All of them were overloaded, even for the heavy Southron mounts. If it weren’t for the fact that Helga knew how that booty had been taken, she’d find the whole thing more amusing than anything else.
“Stupid as beasts, too,” she hissed. “By the time they get back across the Wall, they’ll have discarded half that stuff.”
“Half, at least,” responded Adrian. His own face looked sour. That wasn’t because the Southron retreat was upsetting his plans, Helga knew. It was simply because Adrian wasn’t really any fonder of the barbarians than she was.
Well, except for that Prelotta freak, and his mangy Reedbottoms.
Helga’s own opinion of the Reedbottoms, and Prelotta, lacked any of Adrian’s complexity. She understood the subtlety of his Grove-trained logic, more or less; she understood much better the cold-blooded calculations which lay behind her father’s schemes. But Helga’s attitude toward the southern barbarians—the Reedbottoms no less than any of the others—began with their smell, and . . .
Ended there. Stinking savages.
A knot of horsemen was approaching the head of the column from straight ahead on the road. A large knot—perhaps fifty in all; heavily armored, and riding even larger velipads than most Southrons. And they were trotting, not galloping in headlong retreat.
Reedbottoms, then. Prelotta’s tribesmen didn’t share the usual Southron contempt for armor, and they transferred over to cavalry warfare their heavy infantry notions of fighting.
Before she could recognize the face of the man leading them, Helga knew it was Prelotta himself. The Reedbottom chief had led a party out yesterday to negotiate with the nearby city of Franness.
“Negotiate,” she muttered.
Adrian heard the mutter, and smiled thinly. “In a manner of speaking. Much the way a footpad ‘negotiates’ with his victim. ‘Your purse or your life.’ ”
Franness was the largest city in the Confederacy’s southern provinces. Nothing on the order of great Vanbert itself, of course—say, fifty thousand residents to the capital’s one million—but still quite a prize for a barbarian conqueror.
Helga had thought Prelotta’s attempt to extort booty from them through “negotiation” was absurd. Everyone knew that Tomsien was coming, with a huge army of Confederate regulars. The barbarians could boast all they wanted, but every single time in history they’d come up against a large Vanbert force, the Southrons had gotten their heads broken.
The city notables of Franness knew that history as well as anyone. Franness was a walled city, with a real wall and not just a flimsy palisade. And everyone—every Confederate city notable, for sure—also knew what the penalty would be if they capitulated to the barbarians and Tomsien emerged triumphant. That, too, was a long Confederate tradition—city councils of besieged cities who surrendered before the wall was breached were subject to decimation, just as routed army units were.
That assumed, of course, that the Confederacy would recapture the city. But . . . It had never failed to do so yet.
Odd, though. Prelotta was close enough now for Helga to be able to see his expression clearly. The open, flanged helmets the Southrons favored did not obscure faces much. It was always hard for her to tell, because of the grotesque scars and tattoos, but she thought the Reedbottom chief looked rather satisfied with himself.
And so he proved.
“They refused, of course,” he announced, as soon as he drew up his mount. “Even heaped the most scurrilous insults upon my head!”
Grinning while he said it. True, with the cheek scars, Prelotta’s grin never seemed especially humorous to Helga. But she’d come to know the Reedbottom chief fairly well in the time since she’d arrived in Marange, and he was clearly not in a foul mood.
Adrian, as always—and in a way which continued to amaze Helga—managed exactly the right response. Her lover’s innate scholarly absentmindedness, which sometimes exasperated her but of which she was basically rather fond, was something Adrian could suspend when he needed to. Those weird “spirits” of his made him just as superb a diplomat as a slinger.
“No doubt you told them you’d rape every matron in the city, by way of revenge,” he drawled. “I’ll warn you though, Prelotta, a good half of them will be withered crones. And the ones who are plump enough to suit you will have nasty dispositions.”