She was therefore already in a foul mood when a pounding at her door broke out not long after dawn. She was trying to get a fire started in the hearth, thinking to allow herself just enough time before leaving to warm herself, get herself outside some hot food. The Emperor was lying on his back on one of the tables, interlacing fingers and toes, rolling back and forth on his spine.
Muttering darkly, Ordeller made her way to the door and lifted the bar. The man who pushed his way in – rudely, not waiting for invitation or even pleasantry – was not hard to identify. A Clade warrior. A young one, who looked almost as tired and fraught as Ordeller felt.
“You’re the keeper of this house?” he demanded roughly.
“Well, it’s a delight to meet you too,” she muttered. “Looks like you’ll be coming inside, then.”
She pushed the door closed. Quietly settled the bar back into place.
“You’re…” He hesitated, tripped by a faltering memory. “Ordeller, is it?”
“That’s the name my mother gave me. If it’s changed since, nobody’s mentioned it to me. Do you want something to drink or eat?”
“No, no.” He frowned at the Emperor, who was far too interested in the behaviour of his own limbs to pay any heed to Ordeller’s uninvited guest.
“Pretty, isn’t he?” Ordeller said.
The warrior gathered himself, and fixed her with a stern glare that looked very much like something his face was not used to.
“The Free have been outlawed. You’re said to have some connection with them.”
“What manure is this?” laughed Ordeller. Not that she expected it to do any good. The Clade were not famed for the ease with which they could be dissuaded or distracted from their given task. They liked their orders, these blue-tunicked boys.
“I was just told to take you to the nearest wayhouse. They’ll know what to do with you there.”
“What to do with me? Is that how you talk to your mother? Would she not slap you round the head for your rude manner?”
He shrugged. A nice little reddening of embarrassment and discomfort to his cheeks, Ordeller thought.
“And how many brave men have come with you to carry this fat old lady off to some cell?”
“There’s just me. Too much happening for any more. And I’m not taking you to a cell. Just to the wayhouse.”
“Do I look like one of the Free to you, boy?”
“Well, no. But I don’t really know what they would look like.”
“Not like me, I can tell you that much,” Ordeller grunted. “Not with ribbons tied in their hair. You think the Free have ribbons tied in their hair?”
“Don’t know,” the warrior said, a touch grumpy now. Patience running thin, Ordeller judged. Well and good. Nothing to be gained by playing any more games, in any case.
She slumped down into the chair behind her, going heavily and limply. She pressed the back of her hand to her brow and rolled her eyes a touch.
“Oh, it’s too much,” she gasped, fanning her face with her free hand. “I can’t be standing this.” She trembled her lip and squeezed a little tear from her eye.
“Just come away with me, will you?” the Clade man muttered in exasperation. “I don’t want to have to drag you.”
“No, I’m sure you don’t,” Ordeller said faintly. She held out her hand. “Help me to my feet, do. I’m feeling so faint. It’s frightening, all this.”
The warrior clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth in irritation, but took a step closer and grasped her hand.
“Thank you,” she murmured.
And she returned that grasp, as hard and firm as she could manage, and smiled at him and said, loud and clear: “Hurt him.”
The Emperor leaped, screaming, teeth bared, at the warrior’s back. Hit him so hard that his breath rushed out and over Ordeller. He staggered and she kicked at his ankles to take him down, even as the ape beat him about the head and tore at the side of his face with those vicious teeth.
The Emperor was a good deal stronger than his looks and scrawny arms would suggest, and he had a terrible temper. He clawed and flailed at the warrior’s shoulders and neck. The man did try to roll away and rise to his feet, but the strength of the relentless blows raining down upon him would have been too much for all but a few. Ordeller could hear the hollow thud every time the ape’s fist hammered on ribcage, and she could imagine what that might feel like.
The man’s wild struggles upset chairs and sent a table sideways. He was bleeding from bites and scratches. Starting to shout. Best to put a stop to that, Ordeller thought. It was early, but not so early that there might not be someone to hear.
She took up one of those fallen chairs and got as close to the combatants as their violent contest would allow.
“Off him,” she snapped at the Emperor, and the ape sprang away.
The Clade man groaned and started to push himself up. Ordeller hit him as hard as she could across the back of his head with the chair, which broke apart in her hands. A shame, that. She had had those same chairs since the day she first opened the doors of the lodging house. The man slumped to the floor, blood trickling from an ugly wound in his scalp.
Ordeller dropped the stumps of the chair and went to the serving counter, leaning over it and fumbling around blindly on the shelf beneath. She quickly found what she wanted. A long knife, not the sharpest, but sharp enough.
“Look away, old fellow,” she muttered to the Emperor as she knelt beside the unconscious man. Then, more tartly, when he did no such thing: “Really, look away now. No need for you to see this.”
The ape did as he was told, sitting on the floor, facing the wall. Folding his arms. Ordeller pushed the knife right through the warrior’s neck.
When the blood was washed from the floor, the corpse secreted away in the cellar – a dreadful business, that, because the man proved heavier than he had looked – and his horse hidden temporarily in the stables, Ordeller took a few minutes to look around the place. She did not know if she would ever be back, and though she had never been one to set much store by such things, she found she would miss it mightily if not.
The Emperor was morose. Ashamed, she understood. He regarded her with wide, sorrowful eyes.
“Don’t worry,” she said gently, stroking the coarse hair on his shoulder. “It’s wasn’t your idea. All mine. And it needed doing, I’m afraid.”
She shook herself, straightened her back.
“Poor old Yulan was right. Always is, I gather. So now the Free’s done. They run and hide, or they get netted by the fishermen of the School. Sorry way for a thing like that to come to an end, scattering into the shadows. Ah, well. We’ll just have to hope Yulan can fight his way out of whatever corner he’s got himself stuck in, won’t we? Wish him luck. You and me, we put it behind us and close the door. Find somewhere a little warmer to lay our heads for a while. At least we’ve got ourselves a horse now. What do you say?”
The ape folded his lower lip over his upper and snorted through his nose. Which might or might not have signified assent. Ordeller had no idea, but he did at least look a little less miserable.
She could not, after all, talk with animals. But she had always been good at training them. Always.
32
The First Day At Towers’ Shadow
Just before the Old Threetower Road lurched up the escarpment above which the mighty towers themselves stood, there was one last village. It was a modest settlement. Thirty or more cottages, a hall, a couple of barns. Smoke curling up from a few hearths, children running noisily between the houses. Men and women, and more children, bent double, working in the small fields behind the houses. In one of those fields, a man waving a long stick at an oblivious bullock that had somehow got in there and set to its own kind of work on his crop.
Towers’ Shadow had changed since last Yulan saw it. It was encircled by a shallow ditch now. The worst of the ruins were gone, only their least remnants left like the stubs of broken teeth smashed
out of a rotten jaw. In some places that he remembered flames, there was bare, black earth as if ashes and burned wood had been trodden into the dirt over years.
The Free looked down upon the place from a ridge to the south. The road ran close by the village, then swept on and up, beginning a laboured ascent of the escarpment.
The fields around the village were thriving. There were springs along the base of the escarpment, giving rise to tiny streams that found their way to one another and merged, making themselves into a tiny river that ran off and away beside the road. Yulan could see the glint of water in the irrigation channels cut from some of those streams. The fields between them were well manured. There were groves of young fruit trees.
He stared and stared at it all, as if by doing so he might convince himself that he was truly here, and that the place still lived. Thrived, even. What his eyes most readily found and settled upon, though, were the surviving scars of those days when the Dog-Lord came.
“Kingshouse,” one of the lancers said.
Up on a hillock to the north-west of the village, perhaps a half-mile or more distant, was the little half-derelict fortification beside which the Free had briefly camped. A ring wall, and inside it a tiny keep. Just three storeys tall, each one a fraction smaller than the one below, to make room for a battlemented shooting platform on each level. It had once been said that wherever you went, you were never more than half a day’s walk from a Kingshouse, and the venal, arrogant Armsmen who garrisoned them. No longer true anywhere, as it had not been here for years.
Yulan wrestled his eyes from the scene below to look up. The Three Towers themselves stood above him, way up there on top of the escarpment. Soaring. Crowned with stone horns. No windows, no stairs, no parapets. Nothing but vast block after vast block of smooth stone, one upon another, climbing up beyond reason. Black and brown vultures described arcs and circles around them and above them, pushed aloft by some hot wind rising from the flanks of the towers.
“What do you think?” Rudran was muttering.
Yulan shook his head. He could not speak. Not yet. He had thought himself prepared for this moment. Perhaps he would have been, had Wren and Hurdan and Fethin Fiveson not died to bring him here. Now he had to earn the right to mourn them as they deserved. He felt a hand on his forearm, looked down at it and then up into Rudran’s eyes. He saw there more that he recognised than he would have expected. It was true: this place held meaning for many more than just him.
“What do you think?” Rudran repeated.
“I think Hamdan and I will go down there,” Yulan said quietly.
Rudran nodded. He understood.
They drew a crowd, of course. As the two of them rode through the surrounding fields, along the dirt track, through the narrow gap in the ditch that served as the village’s entrance, wide-eyed children rushed forward while their parents held back and watched with more suspicion. Those children, though. They laughed. They reached to touch the horses or lay a hand on Yulan’s boot. Every one of them seemed to be smiling. He could not bring himself to meet their eyes. He heard dogs snarling inside his skull. There was no release for him here. Not yet.
A man leaning on a hoe blocked their way eventually. Not at all aggressively. He just stood there, in the centre of the one track that ran the length of the village, and nodded to them when they drew to a halt before him, that chuckling crowd of children still at their backs.
“Hello,” he said placidly.
Yulan dismounted. Hamdan did the same.
“Is there someone who speaks for you all?” Yulan asked. “Headman? Would that be you?”
The man with the hoe moistened his lips and shook his head slowly.
Yulan waited for more to come, but it did not. One or two of the children, braver than the rest, were tugging at his jacket. Only trying to raise a smile from him, he knew. He tried to give it to them, even as their parents, standing at a safer distance, called them away with hisses or tongue clicks.
“Who can I speak to?” Yulan asked.
“Metta,” the man suggested.
“And where’s Metta?”
The villager looked over his shoulder, dipped his hoe to point towards a woman standing in the doorway of a cottage close by. She was of almost the same age as… but Yulan would not allow himself to think of that. She had her hair tied up in a headscarf, and around her neck hung that same great rusted key. A pair of young girls were peeking around the edges of her skirts, staring at these unexpected visitors to their village. They were pretty lasses, with ashy dirt smudged across their chins and cheeks. They had been cleaning out the hearth, Yulan guessed.
“Metta,” breathed Yulan. He could barely get the words out. His throat was tight.
“Let’s talk to Metta, then,” Hamdan said. He sounded little better.
The two of them led their horses slowly over. They stood side by side before Metta. Until suddenly Yulan found himself kneeling. He had not known what he would do at this moment. How he could get beyond it, and turn himself once more into the man he needed to be to save this place from what was coming. Now, unbidden, the certainty came. He knelt, and he bowed his head. A moment later, Hamdan was doing the same thing beside him.
“You’re Massatan,” Metta said, as another headwoman had said so long ago.
“Yes,” breathed Yulan, staring at the ground. “I came here before, Mistress, and terrible things happened when I did.”
She said nothing. Yulan did not lift his head. He waited. He would wait thus in silence for as long as it took.
“You had your hair then,” Metta said finally.
“I did. I cut it when I rode away from here.”
Metta sniffed. Yulan heard her flicking her skirts, the young girls scampering back into the shadows within the cottage.
“Well,” she said, “you cut your hair. In penitence?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
“Lift your head. I can’t see your eyes.”
Yulan and Hamdan did so. They stayed kneeling, though. The villagers had retrieved their children and shepherded them off to some other distraction. A handful of men and women remained, a few paces away. Watchful and attentive. It did not seem to concern Metta. She was toying with that heavy key about her neck. The symbol of her standing.
“What do you want from us?” she asked. “Forgiveness?”
Yulan could see no trace of anger, or hatred, in her face.
“No,” he said. “I want to fight for you.”
“And why do we need you to fight for us?”
“Because the man who burned this place, and killed your women and your children and your old men, is coming back. He will do far worse this time, if he can. He will leave nothing behind him. No stone upon stone, no timber in its place. No one alive. I would fight him to prevent that.” And then, because he could not keep it from her: “But I cannot allow him to climb the escarpment, either. Because if he does, he will betray all these lands to the Empire. So whatever happens, even if he tries to flee, I must bring him to battle.”
“The man who burned this place before,” Metta said, speaking each word clearly and precisely. “Callotec. That is the man you mean?”
“Yes, Mistress.”
She stared at him for long moments. She scratched the side of her nose with a slightly grubby fingernail. Then she glanced beyond Yulan and Hamdan, to the villagers gathered behind them. She beckoned them, and led them all – perhaps fifteen, men and women – into her tiny house. The door closed behind the last of them with a firm tap.
“We are to be discussed,” Hamdan observed.
He looked around; espied a water trough over by one of the barns, where a couple of thin-looking cattle were drinking.
“Let’s see to the horses. We’ve asked more of them than was right, the last day or two.”
They led the two exhausted animals over to the trough, and gently eased them in beside the cattle to slake their thirst. The horses drank long and deep, until Yulan said, “Enough,” and the
y dragged them away.
Hamdan stood in the centre of the village, raised his arms straight up and crossed them once above his head. The others were still there, up on the ridge above the village, in open sight. At Hamdan’s signal, two of them broke away, following the line of the road but keeping to the high, rough ground. Scouting for Callotec.
Yulan and Hamdan tethered their horses and sat with their backs against the wall of a barn. Yulan felt almost nothing now. He existed in the space between two breaths, waiting for the world to happen. He had done what he could. Others would decide his future now. He found that an easy thought to live with.
The sun was warm. Both he and Hamdan angled their faces to feel it.
“It would not be a bad place to die,” Hamdan mused.
The door to Metta’s cottage banged open and the villagers flowed out. They did not rush, or talk amongst themselves. They came out, and dispersed to their own homes. Metta came last of all and walked over to Yulan. He stood.
“Our women and children will leave. Our men will fight with you. They are eager to meet this Callotec, as so few of them were here when he last came.”
Yulan nodded. He felt a tingling in his arms and hands, and a quickening of his heart.
“You need not have cut your hair,” Metta told him. “You were not here when the worst of it happened, and you stopped it when you returned. Is that not so?”
“It is. That’s why I cut my hair, Mistress. Because I was not here.”
“And now you are.”
“Now I am.”
“Well, then,” Metta said, satisfied.
Drann dug. He was surprised at how good it felt to labour like that, with his hands and his back, in a ditch. The ground was hard and dry, fighting him all the way. But still, it felt good. He hacked at it, and battled it, and because he had done such work as this almost all his life, he bettered it.
The Free Page 28