In a Time of Treason

by David Keck

  _________

  AND SO DURAND joined the heaving circle around the wrecked sanctuary while a gang of workmen hammered and sawed for the duke, and Durand cursed the madness of it all. Great songs rose among the masses, their arcane harmonies curling in the high darkness while the labor of marching took place in the rutted earth below. People caught each other’s elbows and watched for the children and the old.

  As he jostled in the throng, Durand found himself stealing glances through piers and broken windows of the sanctuary where the dead lay like ivory men in the candlelight. The duke sat crumpled at the head of his son, while Almora, with her ink-brush hair, nestled against Deorwen’s chest—the little thing was not sleeping, but Durand thanked Heaven that Deorwen could be there with the girl’s father half-mad. And then he saw Deorwen’s eyes searching the darkness where he marched, hidden, and he wondered what comfort there was for her in all this chaos.

  Her father and brother were marching among the mourners—barefoot and stained, dragging their chains like souls already deep in some Hell.

  “I should grab them and fly this city of madmen,” Durand muttered. He’d pulled Moryn from a mountaintop with the Rooks ranged against him and three armies fighting in the streets. “And here, there’s half an army that would lend me aid.” But, that night, such a clumsy stroke must mean war. Abravanal’s men were bound with ancient oaths and they too had suffered for Mornaway’s sin. Worse, after what Durand had seen at the Fuller’s Bridge, he doubted that Severin would submit to any attempt at rescuing him. In his own way, the old man was more stiff-necked than his bloody son.

  Durand looked into the Heavens—only to be reminded of greater disasters. Great glacial landscapes of cloud swung low over the duchies of the north like the face of a falling moon.

  And he circled through the dark beneath the ominous Heavens, making wide swinging pass after wide swinging pass. Near the candlelit mouth of the sanctuary, his course brought him near the scaffold where delegations of Abravanal’s trusted lords slipped through the sanctuary in ones and twos to plead. They scowled and muttered at the scaffold. But Abravanal was unmoved.

  He saw Coensar the Champion standing watch in the sanctuary. Turn after turn, Durand watched the man: his gray hair, the slim blade of Keening—but the glint of an inward gaze. This was not the captain, alert. This was a man trapped and thinking, his eyes fixed. It would have been so much tidier if one or the other of them had died. There had been a wealth of chances for bad luck in the last weeks—Durand felt a wry tug of irony as he stumbled through the gloom—and Coensar had certainly done his best. Now though, Durand haunted the city Coensar meant to command, an untidy reminder.

  A glance into the dark beyond the marching circle revealed that there were indeed creeping things half-visible among the scorched acres just as Oredgar had warned: long-limbed creatures with slack bellies, shadows with vulpine gazes. At the limits of sight, Durand thought he saw something as tall as an oak, watching.

  But the song climbed higher around Durand, and he pictured Coensar on the day they broke the siege, striding among the rafters as he cleared that nest of bowmen above the fight. He conjured up the heartbeats before the betrayal. It had all happened very quickly. There Coensar had been, standing above the fighting like a ship’s master on a pitching deck. Alone, he had thwarted an ambush that should have slain their army, commanding the battle he was winning. But then he must have spotted Durand—the shield-bearer he had trained to knighthood—charging off with Lamoric on his saddlebow and Coensar’s chance was lost, the whole of his future bundled up on another man’s horse.

  But when Coensar swung his ugly peasant’s ball of tines, Durand had been trying to save their blasted liege lord! But now . . . if Kieren was cunning, Coensar was the hero, the Champion. Men would follow him no matter how Abravanal faltered. They could rebuild the dukedom on his shoulders.

  Durand rubbed at his knotted cheek—and glanced up to spot the Baron of Swanskin Down. The man picked Durand’s face from the crowd in a glum instant. He passed Sallow Hythe and the others, each man ignoring Durand except, perhaps, for a flicker of his eyes.

  Durand shook his head, bewildered. “Has Coen told them?” The turf seethed with secret watchers. And, out against the dark, the giant figure still looked on. It leaned upon a crook. Why should the Champion of Gireth stain his own colors? There should be no reason for these men to look his way, unless something had forced Coen’s hand and they were puzzling over what to do with the man who knew Coensar’s secret.

  With so many of his thoughts unsettled, Durand had been keeping clear of Berchard. Now, he wondered if it wasn’t time to ask the man a question.

  Finding Berchard was the work of a moment, and in a few heartbeats, he had pulled the stocky knight out into the dark. “Berchard,” he said, “when did you know?”

  The startled man gulped. “Hells, boy. I thought one of the Strangers had—”

  “When did you know what our captain had done?”

  The knight’s eye rolled. “Do you see them? It’s thick with spirits, man.” A taloned hand spread near the man’s ankle. “Ah. You must see the devils. Fighting men and leeches often do—it’s death that opens the eyes.”

  “I’ve good reason, Berchard.” If the barons knew, they had choices to make about what to do with their heroes. Could they trust the secret to a man like Durand? “I think I’ve a right, haven’t I?”

  With a grunt, Berchard squinted up into Durand’s face. “I came upon an empty village once upon a time—on the River Tresses up near the Blackroot Mountains. Just a few hovels on the bank with gardens plowed back into the wood, and I’d been walking days, coming up from Sallow Hythe, if I remember, and night was coming on. And the last thing I wanted to do was sleep under a thornbush. Did I say it was raining?”

  Durand seized the man. There were things in the gloom prowling nearer, low and catlike. “By Heaven, man! It’s a plain enough question.”

  Berchard stopped cold. There was no joking in his face, and, when Durand freed him, the man continued almost as if he were reading the words from the Book of Moons. “—Pelting down,” he said. “And I looked through the whole place, thumping on the doors and pushing my way into the little wooden sanctuary they had. But there wasn’t a soul to be found.

  “And then it struck me that there was grass standing pretty high in the street. And I thought: there’d been sheep on the meadow and pigs in the forest, but there was precious little moving in the town. So I shoved my way through the door of the first old hovel—and the reek I met!

  “You hear stories of whole villages where some fever carries off every living soul—”

  “Aye.”

  “—And no one’s left to bury the dead. But this was only an ox. Dead, tied, and sinking into its own filth behind barred doors. Maybe been there for a moon or two. Every hovel was the same. I found a dog who’d strangled himself on a stout lime lead. And dead stock barred or fenced in. But not a man.

  “I didn’t know what had befallen the poor devils, but I was ready to take my leave. So I started back toward the wellhead where I’d tied my horse—when I saw it.

  “It could have been someone’s washing: just a patch of red homespun matting the tall grass. But it was a body; hardly anything left of her. Brown as roots and yellow as old crockery. No sign of why. And I picked out another patch of cloth, and another—a path leading back behind one of the hovels. Body after body lying in the bindweed, thistle, and cabbages. Not a stain, nor sign of murder.

  “Now, standing over the yard in back of the house was this dung heap. And the bodies made a path to the thing. First women, then little children—sprawled and horrible. Little kirtles. Bonnets. Finally, hard against the dung heap, five or six men, armed with hoes and forks.

  “So there I am back of some hovel with bodies strewn like stiff mats in the grass all round. It’s still raining. An open grave fanned round this dung heap and me in the middle—when I hear it—Ssssss! Like eggs on a hot pan
. I leap, and the dung heap is shifting, big clods rolling. Something alive is uncurling in that warm reek. And I knew that I was just in time. And so I got my good eye shut and ran like a child, tramping on more than one empty suit of clothes on the way I’ll tell you—cracking them bones.”

  “Just in time for what?” prompted Durand.

  “I’d seen a wet glint of scales. But I’m no fool, and I’ve lived when others have died beside me. I’d heard tales down the Gray Road of a serpent born of a dung heap. Born of a cockerel’s egg, choked with poison. And a glance that’ll kill a man, certain, if he sees it. They call him the basilisk.

  “It’ll have been one of the little lads who stumbled on it. And the others will have come to see what their friend had done, or if he was teasing them. And then the mothers, and then the husbands mad and armed with what they could find. All dead. And any one of them would have been fine if they’d just left bad enough alone. If they’d just decided that they didn’t need to know what had happened. Or if they’d just turned their backs. But that’s never the way.”

  “From the day Coen struck me down. You’ve known since the very day.”

  Berchard shook his head. “You see?”

  “You were there in the Painted Hall.” When Durand lay torn to pieces, his face smashed like a jug. They’d known before Badan and Ferangore. Before Durand could think or stop himself, he’d knocked the old knight sprawling and was striding over him. “Who else? Who else knew?”

  You could see the cords in Berchard’s neck, straining under his beard. If the barons knew, they might be plotting anything, even now.

  “Everyone,” said Berchard. “Lamoric. Your brother got it out of me. Heremund . . . Our Badan might’ve been the only—”

  “I’ll speak to the barons,” Durand snarled. He wouldn’t run. Two-score faces turned his way as he left his friend lying in the rubble and pushed into the procession. All the hours upon the floor in the Painted Hall, all the days in Yrlac, and they had known.

  His face was burning when he broke free of the crowd and stalked toward the gaggle of barons where they colluded by the scaffold—if he’d had a sword, God knew what he might have done. As it was, he set his hand on Sallow Hythe’s shoulder and spun the man round.

  “We must speak,” he said. Sallow Hythe turned slightly, letting candlelight fall on Durand’s face—his brow clouded a moment. “You could be no one but Durand Col,” he said, and Durand remembered that he still bore scars and that his head remained bare from the surgeons’ razors.

  “Here,” said the elegant baron. “I suppose we must deal with every issue when it comes to us. There is a chamber or two remaining in this old shell. At the foot of the tower.” The barons ushered Durand to a low door where the masonry survived. As he stepped over the threshold, the door rattled shut behind him.

  Durand’s father lifted a torch. And Durand stood alone with his father and the barons of Gireth just as he had been on the far shores of the mere ages before. Even Kieren was there.

  “He has no business dragging us anywhere against our will,” Swanskin grunted. The gruff old man paced the room, peering about himself as though he expected the ceiling to come down.

  Sallow Hythe merely closed his eyes. “We will forgive the lapse, I think. For the conversation is one that must be had.” They had the look of men choosing an uncomfortable course, and were bracing themselves to follow through.

  “We have heard a story,” said Sallow Hythe, kneading his temples. “It seems that our Champion has allowed ambition to tempt him into dishonor. And that you were the principal victim of his . . . error in judgment.”

  Durand’s father stood across the room, saying nothing.

  “We are further led to believe,” continued Sallow Hythe, “that Coensar intends to allow you to decide what becomes of him. It is my belief that Coensar is unable to accord his recent actions with his beliefs concerning his own character.”

  “Is that what bothers him?”

  “Did we need more trouble at this moment? You have asked. You are granted as clear an explanation as may be. Lamoric is gone and half the peers of Gireth are lost with him. The city has been laid waste, and manors for leagues around have been sacked by the raiding parties of Yrlac’s army. But have you seen how the people rally? How they gathered here? Even before we returned, they were rebuilding.

  “I imagine that self-absorption is to be expected of a man in your position, but you must have noticed the work gangs—they are not paid laborers.” He raised his hands toward the city beyond the vaults of the chamber ceiling. “It is good will. The undaunted spirit of a land uncowed by the indifference of its faraway king and the brutality of its enemies. When you see the masses marching in their circles. When you hear the mallets and axes in the streets, you hear their defiance.

  “I do not wish to debase this spirit with too much calculation, but morale can be squandered if close account is not taken of it.”

  Young Honefells interrupted, his blue eyes rolling at his elder’s elaborate diction. “Host Above, Sallow Hythe.”

  But Swanskin preempted an argument with a rumble from the dark. “It is simple, boy. There’s not the coin for this work. Whether we war with Mornaway or no, we’ll be sweeping the treasury floor for the last penny long before we’ve so much as renewed the walls. All the silver in Abravanal’s lands will be gone in a thousand hire-swords’ purses. Is it not so, Kieren?”

  Kieren nodded low. “Abravanal is scarcely able to put food in the mouths of those who have volunteered.”

  And so Sallow Hythe spread his long-fingered hands. “His Grace cannot afford justice. Not for you. Our heroes cannot be rapists or thieves or oathbreakers or traitors, for we cannot afford to dishearten their admirers. Not just now, anyway. Not while they are needed.”

  “I have not asked,” said Durand.

  “How many men would desert us if we poisoned the tales of brave Sir Coensar, the Champion of Ancient Gireth, and his holding the rampart for his young lord? Perhaps they would decide that he’d let Lamoric die—or killed him. The duke and his son might both have been made fools of by this mercenary captain. However it came to pass, we would lose some, that much is sure. It might be a third of all our laborers.”

  His face was grim as he paused. “It is more than one man is worth.”

  Durand’s gaze traveled over eyes of flint and winter blue, his father’s included. And for the first time, Durand wondered if these men meant to kill him.

  “Why does the duke not say these things with his own tongue?” he murmured, conscious of being a large man in a small space.

  Swanskin’s broad nostrils flared. “Because you are little better than a common soldier! Because he thought four barons might suffice to serve as messengers! We’ve no time to bandy bloody words with children! There is a host beyond these doors with its lord trussed and ready for the chopping block!” His shout was a physical blow, and Durand felt a stab of panic.

  But then he looked closer at the great men, and saw them shifting in their boots like guilty children. “But that’s not the reason; His Grace does not know.”

  “No,” said Honefells. The bluff young lord gave a grudging, slanted smile. “You’re no fool, Durand. Outrage is the best cloak for a lie, and Abravanal has not come himself, because he does not know. We know. His son has died. Both sons. That is enough for him. He is not party to this. Don’t think ill of the old man.”

  Swanskin frowned. “But, one way or another, the tale must die. We must be satisfied.” Durand knew what he should say. He should let Coen’s treason stand. He thought of his nights with Deorwen. Of the things Coensar knew—or guessed—and did not say. “Long ago, Coensar told me that I need let no blow go unanswered. . . .”

  “You see,” said Swanskin. “A young man’s blood is quick and this injustice will work like a sliver. How if there is some other sleight? How can there not be? How long will he hold his tongue while Coensar lives in fame? We must be finished here. How long have we got ti
ll dawn? Is there an hour?”

  At this, Baron Hroc swelled like a bear. “Are you pushed for time? Why then have we been standing here gabbling with the boy? If he can say neither ‘yes’ nor ‘no,’ why’d we let him speak at all? The time to slit his throat was when he stepped through that door!”

  “You mistake Swanskin’s meaning,” Sallow Hythe began.

  Hroc’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh! So you think I can’t hear what’s spoken plain before me, do you? The boy’s been mad and a fool, but he’s bled rivers for you bastards and he’s never given any man alive cause to doubt his word.”

  As his father rose to defend him, all Durand could think of was Lamoric. And the man’s wife. He’d put a man off a cliff. He’d stolen through the dark of his master’s house. He couldn’t think.

  But Swanskin was speaking. “Then, if we’re to trust his word, we must hear it!”

  Durand seized the door handle and propelled himself outside, hoping for space and air to think and reason.

  Instead, he blundered smack into a scene from the end of the world.

  A thousand bodies were stirring upon the sanctuary floor. Gleaming with sacred oils, they struggled and, finally, climbed to their knees, their winding sheets hanging from their bare limbs. Durand saw Abravanal on his feet, not knowing which way to turn. Deorwen clutched the awestricken child to her breast. And the crowd, at a standstill now, moaned like the sea—five thousand gaping faces. Over all their heads, the sky was churning, the hanging mountain twisting apart, wrenched into spines like the points of a crown. Row upon row, the dead turned with their eyes on the northern sky and their arms wide—each man summoned to prayer by the war in the Heavens.

  At Durand’s back, the barons stumbled from the sanctuary chamber, almost forgotten. While, at the very same instant, Marshal Conran reeled through the broken portals of the sanctuary, hardly a step from Durand. His enormous hands caught Durand’s shoulders as if he were a child.

  “The king,” he breathed. His eye stared so wide that Durand wasn’t sure he even knew there were dead men praying around him. “He is alone. He lashes at the trees. Gnarled branches. Unhorsed! But there is someone in that forest with him!” An impossible gust of wooded air boiled up around the towering knight: the smell of sopping acres under naked trees. His hands were ice and twisting tighter and tighter. Durand saw something moving in that broad, blue eye. In a moment, the big man would snap Durand’s shoulders.