He had gotten as far as the third letter of the alphabet when Rubrik returned. His arrival woke Ulrich, who had been dozing. The priest sat up slowly and moved more stiffly than he had when he went to sleep. Karal frowned; that was not a good sign. Not only because it meant his master was very, very tired, but because Ulrich generally suffered from stiff and aching joints when the weather was about to change for the worse.
"I have good news of a sort," Rubrik began. "I have excellent accommodations for you—the problem is that you might wish to decline them. Your host—is actually a hostess. She is the local Commander of the Guard—as it happens, this village is her home, she has her command-post here, and she has offered her guest room to you."
Ulrich considered this for a moment, as Karal blinked, and tried to imagine a woman in a position of military command. Women were not even permitted to serve with the Karsite army as Healer-Priests; only men could serve with soldiers. The old laws said that women who took on the "habit and guise" of men were demons, to be controlled or destroyed—whichever came soonest. Female mercenaries captured by the Karsite Army had fared rather badly, historically, something that Ulrich had never tried to conceal from his pupil.
For that matter, in Karse, the law still forbade women to hold property on their own; all property, whether it be land or goods, must be owned by a male. By Karsite standards, this Commander was doubly shocking.
On the other hand, Her Holiness had been making it clear that the days of laws forbidding women to do anything were numbered. Vkandis had made His will clear on the subject.
I guess that eventually we'll even have women fighters in our Army, given the way that things are going. Somehow, he did not find that as horrifying as he should have. Maybe he was just tired.
Maybe being around Her Holiness Solaris had taught him he'd better never underestimate the competence of a woman.
"If the lady in question is not offended by us, I fail to see why we should take offense at her offer of hospitality," Ulrich said, finally. "I would be very pleased to meet our hostess. I have never met a female warrior face-to-face before. I believe the experience will be enlightening."
He rose carefully and smoothed out the front of his riding robe with both hands. Karal scrambled to his feet, realizing belatedly that Ulrich had just accepted the unknown woman's invitation.
"I did tell her precisely who and what you are," Rubrik replied, with a twitch of his lips. "Since she is the local Commander, I had to inform her anyway. She said something similar about you, sir."
"No doubt," Ulrich replied dryly, but followed their guide out the door, through the taproom (which was still just as noisy and crowded as it had been when they entered), and back into the night, with Karal trailing along behind.
Evidently someone had already seen to their mounts, either stabling them at the inn or bringing them on ahead, and Rubrik had (correctly) judged that, weary as they were, neither Ulrich nor his secretary were ready to climb back into a saddle again. Instead, they left the courtyard of the inn, turned into the street, and walked the short distance along a row of shops and homes to the large house at the end. The narrow two-storied buildings seemed abnormally tall and thin to Karal; each had a workshop or store on the ground floor, and living quarters above. The house at the end of the street differed in all ways from those lining it; this building had no commercial aspect to it, and it was as broad as three of the others.
It wasn't as big as the homes of several high-born nobles that Karal had seen, nor even as large as the inn, but it was quite sizable compared to its modest neighbors. The main door was right on the cobblestone street, with a single slab of stone as a step beneath it. Torches had been lit and placed in holders outside the white-painted door to light their way, and a servant opened the door before Rubrik could knock on it.
The servant ushered them into a wood-paneled hallway, lit by candlelamps. It was less of an entryway, and more of a waiting-room. They were not left to wait for the lady on the benches however—as soon as the servant shut the door, he directed them to follow him down the wide, white-painted hall to a room at the end.
Karal expected a lady's solar, or a reception room of some kind, but what the servant revealed when he opened the door was an office; businesslike, with no "feminine" fripperies about it. Their hostess was hard at work behind a plain wooden desk covered with papers—she nodded at the servant, who saluted and left. Rubrik gestured to them to go in, following and closing the door behind them.
The lady set her papers aside, and looked them both over with a frank and measuring gaze. Karal flushed a little under such an open appraisal, but Ulrich only seemed amused by her attitude. If she was as high an officer as Rubrik had indicated, there was nothing of that about her costume, at least not as Karal recognized rank-signs. Their hostess wore the same Guard uniform that they had seen before, with perhaps a bit more in the way of silver decoration.
Personally, she was quite attractive, and could have been any age from late twenties to early fifties. She had the kind of face that remained handsome no matter the number of her years, a slim and athletic build, and an aura of complete confidence. This was someone in complete authority; someone who knew that she was good at her work, and did not bother to hide that fact. Karal was intimidated by her, and he realized it immediately. The only other woman who had ever had that effect on him was Solaris, and the Son of the Sun was relatively sexless compared to this Valdemaran commander. He was very glad that he was not the one that most of her attention was centered on.
"Well," she said, slowly, lacing her fingers together. "I've faced your lot across the battlefield, my lord Priest, but never across a desk. I hope you'll understand me when I say that I find our situation a great improvement."
"I, too," Ulrich replied smoothly. "Few Valdemarans would have such understanding, however, I think. Or is it forgiveness?"
"Huh." She smiled, though, and nodded. "I don't know about your Vkandis, sir Priest, but my particular set of gods tells me that past battles are just that; past. I am something of an amateur historian, actually. I like to know the causes of things. Some day, I expect, I'll have the leisure to sit down with one of your scholars and find out just what started this particularly senseless war between us in the first place. For now—" she waved one hand at the door, presumably indicating the house beyond it, "—allow me to do my part to cement the peace by offering hospitality." Her brow wrinkled for a moment, then she recited, in heavily accented and badly pronounced Karsite, "To the hearth, the board, the bed, be welcome. My fires burn to warm you, my board is laden to nourish you, my beds soft to rest you. We will share bread and be brothers."
Karal's jaw dropped. The very last thing he had ever expected to hear from this woman was the traditional invocation of peace between feuding hill families!
She smiled broadly at his open-mouthed reaction but said nothing.
Ulrich, for his part, remained unperturbed, although Karal thought he saw his mentor's lips twitch just a little. "For the hospitality, our thanks. Our blades are sharp to guard you, our horses strong to bear you, our torches burn to light your path. Let there be peace between us, and those of our kin." He then added to the traditional answer, "And I do mean 'kin' in the broadest possible sense."
"I know that," she replied. "If I hadn't, I wouldn't have offered you the blessing." She nodded, as if she had found Ulrich very satisfactory in some way. "Well, I think I've kept you standing here like a couple of raw recruits long enough. You've covered a fair amount of ground today, and I won't keep you from your baths or beds any longer. You'll find both waiting in your room, and my servant will show you the way."
And with that, the servant opened the door again, and she nodded in what was clearly a dismissal.
It occurred to Karal that a real diplomat might have been offended at her blunt speech and curt manner, but he was just too tired to try to act like a "real diplomat."
Then again, anyone who would be annoyed at a soldier acting, like a
soldier is an idiot. No, she didn't mean anything more or less than she said.
Instead of trying to analyze the encounter, he followed the servant, who led them to another room on the same floor, but on a different hallway.
It was tiled, floor and walls, with white ceramic, and contained two tubs, one a permanent fixture, and one smaller one obviously brought in so that Karal would not have to wait for his bath, both with steam rising from them. He and Ulrich had shared bathhouses often enough—they both shed clothing with no further ado. The servant came to collect their clothes as soon as they had both gotten into the tubs, indicating by pantomime that their beds lay in the next room.
Karal soaked his sore muscles, then wrapped himself in one of the towels and followed Ulrich into the bedroom. Valdemaran sleeping robes were laid out for them, a nice touch, he thought. He found his baggage, rubbed in his salve, and fell into the cot in the next room in a complete fog. Once his head touched the pillow, the fog became total darkness that did not lift until the servant woke them in the morning.
Five
After three days of what could only be described as endurance riding, Karal was finally getting used to the pace. He was also getting used to Rubrik, and it seemed that their escort was getting accustomed to them as well. His formal manner loosened a bit, and during the fourth day of travel, he began to talk with Karal directly.
At that point, Karal had to revise his opinion of their escort sharply upward, for Rubrik was even more of a scholar than he had guessed. He spoke four languages besides his own, and his rattling on about the geography, husbandry, and economics of the places they passed was no mere prattling to fill empty ears. He knew this area and the conditions in it as well as its own overlords did.
And that only made Karal more curious than before. Who was this man, that he had so much information at his very fingertips? Surely he had not memorized it just to impress or occupy them.
When they left the home of the lady Guard Commander, clad in riding gear that had been freshly washed and cleaned by the lady's servants, gray skies threatened rain. The rain did not actually materialize in the morning or even the early afternoon, but toward late afternoon the clouds thickened, and the wind picked up. Ulrich's joints hurt him quite a bit at that point, so they actually stopped early for once, at least two marks before sunset.
Their stopping place was yet another inn, this one with a courtyard surrounded on three sides by the inn itself, and on the fourth by the stable. A gate in the middle of the stable led into the courtyard, and this arrangement cut the wind completely. Ulrich descended from his saddle with a gasp of pain, and Rubrik was concerned enough to ask the Priest if he thought he would require the services of a Healer.
"Not unless your Healer can give me the body of a man three decades my junior," Ulrich replied with a ghost of a smile. "No, this is simply the result of old age. I shall retire to my bed with a hot brick and some of your salve, and with luck, this rain will move on so that we can follow suit as soon as possible."
But the rain didn't move on—in fact, no sooner had Karal seen his master settled into a warming bed than it began to drizzle.
The taproom of the inn was mostly empty; the miserable weather was probably convincing people to stay by their own hearths tonight. There was a good fire in the fireplace, though, quite enough to take the chill out of the air, and on the whole it was a pleasant place, all of age-and smoke-blackened wood. Heavy beams supported the ceiling, and below their shelter, gently curved tables and benches polished to satin smoothness were arranged in an arc around the fire. As the drizzle turned into a real thunderstorm, Karal found a perch at a window-seat table and watched the lightning dance toward the inn through the tiny panes of a leaded window.
"Impressive, isn't it?"
The eyes of Rubrik's reflection met his in the dark and bubbly window glass. The man smiled, and Karal smiled tentatively back.
"Would you prefer I left you to your meditations?" Rubrik asked politely.
Karal shook his head. "Not really," he replied. "You can join me, if you like. I've always been fascinated by storms—when I was a boy at an inn like this one, I used to sneak away and hide in the hayloft to watch them move in."
"And let me guess—you used, as an excuse to go to the stable in the first place, that the horses were frightened by the thunder and needed soothing, no doubt," Rubrik hazarded, and grinned, taking the seat on the other side of the table. "My father never believed that one, either, but his stableman was always on my side and backed me up with specious tales of how I had kept the prize mounts from hurting themselves in a panic."
Karal realized that at last their escort had just let something fall about his own past. Up until now Rubrik had been very closemouthed about anything of a personal nature. His father's stableman. So that means he comes from a well-to-do family, if not of noble blood. So his father was no mere farmer as he implied. He responded in kind. "My father never minded too much; there's less work at an inn during bad weather. It's a lot easier for people to stay at home, watch their own fires, and drink their own beer. And of course, once the few travelers who wanted to try and beat the storm got in, no one else would arrive until it was over, so we stableboys didn't have much to do either after we'd dealt with their beasts." There. It was out. If Rubrik was going to be offended by his low birth—
"That's probably the only time you didn't have much to do," Rubrik said, with a conspiratorial grin. "I've always felt a little sorry for inn folk during wonderful weather. They never get a holiday like the rest of us do. It hardly seems fair, does it, that in the very best of weather, when everyone else is out enjoying themselves, people in an inn have to work three times as hard tending to the holiday-makers? I would guess that storm watching was the closest thing to a holiday you ever got."
Karal chuckled and brightened. "I never thought about it, actually. It wasn't as bad as you might think, so long as you like horses. Father never made it easier on me than it was for the other horseboys, but he was a good and just taskmaster." He clasped his hands together on the tabletop and stared out at the rain. "I never really saw the heavy work, when it came to that; I wasn't old enough for anything other than light chores, like grooming. The Sun-priests took me at the Feast of the Children when I was nine, so I was never big enough to do heavy work."
Rubrik looked at Karal for a moment, then stared out at the lightning. The silence between them grew heavy, and Karal sensed that he was about to ask something that he thought might be sensitive.
Probably something about us, about Karse and the Sun-priests. That's not a problem; Ulrich already told me what I can't say. No reason to avoid his questions, especially not if the information he wants is common knowledge at home. I think he's been looking for an excuse to talk to me alone, figuring that I will be less wary than Ulrich. He felt himself tense a little. He would have to be very canny with this man. It would be easy to trust him; hard to remember to watch what he said.
Rubrik coughed politely. "I—ah—suppose you realize we have all kinds of stories, probably ridiculous, about the reasons why the Sun-priests took Karsite children—and what they did with them afterward—"
Karal only sighed, then rested his chin in his hand. "The stories probably aren't any worse than the truth," he said at last.
Rubrik nodded and waited for him to go on. Encouraged, Karal told him all about his own childhood, what there was of it—how the Priests had taken him, how he had been educated, and how, finally, Ulrich had singled him out as his protege. He told their escort about the Fires, too, and caught an odd expression on his face, as if what Karal had told him only confirmed something horrible that he already knew.
"The children taken are either extremely intelligent; intelligence that would be wasted in a menial position, or are children with the God-granted ability to use magic, of course. Ulrich told me later that I had both qualifications, but my ability to use magic is only a potential, rather than an active thing. He called me a 'channel,' but I've
never found out what that means, exactly. I was absolutely terrified that at some point I'd start showing witch-powers like my uncles did, and a Black-robe Priest would come for me and that I'd end up going to the Fires," he concluded. "But I never did—though in one sense, I suppose, a Black-robe Priest did come for me."
Rubrik waited for him to say something; out of pure mischief he held his peace. Finally the man gave up. "Well?" he said. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Karal grinned; at least this would be one thing he could surprise the man with. "Ulrich was a Black-robe—that is to say, a Demon-Summoner—before Her Holiness Solaris made the Black-robe nothing more than a rank. And now, of course, there aren't any Fires. The Cleansing ceremony has gone back to what it used to be. Ulrich and I found the original Rite in one of the ancient Litany Books." He didn't make Rubrik ask for the answer this time. "It's a Rite of Passage, that's what it originally was, before it was perverted; children who are about to become adult bring something symbolic of their childhood to be burned as a sign that they are ready to take on adult responsibilities. Ulrich says it's easy to change holidays and rituals to suit a purpose, since they're usually subjective anyway. Harvest festivals and fertility rites are coming back, too, the way they were a long time ago."
Rubrik took all this in thoughtfully. "Solaris has made many changes, then?"
"Her Holiness certainly has! Mostly she has reversed changes that had been made by corrupt Priests seeking nothing more than power," Karal corrected. He wasn't certain why, but for some reason he felt that point needed to be absolutely clear. Solaris was not some kind of wild-eyed revolutionary, despite what her critics claimed; what she had done in the Temple thus far was restoration, not revolution. "Ulrich is not precisely certain how long things have been wrong, but we know that it has been several centuries at the least. True miracles ceased, and the illusions of miracles were substituted. The God-granted power of magic that should have been devoted to the well-being of Vkandis' people and to His glory was perverted into the use of that power to bring temporal power and wealth to the temple and the Priests. And Vkandis is very real, not an imaginary God like some people have!"
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