“Odda?” Cail asked.
Odda just raised his hands in surrender. “I haven’t been out of the palace in years, certainly not since the slave riots. I haven’t a clue.”
“Your Majesty,” he directed at his wife.
“I’m not sure the Fomor is responsible. The gossip I got last moon from the slaves is the opposite of what I’m getting this moon from the servants. The slaves say that he isn’t a sorcerer. That he swore an oath against sorcery or something.”
Cail had not listened in on the slaves or the servants; the nobles were convinced that the Fomor giant was a priest of some sort. It wasn’t hard to imagine a weak-minded priest inside that hideous face.
“My slaves say that the Fomor stopped a ghost that was frightening them. One kitchen girl says that the Daen judge came in and saved the day, with the giant. Saved a boy from being eaten by the ghost as well.” The queen looked sternly at Odda. “I’m a woman with a weak mind and allowed to believe in such fanciful stories.”
Odda surrendered a second time. “I’m sure, Your Majesty, that I would never contradict you.”
“I think that I do have an answer for you, Lord Ualla,” the king said.
“What would that be, Your Majesty?”
“The Daen claim to rule us, and they seem to be willing to handle problems that have ghosts, unlike my own advisors. Let us give them this problem and see if they can solve it.” He paused for a moment, collecting his thoughts.
“Odda, invite the Daen priestess to early court in the Hall of Thrones. She worships a mother-figure; see what she thinks about someone killing children.” Under his breath he muttered, “And we’ll see what her advisers can do about sorcery.”
“Very good, Cail,” Odda said. “I’ll get right on it.” He excused himself and headed for the door. He was frail and old, but Cail never doubted him.
“What if they can’t?” Ualla asked.
King Cail looked at him sadly; the queen looked at her husband and touched him gently on the arm.
“You going to explain the facts of life to him?” she asked.
“Ualla, son, I’m sorry about your people. They are my people too, but I can’t do a thing for them. The philosophers have had most of a moon since the first death. The killings stopped around the full Summer moon, and I had hopes…but now we have at least six dead children, and I haven’t heard a word of progress since the first body.
“So this is what I’m going to do,” he said. “I’m going to get the Judge of the Daen to accept a Geas.” Geas, Service to the Ruad King, was the fifth of the five virtues. “I’ll give the Daen your problem, and she’ll solve it or be blamed for it. Either way it’ll stop being my problem.”
“Do the Daen even recognize Service as a virtue?” Ualla asked.
“I have no idea. I just hope she has her own virtues to live up to. Maybe one of them will save us.
“Now get out of here. You’ve ruined my sleep and my breakfast. I’ve got a lot to do between now and court, and I’m not looking forward to it.”
Ualla left and the servants started cleaning. Cail leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. He had worked hard balancing the demands of the nobles, the philosophers, the slaves, and the Daen. He had kept the peace in Ard throughout the constant antagonism of the Fomor and the intermittent battles with the Bolg.
His hands shook. Ghosts in the night are just a children’s tale. Just nightmares. He had real things to be frightened off, but he couldn’t shake the feeling. Whatever was out there in the dark, it was hunting him.
Two Moons. The tides would lift him, or the tides would tear him down. Two moons and the world he had held together for nearly thirty years could crumble around him and the nightmares could come true. He sighed deeply and was surprised by a gentle touch on his wrist. Queen Amanda was standing beside him.
“We’ll make it, we always do.”
Cail nodded, not trusting his voice. She had stood by him for forty years, though she stood just as often on the side of the opposition. This time she knew the stakes.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
He eased himself up from his chair and let her lead him to his bath.
CHAPTER 3 JUDGE BREA AT COURT
Midsummer’s Day, Year Twenty-Seven of King Cailagean’s Reign
…and the Blessed Mother placed the sword into Nuada’s hands and spake unto him.
“You have called out to me in your suffering, and I do not bring you peace, but I bring you an answer. You are lost, your enemies surround you, and you ask me how you could lead my children. I bring you an answer. This is a blade of my holy iron, a power never before taken from My Earth. This is the Blessed Mother’s Answer.”
from the Scroll of Nuada “The Coming of Answerer”
The city of Ard moved around her. Seated on the stage, the one clear area in all the press, she could see above the people around her and into the constant noise and motion from the streets beyond. Mistress Brea sat restlessly upon the Seat of Judgment for the Court of the Blessed People. After twenty years of battle, being a judge was returning to her roots but a bit boring. Over five hundred of her people, called the Daen, tried to crowd within the circle of eight great pillars, more a symbolic than an actual grove, and they spilled out onto the streets on every side of the temple. Here justice was done.
The Blessed Mother was known as the bringer of justice, so a high priestess was usually given the less than arduous job of sitting in the throne all day. Mistress Brea had been a high priestess before she was sixteen years of age, following in her mother’s and grandmother’s footsteps. Twenty years ago, she had been sitting on a very similar throne, pregnant, and holding court for the local colony at Tiernan. Now she was the Judge of the Daen colony of the largest city in Ard.
The man before her called himself Absoe of Eiodon, which placed him as one of the many poor cousins of the Eio warrior clan, despite having either ownership or control over a significant stretch of farmland. Demonstrating some degree of poverty despite that farmland, Absoe had decided against paying his taxes this year.
The stately gentleman was pacing through each generation of his inheritance, droning on in Brea’s opinion, but he at least took the time to do it correctly. Every third reference was amusing if only in some minor way; every seventh reference was an important man. He was winding up nicely to the twenty-first, which should be someone of historical significance, worth paying attention. He was only on the fourth generation, and since he would probably get to the seventh, this was going to be a long speech. She tried to pay attention, but it was a half-hearted effort.
Wisdom was supposed to be in her job description, not that she had shown huge amounts of it in her life. She had been raised as a priestess, but like a storybook tale, she had wed the handsome prince and gone off to a life of war.
In Daen tales, ‘marrying a prince and running off to war’ was a happy ending. Perhaps with a rhyming verse about dying together on a hilltop, overrun by enemy forces. Unfortunately, after nearly twenty years of war, it had come to an end, and she had returned to her groves.
Her eyes teared remembering her husband lying on the blood and the snow. Her body was numb from the fighting, and her sight slowly recovering from the Mother’s blessing, the battle madness. The dead giant lay at his feet. His own life blood draining out upon the battlefield. She handed her husband, Coscar, the heart of his enemies upon his deathbed. That had been glorious.
“Ard is the most important city in Pywer, so we can’t just send just anyone to be judge for their colony,” said the Council. Her own sister had come to her with the position, she couldn’t refuse. Brea wondered how they managed before she was available. But she really couldn’t return to a small grove after all those years being next to the Warlord and undeclared King of Pywer, so she took the council’s offer.
Midsummer was here, so the day was hot and clearly going to be monstrously long, even under the shade of the awning. Brea smiled at the
men below and sat up straight, trying to look interested while she stretched her neck and attempted to get some air to the back of her tunic. The carved wooden throne, the Seat of Judgement, was a work of art. The artists had covered it in runes detailing the inner mysteries of the holy priesthood, but the high sides didn’t allow a lot of air flow. Her tunic was made of fine yellow linen and breathed very well even in this warm weather, but nothing breathes when sweat-stuck to a flat wooden panel.
Absoe was focusing mostly on the military exploits of his ancestors, which made it hard to dislike the man. He might drone on, but it was war, and nothing got her blood burning like war. The Blessed Folk were born for war. This wasn’t just saying that they were good with sword and spear, and they were some of the best fighters in the land, but that they were absolutely the best warriors ever. She shook herself out of that lovely memory of her husband, the two of them facing the Fomor insurrection in an icy pass. Coscar’s blood rage had been a thing of beauty.
Her hand caressed the hilt of his sword, Answerer, which stood by her knee. The Blessed Mother was quiet in the iron, but the day was young. Iron was one of the gifts of the Blessed Mother, and the sword named ‘The Blessed Mother’s Answer’ was the rarest iron of them all. Like the Father’s silver or the Dragon’s gold, iron was a terrible material for a sword. It was always either too soft or too brittle. But Answerer was hard as stone, sharp as bronze, and as flexible as a copper bar. The great king Nuada said that he had received it from the hand of the Blessed Mother herself in the distant east, over a hundred years ago.
Brea tilted her head down, resting her eyes. Ard was beautiful, from a distance. The Ruad built a city of great white stone walls, shining bronze roofs, and thousands of people. But the high stone walls also killed the breeze, leaving the stench of the morning sacrifice and the sweat of hundreds of bodies as unwelcome visitors. The bronze roofs hurt one’s eyes to look upon, and the thousands of people, hundreds of her own Blessed Folk, were not all pleasant company when forced to face each other on a daily basis.
Dressed in his best ceremonial gear, Absoe was an imposing figure. His hair was still thick and brown, though his full beard was gray. He stood as tall as any soldier, and only five years ago he had served in the army of the southern colony. He had become a group leader, a relatively high rank, and deserved significant respect, as difficult as paying attention had become. Absoe, as a veteran, wore a long green robe with a thick, black veteran’s ribbon on his shoulders. The lack of gold jewelry and rings may have indicated either humility or poverty, but she was sure Oren would find out.
Oren was the best of scribes; full notes would be taken, and every reference Absoe made would be checked against her Library.
Absoe’s number eighteen had been a bit ironic; the point was that his great-grandfather had been an early colonist. He had owned that land, had plowed it himself, living among the Bolg for most of ten years before the coming of Nuada. The Bolg had opposed the colony, but he had supported the Blessed Folk and died in battle, fighting the Bolg for possession of what he technically already owned.
Lovely. This ironic introspection made her brood a bit, and she nearly missed number twenty. Absoe’s grandfather’s wife was Iesha. In many ways this list of ancestors was like a guessing game. Which ancestor would be his twenty-first? Brea congratulated herself for guessing it ahead of the speech ― Iesha of Namid’s Lake was daughter of…
“My Great-Uncle Macha rode his chariot from one end of Pywer to the other, slaying a hundred Ruad, a hundred Bolg, and a hundred Fomor. Truly one of the greatest heroes of the age.”
Brea agreed, wholeheartedly. Macha had served King Nuada extremely well and his seven stanzas of King Nuada’s epic war were beautiful, in the nasty way of war. The story was nearly a hundred years old, but worth repeating for every generation. She mentally checked to see if she had told it to her own son, who was a descendent of Nuada on her husband’s side. During the war against the Bolg, the Fomor insurrection, and the southern civil war, there had never been enough time to properly raise the children that she had borne. But she had remembered to sing them the old histories, which pleased her.
She looked over and saw that her nephew Keynan had come to court. He was smiling and nodding along with the cadence as well. Keynan was her sister’s son and may have had an uncle or something involved with Nuada. She knew that he had one of the strongest birth-lines among the people. Keynan was a grandson of Lugh, and both his parents sat on the council, but she couldn’t remember all of his father’s line. She ought to remember Nuada’s men; he was her grandfather, through marriage, after all.
The Blessed people had no cities on Pywer and no king since Nuada, but they settled among the other peoples, such as in the great cities of the Ruad, the hunting camps of the Bolg, and the fortresses of the Fomor. The four great and holy cities still stood in the homeland, east across the sea. They had all backed the colony in the beginning, nearly a hundred years ago. Now there was war between the cities, and little support for their distant possessions.
Absoe had clearly memorized his presentation and stood with his head pointed back, staring only at the woven branches hanging between the pillars. Passing through the fifth generation of his ancestors, Brea found that he was ephemerally related to royalty. Sad; a closer cousin and this problem could have been solved before breakfast. Her stomach growled a bit at the thought of food. She didn’t eat before The Blessed Mother, her doves had been sacrificed before court. Now that the grove was holy, Brea wouldn’t have food in here.
There were hours still till noon, and any chance she had of reclining in the cool of her upper Library, sipping wine and reading the scrolls, was contingent on her figuring out why Absoe wasn’t paying his taxes and how best to punish that behavior, so that others didn’t decide that they didn’t need to support the judge, the distant council, and the civil war across the sea.
He had no one standing for him as family, which was very odd and distressing. He had said that his wife was dead, as well as his brothers, but where were his sons and grandsons? It took at least five strong men to work a field, and it was considered hard labor. Usually a field was worked with a whole family, usually ten and as many as twenty people. For the seven whole fields that Absoe owned, Brea expected family and servants to total about fifty people.
Off to Absoe’s left stood the homesteading family who worked one of the fields. They were a nice-sized group including at least six adults and a dozen more children, but clearly of simple farm stock. They stood proudly in their homespun linen tunics. The eldest man was barely thirty years of age, and there were children and grandchildren to spare. Absoe had only called them his Magda or children of Macha. Clearly they weren’t literally sons of Macha or from any noble family, but a protectorate somehow. She would give that more thought.
This might be a relatively complex problem, as such went, and she wasn’t about to produce a summary judgment. Clearly he owned the land, or had owned it, and either leased for seven years, twice, or sold the land. He seemed to indicate that he had not done any of those things, but the tenants, the Magda, had specific rights to the fruits of the fields, which likely obligated them for the payment. Under the agreement, the tenants could be liable for all or a seventh of the tax. She would collect the taxes but not from the wrong man.
The city moved around them, and she found herself watching the traffic instead of listening to the witness. Little unusual happened among the Blessed Folk, even in the capital of the Ruad, so this boring trial had a running start at being the most interesting thing to happen since the full Summer moon. Judge Brea wasn’t particularly interested, but she watched just the same. Still, she let her peripheral awareness expand into the noise and crowd around her.
A man was working a pony cart around the Western Pillar, where the crowd had gathered for the shade. A mass of folk were gathering to the south, where a fresh batch of bread was coming out of a public oven. A handful of hunters were coming in from the East gate
and had just passed to the north of her little symbolic grove. They carried a full elk between them; someone would eat well tonight. Their red hair marked them as Ruad, so the elk was destined for a noble’s table.
Besides that, hundreds of people just...moved. Hundreds were passing on her left toward the East Gate Road, and dozens more were passing on her right, toward the ovens. On the right, there was a steady stream of black-haired children heavily loaded with bread and sausages, food slaves working for Ruad philosophers. As far as Brea could tell, the Bolg and the Ruad looked identical apart from the hair color. The Bolg were slaves in the north of Pywer, and it wasn’t likely a Ruad would be well served to visit the south.
There wasn’t much for her to do at this moment. Watching Oren in front of her taking notes, she was sure he would have an answer for her in a few minutes. Perhaps they would argue with him and that would be much more interesting. Oren was a quiet man, with more years on him than she had―and that wasn’t a few. She knew arguing with Oren was pointless. He was almost always right and more importantly, willing to tell you that you were wrong.
Oren was quiet but intense. He was thin, lightly built for a Daen. With his sand-colored hair, he probably looked a lot like a Ruad when he was a child, but now was easily a head and a half taller than any of them. He cut his beard, which was rare for a Daen, but it worked for him, emphasizing the point of his chin, the dark intensity of his gaze.
She didn’t think that she could find a more careful man than he. There really isn’t such a thing as silence, outside of a poem. So, it really didn’t matter how quietly one did something, but only if someone were listening for it. Oren would always be the one listening.
A movement at the edge of the crowd got her attention. Shouldering through to the inner circle was a slight, pale-haired youth in a white robe. The presence of a single Ruad wasn’t surprising in a Ruad city, but they rarely took part in the Blessed Folk’s courts. The Folk didn’t follow Ruad law, and technically, the Ruad had to follow the commands of the Blessed Folk. However, the Ruad rarely stood for justice at High Court, never while she was on the throne. Even more telling of his purpose, his robe was edged with a red braid, a clear signal that this fellow worked for the Red King, Cailagean.
The Broken Man Page 5