The Pity Stone (Book 3)

by Tim Stead

  The men left, one with the horses, two down the cliff path. Tilian stood among his men knowing he had over an hour to wait. There was nothing more for them to do until Seth Yarra arrived. He wondered if he had made a mistake, if there was something he had failed to consider, but nothing came to mind. It was a gamble, of course. He had predicted the behaviour of Seth Yarra on the basis of what he had seen, but they might do things differently. If they sent scouts down the cliff road before committing numbers to it, his plan would fail. If they spotted his men hidden among the rocks, his plan would fail. There were other things that might go wrong, too, but at the very least he had cut the bridge and Seth Yarra would have to march north to get at Berrit Bay. The cliff road was closed to them.

  They hid. They waited. It was a nervous time. It always was before a battle, though this shouldn’t be a battle, no more than the firing of the great forest had been. It was two hours, more or less before the lookout at the top of the rocks dropped down and signalled.

  Tilian eased forward on his belly and put an eye around a rock. He’d picked the spot beforehand, making sure that he wouldn’t change the silhouette of the rock by looking. They were there, a mass of men marching along the cliff top about a half mile to the east. He could not yet make out individuals, but he could see the green and black banners, one at the head of the column and one carried in the rearguard.

  He pulled back out of sight. His men were looking at him from their scattered hiding places. Some looked strained, others eager, but they were all waiting on his word.

  “A while yet,” he said. He opened his pack and pulled out an apple, and began to peel it with a knife. He’d seen Colonel Arbak do this on the wall. It was a deliberate message to his men. You have time. Relax. Be like me. It worked well enough for the colonel and it worked for Tilian now. He saw men lean back against rocks. One man took out a book.

  Tilian wasn’t as relaxed as he looked. His ears strained for the sound of marching feet. He knew he would hear them clearly enough when they came, and so he kept his eyes on his apple, cutting slices off and eating them with slow precision.

  He heard feet and voices. The marching stopped. They were at the top of the cliff road. He knew that by looking over the side they could see the town of Berrit Bay, quiet and undefended, a tempting prize, but they couldn’t see the point where the bridge was cut, because that was nearly half a mile down the path. He cut a last slice off the apple and ate it, then threw the core away and rolled over, easing into his viewing position.

  They were there – now stopped and only a hundred paces from where he lay. He could see a couple of the black clad cleansers, professional soldiers and officers, standing at the head of the path, discussing their next move. They both wanted to attack the town. He could see it in the way they leaned out again and again, taking long looks at their prize, and in the end they could not resist. They began to pour down the cliff path at a column, one following the other as closely at the terrain would allow.

  He signalled his men. He had twenty four left now and they crept slowly forwards across the stones and grass, settling in a line alongside him, bows strung and arrows in hand. They waited. The number of Seth Yarra on the cliff top dwindled to a hundred, then fifty, and quite quickly he saw that the last five were not going to follow them. This tiny precaution threatened his plan.

  Tilian looked around him and picked his five best bowmen. He pointed to each in turn, and then to the Seth Yarra who had remained as sentries. This had to be done quickly. The enemy’s van would be at the bridge any moment, and shortly after that they would begin to ascend again and the opportunity would be lost. He raised an arm and saw the five men rise up slightly, heard the creak of bowstrings.

  Now it is decided.

  He dropped his arm. The five sentries fell and did not stir. Every shot had been true and fatal.

  “Now,” he called, and the men broke from cover, rushing with all speed to the head of the path, to the three rocks that he had had them move there. They looked innocent enough standing in the grass a few feet back from the edge, but they were Tilian’s weapons of choice. He’d seen the camber of the path, and knew that once started down the rocks would stick to the cliff, and each was the weight of five men at least.

  They wrestled the first into place, ten men heaving and pushing with arms and legs. There was a cry from below. They had been seen, but it was far too late. An arrow flew up, but arced harmlessly out over the sea. One of his men, Tilian thought it was Jackan, had lain down on his back, feet against the boulder, and with a final thrust of his legs, sent it down the path.

  Almost as soon as that was done a second rock was being swarmed forwards, and the men who had pushed the first hurried back to the third, and that too began to move.

  He heard screams from below, but Tilian didn’t look. All three rocks had to go. That was the plan, and soon enough it was carried out, all three sent rumbling down the path, crushing anything that stood before them, hurling men out over the cliff onto the rocks and the seething ocean below. A quick but unpleasant death. It wasn’t war; no more than setting the fires had been war. It was slaughter plain and simple, but it was the only way Tilian knew to win and protect the villages and towns the enemy threatened.

  With the last rock gone, and nothing but silence below he knew that he had to go down the path and see the destruction for himself. He didn’t want to. He didn’t want to see what he had caused, but it was his duty to see it finished. He drew his blade and began the descent.

  It was more than fifty paces before he found the first man, crushed and broken against the path, his blood a stream that flowed down until it was swallowed by the dust. He told those that followed him to throw the body over the side into the sea. He did not watch. He went further down. There were more bodies, many more. He could see where they had tried to escape the racing boulders, pressed against the wall, but they had been shattered all the same. The path had been painted with blood.

  Here and there a spark of life remained among the broken men. He felt pity for them, but for most there was nothing that could be done. Their injuries were too great. They would die here. Never the less, he gave the order to save those that could be saved. It was yet again what Colonel Arbak would have done. He remembered the hero of Fal Verdan saying that a soldier’s job was to win the battle, not to kill the enemy, and he repeated that to his own men. They accepted it, though they were no physics, and their succour for the wounded would be little more than water and rough field dressings. The gravely injured could not be helped.

  This was victory. Tilian had not loosed an arrow, nor had he swung his sword, yet he had won again, and no doubt there would be some further reward for this. Yet he did not like what he had done here. There was a good side, of course there was. The villages and Berrit Bay were saved. His men were unharmed. The enemy were defeated.

  It felt as though he had cheated. Again. Just like the fire in the great forest. There would be no songs about this victory – no tales of how a few had stood against many, even though it had been so. He had won through cleverness, through pragmatic use of the terrain, but it went against all Avilian concepts of honour.

  For all that he doubted the honour of his victory, Tilian decided that it was a good thing. So what if they did not sing of his triumphs? So what if men did not remember him as a great warrior? His loyalty was to the people he led, the villages, towns and cities of Avilian, his rulers and gods.

  They would camp one night, he decided, and then march north to where the horses were picketed, and then around to come into Berrit Bay by the southing road, passing through the villages they had saved, and receive no thanks for it, and into Berrit Bay to meet Colonel Arbak, and get no welcome from the people there.

  That is what it was to be a soldier.

  Twenty Two - Sithmaree

  “It is done. I have finished.” Marik sat back and waved his hand over the mass of documents on the table before him.

  “You have translated every one
?” Sithmaree asked.

  “Every one,” he pulled a face. “This language of yours trips me from time to time. I do not know all the words, and where things have a nature that is not simple, the words do not come to me. In places I have had to describe things instead of translating. I could have used some help.”

  Sithmaree stared at him. It made sense, but the man seemed impertinent to her. He did not show the correct degree of respect. But his point was fair. They could have found him a scholar to work with – one that spoke fluent Afalel – and the translation would have been the better for it, but it occurred to Sithmaree that this way had given her an advantage. She was the only one who had seen the documents that could understand them. None of the guards spoke the Afaeli tongue, and Havil’s grasp was that of an ill schooled child.

  She had not waited until the translation was complete, but had begun to read almost as soon as the first pages were done. She was no scholar, but this was not the bone dry work of learned men. She was reading these things so that she might survive the war, and the one who had written them had done so that he might rule Seth Yarra. Those two facts rose up above the sterility of the text so that each word burned itself into her memory.

  Now she knew secrets. They were secrets that should not be secrets. She understood the metal headed assassin, the purpose of his mask. There were sentences in the work that disturbed her. They said things that should not be said and asked questions that she could not answer beyond mere glib words.

  Why do kings rule? Because they are kings, because their fathers ruled before them, because someone must, because it has always been so. All the answers seemed shallow and failed to touch the question itself. It stood unanswered.

  Why do men starve when there is enough food for the wealthy to feast every day? Again, every reply she could summon seemed merely an echo of the way things were and not a proper reply. Sithmaree did not believe that the rich were cleverer than the poor. She did not believe they were better, stronger, wiser, more deserving. She was not of noble blood, nor was Jidian, nor Narak. She could not answer the question without falling back on Narak’s phrase – time and chance – luck, the fall of the dice. She was not fitted for such thoughts, and yet if she was not, then who? She was a god. She reached out with a word and all the snakes of the world did her bidding.

  Seth Yarra have no kings. Those words were written at the top of a page, and the rest of it was blank. It was as though the writer had struggled to find other words to say about this, and had failed, or meant to come back to it later and had been unable to do so.

  The book is the key. Can the book be overcome? Better not to try.

  She had heard about the book. It was the great book of Seth Yarra, and held all their wisdom, their faith, their tactics, their skills. Things that did not appear in the book were frowned upon, killed, or destroyed. Narak’s favourite example was the horse. Time and again the Seth Yarra armies had been beaten by cavalry. Horses gave the men of the kingdoms unmatched speed, manoeuvrability, and strength, but Seth Yarra would not make use of so obvious a tool because it was not in the book.

  From the start Sithmaree had struggled with Marik’s pages. She knew the words well enough, and even where he had laboured to capture a meaning it seemed clear enough to her. Yet she could not understand the point. What was this man trying to do? Why did he talk about kings and the rich? There was something else, too. At the bottom of a page describing the formal grammar of an entirely different language it said: there are no beggars in Seth Yarra streets.

  She failed to see why he had written this. What possible advantage could the information have?

  As she read further she began to see a pattern in it all. Wherever there was a comparison between a thing in the kingdoms and a similar thing in Seth Yarra lands, the writer seemed to praise the latter. It was as though he truly believed the Seth Yarra way was better than the way of the Kingdoms, but he still wanted to change the book.

  The notes were, for the most part, exactly that. They described things. There were accounts of rituals, descriptions of objects, clothes, houses, and a lot of words with their definitions, all written in the Seth Yarra tongue. The comments that disturbed her were scattered through the text like breadcrumbs on grass, almost hidden in the great mass of words.

  Curiosity drove her, however, and she followed the trail with diligence. Each new document that Marik completed she took away and read carefully, absorbing the burden of the document and at the same time winnowing it for the strange, abstract crumbs.

  Now she picked up the very last document. It described in great detail the ways of formal address among various ranks in the Seth Yarra hierarchy. There was nothing else, just ranks and rules. She looked up to see Marik staring at her.

  “What?” she said.

  “Well, now that you have read all of it, I wondered what you thought.”

  “You…?” She could not finish the sentence. His irreverence was shocking. She should have him executed, but of course Narak wouldn’t thank her for it. This Seth Yarra was his pet, his little project. But actually she found it oddly refreshing. It had been centuries since someone she didn’t know had been casual with her. He might even be flirting. She checked her memory, and decided that he wasn’t, but she liked the doubt.

  “I’m sorry,” Marik said, as if suddenly remembering that he was sitting in a dungeon with a supposedly hostile god. “I didn’t mean to cause offence.”

  “No, it’s all right,” she said, leaning back and fixing him with a stare. He wasn’t an ugly man, she decided. He had nice eyes – brown like all of his people – but with a sort of worried look, and there was intelligence there. “You want to know what I think? What do you think?”

  “About the documents?”

  Again there was that doubt. What else would she want to know his thoughts on?

  “Yes. The documents.”

  “Interesting,” he said.

  “You can do better than that. I promise I won’t have you killed for offending me.”

  Marik hesitated. He looked at her to make sure that she was joking, or not. She smiled. He touched a couple of the documents again, not reading them, just touching, as though there was something in them other than words and pictures. “He’s trying to be Seth Yarra,” he said. “It’s almost as though he’s trying to build his own copy of the book.” He shrugged. “these are fragments, of course, less than a tenth, but the essentials are here. If you had the power you could pretend with this. You see he has a rough grammar of the old tongue, the words the priests speak, and his Gorass is fluent.”

  “Gorass?”

  “The language – what we speak.”

  It had never crossed her mind that their language had a name, but of course it had to. “Go on,” she said.

  “But it’s not just deception,” Marik said. “There’s more. It is as if he is trying to understand the principles. These notes would not disgrace a student of the rule.” He waved his hands over the papers. “Badly organised, chaotic, but if you consider he didn’t study under a master, and he hasn’t seen the Book, then it is quite impressive.”

  Sithmaree dismissed his praise. Not as impressive as you think. Whoever did this had four hundred years to do it, or so Narak believes.

  “You think he likes you?” she asked.

  Marik looked uneasy. He shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I made my choice, and whoever wrote this thinks the Seth Yarra system is fairer. You saw the comments?”

  “I did. Is it true that you have no king?”

  “Of course. The Book rules us, and the masters of the rule mind the book, the cleansers enforce the rule. There’s no need for anything else.”

  “It sounds delightful,” she said, but her tone said the opposite.

  “It’s stifling,” Marik said. “No new ideas, ever. Nobody listens to reason. The only argument is the Book.” She could see that he meant every word. He was passionate, his eyes alight.

  “So year after year, everything i
s the same.”

  “Yes. The writer sees that, and he sees it as a weakness. He also sees that to try to change it would be very difficult. The Book is inviolable. He is right on both counts – that the book should be updated and that it is almost impossible.”

  “Almost?”

  “Well, nothing is truly impossible. Not if the one god wills it.”

  “Still just one god?” Sithmaree asked.

  “Forgive the habit, goddess. Just words. I am unfamiliar with your gods.”

  Goddess was a word Sithmaree had not heard used – a diminutive of god, perhaps, or more likely a feminine form. She was not sure whether she should be flattered or insulted by it, so she decided to let it pass.