Crusade

by Daniel M Ford

  He lifted his now bare hand and Leah stepped close, holding the still sleeping babe towards him. He touched the tip of his fingers to her tiny cheek and bent low over her to catch her scent.

  Mother, he thought, it is for this child that a man as brave and plainly good as any I hope to know gave his life. Please give me the words. For a moment there was only his breathing, and Leah’s, and the child’s.

  “Mother, please turn your gaze on this child. Make Your sun a friend to her, to guard and shelter her always. Let her know peace, and joy, and love above all else. Bless her hands and her eyes and the people and ways she bends them to. Keep her, love her, and guide her.”

  When he finished, he heard a tiny silvery note in the air. Leah looked up at him as if she’d heard it, too, and Lynn slowly blinked her own blue eyes open. They seemed, Allystaire thought, to focus on his for a moment before the infant closed them and drifted back to sleep.

  “Thank you, Allystaire,” Leah said. “I’m sure y’have great matters t’attend to,” she muttered, stepping away.

  “None greater than blessing your daughter,” he said. Picking up his gauntlet, he gave mother and child a polite bow—not deep or courtly, for he felt somehow that might have offended her, but enough—and started for the door and the stairs, when Leah called his name after him.

  He turned and poked his head back into the room, and she said, “Would y’consider taking Renard’s spear with ya? T’the battles, I mean. Even if y’give it t’one o’the other men, just, it’d be like a part o’him was still out there fightin’ and as much as I hate the thought, it’s what he’d be doin’.”

  He looked to where it leaned in one corner of the room, a smooth ash pole with three feet of hide wrapped around its middle, dark with long years of use and supple with long years of care. The head had a wooden case slipped over it, but inside he knew it would be razor sharp on both sides, a leaf-shape as wide as his hand until it thinned to a wicked point. There were marks just above the hide grip where metal braces had once projected out of it, serving as a kind of guard, but Renard had apparently preferred it without them. It was a simple weapon, simply made. No bard would find it worthy of song, but there was something about it that glowed all the same.

  As he walked to it and wrapped his hand around the hide, Allystaire realized that it was all the greater for having been the simple weapon of a simple man who had, after too many years of using it, found the one use it truly deserved.

  “I would be honored to carry it with me,” Allystaire said as he hefted it. The balance of it was perfect. “Whoever made this was some craftsman,” he murmured. “Thank you, Leah.”

  “Bring it back,” she said as she sat down once again, carefully cradling the babe.

  “I will try.”

  Allystaire carried it down out of the Inn, and started across the remainder of the village to the Temple. He looked at the flower-strewn green. Could do with some heather, he thought.

  * * *

  He left the spear leaning on the inside of Temple’s wall, along with his hammer and belt. The Temple itself was empty, but outside many of the village folk and a good deal of the knights and Thornriders had gathered to eat. As best he could tell as he passed, the Barons and lords were being given no preference over the common soldier. The same loaves of bread and bowls of soup were being passed out to all who lined up. The scent of beans and ham rising from the cauldrons as he walked past sent his stomach grumbling, but he felt a different hunger far more keenly.

  His steps took him straight to the pillar of the Arm, where he knelt. In fact, he leaned forward till his head was touching the marble-like but warm surface of the pillar. The hammer etched atop it swam in his vision for a moment till his eyes closed.

  Mother, he thought, then stopped. How do I even begin? This is far from the first time I have led men to battle, or even led men to a battle where they will be outnumbered. But never has it meant so much. I have never hesitated, before, to send men to their deaths in battle, men I knew, men I liked, men I respected. Even loved. He thought then of men like Garth and Skoval, whom he’d trained as boys and bonded with as knights. When Garth had squired for him, he had thought it was a first glance at fatherhood.

  I will try to love the world, Mother, he prayed, if you can help me find the strength to do what I must in the days to come.

  “That strength is not mine to give, My Knight. It is within you already.”

  Allystaire thrilled to hear Her voice, but had to suppress the tiny surge of disappointment that he still felt stone against his head and hands. He resided in the Temple still, and not with Her.

  “I fear the coming battle like none I have ever known,” Allystaire said. “Not for myself. No more that than ever. But for Gideon. For Torvul. For Idgen Marte. For Landen, and Arontis, and what their loss might mean to the people of their Baronies.”

  He took a deep breath and pulled himself upright, shifting his weight on his knee. “I am sorry, Mother. I do not mean to trouble you with my fears. I will not let them consume me, nor will they stop me.”

  “I know that, Allystaire. I know. That is why you are My Paladin,” She said, speaking to him from the air, or within his mind, or from the altar. He could not tell.

  “Make no mistake, My Knight,” She continued, “this will be the greatest test you face in my service. My brother Braech’s power has been turned too long to dark purpose, and what will be unleashed in His name should you fail is more horrid than I can bear.”

  “I will not fail. Whatever it is that is asked of me, I will do. Yet I would ask one thing only.” He paused, and when She did not respond, pressed on. “If it is in your power to see to it that it is asked only of me, then I beg you, I beg you to let it be so. Give me some champion to fight, some avatar to slay, and I will do it. Make this burden mine, and mine alone.”

  “I can no more control what Braech would do than man can control the ocean,” She answered. “You know this. You know also that whatever power We may grant, it must be worked through those we grant it to. My Brother has chosen poorly, and you, and the rest of My Ordained, will be the instruments of his education. Remember, My Arm, your own words to the abomination you fought outside this Temple on the Longest Night.”

  Allystaire thought back to his frenzied battle with Lionel Delondeur, tackling him to the ground and caving in his face, crushing his throat. Screaming defiant words at him. Your strength is taken from them, Lionel, he had said.

  “Mine is given for them,” he murmured aloud.

  “Strength is greatest when it is being spent for others, instead of marshaled to ourselves,” the Goddess whispered. “Remember that. Carry light into the heart of the storm the Sea Dragon will try to raise. See it clearly; know that your enemies will not understand the strength there is in selflessness and sacrifice. You must carry the light of My sun within you through all storm, all darkness. It is a heavy thing, My Knight. I chose you because I know you will carry it.”

  “There is no burden I would not carry in your name,” Allystaire breathed. “Nothing of myself I will not give.”

  “It is not only your task. The Will shall serve you in all things, My Knight, until this battle is won.”

  Allystaire paused for a moment. “And then?”

  “He will have other tasks,” came the very faint answer.

  “Has he been the Dawn, then? Was that what he did with the well, and with magic?”

  There was no answer this time.

  He bowed his head again to the stone. “What if I do fail? What is it that awaits?”

  “There is no strength to be found in despair, Allystaire.”

  This answer was not spoken by the Goddess; it was Mol. Startled, he turned to find her standing on her small bare feet scarcely a pace behind him. He was shocked to look up at the round band of windows in the Temple and find them dark.

  “How long?�
�

  “Only a bit more than a turn,” the girl answered. “Most of the knights and soldiers have been fed. Their horses are being picketed and seen to.”

  He stood up, grimacing at the ache of unlocking his knees. “I should eat and find my bed.”

  “You should,” Mol answered. “But someone is here to ask something of you.” Allystaire peered into the Temple beyond the priestess. Despite the sun having set, it was never entirely dark inside these walls, and he saw two figures, half in shadow by the doors, their arms wrapped around each other.

  One of them he knew, instantly by the way he walked, the spread of newly won muscle along his shoulders and arms. The other, a woman, shorter, with straw-colored hair. He had not met her, but he could put a name to her all the same.

  “Norbert,” he said, “Lenoir. Why have you come?”

  Norbert unwound his arm from around Lenoir’s shoulder and stepped forward, more into the light that emanated softly from the altar. The scar along his cheek was a fierce outline, and there was nothing left in him of the youth who’d left his home to take up with reavers.

  “Y’know why, Allystaire,” he said, just loud enough to be heard. “I know what ya’re about to say, about leavin’ for war and…” He stopped then, a trace of his old hesitance resurfacing.

  “And widow-making,” Lenoir finished for him. The mason’s daughter had fine and delicate features entirely unlike her father’s. “And we don’t care to hear it.” Her voice was firm above the hint of a quaver.

  Not indecision, he thought, but ready for a fight. Setting his mouth in a firm line, he shook his head and said, “No.”

  “No?” Norbert stood to his full height, taking half a step towards the altar. “I can ask Mol t’do it, or Torvul.”

  “No,” Allystaire said. “None of us will marry you tonight.” He paused. “Unless her folk, at least, are here to see it.”

  Lenoir had already stepped forward, raising an extended finger, gathering herself to shout at him, when his words finally settled in. Norbert deflated slightly, laughing, and said, “I’ll run and fetch them.”

  “No need,” Mol said. “I have already called to them.”

  True to her word, they waited scarcely moments before the door opened, and a knot of familiar faces swept in. Giraud, arm in arm with a woman Allystaire knew must be Lenoir’s mother, for she was the image of the girl herself, with grey overtaking the blonde in her hair. Henri, and several of the other village militia men Norbert had fought with. Keegan, who’d spent the months of winter teaching Norbert as much of the bow as he could. Finally, the men of the Order of the Arm, all of them silent, still presences who spread out along the back of the curving wall.

  Allystaire thought quickly, as Norbert and Lenoir climbed the first two steps of the small dais that led to the altar. He came down to stand one step in front of them. The girl quickly shed the long cloak she’d wrapped around herself to show a dress of bright blue that shone with an air both of newness and handmade love. She reached up and removed a pin from her hair and let the coils of it fall to her shoulders. Norbert watched her with eyes wide, as her hair seemed somehow to glint in the steady, even light of the altar.

  “You were not wrong, Norbert, to assume I would refuse this ceremony, speaking of the dangers you face, of how brief might be your moments of joy. Not so long ago, I would have spoken severely of trading a bride’s dress for a widow’s. I will do none of that now. If your moments of joy and love are to be brief, then there is all the more reason to embrace them.”

  He cleared his throat and tried to think back to the first, and so far, the only marriage he had performed, and found, to his shock, the words coming perfectly back to him.

  “Lenoir and Norbert. If you would be wed in the sight of the Mother, promise but two things to each other: love and service. Love and serve one another in day and in night; in joy and in grief; in plenty and in want. Know that in the Mother’s eyes, love is the greatest and highest of ends. Failure to love is the deepest and darkest of sins. Do you swear your love and service to one another, and to the friends and family gathered here?”

  “I do swear,” Norbert said, then Lenoir the same, and before Allystaire could say another word they had embraced and pressed their lips together. A cheer went up from the crowd, hands dabbing at eyes—especially Giraud’s, who was weeping more openly than anyone else he could see.

  A voice, Henri’s he thought, called for wine, and another for food and a feast, and before Allystaire could speak up, it was Norbert who raised his hand.

  “We’ll celebrate proper when we return from the war,” he said as the crowd fell silent. “But there’s no time nor place for it this night, aye?”

  Slowly, the crowd nodded its agreement and deflated, growing silent. The newly-married pair still moved among them, Lenoir being kissed upon the cheeks and Norbert receiving back-pounding hugs—the last and longest from a beaming Henri.

  “Once a reaver apprentice and a man who meant to lynch him,” Mol whispered to Allystaire, having moved quietly to his side. “And now they are as much father and son as any two in the village.” She let that sink in, then seized his hand and squeezed it gently. “Go now and rest, Arm of the Mother. You will need it.”

  * * *

  Allystaire headed for the Inn and climbed the stairs past the empty taproom. He was startled to see a tall and lean figure standing outside his door and almost lowered Renard’s spear into position when the form pushed off the wall and came forward.

  “Don’t spit me on that. It’s Keegan.”

  Glad that the dark would hide the flush on his face, Allystaire shouldered the weapon. “Has a cover over the point anyway,” he murmured.

  Keegan snorted—a noise that sounded a little more dog-like than it would from most men, Allystaire thought. “You’d probably be able to pin me t’the wall w’it anyhow,” he said.

  “What brings you here, then?”

  “All of us have come in t’do our bit. Ya don’t need t’horse or feed us,” he added quickly. “We can cover ground just fine, and tend t’our own supplies. Ya’ll need scouts, and there’s no one here better suited.”

  “Gideon is the greatest scout the world has ever known, in his way,” Allystaire said. “He can see the world from the air. Any part of it.”

  “I’ll not pretend t’know what that means, but I do know that there’re men who know how not t’be seen and that includes from above. It’ll do ya no harm t’have us movin’ on your flanks, and besides, we owe you. And the boy, especially. If nothin’ else, we’ll be his guards.”

  “I will not turn that down,” Allystaire said, nodding.

  “Wasn’t goin’ t’give you the chance,” Keegan said. “We’ll do our bit.”

  Allystaire held the man’s gaze for a moment, looking for any vestige of the deserter, or the chimera that had been made by the God of the Caves. He found only dark eyes, sharp and intelligent, and a kind of resolve.

  “You do not have to, Keegan. I will not try and order men back into a life that already broke them once.”

  “That’s just it,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Ya aren’t orderin’. We’re goin’ of our own accord.”

  Allystaire nodded and extended his hand. Keegan took it, and then the paladin shuffled past him into the room that had been home for the months since the Longest Night.

  Not much of me in it, he reflected as he began to strip his armor off. Just the armorer’s dummy Torvul had found for him. Apparently the dwarf had found a place for it on his wagon on the hard ride back from Standing Guard Pass and gotten it back into the room. Carefully, Allystaire began to layer pieces of his armor upon it, after laying his belt and hammer on the bed.

  Dawn, he told himself, when he’d climbed free of his gambeson—a large rent still in it where the Winsar Ethrik’s sword had sunk into his arm—and began to sit upon the
floor, laying his back against the bed. In the starlight his armor reflected from outside, he caught sight of a small bundle on the side table and reached for it. He found a small leather bag, its strings drawn tight. He pulled them open and spilled the contents into his hand: small, hard, and few in number.

  “My gemmary,” he breathed quietly. He brought the small handful closer to his eyes and moved towards his armor to catch the reflection. There was one tiny fragment of unworked lapis, two men’s rings with plain settings, one of dark green tourmaline, one of brown topaz.

  “I had no right to take those,” he murmured, “and less to keep them.”

  Finally there was the carnelian, the largest piece, a cameo portrait of a woman worked on it. He ran his fingers over it; the likeness was never very good, but he knew the lines carved into it as well as he’d ever known anything.

  He ran his thumb over the carving a few more times, then slid the handful back into the bag and tossed it to the bed. He sat upon the floor, his back propped up by the bed, slid his hammer to his lap, and fell almost instantly asleep.

  * * *

  “Can’t kill him,” Idgen Marte reminded herself. She tried to think of just how many times she’d said that today, and realized she had lost count once past five-and-twenty, so she went back to imagining ways of killing Gilrayan Oyrwyn.

  I could cut the girth strap and let him slide off the saddle to be crushed in a charge, she mused silently. I could cut the ropes of his pavilion free so that it fell upon him, then light the entire concern ablaze. I could get something from Torvul and poison him. I could cut his head from his neck so fast and clean that it might take him half a turn to realize he was dead and drop to the floor. Or I could just shove him off the side of a trail. She visualized his body hitting the rocks.

  She thought these things as she strolled about the elaborate campsite. Silk pavilions housed the knights, including one for Naswyn and one for his son and heir Eckerl, who was as tall and bald and boring as his father, with an affected strip of tawny mustache and a face full of freckles to boot. One for some Oyrwyn lord named Harding who’d already ridden out after the messages Gideon had passed for the young Baron, and who had brought with him a party of hardy light horsemen, all javelins and flails and magnificent arming jackets in bright blue with yellow slashes, the same colors that loudly announced his pavilion. One for the Baron, of course, the largest.