by Daniel Ford
“I collected no gold link from him! There would be records! The value of his animals alone…”
“I told you he spoke the truth,” the choiron said, his voice cutting through the baron’s words like an axe into a tree stump. “If you have no record that is none of his doing.”
“Last I saw of that link, your men were fighting over it in the dirt,” Allystaire offered, with a mocking mildness of expression.
“Let us address the other charges. I see little headway to be made with this one,” Symod intoned.
“Very well,” the baron said, his face cooling, even paling a bit. “May we present men who will give evidence?”
“You may. So long as they know that if they lie to me, I will press a heavy sentence upon them and upon any who fed them lies,” the choiron warned.
The baron gestured to one of his servants, who ran at a sprint for the house that served as a keep. He quickly returned with four people, one of whom walked with a pronounced limp. They tromped over to the baron’s side, arraying themselves on the platform behind his chair. Allystaire recognized the limping man as the survivor of the warehouse. He hesitated to put weight on the leg he’d been knifed in and so stood awkwardly, hunched over. The other three, two men and a woman, he did not recognize, but the patched homespun they wore added another touch of incongruity to this already mad scene. They looked as though they wished they could hide behind the baron’s chair, literally.
“First on my behalf and his own, Choiron Symod, is Rugard of Bend.” The limping reaver hobbled forward, his face uncertain.
“If you are not giving evidence you must stand and leave the platform, my lord,” the choiron said, waving his right hand dismissively. The baron staggered to his feet and dismounted the steps, sinking into his own armchair, the feet of which began to sink into the ground as the intensifying rain stirred and churned the dust.
Rugard looked hopefully at the empty chair and sank into it with visible relief when the Sea Dragon’s priest waved a hand at it. He sighed audibly, then tried to recover some dignity by straightening his posture and pointing at Allystaire. “That man’s a coward who’ll backstab a man, and a murderer!”
“I have not asked you a question yet, Rugard of Bend. I have not even formally admitted you to the assize. BE SILENT.” For the first time, Allystaire heard the choiron bellow with all the force of his voice; he felt the urge toward silence bearing down upon him like a strong hand clasped over his mouth.
Rugard parted his lips as if to protest or apologize, but no sound came out; he worked his jaw, moved his lips and his tongue, and still nothing. His face paled, and he slowly closed his mouth, his eyes drifting, almost sheepishly, to the planks at his feet.
“Now. Do you, Rugard of Bend, attest upon the wrath of the Sea Dragon, that all testimony you give here today will be truthful? Swear.”
He nodded and timidly opened his mouth, managing a ragged whisper. “I swear.”
The choiron nodded and, after a pause, gestured toward Rugard. “Now. You say this man—” the beringed hand, heavy robe draping over the wrist, swung toward Allystaire “—is a coward, a backstabber, and a murderer. Why do you say this?”
“He bust into our place, our warehouse, while we was finishin’ the business he paid us fer, and started attackin’ wi’ hammer and sword till me mates was dead or near enough.”
Symod tilted his head quizzically. “I have a question for the Accused,” he said, turning slowly to Allystaire. “What does he mean, business you paid them for?”
Allystaire cleared his throat. “I had thought to secure the release of the folk they had enslaved by bargaining for them as though I meant to buy them.”
“If you had paid and could take receipt, why did you then attack?”
Allystaire took in a small breath and licked his lips before answering. “The realization—actually, the fact was pointed out to me by another—that in so doing I had given them precisely the profit they wanted, and freed them to attack more helpless folk.”
“Profit is not a crime,” the choiron pointed out, turning his hand palm up, as if weighing something. “Braech is the Lord of Trade and Accords.”
“Slavery, marauding, murder, and rape are crimes, and profiting by them must surely be crimes as well,” Allystaire said quietly, but fervently.
“Are you some force of law in these parts,” Symod asked, “to go passing sentence and punishment upon criminals, then?” Rugard made some noise of protest until the choiron demanded silence by extending his hand towards the man, palm out.
Allystaire thought for a moment, then shook his head lightly. “No. But I am no blackguard. Any man who would see such crimes done, or profit by them, surely is.”
Symod smiled carefully again, considering Allystaire with his narrow green gaze. “Once again you speak of knowing who and what you are…and are not. I suspect we shall hear more before we are done.” He stared a moment more, then turned back to Rugard. “How many in your band?”
“What, my lord?” Rugard was caught off guard. Probably can’t count that high, Allystaire thought, but kept the notion to himself.
“How many men in your band? Do not make me repeat myself again.”
“Right near a dozen, m’lord.”
“A dozen men,” Symod said, slowly, as if savoring the words with twisted lips. “And you call this man a coward for assaulting the lot of you by himself?”
Rugard’s pale cheeks flushed darkly. “He took us by surprise, is all. If ’tweren’t for his backstabbin’ we’d’ve ‘ad him.”
Symod chuckled drily as the rain became a steady pound and began to gather in his hair and stream down his face. Allystaire heard it pinging off his armor as his hair slickened with it, saw the eddying dust begin to give way to mud. Another peal of thunder rolled over Bend, as more lightning played over the wide mouth of the Ash.
“From ambush, then. How did he do it?”
“I can’t speak t’it ‘xactly m’lord, I wasn’t at the front but I know’d ‘e’d’ve never got past me mates that way, and those folk—”
Symod cut him off and rose from his chair, his face a mask of cold fury. “I did not allow you to come before the assize to repeat what someone else told you, only to tell what you saw. All I hear from you is cowardice and hearsay and a petty need for vengeance against a man who bested you. Since you came before the judgment of Braech, you will receive his justice as well.” He pointed one sharp finger at the man and spat the words, “Scourge that man out of the gates of this place.”
An uproar swelled from all quarters. The Baron of Bend sputtered himself purple, unable to summon the strength to stand. Rugard blanched and nearly fell from his chair in wordless shock. The folk clustered behind the wounded reaver shrank as if flinching from a blow.
“No.” Allystaire surprised even himself by speaking up. “If you want him dead, Choiron, give him a weapon and me room to swing.”
“Do not attempt to gainsay me in my assize!” Symod swung the weight of his rage upon Allystaire as lightning flashed and thunder cracked once again, now directly overhead. “I am the Court and you are but the Accused. Be silent!”
Once again Allystaire felt that powerful weight pressing on his mouth, but he struggled through it. The effort of merely pushing words past his lips felt like dragging a warhorse up a hill. “No,” he pressed on. “He would die rotting with the wounds of a scourge on his back. I offer him something clean.”
The choiron’s rage drained in shock. For a moment, his poise nearly faltered, but he quickly recovered himself with another small, flat smile. “No. Besides, why should you protest this man’s death, since he is, as you have said, a murderer and rapist, a reaver and blackguard?” He waved forward the liveried men who were hesitantly climbing the platform; they seized Rugard, whose wounded leg went out from under him, and he was dragged away, blubbering.
He
’s a coward and getting a coward’s death, Allystaire observed. A death he did little to earn, he countered himself. And less to stave off. No counter-thought followed. Aloud, though, he replied, “I do not protest his death, only the manner of it. If it is true that I passed sentence on his fellow slavers, at least I carried it out myself. Will your hand wield the scourge, Choiron?”
Symod’s jaw tensed and his eyes flashed, widening even as rain streamed into them. He turned from Allystaire, seated himself again, and pointed at the baron. “Your other witnesses had best be relevant, Baron Tallenhaft Windspar of Bend, or this assize may well find against you. Call the next.”
“If it please you, Lord Choiron, I have two to call together. Enoc and Fraim, both fishermen and citizens of Bend.”
The two remaining men advanced cautiously, clearly cowed by the priest. They both knelt reflexively and lowered their rain-soaked heads. “Do you, Enoc and Fraim, both of Bend, attest upon the wrath of the Sea Dragon, that all testimony you give here today will be truthful? Swear.”
“I swear m’lord,” the men responded weakly. They stood again, and Allystaire could see, even from several feet away, the yellowing of one man’s eyes. The sots Idgen Marte spoke of.
“Describe to me what you saw, then.”
The taller of the two, and older if the grey in his hair was any guide, cleared his throat and opened a gap-filled mouth. “We was takin’ refreshment in a taproom on the Street o’ Sashes, m’lord,” he began, air whistling through his teeth at refreshment and Sashes. “When we saw that man stride across the street, armed as ‘e is now, and when some guardsman answered, that man right there, ‘e made to follow ‘im inside.”
The other man, shorter and paunchy in squalid and oft-patched canvas pants, nodded emphatically. “Then when the guardsman’s back was turned, ‘e goes and draws a weapon. And ‘e waits till just the moment ‘e, the guardsman, is turnin’ round, and ‘e clobbers him good. Beautiful shot, it ‘twere. ‘spect it brained him right there. Then just as easy as y’please, ‘im,” he pointed at Allystaire this time, “walks o’er the corpse bleedin’ and brainin’ onto the ground as calm as y’please, like ‘‘tweren’t no more’n guttin’ a fish.”
Symod nodded slowly, turning toward Allystaire again. “Is this true? Did you attack this gate guard by ambush and deceit?”
Your word against two men who haven’t fished in anything but their own vomit in years, he thought. But there was the matter of being Godsworn. I have broken enough oaths in this life; I do not mean to add to the pile. Finally, he nodded slowly. “Aye. I brained him much as they say.” A pause. “Had I not, he would have roused the crew and I would have worsened my already bad odds.”
“Then you admit to the crime you are accused of?”
Allystaire shook his head. “I admit to the method they describe. I maintain that it cannot be a crime to kill a man engaged in making slaves of poor folk.”
Symod smiled coldly. “Were you some kind of legal scholar, hrm? Is that why you were Castellan of Wind’s Jaw Keep? For your great knowledge of the law of the land?”
“No. Though I am educated enough to know that there is no law in any of these parts upholding slavery, and that if he claims to make one,” Allystaire went on, pointing one gauntleted finger at the baron, “it holds no weight because he is not a legitimate baron. Not in a legal sense.”
At that, the man who styled himself Baron of Bend rose from his seat with a roar and took one step, his delicately shod foot slipping up to the ankle into the sudden whorls of mud. With the help of sodden servants, he was able to extricate his foot, but the elegant slipper was a total loss. He was never able to utter a word.
Symod rolled his eyes and continued to ignore the witnesses who stood, soaking, hats in hand, a few feet away from his dais. “Perhaps not in a legal sense, but tell me, Sir Allystaire, what makes a legitimate baron?”
Allystaire wearily shrugged his shoulders with a heavy clank. “I do not care to debate politics with you, Choiron. We are here for an assize.”
“And it is for that reason that you will answer any question I put to you,” Symod replied coldly, eyes narrowing again.
“As you will. What legitimizes a baron is when enough men call him that and do his bidding on the back of it. When he has enough spears or swords or bows to make his command mean something. He has those things only because, I suspect, Baron Delondeur is busy pressing the borders he shares with Barons Innadan and Telmawr, so he looks the other way, lets this patch of misery run itself so long as it pays regular tribute. When it stops, or when he is no longer looking east or south,” Allystaire said, turning from the choiron to the baron in his dripping finery, “he will devour you like a bear snapping a fish from a stream, and you will just be another pile of shit in his tracks.”
The Baron of Bend was too stunned to respond, but the choiron roared with laughter, throwing back his head and letting the rain fall upon him; the lashing wind boomed his laughter over the courtyard. “Oh…oh I can see you have met Baron Delondeur, Sir Allystaire. Indeed.” He turned back to the two wet fishermen before him. “Have the two of you anything more to say?”
“We’re tellin’ the truth m’lord” stumbled over “We ain’t lyin’ yer emm’nence”—in truth, Allystaire couldn’t tell and didn’t care which of the men said what.
The priest turned again to Allystaire. “Have you anything else to say to their accusation, which you have confirmed is true?”
“Only that the reaver courted his own ruin by taking slaves. Whether he died looking at me or looking away from me made little matter to me at the time.” A pause. “He was armed,” Allystaire added, tilting his head speculatively. “But he was slow.”
Symod snorted with mild laughter.
Meanwhile, the baron had come to resemble a wet, bulging sack of offal rotting on the now-ruined cushions of his chair, which had sunk a further two inches into the gathering muck.
Only one witness remained, a woman. She had little grey in her brown hair, but the lines on her sun-browned face were deep and hard; the combination made it hard to measure her age. She stood unmoving and uncomplaining in the driving rain, and didn’t seem to be following all the talk that floated around her. Symod dismissed the other two with a wave and then cleared his throat imperiously. She looked up and shuffled forward slowly, not meeting his gaze.
“And your name?” Symod’s powerful voice oozed condescension.
“Yolande, yer worship,” the woman answered. Her voice was distant.
“And you are here because?”
“Morrys was m’husband,” she replied, then turned her face toward Allystaire. The driving rain filled the many lines on her face with a constant stream of water. “Morrys was the man you, ah, brained, was yer word, m’lord. The man on the gate.”
“Morrys, then. Did you know he was a slaver?” Symod sat straighter, utterly unbothered by the rain.
The woman shrugged, returning her gaze to the boards at her feet. “I ‘spected ‘e was up t’nothin’ good. Told me ‘e was just a sword-a-hire and after divvyin’ the la’est loot ‘e wanted to take a southerly ship.”
Allystaire felt his guts twist a bit; they twisted more when the woman reached into a pouch on her belt and fumbled with slick fingers before pulling out a small piece of blue stone. My lapis, one small, gem-loving part of him couldn’t help but think.
“He gimme this, said ‘twere more t’come in silver, mebbe gold. I guess this is yours, m’lord,” she said, holding it toward Allystaire. “I ‘spect yu’ll be wantin’ it back.”
The choiron chuckled deeply. “Indeed, Yolande, I believe that is part of the gemmary that Allystaire used for buying slaves. Slaves your husband helped take.” He waved a hand to dismiss her, and stood, gathering his rain-slicked robes about him, though the sealskin he wore kept him dryer than the rest of them. “Profit from slaving is ill-gained,” he declaimed, tu
rning the weight of his gaze and voice on the woman, “and no one has any right to keep it nor to tax it. Give it back.” Moving with surprising haste, Yolande scrambled over and deposited the small bit of gemstone, crudely broken off the larger hunk, into Allystaire’s gauntlet and scurried away.
“I am ready to declare my judgment,” Symod said, his voice seemingly amplified by a peal of thunder behind it. “Sir Allystaire acted boldly, and the Sea Dragon ever rewards boldness! These false charges you have brought, Baron Tallenhaft Windspar of Bend, are dismissed. Allystaire emerges clean, in this, his victory. Remember well your Oaths to take no vengeance upon the other. Sir Allystaire, would you ask any restitution?”
Allystaire’s gaze was fixed on the shrinking huddle that was Yolande, already creeping off the stage. He shook his head curtly, and then looked to the choiron. “Am I dismissed, then? Is this mummer’s dance done?”
Symod smiled again, and the rain slackened. “Not quite. I have said that Braech favors boldness, Sir Allystaire, and you are bold indeed. His favor would ever be upon the man who takes on a dozen, knowing that his cause or his benefit is at stake, and emerges stronger. I told you that ere we finished this day you might better know yourself, and I tell you that this storm that has blessed us today is a sign of even greater favor from the Sea Dragon!”