Ventus | Page 6

a bench nearby, feeling uncomfortable.
"It's fascinating stuff," said Allegri. He waved the paper. "It's about a battle that took place yesterday, between two very large forces, Ravenon and Seneschal."
Jordan looked up in interest. "Who won?"
"Well, there hangs the tale," said the minister. "It seems each side lined up, on the edges of a great field south of here, on the Ravenon border. They camped, and waited all night, and then in the morning they donned their armor, and took up their weapons, and marched against each other. Very deliberate. Very confident, both sides."
Jordan could picture it clearly; this sounded so similar to the nightmare he'd had last night. In his dream, the mounted horsemen had clashed in clouds of dust on the ends of the lines. Bracketed by the horror of dying men and screaming horses, stolid infantry marched up the center. In his dream, Jordan could tell from the angle of the sun that it was nine o'clock in the morning. He had stood on a hill above the battle, surrounded by flying pennants and impatient horses.
"What colors?" he asked.
Allegri raised an eyebrow. "Colors?"
"What were the colors of the pennants they were flying?"
"Well, if I recall correctly, Ravenon flies yellow pennants. Those are the royal colors, anyway. The enemy were the Senschals, so they'd be red," said Allegri. "Why?"
Jordan hesitated before speaking. To say this to Allegri would be to make it real. "Your semaphore... does it say that the Seneschals had these steam cannon hidden behind their infantry? Like fountains in a way, grey streams of gravel flying up and into the back ranks of the Ravenon footsoldiers."
"Yes." Allegri frowned. "How did you know? I just got this. We're relaying it on to Castor's place right now." He gestured to the far side of the clearing, where one of the brothers was yanking the pulleys on a tall semaphore tower.
"I dreamed this battle." There, he'd said it. Jordan looked down at his feet.
"Is this why you came to see me?" Allegri asked. "To tell me you'd dreamed today's news?"
Jordan nodded.
The priest opened his mouth, closed it, and said, "Where were you in this... dream?"
"On a hillside. Surrounded by important people. I think I was an important person too. People kept looking at me, and I said things."
"What things?" Allegri prompted.
It wasn't like remembering a dream. The more Jordan thought about it, the more like memory it became. "Orders," he said. "I was giving orders."
He closed his eyes, and recalled the scene. His own lines were wavering, and the infantry fell back even as his cavalry outflanked the Seneschals on the right. A group of his cavalry rode hard at the steam cannon, and cut down their operators, but some were lost in the last moments as the cannon were laboriously turned against them. Ravenon now had the Seneschal forces bent back like a bow, but their own lines were stretched thin. Jordan described this to Allegri.
Allegri shook his head, either in surprise or disbelief. "What happened then?" he asked. "The news just reached us--but it's unclear. Unbelievable. What do you know about it?"
Jordan squinted. He didn't want to remember this part; he could see bodies strewn across the grass below, some writhing, and in places where the line of battle had passed, women walked to and fro, cutting throats or administering first aid depending on the color of a helpless man's uniform. Jordan saw one man play dead and then leap up and run down a woman who had approached him with her knife drawn. Three others converged on him and cut him down in turn.
In the dream Jordan had looked away then, and spoke. "We deployed a new weapon," said Jordan now.
"Describe it." Allegri's hands twisted in the cloth of his robe. He sat hunched forward, eyes fixed on Jordan.
"We had the breeze to our advantage. My men set fire to some sort of long tubes filled with... sulphur, I think. They made a horrible reddish-yellow smoke." Jordan didn't want to talk about it any more, but once he had started it was hard to stop. And Allegri was staring at him as if he could force the story out of him by willpower alone. "The smoke went over the Seneschals. They started to fall down, they choked on it. The lines broke. We had time to regroup, we got ready to charge."
"And then?"
Jordan swallowed. "And then the Winds came."
From the hillsides all around the battle scene, a cloud rose as the birds, the bugs, the burrowing animals and the snakes, all rose and marched into the valley. The grass itself began to twist and come to life, and the earth trembled as great silvery boulders wrenched themselves out and sprouted legs. The men and horses around Jordan milled in panic. He could see they were screaming,