Bastion

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Oh, good! I already washed my face and hands in the caravan. I’m glad you know how things go,” she said, and held up her face for a kiss. “Can you show me around?”

  “Nothin’ I’d like better,” he lied—because there was definitely something he would like better, but—well—no privacy.

  • • •

  The dinner summons came when he had just about finished showing her the last of the Post. “We’ll prolly sit with the Captain and the officers,” he told her. “I didn’t the last time I was at a Post, but I was just a little’un. We’re all, like, honored guests and all. You want it known who your Pa is?”

  She shook her head. “Not really. Just saying I am Bear’s assistant should be reasonable. I don’t want to be fussed over.”

  He squeezed her hand as they went down the hall. “Well, then, just let Lita and Lena get all the attention, which they will. The rest of us might as well be invisible when there’s a Bard in the room.”

  The mess hall wasn’t that far from where they had been poking about—looking over the armory—so it didn’t take them long to get there, and as Mags had expected, the Captain’s servant intercepted them at the door and took them to the officer’s table. Jakyr and Bear were already there; Lita and Lena arrived shortly, and once they were seated, the meal was served.

  Which was to say, the men got up and got their food from the mess line, and the Captain’s servant brought them each plates that he filled for them. Mags didn’t mind; the food was good, with a couple of things he’d never tried before, and he wasn’t in the habit even now of leaving good food on a plate because it wasn’t exactly what he was hankering for.

  Mostly, he remained quiet and listened, and ate, as the Captain and Jakyr and (to his surprise) Lita exchanged stories. Or rather, it seemed a little as if Jakyr and Lita were in a kind of competition to come up with the most outrageous and amusing story for the entertainment of the table. They didn’t quite descend to the level of telling tales on each other, but he had the distinct feeling that in other company, or with more beer, it could have devolved to that.

  It might still have, except that Lita had already arranged to have a semiformal concert for the entire garrison once the dishes were cleared away, and that is what she did. Once again, Mags had the intriguing experience of watching a Master tune her art to please exactly the audience she faced. Not only the audience, but the mood they were in—winter was coming, always a hard time. Shorter days meant less light, depressing to the spirit. And this garrison was full of men who were far from home, far from their loved ones, and far from women, serving people who were, if not overtly hostile, certainly nothing like friendly. It was hard on them, far from home with Midwinter coming, and Lita’s concert was purposed to raise their spirits.

  It was a shorter set than the ones she’d done at the inns that they had stopped at, but, then, she wasn’t playing for an audience she had to win over—they were hers from the beginning. She began with purely comic songs, just to test the crowd, but before long, she was working into material like drinking songs that everyone knew, so everyone could sing the chorus.

  Mags held Amily’s hand as soon as the concert started, but as the audience got completely caught up in a lively ballad that relied heavily on double-entendres and allusions rather than coming out and saying what was going on, he felt her squeeze it tightly. Glancing over at her, he saw her nod ever so slightly toward the door. He let go of her hand, and she slipped away under the cover of the chorus. Giving her a bit of time—not that he thought they were fooling anyone, but for the sake of pretending to propriety—he followed.

  With the rest of the concert as a muted background, they spent a very satisfactory, if also somewhat frustrating, candlemark cuddled up together in her bed, kissing and holding each other, but not much more. There was no telling when someone would come along, and he understood without her saying anything that she would be painfully mortified if anyone caught them getting farther than that. They broke apart, reluctantly, and only when they heard the first lines of “The Parting Glass” floating in from the mess hall.

  He had the distinct feeling that Lita had chosen that song deliberately to warn them that the concert was over. Finally someone was on their side!

  • • •

  When a Guardsman says that “they are leaving at first light,” he is being literal. Mags already knew that, but Lena, Bear, and Amily were still scrubbing the sleep from their eyes as they mounted the steps to the caravan and Lita took up the reins.

  At least they can go back to sleep, Mags thought, a little glumly. He wasn’t used to sleeping in a place as busy as the Guardpost was at night. There had been men coming and going down the corridor as the watches changed, and each time they had, it had woken him up. As if she had heard the thought, Lita looked up at him from the driver’s position. She looked like she’d slept like a baby—but then, she was used to sleeping in Bardic Collegium, where it was never quiet.

  “You know, there is no reason why you have to ride for the first part of this journey,” she pointed out, then looked over at Jakyr, who looked very much as if he had stayed up too late last night. Evidently he’d found a convivial comrade in Sergeant Milles. “Nor you either. Although . . . if you were—” She mimed drinking “—you probably would be better off riding than being in the caravan, the way it’s going to be swaying over those rough roads.”

  Somehow she made it sound as if Jakyr made a habit of getting drunk. And Mags could not imagine how she’d done it. Jakyr predictably bristled, and Mags didn’t blame him. Lita hadn’t made any effort to keep her voice down. Deliberately, he was sure.

  “As it happens, I was ironing out some last-minute details with Sergeant Milles,” he snapped, “I was seeing to some extra supplies that he had not thought of, and those were mostly for the comfort of you ladies. So thank you, yes, I will take to the caravan for a candlemark or two.” He looped Jermayan’s reins over the saddle horn and reached for the side of the porch. As Lita hastily scooted out of the way, he swung himself over onto it, pulled open the door, and ducked inside, brushing the Bard with a foot near enough that, although he didn’t actually kick her, it was clear he could have if he had chosen to be a cad, and sloughed it off as an accident.

  Mags decided that a closed mouth was the better part of valor, and just said, politely, “May I?”

  “Be my guest,” Lita replied, staying where she was. He eased Dallen up to the side of the caravan, and copied Jakyr’s moves—without the near kick—and climbed into the wagon. Lita shut the door behind him, and a moment later the caravan lurched on its way.

  This was the first time Mags had been in the vehicle while it was moving, and it did sway, quite a bit. He clung to an overhead rail, while Jakyr rolled himself in a cocoon in blankets on one of the narrow beds, pulled a corner over his head, and turned to put his back to the rest of the caravan.

  The little doors leading into the two cupboard beds were closed. Amily must be in the lower one alone, and probably asleep already again. She’d had a lot of practice by now in sleeping in a moving van. Despite the fact that he would dearly love to have cuddled up with her, Mags decided not to disturb the occupants, and instead took the other narrow bed. It was surprisingly comfortable. There was a featherbed in the box, and it was thicker than it looked. He nestled down into it and closed his eyes, and decided that he liked the swaying of the wagon. Of course, he had never been a baby that had had a cradle—at least, he didn’t think so—but he imagined that was very much what it felt like. As soon as he got cozy-warm, he fell right back asleep.

  When he woke again, he turned over to see that the other bed was empty, and he heard someone softly practicing scales. He realized he must have been hearing that for some time, and he sat up.

  “Want to help me make food for everyone?” Amily asked from somewhere about the level of his feet. “It’s about luncheon time, and there are no inns on this road, but the Cook loaded us with enough food to give everyone somethi
ng to eat. I thought I’d just put packets together; we can pass them out the windows here at the back.”

  “Always happy to give you a hand,” he said, turning to see her peeking out of the bottom cupboard bed. She came out and sat next to him, and together they put up something people could eat in the saddle. Rolls split and buttered, with a thick slice of cheese, a couple of small leeks, and a bit of bacon in the middle. Then they opened the rear windows and stuck their heads out.

  “I’ve got food!” Amily called, and handed the packets out as the half-dozen Guardsmen rode up and reached over their horses’ heads to take them. There was enough in the supplies for everyone to have two, which seemed to satisfy all of them.

  He helped Amily clean things up and tidy everything away, shaking the basket the rolls had been in out the window. It was clear that in a space this small, you had to tidy up everything as soon as you were finished with it, or you’d soon have no room to move.

  :Need me out there?: he asked Dallen.

  :Not in the least. Jakyr is sulking, and he and Milles are exchanging stories about insufferably rude women, and how it’s impossible to understand females in the first place. I think you would only get in the way of their fun.:

  Having, in the course of his duties to Nikolas down in Haven or at the Palace, been forced to listen to far too many such conversations, Mags was inclined to agree. If there was one tune that got harped on over and over, it was how unreasonable women were (among men) and how unreasonable men were (among women). He was inclined to think that everybody just got burrs under their saddles from time to time and got unreasonable in general.

  “All I can say,” Mags said to Amily, “is that it is a very good thing that Jakyr and I are going to be out of The Bastion as much as in. I just hope we don’t get snowed in together too much.”

  “If we do, we have several options,” Amily said thoughtfully. “We could move to another cave. We could tell them to move to another cave. Or we could tie them together and make them work out whatever it is that they’ve been quarreling about.”

  Mags shuddered. “With the third?” he said. “I think there’d be blood afore it was over. Lita, I know she’s got a tongue like a sword, and Jakyr ain’t far behind. They’d flay each other alive with words afore any making up happened.”

  Amily grimaced. “Then we make them move to other caves. Maybe they’ll go into hibernation like grumpy bears and spare us all.”

  • • •

  Jakyr seemed to have worked off his irritation in a couple of candlemarks . . . no doubt by making sure Lita was within earshot of stories she couldn’t respond to and had to pretend not to hear. That was when Mags swung himself out of the caravan and managed to get Amily up behind him, all without anyone stopping or slowing down. The road—if you could call it that—was little more than a track among the trees at this point. Mags had the feeling that if the supply wagons hadn’t worn it down some, they’d have had a hard time tracing it.

  There was a great deal of wildlife out there among the trees. More than once, they heard something crashing through the underbrush, running away from their convoy. :Deer,: Dallen informed him. Once, a fox just stood there and watched them pass, bold as you please. Rabbits fled, as did tree-hares, and squirrels by the dozen raced up trunks and scolded them from imagined safety. Since several of the Guardsmen amused themselves by taking out tree-hares and rabbits for their dinner tonight, the squirrels wouldn’t have been nearly as safe as they thought they were.

  Overhead, birds flitted among the branches like leaves, watching them without any sign of fear. Evidently, few people came here, and fewer still hunted. Mags wondered why.

  “You can see why the bandits picked this part of the country,” Milles said, as another deer went blundering away. “Plenty of game. It’s been so long now that the wildlife has gotten fearless again. Impossible for anyone to get through here without alerting the wildlife, so if you paid attention and were quiet, you could easily tell when someone was coming up on The Bastion. You only need to put out a few sentries to guard quite a big area.” He shook his head. “We must have scouted through here dozens of times. I was just a first-year Guardsman at the time, so I was part of that. All they had to do was to pull back into their caves and make sure we never found the entrance to the pocket valley. We probably went past them a hundred times before we finally got someone to guide us in.”

  “And then?” Jakyr asked.

  “We sent one scout to verify that The Bastion was where the informant said it was. He was truly a genius at what he did and was undetected. We gave them no indication we knew they were there. We waited until we had a double garrison ready to go, and if you’ve ever seen the report, you know how that went.” Milles let the sentence trail off, inviting Jakyr to say he had or had not. Mags eavesdropped shamelessly.

  “I only found out about the gang because of The Bastion being central to my Circuit,” Jakyr lied smoothly. “When I did my research. It looked like a natural place to set up a headquarters, rather than relying on the Waystations. So?”

  “So, we’d planned all this in as close to absolute secret as we could. No one outside the Post knew about it. We even managed to hide the doubled manpower. On the day, we sent men in over the top of the hills before dawn, and killed their scouts as they took up their posts, then filled the hills with archers. We blocked off the entrance, then one full garrison went in, on foot, wearing full plate. Hard to move in, but it made it almost impossible for them to do us much damage. We moved in squares of four, so nobody could get hit from behind. Anybody who tried to escape up the cliffs and over the hills met the archers. The entrance is barely wide enough for a supply wagon, so men in armor could just bull right through until we got ourselves a foothold; then we just kept feeding them in. The bandits tried a rain of arrows, but they never got anything going thanks to our archers above.”

  “Good gods,” Jakyr said, sounding stunned.

  “Aye. It was a slaughter. A sheer butchery. Mind you, they got quick deaths, which was more than they deserved. Remember, we caught them by surprise, so they got very little chance to get into armor themselves. It wasn’t so much a fight as—well, we were like some sort of reaping machine that took men instead of wheat.” Milles ran his hand through his hair. “Not the sort of battle you boast about. When we got a look at what they’d been up to in that camp that we didn’t know about, I have to say I’m glad they’re gone, but it was the sort of fight that sickens a man of fighting.”

  Some of Milles’ memories were strong enough that he actually projected them, and Mags felt nauseated by them too, before he shut them out. He hoped he would never find himself in a position like the one Milles had been in. The bandits had been all but defenseless against the Guardsmen—highly trained, heavily armored, heavily armed. Most of them hadn’t so much as a shield; they’d just picked up whatever weapon was closest to hand, tried to fight their way out of the valley, and been met by arrows everywhere. The ones that survived that had been insanely desperate, or they would never have tried to fight their way past the Guard.

  Then there had been the fights with the ones trying to hide in the caves. That hadn’t lasted past the Guard tossing in balls of pitch and tar that were on fire and put out huge clouds of choking smoke. Again, there was no choice: choke to death on the smoke or face the Guard. And for whatever reason, few of them seemed to consider a third option—surrender.

  Maybe because they knew they’d probably be hung anyway if they did. According to the reports that Mags had seen, they’d been responsible for hundreds of deaths that the Guard knew of. Which meant there were probably two times more that they didn’t.

  “Give me a nice clean battlefield any day,” Milles was saying fervently. “I never want to do that again.”

  “There’s a lot to be said for that,” Jakyr agreed. “Although sometimes a battlefield is no cleaner. I’d rather have been in your shoes than face Karsite demons.”

  Since that was a conversation Mags
really didn’t want to listen in on—having far too vivid memories of the Karsite demons still—he had Dallen drop back to the caravan again. Lita had slowed the vanners; the caravan was pitching a little on the uneven track.

  “Problems?” Mags asked.

  She shook her head. “As long as it gets no worse than this.”

  “It don’t, milady Bard,” offered one of the Guardsmen. “In fact, this’s the worst of it.”

  Sure enough the track smoothed out again, and it wasn’t more than a candlemark later that they found themselves threading an entrance between two sheer stone faces. It looked as if a giant had cleft the hill with an ax, making a passage between two halves of an exceedingly tall hill. A small mountain, he would have said.

  It was a good thing that he was used to the mines, because that passage would have been claustrophobic. As it was, a couple of the Guard looked very uneasy until they came out on the other side.

  And the other side was a pretty, if unremarkable, tiny pocket valley, ringed completely by hills with very steep—in fact, he would have said, sheer—cliffs on the valley side. It was as if that same giant had taken his fist and punched a cup into the hills.

  “Now . . . this is odd,” Jakyr said, looking around himself. “Very odd . . .”

  “How odd?” asked Milles.

  “Well . . . I’ve been to a lot of strange places, so I’ve seen a bit more than your average Herald,” Jakyr replied. “And if I had just come on this place . . . I’d say it was a Hawkbrother Vale. . . .”

  A Hawkbrother Vale?

  :You know, he’s right,: Dallen said. :It has the look of a Vale, a long abandoned one, but a Vale nevertheless.:

  “Huh.” Milles looked surprised. “I thought they were a myth.”

  “Not even close.” Jakyr dismounted. “I’ve met ’em. I’ve been to two Vales. The only thing missing here is the giant trees, but those won’t flourish once the Hawkbrothers leave, and they’d have fallen a long, long time ago. Or got cut down. Those big trees, they’re mighty tempting to a woodsman. You could build your entire Guardpost from the wood from one, and who knows? Maybe someone did. One way to know for sure. Go on, Jermayan. You’re better at this than me.”