His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) (6 page)

“No,” he said. “No, Risto’s outnumbered here,
and I don’t care to add cowardice to the list of vices he
attributes to me. Another time, maybe—when the odds are
matched.”

He let go Seian’s shoulders, adjusted his sword-belt, and sat
down again.

Tyren left the table and went back up to his rooms. He got together
his bags on the bed, pulled the leather cuirass back on, buckled his
sword-belt on his hip and threw his cape over his shoulders. He
wouldn’t spend the night here. In all likelihood Seian would
come looking for a fight later—when the odds were better
matched—and he couldn’t afford that now. He carried his
bags down the corridor and the steps and went out into the
stable-yard quickly, before he could be seen from the mess. In the
stable he called sharply to the boy, who was sitting in his own
quarters with his supper, and told him to go summon the Cesino from
the slaves’ quarters. He went down the row to find the horses.
He could pick out Risun’s head peering out at him from one of
the stalls, but he couldn’t see the black colt right away, and
they’d been stabled alongside one another. He dropped the bags
to go look more closely and saw, with a sudden clenching-up in his
chest, the colt was gone, the stall door standing open to the row.
The colt’s saddle, the military-issue saddle, had been left.
Risun’s had been taken instead, along with the bridle and
halter and one of the muzzle feed-bags.

He just stood there a moment, staring stupidly. The stable-boy came
back at a run.

“I couldn’t find him, lord,” he said.

He didn’t say anything right away. He couldn’t bring his
thoughts together. Then he said, stammering a little, “Never
mind it, then. You can go.”

The boy bowed and ducked quickly away, not wanting to give him the
time to reconsider, maybe. Tyren himself went back out into the yard
and walked over to the gate. He beckoned for the guard to come down
and the man came, hurriedly, raising his right hand in a hasty
salute.

“Yes, sir?”

“My slave took the black colt out?”

“Yes, sir. Not quarter of an hour ago. He said he had his
orders from you. I let him go.”

Tyren said nothing. His heart was pounding, thoughts running through
his head too quickly. He had the absurd urge to laugh.

The guard said, with anxiousness in his voice, “Is everything
all right, sir?”

“No—yes. Yes, of course. Everything’s all right.
When he returns tell him to—tell him to put the colt up and
wait for me in the stable. I’ll be back presently.”

“Yes, sir.”

He saddled Risun a little unsteadily, his thoughts drifting. He could
search for him, of course. The Cesino couldn’t have gotten far,
and people would remember the black colt. You didn’t see a
horse such as that any day. Surely the Cesino must have known he
wouldn’t get far. He turned the idea over in his mind,
considering. Easy enough to mount pursuit. Embarrassing, especially
with Luchian here—Risto couldn’t even keep his own
body-slave in order. But easy enough, and then the thing would be
forgotten, as if it hadn’t happened.

But deep inside he knew he wasn’t going to mount a search. The
thing was his own fault. He should have set the Cesino free back in
Vessy, let him go then. Let him take the horse, even. It wasn’t
that the horse mattered so much. It was just that the horse had been
a gift from his father—for once it had been almost a loving
gesture. Well, it wasn’t the horse itself that mattered. His
own fault. (And, damn it all, why had Luchian even been here? Almost
as if he’d known. Maybe he had known—or he might have
guessed. He’d have known you’d be coming through Rien.
But, damn it all to Hell, why’d he have to be here?)

He’d no intention of coming back to the club. He left the
stable-yard and rode out again onto the Gate Street. At least, he
thought, at least the Cesino hadn’t taken Risun. It was good to
be on his own horse again. Let the Cesino have the black colt; he
still had Risun, and that was how it should be. The Cesino had the
greater need for a fast horse anyway: there was the slave-ring round
his throat, and the penalty for runaways was steep. If only the colt
hadn’t been a gift from his father.

IV

He spent the night under a fat old oak tree a little way from the
road, maybe two or three miles beyond the city’s western gate.
He’d slept out often enough on the journey home from Choiro and
he didn’t mind it. It was cool in the nights but not cold, now
summer was here, and with the saddle at the back of his head for a
pillow and the heavy woolen uniform cape over him it wasn’t a
bad way to sleep. In the morning, while Risun nosed at his feed-bag,
he refilled his water-skin at the thin stream running noisily past
the tree and ate a breakfast of flatbread and raisins from his packs.
He was out on the road again by the time the sun was above the
treetops to the east.

Past Rien to the west was the wilder part of Cesin. The only Vareni
coming through this country were soldiers of the mountain garrisons,
or traveling merchants—slavers, mostly—or troops headed
to and from Carent, which was another fort town three days’
ride south and west of Rien, in the part of Cesino territory that ran
like a peninsula a little way into Varen. Very little civilian
traffic; that was confined mostly to Rien’s southern road,
which led eventually to the port city of Arondy, on the Eastern Sea.
There were still farm villages as you went west, but the people here
were of the old Cesino blood, largely unmingled with Vareno blood,
and few of them spoke the language of the Empire and most of them
harbored a quiet but deep-seated hostility for the Vareni that the
more practical Cesini, or perhaps the less noble-minded ones, had
long ago put aside. Sometimes now, in the dark, mossy hollows by the
roadside, there were the crumbling ruins of old Cesino statues, the
likenesses of tribal kings from before the time of the Varri even,
broken down and overgrown with vines, blackened by age, stone eyes
staring gravely. Altars to the past, or else cynical reminders Cesin
had been independent once, had thought to defy the might of the
Empire—and this is what happens to those who defy the might of
the Empire.

The road narrowed as he went on and by noon of that day, after he’d
crossed the Carent road and left all other traffic behind, the paving
ended and the road was nothing more than a faint beaten track on the
long green grass, and the ground was climbing up beneath Risun’s
hooves, and in the distance, above the black pine, he could see the
blue heads of the mountains, the tallest peaks crowned with snow,
crisply white in the sun.

He came to Souvin in the evening of the second day out from Rien. The
sun was falling slowly down behind the mountains and the little
valley and the village were washed in blue twilight. The southern end
of the valley was bordered by a sheer, forested hillside, and the
floor of the valley sloped up westward to the hills, and eventually
the sheer hillside and the valley floor came together in a seam at
the valley’s western end, under thick pine forest, and then the
forest went on and on, always westward, until the heads of the
mountains broke out of it to stand starkly against the sky. That was
the Outland and it was dangerous country. The village lay below, a
scattering of squat flag-stone huts and outbuildings, some walled
fields for livestock—sheep, mostly, and some cattle—and
then open fields for wheat and barley. The road ended at a wide, flat
plot of grassy ground at the heart of the village—the public
square, he supposed, though without the merchants’ stalls and
the paved assembly places of a Vareno town’s square. A smaller
gravel track led from the common to the fort, which lay at the
western end of the valley, towards the Outland. The fort itself was
very Vareno-looking to be in that green, earthy place: a broad,
rectangular, columned compound with an open yard in the middle, roofs
of smooth reddish clay tile, the fiery Imperial sun blazing on the
great banner hung from the gate-house.

He sat in Risun’s saddle at the northern end of the valley and
looked down at the village and the fort and the sheer hill country
round it. His new command. The village was quiet; it was nearing
meal-time and there was no sound apart from the wind and a bird
singing somewhere in the pines above the valley. It wasn’t so
bad. At least it wasn’t the city. It wasn’t exactly a
command you could be proud of, the Imperial garrison at Souvin, but
at least it wasn’t the noise and grime of Choiro—the
scheming, the incessant politics. He’d hated Choiro.

He touched his heels to Risun’s belly, slowly, and rode down
into the valley, keeping the horse to a walk. Red firelight spilled
out into the dusk from the huts in the village and he heard voices
speaking in Cesino, occasional laughter. He rode on through the
village and over the common and then down the smaller road to the
gate of the fort, and one of the guards atop the gate-wall saw him
coming and shouted an order, and the gate was pulled open for him,
and he rode into the yard. A runner had dashed across the yard from
the gate, had gone up the steps of the building on the far wall—the
headquarters, Tyren guessed; it was the only building in the compound
with broad flagged steps leading up to a columned portico and heavy
wooden double-doors. The runner must have gone to fetch the acting
commander. Tyren dismounted in the middle of the yard and stood
holding Risun’s reins while he looked round. Stables and
storerooms to his left, along the south-facing wall. Barracks and
mess and infirmary to his right. Perhaps sixty soldiers assigned to
this place, quite possibly less, and then there’d be the
various others who worked in the fort’s service: surgeon,
stable-master, cook, their various assistants. Not more than eighty
men altogether.

A man wearing the scarlet lieutenant’s braid on the shoulder of
his uniform tunic was coming down the headquarters steps and across
the yard to meet him. A few others followed him: a junior officer, a
handful of curious regulars.

“Commander Risto,” the lieutenant said, when he’d
gotten close. “An honor. They sent word from Rien you’d
be coming.”

He was older than Tyren by quite a few years, more or less in the
region of thirty. He had a hawkish, tight-lipped, leathery face,
bronze hair washed out to yellow by the sun, already thinning at the
temples. He saluted, measuring Tyren with small, shrewd eyes while he
did so.

“Verio,” he said. “Remin Verio.” He looked at
Risun, looked to the gate as if he expected to see someone else
riding in. Then his eyes darted back to Tyren. “You came alone,
sir?”

Tyren returned his salute. “I came alone,” he said.
“You’ve been in command, Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir. Two months now. Our previous commander died quite
unexpectedly and Rien—well, it takes some time for Rien to get
around to us, sir.” Verio gestured sharply with his right hand
to a couple of the regulars. “You—take the horse. The
bags go to the Commander’s quarters.”

Tyren let go Risun’s reins. He took off his gloves as he and
Verio walked towards the headquarters steps.

“You come from Vessy, I believe, sir?” Verio said.

“Yes,” Tyren said.

“Much trouble on the road?”

Tyren said, “No.”

“We’ll be eating shortly, sir. I can arrange for a meal
to be brought to your quarters, let you rest—”

“That won’t be necessary,” Tyren said. “I’d
like to meet the officers.”

“Certainly, sir,” Verio said.

Inside, the headquarters was laid out simply: a small vestibule
opening into the atrium, and his office adjoining the atrium,
unfurnished save for a plain desk of walnut wood and two cross-legged
chairs. Down the corridor from the atrium were his private quarters:
a single room opening to the corridor through a curtained doorway,
furnished sparsely with a cot, a wash table, a smaller desk for his
own personal use, wooden shelves on the walls, a stand for his
cuirass. A low doorway led back into his office and a small,
shuttered window on the rear wall, the western wall, looked out
across the garden, which was nothing more than a swath of unkempt
green grass with a wizened old laurel tree at its center. The door
leading to the officers’ mess was set in the wall across the
corridor from his quarters. The mess lay perpendicular to the
headquarters itself, along the northern wall of the compound, and a
covered portico led from it to the barracks.

He looked round the place, listening while Verio described it, saying
nothing but approving of it inwardly. Not so bad. It wasn’t the
mud-pit they’d made it out to be in Choiro. It was a simple
place, but he didn’t mind that. If the men were good this
wouldn’t be a bad command at all.

He took leave of Verio a while, asking to be informed when the meal
was ready. He went back to his quarters to wash and to unpack his
bags. He hadn’t brought much with him: a spare uniform tunic,
an extra pair of boots, quills and ink and papyrus for writing, a few
scrolls of verse for his spare time. The room still looked bare when
he was done and he found himself wishing he’d brought something
from the house at Vessy for a memento, though he didn’t know
what. He put up his cuirass on the stand, his sword on the wall-rack
above it, and he changed into the fresh tunic, and by the time he’d
finished Verio’s voice was coming through the curtain—meal’s
ready, sir—and he didn’t think about Vessy anymore right
then.

There were only three men in the officers’ mess, besides
himself: Verio, who was to be his adjutant, and two junior officers,
Regaro and Aino. Aino was Cesino-blood, smaller than the others,
gray-eyed—a traitor to his people, some Cesini would say, for
serving in the Empire’s military, especially as an officer.
Tyren was the youngest man there by several years. He saw them note
that, hide knowing smiles behind politely blank faces. He ignored it
and sat down at the head of the table with Verio at his right hand.