Tahn

by L. A. Kelly

“No, Father, but he did not harm me. He meant it to save some of us.”

  “Cousin,” Jarel said, shaking his head, “I’ve heard it how a woman can be swayed by a captor till she see no more the wrong—”

  “You don’t understand!” she insisted. “I will explain it. All of it! But you know me, and you know the love I had for Karll. If I didn’t know the very truth before God about the man, I would wish him dead. But he is innocent, Father! He didn’t know how to do it perfectly, but he did save my life and yours. He risked his life for the children. And I believe with all my heart that he has given his soul to the care of our Savior!”

  “You speak inconceivable things, Netta,” Lord Trilett told his daughter.

  “I—I should go back upstairs before the boys wake and find me gone.”

  But it was too late for that. Vari had stirred against a pew and then sat up in the dark. “Lady?” he called. “Are you awake?”

  He found Doogan beside him, and Tam and Stuva nearby. But no one else.

  “Miss?” He stood, and the shadows seemed to dance around him. Where could she have gone?

  He was walking toward the altar when he heard a man’s voice and saw the faint candle glow. He ducked into the darkness beneath the nearest pew.

  “They are orphans,” Netta was telling someone. “I told you of the villain, Samis. They were in his capture, and Tahn Dorn saved their lives.”

  “Did you see this rescue?” a gentle voice was asking.

  “No. The children told me about it.”

  “How do you know they are not with him to deceive you, child?”

  Vari had heard enough. Netta clearly didn’t consider this man a threat, but the man obviously didn’t respect them. The youth jumped to his feet. “Let a man who calls me a liar at least look on my face first,” he said.

  “Vari!” Netta called to him. “It’s all right!”

  A tall man entered the sanctuary and lit the candles above the altar. Netta immediately followed, holding the hand of another man.

  “Vari!” she said again. “My father and cousin and Father Anolle are alive and well!”

  But Vari could not brush aside the accusing words so easily. Behind him Stuva was stirring. “Vari?” the boy called out sleepily.

  “Get the others up, Stuva,” Vari told him soberly.

  “I meant you no insult, young man,” Lord Trilett said as Netta pulled him to Vari’s side.

  Netta spoke quietly. “My father is a good man, Vari. And Father Anolle is a priest of God. We are safe with them. But you know the Dorn better than I do, and I trust you can believe that it will take more explaining for them to understand.”

  “We may not have a lot of time, Lady,” he said gravely. “Do any of them know where he is?”

  From the wall where he had lit more candles, the priest moved to join them. “The man who came to inform me of the coming execution was a captain of Baron Trent, and he said they would be bearing the prisoner through several towns before they came. He wished me to ask my parishioners to tell it publicly and to prepare the yard before the church not for this morning but the next.”

  “The next?” Netta asked in dismay. “Do you know at all which towns?” She hated the thought that Tahn could be another full day and night in the pain and humiliation she’d seen.

  “No, Lady,” the priest said with what seemed like real sadness. “I know not, except that what the baron has set in motion will take an act of God to stop.”

  Stuva, Doogan, and Tam were all awake now but kept their distance, watching the newcomers.

  Netta took the clergyman’s hands suddenly. “I have hungered for your prayers, sir,” she said. “Please, pray for him.”

  “Pray for my cousin, Father Anolle,” Jarel said from the doorway behind them. “She is kidnapped by this man called Dorn and now returns with his gang to loose him from law. Even she dresses like them.”

  “Jarel!” Netta exclaimed. “There has been no real law in our land since the death of our king. Each man with men under him is a law to himself. Tahn Dorn is not convicted by any law but the baron’s. And can you really believe him to be your friend?”

  “A valid consideration,” the priest said. “It has been the baron’s men along with the dark-garbed strangers seeking you all these days.”

  “He throws the blame from himself,” Netta added. “To court the people.”

  “We’re not a gang,” Doogan put in. “We just want to help the Dorn.”

  The priest turned his head to look at the child. “Come closer, young man,” he said. “All of you.”

  The boys didn’t move but looked to Vari, and he nodded his head.

  “Would you wish to join us as we pray for your friend?” the priest asked them.

  None of the boys answered, but they came closer. Father Anolle began to pray aloud for the protection of the innocent and for justice to be done.

  “It’ll be daylight soon,” Vari said when he finished. “I want to go and find the Dorn.” He turned to the priest. “I thank you for your prayer. God is with us, I know it. But I would thank you to tell me their most likely road into town.”

  “What do you expect to do?” Netta’s father asked.

  “I won’t know until I see them,” Vari answered. “But it doesn’t matter how many soldiers or people. And it doesn’t matter, sir, what you think of us. Nothing will stop me from trying to help him. I would die for him if I could.”

  “How old are you?” the Trilett lord asked him.

  “Thirteen. Old enough to know the foolishness of your words. What would we gain in deceiving your daughter?”

  Bennamin smiled at Vari’s stroke of stubbornness. “Forgive me, young man, for speaking without knowing you.”

  “Let me feed you,” the priest told them. “Then I will help you find how far they’ve gotten. But promise me that you will allow me to petition God before you act. Your friend shall be surrounded by soldiers. I would that we find a way that will not endanger such courageous and loyal friends.”

  Jarel was staring at him. “You will help them?”

  “They have come to me, and I will do what I can,” the priest said.

  “I would hear your story, Netta,” her father said. “If the man is as you say, we cannot let him bear the weight of such an accusation against him.”

  Jarel turned to him in disbelief. “Would you risk your life for him, Uncle?” he demanded. “We could be attacked as soon as we venture out of here!”

  “If we are not willing to come out for an innocent man,” Benn asked his nephew, “what is the use of hiding? We’ve always represented the truth. If we do nothing but survive, we’ve lost our purpose.”

  “She said he killed Karll!” Jarel continued to protest. “How could he be innocent?”

  Lord Trilett sighed. “I must know more, of course. I understand your concern. But now he is accused of destroying us. If he tried instead to spare even one of us, I am obligated to act.”

  “Oh, Father!” Netta cried. “Thank you!”

  “He has promised nothing,” Jarel reminded her. “Except to hear you out.”

  Netta’s heart pounded within her, but her mind was torn. Now that she had found her father and cousin alive, she was putting them in danger. But she saw little hope in any other way. Lord God, we are all in your hands!

  17

  The cool night faded into dawn and the dawn into midday. The movement of the heavy wagon, though painful, had lulled Tahn into a half sleep. As the miles passed, he was scarcely aware of anything, until they neared the next town. It was Jura, Onath’s closest neighbor.

  “Here they come!” someone yelled.

  More people, Tahn thought. More rocks, eggs, curses. He grasped the bars above him where his chained hands hung and pulled himself to sit up straight. A sharp pain shot from his back to his side, and he groaned.

  One of the soldiers driving the wagon glanced back at him. “You’re always wakin’ up to enjoy this,” he said with a smirk. “Right stup
id if you ask me.”

  “I’ll be glad when we get the mangy dog hung up,” another soldier said. “I’m gettin’ tired of lookin’ at him.”

  “Keep your eyes on the street then, Raulon,” the first soldier told him. “Make sure we don’t plow nobody under goin’ through the crowd.”

  He stood on the front of the wagon and shouted, “Make way for the killer of Triletts, bound to die at Onath!”

  The villagers were scurrying about. Women grabbed their children and hurried them away from the spectacle. But others stayed, pressing forward.

  Someone threw the first handful of rocks through the bars of the cage. “Hang him! Hang him!”

  As the shower of rocks continued, Tahn looked over the heads of all the people at the cloudless blue sky. “Thank you, God,” he stammered through labored breath, “that this cannot go on much longer.”

  A large rock hit the arrow shaft in his back, and he cried out with the new intensity of pain. I will be glad to die, he thought. Lord, receive me.

  On a hill past a row of shops he saw a young man seated on a horse, solemnly watching. Vari? His heart pounded. No! Go home! He wanted to cry out. Just go home!

  But as suddenly as he’d been there, the young man was gone, and Tahn could not be sure it was Vari at all. Keep them away, Lord, he prayed. Keep them away, please!

  “Make way, now! Make way!” someone shouted. Tahn turned his head and saw a woman coming toward him with a huge steaming pot.

  It was a punishment reserved for scoundrels. The boiling water, tossed by an angry crowd, and his memory of it was clear. The ravaging burn that soaked over clothes and lingered, it seemed, forever. “Oh, no,” he said, a tremble in his voice. “No.” Almost he could feel it already.

  The woman rushed forward with the pot held between two towels. But just as she prepared to fling the steaming water, a yapping dog darted between her heels, and she nearly lost her balance. The metal pot clanged against the back of the wagon, and most of its burning contents was lost to the ground.

  He could cry for the relief of it. “Oh, thank you! Thank you, Jesus!” Only his boots had been splashed. It seemed to him the greatest miracle he could ever see.

  The wagon rumbled on down its slow course through the streets, and the woman stared after it, shocked at his prayer.

  There would be no more steaming pots. But the shouts continued, and the rocks, from the mob around the wagon. The woman watched as some of her neighbors pulled away and let the assault go on without them. They heard what I heard, she was thinking. They heard the blessed name from his lips. Is he truly a killer? Or a Christian? It was inconceivable that a man could be both.

  She slowly stooped down and picked up her pot from the mud. She had seen condemned men before, and they had been horrid creatures who either cursed their captors or moaned pitifully for mercy though they themselves had given none. She would have expected this one to be the worst. Like the devil, they’d said, with such hatred for a noble Christian house.

  “Antia!” the coppersmith’s wife was calling her. “My husband has said we shall go to Onath to watch him die. Surely you would join us!”

  But Antia was still staring at her pot. “Not a drop touched him.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself,” the other woman said. “You know the Lord shall punish him. Come ahead, now, before they are too far ahead of us.”

  “’Twas the Lord he thanked.” She twisted the old dish-towels in her hands. Watch him die? It was no longer a happy thought. But she would go with them, she decided. Across the street, the weaver was returning to his shop with his teenage son. “Did you hear him honor the Holy Savior?” she called, knowing the weaver’s family to be far more religious than her own.

  “God be with him,” was his solemn reply.

  They heard, Antia thought. They know what my mother told me, that the pain of death brings out the heart of a man.

  “We would not have expected the baron to avenge them,” the coppersmith’s wife was saying. “There is a good about him we knew not.”

  “A good,” Antia echoed. “Or a bad.” She ignored her friend’s stare and started off after the wagon, her bare feet moving briskly over the dirt street and her pot now abandoned in the still-warm mud.

  Soldiers were sent ahead to Onath, and the crowd following him did not cease. It will be the sunset, Tahn thought, and not the sunrise I see when I die.

  He looked at the faces following behind the cage. Keep the children away, Lord! he prayed again. I want them all to grow and become wise, wiser than the people who so blindly trust the baron’s schemes.

  He swallowed hard and licked at his parched lips. Indeed the thirst could kill me before I see the rope, he thought. But there will be no relief of that until I am plunged in the river of God.

  The streets of the Triletts’ hometown were lined with more people than he had ever seen gathered in one place. The familiar shout had already started and seemed to be bouncing off every wall. “Hang him! Hang him!”

  He closed his eyes. Once before, I heard this, he remembered. Such a long time ago in Alastair. He was a big man, at least when I was so small. He told me to run, but I couldn’t. Not until they left him swinging and turned their wrath on me. Lord God, I still don’t know what I did wrong. Perhaps I was a killer even then.

  It suddenly seemed fitting that a hanging, his earliest memory, would also be his last. He grasped the cage bars above him and looked out at the people. “Dear Lady, they love you. They just don’t know how I have loved you too.”

  His own words gave him pause, and he thought that if he weren’t as good as dead he would scorn himself. What does Tahn Dorn know of love? The lady would be appalled at such a thought. She needed a gentleman. Someone like Karll.

  He caught a glimpse at a boy on a horse between two buildings. No. He turned his head for another look, and the youngster raised his hand and dipped his head in salute. Stuva. Giving him a victor’s honor.

  There was a good in seeing him, but his heart neared panic over it. He would have screamed at him to leave Onath, except for the attention it would cause. And if Stuva was here, he would not be alone.

  Tahn was suddenly pelted from all sides with sticks, eggs, and a volley of stones. But a nearby voice rose above the din. “May the Lord look down upon us this day,” a man was saying. “May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

  It was a large man on a large horse decorated with gold and scarlet. A cross hung at the animal’s neck, the chain of it woven into its mane. But the rider was no priest. He wore a common man’s clothes with a craftsman’s hammer at his belt.

  “It is Father Anolle’s horse,” some woman was saying. “He would have us remember our religion, even with a killer.”

  “Pray for him, if you wish,” a man scoffed. “God’s favor is to punish him just the same!”

  “Death to the murderer!” another man shouted. The fearsome call was echoed over the crowd until it gave way to other shouts.

  Where could all of these people have come from? Tahn wondered. Hundreds. Loud and angry. It must have been the entire town of Onath and a good share more besides. If things had been different, such crowds might have carried the Triletts to the crown. But now they did the baron’s bidding.

  The big man on the clergyman’s horse still rode alongside the wagon, repeating the same prayer again and again as they neared the grounds beside the church. “May the Lord look down upon us this day. May the Lord have mercy on his soul.”

  There seemed to be soldiers everywhere, and Tahn knew the clothes and stance of Samis’s mercenaries among them. They have all come, he thought. The baron’s men and the dark angels under Samis. And most of them young men, like me.

  It had never occurred to him before that he could pray for them, and it certainly seemed to be a strange thought now. But perhaps there could be good in it. If there are any that want out, Lord God, let them find a way. Let them see their masters today for the men they are.

  There were two poles
erected beside a platform across from the church. The noose end of a thick rope hung over a wheel suspended between them. The other end was wound around a turn crank guarded by the baron’s burly captain. Soldiers lined the platform and the space around it, and centered among them stood the baron himself in noble finery.

  The wagon stopped, the drums began their low rhythm, and the crowd began to still.

  “Bring him to face the people!” the baron commanded.

  One of the soldiers leaped up and loosed the chain that held Tahn’s wrists above him. But Tahn did not have the strength to hold himself upright without it and collapsed immediately to the cage floor. The soldiers opened the heavy door and dragged him out. One soldier stood ready to reshackle Tahn’s arms behind his back. But as he started, Tahn glanced up at the tall turret of the church, which stood so stately behind the people. And there he saw the lady.

  It was more than he could bear. She was too close. Stuva was too close. He wanted to scream at her. Don’t let them see you! There are too many! Just too many! There’s nothing you can do! He tried to turn, afraid he might see some of the others exposing themselves to this danger. But he realized too late that the soldier with the chain in his hand took the movement as resistance. The big man swung the shackle down hard with a blow across Tahn’s face.

  At just that moment, the church bells began to ring. The sound of it created a tense stirring among the people.

  The baron fumed. What the devil is this? I asked that priest to stand on this platform and bless the people and our function. I asked him to eulogize the Triletts for the people’s ears. I never asked for this!

  The people were beginning to turn toward the church, and it made the baron furious. The priest would pay for this. Church bells, usually for holy occasions or the funerals of the faithful, were hardly appropriate for an execution. Whatever that mad priest could be thinking, it was time to draw attention back to the purpose at hand. Dorn must die.

  Baron Trent rapped his long golden staff against one of the hardwood poles. “This day we are called of God to avenge the murder of our precious countrymen!” the baron shouted to the crowd. The bells stopped. Now he could be certain he would be heard. “This is the man known to have burned the Trilett home!” he continued. “He called his men to the slaughter of the family we have loved. It is right that he die for his crimes.”