The fourth was a woman as old as the old man; she would try to get taken on as a laundress or cook. Alberich didn’t hold out much hope for that, but if she could, well, an old woman would hear a lot from the Tedrel camp followers. Even if the Tedrels themselves didn’t speak to women, the recruits were of the type that wouldn’t be able to keep their mouths shut.
None of them would have their Companions with them; all of them were confident that their Companions could stay out of sight, but within call, so if things began to look the least bit dangerous, they could get out of the camp and escape before suspicion mounted to certainty.
Alberich was quite certain of one thing, at least. When they were done with these sessions, they would be Karsite, or he would call a halt to the whole scheme. That was how he had sold his plan to the MindHealers; he had to wonder how much they really understood what he meant, but he had to take a chance somewhere.
No one knew how this was going to work, but the MindHealer who had agreed to mediate the experiment had some ideas of his own that he wasn’t inclined to share with anyone, not even Alberich. He had only promised this much: if what he planned worked, the Heralds were not going to get Alberich’s memories, per se, and Alberich was not going to be reliving his own memories. “I won’t say anything more,” he’d repeated stubbornly, no matter who asked him or how many times he was asked. “I don’t want anyone going into this with any preconceptions to muddle things up. If this works, it will work very well indeed.”
Though how they were supposed to enter into the situation “without any preconceptions” was beyond him.
When the time came, Alberich appeared at Healers’ Collegium at the appointed hour, with three of the four Heralds he had recruited trailing in after him, one by one. It probably would have been amusing if they all hadn’t looked so serious, even apprehensive; he could have been a tutor or nanny trailed by his three of his four charges. They were sent to a quiet chamber that held two narrow beds and a chair between them, and stood, as Alberich thought to himself, “like a gaggle of useless idlers,” none of them particularly wishing to take a seat either on the couches or the chair. The young man still hadn’t arrived there when Healer Crathach, long and lean and sardonic, appeared in the room to which they had been sent.
“Ah, good. I only need one of you volunteers at a time,” he said, looking entirely too gleeful for Alberich’s comfort. “Hmm—you, I think, Orven. Take a couch. Alberich, you take the other. Try to relax, and close your eyes.”
The former herdsman made a bit of a face, and did as he was told, taking the farther of the two couches. In silence, Alberich did the same, taking the nearest. He closed his eyes, and heard a creak as the Healer sat down in the chair, felt a hand laid atop his forehead and suppressed the urge to knock it away, and—
And suddenly, he was in Karse.
But this was not exactly a memory. He had never lived in this cob-built hut—too small to be called a cottage—though he had seen plenty like it over the years. This was a typical mountain hut of the poorest sort, yet there was a poorer state than that in Karse, and that was to be the lowest of the kitchen or stable staff, who had not even a scrap of floor to call their own. Scullery maids, cook’s boys—they slept on the kitchen floor and ate what they could scrape out of pots, never washed except what parts of them got immersed in water when they scrubbed things, never changed their clothing until it dropped from their body.
He and his mother had, thank Vkandis, never been that lowly.
However, in this incarnation, it appeared that the protagonists of this “memory” were.
A little boy, who was him, and was not him, about three years old, was watching a woman who was his mother, and was not his mother, scrubbing the floor of this hut—a floor, made, as was usual in these huts, of the scrap ends of boards gathered and pieced together. She did not own this place; whereas his mother had owned, or had at least rented, their little dwelling. This woman was a servant here, the only one; sleeping on the hearth, doing the heaviest of the work, taken on by the mean old woman who owned the place only because, in her outcaste state, she asked nothing but food and shelter for herself and the boy that was him, and not him. He looked through that boy’s eyes, yet he did it from an adult perspective.
Now, he recognized the memory from the framework. If this had been his real memory, he would have been watching his mother scrubbing the floor of the inn where they lived. But this wasn’t his village, it was another, in herding country, where he had served in his first year with the Sunsguard. It wasn’t an inn, for this particular village had been too small to have one; this was just one of the many little houses, with a bush above the door to show that it sold ale and food. He didn’t recognize the woman; she was something like his mother, but mostly not. And although he somehow knew that Orven was actually experiencing this episode as if he were the toddler, Alberich was watching it as a sort of dispassionate passenger in Orven’s head.
This was fascinating; living fiction. Except that Orven was living it. Had he come from a background that was that impoverished? It could be; the MindHealer could be taking both sets of experiences and melding them together in a Karsite setting.
The bones of the experience were the same as his own; a group of fellows who considered themselves to be young toughs strolled past, and decided to abuse the woman because of his presence, calling her “whore” and worse. True, she was not married, and now had no prospect of ever wedding. True, she had not named his father to anyone but the Sunpriest. But his mother—and, in this manufactured memory, this woman—were hardly whores. They sold themselves to no man, and had been so tight-lipped about the identity of Alberich’s father that nothing had ever made them reveal it except to their priest.
The boy knew none of this, nor did Orven who was actually living through this instead of observing it—nor had Alberich at the time. Orven, from his childish perspective, only knew that the men were large and loud, and were making his mother unhappy. They frightened him, and he began to cry.
Now all of this came with an incredible load of detail that Alberich had not even known was in his memory—the scent of the harsh tallow soap the mother was using and of the wet wood of the floor, the beer smell from the cask just inside the door, the aroma of the pease porridge over the hearth, and woodsmoke, the sharp not-quite-spring scent of the air itself, the sour-sweat smell overlaid with goat and sheep of the men. And that was just scent. There was the quality of the sunlight, thin and clear, giving a great deal of light, but not much warmth. He somehow knew the look of the cobbles and the dirt path outside the door, the shape of the hut, with its rough cob walls, whitewashed some time last spring, the whitewash shabby from all the winter storms—the shape of the other houses of the village, of the village itself, a straggle of houses along the road. He even knew the road, cobbled only where it passed through the village itself. Alberich knew where it had all come from; he’d seen dozens of villages like this one over the years. The story came from his life, and the setting, but both were tolerably confused together, creating a new “life” entirely.
It wasn’t him. Orven, taken back in his mind to the level of a toddler, was the one feeling all of this; it would be Orven’s reactions that counted here.
The flood of external detail was giving Orven plenty to take in; internal, of course, was something a good deal more primal, the uncertainty and all the turmoil of a small and terrified child.
Then he came striding up the path, as if the crying had summoned him; tall, bearded, straight-backed, dressed in a long black robe with something bright and shining and immediately attractive to the wailing child on the breast of it. He wasted no time, verbally laying into the men in a voice like thunder, somehow making it clear that it was their good fortune he wasn’t going to lay into them physically as well. There was a great deal of what Alberich—from his dispassionate distance—recognized as Holy Writ being quoted, mostly about the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant. There was also a great deal o
f Writ quoted about the ultimate destination of those who abused the poor, the fatherless, and the repentant.
And a curious thing happened. The more the man spoke, the larger he seemed to become, and the smaller the woman’s harassers became. As they shrank into themselves, unable to look either at the woman or the Sunpriest—that was clearly what he was, although it was Alberich, and not Orven, who knew this—the woman took on more confidence. Since none of the thunder was being directed at him or his mother, the child calmed and crept near to her, and she hugged him close.
“Now, go!” the man finished at last, in tones dripping with disgust. “And if you don’t wish another taste of my tongue, find yourselves something godly to do for a change!”
They slunk off, exactly like whipped curs. Now the man came to stand over the boy and his mother. “How long has this been going on, woman?” he asked curtly, but not unkindly.
She shrugged. “Since he was born, Holy Father,” she replied, in a resigned voice.
Now the Priest looked down at the boy. “Then it is time I took a hand,” he pronounced, in a way that said quite clearly that it would be useless to protest. “I will have the boy with me for two marks in the morning, every morning. It is time he learned the ways of the Sunlord, blessed be His Name, and when the village sees that my eye is on you, there will be no more of scenes like this.”
Then he turned and stalked away again, and the memory—or, more accurately, manufactured memory—was over.
Alberich “woke,” suddenly released from the experience, and opened his eyes. He was as calm as he had been when he took his place on the couch, but from the tear streaks on Orven’s face, it was clear that he had experienced, and quite directly, everything appropriate to that young child in that situation.
The Healer was grinning with great satisfaction, so Alberich had to suppose that what he had planned had worked. But he put one finger to his lips, and motioned to Alberich that he should leave the room for the moment.
Alberich felt a little unsteady, but did as he was “told.” The other three were waiting outside, sitting on a long bench, and looked up at him expectantly when he emerged.
“The Healer, pleased is,” he said laconically, and left it at that. It was not very much later that Orven left, looking quite composed for a man who’d been dissolved in tears only a short time ago, and the Healer called in Alberich and the young man, Herald Wethes.
The next three sessions were similar, with Alberich serving more as observer than participant, but each setting being appropriate to the persona being created for the people involved, and rich with vivid detail. Wethes had another mountain village, but his mother was from a forester clan, for instance, and for the old woman, the village was down in the plain.
Even the identity of the Sunpriest changed, and Alberich had the notion that here, too, the image was coming from the other Heralds, each of them contributing the face and figure of some authority in their childhood, trusted and wise.
He was thoroughly exhausted before the sessions were over, but to his surprise, very little actual time had been spent in the enterprise, no more than a mark or two. But if he was tired, the others were completely drained by what was, for them, a highly emotionally charged experience.
And it was just beginning; he wondered if they were already starting to regret volunteering for this.
But although it was as physically wearing as a good, long practice session, this first set was not as emotionally difficult as Alberich had feared. Well, truth be told, although he had known that the only way to make these fellow Heralds into what he wanted to be was to give them bits of his own life, that was entirely what he had feared as well. He hadn’t wanted to expose himself and his life to others so nakedly.
But it appeared that, somehow, he wasn’t going to. The others had no idea how much of what they were going through was really part of his life, and the emotions they were feeling were theirs, not his.
Perhaps that was what had bothered him the most of all about this whole project; he had not wanted his feelings to be so exposed. If this was the Healer’s doing, then he owed the man thanks. More than thanks.
He lingered while the last of his four volunteers collected herself and tottered off, looking dazed. Healer Crathach gave him a knowing look when he didn’t leave, and leaned back in his chair, arms crossed.
“I’ll save you trying to wade backward through our language, and tell you straight up the answer to what you’re going to ask me,” the MindHealer said with a grin that had just a touch of smugness about it. “Yes, I planned this whole business of only using what you know to build seminal Karsite experiences for our four victims, rather than taking your memories entire. It’s all been very deliberate. I’ve got a lot of reasons for doing it that way, as much for their sake as yours. You wanted them made Karsite, not made into duplicate versions of you. And I didn’t want them subsumed into your rather formidable personality, Herald Alberich. But most of all, I did not want you to have to expose yourself in a way that would have been difficult for you to come to terms with.”
Alberich let out the breath he’d been holding in. “You knew—” he said, with just a touch of hesitation.
“That you didn’t want everybody and his Companion knowing every sordid detail about your past?” Crathach looked sardonic as well as smug, an odd combination. “I’d be a pretty poor MindHealer if I hadn’t been able to pick that up, now, wouldn’t I?”
Alberich just shrugged; it was only the truth.
“At any rate, things will diverge more from here, in the little life stories we’re concocting,” the MindHealer continued, and scratched his head with a slight frown. “How to put this? The powerful incident that formed you into what you are now will remain the same, and all of your background, but the way our agents will react to it, and the details of the incident will be driven by their own personalities. Am I making sense to you?”
“I—” Alberich hesitated.
“Well, never mind, you’ll see it as we go along. The point is, the more we do, the less it will be anything like your own experience.” The MindHealer shrugged, stretched, and got to his feet, then he paused, giving Alberich a long, measuring gaze. “Go, do something,” he said. “Something purely physical. There’s such a thing as thinking too much, especially for you.”
Since thinking was all that Alberich had been doing for the past several marks, the advice seemed good to him, and he nodded. “My thanks,” he replied, and went off to follow his Healer’s orders.
Sendar coughed unexpectedly. Selenay pressed down too hard on the goose quill, and it leaked, leaving a trail of ink spatters on the parchment. She cursed and tried to blot the damage but only made it worse. She dropped the quill and made a grab for the edge of the parchment in irritation.
Her secretary snatched it away before she could crumple or tear it to pieces, as she had two others. “Let Crance take care of it,” her father said, without looking up from his own work. “He has your notes, he has what you’ve written so far, and he should have been doing this in the first place. You don’t need to be here, and you’re getting hunched shoulders from sitting at a desk. Go do something purely physical.”
When she didn’t respond, he looked up at her. “You do not need to write every word of your judgments yourself. Crance doesn’t have enough work from you as it is. For Haven’s sake, you don’t need to replace the entire Circle, clerks and all! You’ve already freed up two Heralds from the city courts so that they can go South, and that is enough, Selenay.”
He sounded exasperated, and he probably was. She was trying so hard—and in her head she knew he was right, but in her heart, she kept feeling that she should be trying harder still.
She rubbed one of her tired eyes, and let poor Crance take the offending paper away to his own desk. “It doesn’t seem like enough,” she said; she felt forlorn, but she was afraid she sounded sullen. “I feel like anyone who isn’t feebleminded or sick, or afflicted somehow, ought to be there
, not here.”
Her secretary, a young man who was nearly as short-sighted as Herald Myste and afflicted with wheezes when he ventured near anything in bloom, looked at her mournfully. She immediately felt even more guilty for making him feel guilty for not being in the fighting.
“My dear—” Her father sighed. “Selenay, you sit in Council with me, you’re serving in the city courts, and half the time you don’t let Crance do his job. You are doing more than you need to, and probably far more than you should. Get out of here into the sunlight before you forget what it looks like and you turn into a troglodyte.”
She stared at him, blinking. He rose, took her hand, pulled her out of her chair, and shoved her forcibly out the door of the Royal Suite as the two guards at the door tried not to stare.
The door closed behind her, and to her astonishment she heard him slide the lock slide home. “And don’t come back until your nose is sunburned!” she heard Sendar say, his voice muffled by the closed door.
For a single moment, she thought about pounding on the closed door, demanding to be let in. . . .
Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor Page 21