The Earth Goddess

by Richard Herley

  Rian woke Hothen as gently as she could. At the usher’s insistence, she dressed him in the rather musty military-style clothes he had last worn some months ago, at an official audience with Lord Torin. Hothen was too sleepy to notice or object; his head drooped as she fastened the collar. Her fingers pushed against the defenceless softness under his chin. She looked up at the usher. “Are you certain he’ll be safe?”

  “Yes. Quite certain.”

  Yes, Rian told herself. Of course Hothen would be safe. Lord Torin would never harm him in public.

  “Please hurry,” said the usher. “We must be getting back.”

  They had almost reached the Receiving Room when it happened. Coming down the stairs and along the final corridor, approaching the brightly lit doorway, Rian heard Lord Torin addressing the assembly, his high, precisely modulated voice clearly enunciating each word. He was saying something about the homelands, praising the citadel, when there was a sudden loud noise: a thud or a smack, so loud and unexpected that it seemed in its wake to fill the room with a swaying, unreal, transparent silence. Rian saw guests in profile, horrified, appalled; only Ika’s face remained, for the moment, calm. Then there came, out of sight, from the front of the hall, the sound of someone falling, crashing backwards. A woman screamed. Reality rushed in and the whole hall was a turmoil of shouting, confusion, of people rising to their feet.

  Before Rian could prevent it, Hothen had been snatched by the usher and propelled to the doorway. A soldier, one of the Commissioner’s men, seized him and he was bundled through the throng, towards the dais.

  Only then did Rian realize that Lord Torin had been shot. She could see nothing of him – the dais had been surrounded, and whether he had been killed or merely wounded she could not tell. His bodyguards were forcing their way to the back of the hall: the arrow must have come from there. But many of the other soldiers, and all the Commissioner’s men, were making no attempt to help find the assassin. Instead they were forming an orderly line, pushing people back from the dais and opening up a passage from the main doors.

  A prolonged and imperious roll of drums silenced the assembly and halted the bodyguards. Even Lady Torin looked on, stunned, incredulous, as the doors swung open and a broad-shouldered man of forty or fifty, his dark-grey cloak sweeping the air behind him, strode to the dais and mounted it. Rian had never seen him before. His uniform was that of a general, the highest rank below a lord’s. On his breast was the green and scarlet emblem of the Garland, the elite of officers dedicated to the Home Lord, and Rian began to be aware that everything this evening had long ago been planned.

  He glanced sideways and down before levelly contemplating the faces of Lord Torin’s dinner-guests.

  He did not choose to speak at once. The leisure of his silence charged the hall with menace, power, inexorable right; he was all these things himself, but what he represented was even stronger, more certain and implacable. He represented the Home Lord: he represented the Gehans.

  “My name,” he said, “is General Kasachie Teshe. I am commanded by Lord Heite, Gehan of the Gehans, to make known a proclamation of the Prime. By order of the High Council, meeting in the third session of the second quarter of this, the Year of the Blue Hare, be it known that Hewzane, Lord Torin of Brennis, has been tried in his absence and found guilty of the following capital crimes against the empire. One: treachery. Two: murder. Three: theft. You are to know that sentence has been executed in accordance with the decree. The traitor’s corpse will be dismembered and burned. You are to know also that Balom, General of Valdoe, Abisende, General of the Coast, Crill, Commander of the Weald, and Tourse, Commander of the East, have been tried in their absence and found guilty of capital crimes against the empire. They will be conveyed to the citadel for execution of sentence.”

  There were cries of astonishment and dismay. Rian looked and saw that these men, four of the highest officers in the land, had been pinioned and rudely stripped of their weapons and insignia.

  “Finally,” said General Teshe, “I am commanded by Lord Heite, Gehan of the Gehans, to make known a proclamation of the Prime concerning the lineage of Brennis Gehan Fifth and the rightful inheritor of the Valdoe domain.” He turned to Bohod Khelle and Rian’s blood ran cold. The general spoke and she heard what she prayed she would never hear. She heard the words that signalled catastrophe, for herself, for her children, for all that remained at Valdoe of human feeling. And for poor Hothen too.

  For the general had said: “Bring forth the boy!”

  * * *

  The system of exploitation devised by Brennis Gehan Fourth was so reliable that it had survived unchanged to the present day. Although based on the methods used in the homelands, it was more flexible and better suited to the needs of an island domain.

  Most of the Flint Lord’s income was gathered, not through taxes, but less directly, through trade, for he controlled the extraction and price of the flint upon which forest clearance and the production of crops depended. Fishing, the breeding of livestock, and certain other trades were taxed at source, by means of tithes and imposts – to which the harvest surpluses of consistently successful villages were also liable.

  The harvest inspectors, nominally soldiers with a military rank, were experts in everything to do with the land. Many were themselves the sons or grandsons of farming families, and well understood the problems caused by the weather, by disease, by evil spirits. Often, and this was a measure of how well the system was accepted, their technical advice was sought and closely followed. During drought or pestilence it was in their discretion to waive or reduce liability to impost, and even, through their regional commanders, to seek direct relief from the Trundle.

  That was the tradition. In practice, the reputation of the harvest inspectorate had declined since the days of the Brennis Gehans. Under Lord Torin the inspectors had become increasingly disliked, and then hated and feared, by the villagers in their control. Their visits now gave rise not to grudging resignation, but dread.

  Farming villages received three inspections a year, the first in spring, the next in the growing season, and the last in autumn when the crops were in. Few villages now escaped the impost. Even the meanest and most wretched settlement received its three visits each year. At the third the harvest was assessed and arrangements were made for the impost – in grain, meat, hides, or sometimes in crafted goods – to be carried to the nearest fort.

  It was this autumn inspection that the farmers dreaded most. Once regarded as incorruptible, the harvest inspector and his men now saw nothing wrong in accepting whatever welcome each village had to offer. Depending on the warmth of that welcome, the assessment might or might not be revised. Some of the inspectors attached to the eastern forts had, so the rumours went, taken this practice one stage further. With the complicity of Commander Tourse himself, they were now demanding outright bribes.

  Beilin Crogh had heard these rumours, and it was a source of regret to him that he had been posted to Matley fort, at the westernmost edge of the domain. The villages in this region were mostly quite new and undeveloped, offering little scope for the imaginative methods adopted by his colleagues in the east. Beilin Crogh hoped one day to be transferred there, or at least to a fort with a less conventional commander than his. He needed more than a soldier’s pay; he dreamed of settling eventually at Valdoe Village, in the shadow of the Trundle, where he would live with his family and slaves and earn his bread by keeping bees.

  But time was getting short. Already he was thirty-four and his eldest son was almost grown. His dream was beginning to look like nothing more than that. Younger men had been promoted instead of him; Beilin Crogh had come to realize that he was not well suited to this work, and now it was too late to change. He was too generous, too unsuspecting. His men, he felt, laughed at him behind his back. All his attempts to toughen up had come to nothing: he forgot each resolution as soon as it was made. This was not the way to achieve life’s ambitions; this was not the way to eminence in the h
arvest inspectorate.

  “You,” he said to the man walking beside him. “Walver. Fasten that breastplate. Are we soldiers or what?”

  Walver looked at him in surprise. After another two or three steps he tightened the straps of his leather cuirass, glancing for an explanation at Lorco, an equally insolent soldier who had only recently been moved to Beilin Crogh’s team. Lorco’s front teeth had been lost in a disgraceful brawl at the fort. He smiled at his superior, showing newly red gums, raising his eyebrows, and ostentatiously checked the straps of his own armour and leggings.

  Beilin Crogh suppressed a stern rebuke. What could he do with men like these, the dregs of the domain? There was not an ounce of sense among the four of them.

  “Lorco,” he said. “What is the name of this village we’re coming to?”

  “Sturt, sir.”

  “Very good. And what is their crop?”

  “Can’t remember, sir.”

  “Tell him, Fairmile.”

  In a resigned tone Fairmile recited the tedious inventory of the summer inspection. So many roods of emmer, so many of oats, barley, lentils, millet; so many swine, goats, milk-beasts, heifers, a solitary bullock …

  Beilin Crogh allowed his mind to wander. He liked the woods at this time of year. They exhaled a special smell: damp, rotting, melancholy, which meant the onset of another winter, the season when he had least work to do and could spend some time at home. This village today would be one of the last.

  The road, leading downhill now through the oaks, became much wetter, strewn here and there with red and yellow cherry leaves. It had rained heavily every day for the past week. At the bottom, near the edge of the fields, Beilin Crogh saw to his annoyance that the mud was so deep as to be impassable. He would have to force a way round it, through the undergrowth, and, of more importance, carriage of the impost to Matley would be delayed.

  This was the first matter he raised with Bocher, the head man, who received him, as usual, in the Meeting House. Upkeep of official roads within two miles of the village was Bocher’s responsibility, not Valdoe’s.

  “I’m sorry,” Bocher said. “We’ll see to it. More ale, master?”

  The customary form of address, coming from Bocher’s lips, sounded unpleasantly servile. Some radical change in his manner had taken place since the last inspection. Beilin Crogh narrowed his eyes.

  “No,” he said. “No more ale. I would like to begin at once.”

  5

  Between sleep and waking, Paoul heard unfamiliar sounds outside and adapted them to his dreams. He was dreaming again of the Meeting House on that first afternoon, when Tagart had answered the council’s questions and Paoul had sat beside him listening. The sun was beating on the polished surface of the floor, pouring through the open shutters, bleaching the interior of all colour and yet imbuing it with its own special, ethereal light. Through the doorway he could see, with a clarity remarkable even for his eyes, each detail of the rising slope of trees. The shape and pattern and colour, the very texture of each leaf was quite distinct. His gaze lingered on the finely toothed edges of the cherry leaves, the cherry leaves beginning to change from green to yellow to red. They were real, and not real, for he could see through them and they were nothing. Coming down the path below them – the path that he and the others had walked just now – he could see nine soldiers like those he had seen at the Valdoe fairs. Four of the soldiers were carrying a tenth, their leader, on a wicker seat. This man had Tagart’s face: he was Tagart, dressed, not in armour like his men, not in the clothes Paoul remembered, but in crude, grimy, and ill-fitting furs and skins. His arm was wounded and he was in pain. Paoul saw him raise his hand and the blood trickled across his palm and down the backs of his fingers.

  But Tagart was also beside him here, in the Meeting House. Yet this Tagart did not have Tagart’s face. He was well fleshed; his thick, curly brown hair had no trace of grey; his dark eyes twinkled. His beard had been shaved a few days since. For some reason Paoul liked this other Tagart. He knew him to be a friend.

  The negotiations were over. Tagart stood up. So did Bocher, and Dagda, and the whole village council. They were afraid. They were afraid of the soldiers coming down the hill.

  “It’s there, isn’t it?” Tagart said. “By the stone.”

  Despite Bocher’s denials, and then his pleas, Tagart made him fold back the altar-mat. A trapdoor had been cut into the floorboards. On either side, let into the wood so that it lay flush, was a white rope handle.

  An unpleasant smell which Paoul had noticed earlier now grew stronger.

  “This will go badly with you if you’re lying,” Tagart said. “Open it.”

  “But, master —”

  “Open it, I say!”

  Bocher and his wife each grasped a handle and heaved. The trapdoor was heavy and stiff. As they pulled, as it juddered and creaked, Paoul knew what they would find. Floating in the bilge under the Meeting House floor, under the altar-stone, face up, they would find the source of the sickly sweetness that Paoul alone had been aware of till now. They would find his father’s corpse.

  But the trapdoor would not open. Tagart spoke more harshly, threatening to bring his men. Bocher and Dagda pulled harder, forcing the door, scraping one edge against the cobbles. From the widening crack came daylight which spilled into the dank, greenish darkness of the tool-house and hurt Paoul’s eyes.

  He sat up, flinching and holding up his hands, and discerned the shapes of two men – one of them Bocher – standing in the doorway.

  “I told you, master,” Bocher said.

  The next voice, the voice of the other man, Paoul had heard before, but only in his dreams, and so he knew he must be dreaming still.

  “What’s that in there? Is it a child?”

  “Nothing for you to concern yourself about, master.”

  “Who is he?”

  “A slave. We found him in the woods. My woman’s brother has gone to make a price.”

  “Bring him outside.”

  “The tool-house contains no produce, master, and slaves do not count towards the impost.”

  “I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. Bring him outside at once.”

  “May I remind you, master, that I am head man?”

  “Do you seek to argue with me?”

  Paoul remembered where he was, in the village tool-house, among the racks and stands and bundles of communal implements. This was the only securable building in the compound, with solid walls and a close-fitting door, against which Bocher had wedged a prop so that Paoul could not escape. He had been here for many days, perhaps nine or ten, grieving, remembering, lying in the darkness and listening to the rain. Until this morning the rain had scarcely stopped, if at all. It had blurred one day with another and he had lost count. Each morning he had been allowed out, for an hour or so, to keep him healthy. He had seen nothing of Berritt or the other children: the whole atmosphere of the village had changed. Accompanied by one of half a dozen different villagers, he had been made to walk inside the palisade until it was time to go back. Although they had also fed him well, kept him warm and, in the past few days, given him infusions in milk or water of centaury, brooklime, and then willow-bark, he had become more and more feverish, so that now, even though he was beginning to think that he might after all be awake, this version of reality seemed little different from the one in his dreams, or rather, in his nightmares, each of which had flowed into the next to make a continuous and inconclusive whole.

  His father was dead. Tagart had been murdered for his sake. Tagart’s body, and the bodies of the others, of all the people he had loved best, had been dragged away and hidden in the woods. Only Paoul had survived. He had been the cause of all their deaths – how, he did not understand – and now he was utterly alone.

  He allowed Bocher to pull him to his feet and lead him out into the unbearable brightness of a fresh and cloudy autumn day. Flinching and shielding his eyes, he could not believe at first what he saw. The other man, the on
e Bocher had called “master”, was the second Tagart, the Tagart of the dream.

  “How he stares at me,” the man said. Gathering up the folds of his cloak, he dropped to his haunches so that his face was just below Paoul’s. “What is your name, boy?”

  Paoul was afraid to speak. The man’s eyes were kindly, dark, precisely as he had seen them a moment ago, in the bleached, unearthly light of the Meeting House. This too was certainly a dream, the strangest dream of all: this too was taking place in sleep. If he spoke he would wake and lose even this imaginary friend.

  “How long has he been in there?”

  “A day or two,” Bocher said. “He has not been well. We thought it best to keep him safe. If he tries to go back to the woods alone, he will surely die.”

  “How can he go back to the woods? The gates are barred. Without a ladder he can’t climb the palisade.”

  “He might try, master, and that too would be dangerous.”

  “Can he talk?”

  “Yes. But he is not well.”

  “I forbid you to put him back in that filthy hole. Look after him properly. Let him have the run of the village, at least until your woman’s brother gets back. He can’t possibly escape.”

  “As you wish, master.”

  “Good. Now, I think we are more or less done. It is time to fix the impost.” He took a last, not unsympathetic look at Paoul. “He won’t fetch much, you know.”

  Bocher humbly agreed.

  On the man’s initiative, he and Bocher set off towards the Meeting House, leaving Paoul alone, still feeling dazed, standing in the mud by the tool-house door. The man was taller than Bocher, but rather round-shouldered. His drab military cloak was stained with much travel; his boots looked well worn. Paoul had already guessed that he might be a beilin, a harvest inspector, for he had seen one before, in another village.

  Beilins were soldiers, and soldiers came from the forts. Everything to do with the forts, according to what Tagart had told him, was to be shunned and feared. But this beilin was just a man, an ordinary man. At no advantage to himself, he had made Bocher let Paoul out. Perhaps he might be trusted: he might even turn out to be a friend.