by Lee Ramsay
Mikken’s lips tightened, but he said nothing to put lie to the claim.
“The point is, I have a surname, a family, and money,” Jakkan said, ticking off the points on his fingers. “You don’t. The men raising you spend their nights swiving each other, though I doubt Anthoun can manage a cockstand. They’re dangling an adoption in front of you to keep you docile until you’re old enough to bed. I suppose the only thing you’ve got going for you is that they don’t engage in pederasty. Or do they?”
The vision in his right eye blurred as Tristan forced the swelling lid to open. A hot flush burned his cheeks as he pushed himself to his feet, fists balling at his sides as he swayed unsteadily. Blood and spittle dribbled across his chest from his split lip.
Beren slapped his brother’s shoulder. “He isn’t denying being swived by the old codgers.”
“I say we give you a few Archs and send you on down to Dresden Township,” Mikken taunted. “You might find a whore to spread her thighs and show you where a cock is supposed to go. If you count a whore as a woman.”
“You can, but they’re still too good for this bag of shit. Save your money; he’d probably waste it trying to find a real man to bed him – provided the old fuckers let him leave. Must be nice being a kept boy, eh?”
Jakkan hooked his thumbs in his belt, ignoring the byplay between the twins as a look of mock comprehension crossed his face. “You were looking at Jayna, weren’t you? Well, for a cockster, you at least have taste. She’s a comely one, but a bit of a squealer; I bent her over a table at the Harvest Festival and put it to her—”
Tristan staggered forward and swung. His knuckles grazed Jakkan’s chin as the more solidly built youth leaned his head back. The blacksmith’s son caught his forearm and gave it a half-twist, forcing him to bend in half to prevent his arm from being jerked from the shoulder. Jakkan’s other fist slammed his bleeding cheek and drove him to the ground once more.
Jakkan delivered a hard kick to the side as he stepped over the youth’s prone body, leaving the younger man squirming and coughing in the dirt. He shrugged out of his leather jerkin and tossed it over a low-hanging tree branch, and thrust his chin at Beren and Mikken as he started rolling his sleeves. “Pick him up.”
Chapter 10
Tristan limped into the manor’s fire-lit kitchen and winced as the door’s pin hinges creaked open. He groaned as he wrapped his swollen fingers around the door’s edge, easing it closed on the moonlit night. The oaken door scraped the tiled floor before latching with a soft click; it had swollen this spring, as it had every spring he could remember.
The young man limped across the kitchen; the swollen tenderness between his legs where a boot had caught him forced him to waddle. He dropped his filthy shirt and jerkin over the back of a chair. With his right eye swollen shut and his left well on its way to matching it, he had no depth perception. The fabric landed on the floor with a thump.
Tristan considered bending down to pick up his clothes and shrugged it off as being too difficult. His balance was precarious enough without tempting it to desert him completely.
He wiped away the drool slipping past his fat, bleeding lip and hobbled toward the counter where the washbasin sat next to a pewter ewer. His boot caught a chair leg and sent it barking across the tile floor. It was enough to upset his already precarious balance, and he crashed into the counter. Water spilled as he upset the ewer, and he was too breathless to swear as the counter edge smacked his bruised chest. Cold water soaked through his britches as he slumped to the floor, his breath coming in weak gasps.
Dragging himself to his feet, he dipped his hands into the water. Dissolved soap burned the cuts and abrasions on his hands, and he realized he could not smell the lye through the swelling and dried blood in his busted nose.
“Was she worth it?” Dougan’s asked from beside the fireplace.
Tristan startled and cursed. He pulled his hands from the water and dried them on his pant legs. The swelling in his lower lip caused him to drool as he glared at the veteran. “What are you talking about?”
The older man stood in his nightshirt, one elbow propped on the mantle while he picked at the gap between his front teeth with a sliver of wood. “You look as though you fell from a tree and argued with every branch about which way was down before annoying the ground for good measure. I doubt you were climbing trees, and since you aren’t likely to beat your face with a rock for amusement, I’ll ask again – was she worth it?”
“How do you know it was over a girl?”
“Two things cause a man to take all wit and sensibility and leave them in the middens – love, and vengeance. You lack a family name to defend, a wife or child to stand for, or a blood debt screaming for satisfaction. I am therefore inclined to think it’s the former rather than the latter.”
Tristan shrugged and regretted it as pain radiated into his neck and down to his elbow.
The older man sighed, bare feet slapping against the tiles as he moved down the mantle. He took down a square bottle and pulled the cork from the neck. He downed a mouthful with a satisfied smack of the lips and handed the bottle to the youth. “The next time you go peeping into the bathhouse, you might want to do a better job making sure the other boys are still far out in the field. Which they aren’t, if the girls are in there in the afternoon.”
“You know about the knothole?”
“Know about it? I’ve been trying to repair the blasted thing for twenty years. The girls knock that one out every time I seal it, and the six others besides.” Dougan took another drink when Tristan displayed a lack of interest in the bottle. “They want to give the boys something to think about, and maybe a reason to marry them. We might not be as uptight about virginity as the gentry and the nobility, but it’s smarter to let the boys look all they want rather than deal with a father who catches them swiving their daughter in the field.”
Tristan stared at Dougan before hobbling over to the table. He lowered himself to a seat with care. “Jakkan thinks I was spying on Rhynna.”
“That arrogant sow? You have better taste than that.”
He chuckled despite the pain it caused. “I tried explaining that to him.”
Dougan set the bottle on the table and seated himself across from the young man. “You would do well to avoid that bastard, leastwise until you learn how to fight better.”
“The man has no honor.”
“Why should he? It was a fistfight. True, it’s impolite to kick a man when he’s down, which it looks like he did plenty of.”
“How we conduct ourselves in battle is every bit as important as winning or losing.”
“For the love of A’Dhian,” Dougan muttered, rolling his eyes as he named a god of war and lifted the bottle for another swallow. “Felden, is it? Sounds near enough to be a direct quote. Yes, he’s right; in war, how we conduct ourselves in war is important, but – battlefield or barnyard – you don’t fight fair in an unfair fight.”
“But honor—"
“Fuck ‘honor.’ Don’t listen to the notions about honor and war Anthoun takes from his books. Honor is standing for those who cannot; it’s fighting to the last breath as it leaves your body, defending those unable to protect themselves. It’s accepting the surrender of an enemy you hate, or staying your hand when it’s easier to slaughter and burn, so you might not have to fight the same war again.” The older man paused long enough for another drink from the bottle. He swallowed and rubbed his palm over his mouth to smooth his mustache and beard. “Fighting fair when it’s a rich bully and his thug friends beating the shit out of you isn’t honor – it’s stupidity.”
The youth’s snorted amusement ended with a pained wince. “Then I am both honorable and stupid, I suppose.”
Dougan nodded and propped his bearded chin in his hand. “Who were you peeping on?”
“Jayna.”
“Thought as much. If you had to lose your wits over a girl, she’s the best one here for you.”
Tristan
winced as he wiped drool from his lip with the back of his hand. “I just wanted a look. I never said it was love.”
“Any fool who covers what he’s doing by insulting the intended bride – no matter how piggish and deserving she is – of a bigger man accompanied by his friends is either in love or an idiot. Though I question your brains sometimes, you’re no idiot.”
“You saw?”
“Which part – the beating you took behind the bathhouse or the one you took in the field?” Dougan’s tongue probed the inside of his cheek as he studied the youth. “Neither. I spotted Mikken and Beren carrying you out to the fields between them. Then the girls came running out of the bathhouse with their shifts sticking to their bodies. The question is, was it worth the beating?”
“What I saw, yes.”
“I was wrong; you are an idiot.” The veteran made a sour sound in the back of his throat and pushed the bottle toward Tristan as he rose. “There is only one thing to do about it until you heal enough to try catching her where those looming idiots won’t see you – get stinking drunk.”
Tristan caught the bottle as it slid across the table. “Considering I faced three of them, I did alright.”
“And I’m fucking the High King of Ravvos,” Dougan said as he stepped toward the door leading deeper into the house. “Drink that down so you can sleep through the pain. I will teach you the best ways to fight dirty once your balls aren’t the size of apples. Don’t let on to Karilen that you want to spread her granddaughter’s thighs, though. She loves you like her own, but an army wouldn’t keep you safe if you tried.”
The youth lifted the bottle with a chuckle as the veteran disappeared through the door. It was whisky, with a smokier scent than the bottle with which he had celebrated the new year. He took a mouthful and blew it across the kitchen as the alcohol bit the gashes in his cheek and the loose roots of his teeth. His eyes watered like a cold winter wind had smacked him in the face as the potent drink stole his breath. He set the bottle back on the table, coughing and trying to catch his breath around the fire burning its way down to his stomach. He missed twice before the glass thumped against the wood.
“Bastard,” he muttered, and wondered why he was grinning at the sound of Dougan’s fading laughter.
SPRING RAINS CAME, and sown fields greened beneath them. The bruises, swellings, and tender spots on Tristan’s body faded – only to have Dougan replace them with new ones. For all that he had been a farmer longer than the young man had been alive, the veteran had survived the War of Tenegath with his life and limbs intact.
“We’re going to leave off with the axe for now,” Dougan explained, vertebrae cracking into place as he twisted his neck. He paced the small clearing beneath the oaks in one of the wilder groves growing within Dorishad’s walls, kicking aside rocks. “You aren’t ready for the sword, much as you might think otherwise. You aren’t fast enough to train with a dagger beyond slash and thrust basics, either. You’re a decent shot with the bow, so you’ll practice with that when time and chores allow.”
“If I’m not going to learn weapons, what am I going to learn?”
In answer, Dougan twisted and threw a punch at Tristan’s head. The young man saw it coming but was so startled that he neither blocked nor ducked. The veteran’s fist plowed into his jaw with enough force to spin him a quarter turn before dropping to the ground.
Dougan grabbed a handful of youth’s jerkin and hauled him to his feet. “You need to learn how to evade a punch before you can throw an effective one. We were using our hands and feet long before swords and spears, so that is the best place to start learning.”
Tristan cradled his jaw in his hand. “I wasn’t ready.”
The veteran patted the youth’s cheek, eliciting a hiss from the younger man. “You never are.”
Thus, he learned to fight with his bare hands. They spent time in the fruit orchards where he dodged and ducked mealy apples, growing faster on his feet for no other reason than to avoid getting pelted with rotting fruit – which Dougan threw with great force and accuracy. He learned how to block fast, hard punches and counter with his own, when it was better to throw a kick or knee, and when to use an elbow rather than a fist.
He seldom landed a blow on Dougan, which was an improvement over not hitting him at all.
Anthoun, of course, disapproved. Dougan persuaded the sage to leave his comfortable library under the pretext for a walk in the orchards, though his purpose was to show him how far Tristan had come in learning to defend himself. The old man watched his lover and ward son circle each other, throwing punches and kicks to the sound of grunts and bruising impacts, and shook his head each time the youth landed on the ground.
The sage raked Tristan’s disheveled, bruised, and bloody appearance with disapproval. “Learning how to outthink your enemy is probably more important than knowing thirty ways to incapacitate or kill him. If it comes to blows, you have already lost.”
To that end, Tristan read until his eyes burned and his brain ached. Anthoun avoided talking about distant lands and strange cultures, certain his pupil would lose himself in fantasies of faraway places rather than focusing on what was practical and valuable. He, therefore, taught the last thing the young man found interesting – the history and politics of the Hegemony of Ravvos – and kept him engaged by asking questions about what they had covered in earlier sessions.
“The Hegemony is a confederation of kingdoms nominally ruled by the High King of Ravvos. The throne is held by Mathonis of Ravvos, scion of the most formidable of the five families who settled this region of Celerus during the Fourth Migration,” Tristan said in response to one such question. “The five kingdoms are Ravvos, sitting on the western shore at the mouth of the River Ossifor, with Kothos, Torrahd, Fershan, and Shreth the next most populous and politically powerful in descending order.”
The sage slouched in his cushioned chair, one ankle crossed over his knee and a glass of white wine held between his fingers. “Tell me more about your homeland.”
Tristan sighed and propped his elbows on the desk, hiding a wince as bruised bones contacted the wood. “Shreth is the smallest of the five kingdoms, not in area but population. The kingdom’s northern third is the most populous, with the realm’s lower third dominated by the Forest of Corarma.”
“Tell me of Shreth’s political organization.”
“King Garoos of House Dremmen currently sits the throne. Though a branch of House Roth founded the kingdom, none of that line survived after Year 637; that dynasty ended with King Harrold the Fourth’s death. House Dremmen was elevated from the hereditary rank of duke as they were the wealthiest and most militarily and politically influential of the ducal Houses.” Tristan moistened his lips with a sip of cool water from his mug. “The Kingdom of Shreth is divided into four duchies; each duchy is divided into three counties and one earldom, and the counties and earldoms are divided into baronies.”
Anthoun set his wineglass on the desk and laced his fingers in his lap. “Excellent. How many ranking peers sit in parliament?”
“One hundred?”
“That’s the Gentry Council,” the old man said with a shake of his head. “Twenty highlords represent the ruling peerage, with sixty-three lesser peers holding baronies within the duchies, counties, and the earldoms. Who is our liege lord?”
“The Earl of Ressent,” Tristan said, confident of that answer. He tilted his head to one side. “Why do we have an earl as our liege, and not a baron?”
“Do you want another nobleman assigning taxes and telling you what to do?” Anthoun asked with a lifted eyebrow. “The honest answer is that none of the nobles can easily lay claim to this part of the country. It’s too far from society, and other than timber, they see little of value. Though the Ashana Sea gives us a long southern coastline, there is no deep-water harbor capable of supporting a decent port. The shoals have too many reefs to make even a shallow-water port a viable investment.
“In terms of land area, therefore, t
he Earl of Ressent is the most powerful man in the Duchy of Riand,” the sage added. “He certainly has more land under his direct control than any nobleman other than the king and the dukes. We are population poor here in the south, however, forcing him to draw the bulk of his taxes – and conscripts, when needed – from his northern lands.”
Flipping the book cover closed, Tristan pushed himself to his feet. “If nobody cares about us, then why bother studying the political structure? The nobles aren’t going to come out here because they’ve changed their minds about us, and we have no voice in the decisions they make.”
“Events happen in the places and times they are least expected. Consider the knowledge I am attempting to impart the equivalent of sending you into a fistfight fully armed and armored.” Anthoun smiled and scratched his shaved cheek. “Nobody ever thought Troppenheim and Ravvos would go to war over a few square miles of land at the mouth of the River Ossifor, but it happened. Nobody expected the War of Tenegath would drag in all the Hegemony’s kingdoms, Caledorn, Reesenat, Merid, and the island realms – but it did. Everyone thought it would be over in a matter of months, and it lasted years.
“The more you study history, the more you’ll discover that, despite our desire for peace, humanity loves war. I suspect we can’t tolerate the quiet.” The sage gave a slow shake and leaned forward, hands folded on the desktop. “If you plan to leave when you reach your majority, you had best understand the history of what you’re walking into. Ignorance will get you killed, leave you longing for death, or wishing that you had never left home.”
Chapter 11
Summer 1414
Spring’s soft rains came less often as summer approached, and oppressive heat and humidity made the fields shimmer and dance. Insects droned in air grown humid and still. Windows left open in the evening in hopes of a breeze invited mosquitoes and midges to feast on sweating bodies; gauzy linen curtains hung around the beds were the only effective means of keeping the bugs out. Summer storms struck fast and hard when they came, with thunderheads billowing into towering columns that flashed lighting and crashed thunder. Birds, insects, and other animals sought shelter as winds whipped through the trees and rain pounded the ground. Vaporous fog rose from warm pools in the muddy ground when the storm broke the heat and passed.