“How many recruits do we have?” she asked the sergeant in charge of guarding the wagon.
“Recruits!” He laughed as though he thought she was joking. “Thirty-six.”
“Close enough to forty. Signal-man! Retreat to garrison!”
The night was no longer quiet. From the water gate Clement could see a distant beacon, its flames subsiding now but still bright in the distance. The roused city echoed with the angry clangor of pots being banged. A mob had gathered at the garrison gate, and all watches had been mustered to guard the wall. Periodically, Ellid’s bugler sounded a signal, which received an orderly answer from each of the scattered companies. The signals told Clement that there had been some few skirmishes, but so far no emergencies.
Clement was feeling very tired. The signal-man told her the time; soon dawn light would start to extinguish the stars. Clement rubbed her face vigorously and shouted at the stable sergeant, “How long does it take to change horses?”
“It’s hard to get the harnesses buckled in the dark, Lieutenant-General,” he said apologetically.
At last, the fresh horses were in their traces, and they were led down the ramp onto the barge, pulling the wagonload of children behind them. The wheels were secured. As the wagon swayed with the movements of the water, Clement could hear children whimpering again. They would quickly learn not to cry, just as Clement had when her soldier-mother came to take her away from the only home she had known.
The barge was loose; the dray horses on shore leaned into the traces. Clement watched until the barge had been towed through the water gate and was picked up by the river’s sluggish current. It would reach a garrison down river by mid-afternoon and from there the wagon would travel to the children’s garrison. She turned away, sighing with relief. Her operation had been a success.
Some six days later, the gate remained blocked by a restless crowd that banged their pots and uttered ugly shouts every time the garrison bell rang. Food supplies came in by the water gate, but three times Paladins had cut barges loose from their tow-horses to be carried away and eventually wrecked by the slow current. Now, as far away as the western borders, lumber mills refused to sell at any price if they suspected the lumber was going to Watfield garrison.
“We can’t manage without wood!” In a temper, Commander Ellid paced Cadmar’s quarters, stepping over and around the clutter of sleeping pallets and gear. Most of the garrison’s officers were sleeping in Cadmar’s quarters at night; four companies slept in shifts in the hallways, and Clement slept with half a company in her own room, while another half occupied it in the daytime. Since the fire, solitude could only be found out of doors.
Clement got up from Cadmar’s table, where she had been going over the duty roster, and took Gilly’s book of maps from its shelf. “We’ll send a company from another garrison to take over a lumber mill,” she said. “Show me where the wood is coming from.”
They discussed logistics, and Clement wrote an order in her own hand, which she had done a lot lately. The harried company clerk arrived, mixed a fresh bottle of ink and trimmed several pens, and left again with a sheaf of paper under her arm. She was not doing duty as a scribe anymore, for she was the only person in the garrison who could cipher well enough to produce reliable measurements for the building plans. “No workers,” grumbled Ellid, still in a temper. “No materials, no facilities, no plans—” The door opened to admit an aide carrying a tray. “No edible food!”
Clement glanced at the unappetizing mess the aide set down on the table. There was a distinct smell of scorched potatoes.
Ellid continued, “And in these conditions I’m to rebuild a garrison in three months’ time? I can predict now that we’re spending the winter without a roof over our heads.”
Clement said, “I would apologize that my operation has made yours more difficult, but since there’s been no more rocket attacks, it seems justified.”
“You did what you had to, Lieutenant-General.” Ellid sat down to stir a spoon in what passed for stew, then picked up a lump of bread instead, with no butter, of course. “No kitchen,” she muttered. “But my old cook would have managed, by the gods!”
Clement hacked open a lump of bread and dropped brick-hard pieces into the watery stew to soften. She was weary of other people’s complaints. Even in the garden, where she worked sometimes to repair the damaged beds and coax the summer flowers into bloom, her fellow gardeners could be heard whining to each other.
“No information?” asked Ellid after a while. Perhaps it had occurred to her that Clement, also experiencing her share of difficulties, had no one to complain to.
“No information,” Clement said. “No one in Watfield admits to knowing anything about the rocketeers. No one claimed the bodies. The Paladins themselves were taken by surprise; that’s all I’m certain of. It took an entire day for them to muster. If they’d known about the attack beforehand, they would have mustered already.”
Side by side, they forced themselves to eat the wretched stew. Ellid finally said, “Better an old enemy than a new one, eh? At least we can anticipate the Paladins most of the time. But these rocketeers, they’re a different kind of people. Do you remember, when we first came here, how angry we used to get because these people didn’t fight like we expected them to?”
“I was nine years old,” Clement said. “But I remember my mother was pretty outraged. That was a strange time.”
“In Sainna, soldiers fought soldiers. Same tactics, same style.”
“Well, we’re never going back to Sainna, are we? Even if the wars are over in that country, no one would be glad to see us return. After thirty years in exile we’d look like an invading force to them.”
“The wars were neverover in Sainna.” Ellid lapsed into a silence, perhaps reflecting gloomily, as Clement was, on their equally untenable situation in Shaftal.
Their silence was interrupted by a gate guard sent to fetch Clement. “A group of gray-hairs want to talk to someone about the children. They want to negotiate their return, they say.”
*
“You can’t go down there, Lieutenant-General,” said the gate captain. “They’ll tear you apart, and it’ll be on my head.”
From the watch tower, Clement surveyed the surly crowd below. She saw people in neat, close-fitting clothing that advertised their leisure and prosperity. She saw laborers in longshirts and breeches with padded knees. She saw young people flirting or playing games of dice, and she saw old people who had brought chairs to sit in. Many of the people waved strips of white cloth on which were painted messages no one on the wall could have read. Baskets of bread were being passed overhead, from hand to hand. Clement caught a whiff of it, and watched with ravenous fascination as a man took a steaming loaf and tore it into pieces to distribute to his friends.
Clement could see no children. Most of the old people appeared to have gathered close to the gate. The siege gate was still closed, and no one could see in, so the people below looked up at the towers. “Lower a ladder,” Clement said.
“Lieutenant-General!” the captain protested.
She gave him a look, and he turned briskly away to shout commands. She stripped off her weapons and insignias, and, when the ladder was lowered, climbed quickly down. Someone threw a turnip at her, but with shouts and shoving the crowd seemed to get its hotheads under control. Clement set foot on stone, and turned to find herself surrounded by old people, who showed no sign of being disconcerted by her arrival in their midst. “What’s your rank?” asked one, and another said, “Do you speak our language?”
“I’m told I speak it perfectly,” said Clement. One of the three people closest to her looked uncomfortably familiar. A painted strip of cloth was wrapped around her neck and hung down the front of her shirt—a farmer’s work shirt, extravagantly gathered at the shoulders to allow free movement of the arms. The old woman said to the others, “This is the one who took our children. She’s an officer.”
There was a silence. The
crowd surged, but then subsided. An old man said, “It was a stupid thing to do.”
“So was burning the garrison,” said Clement.
“Our children had nothing to do with that!”
“I was told you wanted to negotiate,” Clement said impatiently. But someone had already jabbed the man with an elbow.
The woman said, “You look famished. Would you like some bread?” She waved a hand in the air and one of the baskets of bread made a swift journey to them. Somehow, though Clement meant to refuse, she had half a loaf in her hand. One bite, she instructed herself, but could not make herself stop before three.
These were very canny people. “The children,” she said to them, “Are no longer here.”
“What!” they cried.
“They haven’t been here for six days. Shout their names and bang your pans all you want; they can’t hear you.”
“Where are they?”
Clement leaned against the ladder, with one arm wrapped casually around a rung. These people might not realize it, but the soldiers above were poised to raise the ladder, with her on it. She took another bite of the excellent bread. “What will you offer?”
“Take us instead.” The woman gestured at the crowd of gray heads.
It was the second time this old woman had offered herself in place of the child. And it revealed just how little she and her fellow Shaftali understood the Sainnites, for it had not even occurred to them that the children might be more than mere hostages. Clement replied, “I’ll trade for the rocketeers. One child for useful information. One child for every rocketeer, delivered to us alive.”
“They are children!” said one of the people in disbelief. “They are not weights on a scale. They are children!”
“They are weights on a scale as far as we are concerned. Is that all you have to tell me?”
The woman said with unconcealed frustration, “We can’t just deliver these people to you! We don’t even know who they were! One market day, they were in the crowd: strangers, loudmouths with strange ideas. A few days later, your garrison was attacked. That’s all anyone knows.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Clement said. “Well, I appreciate you making this effort to meet with me.” The impatient man uttered a sardonic snort and was jabbed with an elbow again. “If anyone wants to talk again, you can ask for me by name—it’s Clement.”
She started up the ladder, but paused to add over her shoulder, “Maybe you’d better clear the gate. We don’t really want to shoot you, but we will if we must.”
The mob began banging their pans again, and continued long after Clement had safety reached the tower. The remains of her loaf was distributed to the guard, one bite at a time, as long as it lasted. Clement wished she had managed to bring up the entire basket.
Whatever impression Clement had made on the townsfolk, there was no particular result. The crowd at the gate did not dissipate. Everyone in the city now seemed to be wearing those printed strips of cloth. No one came to the gate asking to talk to her. Perhaps no one actually knew anything useful about the garrison’s attackers, but it seemed more likely that no one was willing to be publicly identified as a traitor.
A message from Purnal, who commanded the children’s garrison, eventually arrived. It confirmed the safe delivery of the children, then lapsed into one of his lengthy vituperations, full of dire predictions of what would become of the Sainnites now they had become baby thieves. “What idiot dreamed up this bizarre plan?” he wrote. “Did anyone even try to think of what might result?” She only read one page of his jagged, angry handwriting, and then threw the entire missive into the fire. Cadmar had always done the same with anything that came from Purnal, while commenting that Purnal’s brains were in his leg—the one that had been cut off.
Chapter Nine
All that remained of the spring’s plague was a flea in a bottle, which Zanja chanced upon one day, in the bottom of a clothes chest, underneath a pile of winter clothing that she was layering with strewing herbs to keep away the moths. Hard red wax sealed the cork, but the flea hopped vigorously in its prison. Karis never mentioned the flea, and Zanja never asked about it.
Winter snow had barricaded the household, but now the scattered neighbors regularly came calling, and the road that could be glimpsed from the apple orchard had become a busy thoroughfare. Karis worked long days at the forge with two local youths who served as her casual apprentices. Emil and Norina wandered Shaftal, J’han remained deep in the south with the Juras. Medric read books and wrote letters all night, and slept during the day. Leeba spent entire mornings or afternoons with her friends. It was quiet.
Early in the summer, Zanja, Karis and Leeba traveled to a fair in the nearby town. A company of players performed one drama after another, shouting their lines over the hubbub of hucksters, jugglers, musicians, and peddlers. Leeba spent her pennies on exotic candies that she immediately gobbled up, and ran wild with a giddy mob of her friends. In the tavern, people who rarely traveled to town lined up to stand drinks for Karis and ask for advice, having brought with them the evidence of their difficulties: withered leaves, unsprouted seeds, underweight babies, the mummified remains of aborted livestock, fistfuls of soil, vials of water, examples of weeds that they could not eradicate. As Karis listened, considered, talked, and politely took an occasional small sip from her constantly refilled cup, Zanja ingratiated herself into a group of traveling merchants who had left their stalls to the care of their underlings and had come in to escape the heat.
“Now that’s a rare sight,” one of them commented. “An earth witch consulting at the fair like old times.”
“She’s a local secret,” Zanja said, though it was not exactly true any more. It had taken a couple of years for Karis to become known in the region as an earth witch, but now the word continued to spread. Some of the people here today had journeyed a good distance to seek her advice. Yet, though Karis was certainly the only earth witch in Shaftal, and though rumors of the lost G’deon had subsided but not been forgotten, it apparently had not yet occurred to any Shaftali to put the two together. The Sainnites might have instantly recognized Karis as a threat, but to the Shaftali she simply was one of them.
“Aren’t you drinking?” asked a merchant.
“I’m cursed by a dislike for ale, and there’s no cider to be had at this time of year.”
“Ah, it’s a curse indeed! In this hot weather!”
Zanja said, “I’m curious about what happened in Watfield. I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything?”
“We’ve just come from there.”
“That’s a long journey!”
“But this fair is on the way to the big ones in the north…”
The complications of a traveling merchant’s schedule were already well known to Zanja, but she pretended to listen.
“So what happened in Watfield?” she was finally able to ask.
“Well, you know that it was a sneak attack, in dead of night. And the attackers used some kind of device that flew through the air and exploded with fire. And they say the fire couldn’t be put out…”
As Zanja listened, she remembered the first time those devilish devices had been used on a Sainnite garrison: the hissing of the lucifer, the rockets’ garish and explosive flight. Her hand had lit the fuses. Though she smiled wryly at the memory, setting a garrison afire was not something she felt inclined to do again.
Later, she went out into the dusty yard, which was occupied by several donkeys, some chickens, and a few sickly sheep awaiting Karis’s examination. A raven flew down from the rooftop and reported on Leeba’s activities. Zanja’s daughter had skinned a knee, been yelled at by a merchant, and was now watching a puppet show.
Zanja said, “Give Emil a message for me.”
“Emil is free to speak to you,” the raven said. “He asks if you have learned anything about the attack on Watfield.”
“It certainly was a rocket attack, and it sounds to me like the rockets carried Annis’s Fire. Anni
s didn’t like Willis, but I suppose he might have flattered her into giving him the recipe. If it was Willis and his people who attacked Watfield, what is he trying to accomplish?”
“He’s captured the imagination of the people. He’s made it even easier to get recruits to his cause.” The raven paused. “I believe that Willis and his company are responsible for several other incidents this summer. They are moving quickly from place to place, not following a predictable pattern. They haven’t attempted something like what they did in Watfield, but everything they do seems too provocative to be laid at the door of local Paladins.”
“That stupid man is going to take over Shaftal! And in the name of a G’deon he wouldn’t like if he ever met her!”
“Actually,” said the raven in Emil’s moderate way, “his dream—G’deon suits his needs much better than the real one would.”
“His dream is more impressive, certainly,” said Zanja, thinking of Karis in the tavern, peering at the roots of a stunted plant that had been carried three days there for her inspection.
“Superficially, yes. But when people just want their immediate hurts to be soothed, they don’t look too closely at the cure that’s being offered.” The raven added, “Now the Sainnites have retaliated by snatching a cartload of young children.”
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