Recluce Tales

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

Suddenly, he cocked his head, then stood and hurried toward the sheep shed. There, he unbarred the door and slipped inside. I hurried after him, and so did Ma, after she ran inside the cot and came back out with the lantern.

  The old ewe was against the wall of the shed, and the others had given her space.

  “She’s not going to make it,” Ma said. “I can tell.”

  The stranger knelt down on the soiled straw, close to the ewe, and she let him. I don’t know what he did, but one moment, the old ewe was bleating in distress, and the next, he was putting his left hand on her head, and it stopped. Then he began to talk to her like she was a sick child, and this black mist … or something like it … blacker than the darkness in the places where the light from the lantern couldn’t reach … it sort of ran down his good arm and into the ewe.

  Ma and I just watched.

  He didn’t seem to do anything, and yet he did.

  It must have been a good glass that passed while she delivered the two lambs … and the afterbirth. He touched both of the newborns somehow with that blackness, and before long, both lambs were nursing, and the old ewe was acting years younger, like nothing at all had been wrong.

  When the stranger stood and turned, so that the light from the lantern fell on his face, he looked older, worn-out, a lot more tired than after he’d fought the men who’d been chasing him, and his face was all sweaty. “They should be all right now.”

  “What did you do? You some kind of mage?” asked Ma, so soft that I could tell she was half scared and half plain shocked.

  “I’m no mage, not the way the angels are. I’ve just learned a few things along the way.” He looked at me. “Anyone can learn some things about order.” He shook his head. “We still need to get rid of the bodies. If they’re found around here, you’ll be the ones blamed.”

  “They tried to kill you…,” I began.

  “That doesn’t matter. Anyone who helps a traitor is guilty, and I don’t think you want to be hung or leave everything and head for Axalt.” He looked at Ma.

  She shook her head. “I’ll get the spade.”

  We walked outside, and Ma hurried to the cot and then back with the spade and sort of thrust it at the stranger’s right hand.

  He wasn’t looking and the shaft struck his glove. It sort of clunked, dull-like, and he grabbed the shaft with his left hand. “I’m sorry. My right hand isn’t that limber.”

  It didn’t sound limber at all. It sounded like there was metal under the glove. I wondered if he had some sort of wrist guard or brace there, but before I could ask, he said, “We’ll need to use the gelding to carry the bodies, one at a time. Can you do that, Frankyr, while your mother shows me somewhere over the hill where we can bury them?”

  “Yes, ser.”

  We finished burying the four of them on the far side of the hill sometime before midnight. The stranger insisted that we dig deep, and he and I did the digging while Ma held the lantern.

  He gave us all the coins that the riders had, and there were fifteen coppers and five silvers, and one plain gold ring. “You could have gotten that anywhere. I’d not sell it for a season or so, though, just to be safe.”

  Then, after we stalled the gelding, he saw us to the cot and walked back to the shed. I heard him climb up to the loft.

  When I woke just after first light and went out to offer him breakfast, he was gone. So were the four horses. There was a cloth pouch tied to the bar on the inside of the sheep shed, with six golds inside, and a scrap of parchment with words written on it.

  I’d never been to school, and I couldn’t read what he wrote. Ma couldn’t, either, but the golds spoke for themselves, and who could we have asked to read it right then? Years later, when no one was asking about the riders who disappeared, when I went to Axalt to sell some sheep, I had a merchant there read it to me, and he said that it read:

  You and your mother deserve half.

  Remember—believe in order, and live in order, and all will be right.

  Under the words was just a letter. I could tell that. It was an R.

  I guess we follow order. Anyway, I tried. A good herder might bring in a gold a year, and we had six. So we spent a few silvers here and a few there for a good ram or ewe, and before long Ma could buy a loom, and one thing led to another.

  The one thing that bothered me, and it still does, is that we never even knew his name. I suppose we didn’t need to. The lambs grew into strong ewes, and they lived twice as long as any we ever had. They also stayed black, and so did all their lambs, and the lambs that came from them, and we get twice as much for their wool. That’s how we could build a real house here and buy more of the land. We’ve kept the coal to ourselves, though.

  You might say that all that came from the blackness of a good-hearted stranger.

  There are always those who think that the arts, especially those involving words and music, are somehow “soft.” But when songs can change the present and the future, how soft are they, and how much of the ensuing suffering falls on the singer?

  SONGS PAST, SONGS FOR THOSE TO COME

  I

  The silver-haired druid lies on his narrow bed in the chamber whose naturally polished wooden walls seem to curve without doing so. His eyes are wide, both unseeing and seeing too much as the images only he can apprehend swirl before him … one after the other …

  … a room walled in white stone, sitting in which is a man all in white with bronze starbursts on the collars of his tunic …

  … a dark-haired woman looking intently at him, as if listening …

  … a silver-haired youth, blank-eyed, carrying heavy white paving stones, blood seeping from his feet and oozing from the holes in his boots …

  … the same dark-haired woman as before in a black uniform walking into a large hall, when crossbow quarrels transfix her …

  … a younger, silver-haired woman, also in a black uniform, standing above the model of a walled and towered structure, just as the model explodes, shredding her form with metal splinters and engulfing her in flames …

  … a blinding light pouring from the sky like a second sun, melting the buildings beneath it as if they were wax …

  … a city of black buildings surrounding a harbor from which strange ships come and go … amid a sense of order and peace …

  And there are others, many others, but those are the images that matter, and which pierce him to his very quick.

  He shudders as his eyes unglaze, and murmurs, “Not again … you ask too much.” Except he knows that he addresses no one. After eightdays of the same dreams, there is no one to address.

  Except himself.

  II

  The druid’s niece stops behind the low stone wall and studies the narrow forest pool that holds a small stun lizard, sunning itself on a rock barely protruding from the water, a rock that catches one of the few shafts of sunlight passing through the high canopy of the Great Forest. She smiles briefly before turning and continuing along the path. In time, she reaches her destination, a small dwelling set back from the main path, but linked to it by a second path, this one covered with a fine gray gravel that would sparkle in the light, if any direct sunlight could penetrate the high canopy of branches that protect the structure beneath that appears to be set unduly tightly between the massive trunks of two trees—except that the walls of the dwelling flow into those trunks.

  She opens the door. “Uncle!”

  There is no response to her call. So she steps into the tiny foyer of the ancient dwelling and glances around, her eyes taking in but not truly seeing the woven grain of the wood so carefully grown into the shape of the chamber long years before she had been born. There is no one there, nor in the small sitting room beyond the archway.

  “He must be in back.”

  After closing the door, she takes the gray path around the southernmost of the massive tree trunks and makes her way through the middle of a garden of mixed flowers, whose scent changes daily. The path ends at a circle of gre
en moss.

  At the western end of the moss is a bench that appears, only appears, to have been carved out of an enormous tree root. The man seated there wears a simple brown shirt and trousers, with boots of the same color. His hair and beard are silver.

  “Greetings, Lynahra.”

  “Didn’t you hear me, Uncle?” She crosses the moss and seats herself on the end of the bench, turning slightly so that she can look directly at him.

  “I knew you’d find me if you thought it important.” His deep green eyes hold a smile.

  “Why have you grown that beard? You look old.”

  “That is the idea. No one pays much attention to an old bard.”

  “You’re leaving the forest again? Why?”

  “There are songs of summer yet to be sung,” he says gently, “even by one lost in endless autumn.”

  “When you speak that way…” The silver-haired younger woman shakes her head. “You don’t have to go.”

  “But I do.” Better that than chaos left unbalanced … and unending dreams that will only worsen. That he knows from bitter experience. “There are matters that must come to be.”

  “And you will make them happen with song?” Her voice is sad, rather than skeptical.

  “I cannot forge black iron, nor can I bend the forest to my will. Order must have a focus to balance the white city.”

  “You’re not going there?”

  “Only for a little while. What order needs is much closer.”

  “Then why are you—”

  “Going that far?” He lets the silence draw out for a time before he goes on. “Because even great and violent acts require fertile ground and cultivation, and what is most effective often requires time and a wandering journey.” And others to believe it is their idea.

  “And songs to sing?”

  “Is that not what I do?” For all must seem the doing and will of others.

  III

  The mare he had bought in a small town south of Clynya eightdays earlier lifts her head ever so slightly. The bard can sense that she smells something on the light breeze that comes out of the northwest.

  Almost four eightdays have passed since he first entered the lands of the Tyrant, then left them. Spring has given way to early summer. The Westhorns are behind him—for now—and, if he recalls correctly, for it has been all too many years since he passed this way, the small town of Vryna lies ahead, if too far to reach before the sun drops below the rolling hills of Gallos stretching westward behind him. Beyond Vryna lie the Easthorns, far less daunting than the Westhorns that shelter Westwind within their stern and chill heights, and beyond the Easthorns lie Certis and Montgren … and the white city that rules both in fact, but not in name.

  He can smell the hint of wood-smoke, suggesting a camp just ahead, and one likely with guards, since lone travelers would be more circumspect. He continues to ride, and in some fraction of a glass, he sees the encampment, with two wagons flanking a fire. He nods and rides slowly, but directly, toward the fire, fingering the leather grip of the time-and-use-polished wooden truncheon at his belt. He does not slip his hand through the wide leather strap.

  “Stranger … best you stop there.”

  The silver-haired and bearded bard reins up. “As you wish.”

  “What are you doing out so late and alone?” The shadowed speaker is a woman, who holds a small crossbow aimed at him.

  “I’ve been riding far later, and I always travel alone. Why are you camped so close to the town? Vryna was once friendly to traders, not that I’ve been through here in years.”

  “What’s in the pack, old man?”

  “A guitar.” That is absolutely true, but not the whole truth.

  “Minstrel or not, you’re old to be traveling alone,” says the hard-eyed woman with the twin blades at her wide belt.

  “And you are far from Sarronnyn, lady-blade. There must be a story behind that.”

  “That’s for me to know. What’s your name?”

  “Bard.”

  “Is that a name or a title?”

  “Both.”

  “Fair enough, Bard. You can tie your mare with the others. She’s not in season, is she?”

  “No.” And she won’t be.

  “There’s a tie-line beyond the wagons.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You were once a blade?” asks the armswoman.

  “Of sorts,” he admits. “Why do you ask?” He knows full well why, but wishes an answer from her.

  “Old as you are, riding into a strange camp is a danger.”

  “Not when the guard once served with the Tyrant’s forces and still keeps the blades.”

  She laughs, if with the slightest trace of bitterness. “Go tie up your horse. There’s not much left from supper, but no one would grudge you that in return for a song or two.”

  “It has been a long day,” he replies with a smile, then dismounts and begins to walk the mare toward the wagons, the fire, and the tie-line beyond.

  “There’s a minstrel headed to the tie-line!” calls out the guard.

  As he walks the gray mare into the haze of smoke and the flickering light cast by the fire, his eyes take in those standing near the end of one wagon—a heavyset and black-bearded man, an older graying man who would scarce cast a shadow even in full sunlight in early morning or late afternoon, a second armswoman with graying blonde hair, and a younger man barely beyond youth who sports a scraggly and uneven beard that only emphasizes his lack of experience. The bard nods to the four. “Good evening. I appreciate the welcome.”

  “There’s a mite of trail soup in the black pot,” offers the black-bearded man.

  “That would be much appreciated.”

  “You’re not from around here.”

  Bard shakes his head. “From the West, beyond the Westhorns, not far from Clynya.”

  The older armswoman stiffens, but says nothing.

  As Bard approaches the tie-line, the gray gelding at the end sidles away, most likely because he sees and smells the mare and the stranger.

  “Easy there, fellow,” he offers, placing a hand high on the gelding’s withers.

  The gelding whuffs, then almost seems to nod.

  Bard takes a lead from the saddlebags and secures the mare to the tie-line. He sets the saddlebags and his pack well back from the horses before uncinching the saddle and removing it and the thick blanket. He glances around, knowing even before he does that the older armswoman is moving toward him along the shadowed side of the wagon.

  “Clynya,” she says flatly. “That’s awfully close to the Great Forest. You’re silver-haired, too.” She keeps her hands well away from the hilt of either blade at her belt.

  “I am, and it is.” His words are soft.

  “I’ll be interested to hear what you have to sing. After you eat.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I’m certain you will.” She turns and walks back toward the fire, without so much as a glance back at him.

  He finishes and sets his saddle and gear on the wagon tailboard, although he will have to move them later. Before he leaves the mare to follow the armswoman, he studies the shadowed side of the nearest wagon, then lifts the pack that holds the guitar and two other items with him as he moves to join the others around the fire.

  The trail soup is acceptable, and definitely edible, most likely because of the contributions of the two experienced armswomen, and he needs no encouragement to scrape the heavy iron cookpot clean.

  He has barely finished when the heavyset trader with the square-cut short beard asks, “What news do you have from the West? Oh … I’m Hardyn. Leydon is the thin one, and the young fellow is Gerhard.”

  “All from Certis, I’d wager.” At Hardyn’s momentary start, the bard goes on, “The wagon’s built of Montgren pine, but I’ve never heard of traders from Vergren. Most folks there are herders or the like. Jellico’s the best bet, since most traders out of Rytel stick to the river.” He turns to the graying blonde
. “And you’re?”

  “Eltara. Delana is my partner.”

  Bard understands both messages, unnecessary as it was for Eltara to voice them, at least to him. Before the others can speak again, he continues, “There’s a new prefect in Fenard. He’s hiring armsmen. Some say that’s to garrison the forts on the passes through the Westhorns. Others…” He shrugs and looks to the armswoman. “What might you think?”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Because you once served the Tyrant.”

  “Not willingly and not for long.”

  She lies, but he lets the lie pass and says, “Still … you would know whether the Tyrant would stand behind the Marshal.”

  “I could care less about either, old minstrel. What do you think?”

  “Even if the Tyrant despised the Marshal, she’d likely support Westwind, just to keep the Westwind Guards between Sarronnyn and Gallos.”

  “Any smart ruler would,” observes Leydon, the thin man. “Best to let another do your fighting.”

  Gerhard does not look at the bard.

  “What other news might you have?” asks Hardyn.

  “The women who took over the broken-down port that used to be the great city of Cyad have pushed all the Delapran troopers out of the whole area. They killed hundreds of the troopers. The Duke sent reinforcements, and they slaughtered or routed all of them, too. They’re calling their land Southwind.”

  “Cyad? Never heard of it,” says Hardyn.

  “It’s only a small port, these days,” although he has dreams of when it was not, long before his birth. “It’s the first one with a harbor west of the druids’ port at Diehl. I think the Duke of Delapra called it Eastport. Most of the women came from either Sarronnyn or Westwind. They started coming years ago.”

  “How did a bunch of women manage that?”

  “There were quite a few of them. I gather they’d trained like the Westwind Guards and the Tyrant’s Finest.” And they had some other assistance. Bard was not about to mention that assistance or its nature.

  “Why’d they do a chaos-fired thing like that?” asks Leydon.

  “Word is that they didn’t like the way women ruled in Sarronnyn and in Westwind, or the way men ruled anywhere.”