A Song for Arbonne

by Guy Gavriel Kay

  Blaise said, still gravely, "Given that you haven't even cared to ask of his condition or even his name, it ill behooves you to take such a tone, brother."

  There was a silence. The very calmness of the words made the lash of them bite harder. Thaune felt that he and the others on the bridge had become extraneous, mere hangers-on at the edges of this long, bitter struggle within the de Garsenc family.

  "Well?" said Ranald finally, as if that one word cost him a great effort. "Tell me."

  From behind, Thaune saw Blaise lower his head again for a long moment, and then lift it once more. "He is well. A handsome, healthy child. He looks like a Garsenc. His name is Cadar, for his grandfather of Savaric."

  Ranald laughed then, the same quick, bitter, corrosive sound as before, when his father had escaped. "Of course it is," he said. "She would do that."

  "Can you blame her?"

  Surprisingly, Ranald de Garsenc's laughter ended. He shook his head. He said, "You will not believe me, but I told father and the king both that I was prepared to let her go if she sent back the child. Neither would agree, not that she would have done so in any case." He paused. "I faced summary execution if I did not ride with Ademar to Aubry last autumn. Ask the duke of Savaric, your brave new ally. He was at that burning too, for the same reason."

  It was Blaise's turn to be silent. "I know he was," he said at length. "I know why you were there, Ranald. But Fulk de Savaric has made his response to that tonight. He is with us now. You are about to ride back to Cortil. To the ugliness there. I don't understand. I can't understand. Ranald, will you not tell me why?" There was pain in the question. Every man on the bridge heard it.

  Slowly Ranald de Garsenc shook his head again. "No," he said finally. "I do not owe you that much." He paused, seeming more composed than his younger brother on the ground now. "Nor will I thank you for not torturing me to find the location of the tunnel. I will say this much—" he turned to the duke of Talair, " — I am not going back to Cortil. Forget not, in your urge to mock and diminish your foes, who and what it is you are dealing with. I never forget it, not ever, during any day or night of my life."

  He turned back to his brother. "Farewell, little Blaise, who would be king of all of us. I can recall teaching you to use that sword you carry. I wonder if you remember?"

  He turned then, and was gone into night and fog, only the drumming of his horse's hooves in the mist telling them he was riding east.

  "Of course I remember," said Blaise, to no one in particular.

  He turned then and began walking up the bridge towards the castle, past the two dukes and all the corans, who quickly made way for him. He stood motionless before the portcullis bars until they had been rolled up again, allowing him to pass within, into his ancestral home.

  Feeling buffeted by the speed of events, Thaune of Garsenc was more than a little eased to note heightened colour and hints of bemusement in the expressions of others when they gathered in the great hall.

  There had been no resistance in the end. The announced arrival of Blaise de Garsenc, coupled with the even more tangible presence of nearly a thousand armed men with the duke of Savaric, induced any corans of Garsenc who might have been otherwise inclined to make their peace with the current situation.

  That wasn't the problem. The problem emerged when the explanations began, while the castle servants scurried to provide wine and food and sleeping arrangements, not only for those in the hall but for the northern soldiers, and for the farmers who had also come with Fulk, carrying a variety of arms.

  It was the presence of the farmers Fulk had been ordered to bring that raised the issue. It was winter, after all. Corans often followed their lord wherever he went, and it was not unusual for a duke to bring part of his household with him if he travelled to Cortil to spend the cold months drinking and brawling among the retinue of the king. It was a custom of long standing. That, they had assumed, was why Garsenc Castle was unlikely be heavily defended. But if the ordinary men of the land were being ordered by Ademar to take up arms in the dead of winter something else was afoot.

  Fulk de Savaric knew that. He didn't know what was unfolding, though, because he hadn't yet reached Cortil when his instructions had been changed. His tale was simple. He had been instructed to bring as many men south as he could. Given the mood of the king since autumn, Fulk had not regarded these orders as being the sort he could comfortably ignore. They were mobilizing early for an attack in the spring, he had concluded; it had always been the most likely course of events.

  Halfway to Cortil he had been met by a messenger from the High Elder, changing his orders, instructing him to turn west to Garsenc Castle, and meet Galbert there. There was a threat from the south, the messenger reported, treachery abroad in the wintry heartland of Gorhaut. Fulk knew, as most of Gorhaut had known by then, that Blaise de Garsenc had claimed the throne last autumn.

  Duke Fulk was his own man, if he lacked his father's flamboyance or the confidence of the monarch that Cadar de Savaric had had. He'd turned his thousand men as ordered, riding along a valley path laced with snow, but he had stopped them by a frozen river bed two days later, a half day's ride still from Garsenc Castle. And there, under grey skies, he had made a speech.

  He was not a man for speeches, nor were the men of the north greatly inclined to listen to orations, especially in the cold. What he said was as terse and clear as he could make it, and the words marked a changing of his life. He would have denied that Aubry had led him to that moment, but he wouldn't have said it had nothing to do with it, either.

  He had never liked the Treaty of Iersen Bridge, he told his assembled men, shouting the words into the rising wind. He had never liked the authority the High Elder of Corannos had over an increasingly self-indulgent king. He felt contempt and real anger for the way in which a quarter of the people of Gorhaut had been dispossessed of their land and ordered to find shelter somewhere, anywhere, while the king and his High Elder plotted a conquest in the south. Fulk de Savaric did not think they could hold any lands they took south of the passes; they wouldn't be allowed to, he said, by the other countries of their world. The balance would be too greatly shifted. They would only trade a border war with Valensa for an enormous combat against all the other nations, and the Arbonnais, he said, would die before they lay quiet under a Gorhaut yoke of occupation. They would be forced out of Arbonne, he told his men, leaving ruin and ashes and legions of the dead behind them.

  That, said Fulk, probably didn't even matter to the High Elder, whose war this was. The real point of what was happening now had little to do with land for the dispossessed of the north. Galbert wanted only to destroy Arbonne and its goddess, and the Treaty of Iersen Bridge had been the first devious step towards that. Fulk de Savaric didn't much care either way about Arbonne's goddess; she had never bothered him, he said by that frozen river. What did bother him, what enraged him, he said, were the uprooted people of the northlands. Their king had sold them to Valensa for silver and gold, to raise an army for burning women in Arbonne.

  There were others, he told his silent company, who felt the same way as he. Blaise de Garsenc, the younger son of the High Elder was probably known to many of them. He wasn't even a northlander, but he had left Gorhaut entirely rather than live with the terms of the Treaty of Iersen Bridge. He was very likely coming home now, perhaps even tonight, leading a rising against these very wrongs Fulk was speaking of. The duke proposed to join him, for the honour of the northland and in memory of his father and King Duergar who had truly loved and served Gorhaut. He invited those of his army who thought the same thing and who trusted his judgment to come with him. Those who felt otherwise were free to leave, with his honest gratitude for their service in the past.

  That was all he said. Wind blew down the valley, sliding snow into mounds on the banks of the frozen river, shaking it down from the branches of bare trees.

  Eighteen men left, from a company of almost a thousand.

  The men of the northlan
d had their own hard creed, always, and the lords of Savaric had seldom played them false, whatever the kings in Cortil might have done. Duke Cadar de Savaric had died defending their lands and his own at Iersen Bridge. His son had shepherded the interests of the north with a cautious diligence in the upheavals that followed King Ademar's accession and the treaty he had signed. If the time for caution now had ended, the time for loyalty had not, and loyalty to the north was the first law of the north.

  Not a man prone to the sweep of powerful emotions, Fulk de Savaric had nonetheless been moved by what had followed his words on that wintry afternoon. He was speaking treason, after all.

  There was no shouting when he ended, no cries of approval or swift cheers raised in his name. That was not their way. There was only the grim, stern silence that had always defined the north, as six horsemen and twelve men on foot detached themselves from the company, to proceed east from that icy stream towards Cortil and King Ademar, who was still, when all else was said and done, the anointed of the god.

  The rest had followed him here to Garsenc Castle and would follow him now, he said soberly to Blaise and Bertran and the others gathered in the great hall, wherever he asked them to go.

  "That last," said Blaise, "is the real question, I fear." He seemed to have gradually recovered his composure after the encounters with his father and brother. "We had planned to take this castle, use it as a winter base, a rallying point, for any men who might join our cause, and then see what the spring brought us, in numbers and possibilities. I didn't propose to fight a war in winter."

  "We did once, in the time leading up to Iersen Bridge," said Fulk de Savaric.

  "I know that. I was there. That was against an invader, with no choice offered us. There's another thing: I don't want to begin attacking across the countryside myself, ruining castles or towns. If I possibly can I want this to end up as one battle against Ademar and only one. My army—if I have one—against his on a field somewhere. If I am to come home as the saviour of Gorhaut—the man who takes us back to the god and our true destiny—I can't begin by killing my own people and destroying their homes and fields. I won't do that, Fulk, for the same reason I won't invade with an army from Arbonne."

  "Did they offer you one?" Fulk de Savaric asked.

  Blaise turned to Bertran de Talair. The duke's expression was oddly inward, Thaune saw, as if he hadn't been closely following the last part of the conversation. And a moment later, Thaune realized that this, in fact, was so.

  "Do you remember," Bertran asked Blaise softly, not answering the question, "what your brother said just before he left? His last words to me?" There was something strange in his voice, something that made the room feel cold again, despite the fires now burning on all the hearths. Thaune, by the doorway to the corridor, tried to remember what it was that Ranald de Garsenc had said.

  "He said he wasn't going back to Cortil." Blaise had been standing by the largest of the fires. Now he took two steps towards the duke of Talair and stopped.

  "Would he have been telling you something?" asked Rudel Correze sharply. He rose from his seat. "Because if he was…»

  "If he was," Duke Bertran finished flatly, "then we know why Fulk was ordered to bring all the men he could. And why your brother wasn't going to Cortil. Ademar isn't at Cortil."

  "How did you come through the mountains?" Fulk de Savaric asked abruptly. He, too, had now risen from his chair.

  "Lesser Gaillard Pass to the west," said Blaise. "There were only fifty of us, no wagons or goods. We didn't want to be seen. We might have been spotted had we gone through the High Road Pass."

  "Of course," said Fulk. "But if En Bertran is right about this then Ademar and his army were moving south from Cortil towards the High Road Pass even while we were coming north." Bertran de Talair had put down his wine glass. His face, Thaune saw, was very white, an old scar showing in sharp relief. "That is what has happened, I am certain of it. It fits what we know. They decided not to wait for spring, after all. This is a winter war, my friends. In Arbonne. They might even be there already."

  "And what do we do here with a thousand men? Capture Cortil? Raise the country in revolt?" Rudel Correze's eyes were bright in the firelight. Blaise said nothing; his eyes were on the duke of Talair.

  "There is no country to raise," said Fulk de Savaric slowly. "All of the men who can fight will be with the king. I think I see what he is thinking: he doesn't care what you do here. If he takes Arbonne quickly enough—and it will probably

  408 A SONG FOR ARBONNE

  be wide open to him now in winter, however many men he loses to the mountains—he can come home with an army in triumph from the sack of that land and deal with us in spring, wherever Blaise is."

  "That isn't Ademar thinking, you do realize," said Blaise finally. You could hear the bitterness. "This is my father's cunning, and his dream. He has always wanted Arbonne destroyed. Always. He told me stories as a boy of how the temples of Rian had to be brought down to save the whole world from their corruption. And he knows me. He knew I would not bring an army here, that Ademar would be safe to leave Gorhaut almost undefended, and then come back, as Fulk says, to deal with whatever happens while he's gone." He turned to Bertran. "You know what he's going to do, don't you?"

  The other man's expression was bleak as the winter night. Slowly he nodded his head. "He won't bother with the castles or the cities. He won't try sieges in winter. He's going to force our corans out by making war on the villages and the temples. As he did at Aubry."

  "As he did at Aubry," echoed Blaise.

  "Shall we ride, then?" asked Fulk de Savaric. "You wanted one battle, Blaise. It looks as if you might get it, but it will be in Arbonne."

  "Of course it will," said the duke of Talair with savage irony. "It is warmer there, isn't it? The sun shines, even in winter. If you go far enough south there's no snow at all. You can even catch the scent of the sea."

  "Through the smoke," said Blaise shortly. "Let's go."

  They left two hundred of Fulk's men to hold Garsenc Castle and to spread word as best they could that they were there. The rest of their company set out that same night in the fog and the cold on the long road back to the mountains. At one point during the night the mist finally began to lift and they caught a glimpse through tattered windblown clouds of white Vidonne low in the west before morning came.

  CHAPTER 16

  Roche the priest was in disgrace on Rian's Island in the sea. Someone foraging for winter firewood had smelled burning by a cove on the southern shoreline and had gone to investigate; the risk of the forests burning, though rather less in winter, was always real. A small fire-pit had been found, dug in the cold sand, covered with a flat slab of stone. Lifting the stone with a long branch revealed half a dozen lampfish grilling underneath.

  Roche would have even tried to deny being the culprit, had he not been discovered moments later by the same interfering woodsman in a small shelter not far away, dozing in happy anticipation with a fishing line beside him and the smell of fish on his hands.

  Awakened by an insolent prod of the woodsman's branch, he had stammered an offer to share his morning's secret catch under the mild winter sun while they looked out from the beach at the gentle swells of the sea. The woodsman was not moved, either by the idyllic setting nor even the succulent promise of lampfish. He was one of those depressingly pious fellows who left their homes after some night vision or other to come and serve the goddess on her island, labouring for the priests and priestesses, often becoming more sturdily attached to the doctrines and codes of conduct than the clergy were themselves.

  It was fixed law, the woodsman pronounced with obdurate, finger-wagging satisfaction, that all fish and fowl around the shores of the island were interdicted to mortal men and women, sacred, he intoned virtuously, to holy Rian in her incarnation as protectress of the beasts.

  Roche tried, without real hope, to explain that this applied only to fishermen or hunters from the mainland. As he'd expect
ed, the woodsman knew better than that. Such an impiety, the man declared self-righteously, would have to be taken directly to the High Priestess herself. He shouldered his bundle of wood, took the reins of his equally burdened donkey and started briskly back north towards the temple compound. They always wanted to go straight to the High Priestess, Roche thought miserably, watching him go. As if she had nothing better to do than listen to reports of minor transgressions by her priests and priestesses.

  This was, however, his third such minor transgression—for the same offence—in a year. Despairingly, he wondered if he would be sent away, demoted to service in some temple in the grainlands or the mountains. He didn't want to leave Rian's Island. He didn't want to leave the sea. He'd grown up by the ocean; it was what he knew and loved—as he loved the gracious harvests Rian in her generosity allowed them from the waves. Especially lampfish; most especially lampfish.

  Morosely depressed, cursing his own weakness and the fact that he'd been stupid enough to fall asleep so near the fire-pit, he considered catching up to the woodsman, trying to forestall him, or concocting some tale that would serve his cause before they both got back to the compound. There was, he decided glumly, no point. Roche felt so miserable he almost lost his appetite.

  The fish were ready, he could tell from the wafting aroma. With a heavy sigh, Roche went back to the fire-pit and looked sadly down on his six treasures sizzling invitingly beneath their carefully assembled and sprinkled herbs. As he did so he was somewhat surprised, given the extreme gravity of his plight, to discover that his hunger seemed to be returning after all.

  He wandered back to the compound somewhat later, though in plenty of time for his tour of duty in the temple. He was a good priest, Roche told himself, he just liked fish.

  As he'd anticipated, he was ordered to attend upon the High Priestess forthwith. He saw the woodsman with his donkey by the bakehouse door. The man looked smugly virtuous as Roche walked past. Wiping his mouth and rubbing at the stains on his robe, Roche ignored him as best he could.