The boy-sergeant caught up with them in the hallway, and reported that there was no Davi in the death records. When Clement asked how accurate the records were, Purnal shrugged. “If we never knew her name, we couldn’t record it, could we?”
“I’ve only seen fifteen of the Watfield children. Where are the others?”
“Sick or dead. You know where the sick ones are.”
“You’d better hope she’s still alive, commander, or I’ll have you digging up the graves next.”
“We burn ‘em,” he said. “Sorry.”
Clement returned to the sick room. There, it smelled just as bad as before, but at least it was quieter. A bitter chill was setting in, and she stopped first to add fuel to the fire, for what good it did. The signal of a candle flame led her to a one-armed soldier who bathed with cold water a child delirious with fever. He told her he had not noticed a child like Davi, but then who had time to pay attention?
She found a candle of her own, and started the dreary business of working her way down the rows of pallets, turning back blankets and pulling up nightshirts. If she had to leave this place empty-handed, she would at least be absolutely certain that the child was indeed lost.
After the Battle of Lilterwess, Clement had assisted in the gruesome job of identifying the dead. The Sainnite corpses had been lined up on the hillside, while beyond them the soldiers methodically took the ancient building apart, stone by stone. It was the height of summer, and the flies swarmed, and the rooks noisily invited their friends and neighbors to the feast. Sometimes, Clement identified a soldier by clothing or gear, because the face was gone. Sometimes she stripped a corpse, seeking clues in flesh, in scars, in gender. Friends and lovers were thus revealed.
There was great celebration, that day, and the Sainnites called themselves conquerors. Twenty years later, Clement knelt in a cold, stinking room and searched the bodies of parentless children, and knew herself a fool in an army of fools.
The night was old when she found a very small girl with a mole on her knee. The illness had gone into the girl’s lungs, the sick-nurses said, and she would not survive to morning. “She will,” Clement said, gathering up the child, blanket and all. “I won’t have my labors be for nothing.”
The one-armed veterans, who surely thought that the labor of their lives had long since come to nothing, rolled their eyes at each other, and refrained from comment.
Chapter 21
“Clement is no longer in Watfield,” said Gilly to Alrin, as she politely quizzed him at the door about why he had refused to be shown to the parlor. “The general needs me at his side, and so regrettably I have no time for tea. The woman is here? In the kitchen?”
He stumped down the hall, refusing to even let her take his snow-dusted coat. Alrin bobbed ineffectually in his wake, saying, “I’m truly sorry for putting you through such trouble. But her answer to your note asking her to tell stories in the garrison was so . . . complicated! I urged her to give you a plain reply, but—well, she’s got some peculiar ways.”
She added, surprisingly, “Clement is traveling? The snow can be heavy, even so early in winter.”
“She is a soldier,” growled Gilly.
He opened the kitchen door, to find the storyteller standing in the exact center of the room, utterly still. Her clothing shimmered in the flickering light: silk, a deep red vest over a rich purple blouse, and trousers black and glossy as her hair.
“Don’t you look fine!” Alrin sounded more nervous than complimentary. “Those deep colors, they suit you!”
The storyteller turned her head as though to seek the object of Alrin’s admiration somewhere behind her, and Gilly noticed for the first time that, though her hair was chin-length, a single slim braid hung down the center of her back, black as a burn, with a coal-red tassel dangling from its tip. It was no more strange than the rest of her: strange but not frivolous. Alrin certainly had known how to dress her.
Gilly said to her, “It’s foolish and dangerous to dicker with Sainnites over price. All we’re paying for is a few tales.”
The woman turned, and slowly said, “What does it mean, to be the General’s Lucky Man?”
Alrin made an anxious sound. “Oh, sir, you see! She’s not right—she’ll say something to offend.”
Gilly said to the border woman, “I’ll explain that to you, if you tell me why no one knows your name. A trade, tale for tale.” She nodded her assent. “Well, then. The Sainnites say there’s a certain allotment of suffering that the gods set aside for each one of us. Some few are given all their life’s curses at once, when they are still in the womb. They are born monsters, but they are lucky, for all their allotted ill fortune has been used up already. Powerful people have monsters beside them, as barriers against the ill will of the gods. So, I am Cadmar’s Lucky Man.”
As though she did not quite trust her finery, the storyteller sat cautiously on a kitchen stool. She said, “A curse has taken away my name, and made me a gatherer of stories. The witches of my people took my weapons, and cut my hair, and burned all my belongings, and destroyed my name, and with my name they destroyed my memories. I know this is what happened, but I don’t remember it. Now, I am just a storyteller, and have been for many years.”
“Without memory the stories are all you have?”
She said quietly, “You want to be my friend, Lucky Man, because I am as monstrous as you are. Beware, or I will make you into a story.”
Gilly said, “Make it a good one.”
She gazed at him, unsmiling, her eyes hidden, as always, in shadow. “I am a collector of tales,” she said. “And I will trade story for story.”
“No pay?” He glanced at Alrin. “Is this what you couldn’t tell me?”
Alrin sighed mightily. “Surely you see that I couldn’t let her work at the garrison for no pay—she would be no use to me, but I’d still be paying her expenses. Why would I do that for a complete stranger?”
“We’ll pay for her room and board. She can find a place in a boarding house, if you don’t want her here.”
“Oh, I’m willing for her to stay.”
“It’s settled, then.”
Alrin said worriedly, “But she says whatever she likes! She has neither manners nor fear!”
“That’s not your problem, is it?” He turned to the storyteller. “I will arrange for the soldiers to tell you their stories, as many stories as you tell them. Is it agreed?”
“It is,” she said indifferently.
“An escort will bring you to the garrison this evening. You can eat with us if you like, but I don’t recommend it.”
“I will eat with you.”
“Well, it is arranged.” Gilly lifted his cane, and thunked it to the floor again. “What was this punishment for?” he asked.
“Perhaps I murdered my wife.”
He looked at her, and she looked back at him, neither sad nor ashamed, nor even interested. “I’ll see you tonight,” he said, and left.
By evening, the snow covered the world like a flour paste, ankle deep and ungodly slippery. Though men of unsteady gait should stay safely by the hearth on such nights, Gilly borrowed Cadmar’s aide, and leaned on him, and on his cane, and on whatever railings were convenient, and so managed to journey to the refectory without falling too disastrously. But it was the journey back to his rooms again that Gilly dreaded, for by then the snow would have hardened to slick ice. Too soon, the winter would lock him indoors, and the pain brought on by cold would cripple him truly, and in the darkness of winter he would wonder what his life was good for. It happened every year.
In the refectory, which, fortunately, had been rebuilt before the snow began to fall, they were just hauling in the cauldrons on wheeled tables, with one person pulling and one person pushing and a third person holding down the lid to keep the contents from spilling out. The soldiers stood drearily, with their tin plates in their hands, and held them out to the cooks in the hopeless manner of people who can no longer be disappoint
ed. They were given as much stew as they wanted, and fist-sized lumps of bread that were sure to be as hard as stones. Gilly had lived since boyhood on such fare, and when the aide brought him a serving, he broke his bread into the stew and ate what he had been given. The table at which he sat was slowly, discreetly, emptying as its occupants spotted friends and casually went to sit with them. The big room became intolerably noisy; conversations between neighbors were conducted in shouts.
But the incredible racket faltered abruptly. Gilly raised his gaze from the splintered tabletop. The storyteller had arrived. The soldier who had escorted her was hanging the woman’s fine wool cloak from a peg, and then, proprietarily, he showed her to Gilly’s table. The soldiers turned and stared at her so frankly Gilly feared she’d take offense. But she did not seem to notice.
“The soldiers avoid you,” she commented as she sat beside Gilly on the bench.
“Like fish fleeing into a net.”
“And does that fearfulness make you rich? Or get you a good husband?”
“It merely makes me feared.”
She said somberly, “Your life is all wrong, then.”
The soldiers had let the storyteller’s escort cut into the front of the line. To pay for his privilege, though, he apparently gave those nearby an explanation of her presence, and Gilly watched the news spread like a wave across the room, and out the door. Gilly’s table quickly began to fill again; the soldiers, trying quite hard to behave with civility, introduced themselves and their friends to the storyteller, and asked eager questions that the storyteller, with no apparent effort, replied to without answering. They resorted to volunteering information: that the stew she was now eating was better than they had eaten for some time, but still was pretty bad; that the big, meaty beans in it were fallow beans, so-called because they were grown in fallow fields; that the kitchen had been re-built at last, which explained the improvement in the food. She looked up from her nearly empty bowl and said, “You know the difference, don’t you, between information and stories?” She glanced at Gilly, and it seemed she was curious and not intending to be mocking.
“You will be paid,” he gruffly said. “These soldiers here are just intrigued by you, and making idle conversation as best they can. We never see anything new here.”
She stood up, then, and stepped up onto the bench, and from there to the tabletop. She did not need to call for quiet; the only sound came from the soldiers, summoned by fleet-footed rumor, who struggled to get in the crowded doorway. She said in a loud, clear voice, “I am a gatherer, a carrier, a teller of tales. I have come to trade with you, tale for tale. Once, when I was walking through the southland, along the edge of a lake, I found an old man, who sat on a stone by the water and wept with sorrow. ‘Old man,’ I said . . . ”
Sitting directly below her, Gilly could clearly see the thin scars that criss-crossed her hands. She shaped the old man in the air, with words and gestures telling how he was haunted by the ghosts of three women, each of whom blamed him for her untimely death. She stood balanced, poised, with her weight on her toes like a dancer. The tassel at the end of her braid bounced lightly, softly, communicating the rise and fall of the story, and then signaling its ending.
The soldiers pounded the tabletops and roared appreciation. And then her hands smoothed the air like a magician soothing a troubled ocean, and the voices fell silent. “I am sure you have heard of Haprin,” she said. “But do you know that Haprin has a spring that bubbles out of the ground so hot, you can boil eggs in it? And yet no one goes near that spring, not even in dead of winter, because it is a place of bad luck. Long ago, when Shaftal was a young and wild land . . .”
The refectory became so jammed with soldiers that no one could reach the food line any more, and the listeners passed plates of hot stew hand to hand, across the room, and even out the door. In the rapt silence that followed her sixth story—a love story, this time, with a satisfying ending—the night bell could be heard to ring. She glanced down at Gilly, and Gilly got stiffly to his feet. “Will you return tomorrow, storyteller?”
“You owe me six stories,” she said, speaking to the crowded room.
One of the captains, whom Gilly had spoken with that afternoon, promptly said, “My company will pay.” He named a place and time for her to meet with them the next day. She bowed, and descended, and though Gilly had to hold his ears against the din of acclaim, she did not seem to hear it.
“I’ll accompany you to the gate!” he shouted.
Once outside, he regretted his offer, for the footing was worse than he had expected. She held out her arm, though, saying, “It’s hobnail season already.”
“Hobnail boots are too heavy for me,” said Gilly. When he leaned on her, she was steady as stone, despite her light build. And that strength spoke to him again of the past she claimed she could not remember. He said, “Your body betrays that you are a knife fighter.”
“I have a warrior’s scars,” she confirmed. “Sometimes, I feel how muscle and bone remembers a long training. But I have been weaponless a long time, I think.” She added, after a moment, “Do you suspect me, Lucky Man? Do you think I am trying to disguise myself? I can’t disguise a self I do not know.”
“Only when I noticed your scarred hands did it occur to me to doubt your tale, peculiar though it is.”
She said, with just a trace of humor, “Oh, a storyteller can be most dangerous. Your caution is very sensible. Since I don’t care who hears my tales, or who tells them in return, simply send me away!”
“I am sure you don’t care. I think you are truly indifferent about everything.”
“The people who remember are the ones who live passionately. They believe they have something to protect, or a future to anticipate. I am not that kind. What kind are you, Lucky Man?”
He could not answer her, and the rest of the journey to the gate, they walked in silence. The clouds were breaking up, and a brisk wind began to blow. As the storyteller went out the gate, the wind blew back her cloak, and in the faint light of the gate lamps, her red silk shimmered like flame.
Chapter 22
“Lieutenant-general? May I have a word with you?”
Clement had found one comfortable chair in the garrison, and had it put by the fireplace in her own spartan quarters. There she sat, with a washed uniform hanging nearby to dry in the heat of the brisk fire. She had slept in that chair no few nights, but now it was Davi who slept, curled in Clement’s lap, with her thumb in her mouth.
“Come in,” she said to the sergeant at the door. “But be quiet.”
“It looks like snow again,” he said in a low voice. “Unbelievable weather.”
“It was this bad when we first came here, thirty-five years ago. It’s been this bad every year since then.”
“Well.” The sergeant was a relatively young man, probably Shaftali-born. The habit of complaining about the weather was endemic, though, even among those who had never known anything else.
“Come closer to the fire,” she suggested. “What’s on your mind?”
“Ten days we’ve been here. The sick kids are getting better, and you’ve found that one you wanted. The company’s wondering when we’ll head back to Watfield.”
“Do they want to make that journey?”
“If they have to do it,” he said honestly, “They’d rather now than later.”
“Well, I’m thinking they’ll be trapped here all winter. I know it’s not what they expected.”
The sergeant looked more relieved than apprehensive. “I don’t know that they’d mind. Conditions in Watfield are pretty bad.”
“It’s dirty work here, too.”
He shrugged. “We’ve got fresh food, warm beds at night—”
“Luxury!”
He gave a grin. They’d gotten comfortable with each other over the days, working elbow-deep together at one or another disgusting task had been a great leveler.
“I won’t tell the folks in Watfield how comfortable you are,�
�� she promised. “So they won’t harass you about it, come spring.”
His jaw went slack with surprise. “But you—”
“Ssh!”
He lowered his voice. “How will you get there? And surely not alone!”
“Not quite. I’ll have Davi with me.”
“You can’t make the journey unattended.” His voice was strained by the depth of feeling he struggled to convey without volume.
“You may be right, but I’ve got to try.”
“But how?”
“There’s only one way, sergeant. By pretending to be Shaftali.”
He shut his jaw with a snap. “Huh!” he finally said. “But you look pretty military.”
“If I have to, I’ll pretend to be a Paladin.”
“You think you can?”
“You think it would occur to anyone that the Sainnite lieutenant-general would travel alone, on foot, in winter, with a sick child? I’d think they’d find it more believable that I’m one of them, even if I do seem strante. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I’ve got to try.”
“If the Paladins should capture you . . .”
“I’ll be dead.” She gave a shrug, and Davi mumbled a complaint. She stroked a hand down the child’s head to soothe her, and that seemed to work. “Cadmar would be angry about it, I suppose. But I can be replaced. And no one will blame you, considering how far I outrank you.”
“But still,” he said.
“You’ve told me your objection. You’ve done your duty. Anything else you want to talk about?”
He left, apparently more wretched than when he arrived.
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