The Shadow of Tyr

by Glenda Larke

  ‘General! Wait!’

  She suppressed a sigh. Gevenan. Even without the message of her senses, she would have known. No one else called her general. He strode out of the olive grove on course to intercept her.

  ‘Yes, Legate?’ she asked as he caught up. Damn the man. He was like grass seeds caught in a trouser leg. Hard to get rid of, and so confoundedly irritating in the meantime.

  ‘Brand said you were going to meet the Quyriot. You shouldn’t do that alone! Especially not carrying money.’ He indicated the purse that swung at her waist. ‘These men are smugglers, damn it!’

  ‘One man, and it’s Berg Firegravel.’ A good nickname, that. Firegravel was the Quyriot word for obsidian and Berg was dark and hardy.

  ‘I don’t care. Next time call me, or one of my men.’ He turned to walk with her.

  ‘I am well able to look after myself.’

  ‘You’re my commander; that makes me responsible for your safety.’

  ‘I am indeed your commander; therefore you should treat me as if I know what I am doing!’

  ‘You were the one who told me you could be brought down by an arrow, just as easily as the next man. Woman.’

  She smothered another sigh. ‘I do have the advantage of being able to sense aggressive intention. Berg has no such intention. And he is alone, except for that disreputable pony of his.’

  ‘The shit-coloured one that looks like a tattered bearskin on legs?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  The animal in question was tied up to a temple pillar, and was indeed as wretched in appearance as Gevenan had described. Real bearskins, sewn together to serve as Berg’s cloak and now flung across the beast’s back, did nothing to dispel the image. However, neither Ligea nor Gevenan were deceived. The pony, shaggy and unkempt as he appeared to be, was plateau-bred, capable of carrying a man over steep mountain passes in the cold without a stumble on ice patches or loose scree, and just as able to maintain a steady pace over the plains. What they lacked in speed, Quyriot ponies made up for in endurance.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to ask—what are those foot strap things the Quyriots use, attached to the saddle?’ she inquired as they neared the temple.

  ‘They call them stirrups. Probably to keep the rider’s feet off the blasted ground. Damned ponies are so short-legged they look like weasels.’

  ‘Try them.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stirrups. Have some made for your own mount and try them out.’

  ‘Why in all of Acheron would I want to do that?’

  ‘Maybe because these Quyriot plateau people are the best horsemen I’ve ever seen. And it seems to me that if you had a way of bracing your feet when you launch a spear, or loose an arrow, or sweep a sword, it could only be an advantage. Make some and try them. Although I wonder if they might not be better made of metal than just leather.’

  He shrugged as if he thought it yet another weird idea of hers, but she had already felt his quickening interest as he began to think it through. The stubborn old dog. He won’t ever acknowledge I might be right if he can avoid it.

  They mounted the temple steps together, to greet Berg who was insolently leaning up against the statue of Selede. Ligea had already discovered the Quyriots did not worship the gods of the pantheon and loved to show their disrespect for them. She was not altogether sure what they did worship; they never spoke of their beliefs except in the vaguest terms.

  He was dressed, as usual, in warm woollens with beading sewn around the collar, yoke and cuffs. A wide cloth belt was patterned with obsidian. Necklaces, earrings, brooches, bangles and rings made of obsidian and glass beads glistened in the sunshine.

  ‘Like a bloody walking pawnshop,’ Gevenan muttered in her ear.

  ‘Hoy, lady,’ Firegravel said, ignoring Gevenan. ‘Y’dropped your load, since I last saw yus. A lad, was it?’

  ‘It was indeed.’

  ‘May he ride like the wind and fart like the devil, then.’

  Gevenan gave a bark of laughter.

  ‘Thank you, Berg. I am sure he will,’ she replied, wondering if every man in her life at the moment was intent on banishing all memories of polite society from her brain. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come up to the villa to drink to his birth, and share a meal?’

  Berg shook his head. She knew him well enough to know that he felt uneasy if he ventured too far from the mountain passes. ‘The mountains call me,’ he said, a polite way of saying he had already reached the end of the preliminaries, and was eager to move on to business. ‘But I’ve brought yus more fancy glass and gravel.’ He dug into the bags he had taken from his horse and produced several drawstring pouches. He tipped a sample of the contents of the first into his hand. Tiny glass and stone beads rolled out in an array of subtle hues. ‘Five thousand beads,’ he said proudly, ‘and twenty-five separate colours. And I have the larger obsidian ones in black and green this time…’

  They haggled for almost fifteen minutes before they finally settled on a price that was no surprise to either of them. The Quyriots were delighted to have been relieved of the problems of marketing smuggled beads to the rest of the empire and relished the cash Ligea gave them, which they then used to fund the Quyriot rebellion. Ligea sold the items on, using a network of slave contacts supplied by the ex-slaves under her command. The profits weren’t high, but they were steady and every bit helped. She was all too aware that her fortune would fast diminish if she continued to spend lavishly on equipment and horses; she didn’t need Arcadim’s periodic agitated messages to tell her so.

  When the haggling was over, Berg produced a necklace of black obsidian beads, carved with the runes of his people. ‘For your son,’ he told her. ‘Put it round his neck, and he’ll have the blood of a Quyriot horseman in his veins.’

  She took it from him, marvelling, and thanked him.

  ‘We don’t sell beads like them,’ he told her. ‘Never. Them’s for the people of the passes: us. And yus, now, cos yus are agin those bastards of Tyr. There’s stone magic in the runes. You tell ’im as he grows. Wear those beads and he’ll always understand the beast he rides. Not like yus city folk.’

  She doubted he knew much about cities, but nodded anyway. The idea that the Quyriots were intent on subverting her son to their ways—even though he was still a day or two short of a month old—should have been amusing. Instead, she was touched. Gevenan just muffled a laugh and looked his normal sardonic self.

  ‘And I came t’ask how many colts yus wanted from the foalin’,’ Berg continued. ‘You said yus was interested. Looks like bein’ a good season. We got three hundred mares breedin’ this year in my clan alone. Not, of course, that we want to sell all the crop.’

  She blinked, impressed. ‘Well, to tell the truth, we’d prefer those already broken to the bridle…’ More discussion ensued, more prices were haggled over and logistic problems solved.

  She had been delighted to discover that the Quyriot rebels were only too glad to sell plateau ponies. They were not much use to a man as big as Brand or as solid as Gevenan of Inge, but they were excellent mounts for most of the ex-slaves. Agile and strong, they could prop and turn faster than even a trained warhorse. Because they were short, they were easy to mount and less feared by men who had not ridden before. A fully grown man looked ridiculous mounted on such a short-legged beast, but that, Ligea felt, was an advantage. The legions were unlikely to take her mounted forces seriously. If so, they would pay for that mistake. Some of her men, under Gevenan and Brand’s tutelage, were already proving the worth of the beasts again and again.

  Once the business discussion was over, Berg again refused their hospitality, mounted up and headed back towards the mountain passes.

  ‘A long way just to sell a few pretty beads and tell you about some pregnant ponies,’ Gevenan remarked. ‘Holy gods, it’s men we want, not horses.’

  ‘I know. And you shall have them. As soon as Arrant is doing well with this new wet nurse, I shall be off to recruit.’


  ‘And just how do you intend to do that?’

  ‘If there’s one thing Tyrans is not short of, it’s slaves.’

  ‘And, may I remind you, legionnaires to catch them when they escape.’

  She grinned at him. ‘I’m more than a match for most legionnaires. I plan to concentrate on slave pens, slave auctions, slave transport—rescue and run, and hope some will stay with us to fight. I intend to build up an army of ten thousand fighting men.’

  He snorted. ‘Pride puts your nose so far in the air you don’t see the roots that trip you up. All this takes money, as well as courage. We’ve been here, what, not quite five months? You’ve been bringing in arms and horses. We grow enough food for our own needs, and more, and the farm has ideal grazing and oats for the nags, thanks to the soils and the mountain snow-melt—but all that buying weapons and armour, plus the iron needed for blacksmithing and the leather and the bronze—it’s expensive. Bringing it here secretly doesn’t come cheap, either, I’ll bet, and the longer it goes on, the greater the chance of betrayal and detection. You asked me to sodding lead this rabble, to train them up, and I have. And you know what? I’ve got to like the bastards. They are my men. And I don’t want anything to happen to them before we even begin.’

  He stopped at the edge of the orchard, under the shade of a plum tree. ‘I want to know what your plans are in detail, Legata, and if you’re not prepared to tell me, then I’m going to head back to the other end of the world, where I was born and the grass is always green, and we don’t call three-quarters of the year “the desert-season”. We may not grow olives, but, by the many heads of Ocrastes, we sure have the sweetest apples you ever tasted.’

  ‘Apples?’ she asked, not sure what they were.

  ‘Never mind. I mean it, Legata. I don’t know how you are going to hide ten thousand men here. Nor do I know how you intend those ten thousand to defeat the twenty thousand legionnaires in Tyrans. I’m sick of not knowing what I’m training a mob of kitchen boys and stable hands for. You’d better have a good plan, lady, because I won’t lead them to a defeat.’

  She picked a switch of leaves from the tree to fan away a persistent horsefly. ‘It would indeed be a defeat if we played by their rules. So we won’t. The battle will be of our choosing, Gev. We are going to gnaw away at their edges, year after year. We are going to rob their pay wagons, set fire to their equipment, steal their horses, destroy their food supplies, wreck their capacity to replace what they lose. When it comes to battle, they are the ones who will be demoralised, fighting with inadequate weapons on empty stomachs against an enemy who won’t stay still long enough to lose a battle.’

  ‘And we will start the planning now?’

  ‘Tonight, if you like.’

  ‘I hope you know what you are doing.’

  ‘I was once locked in a room for a long time with—among other things—a great many books. A lot of them dealt with five centuries of military history. I know what worked in the past. And what didn’t.’

  ‘Great. A philosopher-general who knows the theory of war.’

  She refused to take offence. ‘That’s right. I do. You are here to supply the practicalities. And Homfridus deals with the logistics. You are right; we should start our detailed planning. It is time.’

  ‘Good. Oh, and something else. Homfridus told me you wanted men to remove the statue of Selede from yonder temple. That you want a simple altar built in its place with the words “Do no person harm” written on it. What in all hells are you up to, messing with religion?’

  ‘All part of the plan, Gev. The pantheon belongs to the present Exaltarchy and perpetuates the legitimacy of an empire based on war and conquest and slavery. Why in all the sweet hells should we—who have suffered at the hands of this empire—worship at the feet of their many-headed God of War or their Goddess of Cunning? I want to give people an alternative. Selede’s temple will now be a temple to the Unknown God. People can make of that what they will. I would appreciate it if you would encourage the men to leave their offerings to the Unknown God in the future.’

  He stared at her for a long moment. Then guffawed. ‘And I thought I was cynical! Ligea, my dear, you sweep me from that pedestal and stand triumphant as Queen of the Cynics. Creating a new god to serve your own purposes? I would never have thought of that one!’

  ‘I didn’t. I mean, there already is an Unknown God. He has a temple in the Snarls.’

  ‘He does? All right, not cynical, just illogical. You would send your men into battle worshipping at the feet of a god who bids them do no harm!’ He chuckled and strode off in the direction of the stables.

  ‘Who said religion was logical?’ she yelled after him, but he didn’t turn around.

  She continued on to the villa, where the baby’s wailing soon drew her wandering thoughts back to the present.

  Arrant. Four weeks old. Demanding in a way only babies can be. In a way she had never envisioned. She’d thought beforehand in vague terms of wet nurses and dispatching him as quickly as possible to Kardiastan so she could get on with her life. And then had come the day of his birth. The way the memory of pain and, yes, the terror that something would go wrong, had all vanished in that first wondrous moment of motherhood when she had held her son in her arms and his tiny fist had closed around her finger. Never, never had she considered she would feel the way she did. Protective. Insecure and anxious for his safety. Savagely angry when she even thought of anyone ever harming him.

  She looked down at her tunic where a wet patch spread into the material, prompted just by the baby’s cry. Damn it, I can’t be like this. I have a war to win. I can’t be thinking of him all the time. Why in all the mists of Acheron doesn’t someone arrive from Kardiastan to take him away? She had asked Arcadim to send a message to Temellin the moment she was certain of where she’d be for the birth, but no one had yet come. Back in Ordensa, she and Temellin had agreed that he should not risk sending letters, not at first, but she had expected a person.

  Damn you, Temellin. He’s your son. Where the Vortex are you when I need you?

  The baby wailed again, more insistent this time. She sighed. The first wet nurse had not been a success and she had been forced to continue her own feeding of him until they’d found a second. This second woman, after her own child’s stillbirth, had plenty of milk, but Ligea’s body seemed reluctant to relinquish its role. Damn, damn, damn, she thought, brushing her fingers over her breast as if she could rid herself of the spreading stain. I hate this. I should never have been a mother. What the hell do I know about nurturing someone?

  The only mother she could remember with any clarity was Salacia, Gayed’s wife, who had ignored her whenever she could, and been as cold as a snowseason wind when she couldn’t. Ligea could still see the pinched frigidity of her stare when her gaze alighted on her adopted daughter. There had been the slave Aemid, of course, and she had done her best—but Gayed had kept her under tight scrutiny to limit her influence.

  Ligea sighed. She still suspected she had made a bad start before Arrant was even born, and not just while in Kardiastan and Tyr. Even the journey with the escaped slaves across Tyrans to this farm in the foothills had been a nightmare. She’d worried every time she used her magic that she might be harming her unborn child; she’d been sick with anxiety every time she raised a ward around their encampment at night, or blocked a road or a trail with a ward; she’d been panic-stricken when they were attacked by a force of legionnaires sent after them and she’d come close to draining her power once more. On that occasion, she’d had to destroy the arch of a massive stone bridge across the River Tyr to stop the pursuit.

  After they had arrived at First Farm, she’d fretted for the rest of the pregnancy, certain she had harmed the growing child. There had been one more incident when she had nearly lost him, and the worry that he was somehow damaged had remained. It had dissipated a little after his birth when she’d been able to reassure herself that he had the normal complement of fingers and toes,
all the prerequisite features of a face in the correct places, and a set of lungs loud enough—and an appetite hearty enough—to keep a whole houseful of adults at his beck and call. She’d been relieved, and yet unable to put aside that niggling feeling of concern, even though she had no further basis for it. The annoying thing about being a mother, she decided, was that you could never forget you were. If she was honest, she even had to admit she enjoyed feeding him herself and hated handing him over to the wet nurse.

  She entered the archway to the main entrance of the villa and hence into the family living hall. Brand was attending to Arrant, and neither the wet nurse nor Narjemah was anywhere in sight. He was holding the baby, joggling him in his arms, making absurd gurgling noises, a ridiculously inane expression on his face. Arrant quietened. She paused to wonder if Temellin would have been so tender toward to her child if it were Brand’s, and thought not. Temellin did not have Brand’s generous spirit.

  I could have loved him so well, if there had never been a Temellin.

  At that thought, she looked down at her cabochon with a surprising resentment. She wouldn’t have changed what she was for anything, surely, yet right then she found herself wishing she had been born an ordinary person, of ordinary parents, in some ordinary town somewhere.

  Blast it to Acheron, she thought, it’s this Vortexdamned motherhood stuff.

  Brand looked up and gestured as if to pass her the child.

  She shook her head. ‘I am trying to stop feeding him, not continue. Where’s Dulcia?’

  ‘I’ve sent Narjemah to get her. She’ll be here in a moment. Sure you don’t want to hold him?’ She heard the words not spoken, as she so often did with Brand: Remember, he’ll be gone soon, to Temellin, and you won’t have him to hold any more…

  ‘You seem to be doing a good job of it,’ she said sourly, thinking in turn: Can’t you understand? I don’t want to care too much.

  ‘He’ll be one month old soon, Ligea.’

  She nodded, her heart lurching.

  ‘You remember the promise I made, to leave?’