Well, that was interesting! It might be useful, too. If there was some rivalry there, it might just be possible to exploit it
The first thing to do was to find out just what, exactly, the function of this older man was. Then she could see if there was some way to use one of them as leverage against the other.
She turned her attention back to Jamal, studying him further. He was the younger of the two, and might be the more flexible and forward-thinking. It might be best to appeal to him, rather than to the older man.
“He’s watching us,” Keman whispered urgently. “The old man, he’s watching us.”
She transferred her gaze, quickly. The old man was watching them both closely, eyes narrowed. Even as she looked, he turned his head slightly aside to talk to one of his followers, never taking that speculative regard off of them.
“I wish I knew what he was saying,” Keman muttered to her.
She nodded; there was a great deal of intelligence in that man’s face; something about the determined set of his mouth and chin told her he would be a bad man to cross. He would take his time about a solution to the problem you represented, and when he had his solution, he would methodically and thoroughly implement it. And she could not tell what she and Keman meant to him. Now, more than ever, she cursed the ability these people possessed that enabled them to keep her out of their minds.
“I wish,” she replied fervently, “That I knew what he was thinking.”
“Where did these new green-eyed demons spring from?” First Iron Priest Diric asked one of the acolytes in an aside. He took care to show none of his displeasure in his expression, but he made it very clear in his tone of voice. “And more to the point, why was I not informed of their capture?”
“Lord, as to the first, I was told that they were caught spying upon the wagons this afternoon,” the acolyte replied, keeping his voice down and cultivating a pleasant tone, as if he spoke of nothing consequential at all. “As to the second, lord, I cannot tell you. I only heard of them this very evening.”
Diric raised an eyebrow, both at the words and at the precautionary tone of voice, and took a sip of his beer, savoring it carefully. Only he and Jamal received beer; there wasn’t a great deal of it left, and there was no more barley to brew more. Somewhere, somehow, the Forge Clan of the Iron People were going to have to find farmers to trade with. The People were running short of all manner of grain and grain products; in a month or so there would not even be flour for bread.
For that matter, they would have to find supplies of iron ore, or better yet, iron ingots. The last farmers they had found to trade with had been clustered in a village six months’ travel behind them—the last miners, nearly a year in their wake. The forges had not been unpacked for far too long; the war-bulls would need horn-tips soon, surely. The women were already complaining that they needed new jewelry.
But Jamal did not seem particularly interested in finding miners or farmers with whom to trade. He seemed much more intent on finding someone to fight.
It was a good thing that the land itself had conspired against this particular plan. The People could not have sustained a war with supplies in their current state. The only creatures they had encountered on this endless grass-plain were alicorns and these new green-eyed demons.
Of which no one bothered to inform me until I saw them myself when I entered the gather-tent. He had a sour taste in his mouth that the beer could not remove, and a bitter taste in his mind when he considered his War Chief. Jamal was ambitious; he had known that from the start. The War Chief had made no attempt to cloak that ambition, and indeed, most War Chiefs were ambitious. Diric himself had outlived three of them—ambition was a good thing in a leader whose functions were all of aggression and defense. But Jamal was also popular, and that was beginning to worry Diric. The fact that he had been able to convince his followers to conceal the existence of these new green-eyed demons was very disturbing.
He cast a veiled glance at the War Chief, who reclined at his ease and watched with a paternal smile on his lips while the unmated danced and disported with one another. He had heard rumors that Jamal had greater ambitions than any other War Chief in Diric’s memory. Those rumors spoke of Jamal’s dream of returning to the homelands laden with booty, to unite all of the Iron Clans under his sole leadership. No one had ever done that before; the only body with any authority between the Iron Clans were the Priests, who oversaw disputes and made all needed arrangements whenever two or more Clans gathered together. Never had any two Clans agreed on a single leader before, much less all the Clans together. Had it been anyone else, Diric would have dismissed the ambition with a snort as idle dreaming. The trouble was, Jamal was just charismatic enough to carry the plan off. If he returned with the wagons groaning with foreign booty, his chances of success were very good.
And then what need would he have of the Iron Priests? Diric asked himself, knowing what the answer would be. None, of course. And if he coveted the power held by other War Chiefs, how much more must he covet that held by the Priests?
Diric had not realized how much power the War Chief already held until this very evening. It had happened before, of course, that he did not hear of something until it happened to suit his rival—but it had never happened with something as important as the capture of these green-eyed demons.
The original two demons had been caught in the days of Diric’s father’s father, and were the Forge Clan’s treasured possessions. Until that time, the fearsome pointy-eared paleskins had been deemed only legends, the kind of creature one frightened a disobedient child with. Diric knew the legends better than anyone else; it was his job, after all, to remember them and recount them so that the Iron People never forgot them. The legends told of a great war with these demons, who entered the world through a door between this world and their own. The demons had coveted this world—how not, after all?—and had killed and harried the ancestors and their former allies, the Com People, until the Iron People were forced to flee into the South with their herds, leaving their allies to hold the demons back so that they could escape. Only the cattle had survived that flight; there had been another sort of beast commonly ridden by the warriors and used as a pack animal, but these had not been able to bear up to the stresses of the flight or the hotter and wetter climate of the South. In time, the ancestors learned the twin secrets of the Magic-Metal and the Mind-Wall, and the few demons that followed after them were defeated and slaughtered.
The legends spoke of the contempt of the People and of the god, the First Smith, for these cowardly demons, who employed weapons that revealed that cowardice, weapons that killed at no risk to the wielder. But no one had believed in the legends of green-eyed demons except the Priests—until these two had appeared.
The War Chief of the time had made much of the fact that he had captured the terrible demons and enslaved them for the entertainment of the People, but Dine knew these two, Haldor and Kelyan, very well, and he knew they had been little or no threat to a well-armored warrior. They were children, youngsters on some kind of impulsive excursion, and as unprepared for the Iron People as the People were unprepared for them. The accepted story of the encounter was that the magics of Iron and the Mind-Wall discipline had protected War Chief Alaj, and had made it possible for him to overpower them. Diric had a rather different view of the encounter.
Those two, Haldor and Kelyan—they were not and are not as fearsome as their legended ancestors. Their powers are nothing like the powers those demons were said to call upon,
Now, either the legends greatly exaggerated those powers, or these two were simply weaker. Diric was inclined to think the latter. In general, the legends as he had studied them made very few mistakes—they had not exaggerated the danger of the one-horns, for instance, nor their suicidal ferocity. So why should the danger represented by the green-eyed demons be any less than the legends painted it?
By this point, most of the people took the former view, however; they were used to having Haldor and Kelyan running tame about the camp and making their pretty illusions whenever the gather-tent went up. Diric had not been particularly worried about that until now; he had assumed that the Iron People would never again encounter their old foes. Now he was not so sure, and he feared that complacency could be a danger in itself.