5
The Gravel Ford Inn on the Stroma River was eighteen miles, two days' drive for a flock of sheep, from the outskirts of Carcosa. In the common room Garric's body slept with a score of other men: Benlo's guards, wagoners bringing produce into the city, boys going to seek their fortune.
There was always traffic this close to the capital. The innkeeper had an income that Reise would have envied, though Reise would never have allowed rushes so filthy to lie on the floor of his inn.
Garric's dream self watched King Carus climb the escarpment of Ladera Castle on a bright spring day. Fifty men followed him, using the fingers and toes of three limbs to grip while the other limb rose to a new hold as slowly as a snake stalks a field mouse.
"We couldn't wear armor, not even helmets," Carus said. He and dream Garric leaned on a rail, but the structure to which the railing was attached blurred at the edges of vision. The landscape, the castle, and the forlorn hope creeping up its walls were in a different time and place. "If anybody'd looked down from the walls, they could have wiped us out by dropping handfuls of gravel off the battlements."
He laughed with rollicking joy. "I was only a few years older than you then, lad," he said. "Just ascended to the throne and too young to know what the risks were. But I was right: it had to be done or the kingdom would have crumbled right then instead of in twenty years, after we sailed for Yole. . . ."
The king's voice sobered as he continued speaking, not into sadness but with a kind of steely anger. If anything his tone grew lighter, flexing like a bowstaff coming to full nock.
In the sea below Ladera Port and the castle at its western end was a fleet of over a hundred war galleys, bow-on to the shore. Their oars moved sluggishly, just enough to hold station against the ebbing tide. Bronze rams dipped and lifted with the swell. Troops were winding back the arms of the catapults on the vessels' foredecks.
"Because of the weight?" dream Garric asked. He'd climbed the fangs of rock off the shore north of Barca's Hamlet every nesting season since he was twelve, coming down with a basket of green, tangy guillemot eggs in his teeth. It made his fingertips ache to watch the climbing soldiers. At least they didn't have salt spray drenching them as their friends waited below at the oars of a small boat.
"Because of the noise," Carus said, his voice soft and cheerful once more. "One clink of steel on stone and Count Rint of Ladera would have been King of the Isles—at least until one of fifty more usurpers cut him down."
Men stood on the castle's battlements, even here on the south side, but all the guards were looking toward the sea and the threatening fleet. Carus, his dark hair restrained by a golden fillet, wore his long sword in a sheath strapped to his back where it was out of the way until needed.
A catapult fired from the castle wall, the arms slapping loudly against their stops as the head-sized missile sailed toward the ships in a flat arc. The stone splashed into the sea among the oarblades of the quinquireme whose gilded prow marked her as the royal flagship. Iridescent water spouted higher than the mast of a ship under sail.
"Wouldn't it have been safer to attack at night?" Garric asked. The figure of the young king was only a few feet below the lip of a tower on which a pair of Laderan guards craned their necks to see the fleet over the castle's opposite walls.
The older Carus shook his head. "It had to be by daylight so that they'd be watching the ships," he said. "They never dreamed that I'd landed the night before with fifty men and crept to the scrub at the back of the castle in the dark."
The young king came over the battlements in a twisting leap that an acrobat would have envied. The guards turned. The long sword was in Carus' hand, striking right and left like twin strokes of lightning. More men swarmed onto the walls, overwhelming the handful of guards on this less-threatened sector before they could even give the alarm.
"And with your help, lad," Carus said again in a voice like sun quivering on a sword edge, "I'll settle things yet with the Duke of Yole."
"Sir, he's dead," the dream Garric protested. "Dead a thousand years!"
Carus shook his head, his eyes on troops running to complete the capture of Ladera Castle. Defenders were already leaving the walls, throwing away weapons and their armor to surrender as unarmed civilians.
"All times are one time, lad," he said. "Later is as good as sooner."
The troops were shouting as they flooded into the castle. The shouts grew louder.
"Attack! Attack!" a man cried.
Someone stumbled over Garric sleeping in the darkness. He lurched to his feet in the Gravel Ford Inn, fully awake but still blinking with the bright dream daylight of a moment before.
"Attack!" the man outside warned. It was Cashel shouting.
Garric groped for the weapons lying beside his bed of woven straw. The bow would be useless at night. He grasped the hilt of the sword the drover had given him and ran for the door along with Benlo's guards.
As Garric's hands started to draw the sword, he felt the laughing form of King Carus merge with him.