The Legacy of Gird (99 page)

"So they don't see the worth of it, eh?" Rahi sat down, and waved at him to do the same.

"Aye. It was on the edge of the magelords' holdings, and even I remember that things weren't too bad until after the war started. That's when our Duke—the Duke that was—raised the fieldfees and imposed stiffer fines. We had less bad to fight about, and more to lose, and there's feeling now that the grange system's as bad as the magelords' stewards ever were."

Rahi whistled. "Perhaps they don't think they need anyone at all, is that it?"

Sidis twisted a thong and untwisted it. "That's what it seems, most times. They're good folk, but they don't look ahead much, and they think they can deal with their own lives better than anyone else." He looked troubled, someone telling an unpleasant truth about people he cared for. "I've wondered myself, now the magelords are gone, what we need all this drill for. I come here, and you all seem to know things—it comes clearer, like. But how I'll explain it to them—"

"Maybe they should do without a grange for awhile." Rahi leaned back against the wall, watching his face. He didn't say anything at first. "If they don't want it, if they aren't supporting it—maybe they have to feel the need first. Da always said you can't convince an ox it will need water in the middle of the work when you show it a bucket at dawn. You could find another place . . . even here."

"But—" His hands worked the thong back and forth, back and forth. "It's losing, that is. Giving up. If there's a grange somewhere, it should stay—"

"Not if it's not wanted." Rahi felt her way into this argument, hoping she was right. "We're not here to make things worse, after all. The granges started because people wanted them. It's true there has to be some kind of law—if those folk come to market in a town with a grange, they'll have to abide by the Code. But if it sticks in their throats, why not let be?"

"The other Marshals," Sidis muttered. "They talk of their granges growing, of founding new bartons. They'll think I did something wrong."

Rahi opened her mouth to deny that, and then stopped. To be honest,
she
thought he'd done something wrong. He'd come into the war, and then his position as Marshal, without any real conviction. And if she thought so, others might as well. She could not reassure him with her dishonesty. "If you made a mistake," she said, picking her words as carefully as she would have picked through a bundle of mixed herbs, sorting them, "—if you did something wrong, it sounds to me that your folk have made mistakes as well. You couldn't have done all the wrong. Our whole system began with the people, the peasants. If they aren't with us, we have nothing. Pretending we do leads right back into what the mageborn did, all that pretense about the lords protecting the people, and the people serving the lords. If the folk in your grange don't want a grange, it won't be a real grange no matter what you do."

His brows had drawn together, but his hands were still. "Some do—at least—"

"If they want it, they will make it work. Think about it."

"What would you think, Raheli, Gird's daughter, if I let the grange go—closed it, or however it's done?"

Rahi looked past him, seeing against the far wall of the room a stream of images from the war, and the years after. What might it have been like, to live in a village with a better lord than Kelaive? Or with no lord at all? Could there be farmers, village folk, who did not understand in their bones what the grange was for, and how it worked? Apparently so. "I would think you had tried," she said. "I hear the truth in your voice. But it's not my decision." She could not tell what Sidis thought of what she said; he merely nodded and went away, leaving her to ride out of Fin Panir later that day still wondering.

She took that uncertainty with her back to her own grange, and looked more carefully at the people who did not choose to come. She had heard no grumbling for some time, but did that mean satisfaction? Or that people grumbled where she could not hear them? She was not surprised when a letter from Fin Panir reported that Sidis's grange had dissolved, and he himself had given up his Marshalship. She hoped they would fare well, and hoped that her words had not formed his decision.

It was half a year before she came to Fin Panir again. Luap had finished his
Life of Gird
, and the Council wanted her approval. From the tone of the letter, she wondered what the other Marshals thought of it. They might have sent a copy, instead of a letter, surely it would have been easier to send the scrolls here, instead of dragging her to Fin Panir in the busiest time of the year.

A copy of the original awaited her in Fin Panir; the young yeoman who led her to a small room opening on an interior court pointed to it. "Luap said that was for you, as soon as you arrived."

Rahi stretched out on the room's narrow bed, and unwrapped the scroll. Luap's fine, graceful handwriting moved in even lines; she found it easier to read than her own crabbed script. "In the days of the magelords, in the holdings of one Count Kelaive, was born a child who would grow into Gird Strongarm, the savior of his people." Rahi wrinkled her nose at that. A bit flowery, not much like Gird himself.

She read on, her thumb moving down the scroll and holding it open. It couldn't be exactly like Gird, she reminded herself, because Luap hadn't known the young Gird. Even she had only village tales to rely on. But she felt uneasy, as if a hollow bubble were opening in her chest. She could not say, at first, just what it was, but something . . . something was definitely wrong. She put the scroll down and lay back for a moment. Would anyone else notice it? Did it matter, when so far as she knew, no one else had survived from their village?

She picked up another scroll, and began reading. This was set during the war; Gird was enjoying a mug of ale in a tavern—she stopped again, trying to remember. Tavern? When had they been in a tavern? The drinking she remembered had been in various camps in the woods; by the time the army was taking towns, he had not been drinking that much. She looked at the scroll more closely. It was, she decided after a bit, intended to be funny: the great war-leader relaxing with ale, becoming excited, almost starting a fight. Her shoulders felt tight; she remembered how dangerous Gird could seem, in those rare drunken rages from her childhood. It had not been funny at all. And worse than that . . . this was not real; she could think of no time when it really happened. She scanned along the scroll, looking for some reference, and found it. This was supposed to have happened after the capture of Brightwater, and before Shetley, but she remembered that time as clearly as the past half-year . . . Gird had not been in any tavern; he had been off trying to persuade brigands to join the army.

Luap had made it up. He had made up a good story, as men often did, but then he had put it in this work, which was supposed to tell Gird's story for all time. Rahi felt cold, then hot. How much had he made up? Was that what bothered her about the first scroll? She snatched it up, and read it carefully, with growing anger.

"You're not telling the truth!" Rahi's voice went up. Luap managed not to wince visibly. He had been afraid she would not appreciate what he had done, how he had turned the story of an ordinary farmer-turned-soldier into the shape of legend.

"I am telling the truth—I'm telling what it meant. That's what they need to know, not every little detail."

"It's a lie." She glared at him, Gird with brown hair and breasts, the glare he remembered all too well. "You're making it into a story . . . a song, like the harpers sing, that everyone knows is just a tale."

"Raheli, listen! If the harpers change the kind of tree a prince hid behind, because it rhymes—oak, say, instead of cedar—that helps the listener remember. It doesn't change anything important. The prince still hid behind a tree: that's what matters. If they say half Gird's army wore blue, when it was one person less than half, or almost two-thirds, why does that matter? The point is that we won at Greenfields. That's all I'm doing. I'm making sure people remember what it meant—what his kind of life meant—and they won't make sense out of the real details. You didn't yourself."

Would it work? For a moment he thought it had; her gaze flickered, as she thought about her own reaction. But then the angry glare came back.

"You're turning him into a lovable old gran'ther, using even his lust for ale—"

Luap shrugged that off. "Most men like ale; it makes him more human—"

"He
was
human! And his liking for ale cost us lives, you know it did."

"That's not the point—"

"It
is
, and it would have been
his
point. Was his point, at the last, remember? There's nothing good about it. . . . I remember after—" A long pause; he wondered which
after
she was seeing. "After my mother died, a bad stretch then; he came home drunk and sour with it, angry with everyone—"

"He had cause," Luap offered, sympathy he did not really feel.

"Everyone has cause," Rahi said. "But some do better. He did, later. And if you make it endearing, you diminish him—what it cost him to stop it, to change." In her eyes,
I never did that
, defiance but not quite pride. He knew she didn't, had sought, without admitting it, evidence that she was as fallible as Gird. As far as he could find out, she made none of Gird's mistakes; no drinking, no carousing, no wild flares of temper. Frustrating. He had never been able to maneuver Gird while Gird lived, and he could not maneuver Raheli, either.

He shrugged, as close to discourtesy as he allowed himself with her. "I'll change it back, then. You're his daughter; it has to please you—" He expected an explosion; instead he got a flat stare, and her nostrils widened as if she'd smelled something dead.

"I'm not . . . you're trying to make me feel bad about that, and I won't have it. He said you were slippery, and he was right about that." If nothing else. She didn't have to say that; it hung between them, something on which they agreed. She took a deep breath, and tried again. "I'm not asking you to improve the tale to please me; quite the contrary. I want you to tell the truth. Just the plain truth." If you can. He heard that, as if she'd shouted it.

"Even you don't believe the plain truth," he said, accenting "plain" just a little. "You weren't here; you're convinced it was something else than what we said."

She shook her head, the dark hair tossing back in a movement he remembered from his wife. His mouth dried. "
You
said things I found hard to believe—"

"Then ask the others! I know you did—"

She prowled his study, a thundercloud ready to burst. "What they said made even less sense."

His temper flared. "Then believe what you like! If I lie, and the others talk nonsense, what will you have in the chronicles, eh? Shall we just forget him, and all he tried to do?"

"You know I don't mean that." Again that level gaze. "We can't just forget him. But—"

He would try sweet reason, though it had never yet swayed her. "You hate having to hear it from me. You don't trust me; you never have, not even as much as Gird himself did, and you wish you'd been here yourself. Well, so do I. Then you could tell me what to write, and—" He stopped himself from saying
and if you lie, it's your oath forsworn, not mine.

"I would not have said to turn a dark cloud into a dark beast," she said firmly. "Even if I'd seen such a cloud."

"I'll change it," Luap said. He could always change it back. "I simply have no idea how to write of
that
cloud so anyone years hence will know what I mean."

"Do you know what you mean?" That with a shrewd sidelong look that took his breath away, the very look Gird had given him so often.

"I—no. No, I don't. It seemed—I told you—as if all the wicked thoughts and shameful fears in every heart had taken visible form, a black blight thicker than a dust storm. But
what
it was . . . I daresay only Gird himself knew. The words he spoke, that scoured it, lifted it, condensed it—those were no human words. I know that, and I've asked the elves—"

"And they said?"

"They found I could not recall the shape of the words, could not repeat them—and indeed, it was as if they slipped past my ears—and would say only that Adyan might be pleased with Gird."

"And then he died, while you stood there doing nothing." That was unfair; he seized that unfairness and cloaked himself in honest resentment.

"It was the gods' will; none of us could move. I cried—dammit, Rahi, I told you that, and others must have—"

"Yes." She had turned away. He waited. Finally she turned back; her eyes were dry. "You cried; I cannot cry yet. Tears are cheap."

He hated her. He felt he had always hated her; he willed himself to forget the times he had been sure he loved her, when (surely) he had only loved her father, and of her father only that part she herself could not share. "Your tears," he said formally, in as steady a voice as he could manage, "your tears you can name the worth of. It is your right. The tears of others you have no right to shame." He felt dark, dire, brooding as a storm-cloud low over the western hills. Great, and in some sense noble, to chide her about that, standing up for the tears (he could almost feel his gathering to fall) of plain, simple men who rarely cried, whose tears tore apart the rock walls of their souls, great floods that ripped mountains asunder. He looked up to find her watching him, that flat peasant stare (how had he ever thought it attractive?), that hard mouth with no sweetness, a dried haw withered on a dead stem.

"You're too poetic," she said. "You will make it all pretty, make all the patterns match at the edges, as they do in the rugs we took from the mageborn houses . . . better you should learn from village weavers, who leave one corner open for the pattern's power to stay free, and able to work."

"You don't understand." She didn't. She couldn't. She could but she wouldn't. He did not know which, but only that she did not understand.

"Nor you." Her back to him now, a back broader than a woman's ought to be, shoulders bulking more than his own. He had an excuse, a scholar's hours, but she had no excuse for looking (to his now critical eye) like a stubborn ox. "I'll see you in Council," she said, and left the room without looking back. Luap's mouth held a dry bitterness; he made himself sit back down at the desk, but could not find words to pen. Council meetings had been going so well, until now; Raheli would ruin all that, he was sure.