by Daniel Ford
“Come now, Idgen Marte. You witnessed what I…” There, Allystaire paused and shook his head. “No. Not what I did. What was done through me. You saw.” He looked down at the boy and patted his shoulder. “What is your name, lad?”
“Gram, m’lord,” he replied, the same awed but still expression on his small, thin face.
Allystaire turned to face Idgen Marte again; his faint smile still lacked mirth, but there was something less grim in it, now, something with a promise of more than fury and death. “Stay here with Idgen Marte for a moment, Gram.” The boy nodded lightly at the warrior and wandered back toward the wagons to stand, trusting, at Idgen Marte’s side.
“What’re you planning to do,” Idgen Marte asked, as one of her hands settled on Gram’s shoulders.
“Thought I would make a bit of a speech.”
He rounded the wagon and left the two of them behind, walking into the circle of light cast by the flames, seeming brighter now that dark had overtaken dusk.
“Good people of Thornhurst,” Allystaire half-shouted, drawing their attention to him; they stopped whatever tasks they’d set to, returned from wherever they’d scrambled but moments before. “I come to you this eve with a message.” He paused, waiting for their eyes to turn to him; he felt more than saw, for many sat too far from the flames to be more than shapes.
“A message of hope from someone who has heard your suffering and come to answer your cries.” He turned toward Idgen Marte and Gram and waved a hand. “Come here, Gram.”
As Gram walked over into the circle of light, a gasp ran through the crowd. A man and woman, the former hobbling and with a fresh scattering of bruises on his face, pushed their way through the crowd and swept the lad into their arms. Gram remained quiet. The man handed him off to the woman and turned to Allystaire.
“What’ve you done?” His tone was shocked and his jaw sagging.
“I told you; I bring you hope,” Allystaire said quietly. He turned to the crowd and raised one of his hands, palm out. “How many of you are godly folk, who fear Braech, are careful never to curse Fortune? Eh? How many of you listen to Urdaran and turn away from your toil and your burdens in this life?”
No hands raised. Allystaire lowered his, nodding slowly.
“I do not blame you. When does Fortune ever turn her wheel toward such as you?” There were a few rumbles in the small crowd. “Braech would praise the courage and cunning of men who stole your goods, or your very lives, with fire and sword.” Deathly silence greeted that. Allystaire thought he saw a brief flash of heat lightning on the far, dark horizon. “Urdaran offers you no solace or respite, only empty bellies and vacant eyes.
But I bring you hope. I bring you a Goddess who woke to the cries of the least of you, and who brought her weeping to my ears so that I might save her.” He turned to Gram, still wrapped placidly in his mother’s arms. “And now for second time, this Goddess has given me a chance to save one of your children. It is because of Her—the Mother—that this boy walks again.”
Gram wriggled away from his mother’s arms and came forward to Allystaire, saying, “When y’healed me, m’lord, I thought I heard a lady’s voice singin’. And something very warm-like, hotter than the hearthstones after a day’s fire.”
A dozen folk stood, shouting questions; Allystaire raised his hands to calm them, and finally Gram’s father spoke above the rest.
“Is this a trick? How do we know y’aren’t in some sort o’game here?”
“That’s not fair, Chals,” another man shouted from back in the crowd. “Yer boy’s bones was showin’ and he was done fer. There still blood on his trews? Was e’rywhere on the wheel and soakin’ into the road. If he’s walkin’, ‘twere magic and no trick.”
Allystaire raised his voice above them all, his battle voice, but he issued no commands. “I do not lie to you, Thornhurst. I cannot,” he added, surprising himself. “I near beggared myself, and I killed men—which I do not do lightly—to save you. And even as I saved you, I did not understand why.” He smiled as he spoke, his hands raising, wrists pointing upwards. “But now I do. The Mother was Calling me.”
“Does She call us?” Gram and his family fell back into the crowd as the shouting began again. “What are we to do? Do we give homage?” Similar questions filled the night air till Allystaire once again called for silence.
He let his eyes trail into the darkness where Idgen Marte stood by the wagon, then back to the village folk. “As for worship…” He paused, shrugged. “I do not know. But together, we will learn, as Thornhurst is rebuilt.”
“Why you? Why not me?” A younger, male voice singled itself out, but the speaker did not push forward. Renard, standing a bit apart from the crowd, turned as if to locate the speaker.
Allystaire struggled for an answer. All that the Goddess had told him the night before sprang to his mind, but before he could answer, Idgen Marte called out, “This Goddess has sent you a paladin, boy. A holy knight of legend.” With her casual, graceful saunter, she emerged into the light. “What more ought any of you to ask tonight? I saw a miracle. A thing of tales, in front of my eyes, and now all of you see the same,” she pointed toward Gram, “as that lad lives. Celebrate that and leave off questioning for one night.”
In his head, Allystaire heard Idgen Marte’s words as if plucked out upon a harp, and he felt a swell as of voices shaping a note, and in his mind he heard Her voice. Others will be Called, my Paladin. These are my people now, and yours.
The music slowly ebbed. Around him, the folk of Thornhurst, singly and then in groups, sank to one knee, lowering their faces. Allystaire shook his head, opened his mouth, then stopped, as Her voice sounded again. Remember well that you belong to them. Then, carefully, he too bent a knee and lowered his head, and on a hilltop where walked a lad who should have died, they—Paladin, warrior, soldier, villagers—felt something birth itself into the world in the still summer night.
* * *
When he awoke early the next morning, sitting upright against a wagon wheel, the resurgence of pain in his knee and his back led Allystaire to wonder, briefly, if the previous day had been an elaborate flight of fancy. She promised a restful night, he reminded himself, not freedom from pain. The tang of the old wounds was all the sharper for a day’s respite, and as he levered himself to his feet, he heard the usual sharp cracks from his joints. His hammer had lain at his right hand throughout the night, and now he bent, wincing, to pick it up and slide it into its spot at his hip.
He stretched his arms wide, yawning, then turned east to watch the sky slowly lighten. He heard quiet footsteps behind him, but did not turn around; he simply waited.
“Tell me. All of it.” Idgen Marte’s voice was soft and almost pleading.
Somehow, Allystaire was unable, or unwilling, to turn from the sunrise and the way it so slowly, but so inevitably, rolled back the dark. “I think She was guiding my steps from…well, from the day I rode into Thornhurst,” he said, frowning, as the woman stepped to his side and followed his eyes toward the horizon.
Idgen Marte didn’t respond, but she turned her eyes to him, watching, waiting; he could feel her impatience in the way she rocked forward on her toes, the way her long frame seemed coiled and taut.
Finally he turned from the sun and faced her. “At the assize, even before the assize, I could feel the power that radiated from the choiron. I felt the power granted him by the Sea Dragon. I saw him bend his will against people when they spoke. He tried to silence me, and he failed.” He swallowed, turned away from Idgen Marte’s intense brown eyes, and resumed watching the glinting daybreak. “He found in my favor. Told me I had been bold and cunning, that Braech favored me. That Braech wanted my service.” He heard Idgen Marte gasp, and he turned back to her, holding up a hand. “I told him what I thought of a god whose favor was ever for the victorious. He dismissed the baron’s claims, but there was a woman. A widow of one of
the reavers.”
Idgen Marte smiled knowingly, shaking her head. “How much silver did you give her?”
“Most of it,” Allystaire admitted, shrugging heavily. He laughed faintly. “I thought I left Oyrwyn with gold enough to last me a year of good living. Surely enough time to start earning more. Nigh on a month and the bulk is gone.”
Idgen Marte poked him with a knife-edged hand, sharply, in the side of the ribs, where his boiled leather vest didn’t protect him. “You’ve no idea how to tell a story, do you? On with it.”
He flinched away from her playful, but still painful strike, and rubbed lightly at the spot she’d hit. “Fine, fine. I had put the widow on a boat and given her enough silver to buy a boat of her own, I think,” he continued. “I know less about boats than I do farming,” he grumbled. Idgen Marte glared and he picked up the story again quickly. “I rode out of Bend. It was no trouble to follow the tracks of the wagons. And then She was there.” He paused, searched for words, and found none, but went on anyway; Idgen Marte’s eyes were rapt. “She told me that she had tested me. Mol, the villagers, the slavers, the widow, all of it. And then She bestowed upon me three…gifts. Three…powers? I do not know what to call them.”
Allystaire looked down at his hands, spread his fingers wide; both hands were calloused, scarred, rough and heavy, with swollen knuckles and large fingers, some of them crooked. “You saw the first of them last night. The lad. Healing him.” He held up his left hand, turned the palm toward himself and studied his skin. It looked much the same as it had done for years.
“And the others?”
He slowly shook his head. “I suspect you will see them.” Allystaire felt keenly for a moment that some other sense was appraising the warrior in front of him, using his eyes. A presence was weighing and judging her.
Idgen Marte laughed lightly, tossing her long dark braid. “Now that is storytelling. Drama.” Her mirth faded quickly, though, and she studied his face. “In the stories I heard, paladins were men of fair face and fairer voice. Refined and courteous. Parthalian, for instance. The stories say he was so beautiful to look upon that no maid could refuse him, yet in his honor, he never asked. There’s nothing about being broken-nosed and linkless, with all the wit and charm of a hunting hound.”
“You forgot old and stoop-backed.”
“See? You’re hardly some fair and flawless knight out of minstrel song.”
Allystaire snorted. “I have known many knights. Too many. Those who remain fair do so because they die young. Some have glib tongues or cunning minds, but no more than other men.”
“Allystaire,” Idgen Marte said, stepping closer to him and wrapping her arms around his neck in an embrace that was half sisterly, half back-pounding warrior’s embrace. And she did pound his back, twice, with a firm fist. “If any true paladin ever walked this world, I think he probably looked like you.” She stepped back, laughing at the confused flush in his cheeks. “More important, he felt like you,” she added, poking him, not too lightly, in the shoulder that had been skewered by a slaver’s sword not long before.
“You told me I was terrifying, not two days ago,” Allystaire replied, doubtfully.
“You are,” she said, flashing that faint and knowing smile. “And that’s precisely part of what I meant. But I think the villagers have all realized, or will soon, that they aren’t the sort of folk who need fear you.”
Idgen Marte turned and walked off, leaving Allystaire alone with the first real light of dawn greeting his eyes. He blinked against it for a moment, then followed the woman toward the blanket-huddled shapes of the villagers and began to rouse them. He was gentler than Idgen Marte, who didn’t quite resort to kicks, but wasn’t shy about threatening them.
Renard soon joined her, his rumbling voice booming over the unseasonable morning cool. Watching two of nature’s own sergeants at work is a beautiful thing, Allystaire reflected. Soon the Thornhurst folk, down to the youngest, were in various stages of preparation—building up fires, fetching cookpots, tending to horses. He soon realized that the best he could do was stay out of their way. Bit like commanding men again, he thought. Two men, anyway, and a whole gaggle of camp followers. He winced, not for the first or last time, at his own thoughts, then went to tend to his horses.
The previous night, he had picketed Ardent with the palfrey and the mule, and as he walked to the treeline where they stood, Allystaire paused when he saw a small figure moving among his horses: Mol. He took a few steps toward her and must’ve given himself away, for she spun to face him. In the pale light, under the boughs of trees, her face was half in shadow, and yet the pools of her eyes seemed a slightly brighter darkness within it.
“Mol.” He said her name quietly as he stopped in his tracks. The girl stared at him for a moment.
“I was talkin’ to Ardent,” she said, matter-of-factly. “He was waitin’ for you to learn his name. Says it took ya too long, but then he seems t’think y’aren’t very keen.”
Allystaire smiled uneasily. “Says all that, does he?”
“Thinks it,” the girl responded with a shrug. She turned and started patting the horse’s flank.
Allystaire took another couple of steps toward the girl and the animals. “Mol, did you hear me talk last night?”
“I could hear it. The Mother told me y’were t’heal the boy.”
“She talks to you?”
“Betimes,” Mol replied, turning back to him. “I wish she did all the time. Her voice is the best singin’ in the brightest day,” she added wistfully. “I think She came t’me after the reavers left and I was alone. And there are some times I don’t remember rightly. I remember bein’ angry, so angry at you, but not why, but She told me ya’d set it right.” She trailed off, struggling for words. She bit her lips and continued to stroke the grey horse that stood placidly above her and finally said, “And ya did.”
“Has She told you what we are to do next?”
Mol shook her head quickly. “Ya’ll figure it out. Y’have so far.”
Allystaire’s eyes sank to the ground, and he sighed deeply. “Guidance, Mol. I know how to give orders to knights and soldiers, not how to…” He quieted as the girl walked to him and took his hand between both of hers.
“Have faith. In yourself as well as Her.” Something in Mol’s voice had changed, from one moment to the next, as soon as she had taken Allystaire’s hand. Her demeanor had grown serious, her face calm in a way that didn’t seem at all like the child he’d come to know on the road.
“Faith is not one of my few virtues,” Allystaire protested. “You noted that yourself, once.”
Mol fixed him with a large-eyed stare, and said, “Remember that She had faith in you before you did in Her.”
She dropped his hand and padded away quietly without a backward glance. Allystaire fed and saddled and packed his horses and mule. “Time you had a break, I suppose,” he murmured to Ardent, as he tied a lead to his halter, as well as one to the mule’s, and gathered the reins of the palfrey. The destrier tossed his head in protest and pulled against the lead. Allystaire tugged it gently and started to mount the palfrey, but the smaller bay pulled away from him.
He tried again, and once more the riding horse shied away, leaving him with one foot in the stirrup and one bouncing in the dry grass. Finally he planted his foot and hopped away. Destrier and palfrey both stopped, staring at him with big liquid eyes.
“A conspiracy,” he murmured. Begrudgingly he untied the rope lead from Ardent and affixed it to the palfrey’s halter, then led his animals down the hill and to the road, where the small caravan was slowly gathering, Idgen Marte at its head and Renard at the back. Allystaire tied the palfrey and the mule to a wagon and slid up onto Ardent’s saddle. It took him only the briefest moment to realize that all eyes were fixed on him; he sat straight in the saddle, looked to Idgen Marte, and gave a simple nod of command. She rai
sed a hand—whips cracked, wheels creaked, and the wagons began to roll.
The pace they set was plodding and careful, but steady, covering much more slowly the very terrain Allystaire and Mol had ridden over but a few days before. The cooling calm of the post-storm air was gone, burned away by summer’s oppressive heat, and once more moisture was thickening the air and worsening the heat. Patches of grass along the dusty, beaten track were browning. In most cases, though, the villagers, even the children, bore the heat well.
Allystaire relaxed his senses, sitting easily atop Ardent, reins in hand. He reflected on the past few days, turning over the events. How much did She guide me? Or Mol, for that matter? He thought over Mol’s words, her constant questions, her insight. Her words from the dawn came back to him; Remember that She had faith in you before you did in Her. He grunted, smiling in spite of himself, and looked back at the horse plodding along behind him. “Have you faith in me as well?” Ardent didn’t answer. If he had then I would know for sure I had gone mad.
It wasn’t until well after noon—he, Idgen Marte, and Renard insisted on no pauses for a midday meal, so everyone ate bread and dried fish as they walked—that he realized that a crowd of folk, mostly the younger, had clumped around him.