by Hugh Cook
Blackwood and Hearst would usually be present at their conversations – but, instead of listening in, those two usually talked man-talk about the hunting of large, noisy animals, the trapping of the same, about Hearst's adventures in the Cold West (special emphasis on mammoth hunts) and Blackwood's foolhardy ventures (in his younger days) into the weirder reaches of the Penvash Peninsular (special emphasis on encounters with giant bears).
Hearst and Blackwood one day concluded an inconclusive debate – does the crocodile really exist, and, if so, is it possible to kill it bare handed? – to find Mystrel and Miphon still indefatigably talking medicine.
'… and, of course, garlic is good for wounds,' said Mystrel.
'Yes,' said Miphon, 'But what would you do for an ulcer that wouldn't heal? I don't think I'd use garlic for that.'
'No,' said Mystrel. 'I'd use bandages soaked in honey.'
'Honey!' said Hearst, taking an interest for once. That'd rot the wound.'
'You'd have to change the bandages four times a day,' said Mystrel. 'You wouldn't just leave it there, you know.'
Tt'd still go rotten.'
'Now when did you last see rotten honey?' said Mystrel. 'It keeps in the hive through winter and beyond because the bees make it with a guarding. That's why you can use it on ulcers.'
'You'll have to teach your child, when the child's old enough,' said Miphon, impressed by her competence.
'Boys have a lot to learn besides herbs,' said Blackwood. 'Fishing, hunting, weather-lore – it's the women who've got time to sit at home talking of herbs and honey.'
'Oh yes,' said Mystrel, warmly. 'And carding the wool, and spinning, cleaning the fireplace and making the rushlights, putting the stew on to cook – and that's only the start of the day. Then there's baking bread, drawing water, doing the washing – '
'Peace!' said Blackwood.
Hearst laughed.
Mystrel, her temper up, gave no mercy: ' – and there's plucking birds and scraping hides, weaving the reed-mats, gathering water cress, gathering the big-ear fungus, and soap, in season – up to the elbows in ashes and animal fat. There'll be time enough in a boy's life for my son to learn what I've got to teach him.'
'It might be a girl,' said Miphon.
'No,' said Hearst. 'Blackwood will have a son.'
'It's not him who's with child!' said Mystrel. 'But you're right. It will be a boy.'
'I'll teach him how to use a sword,' said Hearst, who, while they were talking, was slowly incising a rune into the metal of his battle-sword Hast.
'No son of mine will go to the wars,' said Mystrel.
'Then we'll make him a wizard,' said Miphon.
'No,' said Blackwood. 'My son will be a hunter, like his father. When he's old enough. I'll take him north, into the wilds.'
But, for the moment, he spared them further stories of those wilds, for his curiosity was getting the better of him: 'What's that you're cutting into your sword, Morgan?' 'A rune,' said Miphon.
'It's a death-pledge,' said Hearst. 'Out there is a traitor – an oath-breaker. Volaine Persaga Haveros, a Collosnon spy. He swore an oath of loyalty to the prince – and a second oath of personal loyalty to Elkor Alish. When I meet him again, I'll kill him. The rune dedicates this sword to revenge.'
An oath-breaker could not be forgiven; nothing is worse than to betray a pledge of loyalty.
'If I had even a good kitchen knife,' said Mystrel, 'I wouldn't damage it like that.'
Women, it has sometimes been remarked – by Kash m'pie T'longa amongst others – have never been very enthusiastic about the mystique of murder and revenge.
'This is only a scratch,' said Hearst. 'I could tell you a tale of a sword – '
'What sword?' said Blackwood.
'Oh, it's a children's tale I was minded of,' said Hearst. T won't insult you with it.'
As Miphon was a wizard, he did not think it safe to tell the sword-story he had almost started on. The sword in question was the blade Raunen Song, which, according to the Black Blood Legends of Rovac, bore the rune-written names of a thousand wizards.
A legendary' hero of Rovac had sworn to take that sword, Raunen Song the ironcleaver, the stonesplitter, and kill each and every one of those thousand wizards. But the hero had disappeared, centuries ago, without a trace. And this was not the time or the place to encourage the ancient hatreds between wizards and the Rovac.
'Why did you leave the Cold West?' asked Miphon, taking advantage of Hearst's silence to ask a question which had puzzled him for some time. 'It must've offered you more than Estar can.'
'Yes,' said Hearst. 'But it was too cold.'
He did not elaborate.
'What about Alish?' said Miphon. 'Why did he come here? Some say he commanded armies in the Cold West. Why would a man like that come to Estar? They say he coUld've led the conquest of the whole of the Cold West, if he'd stayed.'
Ah yes. If he'd stayed. But after Larbreth,.. after Larbreth, everything had changed. Especially Alish.
'Well, he's here now,' said Hearst. 'And we've made a common cause together. So…'
He let his words trail away; nobody insisted that he complete them.
'It must be about noon,' said Blackwood, rising. 'I have to go to help with some butcher work.'
'What's left to kill?' said Miphon.
'Horses,' said Blackwood.
Hearst watched the way Blackwood and Mystrel looked at each other before they parted. What was in that look? Not a childish form of infatuation, not the ardent lust of the young – but a kind of empathy and trust nurtured by long years of shared and undivided loyalty.
He envied them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Name: Valarkin (brother of Durnwold).
Birthplace: Little Hunger Farm (which is also his current residence).
Career: leaving home, he became an acolyte-priest of the temple of the Demon of Estar; survived the destruction of the temple thanks to his caution (which some would call cowardice – but then, some are dead, and he's not); returned to his father's farm to become a farm labourer.
Prospects: with no union, no continuing education programme, no pay, and little chance of promotion, his career structure currently seems non-existent.
Description: a young man who is not really as pretty as his mother thought he was at birth.
***
'To your left, Valarkin!' yelled the old man. 'To your left!'
Valarkin, exhausted, pretended he did not hear. Sheep stampeded toward the gap he had failed to fill, but one of the dogs got there first. The old man -Valarkin's father – cursed him roundly. A single sheep found the way into the pen; the rest mobbed in after it. Leelesh closed a leather-hinged gate on them.
The open-mouthed lambs panted, their breath steaming in the chill air. It was cold and grey, as it could be in summer in Estar, where the weather's caprice easily destroyed any brief prosperity a family might achieve. Spring snow could kill lambs. Then, if the summer was too hot and fine, sheep might fall victim to fly strike – flies laying eggs in their backs to hatch to maggots which caused stinking black sores which could kill the animal. Rain forestalled fly strike, but prevented shearing, as wool stored wet would rot, and be worthless in the marketplace.
'Come on, Valarkin,' said the old man.
Valarkin shivered. His limbs were stiffening as he cooled down after the rigours of herding. One ankle hurt where he had twisted it jumping across a stream. His legs, to the knees, were filthy with bog-mud.
'Come on, Valarkin! If you just stand there eating air, then air is all you'll get to eat.'
It was no joke. They would starve him, given an excuse. He wished he could have them, one and all. strung up in the temple for a sacrifice. Yes!
The girl Leelesh, the voiceless moron his father had made Durnwold marry to get her dowry of a dozen sheep, opened the gate for Valarkin then guarded it while he caught a sheep. He wrestled it out of the gateway, dragging it by the neck. As soon as they were in the open, the s
heep struggled convulsively. He lost his hold. It bolted – straight into the wooden fence of the pen. Grabbing it in a throttle, Valarkin pulled it backwards, clawing at the wool. Man and beast rolled over and over each other.
'It's not mating season yet!' yelled his cousin Buffle.
'You'd better tie its legs together,' jeered the old man. 'Like the other women, when they shear sheep.'
'Who's shearing who?' cried Buffle. as Valarkin struggled.
Valarkin, breathless, did not respond. Muddy, panting, he dragged the animal to where his shears lay waiting. One of his cousins had secured a sheep and started to shear while Valarkin had been fighting his animal to a standstill.
They expected him to shear, but did not choose to instruct him. They thought him a fool to have ever left the farm. As his father said, it might be a poor living. but they had never starved yet, and, isolated here in the south-east of Estar, they were safe from most of the world's violence – pirate raids, bandits and Comedo's excesses – even if it was a long way to take wool to market.
They thought him a fool; worse, they hated him for his pride, so it pleased them to make him their resident fool. He knew they had expected the sheep to race him for the horizons. They would have been happy if it had. But it was not Valarkin but cousin Afeld who was first to lose a sheep.
'Whoa!' shouted Afeld, as the delinquent twisted free and ran, trailing half its fleece across the ground.
'It's not a horse,' said Buffle.
But Afeld did not hear, for he was already sprinting downhill after the sheep. Dogs and children followed. The dogs barked, the children screamed, and the old man – red-eyed and furious – bellowed abuse at Afeld. The sheep was cornered where two ditches ran together, and was sheared on the spot.
A little shearing, and Valarkin began to feel the strain in his forearm. Each snip freed only a little wool. Not knowing that wool came more easily off the larger, fatter sheep, he had chosen a small, light animal, thinking it easier to manhandle. It was giving him a hard time. He fought the four kicking limbs, lost control, grabbed the brute by the tail, hauled on its ears, and finally knelt on its neck and subdued it.
'Come on, Valarkin,' said Buffle, with a grin which showed small brown and black teeth which he was destined to lose before the age of twenty. 'I've finished mine already.'
He is only a boy, thought Valarkin. Only a boy, thin as a rabbit, a cast in his eye, a low-grade sacrifice we would have clubbed to a cripple then battered in the dark till the god drew nearer… till the room became cold… till mist formed, and the face: maw of mist, eyes of shadow… time for the high priest to ask for a granting, then time to withdraw… sometimes, a scream… 'Come on Valarkin!'
He bent to his work, his back already aching.
With time, the ache got worse.
Between the shearers' raids the remaining sheep stood bleating in the pen. Their pounding hooves and guttering urine steadily mucked the ground to mud. When men entered the pen, the rearing hooves of panic-stricken sheep marked the fleeces of their sisters with mud. Any sheep not properly controlled whirled around when grabbed, threatening to send its attacker sprawling. A fall would be a disaster.
Once, as Valarkin regarded a sheep from a certain angle, the heavy head momentarily reminded him of equine grace and nobility – but the illusion was transitory. They were stupid, filthy animals. He hated them. He sheared without mercy, shaving the wool close to the pinkness of the skin, not caring if he clipped it to leave a little disc of white into which tiny bubbles of blood would flourish, swell then merge.
Once he knelt on a sheep's neck so hard for so long that, released, it lay still, convinced it was dead; he gave it a shove, and it got on its way. Sheep smells thronged his nostrils; their dung stained his knees. He was revolted by their smell, their stupidity, the way their bowels gave way in the middle of the shearing. He was repulsed by their blood-heat when he shoved a knee to belly-softness to assist with control.
Valarkin worked on, nearing collapse. He did not hear the sheep bleating, the clippers clicking, the women laughing and gossiping as they folded fleeces. His world was limited to his blurring field of vision, the straining muscles in his right arm, the ache of his back. He did not hear the arrival: he did not know who had come until he was called.
'Valarkin!'
He looked up slowly. Tall, the man was tall, tall on a 149 high horse. Valarkin had a confused impression of leather, sword, shield-boss, chain mail… the world swayed as blood ebbed from his head, and he lowered his head to save himself from passing out, lowered his head close to the world of wool and dung-heat. When he looked up again, he saw it was Durnwold smiling down on him.
'Greetings, Valarkin. How are you, my brother?" 'Still breathing."
He was too tired to say anything more.
Durnwold swung down from the saddle and hobbled the horse expertly – there were no trees to tie it to, and the rickety pen could scarcely withstand the assaults of the struggling sheep.
'You look tired," said Durnwold.
'I am,' said Valarkin.
The ewe he was working on, as if sensing he was distracted, struggled suddenly. Valarkin subdued it. He wanted to smash it with his fists. He wanted to rip its guts out. He wanted to vomit.
'I want to talk to you,' said Durnwold.
'What about?'
'The future.'
'The future?'
'The temple's gone for good, isn't it? So what now? Is this what you want for the rest of your life? You hated it when we were children. Has so much changed?'
Valarkin was about to reply, but at that moment his father – who had been away getting a drink from a nearby stream – returned to greet his son: 'Durnwold! What are you doing here?'
'What am I doing? I'm standing on my own two feet, as I said I would.'
'On your own two feet, is it? That's a clever trick. You're a strong, brave lad, Durnwold, to be standing on your own two feet. You still have your head as well, I see. How long do you hope to keep it? The rumour says there's enemy raiding Estar. Collosnon foreigners. Are you going to fight a whole empire with that shiny, bright sword of yours?'
'What do you know of the Collosnon empire?'
'Durnwold. lad. Do you think your da's a know-nothing? I've been to the Lorford markets, haven't I? More years than counting. I've heard the talk. They've got armies the ants themselves would envy, those ones.'
'They sent five thousand men against us,' said Durnwold.
'Now don't try shallying your da, Durnwold lad. You'd be dead if they'd done that.'
'We slaughtered them,' said Durnwold. 'We had wizards to help us.'
'Help from pox doctors?'
'I've met them. They're not like what you'd expect.'
'Pox doctors!' sneered his father, and spat.
It was now that the women and children, who had held back from Durnwold – not recognising him, or knowing him yet fearing him – tentatively began to approach. Soon they were crowding him, shouting and jabbering, clamouring for attention.
'Get back to work,' shouted the old man, waving his arms as if he was scaring away geese. 'Scram your backsides!'
He chased them away, then took Durnwold aside and spoke earnestly to him. Valarkin ground his knee a little harder into the flank of the sheep. He set to work again, cutting, thrusting, tearing, jabbing.
The last of the wool, complete with is complement of dirt, came free from the sheep. Valarkin slapped the animal to set it on its way. Durnwold broke away from his father and came over.
'What did he want?' asked Valarkin.
'Some money. He got a bit.' Durnwold broke off to yell at the children: 'Get away from that horse, you! He'll eat you!' Then, to Valarkin, quietly: 'There's plenty of money these days. Plenty of everything – we had the spoils of a whole army to divvy up between us.'
'Was it a hard battle?'
'It was easy. Wizards won it for us. Did you know there were wizards in Estar?'
T met them myself,' said Valarki
n, 'The day after the temple was burnt. But as for the Collosnon – we knew about raiding parties, but nothing about any army.'
'Oh, there was an army all right,' said Durnwold.
They talked together out of earshot of the others. Durnwold told of the enemy army's arrival, attack and destruction. Valarkin listened intently as Durnwold told of the mad-jewels and the red charms.
'And what now?' said Valarkin.
'Now we go east,' said Durnwold. 'To the land of Trest. Wizard hunting! We'll bring that thug Heenmor to bay then -'
'Chop him to bits with swords and hatchets!' said Valarkin, using a well-remembered phrase from their boyhood games.
Durnwold had always played at being the emperor across the seas, with Valarkin as his master of ceremonies.
Talking together, the brothers found time had not destroyed the empathy they had had before their careers had put leagues of distance and silence between them, as Durnwold strove to satisfy his ambitions through the sword, while Valarkin sought power and prestige in the temple.
'I thought I might find you here,' said Durnwold, 'but I wasn't sure.'
'Where else would I go?'
'It's a wide world.'
'I'm a priest,' said Valarkin. 'Ail Estar hates me, for that reason. After the temple, I visited Lorford – but I was lucky to escape alive. This was the only place left. Everything I hoped for is ashes.'
'So the temple really is gone for good.'
'Yes. All finished. Over. I'm the sole survivor. The temple is in ruins. The Deep Pools, choked with rubble.
The High Priests, dead. The powers of summoning, the farsight secrets – dead with them. The five elder books are ashes. It cost the temple generations to learn our god's desires – to learn how to praise, to sacrifice, to plead. All that knowledge is gone. It can't be replaced except by revelation – which might come to one man once in a century. We can't control the god any more. It's over.'