Greylady Read online

  Greylady

  The Clan Wars

  Book I

  Peter Morwood

  There was already a fourth arrow on the string of his bow, but it wouldn’t be needed now, and—

  —Bayrd took one look, yelped, and dropped it. The arrow went end-for-end to the ground and drove a little way in under its own weight, then toppled slowly sideways and lay there.

  It was sizzling.

  Wreathed from nock to point in a slowly fluttering scarf of blue flame, it was making a sound absolutely like that of frying bacon. Every now and then the barbed head spat fat white sparks that went dancing across the sand, as though it was still red-hot under the hammer of the smith who had forged it eight months before. And yet the wooden shaft wasn’t charred, the blue and white feathers of the fletching weren’t shrivelled by the flames. It just lay there.

  Sizzling…

  Novels by Peter Morwood

  The ‘Horse Lords’ Series

  The Horse Lord

  The Demon Lord

  The Dragon Lord

  The War Lord

  (Forthcoming: The Shadow Lord)

  The ‘Clan Wars’ Sequence

  Greylady

  Widowmaker

  (Forthcoming: Cradlesong)

  The Tales of Old Russia

  Prince Ivan • Firebird

  The Golden Horde

  (Forthcoming: The Blue Kremlin)

  In the Star Trek Universe:

  Rules of Engagement

  The Romulan Way

  Other Novels:

  Keeper of the City

  Space Cops 1: Mindblast

  Space Cops 2: Kill Station

  Space Cops 3: High Moon

  Seaquest DSV

  For more information, visit http://www.petermorwood.com

  For Diane

  Another story, another world

  Content

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  Prologue

  The Words of the Wise One

  “In the time before, the Land had its own people. None speak of them now, save for scholars wise in the old words, for the people of Before are gone. They are one with the people of Now, or they are dead.

  “The people of Now came up out of the eastern sea, riding the wings of storm into the calm of a still, hot day in summer, and they struck the Land with a storm of war far harder than one of wind and rain. The people of the time Before made war as a game, a hunt, and they bound it around with the requirements of honour so that it remained no more than a savage sport, its prizes the taking of ransoms, hostages, and, sometimes, heads.

  “Those who came from the east did not make sport of war. Some said that they came from their last home with only what they wore and carried; but they wore iron, and carried steel, and with those they could take all else they desired. They took the Land, and if they rode the storm-wind in their coming to the Land, they rode tall horses ever after.

  “They were an Mergh-arlethen. They are the Horse Lords. The Talvalins. And this is their story…”

  The old man struck once upon the strings of his harp, a sharp, open-handed slap that sent a sharp, melodious discord twanging throughout the high hall. It brought silence as no other sound could do. Lords and ladies, warriors and women, servants, and even the growling hounds beneath the tables, all grew silent as the echoes of those struck steel strings shimmered into silence. In the feast-hall of a great clan-lord, and especially that of Halmar, ilauem-arluth Talvalin, none save a singer of stories might behave with such casual impudence. No, not even the Overlord Erhal himself, though his guards flanked him forty deep. But for those whose minds held history, all things were permitted – if their songs met with approval.

  The old man stilled his harp strings with a caress of that same striking hand, then stroked his beard and moustache so that they might better spread their silver sweep and fall across his cheeks and chin and chest. There was a softness, a benevolence, about so fine and wise a gentleman, one with a broad brown brow and white whiskers and rosy cheeks, wearing the wrinkles of many smiles about his eyes. Except that there the softness died, for a wide white seam of scar crawled down from his hair and clear across his face to hide itself within his beard. In its wake, one of those eyes was milky-pale and sightless, half-hidden by a black slouch hat. But the other burned with an ice-hot sapphire blue, the freezing fiery remembrance of what was done in recompense for the loss of half his sight.

  Then before the high hall grew too cold, the old man smiled; and with that smile the hall warmed again, and people smiled in turn, and forgot that for a moment one and all of them held in their breath for fear – no, surely not fear, it was no more than interest! – of what this ancient one-eyed man might do, of what he had done before. His slender fingers reached, and spread, and touched, and music rippled like the mantle of Heaven, ennobling all who heard it be they lord, or servant, or only dog panting beneath the table or cat dozing by the fire. He looked at Halmar Talvalin, and inclined his head not with the acknowledgement of command, but with that small nod of someone who had at last made his own decision. The soft notes of a simple scale chimed out, and he said:

  “This is how it was…”

  1

  Invasion

  Farren moved quietly through the green shadows of Gelert’s Wood, making no more sound than the sigh of the dying wind as it stirred the treetops. He was a hunter. Of bees, for their honey; of birds, for their eggs; of mushrooms, of rabbits… Of anything in fact not quick enough to get out of his way and yet small enough to be hidden in the capacious pockets of his hunting-coat.

  That made him a thief. Gelert the High Lord of Prytenon disapproved of hunting without his permission; and since that permission was seldom if ever given, it followed that he disapproved of Farren. But he and his people still bought the eggs, and the honey, and all the other things that Farren and people like him brought to market, and had the good grace not to question how such commodities had fallen into the poacher’s possession. They would have disdained to hunt such little, tasty things themselves, preferring bold, dangerous beasts like stag and boar and the great wild oxen. It was a matter of honour.

  Of course, if they caught him in the act of poaching even those little morsels without the permission they never granted, that same high lord and his warrior-vassals would have seen him tied wrist and ankle to four strong horses before they were whipped to the four horizons. That, too, was a matter of honour.

  So Farren moved quietly through the woods.

  At least there was no need to move as quietly as usual. This was one of those times when the poacher could well believe that he was the only thing moving at all, quietly or otherwise. After last night Gelert’s Wood and every living creature in it seemed to be holding their breath, in case too much activity might invite the storm to return. It had built all yesterday afternoon, darkening to a slate-skied evening, and after dark it had come howling up out of the deep sea to lash against the coast of Prytenon with thunder and lightning, wailing wind and horizontal rain. The worst storm so far this summer, in a year already grown notorious for them.

  It was said here, near the coast, that all dry land had once been open ocean, and the Lords and Ladies of the Deep Sea were jealous of their loss. To the superstitious, and those who made pretence that they had some knowledge of the wizardly arts, it must have seemed as though those Lords and Ladies and all the other demons known to dwell beneath the sea were trying once again to fling their cold, wet realm across the land like a smothering, choking cloak.

  They had done so before. Though Farren had never been there himself, he had spo
ken to travellers from the Cernuan Westerland. They had told him how a man could stand on the roads that led only to empty cliffs and hear the bells of Kerys ringing, ringing, in the cold green water forty fathoms down. The Lords and Ladies of the Deep Sea had reached up glistening, foam-laced arms one night and dragged the city below to be their plaything. Every brick of every building, and every man, woman and child who had been sleeping in them. All the roads to Kerys ended there, on the cliffs above the sea. Forty feet of the city wall curved along the cliff-edge, with the great gateway set square in the middle of it. But the gates swung loose now, rotting in the salty air, unbarred, with no-one left to bar them or anywhere to stand beyond them on two hundred feet of empty air, straight down into the waiting water.

  Farren had thought it typically Cernuek, nothing more than a good story. For all he knew, there had never been a city called Kerys. And even if there had been, and it had fallen into the sea during a storm – as he had seen great chunks of headland do before, without the weight of buildings to encourage them – there was no way in which the bells would be in any fit state to ring after a drop like that. He was a sensible man, was the poacher. At least in the daytime, and in still air.

  Last night, with the gale hooting like mad laughter around the chimney of his cottage and the heavy, hard-driven raindrops pattering and scrabbling like wet, drowned fingertips against the barred shutters of its windows, Farren might have believed anything. Even that the sea had risen from its bed and come roaring in five miles from the shore to invade the land at last. The sound of ringing bells would have driven him under his own bed, shrieking fit to match the storm outside.

  But that had been last night. Now that the wind and rain had passed, leaving the air rinsed and clean under the warmth of a cloudless blue sky, Farren knew that the only risk a land-dweller could run from the sea was in building his house too close to the edge of it. And as for going out on it in a boat, Farren left that to other, braver people. He liked to dine on fried fish as well as anyone else in his village, but not to the extent of chancing that the fish might dine on him. Not that Farren was a coward, or anything like that; but he sometimes had too much imagination to really enjoy the battering of storms at night.

  It was the sort of day when larks sang – and they did – and bees buzzed – and they did – and the fortunate few with nothing better to do could wander through the warm woods and lie by the sea-shore and do nothing at all, except to leisurely hunt for gulls’ eggs and the other things that fetched a better price at market than was justified by the minimal effort of their finding. Had it not been for the remote risk that one of Lord Gelert’s vassals might have been abroad to see whether the lord’s lands had suffered any damage, Farren might have whistled. That, however, would have gone beyond well-being and bravado into foolhardiness, chancing not only his arm but the other arm and both legs as well. So he kept quiet and let the birds do his whistling for him.

  Farren’s usual custom on these jaunts was to gather nothing on his way out – though he might mark the location of, say, a nest of wild bees or a good stand of mushrooms for future reference – in case of who he might meet exercising horses on the empty beach when he reached the shore. It was only on the way back to the village that he would gather in whatever harvest he had spotted. Fair was fair, and if he was caught he was caught. But once back under his own roof, no Prytenek warrior who might have pursued him would demean himself by entering a peasant’s home to search for such things as he would not have troubled himself to gather up in passing.

  Indeed, if the great man’s humour was good, he might buy up such produce without waiting for market, and even pay a little extra for the fun of the chase. Fair was fair, and another matter of honour.

  The lords of the land regarded everything as a game, a rough and often fatal sport, whether it was war, or political argument, or the workings of the laws that they themselves had passed. If one remembered that the first and only rule was that there were no rules, then those games were easily played. For a peasant, that was what he could expect from honour.

  Farren yawned; the warmth of the damp, heavy air was having its effect on him, especially after a night that had been mostly sleepless. Even though he was almost clear of the forest, there was more than a mile of sand-dunes still to be crossed, dunes held in place by bracken and heather and needle-pointed marram grass. No matter how fierce the storm-wind blew, those dunes weathered all of it, and if their vegetation cover was stripped away by a particularly fierce gale, it was capable of growing back almost while he watched.

  Farren was halfway through the dunes when he yawned again. The heat of the reflected sun had been beating up at him since he first set foot on the sand, and slogging through its shifting heaviness had made his task no easier. A nap would be pleasant enough, and it wasn’t as though he had to be anywhere. He had slept in the dunes before, for one reason and another; a mattress of fern and heather laid into a hollow scooped in the sand could be as comfortable to weary bones as the straw pallet of his own bed, and with fewer creatures living in it. Things to be stolen would still be there when the heat of the day had faded somewhat. That was what he told himself, at any rate. Far off in the distance beyond another three or four steep slopes of sand he could hear the slow rushing of waves as they ran up onto the shore of Dunakr Bay. It was a lazy sound, no encouragement to effort, and without thinking any more about what else he might be doing with the day, Farren the poacher made himself a nest among the bracken and fell fast asleep.

  * * * *

  “Land!” yelled someone. “Land-ho! Land!”

  Bayrd ar’Talvlyn raised his head from the deck, and peered over the gunwale of the ship. There was no land anywhere that he could see, and he squinted blearily at the dance of sunlight on water. It was beautiful, in its own way, but for him and for his stomach, the only beauty was that the water itself was near enough flat calm. It had been anything but, this past few days, and last night had been the worst of all. Bayrd was no sailor.

  There were times when it felt as though he had been almost everything else. At twenty-seven years of age he had been married twice – once for dynastic reasons and once for love – divorced once, widowed once, and without children to show for it in either case. His clean-shaven, regular if not especially handsome face was unmarred by that, and his straight nose was unmarred by the usual stamp of a warrior who has seen battle. A man whose helmet-nasal had taken the blow from an enemy’s weapon and transferred the shock to the nose it was supposed to guard invariably had a somewhat flattened, cynical look. From the expression that usually lurked in his grey eyes, a glint suggesting lazy amusement at everything the world had to offer, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn managed the cynicism quite nicely without any reshaping of his features.

  For all of that experience, he had still managed to avoid travelling aboard any vessel larger than a river ferry before, and this first encounter with the realities of ocean voyaging was enough to have soured him against it for the rest of his life. And there had been times, during the storm, when he though that life might have been measured in minutes.

  He sagged back onto the deck, salt-stained and soaked, but mercifully clean. All the vomit that he – and probably everyone else aboard except the crew – had spewed everywhere had been washed away by the massive waves that had gone roaring through the scuppers like wild animals released from captivity. His guts gave another aching experimental churn, but there was no longer anything there for them to work on. He was grateful for that. Death would be preferable to a repetition of what he had gone through this past twenty hours.

  Bayrd sneezed – it hurt, but right now very little didn’t – and stared up at the lookout post at the mast-head as it described slow arcs across the blue sky. Then a slow, rueful smile began to spread across his face. He might live to be a sailor after all, or at least a landsman able to travel by ship without shaming himself at the first roll of the vessel. No more than a week ago, just watching that movement would have sent him hurryin
g to the leeside railing. Now it was merely restful.

  At least there was still a mast for him to watch, even though its sail was no more than a decorative fringe of canvas hanging from its yard. He could vaguely remember the sail giving way, with a sharp bang and then a long rending sound that was so like and yet unlike the thunder splitting the clouds above. It hadn’t been worthy of more notice than that, not at a time when Bayrd thought he might die and hadn’t really regretted the prospect. Death in battle he could have faced with equanimity.

  At least, he reconsidered, probably. Though he was old enough, the likelihood had yet to present itself, for all that being killed on someone else’s behalf was a common ending for Albanak-arluth’s people. Bayrd gazed up at the sky some more, soaking in the heat of the sun as he might have done in a tub of water. Lulled by the creak of cordage and timber, a sound that had annoyed him once but was now a soothing counterpoint to the lap of water against the hull, his eyes grew heavy as he began to slip into a doze that was half a hypnotic trance brought on by the slow, regular swing of the mast. Then his eyes snapped open again as the questions came tumbling out of his subconscious; questions for which he had no answers.

  Where was the Lord Albanak? Where was everyone else? Was this the only ship to survive the storm…?

  The possibility of being alone was almost as frightening as that of being drowned. He sat up with an abrupt jerk that sent stabs of protest through his over-worked abdominal muscles. Bayrd gasped, winced, swore viciously as if that would alleviate the pain or at least make him feel better – it did neither – and scrambled squelching to his feet.

  Then he swore again, by the Father of Fires and by the Light of Heaven, but this time with a deal more reverence. His grip on the taffrail was tight enough to suggest that he might have fallen down without its support, but that fall would have been from surprise rather than weakness. As he looked from horizon to horizon, his jaw sagging like that of the merest yokel at a fair, Bayrd realized that he had seldom been so not alone.