The Legacy of Gird (108 page)

For that, and for some other reason he did not fully understand, when the Marshal-General called on him again, he found himself speaking with less forethought and grace than usual.

"Marshal Raheli has said more than I would claim—that boy frightened me. It's true that I think our young people are best trained elsewhere—some place where we can be sure their power does no harm, that they have control of it, and know how to use it for good. But that boy—Marshals, I cannot claim to understand that."

"But if you had such a child, in your distant place, you would not let him come back here to cause trouble, would you?"

"No." He shuddered at the thought. "I don't know what we'd do—but we would not let him loose on the world."

"What about Arranha's thumb?" asked another Marshal. Many of them. Luap knew, liked the old man even though they would not follow his god. Luap shook his head.

"We don't know. If Aris were here, I'm sure he could heal it. But Garin is not as skilled, or as powerful. Arranha says if the Sunlord wants him healed, he will be healed, but he's feverish this morning."

Bald Seli had attended the Council, though his sheep-farmers had already headed home. Now he spoke up. "Maybe I should have let them kill him, 'stead of bringing such trouble on us."

Glances flicked at Luap, each a minute but definite blow. "Maybe—but I think you did right," Cob said. "You were trying to be fair; that's what mattered. And I'll agree with Raheli, Gird's daughter, that if the mageborn had some safe place to teach their children, we might not have problems like this. At least not with the mageborn. It's not Luap's fault that the boy went wrong; for all we know he was cursed from birth."

To Luap's surprise, the other Marshals slowly came around to the same decision, and for much the same reasons. No one wanted to say good riddance to the mageborn—he was not even sure they thought that inwardly. Instead, the boy and his uncontrolled powers became the reason to agree that the mageborn needed a place to be trained properly. And they trusted Luap and Arranha to oversee that training and determine who might come back to the eastern lands.

"Will you take everyone? All the mageborn?" asked Bald Seli finally.

Luap shook his head. "I will take all who want to come, and try to persuade the younger ones that it's best. But some are too old, at least until we have established a settlement. Most of you know Lady Dorhaniya, for instance: she will certainly not come at first. Others are happy here, and get along well with those who are not mageborn—either they have no magery, or they are content not to use it. Unless you demand it, I expect they will choose to stay. Those who have little mageborn heritance, and whose families have no other mageborn blood, will almost certainly stay."

"I like that." Bald Seli said. "I remember old Gird saying we needed most to get along with each other; I'd hate to see that dream abandoned."

"So we'll give you all the troublemakers," Cob said to Luap with a grin, "and keep all the good ones—except you and Arranha, of course. And I suppose young Aris will come with you?"

Luap didn't want to start on that. "I thought to invite all mageborn who wanted to come—"

"But no others?" asked Raheli.

There was the crux of it. "I hardly thought any but mageborn would
want
to come," Luap said carefully. "Surely it would be as strange for them as a society wholly without magery is for the talented among us."

"But who'll do the work you mageborn don't know how to do?" asked Bald Seli. "Your folk don't know cooking and building and such, do they? They couldn't yoke a span of oxen and use a plough. . . ."

Luap nodded. "Some of those I think will want to leave are half-bloods, as I am . . . remember that I was fostered among farmers; I farmed, before the war." From the look on Bald Seli's face, he didn't quite believe it. Luap let a little humor seep into his voice, as he broadened his accent. "Aye, Var, coom up there; steady, Sor. . . ." His hands clutched imaginary plough handles, and his use of the traditional names for oxen brought smiles to more than one face. He grinned at Bald Seli. "My foster-father had me make my own yoke, same as anyone else. I've no doubt there are better farmers among you, but I made my crops and paid my field-fee and fed my family from my own work."

"I thought you'd been brought up in a big house." That was Kevis, who knew Dorhaniya.

"Only as a small boy. Then it was off to the farm, and no more big house for me until I came here." Luap glanced around the room. "I won't say all of us are farmers, or have such skills, but even for those who don't, it won't hurt them to learn." A shuffle of feet at that, agreement too strong for silent nodding. "We won't have to take the farmers and crafters you need here." Phrasing it that way, it could seem he was concerned for the welfare of those left behind. Which he was, in a way.

"But if someone wanted to come—I'm thinking, Luap, that if Aris goes with you, Seri will want to go too. You can hardly expect to separate those two."

"I wouldn't forbid it, certainly." Certainly not now, not when it could cause the failure of the whole plan. "But we don't want youngsters who wish they had magic powers wasting their time out there, when they could be learning good crafts here." Others nodded, seeing the point of that. "As well, since it is for our people to learn to use magery, it could be more dangerous for those without it. What I'm thinking of is more—more an outpost, say, where our people go for special training. When they have it, some of them—if you permit—will no doubt want to come back, and use their powers for good purposes." More dubious looks, at that, eyes shifting back and forth under lowered brows. All the better: if they forbade mageborn to return, then it was not
his
fault that the peoples sundered.

"What about the archives?" asked another Marshal. "How can you keep the archives and lead your settlement?"

Luap relaxed. This was something he had planned carefully. "We have many good scribes now, those who can not only copy a text accurately, but understand how to organize the archives. I can't do both jobs—certainly not in the first few years out there—but I will always be available for questions. Frankly, I think my successors—those I will recommend—are as skilled as I am, if not more skilled. I will continue to write, of course, but I doubt you'll miss my contributions."

"But are these scribes Marshals?" asked the same man.

"No," Luap said. "Although there are at least three who have been yeoman-marshals and might qualify for the new training, if you felt it important. Certainly there are advantages in having an Archivist who is also a Marshal . . . even though I'm not."

"As good as," Raheli said. "We've granted you Marshal's blue, and the authority within the archives. I, for one, would prefer an Archivist to have Marshal's training."

The Marshals discussed that for a time, and Luap realized that they had made their decision, made it far more easily than he had ever expected. They would argue about when he should go, and who should be in charge of the archives after him, and how often he should report . . . but they were letting him go.

So he told Arranha that evening, trying to cheer him up. Arranha's thumb had swollen to twice its size, and a red streak ran up his arm. Suriya, the woman Aris had worked with in herblore, had come to poultice it, but so far without effect.

"She didn't have to tell me it was a bad bite," Arranha said. He sat with his eyes almost closed and the tense expression of real pain on his face. "I knew that, from the malice on his face, the way he ground his teeth on it, the way I felt."

"I
wish Aris were here." Luap tried to sit still; he knew that Arranha needed quiet, restful companions.

"I, too. Young Garin has a lovely voice, but not a tithe of Aris's healing power. He eased the pain awhile . . . suggested I have Bithya in, that girl Aris worked with . . . but I'll wait. Perhaps I won't need her."

"Do you want us to send after Aris? Although I don't even know for certain which way he went."

"No . . . no, don't trouble the lad. He needs this chance to show what he can do somewhere else, and if the gods don't choose to send him back . . ." Arranha's voice faded. Luap felt a stab of worry. The old man could die of this, and then what? He needed him; they all needed him. Mageborn and peasant alike, they needed his wisdom, his determination to find the light in any tangled darkness.

"Rest now," he said to Arranha. "Is there anyone or anything . . . ?"

"No . . . don't bother."

Luap wondered if anyone else might help. Raheli, he remembered, had had a parrion of herblore. When he found her, she shook her head. "The woman Aris studied with knows more than I did, she and her daughter both. We talked about it."

"There's nothing more—?"

"Not without taking his hand off, and that's chancy, as you know. Sometimes it saves lives, but some die anyway."

"I thought of sending for Aris, but we don't know where he went, and Arranha says not to."

"Arranha's getting feverish. But you're right, we don't know where Aris is, and we have no way to find him." Rahi sighed. "It seemed like such a good idea, giving Aris his chance to travel and test his healing—and he and Seri might make a good partnership, if they had time together—but now I wish we'd waited." She stalked restlessly about the room for a moment, then said, "Well—and when do you think you'll start resettling your people?"

"I don't know I'd—you know Arranha and I had talked about it?" She nodded. "I depended on his advice, but now—"

"Now you may have to make all the decisions yourself. I hope not, for your sake as well. What will you do first?"

"Take others to see it. Start thinking how to make it workable—we should grow our own food, for one thing, and not have to transport it from here. There'll be plenty of work, hard work, to make it feasible."

She nodded. "There's something else: you need to think which mageborn to move first, and whether you want to gather them somewhere before you take them. Supplies for the first year or two, until your crops take hold. . . ."

"Supplies, yes." Luap grimaced. "Well—I did it for Gird; I ought to be able to do it now. But I don't even know how many mageborn there are, or how many will come."

But the familiar rhythm of planning comforted him in the days following, as Arranha grew sicker, the swelling worse. He began making lists: seed grain, vegetable seeds, tools for farming and tools for making tools. He knew of no mageborn smiths . . . could he hire a smith to set up there? And if he could, with what could he pay a smith's high fees? He found a master smith, and began asking the necessary questions; smiths were notoriously slow in giving answers. He went back to his lists. They would need a few looms—with skilled craftsmen and enough wood, they could easily copy the pattern looms. He paused, thinking. He had never worked wood himself . . . and that forest was very different . . . did that matter? Another question to ask a craftsmaster. He needed to know more about the skills of the people he would take—how many mageborn could weave, cook, plough, reap? So far as he knew, the work that needed doing—the work that would keep them alive—had never been done by magery.

Several times a day he checked on Arranha, who was unfailingly cheerful but visibly weaker each visit. To his surprise, others with no mageborn blood at all also visited. Rahi delayed her return to her grange and scoured the archives for anything on herbal treatments. Dorhaniya worked her way up the hill and arrived breathless and faint; Luap was afraid she would have a fatal attack as well. He insisted that she stay overnight in the palace; Elis agreed, and the next day Luap hired a cart to take her home. The men who had listened to Arranha's many lectures on light and wisdom came to stand by his door, peering in shyly but unwilling to intrude on a sick man.

Luap felt a deep guilt he could not explain. He knew it had not been his fault: the boy would have bitten anyone; he had been mindlost if not possessed by some evil. He knew it was not his fault Aris was gone—Rahi had confessed that she and the Rosemage and Arranha himself had connived at that. He knew it was not his fault that he lacked the healing magery. But he felt guilty nonetheless . . . somehow it
was
his fault—his fault that Gird's dream had not come true, and his fault that Arranha suffered for it. In reaction, he felt that his irritation was pardonable when one of the scribes made a mistake or spilled the ink. He got a morbid satisfaction out of scolding someone he would not ordinarily have scolded, and then lashing himself for being short-tempered.

He clung to his lists, and shared them with the Rosemage and Rahi. The Rosemage pointed out that he should require the mageborn to pay their own way, if they could: he was not a king, so he could not be expected to fund the expedition. Some of them were still wealthy; nearly all of them had something to contribute.

"They'd better," Rahi said lazily, leaning back on the cushions of a bench in the scribe's room. It was late night, and the scribes had long since ceased work. "If they don't have something to contribute, they'll starve."

"More than skills: money," the Rosemage said. "Clothes, tools, dishes, all that."

Luap had a sudden panic. "How are we going to transport all that? Either we have to take it to the cave, and try to stuff it in the chamber; or we have to take it into the High Lord's Hall—that doesn't seem right." He had a vision of the chamber choked with boxes, bags, sacks, bales of household gear . . . of the mess creeping across the floor of the great hall. Yet it had to be done: they couldn't make everything out there.

"It will work," the Rosemage said. "You don't have to do it all yourself."

"No, but—" But it had been his idea, his plan, and his place . . . his dream, in place of Gird's. If it came true, it would be his responsibility; he could not deny that. Gird had known, Gird had not started a war and then gone home to twiddle his thumbs and watch how it went.

"Scary, isn't it?" asked Rahi with surprising understanding. He looked at her, and she smiled. "Back before you joined, that very first battle, Norwalk Sheepfolds . . . remember it from the archives?"