Both captains nodded; one of them laughed grimly.
Beguchren barely smiled. “Just so. So we shall prefer to delay Iaor Safiad past the likelihood of any great interference. We should prefer to hold him entirely. But we will first show him a face that may make him pause to reflect, rather than merely gather his forces for an assault. We shall assuredly not draw the first bow.” He glanced from one man to the other and added without emphasis, “Indeed, you may warn your men that I will personally see to it that any man who shoots without the command is bound under the geas.”
Lady Tehre looked up at that, suddenly attentive, frowning. Both captains paled. “No one will draw without leave,” the senior said earnestly. “We assure you, my lord.”
“Indeed, I am certain of it,” murmured Beguchren. “Now, if we should be compelled to fight, we shall hope Lady Tehre may compensate for our poor disposition of forces.”
The captains glanced at each other and then, with the greatest respect, at Lady Tehre. They were northern men; that was one reason the Arobern had left them with Beguchren. They had seen the Great Wall.
“Well, but,” said Lady Tehre, worried, “there is no stone here to break; the mountains are a great distance away. I think too far.”
The lady was perched on a camp chair, her hands folded demurely in her lap, a few strands of her dark hair curling down beside her face. She looked fragile and feminine and markedly more beautiful than she had six years ago. Marriage to Gereint had suited her very well.
She said now, “I can tear up the road under their horses, to be sure, my lord, but that wouldn’t be enough to stop them, do you think, if they are determined? This soft black soil is very deep here along the river. I don’t know what I could do with it.” A tiny crease appeared between her fine eyebrows as she slipped into a maker’s reverie. “Soft earth might actually flow, in a sense, rather like very thick molasses,” she murmured. “I wonder…”
Beguchren left the lady to consider how deep soil might flow like a liquid and said to the captains, without the slightest fear he would distract her, “I expect the Safiad to make his appearance, in considerable force, quite soon. Today, tomorrow, most likely not so late as the day after. Suppose he approaches this very afternoon. If we cannot halt him entirely, I think we must delay him at least three days.” After that, if the Wall had held so long, it would probably break. At that point Iaor Safiad would have to forget about the Delta and set his men against the griffins. If that happened, Beguchren intended to support the Feierabianden king with his own men. Provided he had any left, which he would not if he had been forced to use them in battle. He did not intend to have events come to that.
He said merely, “We do not wish our king to find himself pressed from the rear when he has urgent matters to which he must attend elsewhere. We most particularly do not wish him forced to engage Iaor Safiad personally. Given the possibility of unfortunate errors attending that sort of engagement, even if they had been previously avoided.”
Again, both captains nodded. One of them murmured, “No, indeed, my lord,” in a fervent tone that made Beguchren suspect the man had young sons of his own, and sufficient imagination to flinch from the picture this statement called to mind.
“We shall hope, however, to persuade the Safiad to hold using nothing more forceful than moral suasion,” Beguchren said firmly, and dismissed the captains. As they drew away, he overheard one of them murmur to the other, “Well, my lord is the man for moral suasion, if anyone is,” and the other answer, “He might bid the river flow backward and have it comply, but an offended king is likely to prove harder to turn than a river.”
This summed the situation up tolerably well. Beguchren, too, would have much preferred not to be forced to depend wholly on his own personal persuasiveness. Lady Tehre was a weapon, but it was not weapons that would win this particular argument—not if it could be won at all.
He could not help but recall, as sometimes he did rather too vividly, that once his usefulness to his king had not been limited to the fluency of his tongue and the persuasiveness of his arguments. Sighing, he rose—stiffly, for he was no longer a young man—and, leaving Lady Tehre to contemplate the possibilities inherent in this gentle pastureland, went to once more look over the arrangements he had made.
The King of Feierabiand rode south along the river road and out into the broad pastureland just after noon. Scouts had warned Beguchren, so he had his men properly drawn up. The formality of their disposal made the thinness of their lines all the more apparent, which was not accidental. Nevertheless, they made a fine, aggressive display, with all their neat uniforms and their helms polished and their spears neatly parallel. The spear-and-falcon banner of the Casmantian king flew over their heads, sapphire and purple.