The Legacy of Gird (55 page)

Then he gave them all his plan, which combined (he thought) absolute common sense with absolute fairness and honesty. When everyone complained, he was sure he'd gotten it right: it pleased no one completely, but everyone slightly. Somewhat to his surprise, the grumbling died off, and the townsfolk and traders went back to their work. He had expected more trouble, not shrugs and winks and return to business as usual.

Many of his yeomen had never been in a town as large as Brightwater. Gird spent the next several days straightening them out, and insisting (until his voice nearly failed) that his rules applied to them, too. It was always possible that a townsman's gift of a pear or meat pasty to the man patrolling the street was not intended—or taken—as a bribe, but Gird could see clearly where it might lead. If someone wanted to give supplies to the army as a whole, as the farm villages had done with their gifts of food and tools, then Gird insisted it had to be done openly. Selamis had to record the gift, and then Gird would distribute it among all the cohorts as needed. Only a few yeomen were obviously looking for bribes, or extorting gifts, whichever way it could be described. Gird shocked his followers and the townsfolk by discharging those few, publicly, and explaining why. After that, the problem seemed to disappear.

He himself had a chance to see inside a rich man's home for the first time, when the surviving master merchants and craftsmen invited him to dine. He had never really thought about what would go into all those rooms, had envisioned even a king's palace as a glorified peasant cottage, but with everything whole and in abundance. The guard barracks had reinforced that notion: it was larger than his cottage, but the furnishings were much the same. Now, when he stepped onto glazed tiles of blue and white, when he saw the tapestries hung from walls, the carved and inlaid chairs and tables, the shelves crowded with things whose purpose he could not even guess, he realized how wrong he had been. The dining hall lay at the back of the house, facing a walled garden—but a garden made more for viewing than using. No cabbages, no redroots, no onions or ramps—but bright ruffles of color he did not even know. Two fruit trees were trained against opposite walls; their fruit gleamed like jewels among the leaves.

The meal itself surprised him as much as the house. He had assumed rich men ate more of the same food that he ate—what else was there? He peered suspiciously at a translucent yellow-green liquid in a glossy blue bowl, and waited until the others had dipped their spoons (their
silver
spoons) into it before trying it. It tasted like nothing he had ever imagined; he could have drunk a kettleful of it. That was followed by a stew of vegetables and fish, then a roast of lamb, rolled around a grain stuffing flavored with herbs. He had not known lamb could taste like that. Then came a dish of fruit with a honeyed sauce, then an array of cheeses, white, yellow and orange.

By this time, he had had more food than his belly would hold with comfort. The merchants nibbled on, watching him covertly. He wondered if they knew he was calculating how many of his yeomen just one such meal would feed. They might—and they might be worrying about it, too. He looked around the room, noticing the soft-footed servants who had brought and removed all those dishes. One of them met his gaze with an angry challenge; Gird gave him a slight nod. He refused the last three courses, explaining that he never ate so heavily in the midst of the day, and when he left he felt as if he should take a bath and wash it all off.

"And that's an honest one, they say," Gird reported to Selamis and several of the marshals that evening. "Not so rich as the one the mob killed, not cruel or unfair to his laborers and servants. I saw just that one part of the house, from the entrance to the dining hall—but if the rest is anything like it—"

"It would be," said Selamis, the corners of his mouth twitching. Gird glared at him.

"You know all about it, I suppose; you may even know what that green stuff was that looked like ditch-water and tasted—oh, gods know how it tasted, but it was good. But men like that, they have a lot to lose. They've done well under the lords; they won't stick with us if they don't do well under us. But if we bend the rules for them, we're betraying our own people."

The marshals nodded seriously, but Selamis lounged in his seat, almost smirking. Gird wanted to clout him. It was hard enough making the marshals accept him when he was invisibly efficient; when he put on airs, it rubbed everyone's hair backwards. Gird glowered at him.

"I suppose you think
you
should have gone to that dinner? You, who would know all the names for that land of food, and which of those pesky things on the table were for what use? I see the way they talk to you first—maybe they should've asked you." Gird paused for breath, puffed out his cheeks, and made a rude noise. "But they didn't ask you, Selamis: they asked me. They know where they stand with me, even if they don't like sharing table-space with a big stupid peasant who doesn't know what to do with a silver spoon. You're in between: not one nor t'other, not true peasant nor true lord.
We
don't care if you're a bastard or not, but they do. Yet you push it in our face that you're more like them."

Selamis had gone first red, then white, then red again. "It's not my fault," he said, glaring at Gird. "I can't help it that I know figan soup when I hear of it, or what the things are. Or that the better—the merchants and such are comfortable with me."

"No, I suppose not." Gird was half-ashamed that he'd let his temper loose, but the silent support of the marshals, who had never liked Selamis that much anyway, stiffened him. "What is your fault is the way you use it. If you're one of us,
be
one of us; don't be smirking in your ale when you know something we don't."

From the traders he found out where the king's army had been all this time. It seemed that after reaching Gird's village, they had had word from Gadilon about an army harassing his domain—an army headed by a terrible, cruel commander named Gird. Gird thought back to his near encounter with the brigands in Gadilon's forest, and managed not to laugh. The king's army was busy, the traders said, in the south and east, convinced that that was the main peasant force. And the traders had heard only vague rumors of trouble in the north until they were near Brightwater—and then the rumor had said the trouble was up on the River Road, near Grahlin.

"We were near Grahlin," said Gird, not specifying when, or why they'd left.

"I don't expect the king has heard that yet," the trader said. "Sier Sehgrahlin has much of the old magicks, but not the way of calling mind to mind. Even if he could, the king could not hear, nor any with him. There's no one much left with that, but the king's great-aunt, and she's too old to matter."

"Where is she?" asked Gird.

"In Finyatha, of course, in the palace. Amazing lady; she came to the market there once, when I was a boy, and my grandfather sold her a roll of silk from the south. She looked at me and said 'Yes, you may pet my horse,' and my grandfather clouted me for presuming. I never asked; she saw it in my mind. She told my grandfather so, and he said I shouldn't even have been thinking it, and clouted me again."

"What was the horse like?" asked Gird, suddenly curious.

"A color I'd never seen; I heard later it was favored in Old Aare: blue-gray like a stormy sky, with a white mane and black tail, and what they called the Stormlord's mark on the face, a jagged blaze that forked. But it was the fittings that fascinated me: that white mane was plaited in many strands, each bound with bright ribbons that looped together. The saddlecloth was embroidered silk—I was a silk merchant's child, I could not mistake that. Then when she mounted, she sprang into the saddle like a man—and rode astride, which the horse nomad women do, but no merchant woman I had known. My grandfather told me later all the magelords do, men and women alike, but they think it is presumptuous in lower ranks."

Gird returned to the topic that seemed to him more important. "But if she is the only one—and the sier Grahlin has no such powers—then his messengers must find the king's army before the king will know and come north?"

"Yes. If he even calls for him: did you not know that Sehgrahlin is the king's least favorite cousin? They have been rivals for years; Sehgrahlin refused to send his troops on this expedition, although he has some up north, guarding against the horsefolk. He will not like to ask the king for help, that one; he will do his best to drive you out of his domain with his own powers."

He had done that, Gird thought, but what more would he do? He asked the merchant, who shrugged. "He might help Duke Pharaon—they've hunted together a lot, and he once loved Pharaon's sister—but he married into the Borkai family. Those he would help, but they lie away north of you, north and west, right on the nomad borders." The trader knew what the gnomes had not—or what they had not bothered to teach Gird—which lords lived where, and how they were related. Gird had Selamis write it all down, although he suspected Selamis might know some of it already. Then he asked about the one magelord family the gnomes had mentioned, and the trader's expression changed. "Marrakai! Where would you have heard about them? They're not even in Finaarenis; Marrakai's a duke in Tsaia. No magicks, that I know of, but probably the best rulers in both kingdoms: honest, just, and put up with no nonsense. If that brigand you say is using your name wanders into Marrakai lands, he'll find himself strung high before he knows it."

The trouble with towns, Gird realized when he had been there a hand of days, was that they were harder to leave than villages. He would like to have had a town allied to him—but he could not hope to protect Brightwater against a full army. No army had come, but one might. Their barton had grown, swelled with sudden converts, but he didn't trust that. The newly elected council of merchants and craftsmen wanted him to stay (one told him frankly that it was cheaper to feed his army than pay the bribes and taxes of the earlier rulers) but he had not won his war. When the gnomes sent word that it was now time to redeem his pledge to help them at Blackbone Hill, he was glad of the excuse—but he left most of his army near Brightwater, under the command of Cob, whose broken foot was nearly healed.

Under a milky sky, the crest of Blackbone Hill loomed dark and inhospitable. Gird had expected the darkness, but not the shape, which made him think uneasily of a vast carcass, half-eaten. Sunburnt grass, like ragged dead fur, seemed stretched between the gaunt ribs.

"There's them says it's a dragon," Wila, his guide, said nervously. Clearly he thought it was something. Gird forced a grin.

"If 'tis, 'tis dead, long since."

Wila shook his head. "There's bones, up there. All black, black inside and out. Seen 'em myself."

"Dragonbones?" Despite himself, Gird shivered. No one had seen a dragon, but the tales of Camwyn Dragonmaster proved that dragons had lived, and might still. Even the lords believed in dragons; one of the outposts up on the western rim was called Dragonwatch.

"Dunno." Wila paused, and hooked one foot behind his knee, leaning on his staff. "All the bones I seen was too little, unless a dragon has almighty more bones than other creatures. If they'd been normal bone, I'd have said fish or bird—something light, slender. But black like that—and no one could think that hill's just a hill, like any other."

Gird glanced upslope again: true. Something about the shape of it, malign and decrepit, made the hairs on his neck crawl. "Why's anyone live here, then?" he asked.

"Well, now." Wila switched feet, and leaned heavily into his staff. Clearly this was a question he'd hoped to answer. "In the old days," he said, "before the lords came out of the south on their tall horses, this was uncanny ground. The Threespring clans claimed the east side for spring sheep grazing—it's not so bad then, with new grass and spring flowers. The Lady tames all, you know," he added, and dipped his head. Gird nodded, and swept his arm wide, acknowledging her bounty. "Then the Darkwater bog folk, they claimed herb right to the western slope, and the land between rock and bog."

"Herb-right to
that?
"

"Aye. In the old days, that is, when the Darkwater bog folk gave half the herbalists in this region, they gathered the Five Fingers from that very rock, the Lady's promise to redeem it, they said." He peered closely at Gird. "You do know the Five Fingers—?"

Gird nodded. "But where I come from, only the wise may say the names—I have heard, but cannot—"

"Ah—yes. I forgot. You're from the overheard, aren't you?"

"Overheard?" Gird hadn't heard
that
term.

"Where the kuaknomi overhear the blessings and overturn them. That's what I was taught, at least. Where the kuaknomi overhear, only the wise may say the name of any sacred thing, lest a prayer be changed to curse."

"They don't come here?"

"Well—there's them as says Blackbone Hill has felt their touch, but aside from that, no. We have the truesingers here, the treelords."

"Elves?"

Wila snorted, then coughed. "That's coarse talk of them, lad. What they call themselves is truesingers. Sinyi, in their tongue."

"You
speak
it?" Gird could almost forget the coming battles for that.

"A bit." Wila put both feet on the ground, and picked the staff up. "Best be going, if we're to be past the Tongue by dark." And despite Gird's questions, he would say no more about elves, but led the way at a brisker pace than Gird expected from someone his age. What he did say, briefly and over his shoulder, had to do with the human settlement now nestled at the hill's steeper end. "Lords forced it," he said. "Broke apart the Threesprings clans, and settled a half of 'em here, and put in two brothers from the bog folk, and set them all to digging in the hill. Came out as you'd think: fever and death, broken bones and quarrels, but the lords want what comes out the mine shaft, and never mind the cost. Send more in, when too many die. It's a hard place, Blackbone, and no hope for better."