To her and the two men. ‘All my life. Wherever I am. And I know what I see out there. I can tell you that I am fifteen years old now, not fourteen or I could not be here. They would not have allowed me.’ A thought struck him. ‘Tell me: is there a stream west of us, a river below where they are descending now?’

‘There is,’ Donar said. ‘Do you want to join battle there?’

A red, fierce joy was running through Baerd, wild and uncontrollable.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘Oh, I do. Mattio, where do we claim our weapons?’

‘There.’ Mattio pointed southeast to a small nearby field where tall stalks of corn were growing, in defiance of what should have been the season. ‘Come. They will be at your stream very soon.’

Baerd did not speak. He followed Mattio’s lead. Elena and Donar went with them. Other men and women were in that field of corn already and Baerd saw that they were reaching down to pluck a stalk to be their weapon in the night. It was uncanny, incredible, but he was beginning to take a part of the measure of this place, to understand the magic that was at work here, and a corner of his mind, which worked outside and around the stern logic of day, grasped that the tall yellow grain that was so endangered was the only weapon possible tonight. They would fight for the fields with grain in their hands.

He stepped in among the others in that cornfield, careful of where he walked, and he bent down and grasped a stalk for himself. It came free easily, even willingly to his hand in that green night. He walked out on to fallow ground again and hefted it in his hand and swung it cautiously, and he saw that already the stalk had stiffened like metal forged. It sliced through the air with a keen whistling sound. He tested it with a finger and drew blood. The stalk had grown as sharp as any blade he’d ever held, and as true to his hand, and it was many-edged like the fabled blades of Quileia, centuries ago.

He looked away to the west. The Ygrathens were descending the nearest of the hills. He could see the glint of their weapons under the moon. This is not a dream, he told himself. Not a dream.

Donar was beside him, grim and unwavering. Mattio stood beyond, a passionate defiance in his face. Men and women were gathering behind them and all around, and all of them held corn swords in their hands, and all of them looked the same: stern and resolute and unafraid.

‘Shall we go?’ Donar said then, turning to look out upon them all. ‘Shall we go and fight them for the fields and for our people? Will you come with me now to the Ember war?’

‘For the fields!’ the Night Walkers cried, and raised their living swords aloft to the sky.

What Baerd di Tigana bar Saevar cried he cried only in his heart and not aloud, but he went forward with all of them, a stalk of corn like a long blade in his hand, to do battle under the pale green moon of that enchanted place.