Tigana by Guy Kay (novel24 txt) 📕

and treacherous. Elena’s Others were wet and grey, dark with their parasites and open sores. She clenched her teeth and fought, letting this Ember Night body’s grace be guided by her soul, the stalk that was her sword dancing with a life that seemed to come from within itself as much as it did from her. She was splashed with mud and water, and she was sure there must be blood, but there was no time to check, no time now to do anything at all but parry and hammer and slash, and fight to keep one’s footing on the slope of the riverbank, for to fall would be to die.

She was aware, in scattered, hallucinatory flashes, of Donar beside her and Carenna for a time. Then she saw him stride away with a handful of others to quell a movement to the south. Baerd came up on her left at one point, guarding her open side, but when she glanced over again—and now the moon was very high—she saw he was gone.

Then she saw where. He was in the river, not waiting for the Others to come to him. He was attacking them in the water, screaming incoherent words she could not understand. He was slim and young and very beautiful, and deadly. She saw bodies of the Others piling before his feet like grey sludge blocking the stream. He would be seeing them differently, she knew. He had told them what he saw: he would be seeing soldiers of Ygrath, of Brandin, the Tyrant in the west.

His blade seemed almost to vanish in a blur, it moved so fast. Knee-deep in the stream he stood rooted like a tree and they could not force him back, or survive in front of him. The Others were falling back from him there, scrambling to withdraw, trying to work their way around their own dead to get further down the stream. He was driving them away, battling alone in the water, the moonlight strange on his face and strange on the living stalk that was his sword, and he was a fifteen-year-old boy. Only that. Elena’s heart ached for him, even as she fought an overwhelming weariness.

She willed herself to hold her own ground, north of where he was, up on the muddy bank. Carenna was further south along the river now, fighting beside Donar. Two men and a woman from another village came up beside Elena, and together the four of them fought for their stretch of slippery ground, trying to move in concert, to be of one mind.

They were not fighters, not trained for battle. They were farmers and farmers’ wives, millers and blacksmiths and weavers, masons and serving-girls, goatherds in the hills of the Braccio Range. But each and every one of them had been born with a caul in the highlands and named in childhood for Carlozzi’s teachings and for the Ember war. And under the green moon—which had passed its apex and would be setting now—the passion of their souls taught their hands to speak for life with the blades the tall grain had become.

So the Night Walkers of Certando did battle by that river, fighting for the deepest, oldest dream of the widespreading country fields beyond all the high city walls. A dream of Earth, of the life-giving soil, rich and moist and flourishing in its cycle of seasons and years; a dream of the Others driven back, and farther back, and finally away, one bright year none of them would live to see.

And there came a time, amid the tumult and the frenzy, the loud, blurred, spinning violence by the river, when Elena and her three companions forged a respite for themselves. She had a moment to look up and she saw that the stream was thinning of foes. That the Others were milling about, disorganized and confused west of the river. She saw Baerd splash further into the water, hip-deep now, crying for the enemy to come to him, cursing them in a voice so tormented it was scarcely knowable as his own.

Elena could barely stand. She leaned on her sword, sucking in air with heaving sobs, utterly spent. She looked over and saw that one of the men who had fought beside her was down on one knee, clutching his right shoulder. He bled from an ugly, ragged wound. She knelt beside him, tearing weakly at her clothing for a strip to bind it with. He stopped her though.

He stopped her and touched her shoulder and, mutely, he pointed across the stream. She looked where he pointed, away to the west, fear rising in her again. And in that moment of seeming victory Elena saw that the crown of the nearest hill was not empty any more. That there was something standing there.

‘Look!’ a man cried just then, from further down the river. ‘He is with them again! We are undone!’

Other voices took up that cry along the riverbank, in grief and horror and cold fear, for they saw, they all saw now, that the shadow figure had come. Within the darkest spaces of her heart Elena had known that he would.

Just as he almost always had these last years. Fifteen years, twenty; though never before that, Donar had said. When the moon began to set, green and full, just when— so much of the time—it seemed as if they might have a chance to force the Others back, that dark figure would appear, to stand wrapped in fog and mist as in a shroud at the back of the enemy ranks.

And it was this figure the Walkers would see come forward in the years of their defeats, when they were retreating, having been driven back. It was he who would step on to the bitterly contested places of battle, the lost fields, and claim them for his own. And blight and disease and desolation spread where he passed, wherever he walked upon the earth.

He stood now on the neatest of the