Knights of the Sword

by Roland Green

  However, a chief with men in need of healing has no time for jests, or for listening to the babble of clerics. A chief who has sworn not to harm priests—and knows that threats against them are as useless as threats against kender—also must be exceedingly patient.

  Darin was sure that spring had turned to summer before Sirbones finally ran silent. The priest looked up at the towering figure before him and said, in an entirely different tone of voice, “How many men have you who need healing, and what are their hurts?”

  Darin wasted no time gaping, the more so in that the roster of his wounded was always the first thing he rooted in his memory after a battle. He could have recited it drunk or dying, and now spoke swiftly.

  Almost before he was aware that the priest had vanished, Sirbones reappeared, carrying his staff and a small bag. The staff seemed to be plain, polished wood, with a blue glass tip—except that the glass glowed, was faceted like a jewel, and seemed to have some tiny figure dancing within its blueness.

  “Lead me to your men.”

  “I must remain within the walls until we are done,” Darin said. He pulled out a ring and handed it to the cleric. It was silver, with a dolphin engraved upon it. Waydol had worn it upon the little finger of his left hand, until he gave it to Darin, who had just turned ten.

  “This is a sign that you come with my permission, and your healing is lawful.” Darin tried to glower. “If it is not, and you live long enough in the face of my men’s wrath—”

  “Of course, of course. A traveling man am I, and I have fared in far lands and with men less courteous than yourself. I remember once—”

  Darin pointed at the gate and muttered a frantic prayer to various gods that Sirbones was not going to go maundering again.

  By the time the prayer was finished, the cleric was gone.

  * * * * *

  Darin did not see the priest of Mishakal again until the next morning. When he and the men inside the village gathered the loot and their breakfasts and marched out, Sirbones had already finished with the wounded raiders. None of them were quite as fit as they had been before wounds, but all could fight and march.

  “I wonder if that healer is weak, or not giving us his best,” Stalker said.

  “Treachery is hard to believe in a priest of Mishakal,” Darin said, then made a gesture of aversion for good measure. “As for being weak or fumbling—anyone can suffer that fate. It is something beyond even healers.”

  Stalker seemed about to reply, but then one of the raiders came up with a jug of spring water, into which he had mixed cider and crumbled herbs. It was a refreshing drink that not only killed Darin’s last thirst but made him aware of how long he had labored (it had hardly been worthy of the name “fighting”) since dawn.

  Darin drew off his gauntlets, wrapped them in his cloak to make a rough pillow, lay down, and was almost instantly asleep.

  He awoke to see Sirbones standing almost over him, so close that Darin could have grabbed an ankle and snatched the little priest off his feet. Then he heard the sound of wailing and lamenting from the village.

  He leaped to his feet and rested a hand on his sword hilt. Actually drawing it might lead him to the wrong conclusion.

  “Who is weeping, and why?”

  “Oh, it is the folk of Dinsas. They grieve for themselves, and for me.”

  “You?” Darin looked down at the priest. He seemed hale enough, but then with priests of Mishakal this could be an illusion.

  Sirbones laughed. It was the laugh of a younger man than he had seemed to be last night. Darin also noticed for the first time that Sirbones seemed ready for traveling. He wore trousers and a loose coat, had a pack on his back and several pouches on a well-made belt, and had his healing staff slung across the pack and wore stout shoes instead of sandals on his feet. In one hand he carried a silver-headed walking stick.

  “No. I am not sick or dead, and you are not talking to either a ghost or a carrier of plague. You are merely talking to one who wishes to continue his journey with you.”

  The way Sirbones said “journey” seemed to give the word ritual significance. Darin remembered that each priest of Mishakal had to go wandering for a few years, as part of his priesthood. He supposed that he should be honored, and he would certainly be grateful if the priest continued to do good work and did not talk men to death as fast as he healed them.

  “Indeed. What have the villagers to say to this?”

  “Nothing.” Then Sirbones added hastily, “That is to say, they cannot go against my duties as a priest of Mishakal and the will of the goddess. They are not happy, however, and predict dire fates if I go with you into the Minotaur’s lair.”

  “Waydol does not have a lair,” Darin said. “He lives in a hut overlooking the seashore, like a civilized being. Nor will he hurt you, unless you talk to him at the same length as you have talked to me.”

  “Ah, that is a vice that comes when one has much of one’s own company,” Sirbones said. “But if one has no love for oneself, one is a poor healer, for one loves not others. Also, one’s own company is what one finds most often on one’s journey.”

  “How long ago did you begin your journey, if that is a lawful question?”

  “Certainly,” Sirbones said. “I left the Three Lakes Temple in Solamnia twenty-six years ago this summer.”

  “How long were you on the journey before you returned to the temple?”

  “I have yet to return, young giant. I found that the farther I stayed from temples, the more the goddess favored me. I have been in Dinsas a full three years, which is the longest I have stayed in one place since I left the temple. It was time for me to move on.”

  Darin squatted. This brought his eyes almost to a level with Sirbones’s. “I am not sure that I should not take back the—our prizes from last night. If I cannot ask you to return—”

  Sirbones shook his head emphatically. “You cannot. Nor are you bound by any oath to return the villagers’ wealth, which is but a fraction of what they possess. It would displease your men, and you will need their loyalty on the long journey home.

  “Also, Waydol will need every man at his command, and soon.”

  Darin stood. “You have prophecy?”

  “Only knowledge from your men, gained while healing them—ukkkh!”

  “Aaargghhh!”

  The first sound came from Sirbones, when Darin snatched him up by the collar, to dangle him at arm’s length. The second came from Darin, when fire seemed to shoot up his arm and make arm and hand alike go limp so that Sirbones dropped to the ground.

  The priest picked himself up while Darin was still rubbing his arm. “I lack strength to do that every day, and you cannot afford to be hurt every day,” Sirbones said firmly. “I have not stolen thoughts from your men’s minds. I only listened to them and their friends talking. I added their knowledge to mine, and the sum was a need to help Waydol.”

  Darin sighed. “Well, if I cannot send you back or keep you from following me,” Darin said, “I suppose the next best course is for you to march with us. You can keep up, I trust?”

  “You may indeed trust me in that, and wisely,” Sirbones said. He sounded maddeningly complacent.

  Darin looked after the priest as he strode off toward the assembling line of men. He rubbed his arm and realized that the pain had vanished as swiftly as it had come. In fact, all the aches from yesterday’s exertions had also vanished, not only from his arm but from the rest of his body. Even the mild case of the flux from a bout with bad water two days ago was gone.

  Darin began gathering his own gear. He still was not sure that bringing Sirbones home would not be bringing an owlbear into the sheepfold. But it seemed hard to believe that the Minotaur and his heir could not between them deal with anything short of Mishakal herself!

  Chapter 2

  “All seems in order,” Sir Niebar said. “I regret that it took so long to be sure.”

  Sir Pirvan of Tiradot frowned. “Do you imply a fault in our accoun
ting?” He hoped his tone could convey a sense of injury rather than his taking refuge in the Measure’s dictum that no knight will ever wittingly insult another.

  Although if all knights had always lived up to every part of the Measure, the Solamnic chivalry would long since have either brought perfection to themselves and the world or gone mad trying to obey too many different rules at once.

  The thieves of Istar had prided themselves on a complex and comprehensive set of customs to regulate the conduct of “night workers.” They had, however, never committed the ultimate folly of the Knights of Solamnia, which was to write everything down in a multitude of stout volumes.

  “It does not,” Niebar replied. “Indeed, it reflects your success and prudent management. Your manor is doing well.”

  “That is Haimya’s doing more than mine,” Pirvan said. “Fate had it that she leave off journeying for some years, when Gerik and Eskaia were young. In that time she discovered a gift, even a taste, for running a manor.”

  And if you even think too loudly that we should be able to spend more of our own money to support the knights’ work, so that they have to spend less, I will knock you down and Haimya will geld you with a dull pruning hook.

  Niebar rose to his full height, then bit back an oath. He had not been at Tiradot Manor long enough to remember which rooms were too low for his considerable height. He rubbed his scalp with one hand and thrust out the other to Pirvan.

  The former thief turned Solamnic Knight took the proffered hand. He even managed a sincere smile, though the sincerity came more from the imminence of Niebar’s departure than from a genuine regard for the man.

  Well, somewhat. There is no pleasure in his company, but he is honest, brave, and courteous without making a show of any of these virtues. Worse men have taken the Knights’ Oath.

  The two knights walked down the spiral stair from the solar room atop the tower at the west end of the great hall. The outer door led to the courtyard of the fortified manor, where Pirvan’s groom and stableboy had already led out Niebar’s horse, and where Niebar’s squire and serving boy had already mounted.

  “Farewell, Pirvan,” Niebar said. “I will not wish you a quiet year, because neither you nor your lady wife have much taste for that. But I will pray that what you wish for most will come to you, and soon.”

  Niebar had to be past forty, older than Pirvan, but he leaped into the saddle with the agility of a youth, without disturbing his horse, except for what might have been a sour look and a faint whicker. Then the gate swung open, three pairs of boot heels pressed into three sets of equine flanks, and the year’s visitation party trotted off.

  * * * * *

  Pirvan waited until the last scrawl of yellow dust vanished from across the green horizon, then went in search of Haimya. Learning that she and the women were down by the millstream doing their best to wash winter out of the woolens, he went the other way, toward the ruined keep that was the oldest surviving human habitation on the Tiradot lands.

  Built in the Age of Might, it had housed local lords of varying degrees of honor or rapacity until the Third Dragon War, in which it fell variously to both human and draconic foes. By the end of the war, it was uninhabitable.

  When prosperity returned to the land, the then lords of Tiradot decided that the times of living in a fortress were past. They built a stout-walled, peak-roofed house with three floors and two wings, and all the appurtenances of a large farm as well, then surrounded the whole affair with a wall designed to keep out cattle thieves and cutpurses rather than armies.

  Some generations later, another lord of Tiradot died without heirs, leaving the manor to the Knights of Solamnia. As the terms of the Swordsheath Scroll further generations afterward left the knights all property they had previously possessed, the Great Meld had made no difference in the status of Tiradot.

  What eventually did make a difference was the need of the knights for the services of one Pirvan the Spell-Thief of Istar. When he prevented a renegade mage from unleashing Frostreaver axes on the world and helped bring down a black dragon revived untimely from dragonsleep, these feats were held to make him worthy of acceptance as a Knight of the Crown.

  The price of his admission was to be as one of the eyes and ears set about the world, and particularly about Istar (in whose territory the manor lay), charged to him by Sir Marod. To do this properly he needed lands and other property suited to his station, and thus Tiradot Manor fell to his lot.

  Pirvan was not sure to this day, some ten years later, who had fallen to whom. He had once heard a crown called “a splendid misery”; owning a manor often seemed much the same, on a more modest level.

  At least one could say that the name “Pirvan of Tiradot” sounded better on the ear and in the heart than the name that he might otherwise have borne, one whispered behind his back but well known for all that:

  “Pirvan the Wayward.”

  * * * * *

  As always, when bleak thoughts paraded through his mind like a band of drunken ogres, Pirvan found relief in vigorous exercise. A swift side journey to the armory gave him climbing irons, leather trousers and sleeveless tunic, rope, tool belt and pouches, and spike-soled boots. All the metal hanging about him clinked and jingled like tinkers hard at work as he walked out of the gate, toward the old keep.

  The walls still rose some ten times Pirvan’s height on three sides, though they seemed even more cracked and crumbling than before. In places, the rubble core now dripped stones where before solid blocks had kept all tight and orderly.

  Time to sell the rights to the villagers to quarry this old pile, Pirvan thought. There’s a good plenty of new houses and new rooms to old houses, not to mention stones for walks and walls, living up here. When I feel sour in mind or body, there will always be trees to climb.

  The keep was a quarter of an hour’s walk, and the road to it was also the main road from the village that went with the manor. Pirvan passed a goatherd with her flock, a carter with a load of barrels (new, empty ones from the local coopers, judging from their polish, rattling staves and the speed the cart was making), several small boys doing nothing in particular, and an older lad carrying home two scythes freshly sharpened at the smith’s.

  One and all, they greeted Pirvan with courteous respect rather than servility. This was very much to his taste, and would have been more so if he’d been sure why they did it. Was it their natural custom, their knowledge of what an exceedingly odd sort of lord and knight he was, or the growing suspicion of the Knights of Solamnia spreading across Istar?

  To be sure, even the last and worst reason hardly meant danger. Istar’s claim to be the seat of all virtue in the world was more uttered than honored, and even many Istarians could not say the word “kingpriest” without smiling. It would be generations before the Knights of Solamnia had to contend with the hostility already shown toward nonhumans and human “barbarians”—unless the knights had to step forth as defenders of those folk.

  Which, in truth, they ought to do. Indeed, ought to have done before now. But the knights had gained too much at the time of the Great Meld by fighting Istar’s battles. Too much that they would be reluctant to lose over a minotaur thrown from a tavern without even being allowed to get drunk first, or a kender maid molested when nothing belonging to anyone else could be found on her person …

  More dark thoughts, Pirvan realized. At this rate he would need to be going up and down the keep until noon to clear his head.

  * * * * *

  The keep walls were in even worse condition than Pirvan had remembered. His men-at-arms had the right to use them for climbing practice and other training, but there were only eight of them. A dozen knights climbing in full armor could hardly have left these gouges and cracks, and Pirvan wondered if the local boys were using the keep for wagers and dares.

  Another reason for pulling the lot down, before one of those bold ones breaks his neck and his parents’ hearts.

  Pirvan had to find a new route to the
top before he could climb, then just for the challenge found another new route for his second climb. That one proved longer and harder than it had seemed, and when Pirvan reached the top, he was drenched with sweat, bleeding on several knuckles and one cheek, and quite prepared to catch his breath, then turn homeward.

  “Good day,” said a cheerful voice from out of sight beyond the battlements. “May I offer you some water?”

  Pirvan moved up another finger’s breadth, slapped both hands down on a flat stone, and vaulted onto the roof of the keep. He drew his dagger as he landed, rolled, and came up with it held by the point, ready to throw.

  But his wife, Haimya, had already drawn her own knife, as well as the buckler, hardly larger than a pot lid, with which she was so deft. They stood on guard against one another for a moment, then, as one, sheathed their knives and embraced.

  “As well we didn’t decide to practice,” Haimya said, bending down. “We might have punctured the water bag, and Kiri-Jolith knows you look like a man who needs a drink.”

  Pirvan was too busy uncorking the bag to do more than nod. He spoke only after the water, laced with extract of tarberry and a hint of lemon, had washed the dust and sweat from his mouth and throat.

  “Bless you, Haimya,” he said. “It was a pleasure to see you. How did you come up?”

  “By the stairs,” she said, not quite meeting his eyes. No one could fault her courage or her skill with arms, but she had little head for heights and had never quite gotten over being ashamed of this.

  “And how can it be a pleasure to see me when all you’ve looked at is the water bag?” she added, hands on her hips. The pose brought out the full splendor of her muscular figure, as tall as her husband’s and, if anything, broader across the shoulder, without being any the less desirable.

  She wore a loose tunic over men’s breeches and low boots on her long-toed feet, and it did not hurt that the tunic was damp enough to cling closely in interesting places. The breeches, too—and Pirvan gently put a hand on each of his wife’s hips, then kissed her on each cheek before his lips found hers.