PART IV
Chapter Thirty-one
Greenfields broke the king’s power, and gave Gird control of the main grain-growing regions of Finaarenis. But it was not the end of the war. Those lords who had not joined the king’s army, for whatever reason, were now sure destruction loomed. Some walled themselves in Finyatha; others fled toward Tsaia. Heirs of lords killed at Greenfields squabbled over inheritances now in jeopardy; rich merchants, who assumed a peasant government would have no desire or need for fine goods, appealed to the remaining lords for help.
Gird knew all this, and much of it he had anticipated, but his first problem was securing the year’s limited harvest. Where there were no lords, there might be brigands. He split his army into sections, put each under a high marshal, and sent them to settle the countryside. He himself rode for the north, crossing the Honnorgat for the first time in his life on the gray horse, which seemed less like a broken-down carthorse every day. He could stay on at a trot now, although he preferred the swinging canter. Most of his marshals had caught a horse and learned to stay on it, as well. It made supervising a march or a movement much easier, and messages could pass far more quickly. Feeding the beasts was another worry, but men could not eat grass, and horses could. In summer, at least, they could afford a few horses.
Rumors of the king’s defeat spread even faster than Gird had expected. In the north, he and his column found mostly deserted, looted manor houses, and celebrating peasants. Few of his recruits had come from the north—in fact he had trouble understanding their speech—but they seemed genuinely pleased with his success. He wondered if the quickly-established bartons in each village would ever amount to anything, and prayed that war would not test them.
Finyatha offered a different problem. Largest and richest city of the north, the seat of the Finaarenisian kings, it hung just out of his reach like a tempting plum. Most of its people were common folk, as everywhere, but at the moment it swarmed with magelord refugees. He had no knowledge of siegecraft; common sense told him that assaulting those walls with pikemen would do no good— a much smaller force on the walls could defend it. He thought of trying to divert the river, but remembering Segrahlin’s tricks with water decided that some mage inside could simply call water into any well he wanted. In the end, he left it alone, and like an overripe plum, it fell on its own. One party of magelords tried to escape along the River Road to Tsaia; most of those fell to raiding parties, Gird’s or brigands. The rest were too weak to keep control of the city. When the disruption inside reached the gates, and the fighting erupted into the fields outside, Gird’s column—which had been waiting at a distance—marched in with little difficulty, to the apparent delight of all.
The gray horse brought Gird into those stone streets as if carrying a king; cheers racketed off the walls, and the flowers of summer fell on his shoulders, Alyanya’s blessing. Then the horse pranced into the courtyard before a towering stone structure that seemed to spring, like trees, from the roots of the world itself, and reach skyward with every stretched finger. Between its arches, great windows had stood; they were shattered now, glittering fragments crunched beneath the horse’s hoofs. A few pieces still clung to their frames, reflecting brightness against the cool darkness inside. The horse knelt; Gird stepped off and looked around. It was a hot day, blue-skied, and the courtyard had blue shadows under every ledge of gray stone. The very air shimmered; he blinked. Was it the air, or his eyes?
Arranha stood on the steps, between splintered doors. Gird would have been surprised, but could not quite feel it. “This was Esea’s High Hall,” Arranha said, as if he were a guide. “It became something else, something worse, and Esea’s blessing was withdrawn.” He shook his head. “I warned them, but they thought they could extract more power by bringing darkness and light so close together.”
Gird could not follow this, but he did follow Arranha into the partly ruined building. It soared overhead, high arches of stone, one after another rising from fluted pillars, making a space reminiscent of a great forest. At the far end, where a circular window had been, sunlight fired the lower arc to a silver crescent. Gird felt hairs rise on the back of his neck. He swallowed.
“You must see this,” Arranha was saying, “because you must decide if the gods demand this building be torn down. I myself would hate to see that; it’s the most beautiful in the north, to my eyes. But the people know what went on here; you must see for yourself.”
What he had to see was evidence enough that the magelords had lost all sense of right and wrong. Arranha tried to explain what they thought they were doing; to Gird, who had never sailed a ship, did not know a lodestone from any cobble in the river, who did not care about the theory behind it, it was simply disgusting and grotesque. An excuse, as he saw it, for some to bully others, to excuse their own cruelty on religious grounds. Here were the same symbols he had found in that count’s dungeon: the barbed chain, the masks with horns and spikes, painted to terrify, the instruments whose only purpose was pain. The place Arranha had led him to stank of old blood, death, and fear. He heard a nauseated gulp beside him, and turned to see Selamis at his side; he had followed Gird, as he often did, without speaking or asking permission.
“Don’t make it worse,” Gird said. “Go spew outside if you must. But this is your real inheritance from your father.” The younger man made it to the outside before he threw up. When he came back—to Gird’s surprise—he looked grim but in some way satisfied.
Gird came back out to find a crowd of those who had suffered under the old, and wanted his justice. His, he thought. The blue summer sky pressed down on him. Another than Alyanya had given him that victory; what did he want here? Justice, and all that came with it. The Hall?
The evil, he told them, is not in the stones, but in those who did wrong. Justice will rule here, the High Lord who judges all things rightly. He himself went to the crypt under Esea’s altar and scrubbed it until it stank no more of all that had happened in it. He brought in the holy herbs for the dead, and lay them reverently on the floor. He came up to find the crowd still standing, and scolded them as if they had been his yeomen for years. Cleaning before building, he said, waving his arms at the shattered glass in the courtyard.
With Finyatha fallen, the other lords in Finaarenis fled to Tsaia, where the Tsaian king gathered an army to retake that land and save his own. Gird ignored that for the present. They had not time before winter to mount a campaign; the Marrakai told him all he needed to know of preparations. He himself was back in Brightwater before snow fell, with Selamis and Arranha, to plan for the coming year.
Despite the destruction of farming villages and fields, they had more food than the year before. The lords’ granges had held a surprising amount; some had burned, but more had been saved. Many other goods were found in more abundance, though the distribution was not as even as Gird would have liked. But he did not interfere with anything but gross injustice. If these people were to help make their own fair laws, they would have to start by making some mistakes.
In spring, the fighting spread eastward into Tsaia. Gird had not realized how far the barton organizations spread—not only in Marrakai lands, but beyond. Barton after barton rose, combined with its neighbors, and elected a marshal: most were competent. The Tsaian royal army which had at first treated the very idea of a peasant army with contempt, even after the defeat in Finaarenis, fell back again and again. Gird did not want his Finaarenisian troops to invade Tsaia: they had fought for their own freedom, in defense of their own homes and families. That much he had felt confident— that Alyanya, Lady of Peace though she be, could understand and condone. Invading someone else’s land, even for the best reasons, did not seem the same.
But Ivis, his high marshal in the east, had no such worries. Bartons were bartons; yeomen were yeomen; in any fight between peasants and lords, he wanted to be one of the leaders. Several cohorts volunteered to go to Tsaia with him. Gird, working hard on the new and—he hoped—simple legal syste
m that would enable men to live in peace and deal fairly with one another, let him go with only a warning.
The legal code was, in fact, turning out to be much harder than he had expected. If he made the laws simple, they were so general that someone would claim not to know how that general principle could be applied in a particular instance. If he made the laws precisely applicable to common situations, someone would come up with an uncommon situation and claim to have found no guiding general principle. Gird tried to ignore the twinkle in Arranha’s eyes, but finally admitted that he had been as naive in law as in war.
“Not that you won’t end up with better law than we’ve had,” said Selamis, quite seriously. “I think it’s coming quite well.”
“Some of it,” growled Gird. It had been so simple to say that no one should beat up someone else, but now he was faced with honest merchants who had pursued thieves, and husbands convinced that they must beat their wives. And how much beating was beating? If a thief, once caught, kept fighting and had to be clouted before he would come along to a magistrate, was that a lawful or unlawful beating? Gird had insisted that the right to beat, within marriage, was both limited and equal for both sexes, but enforcement proved beyond his means. He felt at times like the father of a roomful of quarrelsome children, each of whom insisted that the other one started it.
Mercantile law proved equally tricky. Gird himself had gone around to three markets, taken a sample weighing stone, and found that no two were the same. He had one of the Brightwater masons cut one that matched the middleweight stone, had several more made to balance it, and replaced all the Brightwater weightstones with the standard. As the mason turned out more standards, Gird sent them to nearby markets, and insisted on their use. Prices danced up and down with the new stones. Gird assumed they would settle to something equivalent to those before, but his mental analogy—a chip on a bucketful of water, after shaking—did not satisfy him.
At least this year most of the arable land was under cultivation, and his noncombatant camp followers had returned to their homes or settled in partially deserted villages nearer by. Some of the bartons had dispersed as well, those that had villages to return to. Food should not be a problem, if the war stayed in Tsaia.
As the war receded eastward, the land that had been Finaarenis settled back into farming and trade. Some lands were blighted, some wells ruined; peasants shrugged and moved on. Some fields grew rich green grass over bones the crows had picked; those they avoided for another year. Gird moved from Brightwater to Grahlin, amused now to see how small a town it really was, that had seemed a city to him. Esea’s Hall there had been burned, by the local inhabitants; they showed him the charred foundations proudly. He moved on east, to camp near the Tsaian border for a time.
Tsaia fell, at last, with blue-shirted farmers calling themselves “Gird’s Yeomen” holding the king captive in his own dungeon. By the time word came to Gird, the king had escaped—and been found dead, of a magelady’s anger. The two messages came on the same day, in Ivis’s difficult script. Gird had tried to insist that his marshals, at least, must learn to read and write, but some had struggled as hard as he himself. He looked up from puzzling his way through it, having read it aloud, to meet Selamis’s steady gaze.
“So,” he said. “You are the last surviving magelord of rank, if you look at it the way you once did.”
Selamis shook his head. “No, you know I don’t.”
“You feel no slightest flicker of desire for that throne? They say it is lovely.” The throne of Finaarenis had been hacked to bits before Gird saw it.
“None. That was not my throne anyway, even if they wanted a king.”
Gird drew a long breath. “I suspect they do; there’s a different feel over there. Marrakai said their king was foolish, not cruel, and Marrakai is anything but a fool. It’s a land that might take lords, if they were not mages.”
Selamis looked down, pensive. “And where is a land that will take mages, if they are neither lords nor evil?”
“You think of yourself? You are safe with me.”
“I think of others like myself. I cannot be the only bastard with magic in his blood, that will someday bring him death at the hands of those for whom all magic is evil. Even some of the pure blood— that lady you sent away, and her children.”
Gird cocked his head. “If I had magic in my hands—if I could bring light, as you and Arranha can, whenever I needed a light to find my way; if I could light a fire with it, and never be cold—I would find that tempting. I would want to use it, first for myself, and then for those I loved, and then—I don’t know, friend luap, as you would be called—”
“I wish you would just call me Luap, as the others are doing now—”
“And forget who you are? I wish I could. But I see no way to use magic well, to have that much power others cannot share, with no force to bar misuse.”
Selamis waved at the papers Gird had been working over, another revision of the first part of his Code. “Your law?”
“Law without force behind it is but courtesy: for love or greed, men do things they should not, and law must have a hard hand to knock those hot heads into sense. For ordinary men, the law can serve, but what force can bind a mage?”
Selamis laughed aloud. “You did it yourself, Gird—a good knock to the head, as you say, and there I lay.”
Gird laughed too. “Yes, an untrained mage. By the gods, d’you suppose if I’d felled that sier in the first place he would never have fought against us?” A ridiculous idea, but he was in the mood for it.
“Mages are children first, Gird—good parents can teach them law.”
That sounded reasonable but he still had his doubts.
Then the Tsaian king’s killer sought sanctuary in his camp. He wondered what she would say about his death. Magedead, the report had been, from someone who claimed to know what that meant. A royal ring on his chest, and briars grown over him, in bloom even in this season. The season was autumn. Late autumn.
“Bring her in, then,” he said to Selamis-now-Luap.
“She’s a mage,” said Selamis. He meant more by that; Gird looked at him sharply.
“So?”
“She’s one of them, but not one of them.”
“One trying to do good, like the Marrakai?”
Luap looked away. “Not precisely. She had lived for years as a sheepherder.”
“A mageborn lady?”
“So those who knew her say. In exile from the Tsaian court, for some wrangle there—”
“And she comes to us. Why? Did she say?”
“She says you must know how the king died, and hopes you will let her take service with us.”
Gird stared at Luap. “Is she a fool, this magelady? Take service with us? Why not join Marrakai, if she’s what you call a good mage?”
Luap shrugged. “I don’t know. Will you see her?”
Gird shifted in his seat. “Oh, I’ll see her.”
She was tall, and even in armor conveyed a lithe lightness, a supple strength. It set Gird’s teeth on edge. This one had never, he was sure, borne a child or suckled, had never so much as cared for a sister’s child. Dark hair, braided snugly to fit beneath the helm she carried under her arm. Skin pale as ivory, flushed with rose at the cheeks, eyes used to command, bright and piercing. Before he could speak, she had spoken.
“The king is dead, and by my hand,” she said. “If you do not allow murderers in your army, you will not want me. Otherwise—”
Gird felt that his head was full of apricot syrup: sweet, cloying, thick. He dragged his thoughts through it, just able to think So this is what that charming is about! Whatever had happened to the magicks of the other magelords, this one had full measure and running over. He struggled with his tongue, which wanted to say “Yes, lady,” and dug his fingernails into his palms. It helped a little.
“I wish you’d stop that,” he said, somewhat surprised at the even tone in which it came out.
Her mouth open
ed, and her cheeks paled. “You—are not afraid.”
Humor tickled the inside of his mind, thinning the rich syrup of her magicks. “No, but I am getting angry. I don’t like tricks.”
“It’s not a trick,” she said. The pressure of her sweetness increased; it was hard to breathe.
“Trick,” insisted Gird, through the honeyed mist over his eyes. “Same as luring a fly to honey, and swatting it. You might try honesty.”
All at once, the magicks were gone, his mind clear, and the woman’s face had gone all white around the mouth. That had gone home hard, though most of the magelords didn’t seem to regard honesty as much.
“I did,” she said between clenched teeth. Without the magicks, her face was older, not unlovely, but no longer a vision of beauty and terror. The dark hair had silver threads in it; the face had fine lines, a touch of weather. “I tried honesty, back then, and that brought me exile. And when I tried again, my duty to the king— ah, you would never understand!” She turned away from him, a gesture Gird read as consciously dramatic.
“You killed him,” Gird said, deliberately flat across that drama.
“I killed him.” She faced him again, and now he saw tears glittering in her eyes. Did she really care, or was it all an act? Women he knew cried noisily, red-faced, shoulders heaving, not one silver tear after another sliding down ivory cheeks. “I trusted him; he was my liege. And then—”
He was tired of her dramatics, and wholly out of sympathy with her kind of beauty. “Spit it out, then, lass, or we’ll be here all day—” It was the tone he used on his own folk, the young ones, the frightened ones. On her it acted like a hot needle: she jumped and glared at him.
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