Gird nodded. “I’ve made plenty. It’s a rare young man sees that, but you have a rare father.”
“He’s—different.” Mesha walked on some strides before explaining that. “I knew that before I knew why; I could see it in the way others treated him. They’re afraid of him, although they have greater powers.”
“I hope for your peoples’ sake that you are different the same way,” said Gird.
Mesha looked at him, started to speak, and then, after several minutes of silence, tried again, his face turning red even as he spoke. “What is it like, being a peasant?” When Gird did not answer at once, he turned away, ears flaming, and hurried on. “The harpers sing of simple country joys, of the delights of the farm. My father’s people seem happy enough, but they would not tell me, would they? I asked my father, and he said go and try it—but my tutor brought me back.”
Gird thought at least part of Mesha’s curiosity was genuine interest, something he had had no chance to pursue in a place he was so well known. He looked, to see the young man staring at the ground as he strode along.
“I liked farming,” Gird said. “It’s hard work, but I grew up with it; I was good at it. Have you ever milked a cow? Swung a scythe? No? Well, it came natural to me. Digging’s no fun, but it has to be—plowing, planting, harvesting, all that’s the good part. Seeing Alyanya’s grace fill the baskets and barrels. Weather’s weather, the same for all. What’s bad comes from other men—from the lord taking more and more in field-fee every year, from death-fee and marriage-fee, from losing the right to gather herbs and firewood in the forest, all that. Having to take grain to his mill, instead of using our handmills, and having to buy ale from his brewery, instead of brewing our own. Going hungry, when there’s no need but to pay the taxes, seeing our children thin and sick, while his plump younglings ride by on fat ponies, trampling our fields.”
Gird looked over to see how Mesha was taking this; the young man’s face was sober, neither angry nor disapproving.
“Never think the troubles of peasants are little ones, Mesha. Hunger gnaws at you; the hunger of your family, of your children, hurts worse than your own. To feel the winter wind strike through ragged clothes, to have no fire in the house, and then the steward comes, smelling of meat and new-baked bread, to demand a special tax because the lord’s courting a lady, or his lady has had a child, that’s the bad part of it. Our lord, Kelaive, said peasants were lazy cowards: said it with his plump belly full of food we raised, with his well-fed soldiers around him, and we listened, shivering in a cold wind, or baked by summer sun. The steward said we should understand his greater problems. Greater than hunger? Greater than cold, than sickness, with healing herbs denied? Can there be worse than choosing which child shall have a crust of bread?” He could say no more; he felt the blood beating in his ears, the breath storming through his lungs.
“I’m sorry,” Mesha said.
“It’s all right,” said Gird, blindly walking on.
“It is not, and it is not right that I did not know.” Mesha sounded angry now, and not with Gird. “My father is a better man than that. I know it.” But Gird heard the uncertainty in his voice.
“I hope so,” he said, carefully making his voice light and easy. “As you will be.”
“I would tell you of things my father has done, but I see now that it is not enough, not for me. I must know how our people live. He has asked me before to take over a village, but I wouldn’t—”
Gird was surprised to find himself relaxed again, “You are young, Mesha. When I was young, I did not look for pain. I trained as a guard under that very steward—not looking, not seeing. My family—I thought they were fools, and I would show them all. After all, as a guard I ate their food, wore their clothes, brought money home—real coppers—to my father. And boasted of it. That’s what hurt worst, later—that I had boasted, while my sisters and brothers went hungry and I was full.”
“You—you do not hate me?” That was a boy’s voice, a boy’s naked desire to have an older man’s respect.
“No. I do not hate you, or even—by this time—Kelaive. I hate what made Kelaive greedy and cruel, what made my father cringe before even his steward, what has kept you—who would, I daresay, be just and generous if you could—from knowing what you need to know.” Gird smiled at the young man’s worried face. “Be at peace, Mesha, while you can; long life brings enough battles to every man’s door.”
Once he crossed the border into Finaarenis, Gird began arranging transportation for the promised pikes. It would have been easier to sneak them across country before the summer’s war erupted; the gnomes had advised him to go to Marrakai first. But he wasted little energy on regret. Before the leaves fell, all his pikes were over the border.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Meanwhile, his people told him, the war had hardly slowed for harvest. The king’s army had split, one column going to Blackbone Hill, where they found only ruin. The other had started west along the River Road, but when it reached the lands controlled by Sier Segrahlin, the sier had refused the king’s army passage. Rumor had it that the king and the sier would not mend their quarrel, whatever it had been, until an enemy army lay at the gates of Finyatha.
“We could arrange that,” said Gird, laughing.
“Could you?” Arranha, to Gird’s surprise, had come to Brightwater. He wore the same face Gird remembered, and seemed content to live with Gird’s army and to endure the nervous glances of the other yeomen who distrusted anyone who had been a lord.
“We must someday,” Gird said. “But having fought the sier, I would prefer not to do it again, if we can avoid it.”
Arranha smiled at him. “You are acquiring prudence, then? I thought he might give you trouble. If his powers last, if he is not killed by a rock falling on his head, or lung-fever—”
“Can he be killed so? When my bowmen aimed at lords, the arrows flew astray.”
“As I understand that form of magic—and it is not my own— one must know of the attack to defend against it, like a man holding up a shield over his head. If someone surprises him, he has only the strength of his bone.”
Arranha had brought additional reminders and suggestions from the gnomes. “Not free gifts of information, you understand. I was told that they consider this to fall under the original contract; they’re pleased with what you accomplished at Blackbone Hill.”
Gird snorted. “They damn nearly got us killed at Blackbone Hill; they didn’t tell me what they were doing, or that they’d been talking to the miners—”
Arranha laughed gently. “But you survived.”
Another surprise of that homecoming was Selamis. After Gird had scolded him for not letting go his aristocratic background, he had seemed to fit in better. Once more, he was almost unnoticeable. Gird had begun to make use of his special knowledge, taking it for granted that Selamis would know which lord was related to whom, and what the news the traders brought meant. But until he left for Marrakai’s domain, the other marshals had still been wary of Selamis. Several had come to him privately, and asked him not to make Selamis a marshal, or give him command. Gird had had no intention of doing that anyway. Now, however, they all seemed at ease with him. The marshals had discovered how handy it was to have someone able and willing to write and keep accounts—and someone whose face everyone knew, but who had no actual command. Selamis, Gird heard with some surprise, had stopped a street brawl—and he had patched up a quarrel between two of the newer marshals—and he had convinced the ranking merchants that the Brightwater yeoman-marshal was worth hearing.
“I thought you were crazy,” Ivis said, on Gird’s first night back. “A lord’s son, troublemaker in his village—I know, you said he wasn’t, but we had one in our village and you never did. Now— he’s not that bad. You know what Cob’s been calling him?”
Cob leaned over and punched Ivis. “Hush. Gird won’t approve.”
“What, then?”
“Luap,” said Ivis, snorting with gl
ee. “You know—the lords’ own term for a bastard who can’t inherit. Rank but no power. Cob’s been calling him our luap.”
Gird looked hard at Cob, who had the grace to blush. “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said defensively. “He’s the one taught me the word, and made a joke about it. Spends all his time with us high-ranking folk, marshals and you, and has no command of his own. So I took it up, and he just grinned.”
“Joke or not, I don’t like it.”
“Why not?” That came from the subject of discussion himself, who flung a leg over the bench, clapped Gird hard on the shoulder, and faced him squarely. “No one’s ever liked the name my father gave me: you said yourself Selamis was a strange name. I am a luap: my father’s bastard, and your trusted assistant in all but command. They’ll tell you I’ve practiced, and learned fighting, but I’m still best at keeping accounts.”
“Yes, but—” Gird shook his head, uneasy about something in the guileless, open face in front of him. If it didn’t bother the man, it should. But this was one argument he lost; he found that many of the yeomen had fallen into the habit of speaking of “the luap” or “that marshal’s luap.” With Gird’s return, and Selamis’s return to Gird’s side, it quickly became “Gird’s luap.” Gird still called him Selamis, though he sometimes slipped.
Later that fall, the lords changed their strategy. They had not been able to trap Gird’s army all summer, and he had inflicted sharp losses on them. So they turned their attention ever more strongly to the land which supplied him with soldiers and supplies, forcing the evacuation of farming villages, burning them out if they resisted, stripping the countryside of resources. They had armed soldiers supervise the harvest, after which the fields were burnt; for hands of days the sky was streaked with smoke, and ash dusted travelers. Livestock they drove to the lords’ fortified towns or dwellings, and any they could not confine under guard were slaughtered to feed the soldiers.
This work proceeded at different rates in various parts of the kingdom. Some lords were loathe to lose the produce of villages they had established, and counted instead on quartering more of their own soldiers among them. Some did not have the resources to reduce or move more than one or two villages that autumn. Those that survived could choose to try escape, or wait and hope that the coming spring would change things. But Gird found more and more refugees wandering, some seeking him and some looking for any safe place to spend the winter.
His own force controlled the valley lying south and east of Brightwater. This provided a large grain harvest—large, that is, until he measured it against his increasing needs. The town of Brightwater, all the little villages, his army—the grain would feed so many only if it were carefully managed, and by his own laws (he felt the teeth of a joke in this) he could not seize it. Some, of course, would not trust him, and yield it willingly. His own followers had sometimes less patience than he did; he found himself scolding his own as often as the others about the need for fairness, the evils inherent in bullying.
“It’s not the same thing,” Ivis argued, one dank late-autumn day, when a cold rain had blackened the falling leaves to a silent dark carpet. “If we’re fair in distribution—in famine law—and all share equally, then it’s not bullying. Bullying benefits the taker—
“So it does—and so it does here.” Gird blew his nose noisily on a bit of dirty fleece and rubbed it on his sleeve. His head was pounding, his ears felt full of water, and he was sure this was more than a fall chill. He could not feel this sick with a mere chill. “It benefits us—the takers—because then we have more to distribute fairly, and our own share—as well as others—is larger.”
“But it benefits everyone.”
“No. Not the ones who lose—who have larger shares now. Our way is right, Ivis, and better than theirs—I know that. But part of our way is how we do what we do, not just what we do.”
“If we all starve it won’t do them any good—”
“We aren’t starving yet. Besides, while I won’t bully our people, I don’t have anything against taking from our enemies.”
“I thought you said we weren’t ready to assault their fortified places.”
“A grain caravan isn’t fortified.” Gird did not bother to explain, the way his throat was hurting, that he’d suggested to outlying bartons that they attack grain caravans. Some of them were successful—successful, too, at running off herds being moved from the deserted villages. More and more bartons began even bolder actions: ambushing any guard unit unwary enough to camp outside walls, or travel carelessly along the roads and trails. Clashes between small groups of rebels and small units of guards soon convinced the guards to move only in larger numbers.
Winter snows had always meant the end of military actions, but this winter brought no peace, only the slowing of movement. Gird, struggling to codify his laws with the help of Selamis and Arranha in Brightwater, sifted the reports from distant villages. Here a barton had ambushed a lord and two hands of guards, killing all of them and leaving that domain open; there two bartons had fought off a brigand attack, only to fall to the soldiers who came onto the scene when the battle was almost over. The merchants and craftsmen of Tarrho, a town about the size of Brightwater near the eastern border, had decided to overthrow their lord and declare their freedom—then the servants and laborers had rioted, overthrowing the merchants in their turn. Tarrho’s small barton had tried to bring order, but had the trust of no faction; after bitter fighting that left many dead and the city without supplies of food, brigands rode in, looted everything, and set it afire. The king’s messengers declared it was the fault of Gird and his rebels; the barton’s survivors, who arrived in Brightwater before Midwinter, explained what had really happened.
“A good many of them brigand bands claims to be your yeoman, Gird,” the yeoman-marshal said. “Nobody knows, for sure—I mean, if they aren’t one of yours already, they don’t. So they’re afraid of your name, and the bartons.”
“That’s why we need to have our rules known,” Gird said. “If they know we have rules, and what they are, and they see that we stick to them, then perhaps they’d trust us.”
“Maybe.” The yeoman-marshal did not look convinced. Gird peered at him.
“What do you think it would take?”
“Well—sir—I think they need something to see. We can say we have rules, but that’s not enough, not for city folk used to looking up law in a book.”
“Which is why I’m writing it down,” said Gird, slapping the table and jostling Selamis’s tools. He pointed at the younger man. “This is Selamis.” He still would not say my luap. “He writes a better hand than I do, one anyone can read.”
“That should help,” the yeoman-marshal said, craning his head to see what was on the top sheet.
“It’s very simple,” Gird said. “I told him, we have to get it all into no more than four hands of rules—if people can count their fingers and toes, they’ll be able to remember them.”
And gradually, copy by copy, the first simple laws that later became the Code of Gird spread from barton to barton, even into the towns. Of necessity, these rules were suitable for a time of war; Gird could not possibly work out all the laws needed for trade and commerce in peacetime. But he was sure of his intent: cruelty was always wrong, and always harmed the community. Honesty and fair dealing were good, and helped it.
In the bitter cold and deep snows of winter, no army could march far. Stragglers came to Brightwater and the villages where Gird had some of his army encamped—starving, ragged, sometimes dying of cold even as they staggered to a fire. Gird himself traveled from one camp to another as best he could, trying to make sure that food and warmth were shared fairly among them. He knew, without needing the gnomes’ advice, that he would have to win in this coming year—at least he would have to control most of the farmland, so that his people could grow food again. Otherwise his army would starve, and then the lords would win without a fight. Food stores dropped lower and lower. His yeom
en did not grumble much, seeing Gird’s belt as tight as theirs. But the soft cries of hungry children pierced him as if they were all his own. He hardly saw Rahi or Pidi, these days; Girnis had disappeared into the dust of war and he knew nothing of her. But the children in the camps were always with him, a reminder of what he was fighting for, and what would be lost if he failed.
It was in the first days of coming spring, uncertain weather that could bring thaw or hard freeze from day to day, that he took one of his cohorts out to seek food from one of the villages that had promised it the year before. They marched four days, south and east down the valley, across a ridge, and down another valley. Gird had sent a runner ahead. But instead of a yeoman marshal, or the barton, come to meet them, he found the entire village standing grim and unwelcoming in a snow-swept meadow nearby. They would not, they said, give anything—not one stone’s weight of grain or handbasket of dried fruit. Begone, they said, before you bring the lords’ wrath down on us. Gird nodded, and looked them up and down individually.
“What it comes down to, you don’t trust me.”
The cluster of ragged men and women said nothing. He hadn’t expected them to admit it. No one met his eyes. Behind him, his cohort, even more ragged than the peasants from the village. He could hear their breathing, the rasp of pebbles under their feet when they shifted in place. He could feel, as if it were a hot iron, their rapt attention on the back of his neck. His own belly knotted with hunger; he knew theirs were empty too.
Gird tried again. “You agreed with us last year, you remember that?” He stared right at the headwoman, who stared at her feet. But she nodded, slowly. “Yes—you said you’d share your harvest with us, feed us, to help us win against the lords—”
“You didn’t win.” That voice was bitter, but low, from the back of the group. Gird could not tell which dark-wrapped head it had been, or whether man or woman.
“We haven’t won yet,” said Gird. “But we’re a lot closer—Lady’s tears, did you think it would be all one battle? We told you—”
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