Empire's Reckoning

by Marian L Thorpe

  A woman emerged from the closest bothy, carrying a bucket. Seeing me, she stopped, and putting the bucket down ran back into the dwelling, calling to someone. Another woman, older, came out.

  “Gubbë,” this one said. “We’ve not seen your like here for a long time.”

  “I have been in the hills,” I answered. She would not press me for more, I knew.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “You are kind,” I replied, “but no. But is there space in the byre for me to rest?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You will bless us, gubbë?” The price expected.

  “I will.” She led me to the half of the bothy the animals occupied, the milk cow and the pigs, if they had them. Although this should be slaughter month, so the pigs might already be ham and bacon, hanging in flitches above the hearth. The byre was empty, as I had expected; what animals they had would be out foraging, but it was dry, and the reed bedding tolerably clean.

  I settled into a corner, spreading my tattered blanket, which served as my cloak, out flat. I wished the cow had been indoors; her warmth would have been welcome. But I piled reeds over me, and the wife of the cot brought me hot tea, tasting of berries, and slowly I warmed and dried.

  In the adjoining room of the bothy, I could hear the women talking: first about me, and how long it had been since the torp had had any chance of a blessing.

  “I thought perhaps the gods had deserted us,” a voice said. “That when our lord rebelled against the south, it angered them.”

  “Why should it?” The older woman, I thought. “The gods should be happy we supported those whose ancestors we share. The Marai are our cousins,”

  “Cousins?” a wavering voice answered. “Cousins who take our girls away, and increase our tax? They are worse overlords than Linrathe ever was, daughter.”

  “Mother! Do not say such things.”

  “Why? You are worried about the gubbë? He is probably asleep.”

  “But if he is Óski?”

  “He is not. But if he were, should he not know how we are mistreated by men who call themselves his sons?”

  Here was some of the discontent Roghan mentioned. Taxes and taken women; Linrathe had always taxed, but it had treated Sorham’s women with respect. Did the men object to the same things? I wondered what might have happened to my sister: Roghan had not mentioned her, and I had not asked. I had simply assumed she had married.

  I must have slept then, because I woke to men’s voices, and the byre door opening. “Let’s have a look at this gubbë,” I heard a deep voice say.

  “Yes, my lord.” A lantern was held up. I shielded my eyes, hoping the movement would obscure my face.

  “Ja, well, he certainly looks like a gubbë,” the Harr said, looking down at me. “Have you a name, wanderer?”

  “Sören,” I said in a hoarse whisper, “my lord.” I hoped my shock would be taken for fear. The Harr in front of me was Dugar. The river must have bent further west than I had realized, and in the days and nights of heavy cloud, I hadn’t noticed.

  “Hmmph,” he muttered. “Well, spend the night, give the animals and boats a blessing, and be on your way in the morning.”

  “I will, my lord,” I replied. He couldn’t have recognized me, could he? The light was poor, and he had not come close. I settled back into the straw and waited for my heart to stop pounding.

  The milk cow — my only companion, so the pigs had been slaughtered, I concluded — did warm the byre when she was brought in for the night, and a woman brought more tea and a warm cake, before the house slept. All the conversation I could hear, little enough over the cud-chewing cow, had to do with fishing and the farm, nothing more.

  In the morning, I blessed the cow, and then went to the harbour to say words over the boats. “D’ye want to come on board, gubbë?” a fisherman asked. “We can leave you in the next cove, save you the walk.”

  In the proximity of a small boat, someone was bound to notice I wasn’t old. “No,” I said, “you are kind, but I do not like water. I will walk.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, already turning to his day’s work. I set off along the shingle of the beach to where a rough path climbed up onto the headland. The day had dawned sunny, for once, and when I was well beyond the village, I began to sing quietly to myself. It helped pass the hours, and I needed music.

  The wind was off the water, and strong. I didn’t hear the horse until it was nearly upon me. “Sorley of Gundarstorp!” Dugar called. He reined his horse to a stop in front of me.

  I couldn’t run or hide. I pushed my makeshift hood off my face. “Dugar,” I said. “I was out of my reckoning. I didn’t realize whose lands I had reached.”

  “Gods, you stink,” he said cheerfully. “How do you bear your own company? The Teannasach sent you, I warrant, to gather information?”

  “Ruar, yes,” I replied. “And my task is not known to anyone else.”

  “Where are you headed? Home?”

  “I was.”

  “Bad idea,” he said. “Someone will recognize you. You speak Marái’sta well, I expect?”

  “I do.”

  “Then come spend the winter with me. I have two boys you can teach, and no one here will know you.” I stared up at him. “Think, man,” he said. “You go home, and even if Roghan can keep you hidden away, and the torpari don’t talk, you’re risking his life if it becomes known he’s harbouring a traitor. I can always claim I didn’t recognize you; he can’t.”

  He’s right, I thought. I would be a danger to Roghan, and to his family. To the boy named for me, who was my heir. I nodded, slowly. “All right,” I said. “Thank you, Dugar.”

  “I’m not having you up behind me, smelling like you do,” he told me with a grin. “The house is that way.” He pointed. “The bathhouse is the outbuilding closest. I’ll have water heated.” He turned his horse and cantered away.

  That bath was worth what I had suffered to get it, almost. “Feeling better?” Dugar asked, coming in with two tankards of ale and a servant carrying a pile of clothes. “Burn the others,” he told the woman. He handed me ale, settling down on a bench. “You’re beyond thin,” he observed. “And you had no bow, and only rags to wear. What happened?”

  “I was robbed, for my fur cloak,” I improvised. “And beaten. Two trappers. I don’t know whose land,” I added, forestalling the question.

  “They took your ladhar too?” he asked, after a draught of ale.

  “Smashed it, and my bow.”

  “Fucking scum,” he said. “There’ll be one you can use here somewhere, although probably not up to your standard.” He got up. “The mid-day meal’s almost ready. Join us. Don’t shave. The beard will help disguise you.”

  Clean, my still-wet hair combed back, I found my way to the central hall of the house. Men were taking places at the table; women brought food in from the kitchen. Two small boys, perhaps five and six, looked at me curiously.

  “Sören, welcome,” Dugar said. “He’s a teacher,” he told the others. “Time the boys had some proper lessons this winter.” He made introductions. I wouldn’t remember all the names, but his wife was Eilis. The older boy was Dugar, of course, known as Dugi, and his brother Gefen. I’d learn the rest in time.

  No one but the boys showed any interest in me. Travelling teachers had been a part of Sorham for generations; I supposed they still were, scholars who had chosen the Marai cause. I’d better be careful, if asked my allegiances.

  After the meal Eilis showed me to the room that would be mine, small but adequate, and told me she would find me a few more clothes. After I’d thanked her, she took me to another room, with a small central table and a few books. I could teach the boys here, she suggested.

  The days settled into a routine. I taught the boys in the morning: neither knew their letters, although both could count, and add and take away to some extent, so we began with that, and the simplest of the danta. The ladhar I had been given wasn’t one a professional musician would have used
, but I didn’t mind. Sounding like a scáeli would be unwise. When I sang, either when I was teaching the boys history through the simplest of the danta, or occasionally for Dugar and his household in the evenings, I purposely kept my voice rough.

  I’d thought I might be expected to oversee the boys all day, but that wasn’t the case. Dugar took them out with him many afternoons, much as my own father had, teaching them about the responsibilities of the Harr, and the work the men and women of the torp did. They had riding lessons, too, or one of his men instructed them in the use of their tiny bows and wooden swords. All what I had learned at Gundarstorp.

  One small problem did arise. After an evening of music and ale, Dugar had stopped me on my way to my room. “It’s a cold night,” he’d said. “Shall I send a girl to warm your bed?”

  I’d thought this would happen. “Thank you, but no,” I replied. “I — I have someone, in the south.”

  “So?” he said. “She’s not here.”

  “I promised,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Suit yourself. You change your mind, the red-headed one from the kitchen is good.”

  “I won’t,” I told him, “but thank you.”

  He eyed me. “Is this something they teach at that southern Ti’ach? I remember when the toscaire Cillian came to talk to my father, he wouldn’t either. He and I are much of an age, and I’d have not turned down a girl then. Or now, come to that. And you must be, what, twenty-five?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not natural,” he said, and I tensed, waiting for him to make the connection, to slur the words together into the derogatory channàdarra. But he just grinned. “I hope she’s worth it. And I’ll lay a bet you won’t keep your promise. It’s a long winter.”

  Chapter 50

  I had done a fair job of not thinking about Cillian, pushing my anger and confusion to the back of my mind. The obsessive recounting of our last conversation which had circled in my mind after I had left Wall’s End had receded, but the idea that he had used my love for him to convince me to sign away Sorham had not.

  It nagged at me when I was alone, and so I tried not to be. Someone was usually happy to have music of an evening, and I could play until fatigue forced me to bed. This night, Eilis had asked for An Dithës Braithréan.

  “I—I don’t know it well, my lady,” I said. Dugar made a sound, disguising it by a cough. I didn’t know if Eilis knew who I really was: probably not. But Dugar knew full well that I would have sung this song all my life.

  I sang it, but badly. I heard the tightness in my voice, and afterwards I pleaded a sore throat and went to my room. I did not want company, suddenly: I needed to think. Weeks earlier, speaking to Casyn of the Procurator, I had told him why I thought the Casilani official was hiding something. I can hear when a voice is being constrained by fear or tension, I had said.

  Think back, I told myself. For most of the years I had known him. Cillian had treated me with detachment. He’d never been anything but polite, gentle in his refusal of my tentative advances at eighteen, never letting there be real friendship between us. Much the same, I thought, as he treated everyone, except Perras and Dagney and Isa. His voice had reflected that: restrained, and often sardonic.

  But from the first days on the river, he’d been different. Still a distance between us, but it hadn’t seemed so cold. Then he’d taken me aside one day, for a private conversation, and after that there had been genuine and growing warmth in his tone. I had felt welcomed, wanted. I‘d sensed detachment only when we talked seriously about what Casil might demand, and the difficulties of defending Sorham.

  I picked up my ladhar, considering those conversations. Cillian’s analytic, reasoned tone had not just been for me; he had spoken to Turlo in the same way, and Lena, when the talk had turned to her land. The more demanding the work had become, the more he needed my concurrence, and Lena’s, with his terms for the treaty, the more distant he had become, cold and logical. All his warmth had been reserved for Eudekia. But I had seen him with her, and I could not equate that expertly flattering attention, his smooth tone when he spoke to her, with what I heard when he called Lena käresta.

  Or sometimes when he said my name. Notes rose from my ladhar: the tune I had been playing that night at Gundarstorp, so long ago. I closed my eyes, seeing the scene again, Cillian kneeling before me. Sorley, he had said, before his fingers had rested lightly on my knee. Somhairle.

  Somhairle. All the proof I needed, spoken in the dialect of Sorham. Subtlety with words, the precision of utterance, the fine division of meaning: these were Cillian’s skills, as honed as my own ability with the ladhar. On his lips, my cradle name was an endearment; a promise, perhaps. A pledge, and one given more than once in the past year. He has loved you since you were sixteen, Lena had told me once.

  I put the ladhar down on the bed, burying my face in my hands, the tears beginning. I flung myself onto the bed, muffling the sobs in my pillow. Only ever my own doubts. My own unworthiness. My own betrayal.

  Chapter 51

  Hard winter had not arrived yet, not down here by the sea, and late one morning Dugar came to the schoolroom. “Go outside,” he told the boys, shouting after them, “and close that door behind you!”

  He sat down on the bench the boys had just vacated. “There’s a few Härren arriving today, and tomorrow,” he said. “You’ll be interested in our talk. Your brother’s one of them. Thought I better tell you, so you don’t react, although you handled that fine at Dun Ceànnar. Easier to forget here, though, among your own people. I’ll tell him the same.”

  I thanked him. “Is there anyone else who might recognize me?” I asked.

  “Don’t think so. Pietar — he’s your closest neighbour, am I right?” I nodded. “He’s all for Marai rule. He won’t be here.” He reeled off other names. Some I’d never met; a few I might have when my father had taken me to Dun Ceànnar when I was seventeen. Or I might have met their fathers: Sorham’s convention of maintaining the torp’s identity through the name of the heir could be confusing. One, though, concerned me.

  “Kitrig,” I said. “He’ll know me.” We’d ridden to Dun Ceànnar that year with him, and his son of the same name. Kitri, the son, had been interested in swordplay and weaponry, and we’d had next to nothing to do with each other once we’d reached the council meeting, but still...

  “The young one?” Dugar inquired. “Old Kitrig was killed in the fighting, same as my father.”

  “Yes.” I explained. He rubbed his chin, thinking.

  “He doesn’t like the Marai rule, but that might not stop him thinking of you as a traitor,” he said. “They’re all like me; they fought for Fritjof and saw the error of that later. You didn’t. How do you deal with that, by the bye? Not that you didn’t fight for Fritjof,” he clarified, “but that I did.”

  By not thinking about it, but I couldn’t say that. “It’s past,” I said. “Linrathe has blood to atone for, too.” Cillian’s injuries and Callan’s death were not Sorham’s doing, or even Varsland’s. “But why did you allow the Marai to take the girls, Dugar?”

  “Couldn’t stop them,” he said. “It was one of the things that turned me against them. Was there someone special? Maybe I can find out where there are.”

  Would it ease Dagney and Isa, to know? “Two students from the Ti’ach na Perras,” I said. “Jordis, who is an Eirën’s daughter, and Niav, a torpari girl with a fine voice. They would have been sixteen and twelve, or thereabouts,” I added, bitterness sharpening my tone.

  Dugar chewed his lip. “I’ll enquire,” he said. “Was the Eirën’s daughter a possible bride for you? Because you know she’ll be a mother by now.”

  “No,” I said. “Just a friend. I was meant to marry a girl named Betis, but her father wed her to Roghan, instead. I don’t mind,” I added at his look. “It wasn’t a love match.”

  “Better that way,” he said, getting up. “Wives die. My first did: two dead babies come too soon, and then she died with the third. Eil
is has done her duty with the two boys, and I leave her alone. She’s a good mother, so why risk her life?”

  It explained the age of the boys. I had wondered. With Dugar in his mid-thirties, I would have expected them to be ten or twelve.

  “I have an idea about keeping Kitrig from recognizing you,” he said. “But I need to find something, and I shouldn’t send a servant to look for it. We’ll talk again.”

  I went out into the yard to find his sons. They weren’t in sight, but I had a fair idea of where they’d be, and I wasn’t wrong. They’d bridled one of the shaggy dun ponies and were riding it in the field behind the barn, Dugi handling the reins and Gefen behind him. Dugi was fearless with the ponies, and even at six a good rider. I saddled one for myself and joined them. We’d ride a while, and practice Marái’sta words while we did.

  Late in the afternoon Dugar found me again. He handed me a leather band, wider in one section. “It covers one eye,” he explained. “It was my grandfather’s; he lost an eye. Don’t know how. It’ll need some softening, but there’s beeswax in the kitchen. Ask anyone. You sure you don’t want Bearga, by the way? She’s good with her mouth, if you’re leery of leaving a bastard behind.”

  I flushed. Dugar was getting insistent about this. Could I? Just to keep him from wondering? The girl would talk, so I couldn’t just have her stay in my room for an hour before having her go on her way. I’d done some youthful exploration with the torpari girls, hoping it would change my inclination. It hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful, although I’d kept my eyes closed, imagining different hands and mouths on me. I wasn’t sure what had worked at fifteen would now, but I might have to try.

  “Maybe,” I said, to let him think I was weakening. He chuckled.