by Victor Milán
The village volunteers, nineteen of them, of both sexes and various ages, stared with mingled fascination and horror at the spectacle of a talking horse. They seemed to find it as hard to get over Goldie as they did to get over Shield of Innocence.
“Why don’t you go graze down by the river?” Zaranda asked out of the corner of her mouth. “You’re unsettling the recruits.”
“I wouldn’t miss this for the world,” Goldie declared. “But go ahead; don’t mind me. I won’t say another word. You people there, with your pots on your heads and your kitchen cutlery clutched in your fists—pretend I’m just another horse.”
Zaranda covered her eyes momentarily with her hand. Not for the first time she wondered why she hadn’t taken Baron Hardisty up on his offer. It probably had to do with the fact that it helped to be able to look into a mirror when she wanted to brush out her hair.
The mercenaries Zaranda had brought out of Zazesspur stood or lounged about some straw bales that had been dragged up to serve as target practice. Farlorn stood by them, arms crossed and yarting slung over his back, amusing them with a constant low-voiced commentary, probably biting. Shield of Innocence and Stillhawk stood behind her, winged out left and right, with the ranger back a bit farther so that he could keep an eye on the great orc as well as the village volunteers. Chen hovered behind Zaranda, as close as she could and still have reasonable claim of being out of the way.
Collecting herself, Zaranda strode forward to place herself in front of her troops, doing a deft sidestep en route to avoid tripping over an inquisitive yellow hen. The livestock had miraculously appeared on the village streets. The children were still being kept inside at Zaranda’s request. She didn’t need them hooting and laughing at the efforts of their elder siblings.
“People of Tweyar,” she declared. “My name is Zaranda Star. I and my people are here to show you all, men and women alike, how to fight to defend yourselves, your loved ones, and your village. We know we cannot keep you away from your fields more than an hour or two a day, so we’ll get started—”
“Women can’t fight.”
Zaranda craned her head. “I beg your pardon?”
“I said, women can’t fight. It’s a waste trying to teach them to. Like teaching a dog to talk.”
“Well, so long as you specify dogs,” Goldie murmured.
The voice had come from the second rank. “Please step forward so that I can have a look at you.”
The speaker didn’t seem eager to leap forward, but the pair standing directly in front of him stepped with alacrity to either side, leaving him little choice. He was a young man of middle height in brown chemise and holed tan hose, whose width of chest and shoulders would have been considered huge on a tall man; likewise his belly. His legs by contrast seemed almost comically short and thin. His hair was brown and lank, and a beard fringed his jaw, as broad as Shield’s.
“I am Bord, the miller’s son,” he said sullenly. “And I still say women can’t fight. It takes strength to be a warrior. I’m strong.”
“No doubt you are, Bord Millerson. But I don’t agree that strength is the only thing in combat, or even the most important thing. Many other things matter as well: skill, speed, wind, heart. And most of all, intelligence.”
Stubbornly he shook his head. “None of that matters if I hit you with this.” He held up a fist the size and apparent consistency of an oak burl.
“Ah, but first you have to hit me. Listen well: if strong was better than smart, horses would ride us.”
“I find that remark in poor taste, Randi,” Goldie said.
“Pipe down.”
“Words,” the burly youth said, shaking his head like a bull troubled by a blowfly. “Just words.”
Zaranda unfastened Crackletongue’s scabbard from her belt, took the sheathed weapon by the hilt and held it up. “Let’s test it, shall we, you and I? Somebody get him a quarterstaff.”
This was done, and in a moment the two stood facing each other before the uneven ranks of villagers. Bord scowled. “You have a sword,” he said. “That isn’t fair.”
“My sword shall remain sheathed,” Zaranda said. “That makes it no more than a club—one with shorter reach than that stick of yours.”
“How do I know you won’t use magic on me?”
Zaranda sighed and resisted the urge to look around at her own party. She had said nothing of magic to the villagers.
“I swear that I will not.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
Zaranda did so. Reluctantly Bord braced his legs wide apart, and took up stance holding his staff two-handed before his belly.
Zaranda tapped his left cheek with her scabbarded sword.
Bord frowned and whipped the staff up and around in a belated counter. Zaranda tapped his right cheek.
“I’m quicker and more skillful,” she said matter-of-factly, “and that’s twice over that you’re dead. Had enough?”
The young man’s vast face turned red. He slid both hands to one end of the staff and aimed a whistling blow at Zaranda, who ducked back easily out of harm’s way. Bellowing anger, he aimed a fearsome overhand stroke at her; she effortlessly deflected it into the dirt with the flat of her blade. He cocked the staff back over his shoulder for another blow. She poked him in the belly. He sat down in the dust with a vast thump.
Zaranda placed the tip of her scabbard on the ground and rested both hands on Crackletongue’s pommel. Several of Bord’s comrades helped him to his feet. The last that was seen of the miller’s son that day was him tottering off for his hut with a supporter beneath each arm.
“It’s not just a life,” Zaranda said to her friends out of the corner of her mouth, “it’s an adventure.”
Puffing and scowling with effort, the strapping village lad managed to draw the short bow halfway to his ear. With a yell of triumph, he gave the string a final tug and released. Then he stared dumbly at the arrow, which was still in place, clasped against the bow-staff with one finger.
“You pulled the string out of the nock that time, Ernico,” Zaranda said gently. “Now, try it again, and take your time.”
Stillhawk, his darkly handsome face inscrutable—Zaranda envied him his long practice at showing no emotion—helped the boy nock another arrow and tried to steady his arm as he pulled on the string. Straining and trembling, Ernico got the bow half-drawn again and loosed at the hay bale twenty paces away. The arrow arced high and fell to earth two-thirds of the way to the target.
The mercenaries, now sitting on spare hay bales off to the side, set up a great hooting and sardonic applause at the effort: “Ho there, lad! Is your arm made of whey? That bow’s a toy; my five-year-old niece could draw it full!”
The boy blushed until his prominent ears looked ready to burst into flame. He snatched away a fresh arrow proffered by Stillhawk from the quiver on his back, nocked it, heaved with all his might to draw. Puffing, blowing, straining until his whole upper body shook and his face turned purple, Ernico succeeded in drawing it almost to his ear.
“That’s it!” yelled one of Balmeric’s men, but another jeered and said, “A silver piece he can’t get it to his ear.”
Ernico grimaced horribly, yanked the string the rest of the way back and, uttering a terrible yell, released.
His final effort had shut his eyes and pivoted him halfway round, however, so that he had come to bear squarely upon the onlooking crossbowmen. They scattered like quail an eyeblink before the arrow buried itself in the bale where one of them had been sitting a moment before.
“Crossbows,” Zaranda said to no one in particular, as the mercenaries picked themselves up off the ground and Ernico danced around with the bow held victoriously above his head. “We need to get them crossbows. Anyone can shoot a crossbow.”
“Platoon, forward!” roared Shield of Innocence.
Like a vast, untidy, many-legged beast, the group of recruits lurched to its feet and into a stumbling run across the furrows of a dormant ba
rley field. Shield scrutinized them with a critical eye, his shadow long, his lumpy form looking somehow majestic against the eye of the setting sun.
Zaranda watched from the side. The troops dashed forward for all they were worth, clutching sharpened sticks to their breasts in lieu of spears. A particularly gawky girl put a foot wrong and went sprawling. The others rushed over her like an avalanche.
Zaranda didn’t even wince. Despite the fact that unidentified riders had been glimpsed in the distance, apparently surveying the unprecedented goings-on in Tweyar, she had been sleeping soundly. She no longer heard those horrid insinuating whispers whenever she shut her eyes. Life was good. At least in comparison to what it had been in Zazesspur.
“Platoon—down!” Shield bellowed, voice great as a thunderclap. The recruits all went face first in the plowed earth as if they’d been snagged by trip spells.
He has a talent for this sort of thing, doesn’t he? Stillhawk signed—reluctantly, Zaranda thought.
“Indeed he does,” Zaranda said. Which was fortunate. For all his fighting talent and knowledge of warcraft, Stillhawk was hampered as an instructor by the fact he couldn’t speak. Besides, the type of fighting he was most accustomed to was a stealthy, solitary art, demanding the utmost skill and concentration, and not really suitable for the village recruits to study at this stage of their training. Farlorn was a master swordsman, and no mean hand with a bow himself. With his bard’s tongue, he could impart his knowledge more readily than any of them, but he tended to grow bored and wander off along the riverbank, picking wildflowers and composing new songs, or inveighing the village girls with the songs and bouquets those walks produced. Zaranda, with extensive military experience, could plan a campaign or a battle, inspire troops, extemporize and lead an action in the heat of combat. But she had little enough grasp of how to train untried, peaceful folk.
Shield, it seemed, knew just how to go about it. Demanding but not demeaning, stern but evenhanded, he was adept at getting the volunteers to give their best without driving them too hard. And once they got over their instinctive fear of a gigantic orc warrior, the recruits had taken to Shield as if he had been born among them.
Shield ran them back and forth across the field, jerking them up and down like marionettes. The exercise was meant to toughen them, to get them used to operating as a unit, and to accustom them to handling weapons. At length the orog ordered them to stand and looked to Zaranda. She clapped her hands and called out, “Well done, everybody! Let’s head for home.”
They trooped back toward the village. An ancient man in a kettle helmet—Zaranda would have sworn it was an actual kettle—cleared his throat for attention. He was by far the oldest of the volunteers, and hadn’t a tooth in his head.
“Young mistress,” he said, “pardon an old fool for asking a fool’s question but—why do you do this?”
“There are no fool’s questions, save those not asked,” Zaranda said, “but could you be a little more explicit?”
The old man frowned a little at “explicit,” but he said, “Why are you trying to make fighters of us farming folk? Why not simply protect us yourselves?”
“It’s like the old saying, Grandfather,” Zaranda said. “Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him his whole life.”
The old man frowned in puzzlement until the wrinkles in his face became deep canyons that threatened to swallow his features whole.
“But what,” he finally asked, “does all this have to do with fishing?”
Zaranda patted the old man on top of his helmet. “You know, Golban, I bet your wife has ready a pot of beer that’s been chilling in the river all day long.”
He brightened and stood straighter. “I bet you’re right,” he said, and set off at speed for home.
At the village outskirts, Zaranda came upon Shield of Innocence sitting in the dust. He had a village toddler on his knee and a pack of others crawling all over his mighty frame. He made a series of ferocious faces at the child he held, rolling his small eyes and opening his tusked mouth alarmingly. The children laughed and laughed in delight.
Zaranda shook her head. “Now I’ve seen everything,” she said to herself. The orog had a talent for more than teaching warcraft, it seemed.
The people of Tweyar had taken Zaranda’s party into their homes, while the mercenaries, with some help from the locals, built themselves temporary living quarters. It was the kind of manual labor hired fighters traditionally disdained, but Shield and Stillhawk pitched in. Farlorn lightened the labor by his songs and badinage, though he himself did no work, bards being even more averse to that than warriors. Besides, the soldiers were happy enough for something to do. It was no arduous labor; given that Tethyr’s long and temperate summer lay ahead, the quarters consisted of little more than a couple of plank sheds with roofs to spill rain when the two-week wet season arrived. For their part, the villagers were happy enough to help; the structures could be used for storage when the outsiders had moved on.
Zaranda, however, was quartered in a hut whose lone occupant, a widow, had died not long before the company’s arrival. She started to head there and almost ran into Chenowyn, standing in the path looking wan.
“Excuse me, child,” Zaranda said, feeling a flash of irritation and starting to push past. She had a great many things on her mind, not least of which was the fact that her rapidly dwindling resources, little offset by the meager amounts the villagers were able to pay, could keep her mercenary contingent satisfied for only so long. And, of course, her creditors would scarcely settle for a share of the grain and livestock that were the villagers’ main mode of payment. She had to expand her operations soon, yet to succeed she must make a solid start here in Tweyar.…
She felt a hand on her arm, turned to see Shield smiling at her in the twilight, tusked and benign. “A moment, Mistress Zaranda,” the orog said. “Perhaps you’re forgetting the education of someone?”
Zaranda frowned and opened her mouth to lash out. Then she shut her mouth and nodded. “Chenowyn,” she said, “I’m sorry. I’ve been neglecting you.”
The girl only looked at her, eyes huge and amber in the gloom. Zaranda smiled and took her shoulder.
“Come along, then. Let’s review what you’ve learned of magic so far in your life. And then I’ll start you on some simple spells.”
Eight days after Zaranda’s party came to Tweyar, a bandit gang made good on the prediction uttered by Osbard’s wife.
They struck in the early afternoon. Their intent was to catch the villagers logy with lunch, the traditional Tethyrian noontime siesta, and work beneath the warm sun, then to ride down as many as they could and burn the village, with such other merriment as presented itself. They wanted to provide a striking object lesson for any other village brash enough to try hiring outside protection or organizing a self-defense force.
A score of ragged riders, strung out in crescent formation, found a bare handful of farmers in the fields, and these not far out. The villagers began running as soon as the bandits began cutting like a scythe across the just-planted fields. The riders had no chance of reaching them before they scuttled within the shelter of stout walls of sun-cured mud brick.
“Don’t worry!” the chief bandit, a lean, sunburned desperado who wore his blond hair in a scalplock, called to his men. “They’ll be eager enough to come out when we pile brush against the walls of their hovels and commence to roast them!”
For good measure several short-bow-armed bandits sent arrows after the scurrying villagers. But the raiders were not true horse archers, skilled in the extraordinarily difficult feat of aiming and hitting a target from the back of a moving mount; that took even more training than learning to draw and accurately shoot a longbow, and any adventure-minded boy or girl of the Dales could tell you that took five years’ hard work. They were just horsemen who happened to have bows. They didn’t hit anything.
Hooting and brandishing their weapons, the marauders rode
through the streets of Tweyar. The field-workers had made good their escape; the bandits had the narrow dirt lanes to themselves. Unmolested, laughing and catcalling, they followed their leader to the well-trodden dirt of the little common before the village hetman’s house.
“Ho, Osbard,” the bandit chieftain called, “why so coy? Have you some reason to hide your face from old friends?”
Vander Stillhawk rose up from concealment behind the parapet of Osbard’s roof and shot the bandit leader through the throat.
As he fell to lie kicking in the khaki dust, Balmeric’s crossbowmen, likewise hidden on the village’s flat roofs, peppered the raiders with quarrels. Farlorn and Zaranda plied longbows from the houses next to Osbard’s.
The bandits wheeled their mounts and fled, leaving seven more of their number unhorsed behind. Two of these lay unmoving where they dropped. The others scrambled up and, clutching at the missiles sticking in them, tried to scramble after their fellows.
The village doors burst open and the village volunteers rushed forth, waving clubs and hoes and shovels and makeshift spears. Screeching with anger pent-up over years of helplessness, they fell upon the injured bandits, bludgeoning, hacking, stabbing.
Zaranda stood up, letting her longbow hang by her side. She was an indifferent archer at best, and had only taken up a bow to add weight to the initial ambush volley. Stillhawk and the half-elven bard kept up their fire, emptying three more saddles before the bandits escaped into dust and distance. The mercenary crossbowmen set their weapons aside to simply watch.
Out on the common, blood flowed.
Fire leapt in the cleared common before Osbard’s house. Hand in hand, villagers and several mercenaries danced around it to the merry tune of Farlorn’s yarting, considerably the worse for drink.
Balmeric reeled over to where Zaranda leaned against the front of the hetman’s house, a clay mug of the tasty local beer in hand. “Dogs,” he said without heat. “D’you know, Zaranda, they actually think they won today?”