Ordination

by Daniel Ford

  Suddenly Rede leaned hard against the altar, holding a hand to his temple. “I…speaking of these things. It is as though the Eye is still in my mind. It pains me.”

  “Then speak on them no longer,” Allystaire replied. “I will have more questions for you later. For now, study the runes as long as you need.” If the Urdarites felt Her, felt my Gifts, Her power—who else has?

  His musings were driven off as Mol and Idgen Marte arrived with the requested writing tools, and Rede set down to the business of copying what he saw on the alter stone.

  Allystaire drew Idgen Marte and Mol away from the alter—by now, most of the village folk had dispersed as well—to let Rede work. They watched from a short distance for some time as the light receded, till finally Allystaire tilted his head toward Idgen Marte and murmured, “The Wit, or the Will?”

  “Neither freezin’ one, I hope,” she whispered.

  “He isn’t,” Mol piped in, her voice a little distant.

  “Isn’t what?” Idgen Marte asked gently.

  “The Wit or the Will,” she replied, lifting her face to Idgen Marte and smiling dreamily. “He saw. Is seein’, too. That’s his part. Wit and Will are still out there.” She indicated there with a grand sweep of her arm that Allystaire speculated incorporated most of Baronies Delondeur, Innadan, Oyrwyn, and probably across the Ash into Varshyne.

  “That is a lot of ‘there’,” Allystaire said in a tired voice.

  “You’ll find ‘em,” Mol insisted brightly, reaching up to take Allystaire’s massively-knuckled right hand with her little one, squeezing it. “Faith,” she said.

  “Faith,” Allystaire repeated, nodding, and then Rede lifted up several sheets of hastily scribbled-upon, blotched parchment in triumph.

  * * *

  Some time later, Allystaire, Idgen Marte, Rede, Mol, and Renard sat around the table in the mostly restored village house that had been set aside for Allystaire and Idgen Marte’s use. He’d protested at first, but the villagers insisted that he make use of it. He and Idgen Marte traded use of the bed and shared the rest of the house in most other ways. A small fire burned on the hearth and had been used to light lamps he kept dangling on chains from the roof timber.

  The sheets of parchment were scattered across the small round table, its unfinished, still slightly rough surface obscured by Rede’s papers. They took turns passing them from hand to hand, turning them about in what light they had. All except for Mol, who dozed lightly on her stool, head slumped on her chest.

  “Not a word any of us can read. Not so much as a single rune or cipher,” Allystaire said quietly, setting down the parchment he’d been examining. He sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose with finger and thumb.

  Renard stared listlessly at the fire behind them; Idgen Marte flicked a curled edge of parchment with her finger. Rede stared at the sheets before him with a frightening intensity.

  “Surely the Goddess will lead us to an understanding. Surely She has not granted my sight back in futility. I must simply study them some more—”

  Allystaire cut him off with a wave of his hand, and bent over the table, neatly shuffling the parchments into a straight-edged pile, then dropping a round, dry stone atop them. “We can study them in the morning when there is better light.” He paused a moment, and almost absentmindedly added, “Her light.” Then, tapping Renard on the shoulder, he pointed with his chin toward Rede. “Find a bed for him?”

  Renard stood with a grunt, nodding the affirmative as he did. “Come along. There’s space at the inn, I’m sure. Might be on a bench or a floor but it’ll be a roof and blankets.” Then Renard bent over and gathered Mol up in his arms. She didn’t protest and barely stirred. Sleepily, she wrapped her arms around the soldier’s broad neck and laid her head against him; her weight didn’t seem to impede him, and he ducked out into the night, gesturing for Rede to follow.

  The former Urdarite priest tugged on the sleeves of his rough monk’s robe and said, “Could we find more fitting raiment tomorrow?”

  Allystaire narrowed his eyes. “Fitting what?” I don’t like the sound of raiment.

  “Well, me. I cannot wear the robes of a god I no longer serve.”

  Idgen Marte stood, yawned widely, and said drily, “Surely we can find you some good work clothes.”

  Rede rubbed his hands together. “Work clothes? Not…vestments? Robes?”

  Allystaire snorted a quick, mirthless laugh. “Two things you ought to know, Rede. First, everyone in Thornhurst works. Until this village thrives on its own again, no one loafs. Second, we do not have vestments, raiments, robes, chasubles, or surplices. Put that thought out of your head.”

  Rede’s mouth fell open in quiet disbelief. “Yet if you are Her paladin and prophet, what is your badge of office? What do you wear to…”

  Allystaire thought on this a moment, and then bent down and lifted his hammer from where it rested on the ground, sliding his hand up the haft to just under the head, and tapping the top of the sledge with his free hand. “This.” Then he lifted it and pointed to the far wall, where his battered grey armor lay in as neat a pile as he could manage. “If need be, that.”

  Rede began to protest again, when Renard’s voice carried quietly from outside the door. “Make me wait a moment longer, priest, and you’ll be sleepin’ in the mud.”

  “He isn’t accustomed to waiting,” Idgen Marte said, crossing her arms and tapping her boot once or twice on the floorboards.

  Rede hurried to the door, stopping a moment to look back at them. He turned his drawn and pale face from one to the other and exclaimed, “Scandalous!” Then he whirled out the door with a dramatic flare of his mud-spattered robe.

  Silence reigned a moment; outside crickets sang and an owl called, as Allystaire and Idgen Marte stared at each other. Finally, she held her hands out, palms up.

  “Have you the faintest idea what that fool meant?”

  Allystaire thought a moment, then cleared his throat and spoke, choosing his words delicately. “I believe good father Rede believes that we are, ah, sharing the bed, so to speak.”

  Idgen Marte laughed heartily for a moment, joined in by Allystaire, and both of them sat again.

  “Scandalous? As if farm folk like this could be scandalized,” Idgen Marte remarked incredulously.

  “I do believe Urdaran has some ideas about how clergy comport themselves.”

  “Good thing I’m not clergy then.”

  “I think you probably are. We both are.”

  “Not like any clergy this world’s known then.”

  “I think that is the point,” Allystaire said, then considered, as he scratched the side of his nose. “What in the Cold are we going to do about him? I think he imagines he is Called, as we are.”

  “Imagines?” Idgen Marte waved a hand dismissively. “He assumes he has been. And more to the point,” she leaned forward and dropped her voice, almost whispering, “what if he has been?”

  Allystaire shook his head. “That I do not fear. The Mother would have come Herself, aye? As She did for me, and for you. And I think for Mol, when neither of us saw. Moreover, Mol said so.”

  Idgen Marte nodded, visibly relieved as she sat back. “If the Voice says it’s so, it’s so.”

  Allystaire nodded agreement, pushed himself to his feet, licked his forefinger and thumb, and started extinguishing lamp wicks; they hissed against his skin. “Aye. Time to sleep. The bed is yours.”

  Idgen Marte stood and headed for the doorway to the only other room of the tiny house. “You know, for what it’s worth, the Mother didn’t say anything about being chaste when She came for me.”

  “Nor me,” Allystaire said, quietly. “I do not think that such is Her way.”

  Idgen Marte nodded, shouldering aside the blanket that covered the doorway and disappearing behind it.

  Allystaire dimmed the r
est of the lamps, felt his way in darkness to his hammer, grasped it in one hand, and then stumped over to the far wall. He put his back to it, sat down, laid the hammer at his side, and slept lightly, hindered along the way by the occasional thought of Leah or the Goddess or other women he had known. There was one face that kept swimming before his eyes, until he pushed it away firmly.

  He dreamt of her, anyway, of dark auburn hair and fields of wildflowers.

  CHAPTER 24

  Serving in Joy

  Allystaire woke quickly, as always, scarcely breaching the surface of consciousness before he snapped into full awareness. He had barely moved—his hand rested upon his hammer, his hips ached from sitting all night, his back and legs were sore, and a thin light slanted through the wooden walls of the small house. He rocked forward and came to his feet with a groan, picking up his hammer and tucking it snugly on his belt. He tottered over to the door and through it, letting it swing open behind him, and yawned in the sun. He stripped off his shirt and went to the rain barrel at the corner of the house, picked up and filled the small bucket that sat next to it, then bent forward and dumped it over the back of his head. He repeated this a few more times, washing his arms, back, chest, and head with the lukewarm water.

  He was halfway through these mild ablutions when Idgen Marte stumbled out, blinking, a jar in one hand. She took a healthy swig, gargled, spat a mouthful of beer into the dirt. Her hair, for once, was unbraided and fell over her shoulders and halfway down her back in a thick dark wave. She wore a long, shapeless cotton shirt that came halfway to her knees, and no sword.

  “You know,” Allystaire said, his voice croaking with disuse, “without a weapon, and with your hair down, you almost look feminine. Best you do not let anyone else see you. They will be trying get you married and stuck in a kitchen.”

  She snorted, took another swig from the jar, and swallowed, then held it out toward him. “And without a shirt on you look like a shaved bear. Half-shaved, anyway. They’ll be baiting you in a pit, they get a glimpse.” He reached for the jar, and while he took a swig and sloshed it around his mouth, she pointed to the long and twisted scar on his ribcage. “You still owe me the rest of that story.”

  Allystaire lowered the jar and handed it back to her, empty, as he swallowed, then winced. “Ah, where was I with that?”

  “Telmawr. Aldacren Keep. Knights, lances, banners, all that shit.”

  “Ah, yes. That. Well, after the first charge it all degenerates. Chaos. Murder everywhere. When you read about battles in books it talks about lines and ground and maneuvers. In reality, you do not see any of that. Not in the midst, anyway. That all changed for me later, but that day, it was kill the man in front of me and hope the one behind was a friend. All that chivalry? Yielding, letting an unhorsed knight recover himself? That, as you said, is shit.”

  Idgen Marte pushed a handful of hair out of her eyes and grinned.

  Allystaire took a deep breath, exhaled, and said, “Well, after we had been at it for an turn or two, I was unhorsed. That is to say, my horse took a spear in the neck and I cleared the saddle before it could fall on me.”

  He paused, shrugged at the disbelief that was plain in Idgen Marte’s mocking grin, and said, “This was near a score of years ago. I was young and spry.”

  “You weren’t ever young.”

  “I was spry, anyway.” He cleared his throat and went on, “Well anyway, as I was standing there wondering what to do without my horse, some knight in cloisonnéd plate tried to spit me upon his lance. Right flowery thing it was, too, with vines carved all the way up. Foolishness. At any rate, I tried to turn away, and the lance found me but did not quite spit me like the knight intended. I realized pretty quickly that it had torn me open, but shallowly and straight across the ribs.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I used the fact that it was stuck between my body and my armor. Yanked the idiot right out of his saddle because he had the thing lashed to his freezing gauntlet, if you can credit it. The force splintered the wood, and I tugged free. As Sir Cloisonné lay there like a fool, with one useless arm, I gave him a thorough clubbing with a spiked mace I carried in those days. Once blood started to ooze from his visor I caught on that the business was through. Good thing, too, because that foolish mace got bone-stuck.”

  Idgen Marte chewed her bottom lip for a moment. Allystaire, thinking he was done, retrieved his shirt and started to tug it back on.

  “How’d ya survive? Still an ugly wound in the middle of a fight.”

  “Well,” Allystaire said, drawing out the single syllable. “That was pretty much the end of the fight. The idiot in the cloisonnéd armor with the vine-carved lance turned out to be Baron Telmawr.” He paused again, shrugged almost apologetically, and said, “Watching their baron brained took some of the fight out of the knights, and while it took a while for word to get out to their foot, some of the Old Baron’s retinue saw what I had done and surged forward in triumph. I was hustled back to the camps and the chirurgeons and the praise of my liege.”

  “And the chirurgeons didn’t manage to kill you?” Idgen Marte stretched her arms out to either side, till her back and shoulders crackled lightly. “Seven of every ten chirurgeons, physickers, alchemists, and healing-men I’ve met in this part of the world have been quacks out to poison anyone they can.”

  “You have not met dwarfish chirurgeons, then,” Allystaire replied. “The Old Baron did not hold with quackery. In his host, chirurgeons knew how to set a bone, when to bleed a wound and when to sew it, when a man was lost, and how to send him off with a painless slice. Michar saw to all that, and more. They got me to his care right quick that day. First time that dwarf saved my life. Not the last. Gerard Oyrwyn always said that Michar cost more than any three knights put together, and that he was worth more than any ten. I cannot say he was wrong.”

  “You talk about Old Baron Oyrwyn like a boy talks about the grandfather he worshipped,” Idgen Marte noted.

  “I never met my grandfather,” Allystaire said, shrugging as he smoothed wet hair back along his scalp. “By all accounts, he was a terror in the field and most everywhere else. Gerard Oyrwyn was better than that. Not a hero, true. He had a cunning mind and an eye to advance his family. Yet he wanted his knights to be something more than murderers in enameled steel.”

  “Why no paint on your armor, then?”

  “I left the brightwork behind,” Allystaire said. “Took the best armor, not the prettiest.”

  “Lot of men would say those were one and the same,” Idgen Marte pointed out.

  “Style,” Allystaire said, “is for dead men.”

  She snorted again and turned back to the house. “Style is at least half of the point.” He heard her mumbling something about ‘northern barbarians’ as she vanished into the darkness of the house.

  The thin predawn light thickened as the sun rose. Allystaire gathered his shirt, went back into the house, and got himself shaved and was dressing when Idgen Marte emerged in her gusseted and studded arming jacket, leathers and riding boots, sword on one hip, quiver on the other, knives at the small of her back.

  “Expecting a fight?” Allystaire had just settled his hammer on his belt, which was cinched around plain riding leathers for trousers and a clean shirt; no armor, no other arms.

  “Expecting to be gone,” she said, filling the last syllable with urgency. “It is time to go, Allystaire. Rede saw. It’s what She told me we were waiting for.”

  “I agree, but we do not yet know where we are going.”

  “Pick a direction. Throw a handful of grass in the air,” Idgen Marte suggested, throwing up her hands, exasperated. “Piss at the wind and follow the stream. Does it even matter where? We just need to go.”

  “We cannot just leave with no plan and no destination,” Allystaire argued.

  “I think I can help wi’ that.” They whirled to find Mol stand
ing at the edge of the table, reaching carefully to pluck the sheets of parchment from the table. She rifled through, them, selected one, then padded, bare of foot, to the front door, pausing to look back at the two of them. “Well?”

  They followed, Allystaire taking a moment to tug his boots on. Mol stopped just a few feet outside the door, in sight of the village green, which still bore a large, dark scar, but a smaller one than a few weeks ago. She held up the piece of parchment in her hand; instead of rows of handwriting, it had a few scattered marks. Mol held it steady, both hands above her head, and a ray of the rising sun caught it. Allystaire and Idgen Marte held their breath as they waited to see what the Mother’s light would reveal. Allystaire thought the runes began to glow; Idgen Marte peered forward, craning her neck, expecting, perhaps, unseen letters to crawl across the page. They stood tense and anxious, jaws taut, fingers curling.

  Nothing happened.

  They waited a few moments more. Mol turned back to look at them, her face obscured by her upraised arms. Exasperated, she lowered the paper and turned around, frowning. “Can y’not see it?” She held it up again, not quite as boldly as before. She extended her arm in front of her like a frustrated scholar with an idiot for a pupil, then stabbed at the sheet with one finger. “Were y’expectin’ the Mother to make the runes come alive for you? To spell out in mystic fires the course yer t’take?” She stabbed at it again. “Tis a map, y’great stupid…” She groped about a moment for a word and, finding none, exhorted them again, “Tis a map. This is Thornhurst.” She pointed to a rune at the center.