Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  That said, she turned and ran to Allystaire, pressing her face against him and sobbing; he knelt to embrace her and could feel her small body shuddering with days of grief suddenly unleashed all at once. He stood, still holding her, and looked to the crowd.

  One by one at first, then forming a line, the folk of Thornhurst came forward and spoke of their sons, their fathers, uncles, and nephews. Their wives, daughters, nieces, and mothers. It took the best part of three turns with the sun beating down on them and sweat streaming from all of their faces. Allystaire felt it pooling on the small of his back and down his arms.

  Allystaire was sure, when it was over, that everyone had spoken, save Norbert, Idgen Marte, and Renard. Even Henri came forward to speak, shakily, about his sons, Matthar and Kev. Mol had gone to join her uncle Tim when they came forward, so Allystaire simply stood back, listening.

  By the end of it, clouds had drifted in front of the sun, and a breeze had begun to blow across them, soft, yet potent. It took with it the worst of the heat and dried the sweat and tears on their cheeks.

  When the last speaker had finished, Allystaire came forward again.

  “The Goddess has listened to every word you said here today. She has come to know the kin that you lost, as have I,” Allystaire began.

  “Mol,” he said, waving a hand toward the girl. “Come here please.” Mol disentangled herself from her mother and her uncle and dashed over to him again. Allystaire turned and walked to the altar, gesturing for other folk to come closer, if they wished. Some few, including Gram and Henri, crowded around.

  “Do you see this? This is the beginning of Her place among you. A temple, if you would,” Allystaire explained, gesturing toward the altar of stone, upon which sat the rounded one Mol had brought. “Put your hand upon it, Mol.” He looked to the silently loitering Idgen Marte who, grudgingly, placed her own fingers upon it. Once again he retreated into himself, thinking of the Goddess’s words to him, of the touch of Her hand upon his, and thought again—Let it mark forever the graves of those I could not save. Let it be a sign to Your people that their cries will never again go unheard.

  Once again he heard a cracking sound, louder this time, and felt a thrumming vibration pass through the stone, and suddenly his hand was pushed upward by nearly a foot. Idgen Marte and Mol jumped back, and the crowd gasped.

  Before them now stood a larger stone altar; instead of a solid block, a flat oval stood on three short, rough columns. It was all of a piece—light grey, smooth, utterly featureless.

  Around it, folk suddenly knelt. Allystaire did the same, sharing a smile with Idgen Marte and Mol.

  The sun broke free of its cloud cover and shone on them, rays bright against the surface of the altar. The stone flashed a brief red-gold, then was grey again.

  Allystaire thought he heard a single piece of a song, just a few notes, then all was still, and he pushed himself back to his feet, his knees protesting all this up and down.

  “It is in joy that I would serve you now. Let us, together, make this altar worthy of Her. As we rebuild this village, on this spot, let us raise a chapel. Use it to meet, to pray, to celebrate, and to mourn. Shall we?”

  The villagers looked from him to each other, eyes wide.

  Henri was the first to speak, growling out a rough, “Aye!” with his eyes slantwise toward the ground. Around the rangy farmer echoed a chorus of ayes and a general, if subdued, agreement.

  Nodding, Allystaire continued. “Very well. In that case, we have a bit more to do. Norbert!” His voice resounded sharply through the air. “Come forward.”

  The tall youth, loitering far back of the crowd with Renard close at hand, did as he was bid, though not without trepidation. He was careful to skirt the grave, and the crowd that had gathered around the altar parted, but reluctantly. Murmurs ran darkly among the villagers as he passed.

  “Norbert,” Allystaire said, “you have admitted to knowingly joining the brigands that sacked this town and tried to enslave these people.”

  “Aye, m’lord, but—”

  “But nothing!” Allystaire’s voice rang like a hammer on hot steel. “You joined them, and while your hand held neither blade nor torch, you stood by while men you traveled with murdered and burned and raped. And worse, from this evil you stood to profit. All this is true, aye?”

  Swallowing hard, Norbert nodded and muttered a single, shamed, “Aye.”

  “Then your life is forfeit.” He paused to let that sink in, then added, “Unless you are willing to come forward now and beg the Mother’s forgiveness. She is merciful; yet you may find Her mercy a bitter draught.” Allystaire stood aside and indicated the rough altar with one hand.

  Gulping again, Norbert took a few faltering steps forward and knelt in front of the altar. For a moment he simply stared at it, then he cried out in a loud, pained voice. “No. NO!” He raised his hands to cover his eyes, and Allystaire knew that whatever the lad was seeing, it was not the altar, not the grass, not the foothills beyond them to the north and east. Norbert slowly sank into a huddle on the grass, much as he had done on the green amidst the pile of bones the day before.

  Allystaire felt a pang of guilt for making the boy relive his misdeeds yet again. As he looked down at Mol, who watched Norbert with curious detachment, he thought back on her words about her father.

  His guilt burned away like mist under the rising sun.

  Finally, Norbert simply sprawled in front of the altar, sobbing and clutching his head with his hands. Allystaire stepped forward and hauled him up. “You have asked. Now are you ready to hear what you must do to earn Her forgiveness, and that of the folk around you?”

  The lad nodded limply, his face a mess of tears and grass.

  “Very well. As I said, your life is forfeit. For a year and a day, you will serve this village with the labor of your hands. Your bed and your board will be found for you, but in exchange, from morning till sunset, you will refuse them nothing. You are everyone’s farmhand; you are everyone’s peat digger, hod carrier, woodcutter, and shepherd. Every waking minute of your life belongs to this village. Refuse a task at your peril. And—look at me, Norbert,” Allystaire suddenly bellowed, for Norbert’s glazed gaze had fallen to the ground. He glanced back up with fresh tears filling his eyes.

  Allystaire seized his collar and pulled his face close. “Mother help you, lad, if you try to run away, and you had best hope I am dead. For then, at least, you must wait till the next life for me to find you. And I will.” He took a deep breath. “Do you accept?”

  Norbert nodded frantically in the affirmative. “I do, m’lord. I do. People, all of you, I do. Anything. Anything you ask.”

  Just what did you show him, Mother? Allystaire found himself wondering. “Good. And people of Thornhurst; remember that mercy may be a kind of strength. The boy’s labor is yours, but not his life, nor his thoughts. He will eat and sleep as well as you, for without food and rest, what work can he do? Do you all understand?” More general assent was murmured. Allystaire let Norbert go, and stepped away from him, inhaling a lungful of air with which to shout.

  “Then for the Mother’s sake, go and eat. Sing and play and tell tales, the lot of you. A great deal of work remains, but it will keep. Take the day to remember your kin in happiness. Get drunk, if you have a taste for it! But remember that we—all of us—must be ready to put our backs to it tomorrow, aye?”

  Amid roars of laughing approval that met the exhortation to inebriation, the crowd melted away, leaving Allystaire, Mol, and Idgen Marte alone with the transformed altar that the three of them, together in prayer, had raised out of unworked stone.

  CHAPTER 18

  A Strength Out of Legend

  The late summer sun was, if anything, more brutal than that of midsummer. The gentle hill upon which the altar sat was baking, much of the grass parched and browning.

  So was the pair sparring upon it.<
br />
  Allystaire carefully circled, his long, heavy sword held in a cross-body guard, the tip above his left shoulder, blade canted slightly forwards, the pommel near his right hip. He moved his weight from one foot to the other as he stepped side to side; suddenly he lunged forward, swinging the blade in a high-line, horizontal cut.

  With neat economy of motion, Idgen Marte squatted under the sweep and lunged forward with her own sword, striking him twice—once just below each kneecap. The second blow sent him down to one knee, cursing, laying his sword down alongside himself.

  “The knees?” Allystaire spat into the dirt their circling feet had stirred into small dustclouds moments before.

  “Y’don’t get to ask an opponent not to hit you somewhere when it counts,” she noted.

  Glaring up at her under knitted brows, Allystaire rumbled, “I do not need lessons for a squire.”

  “Then stop fighting like one,” Idgen Marte retorted, poking him in the shoulder sharply with the tip of her sword.

  Allystaire swatted ineffectually with his bare hand, missing completely as she drew it back.

  “Trying to get your fingers cut off?”

  Allystaire reached for his weapon, wrapping his fingers casually around it more than a foot up the blade, which was covered in a sleeve of grooved pieces of wood Idgen Marte had supplied, exactly like her own.

  “Do not patronize me. I was fighting battles when you still wore dresses.” He rose stiffly to his feet, picking up his sword with one hand on the hilt and one along the lower, dull part of the blade.

  Idgen Marte’s face blazed with anger, the scar down her chin taut and white as she set her jaw and charged at him. Allystaire suddenly dropped his right foot back and held out his sword, holding it like a spearman set for a charge, grinning very faintly.

  The grin faded as Idgen Marte dropped to the ground, sliding with one foot forward, driving her boot sharply into his thigh as momentum carried her on her back, until she crashed against him and sent him sprawling. She popped back to her feet and laid the wooden covering of her blade against his neck, smiling crookedly.

  “Did you really think that would work?”

  “For a moment.” He batted her weapon aside and stood, gathering up his own sword and turning to find its scabbard.

  “You’re lucky, you know,” Idgen Marte called after him, as she began untying the knots that held the wooden slats over the edge of her weapon. “I was aiming for your balls.”

  “I have been kicked in the crook before,” Allystaire snorted. “It hurts, but so does getting kicked anywhere. Got to learn to deal with pain.”

  “Or learn how not to get hit.” Idgen Marte belted her sword back around her hips.

  Allystaire buckled his back around his torso and once again set the comforting weight of his hammer in the loop on his belt. “Still not going to spar me with this?” he asked, rapping a knuckle solidly against the dull black head.

  “Not on a beggar’s life,” she snorted. “No way to take the sting out of that, and I like my bones right where they are.” Then, pausing and cocking one hip out, placing a fist thoughtfully upon it, she asked, “Why d’ya even carry a sword, anyway?”

  A shrug. “It is expected. Knights carry swords. Most also carry something else—a mace or a flail or an axe. You never want to die for lack of being able to fight back. Yet most of them want to be swordsmen, so they spend all their time on it. The sword is elegant, versatile; glory is won with its point and legends are made with its edge. More teachers to learn from.”

  “So then why the hammer?”

  He looked down at it, running his hand over the rough metal. “The hammer makes no false promise of glory or nobility. You know precisely what it does, and precisely what the man swinging it in anger means to do. And, I suppose,” he added, “after the battle you could…” He shrugged vaguely. “Carpenter something with it, too.”

  Idgen Marte snorted and started walking back toward the village that was slowly rising again behind them; they had been swinging and smacking at each other in a treeless field beyond the grave and its attendant altar they had built three weeks before.

  “You’ve never carpentered anything.”

  “Not true,” Allystaire countered. “I have hammered some wood in my day.”

  “Like what?” Idgen Marte turned to face him, doubt written openly on her sneering, sun-browned face.

  “Catapults. Siege towers—”

  “Those hardly count,” she said, cutting him off.

  “I made a table once, a camp table, had some help from a real carpenter to help get the folding bits right. Built it out of the remnants of a smashed tower, in fact. Broke, though.”

  “How?”

  A bit red-faced, Allystaire turned his eyes from hers. “I threw a man down on top of it.”

  Idgen Marte laughed too hard at that answer to follow up with another question.

  “He disobeyed my orders during a battle,” Allystaire went on, still slightly flushed. “And got good men killed for it. I should have had him hung. Or at least whipped.”

  “Instead you ruined a perfectly good camp table. Who was he?”

  “Someone too important to throw through a camp table,” Allystaire said, stomping away.

  Idgen Marte trotted to catch up with him, her long, dark braid bouncing along her back. “How many of these cryptic stories are you going to start without finishing? How many d’ya have?”

  Without turning, Allystaire shrugged and said simply, “A lifetime’s worth.”

  “Well, how many is that?”

  Allystaire turned back to face her. “I do not know. Is every campaign a story? Every battle? Every skirmish? Every death? What about all the times in between, eh? The marching and riding, the discipline, the bad food, the diseases that strike men down like a bowler at pins? Are they stories, too? What about the horrible things that happen when a town or a castle falls? Are rape and looting and burning and murder all stories, too?”

  Idgen Marte frowned, then shook her head. “I’ve seen all that, too. I’m not some fool boy with a spear in one hand and his cock in the other, y’know.”

  “Then why ask me for stories if you have seen it all?”

  Idgen Marte frowned harder. As she often did, she reached out faster than he could stop and poked him in the shoulder. “Swapping stories are what makes what we’ve done worthwhile, y’big dumb cow slaughterer,” she said, jutting her chin toward the hammer on his belt. “If you can make a story of it, it can’t have been so bad, aye? So at least tell me this: Who was the man who got thrown through a camp table?”

  Allystaire looked off for a few moments toward the rim of hills, easily visible in the clear afternoon light. “Well, now he is the Baron Oyrwyn.” He paused a beat. “And it was not thrown, exactly, more like a good hard shove.” Another pause. “With both hands. And possibly some emphasis once he hit the table.”

  Idgen Marte blinked once, startled, then recovered her faint, practiced smirk. “You threw your liege lord’s heir through a table? “

  Allystaire raised a cautionary finger. “In point of fact, he was not the heir at the time, just the Old Baron’s natural son, gone to the wars to learn the trade.”

  “Some day,” Idgen Marte said, tapping his arm this time rather than poking him, “probably in winter when the snow is piled up past the door and there’s naught else t’do, we are havin’ a sit-down, and you are telling me every piece of all this. I tire of just hearin’ bits.”

  “On my first campaign I was fifteen summers old. My last was not quite a year ago. Score-and-one years make a lot of stories, and some I mean to keep.”

  “That is why I’ll ply you with ale. Brandy if I have to.”

  Snorting, Allystaire said, “You would get further with wine.”

  Idgen Marte opened her mouth to retort, but one of the village boys came
pounding up to them, chest heaving, and paused to suck in air and try to speak at the same time.

  “Calm, lad. Calm. What ails you?” Allystaire felt the hair on the back of his neck stand, his heart slow down, and a ball of lead take shape in his stomach. He felt himself instinctively straightening up, his feet spreading and weight shifting. He glanced to Idgen Marte and saw her doing the same.

  The boy gasped a few more times and finally managed, “Men…men, m’lord. armored. Armed. Comin’ from the other side o’the road. We was mendin’ fences and saw ‘em—”

  “How many?”

  The lad held up his right hand, all fingers splayed. “At least so, m’lord. P’raps more.”

  “That is a good lad. Now run back to the village and find Renard. Then gather up all the younger children and go wherever he tells you. Run!”

  With another quick, deep breath the boy gathered himself and loped off with the boundless energy of excited youth. Allystaire turned to Idgen Marte. “Horse. Bow. See if anyone can get Ardent saddled for me. If I draw my hammer, waste no time.”

  Idgen Marte hurried off at a steady, ground-eating pace, her legs swinging in long arcs from her hip, sword and braid bounding along behind her. Allystaire began a steady trot, but slowed to a walk as soon as he came in sight of the village green. Best to be seen calm. Despite his slow gait, Allystaire’s mind raced. I have my hammer. Sword. Shield is leaning against the saddlebags. The ones with my armor in them. “Could be nothing,” he reminded himself. “Just men passing through.”