“But what about our tools? I thought we could use farm tools— we did use them.”
Setik snapped a command at one of the others, who went jogging off to the gnomish armory, and returned festooned with agricultural implements. Setik picked up a scythe. “Show me how your people used this at Norwalk.”
Gird hefted it, enjoying as always the very balance and swing of it, then shifted the handgrips for a better overhand stroke, and lifted it. It made an awkward chopping weapon, harder to control than a mattock, but it could reach over others and deliver a solid blow to a head or back. He had seen only two of the successful strokes, both oblique downward swings that ended in a soldier’s back. He demonstrated on the straw-filled leather dummy set up in the middle of the chamber.
“I thought at first of swinging it as usual,” he explained. “It could take off a leg. But the backswing’s too dangerous—there’s no way to control it in formation.”
“That’s what I thought.” Setik scratched his head. “We had a weapon more like a mattock, used with a similar stroke but easier to handle because it balances better. That great long blade out there, and the curving handle, make this one very unbalanced. And even you, with your strength, could not swing it sideways at head level.”
“Even if I could, the greatest danger is to the person on my left and behind. I’ve seen someone killed like that in harvest, a scythe-tip buried in his belly.”
“Good individual defense,” Setik muttered. “One man against several armed—that might work. Sharpen the outer edge of the blade as well. But not a good formation weapon. I suppose you use the shovel like the pole?”
“Yes, but it has that edge.”
“Hmmm. What we call a broadpike. It would also work with a sharp downward stroke, but that would not fend off the enemy’s. These little things you mentioned, sickles and firetongs and such— good for brawls, maybe, or defense when surprised by an enemy while working—but not for your army.” Setik went down the list, explaining and demonstrating why each tool was not worth using as a weapon, “unless you have nothing else. But I would not waste my time drilling with them. If you are fighting with trained units against real soldiers, you need a formation weapon. We use polearms, to give us reach, a hauk in close fighting, and archers… do your people know archery at all?”
A hauk, when Gird asked, was a short stick, a club, which could be used for training, or for cracking heads—it reminded him of the guards’ billets and maces. The gnomes in formation had hauks thrust into their belts behind their backs, ready to grab when needed. Gird learned how to handle all the gnomish polearms correctly; Setik recommended that he settle on one, fairly easily made, for his own army. “A simple spike on the end of your pole will do,” Setik said, “and any smith can make that from scrap metal— those scythe blades, for instance. A real pikehead is better, and you could use broadpikes, but that takes more metal, and more skill in smithing. Sharpening the pole itself is better than nothing, but wood alone is not likely to penetrate metal armor—if that’s what they’re wearing.”
Setik knew exactly how footsoldiers with pikes should maneuver against cavalry; Gird’s rude guesses, based on practice with men on logs, came close but would, Setik said, cost him too many soldiers. Archers were the worst threat; the gnomes dealt with enemy bowmen by having better bowmen of their own. Gird was not sure his people could learn that fast. He himself had never been better than average with a bow. And the art of making good bows and good arrows—strong enough to be useful in war—had passed from his people to the Aarean lords. Peasants had not been allowed to have bows, or make bows; what they had now could take small birds and animals, but no more. Setik shook his head, and explained to Gird again just how much damage an unopposed group of archers could do. The implication was clear: learn this, somehow, or die for its lack. Gird began to consider who among his people might know a clandestine archery expert—someone far to the north, who might have friends or family among the horse nomads, whose bows the Finaareans respected, perhaps.
Days passed; Gird was no longer sure how many. The gnomes did not celebrate Midwinter, and refused to interrupt his lessons for it. He hoped the gods would forgive him, this once—perhaps, since he was underground, among gnomes, they would not know. That didn’t seem likely; the gnomes certainly thought that the High Lord, the great Judge, knew everything above ground or below.
He felt stuffed with new knowledge, things that made perfect sense during the lessons but came apart in his mind afterward like windblown puffballs. The Warmaster had been appalled to discover that Gird had no idea how many of the lords there were, or how many soldiers they had. That Gird could not draw an accurate map of Finaarenis and the surrounding lands. That he did not know who the king was, or how the king was related to the various nobles, or how the land was governed. They poured all this into him, day after day, every minute of his waking hours filled and overfilled with new knowledge. He had never known there was that much knowledge in the whole world, and he wished he hadn’t found it out. Even with the gnomes’ organizing skills, he found himself remembering the name of a town when he wanted the number of stones of grain needed to feed a hundred men on march for two hands of days, or coming up with the right way to place scouts to watch a tradeway when he wanted the command that split a column marching forward into two columns, one of which was veering off to the right. He could imagine himself in the midst of battle calling out the exceptions to liability for delivery of spoiled perishables instead of the right commands, and he sweated all the worse for it. This struggle was no easier that he did not know how long it would last: how long he had to learn what—he now agreed—he needed to learn. Years would not have been enough; he had started with a bare half-year, if he was going to lead the war in the next season. He would have fretted about that, if he had had time. Instead, the worry seeped into his other thoughts like a drop of dye into water, coloring every moment with fear he had not named.
He would have discussed it with Arranha, but the priest was often away when Gird returned to his assigned quarters and fell into bed.
At last, with no warning (at least nothing he had noticed) he and Arranha were summoned to the largest of the ceremonial halls, where a crowd of gnomes had assembled. Silently, Gird noticed; there was none of the whispering or chattering of a human crowd. Lawmaster Karik (one of the four or five he had finally learned to recognize at sight) led Gird to the front of the chamber, and spoke lengthily in gnomish. Then he turned to Gird.
“It is time to send you out, if you would be at your encampment before your people are sure we have killed you. Remember your contracts with us; we have delivered to you that which we promised. You have your obligation.”
At least he knew the correct response. “I acknowledge receipt of your knowledge and training; I admit my obligation, and swear to fulfill it to the length of my life.”
“Witnessed.” That brought a stir, and the chorus from all. “Witnessed.”
A chill went down his back. He fully intended to carry out all he had promised, but that “witnessed” meant uncounted gnome pikes at his back if he failed.
Chapter Twenty
He had known he missed the sun—even the thin, cold sunlight of winter—but not until he came out into that remembered beauty, and rested his gaze on a horizon impossibly distant, did he know how much. Tears stung his eyes. It had hurt, in ways he could not define, to have his vision trapped between walls so long. It had hurt to have sounds reverberating in those walls, quiet as the gnomes had been. It had hurt to smell no live wind, with its infinitely varying smells, its constantly changing pressures on his skin. They had led him out into a morning of softly falling rain, a cold spring rain that still held a threat of late snow. Between the showers that fell curtainlike here and there he could see long tawny slopes, dark patches of woodland, the soft lavender and muted burgandy of sap-swollen buds coloring what had been gray. He heard the soft whisper of the rain on sodden grass, the distant gurgle of water running away d
ownhill, a vast silence between the sounds where nothing would echo. Cold and damp as it was, it soothed the inside of his nose, easing with smells of wet earth and rock the dry itch from a season underground with only rockdust and gnomes. His own human smell, that he had been aware of as unlike the others, disappeared into that freshness.
“We will see you at Blackbone Hill,” said Armsmaster Setik, who had come out with Gird. Arranha was staying behind awhile, but had told Gird he would follow him later. Gird wondered if Arranha knew about Blackbone Hill; the gnomes mentioned the name only when Arranha was not around.
“Yes,” said Gird, drinking in another breath of that air, wondering why the ragged, uneven landscape of duns and grays seemed so much more beautiful than the careful sculpting of the gnomes’ halls.
“You have the maps.”
“Yes.” As he looked at the land, now, the maps he had been taught to use seemed to overlay it. He would go that way, and find a tiny watercourse to lead him north and west, then leave that one by a steep-browed hill, and find another beyond the hill, and then the wood he almost thought of as his wood…
“And—” Setik looked up at him with an expression Gird could not interpret. “I found it most satisfying; for a human, you are— are not unlike a kapristi in some ways.”
Gird turned, surprised. The Armsmaster had been even less outgoing than his other instructors, if possible. Gird had assumed he would be glad to rid himself of a clumsy human oaf. Setik’s brow was furrowed slightly, his scars pulled awry.
“You are by nature hasty, as all the lateborn are: hasty to laughter, to anger, to hunger—but you forced foresight on yourself, and withheld haste. You have a gift for order, for discipline, for what we mean by responsibility.”
“You are a good teacher,” Gird said.
The gnome nodded. “I am, that is true. But the best teacher cannot turn a living thing from its nature: I could not make stone grow and bear fruit like a tree. I could not teach a tree to fly. Even among us, who are much alike, some have less talent for war than others. You have it, and you have what is rare with us—what war requires that the rest of our life does not need, and that is a willingness to go beyond what is required, into the realm of gift.”
Gird was both puzzled and fascinated. All he had heard, from Lawmaster Karik, showed the gnomes’ distrust of gifts, and until now he had not suspected the gnomish soldiers thought differently.
Setik smiled suddenly, a change as startling as if rock split in a manic grin.
“War calls for more than fair exchange; we soldiers know what the lawgivers cannot understand. Even among us, I say, are some who freely give—and in war that giving wins battles. You have that; from what you say, it is a human trait.” Abruptly, he stopped, and his face changed back to its former dourness. “Go with the High Lord’s judgment,” he said. Gird glanced back at the entrance to the gnomes’ caves, so nearly invisible; there stood several others, watching and listening.
“You will not take thanks,” he said to Setik, “but among my people it is rude to withhold them. I will thank the gods, then, for sending me to such a good teacher of war, and ask their grace to keep my mind from scrambling together what you so carefully set apart.”
If he had believed the gnomes had any humor whatever, he would have said Setik’s black eyes twinkled. “Soldiers of one training are as brothers of one father,” the gnome murmured. “Go now, before someone asks awkward questions.”
Gird nodded, saying nothing past the lump in his throat, and headed downslope. He stepped carefully across the boundary, and did not look back until he had traveled well out of sight of that unambiguous line.
The gnomes had shown him a small, exquisitely carved model of the lands they called gnishina, all drained by the great river Gird had never yet seen, from the western plains to the sea. All his life Gird had lived among low hills and creeks whose windings made no sense to him. He had thought the world was made lumpy, like redroots in a pan, until he saw the gnomes’ country, with great mountains rising behind a line of hills.
The model made sense of what had seemed random hummocks. He had not understood the gnomes’ explanation, but the great concentric arcs of rock were obvious enough, with the river dividing them like the cleft of a cow’s hoof. Rows of hills, variously shaped by the different kinds of rock in them (he understood that much; everyone knew that red rock made rounded slopes, and white rock made stepwise ones) bowed sharply away from the river, to run almost parallel to the southern mountains as they neared them. Between the hills ran the creeks and rivers, all tributaries of the Honnorgat. These stream valleys had formed natural routes of travel. Moving a large force north or south was easiest near the Honnorgat; moving it east or west was easiest away from the great river.
Once more under the open sky, he could interpret the hills before him for what they were: the flanks of a great arch. Going north, he would cross white rock to yellow, and yellow to brown, then travel west to come back to yellow and white. Just so a man might run his finger from the side of a cow’s hoof to the cleft, then forward to the point—and find hoof wall again. More importantly, with his understanding of the whole region, and the maps the gnomes had provided, he would know where he was—where his army was—and how to get where he wanted to go. He hoped.
Human lands were scarcely less perilous than the gnome princedoms, though their perils were less uncanny. Gadilon might not trouble his gnomish neighbors, for fear of their retribution, but he had no intention of letting a peasant uprising unseat him. Gird was hardly into that domain when he saw the first patrols, seasoned soldiers whose alertness indicated respect for their new enemy. Whatever had happened while Gird was underground with the gnomes, it had ended all complacency in the outlying holdings. Gird spent an uncomfortable half-day lying flat among dripping bushes as the patrols crossed and recrossed the route he had planned to take. When dark fell, he extricated himself, muttering curses, and edged carefully around the hill and down a noisy watercourse. Here the water noises would cover any he made.
Even with his caution, he was nearly caught. If the sentry had not coughed, and then spat into the water, Gird would never have known that the dark shadow of a boulder was actually a person. He stopped where he was, wondering if he’d been seen. Another cough, a muttered curse. Gird crept away from the stream’s edge, feeling the ground under his feet carefully. He could not stay here, and he could not go back—not without knowing where the other soldiers were. He made his way into the tangle of rocks on that side of the stream, and eased his way up onto one of the huge boulders. From that height, he could just see a twinkle of firelight downstream and below. The sentry had probably been told to climb where Gird now was, but up here the night breeze was cold and raw; the man had slid down to get out of the wind. Gird flattened himself on the cold hard stone and thought about it.
With his gnomish training in mind, if he’d been the person responsible for that camp, he’d have had sentries upstream and down, and scattered through the woods. Scattered where? His un-gnomish experience told him that men, like the sentry whose cough had revealed him, cared for their own comfort. No matter how wisely a commander had sent them out, they would each choose a place that combined the maximum of personal safety and comfort with sufficient—to that individual—performance of the assignment. If he could figure out what that was, he could get around the camp in safety. If he made a mistake, they would all be after him.
One simple answer was to backtrack upstream and swing wide around the camp. That would work if he didn’t then run into another patrol. He could think of no reason why Gadilon would have another patrol out to the south, but who could read the lords’ intent? Or he could try to angle away from the stream, through the brush and woods, and hope to avoid any other sentries without losing so much ground. If the streamside sentry represented the distance from the camp that all of them were posted, that should be possible. He was still debating this with himself when he heard horses’ hooves in the distance, a cry of
alarm from the camp, and a trumpet call. The sentry below him gasped, and started back for the camp at a run, falling over rocks and bellowing as he went.
Gird stayed where he was, trying to understand what was going on. More lights appeared: flickering torches moving between the trees. Loud cries, shouted commands, responses from distant sentries. He felt a little smug that they were coming from the radius he’d guessed. He wished he could get closer, and had started down from the rock when he heard the unmistakeable clash of steel on steel. More yelling, more screams, more noise of hoofs, weapons, another trumpet blast cut off in mid-cry. He could hear noise coming his way, as several men thrashed through the undergrowth, stumbled over obstructions. They came near enough that he could hear their gasping breath, the jingle of their buckles and mail, the creak of leather. Behind them were more; someone shouted “There they go!”
With a crunch of boots on gravel, they were beneath him. He could just make out two or three dark forms against the starlit water, the gleam of starlight along a weapon’s blade. One there was wounded, groaning a little with every gasping breath. Gird lay motionless, hoping no one would notice the large shadow flat on the top of the boulder.
“Don’t let ’em get away!” he heard from downstream. “Follow that blood trail.” One of the men below him cursed viciously.
“We got to move,” he said. “They’ll find us, and—”
“Per can’t go farther,” said another. “We’ll have to fight ’em off.”
“We can’t.” A pause, then, “We’ll have to leave ’im. He’s the blood trail, anyway. They find him, dead, they’ll think that’s it.”
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