Viriconium Read Online Free PDF Page B

recluse, preferring poetry to courts and swords. My . . . informant . . . told me nothing but what I have told you. He died a little later. He was in some part responsible for the smoke you saw.” He poured himself a mug of wine, and went on:
    “What I counsel is this: that you should take your company and go north, taking the fastest route and travelling lightly. Should the Queen have prepared an army, you will doubtless overhaul it before any significant confrontation. Unless a Methven be already in charge of it, you must offer (offer only: people forget, and we have not the King to back us anymore) your generalship.
    “If there is no army, or if a Methven commands, then lead your men as a raiding force: locate the Moidart and harry her flanks.”
    Grif laughed. “Aye, prick her. I have the skill for that, all right. And my men, too.” He became serious. “But it will take time, weeks possibly, for me to reach her. Unless she already knocks at the door.”
    “I think not. That must be your course, however long. Travelling by the canny routes, news of her coming would be a full three weeks ahead of her. An army cannot take the hill ways. With speed, we can hope to engage her well before she reaches Viriconium.”
    “What of yourself, in these weeks we scatter like minutes?”
    “Today, I leave for the city. There I will arrange the backing of Queen Jane for the Methven and also seek Trinor, for he would be an asset. If an army has been sent (and I cannot think the queen as ill-informed as I: there must be one), I will join you, probably at Duirinish, bringing any help I can.”
    “Fair enough, Cromis. You will need a couple of men in the unquiet city. I’ll detail—”
    Cromis held up his hand.
    “I’ll ride alone, Grif. Am I hard-pressed, it will be useful practice. I have grown out of the way of fighting.”
    “Always the brooder.” Grif returned to the window and bawled down into the courtyard, “Go to sleep, you skulkers! Three hours, and we ride north!”
    Grif had not changed. However he lived, he lived it full. Cromis stood by him at the window and clapped his meaty shoulder.
    “Tell me, Grif: what has been your business all these years?”
    Grif bellowed with laughter, which seemed to infect his men. They milled about the courtyard, laughing too, although they could not have heard the question.
    “Something as befits a Methven in peacetime, brooder. Or as you may have it, nothing as befits a Methven at any time. I have been smuggling distilled wine of low and horrible quality to peasants in the Cladich Marshes, whose religion forbids them drink it. . . .”
    Cromis watched Grif’s ragged crew disappear into the darkness at a stiff pace, their cloaks flapping out behind them. He waved once to the colourful figure of Grif himself, then turned to his horse, which was breathing mist into the cold night. He checked the girth and saddlebags, settled the Eastern instrument across his back. He shortened his stirrups for swift riding.
    With the coming of darkness, the winds had returned to Balmacara: the rowans shook continuously, hissing and rustling; Cromis’s shoulder-length black hair was blown about his face. He looked back at the tower, bulking dark against the cobalt sky. The surf growled behind it. Out of some strange sentiment, he had left the light burning in the upper room.
    But the baan that had killed his sister he had in an insulated sheath next to his skin, because he knew he would not come again, riding to the light out of battle, to Balmacara in the morning.
    Refugees packed the Viriconium road like a torchlit procession in some lower gallery of Hell. Cromis steered his nervous beast at speed past caravans of old men pushing carts laden with clanking domestic implements and files of women carrying or leading young children. House animals scuttled between the wheels of the carts.
    The faces he passed were blank and frightened, overlit and gleaming in the flaring unsteady light of the