by Susan Dexter
Before the sun had chosen to show his face that first morning after, the girls had rushed off to discover how the sheep had fared, and Dalkin had gone to the marsh to see whether the pigs and piglings were in any difficulty, then to fetch the cows home. As the rain eased, Enna began dragging things out of the kitchen to dry if they could, and Druyan rode out to round up horses and to assess damage they hadn’t had leisure to notice.
Everywhere she pointed Valadan’s nose, scenes of distress assailed her eyes. They had no very large trees along the Darlith coast, but most trees she passed had limbs a-dangle, torn entirely off or hanging by a scrap of bark, the leaves withering. The ground was blanketed with leaves fallen too soon, and bramble canes had been whipped about till they tore each other. Here and there bird’s nests lay overturned, the fledglings dead beneath them after a wild plummet earthward.
The birds would nest again, of course. Some would releaf themselves, and even the spots where the little streams had tom out their banks would be hidden by normal vegetation in a month’s time, troubles forgotten. The grass, most flexible of all, stood cheerfully already, waving green fingers at the now-gentle breeze.
It was Druyan who could not forget or forgive. She had done this, unleashed this mighty force on her home and her people. And she had reveled in it.
The raiders would have done worse. Valadan pawed the turf as she sadly examined a dead badger. Where was its sett? If there had been kits, were they drowned, too, or merely orphans?
“The raiders would only have done it to the farm,” Druyan said sadly. “I did it for leagues.”
Valadan snorted deprecatingly. Storms come.
“I called it.”
It chose to answer. He nosed the badger. Male. Look for no cubs.
Druyan leaned against his shoulder. “I called the wind, knowing I couldn’t just send it away when it had done my will. Knowing it would do this.”
The nature of storms. The stallion reached for a mouthful of grass.
I liked it too much, Druyan thought, watching him graze. I cannot yield to that again. Not even a little. It’s too easy.
Small wonder the fisherfolk forbade women to board their boats, to whistle at all, ever. On the off-chance that one of those women was the one the wind would answer to. The seductive power carried a fearful price.
Returning, she found Kellis struggling up to the roof with fresh barley straw, the last from the previous year’s crop and luckily not all stuffed. into mattresses. Under Enna‘s protests, Druyan went up to help him.
Kellis seconded Enna. “Lady, you should not be up here. It’s too far to the ground.” He took the bundle of straw from her and tried to spread it over the planking in a layer thick enough to keep out further rain.
“You’d know about that,” Druyan agreed pleasantly, staying at the top of the ladder. “How’s your shoulder today?”
He shrugged it a trifle and “It complains but lets me use it. That was a provident storm, Lady. I thought it would pass us by, sweep up the coast—but it turned.”
“It did,” Druyan agreed, dodging his questioning gaze by descending for more straw. What exactly had he seen that night, from his rooftop vantage? Was he wizard enough to know?
Kellis did not press, but went on with the repairs. There was an art to thatching, in which he plainly lacked instruction—he was doing his best to make a watertight covering, but in the end it was still going to leak, and the roof was likely to be much thicker at the repaired end than at the other, unless he ran out of straw. Druyan, no better schooled at the craft, could only hope that Edin the thatcher was one of those men the duke sent home when the threat of the raiders was finally ended.
She said as much, and Kellis agreed cheerfully, not deceiving himself as to the permanence or the efficacy of the job he was doing, taking no offense as he pushed straw about and tamped it hopefully into place.
“Without you warning us, there probably wouldn’t be a roof left at all,” Druyan said. “Or any of us still here, likely. We’d never have stood them off, storm or no storm, without you helping? She laid a hand on his arm. “We’re all grateful.”
Kellis smiled lopsidedly. “I know. Enna put milk in my porridge this morning. Or else I got the cat’s breakfast?”
Druyan began to chuckle. “Next thing you know, there’ll be actual meat in the stew. What a change of fortune!”
Or virtue rewarded. He could, Druyan knew, have used the raid for a chance to disappear, stolen a horse and gotten clean away in the ample confusion. Success would have been virtually guaranteed. Instead, he’d cast his lot with theirs, to succeed or fail as they did. It was such folly, to trust too far a stranger who’d come as Kellis had—but how many times over must the man prove himself?
“WiIl they come back?” she asked, suddenly alarmed, clinging to the top of the ladder, looking out over her cropland. It was so early, there was all the summer before them, and the autumn. All that time of peril and good weather, while crops ripened and stood ready for the stealing. “What do they want, that they have to steal from us? Where do they come from?”
Kellis inched his way up the slope of the roof, tucking straw into rows. Druyan had no idea what he was going to do when he got to the peak—she didn’t see how the thatching was going to hold. The first fresh breeze would strip it away again.
“They all want to be older sons,” he said, after she’d thought he either hadn’t heard or had no answer. “There’s not land enough in their homeland, to divide it among all the sons, so the younger ones get nothing at all, unless they’re strong enough to take it for themselves. They grow up having to fight for everything—every song I ever heard them sing was about war, or raiding, or a blood feud.”
“I always heard they took everything that wasn’t nailed down and went away with it,” Druyan said, puzzled. “There weren’t more than a dozen of those men here. They couldn’t have thought tl1ey’d just move in, keep the farm?
Kellis laughed. “That lot? Not likely. They’d have stolen whatever they could carry and left with it. They don’t want farms—they want gold and adventure. They’re very simplehearted that way.”
“Younger sons here don’t inherit much of anything.” Not to mention daughters, who got less still, no matter where they came in the line of kin. “They don’t go raiding over the sea.”
“There probably aren’t half so many of them.” Kellis worked another row of thatch, and Druyan saw him pass his right hand over it, fmgers cocked in a small binding magic. “I wish you had some tar—this isn’t going to shed water very well. Any Binding I can put on it will wash away with the first rain.”
“That’s the reason it’s so steep-pitched. Run die rain off the straw before it soaks through,” Druyan told him.
“I’m trying not to think about that, Lady. This roof is anxious to shed me again.” He made more hand-passes over the surface, sometimes with straw, sometimes with spellcraft. “Anyway, my folk tell tales of a wondrous golden time—my grandmother’s time, I would guess—when the weather was so fair, there wasn’t a winter you could notice. Lasted for years. Everything grew—crops, grass, and herds. The Eral, too, on their home coasts. I would guess that while they had plenty of food, they grew big healthy babies. Worst luck, lots of them were sons. And they all had big families when their turns came. More sons, so many that fighting among themselves didn’t cull enough, and they started spilling out to plague other lands.” He reached, lost his balance, and flung an arm over the roofbeam hastily. Straw showered down. “Lady, when you see me come sliding down at you, get yourself out of the way.”
“You be careful,” Druyan ordered sternly. The kitchen’s roof was a story less lofty than the hall’s, but still far enough to fall onto cobbles. Kellis had been lucky not to break his neck the first time.
“It’s all right,” Kellis assured her stalwartly. “I know how to fall off this roof! I have experience. I don’t want to take you with me, that’s all.” He tossed out another tiny spell and frowned at t
he effect. “This is meant to keep sheep from straying, not straw from slipping. I don’t know . . . So some of the landless sons go raiding for sport; and some of them go emigrating because it’s that or starve, and they need to raise money first, to pay for the ships, so they go a-raiding, too. And if the songs are true—and I heard enough of those—any time one lord works his way to the top of the pile, there’s a dozen others won’t tolerate him, so they load up families and goods and go looking for other lands to settle on. All they do is iight, birth to grave. Compared to their own folk, my clans were hardly even an obstacle to them. Your folk might be another tale entirely.”
“How so?” Druyan dodged another cascade of loose straw. “Are you sure you’re all right up there?”
“Yes.” But the word was gasped out. “Sorry. What about beeswax? Got any of that?”
“From just two hives? Enough for a roof? Maybe we could take something from the skep the storm upset, but those bees are very unhappy right now, and you didn’t like them much when you looked in on them at winter’s end.” They’d opened the hives to see whether queen and workers had survived, whether they had reserves sufficient to feed themselves till blossom time. Kellis had been stung dozens of times and had made it clear he didn’t intend to go near the bees again. “Last year’s wax all went for candles. There’s some tallow, I think.”
“I’m thinking that if we coated some sacks with something to shed water, it would be a start up here,” Kellis said abstractedly. “Watch yourself, Lady. I’m going to try to come down.”
“There are some hides in the barn. Not sound enough for boots, but maybe we could drape them over. And you’re six feet left of the ladder.”
“Thank you.” Kellis corrected his course, but Druyan didn’t draw an easy breath till they were both safe on the ground, covered with sticks of thatch and looking like a pair of scarecrows.
“So, why is Esdragon another tale to the raiders?” she asked.
“Cities are harder to push aside than herds of sheep.” Kellis brushed a hand through his hair, dislodging chaff. “It isn’t just that cold iron doesn’t poison you; your people stay put. Mine wander. That was what we did when the Eral first came at us—we just moved away from them. It didn’t solve the problem, except that first year. I suppose they’ll never get all of us . . . He slnugged. “Some Clans will always be out of reach, on the fringes. We can’t make the Eral leave, they can’t make the Clans not exist. Nothing resolves. We’ll go where they don’t much like to be—the hills. It’s hard to live there, but the Clans know how to survive.” He pulled a barley stem out of his collar. “Your folk, on the other hand, will stand up to the raiders, and you won’t leave it too late, the way my people did. Working together isn’t the novelty for you that it was to the Clans.”
“And we can fight them off?” Druyan asked, baffled, trying to take it all in.
“You already do.” Kellis waved a hand at the dooryard they had defended so very well. “And if you do it long enough—well, the Eral still won’t go away, but they’ll change toward you. They’ll roll over anything that shows the least weakness, but an equal—they’ll trade with an equal, instead of trying to snatch whatever they want. They’ll have to. It’s not something they sing about on the raiding ships, but they do go places where the medium of exchange doesn’t include fire and blood.
When will that happen?” Druyan asked eagerly.
“Depends on how well you fight,” Kellis rubbed his sore shoulder. “The better you are, the sooner they’ll respect you.”
Druyan’s heart sank, seeing the impossible scope of it. How could she have hoped for immediate relief?
“Every captain’s his own master and does what he chooses. The Eral follow the strongest. But the word will run back to the home shores that a land’s too strong to be profitable for raiding, that it’s too much trouble. Then they’ll start to trade for what they want,” Kellis consoled her.
“Meantime we break our necks watching our backs.” Druyan showed Kellis where the hides were piled. He touched one and wrinkled his nose. “Travic got these in trade, I think,” Druyan said, vaguely embarrassed. “We didn’t cure them here.” The hides from the early winter butchering were all salted down in a barrel, waiting for Mion the tanner to come home. They’d keep, and Druyan didn’t feel desperate enough yet to teach herself tanning. “I remember he wasn’t happy with them—the quality’s poor, they’re stiff and they stink—Travic never thought there’d be a use for them.”
“They’ll stop the birds from diving into the soup pot,” Kellis said optimistically, ducking out of a barn swallow’s flight path. “At least for a while.”
They might add salt-grass hay to the thatch, too, later in the season. ’Twasn’t grown long enough yet. “So, until we impress the Eral so thoroughly that they’d rather bring goods to our markets than swords to blood, the raids will continue?” Druyan wasn’t sure she liked the implications, but she was determined to understand them.
“This place isn’t so easy to find,” Kellis offered, rolling the hides into a long bundle.
“It’s been found twice in a handful of months,” Druyan countered tartly. “The season’s just eased enough to make sailing bearable. And half the settled bits of the duchy are this easy to find.” She explained about the estuaries, the attractions river and harbor offered in Esdragon. “We might as well hang signs out: ‘Rich pickings right here.’ ”
“You keep watch.” Kellis shrugged, then bit his lip. “And your duke has an army in the tield, does he not?”
“He took my men for it,” Druyan agreed bitterly. “They’d have been better use here, seems to me. In case you didn’t notice, no army showed up to help us the other night.”
Kellis frowned. “You have a long coast. Raids are quick. How does the army know where it’s needed in time to get itself there?”
“That’s just it,” Druyan answered. “They don’t. They sit by the towns, and the rest of us are on our own.” Her voice was bitter as black-walnut hulls.
“Keeping watch,” Kellis repeated, “and having some thought for what you’ll do when trouble comes, Lady. There won’t always be a storm. Though there is always the rain.” He lifted the rolled hides with a small groan and headed back toward the kitchen roof, accepting the realities of Esdragon’s weather.
The barley shot upward in the fields. The sheep were sheared, the wool tithe paid. The apple trees set fruit. The kitchen roof leaked a little less with each rain, for Kellis took careful note of the weak spots and tended them, sometimes even while the rain yet came down. He fell off the roof twice more, but both times managed to catch hold of the edge at the last instant, so that he dangled a moment before dropping—a method of landing he reckoned to be far less hazardous than being lifted off helplessly by the wind.
He did, though, pause for a drink at the well before going back up to finish his work and a moment later the roof was forgotten and Kellis off in search of Splaine Garth’s mistress.
Druyan had gone out riding, returning home at dusk and riding straight into Enna’s furious report that Kellis had vanished without a trace or a word, leaving the ladder standing where it might fall on any unwary soul trying innocently to pass through her own kitchen doorway. . .
He wasn’t to be found. The amount of thatch scattering around the dooryard in the breeze suggested Kellis had been gone from the work a good while. There was straw torn from the lower edge—he might have tumbled off again and taken otherwise sound roofing with him. He might have hurt himself—but in such case, where had he gone? He wasn’t in the barn. Had he landed on his head, then wandered off, dazed? Could he have gotten far, hurt? Druyan wondered. Or had he departed, quite healthy and perfectly ready to seize a chance?
Druyan remounted, in no small way confused. If Kellis had wanted to run, he’d had chances in plenty and could have gotten safe away with far more than the clothes on his back, which seemed to be all that was missing. Every horse save Valadan was safe in paddock or pasture�
��from the high vantage of the stallion’s back, then, she saw the lone figure trudging down from the near edge of the headland. The distance was great, but she could not mistake that ash-pale hair.
Druyan touched a leg to Valadau’s side and went cantering to meet him, as much to be out of earshot of Enna’s grumbling as to discover what made Kellis leave his work scarce half done. When she saw him starting to run, I she urged Valadan into an effortless gallop and reached Kellis in what seemed an eyeblink.
“What is it? Did you see something?” Her gaze went to the river, frantic, trying to pull in information. There was no reason at all that another shipload of adventurers should not have found them. Bad luck so soon, but no wise impossible, from what Kellis had said. Maybe the first batch had never left the area, but had only retreated.
Kellis lacked breath enough to answer her, but he shook his head emphatically. “Not here,” he gasped, to further reassure her. “I was trying to find you. . .
And she and Valadan had been leagues away, on the moors. “Then you did something!” Druyan rose in her stirrups and looked out over the fields again, searching in a panic. Whyever had she ridden so far? Fast as Valadan was, would she not have been sensible to stay closer to home?
“Can’t see much in a dipper of water.” Kellis drew in two more ragged breaths. “I couldn’t tell where, except it wasn’t Splaine Garth. A river, a village, a lot of ships—” He faltered, out of breath again.
“That could be anywhere!” Druyan cried, dismayed.
“I know.” He pressed a hand to his side, waved away her concern, “I remembered what you said. And it wouldn’t help if I’d had more water to look in—the only spot I can recognize in Esdragon is this one. But you know the others, Lady, and if I can show you—”
“You couldn’t before.”
“You didn’t see. because I didn’t.” Kellis shut his eyes and shook his head. “Lady, I don’t want these visions! I turn my eyes away, whenever I’m close to anything that might reflect . . . but it’s not helping, they’re hammering at me. I can’t`shut them out. I have to see them. I think I can show them to you. And maybe if you see something that tells you where the raid will be, you can send them a warning.”