Firethorn (56 page)

hat night I lay long awake, waiting for Galan on the pallet in the corner of the Crux's tent. He sat on a footstool and leaned back against his uncle's chair, and his uncle's forearm rested on the arm of the chair close to Galan's head, and though they didn't touch, there was such ease in their proximity, such affection, as I'd not seen since the Crux had learned of Galan's wager. Galan was forgiven and all was well with him, not a care in the wide world. No matter that his uncle still forbade him to ride: the Crux was a man of his word, and no one, least of all Galan, expected him to bend or break it.

Galan turned his head and smiled at something Sire Alcoba said, and the Crux spoke to both of them and Galan laughed. Then he stood and drained the last wine from his cup and wended his way through the press of his kin, his companions. He took up a clay lamp on the way, and came to me carrying that little glow. He crouched and set the lamp on the ground. The lamplight tickled Galan's chin, sent shadows up the hollows of his face. Some of those shadows were bruises he'd taken in the tourney. His cheek was cut where a rivet had scraped him and his lower lip was swollen and split. He smiled.

I was wrong about the bond between us. It was neither as thin nor as weak as a thread. It was a wick. Somehow it burned and was not consumed.

Deep in the night Sire Rodela stole my hard-won sleep. He startled us all awake with a great roar, followed by ceaseless shouts. He wouldn't be quieted. I could hear him too well, because he was in the priests'tent under the care of the carnifex, and there were only two canvas walls between us. I wanted to stop up my ears or run away, but I feared what he might say and so must listen. He cried out
stinking vixen
and
uppish insolent honeypot
and
slippery stinking mudhole.
He swore I had a serpent's eye and I'd put that eye on him and Galan to ruin their peace. He ranted that he'd whittle me down, he'd skin me and make my hide into a prickguard, a sheath for his sword. Yet he never said my name, never said I'd given him aught to drink.

I lay beside Galan with my head on his arm and felt his limbs stiffen and his pulse begin to race. Between his silence and Rodela's din, I was between anvil and hammer.

Sire Rodela shrieked that the priests were trying to poison him and he'd feed them their own tongues if they didn't leave him be; in the next breath he entreated them to untie his ankles and let him go. He cursed Sire Galan and the Crux, begging the gods to drag them under the sea and choke them with mud for the wrong they'd done to him. But before long he was wailing that the gods despised him, and then his lamentations turned to rage and he vowed to spite the gods for abandoning him. With the names of so many others on his tongue, I hoped no one took note of what he said against me.

The shouts drove Galan out of bed. Before the glimmer of first light, he rousted Spiller and Rowney, for there was much to be done. I huddled under the blanket while his warmth leached away.

At dawn I was driven outside by my own stink. The smoke and ash of the fire clung to my dress, and there was the reek of my own fear sweat and the foul discharges of the wounded I had tended. I'd scrubbed off the worst of it the night before and hung the dress to dry while I slept, but the stench remained and now my skirts were damp and cold. I sat by the wall of the Crux's tent in the Sun, for the warmth she gave, shielding my eyes against her. The pains I'd forgotten the day before, in the press of greater miseries, came back importunate and would not be denied.

I had my needle and a bit of thread Boot had given me, and I sewed the torn sleeve of my dress onto the bodice. The sleeve had come off in Fly-killer ' s hand when we ran down the hill, and he'd saved it for me. It's bad luck to mend a garment while you're wearing it, but I had no other clothes. I stitched the pieces of my headcloth back together too, with crooked stitches I was ashamed to make. Such a simple task, and it was almost more than I could do. Before long Spiller came by and dropped Galan's red linen underarmor into my lap and told me to fix it. It was a jack's duty, but I didn't refuse. He and Rowney had many repairs to make to Galan's harness and weapons, straps and laces and buckles and rivets to replace and metal scales to sew on tight, and cleaning besides.

The padded shirt and leggings were stiff and brown with dried blood, and full of holes that must be mended before washing to keep the stuffing from oozing out. Each hole matched one in Galan's skin. I took up his shirt and bent my head to the work and was glad no one marked how my fingers trembled, without strength or sureness—while Sire Rodela screamed.

A hand of days, more or less, before we embarked for war, and the fire had left Sire Galan ill prepared. Before the tourney the Crux and his fellows had given him garments and supplies to replace what he'd lost, generous gifts, but still he summoned clothier and tentmaker, jeweler and armorer to commission what was lacking.

When the clothier came, Galan called for me to help him choose the best of his stuffs, for I knew a good weave and a fast dye. Sire Rodela bellowed, and Galan would not show that he heard, would not raise his voice, and the clothier leaned closer, flinching and nodding. Galan ordered a quantity of garments for himself, tunics and hose for his varlets, and three overdresses and four underdresses for me.

I asked, “Why so many dresses? Why these bright colors?” for he refused to buy the dark wool I urged on him, a green so drab it was nearly brown, like turf in winter. He said if he left it to me, I'd go about in rags, and he wouldn't have it said he was a skin flint.

Galan gave the man twice what the garments were worth, and never minded that he was cheated; the extra coins would buy lamp oil for stitching all night, for he wanted them delivered in two days.

He was a rich man again, with gold enough to waste, purses and purses of gold: ransom for the arms and armor of the seven men he'd killed.

All morning the Auspices of Ardor and Crux met at the king's hall to dicker over these ransoms. It was a solemn business, and delicate, to satisfy the dead and the living and their kin too. By inches they arrived at a price, redeeming each equipage for about half what it cost when it was new—at which price both sides had aimed from the beginning. This swelled the pride and purses of the living; as for the dead, a shade cares nothing for money, but will tarry and be troublesome if the armor he lived in, sweated in, bled in, died in, hangs for show in his enemy's hall, or worse, is worn by his killer.

The weapons and armor were collected by grim drudges, overseen by the Auspices to ensure that not one buckle went astray. They required a cart to take away all that Galan had won. But there was one man who wouldn't accept a ransom, and that was Sire Rodela. The Auspices offered him gold and he roared that the armor was his and he meant to use the helmet for a pisspot and no one could gainsay him—and he laughed and taunted the man he'd killed by name as if his shade stood before him.

Divine Xyster made excuses to Ardor's priests, saying a broken skull had made Sire Rodela unreasonable. I knew better. The way he veered from fury to terror, the way he laughed and lamented, put me in mind of Consort Vulpeja after she breathed the smoke. He howled about the same torments that had troubled her, which I'd thought were mere dreams: shades and black dogs and crawling insects. Why should they both rave of such visitors, unless the dwale had sent them?

The jacks had wagers on if and when Sire Rodela would die and whether Sire Mordaz, armiger to Sire Lebrel, would perish first (he had been stabbed through the bellows); Spiller said Rodela would go soon, he'd heard he was vomiting black blood, but Rowney put five copperheads on him, saying the carnifex must have favorable signs, and besides, the sowpricker was too mean to die. Galan had given his jacks heavy purses and they were in a hurry to lighten them.

Rodela did not seem to lose strength, though he spent it freely. I saw a ragged god-bothered revelator crouching behind the priest's tent, listening to him. Sire Rodela's words tumbled out in a mob, a hundred of nonsense for every one of sense, but they say the words of a dying man are potent; the more obscure they are, the more profit can be made of them. I feared what the revelator might divine, and chased him away.

Sometimes, for a blessed while, Rodela was silent. Never for long.

Sire Galan went to watch Flykiller try his new warhorses up and down the hills outside the Marchfield (with half the men in our camp looking on), to judge which to keep and which to sell. He'd won nine horses. There would have been more if he'd not killed so many from under their masters; most of these mounts had been kept in reserve and never entered the battle. There was jesting among his fellows, some good-natured, some envious, about how it was that a man forbidden to ride had won a stableful of stallions.

So Galan was not there when Divine Xyster called the other priests into their tent, and all their servants and the Crux's varlets as well, and Sire Rodela commenced to scream worse than ever. He screamed and screamed and sobbed, and Divine Xyster shouted, “Hold him steady!” and I couldn't guess what they were doing except they made Rodela suffer. I thought of the peephole I'd cut in the wall of their tent to spy on Galan and wondered if they'd discovered it. But I couldn't bring myself to look.

Later Boot told Spiller and Spiller told me that the carnifex had drilled two holes in Sire Rodela's skull and he'd bled some watery substance that was only a little pink, and then Divine Xyster had plugged the holes with wads of precious amber resin. I asked Spiller why it was done, and he said to drive Sire Rodela's tormentors out. For certain (Spiller said) he was possessed by the shade of Sire Bizco, returned to take revenge, and a crowd of wights who'd crept in behind him through the crack in Rodela's head—and that was why the armiger had so many voices. But I doubted that any spirit dwelling in the wind would give up such an airy palace to be prisoned in the stinking confines of Rodela's skull. It was the dwale that spoke in him: Rift's medicine, Rift's poison. Divine Xyster, with all his omens, had failed to guess that his torments had another cause than his wound.

By the time the priests finished with him, Sire Rodela was hoarse and his shouts tore the air itself. When Galan came back he found me sitting on the ground by the doorway with my hands over my ears. It was a clear day up above in the blue vault, but down below, a glittering haze hung in the air, turning golden as the afternoon waned.

Galan squatted next to me, looked me in the eye. “I thought you said he was dying.”

I looked at him and made no answer.

“Are you weeping for him? How can you weep?”

“If he was a horse, they'd have given him mercy by now.”

“I'm content that he should suffer,” Galan said. But I saw how pinched his face was, how the muscles shifted in his jaw.

I covered my face with my arms. “I just want it done, I want him shut up. Is there no one who'll put an end to his misery? Give me your mercy dagger and I swear I'll do it myself.”

Galan unsheathed his dagger and offered it to me. My fingers itched for the hilt, but I pushed it away. Even if the Auspices and the Crux himself had stood aside and given me leave, I couldn't find the strength in me to use it. So quickly I was forsworn.

“As I thought,” Galan said. “You're too soft to go to war. You can neither endure your enemy's suffering nor steel yourself to end it.”

I wanted to tell him I was not so soft. I wanted to tell him how I'd given Rodela poison, made him drink and wiped his chin clean, but I bowed my head and cried instead.

The Sun descended and pulled the cloak of twilight after her. King Thyrse invited the clan of Crux to his hall for a victor's feast and still Sire Rodela bawled.

The night before, the king's army of cooks had roasted the sacrificial meats and fed the whole Marchfield, but this night all their labors and arts were for Crux. Even our jacks and horsemasters were invited, for they'd played their small part in the tourney; they ate at trestles set up outside the round hall on the bare muddy ground where all the roads of the Marchfield met.

The wind had quieted. I could smell the food and also the pyres of the drudges burning on the cliffs. Cook gave me barley bread and horsemeat stewed with pease and onions; the bread was black and dense and coarse, but at least when it was swallowed you knew for a long time you'd eaten something, unlike the pale bread of our betters.