Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  “At your expense?” Idgen Marte was suddenly at Allystaire’s right shoulder as he watched them go. “With what, exactly, are you going to pay for their beer?”

  “Torvul has charge of all our expenses now, aye? I will refer Timmar to him.”

  Idgen Marte snorted. “I can’t wait to see those two haggle.”

  “Be a duel worthy of song, I expect.”

  “What now?”

  “Temple,” Allystaire replied.

  The route took them through the green and along the outlying cottages, past the first of the farms scattered in the valley and towards the High Road that paralleled the river Ash. And it took them past villagers eager to greet them. Allystaire and Idgen Marte clasped so many forearms, pressed so many palms, and accepted so many hugs and well wishes they were near exhausted from the walk. It, too, was a walk in memories. For Allystaire, of following a column of smoke for a day and finding the charred corpses of a massacre. For Idgen Marte, of watching the carnage as the Arm of the Mother ripped apart the shackles that knights had bound him with, and then of her own Ordination in the stand of trees to the west.

  There were new faces in the crowd, as well—faces from Ashmill Bridge or Birchvale, from towns and villages and hamlets all over Barony Delondeur. Allystaire and Idgen Marte did not know them all, but most knew them, by reputation if not sight. They were farmers, laborers, city watchmen, whores, fishwives, tradesmen, children, and they had come to the place the Arm or the Shadow had promised them. They had come for safety, for shelter, for refuge, for curiosity, to make a new life or to forswear an old one. And now the Arm and the Shadow walked among them, growing ever more uneasy as the weight of responsibility began to settle heavily upon their shoulders.

  The crowd seemed to understand their destination and so eventually parted to let them pass, and they had their first sight of the Temple of the Mother. What had been a waist-height wall of stone marking out the foundation when they left was now a temple; true to Mol’s plan, there were windows spaced all around the building. From its hill it commanded a good view of much of the valley that Thornhurst and its farms nestled in.

  “Goddess, is that glass in the windows?” Idgen Marte leaned forward, her mouth gaping slightly. “Where in the deepest Cold did they find that much glass? How did they afford it?”

  “How did they build a dome?” Allystaire said. They shared a puzzled glance and then made for the doors, carved oak, bound in brass, with a sunburst painted in the middle of it.

  Inside it was still simple: a floor of cunningly nestled planks had been affixed, and rough but sturdy benches stood in three rows up to the altar, itself still rough, seemingly unformed stone, joined together through the joint prayer of Allystaire, Mol, and Idgen Marte. Mol was standing to one side as Torvul examined it carefully. Gideon stood next to Mol, watching everything with his seemingly detached air. Allystaire realized that though the boy seemed indifferent, he was probably taking in more details of what was happening around him than everyone else together would.

  Mol smiled as they entered. “D’ya like the windows?”

  “Aye,” Allystaire replied, cautiously. “We do wonder how—”

  “A master glazier,” she said pronouncing the word with utmost care, “came in not long after ya left. Said you’d healed him after he was knifed in a tavern brawl and spoke to him of Thornhurst. He came here with his tools and all. Name of Grigori. Said he had t’repay it somehow, pay the Goddess. I told him he didn’t need to, but he insisted. He left when he was done, but I prayed wi’ him at the altar and he’s come to the Goddess. Said he’d be back after the winter.”

  “How many people have come, Mol?” Idgen Marte walked up to the altar and almost unconsciously dragged her fingers across the stone. Allystaire followed her and placed a hand upon it as well. He found it warm, and looking up, he saw panes of glass were set directly above it, allowing the sun to fall upon it as much as possible.

  “To stay? More’n three score, maybe four. More have come and gone,” the girl replied. “And there’ll be more in a few days—folk fleein’ Bend.”

  “How do you know,” Torvul started to ask, but Mol simply swung her large, dark, knowing eyes to him and his question resolved into an “Ah.”

  Mol turned back to the rest of them and said, “Tomorrow, at sunrise, at noon, and sunset—we must gather here. The rest of the folk may come at noon. And then at night we keep a vigil. She will come and speak to each of us in turn.”

  Allystaire felt the strum of power in the girl’s words, the binding of something true and important as she spoke, and he knew that the rest of them felt it as well—and that the sound was radiating not only among them but between them—as if each of them was a note. Idgen Marte’s was so high-pitched it nearly escaped his senses, and were it sung or played he was not sure he could have heard it. Mol was something simple and pure and, he knew, harmonizing with every note around it. Gideon, an intense, blaring blast of some great winding horn, a sound that would carry across mountains. Torvul rolled like thunder, if thunder could carry the promise of home and safety in its thrum. He strained to hear his own but then the moment passed.

  He looked to Idgen Marte and saw, he was sure, tears gleaming at the corners of her eyes, quickly blinked away. She moved to his side and whispered, for him only to hear, as the rest were still distracted by the moment that had just passed.

  “Like a silver trumpet signaling a charge. Terrible and beautiful all at once.”

  * * *

  Late that night, when even the Ravens had retired to their tents, Allystaire and Idgen Marte sat in front of the banked hearth inside the rebuilt tavern of Thornhurst, drinking beer that was slightly less sour than when they had left.

  “With no need to stand a watch we hardly know what to do with ourselves,” Idgen Marte said, idly, to break the silence as they stared into the faintly glowing coals.

  “We could still stand a watch if you miss it that badly,” Allystaire offered.

  She snorted, had a sip of beer, and then did precisely what he expected. “The Iron Ravens, Ally? I have to know.” Her tone wasn’t demanding or imperious; it was almost imploring him. She leaned forward in her seat, bending slightly towards him.

  He gave his head a small and uncertain shake. “If I tell you, Idgen Marte—if I tell you this, you can never speak of it. Not to Torvul. Not to anyone.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  He lifted his head and met her gaze with a chilling solemnity. “Neither is what happened to them. Promise me.”

  She thought on it a moment, swirling the beer in her mug, and nodded. “I promise.”

  He drained the rest of his mug, set it down, and let his eyes unfocus among the flickering embers. “They were Oyrwyn soldiers. Some of them Coldbourne, some of them Highgate, Horned Towers. Four score I left to hold a tower that commanded a pass into Harlach. This was near a decade hence. And held it, they did. Harlach had fooled me, and had three hundred men behind me I did not know of. They besieged the tower. I had left them enough supplies to last two weeks—in my arrogance I thought I could pin Harlach’s largest host, grind it down, and be back in that time, or near enough. They stood up to a siege of near four times their number, and they did it for more than a month longer than they had supplies for.”

  “How? What did they eat? Rat? Horse? Leather? Grass?”

  “All of those, save horse. They had none. Oyrwyn armies are mostly foot.”

  “Well, Cold, Ally, everybody that’s gone for a soldier has eaten his share of grass or rat.”

  “They ran out of all of those old tricks well before I was able to relieve them.”

  “Then, what?” Idgen Marte swallowed as she asked the question.

  Allystaire turned to face her, his cheeks pale, his voice low and dark. “What does a raven eat?”

  She gasped, sitting up straight and pressing a hand to h
er mouth. “Oh, oh, Mother, no, Allystaire. No. And they are here? They did, they did that and you forgave them?”

  “It was my fault,” Allystaire said, his voice quiet, but fierce, his body raising half out of his seat. “I left them there. I told them to hold to the last, I said it in jest as I rode away with the rest of the army and the food they should have been eating. Well, hold they did, to the last soldier and beyond.

  “When we finally relieved them, they would open the gate only to me, and me alone. I found them shaking as they stood at their posts. They were sure I would hang them for their crime.”

  “You should’ve.”

  Allystaire made as if to lunge towards her, one hand curling into a fist. “How dare you? They were good , honest soldiers, young and strong and brave, and the gnawing, screaming, horrible demons of hunger drove them to something we have no right to judge. Not then and not now.”

  Idgen Marte sat back and away from him, considering his words, face twisted in reflexive disgust.

  “I could not take them back. They knew that. So I gave them their release, and I wrote them a charter. There were just over two dozen of them left. As a warband, they had no past, no crime. Only their name, their skill, and their word. It was all I could do for them. I asked only that they take no contract to serve against Oyrwyn.”

  There was utter silence in the room save for the occasional crackle of the fire till Allystaire went on. “I could not hang them for my own mistake, Idgen Marte. Surely you see that. And if you do not, it is because you did not see them then, the shame and the guilt and the loathing they had for themselves, and each other.” He lowered his head into his hands, rubbing at his temples with his thumbs.

  Idgen Marte stood up from her chair then and turned as if to leave, thought better of it, and put a hand on Allystaire’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Ally,” she finally said in a whisper-thin voice. “You’re right. Even then you knew that mercy was no weakness.”

  “Speak to no one of this,” Allystaire replied. “If word were to spread I would have to send them away.”

  “Do we want a warband here?”

  “I want this one, yes. till I met you and Torvul, there were only three people I would have trusted more than I do Ivar.”

  “What are you going to give them to do?”

  Allystaire drained his beer and stood up, setting the mug atop the mantel. “I will think on that tomorrow. Start building some defenses, mayhap. Watch towers, or a palisade wall.”

  Idgen Marte tilted her head back a bit, and he had the sense of being watched thoughtfully. “Think we’ll need them?”

  Allystaire took a long breath as he bent to pick up the hammer he’d laid by the side of his chair. He slid it into his belt as he exhaled. “Better to prepare for what could happen rather than what you think or wish might happen, aye?”

  “I suppose.” She picked up her sword belt from a peg on the wall. “Where in the Cold do we sleep?”

  “They gave the house we had shared to a newly come family. Mol told me there were beds upstairs free, though.”

  “You’re planning to sleep down here with your back up against one of the walls, aren’t you?”

  “I am,” Allystaire said, though he’d meant to tell a harmless lie, like That is how I sleep best. The words simply didn’t pass through his throat, and Idgen Marte laughed.

  “Cold, take a bed. Have a decent night’s sleep for once in your life. The Goddess didn’t tell me to live like some kind of self-mortifying monk.”

  “No, She did not. It was my father who taught never to trust comfort too much. A man gets too used to soft beds and rich food, he starts imagining such is his due.”

  “Or,” Idgen Marte countered, “he takes what comfort and joy he can get while it’s there to be had.”

  He shook his head. “That ends in getting soft. I heard it too often as a child to stop believing it now.”

  “A skilled poet could exhaust himself coming up with ways to describe you and never, ever use ‘soft,’ Allystaire,” she said. “And every time you talk about your father, about the Old Baron, about your life in Oyrwyn, it’s like seeing another piece of a map get revealed, another note in a song being written down. I’ve a notion to dig around for bottles of wine and get you drunk, hear the rest of it. Hear what was in that letter, maybe. I saw your face when you read it. At the end you looked like you’d been punched in the gut.”

  “We have to be in the temple in the morning. The Goddess has nothing against honest drink, so far as I can tell, but I doubt she would take kindly to Her ordained coming to her presence with wine-ghosts battering the inside of their skulls.”

  She sighed. “I s’pose. There’s stories I’ve yet to get out of you, though.”

  “Aye, and I have told one more than I meant to already. To bed with you,” he replied, as he began eyeing the wall for a likely spot.

  “And you as well and not up against a wall,” she chided, seizing his arm with one strong hand. “If we’re meant to keep a vigil you’re sleeping on a bed tonight. No arguing. A little comfort won’t kill you.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, but her questions and Audreyn’s letter set his mind moving along familiar paths outside the massive castle in the mountains where the Barons he had served all his life, all of his first life, resided. And on a path leading from the postern gate, to a small tower that guarded a southerly approach—the route from the lands that had once been his charge. How, on a small battlement underhanging the crenellations and reachable only by a rope ladder, a patch of grass was carefully tended, planted with heather, mountain vetch, and loosestrife. A single rough, unmarked headstone stood amidst the flowers. When that image filled his head, his throat was tightly seized with a grief he had rarely allowed himself, and all the soldierly protest went out of him.

  Forcing that grief back down, he let Idgen Marte lead him up the stairs and they sank into separate beds in one of the larger rooms.

  Sleep took him quickly, but not before he found himself thinking of a petite, fine-boned woman of twenty or so summers, her hair an auburn, wind-tossed mass.

  Chapter 16

  A Task is Finished

  The next morning came on too fast. It seemed his eyes had only just closed when they snapped open. Mol stood beside his bed, dressed in her sky-blue robe, her hair loose, her unblinking eyes watching him carefully. Slowly, he realized he could only see her because she held a thick white candle steadily in a holder in one hand.

  “Gideon and Torvul are already on their way,” she said, her voice filling the otherwise silent room. “Were fearful you two’d spent all night in yer jars,” she added. “C’mon now.”

  Years of early rising had accustomed him. Allystaire went from sleep to wakefulness in one willed moment. He was standing and pulling on his trousers and belt while Idgen Marte was still sitting groggily on the far side of her bed.

  Nodding, as if in approval of his quick response, Mol walked around the other bed and came to Idgen Marte’s side. She placed one hand on the woman’s knee and murmured words he could not hear, and the warrior stood up with a nod.

  Soon enough they were all three walking briskly towards the Temple, Mol with her candle in the lead, Idgen Marte and Allystaire drinking mugs of tea and sharing a loaf and a thick wheel of cheese that had been waiting in the Inn. Timmar and his wife had been moving about already, after the myriad early morning tasks their establishment required.

  Gideon and Torvul waited outside the doors, the dwarf examining the carving, tracing his fingers over it. The boy, only slightly taller than Mol, shivered slightly. Somewhere, someone had found boot, breeches, shirt, and vest for him, but not a cloak, and though the vest was wool, the boy was clearly cold.

  Allystaire placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. “We will find you a cloak or a coat today, lad. It is the kind of morning where autumn is look
ing towards winter and thinking of inviting him in. Only going to get colder.”

  He nodded, though quickly all eyes were pulled towards Mol, who had stopped in front of the thick doors and pinched out her candle. “We do important work today, “she said, and Allystaire wondered at the way her voice seemed to switch from the uncultured tongue of an eleven year old village girl to the sonorous and wise tones of someone much older and much more educated. “This morning, when dawn breaks through the Temple windows, we will finish raising the altar. Afterwards the folk can come, with their petitions and questions. At noon, we celebrate. At sundown, a service. We’ll all know what to do.”

  Slightly dumbfounded, Allystaire felt himself nodding at the statement. Of course he would speak, at the sundown service. He had no idea why or what he would say, but it seemed entirely reasonable that he would. From the corner of one eye, he noted Torvul nodding along as well.

  “Tonight, the vigil. Four of us will remain outside the Temple, with one inside for two turns at a time, in the order that the Mother called us.”

  “If I might pose a logistical question, what of our provisions for the day?” Torvul asked, his thick, rumbling voice made delicate by his careful choice of words.

  “She will provide. Her people, our people,” Mol replied, “will bring us food.” The girl smiled, broadly, joy radiating from her features. “Today is a happy day. Try not to look so glum. You ‘specially.” She turned to Gideon, a finger aimed at his ribs. Though the boy didn’t flinch away from the touch, Allystaire saw him harden himself when Mol extended her hand, saw his lips press into a line and his shoulders and arms tighten. And though his stoic face broke into a forced-seeming smile, Mol stopped short. Instead, she took and gently squeezed his hand for a moment.

  Then she looked up to the windows, and all their gazes were drawn with hers, as the first light of the sun began to filter into the Temple.