Yesterday's Kings (6 page)

She smiled and he was entranced.

He asked, “And what is life in the castle like?”

But before she could answer, her stepmother interrupted.

“Enough, eh?” Vanysse glowered at her stepdaughter. “We’ve taken sufficient of his time.”

“And hospitality,” Amadis added. “So let’s be on our way.”

He reached into his sabretache and tossed two coins to Cullyn.

Cullyn watched them fall, insulted. A pig came to investigate the downfall. He kicked it away as Abra blushed. Her stepmother smiled as Amadis helped her astride her horse. He watched Abra mount, and then felt a heavy hand on his shoulder.

“He knows no better,” Laurens said. “Take the coin and no insult, eh?”

“He’s …” Cullyn struggled to find the right word.

Laurens swung astride his horse. “Arrogant? Rude? Presumptious? Name it, lad—I know it. But take the coin—the gods know, he has enough to spend. Use it, eh? And if you ever think of being a soldier, come see me in the keep.”

“I don’t think,” Cullyn said, “that I’d like soldiering.”

“There are worse lives,” Laurens answered. “The gods know, but I’ve been at the trade for forty years and more. Think about it, eh?”

Cullyn nodded and watched them ride away, all set up on great, grand horses, bound for the keep where servants would prepare them baths and set their food before them, cooked and ready to eat, and after take the plates away and clear the tables, while he must butcher the deer he’d taken and trudge afoot into Lyth if ever he hoped to own a horse.

He sighed, and carried the deer to the outhouse; it
was dark before the butchering was done and he washed and settled to sleep.

Which was disturbed by the insensate notion that he was still being watched.

H
E WOKE UNEASY
, the smell of strangers in his nostrils and the memory of odd dreams in his head.

It was as if Abra had imprinted her scent on the cottage. Then he recalled the coins the captain had so casually tossed him and found them in the pig-grubbed dirt outside as he went to the well. He grinned wryly as he scooped up the silver discs—they’d go some good way to buying his horse—before he drew a bucket from the well and bathed. Then he fed the animals and watered his small vegetable garden before making himself a simple breakfast; and all the while he thought of Abra and Elvira, and weighed the proven charms of the one against the untasted charms of the other, and thought that both were unobtainable.

He checked the butchered carcass of the deer and found it sound, so he took up his bow again and went out to hunt another.

He realized that he wanted to wait no longer to purchase his horse. It was as if his unwelcome visitors had started up some desire he had not previously known, so that he was now consumed with impatience. He would, he decided, take a second deer and go straight back to Lyth, not wait for the Summer Horse Fair, but buy an animal as soon as possible.

He was firm in his purpose as he stalked the deer trails through the forest, and equally uneasy, for he felt he was still watched. It was as if some shadow trailed him, unseen amidst the bracken, and although he would
halt and glance around and sniff the breeze, he could not see his follower.

It was like chasing a dream: a thing perceived on the edge of vision, shapeless and unfocused. Sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of some shifting shape that crouched inside the tall ferns or darted behind the bole of an oak, but there was never any firm sighting. Only the sensation of eyes upon his back, as if he were the hunted.

He took a deer with a single clean shot, and as he cut the throat a figure emerged from behind a lowering oak.

Cullyn stared, grasping his bloody knife, ready to defend himself. Save the man—a Durrym, he supposed—raised opened hands in gesture of amity. He was as tall as Cullyn himself, and dressed in similar garb, save his blended better with the woodland, all motley patternings that melded with the trees and bracken and seemed, even, to ape the shadings of the sunlight. He was slender for all his broad shoulders, and long, leaf-brown hair was drawn back in a tail from a narrow face that was simultaneously alien and handsome. He carried a bow strung across his back, and a long knife was sheathed on his hip, but he smiled in a friendly way, so that Cullyn felt a little more at ease.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I am named Lofantyl,” the Durrym said. “Who are you?”

“Cullyn.”

The Durrym nodded. “I have watched you a while now. You love this forest, no?”

Cullyn nodded. “It’s my home.”

“I love it, too. Almost as much as Coim’na Drhu.”

Cullyn frowned, and Lofantyl added: “Our new homeland. Since you drove us out of Coim’na Hass.” He shrugged. “I don’t know what you call it.”

“Kandar,” Cullyn supplied.

“An ugly name, but no matter.” Lofantyl gestured at Cullyn’s still-ready knife. “Shall you put that blade away and we talk?”

Utterly confused, Cullyn nodded.

C
ULLYN STARED
in amazement at the Durrym, but Lofantyl smiled at him, as if this strange meeting were normal.

“I’ve watched you a while,” he said, “and I think you know it.”

Cullyn nodded, and mumbled, “I sensed you there. Was it you who went into my cottage?” He wondered if he should draw his knife and attempt to kill this stranger, considered a mortal enemy by Church and State. But the Durrym seemed friendly, as if they were two chance acquaintances met by accident or, perhaps, design, and he felt no wish to fight.

Lofantyl ducked his head, shrugging a gesture of apology. “I was curious. Your ways are different, and I wondered how you lived. I had never seen the inside of a Garm’s home before.”

“Is that what you call us?” Cullyn asked.

“Garm’kes Lyn. In our language it means ‘taker,’ ” Lofantyl said. “Because you took our land. What do you call us?”

“Durrym. That means ‘exile.’ ”

“We obviously have our own names for one another,” Lofantyl said, smiling, “but I wonder if you and I could not be friends.”

It occurred to Cullyn that this was a most odd conversation. The Durrym were the creatures of nightmare, proscribed by the Church as godless outcasts; they were the reason the great border forts had been built after the war. And they, in turn, had created the Barrier to hold men from the land Lofantyl named as Coim’na Drhu. They were the ogres mothers warned their children of. Cullyn could remember his own mother telling him that a Durrym might come in the night and take him away, if he was naughty. Yet now he sat speaking with one such monster—who seemed not at all menacing.

“Perhaps,” he allowed.

“Save?” Lofantyl asked, hearing the hesitation in Cullyn’s voice.

“I …”Cullyn shrugged, his voice faltering.

“Don’t trust me?” Lofantyl chuckled, a musical sound. “Because I’m … What is that name you have—Durrym?”

“No; yes,” Cullyn spluttered. “But mostly because you spied on me.”

“I wanted to know you,” Lofantyl said calmly, “before I spoke with you.”

“Do you often speak with us Garm … whatever?”

“Garm’kes Lyn,” the Durrym supplied. “No. Sometimes we come across the river to watch you, but not often. I am considered … odd, for my interest in you. But …”

He paused, and Cullyn sensed something behind his calm expression that was not at all calm. “What?” he asked.

“The woman,” Lofantyl said. “I’ve seen her before, and …”Cullyn wondered if the Durrym blushed, for surely Lofantyl’s face grew red as he added, “I believe myself in love.”

“What woman?” Cullyn asked.

“The young one,” the Durrym returned. “The one with the red hair, like oak leaves in the autumn. The one with the face that—”

“Abra,” Cullyn interrupted. “Lord Bartram’s daughter.”

“She’s noble born?” Lofantyl asked.

“Her father’s a Border Lord,” Cullyn said. “Sworn to defend our land against the likes of you.”

“The likes of me?” Lofantyl chuckled. “My own father would defend our land against the likes of you.”

Cullyn shrugged his incomprehension, and wondered if he were not dreaming. He sat in conversation with one of his people’s enemies, who seemed entirely friendly. Indeed, love struck; yet he found the man—he could somehow not conceive Lofantyl as enemy—most likable.

“My father is Vashinu of the Kash’ma Hall. He commands the south of Coim’na Drhu.” Lofantyl chuckled again. “Forgive me—that means that my father is what you would call a Border Lord. His fortress is Kash’ma Hall, and his duty is to hold the south of Coim’na Drhu safe against you … What are you called?”

“Kandarians,” Cullyn said, feeling his confusion grow by the moment. “I don’t understand this.”

“It’s really quite simple,” Lofantyl said. “You drove us out, so we retreated across the river—”

“The Alagordar.”

“Which we call the Mys’enh, and set up the Barrier, yes. I suppose it was better than fighting you. But I always wondered what our old land was like, so I came across the river to find out.” He shrugged, chuckling. “My father considers my interest strange. I think he indulges my fancy only because he has my brother, Afranydyr, to name as heir. But, anyway”—he beamed amiably at Cullyn—“I came and watched you, and saw her. Abra, you said was her name?”

Cullyn nodded. He felt confusion drape him like a cloak, like some wild dream that wrapped him up and carried him off into such realms of fantasy as he could not imagine. He thought that likely he blasphemed the Church’s doctrines by speaking with Durrym; that he betrayed King Khoros and Lord Bartram, both. And yet he could not help liking this man.

“And fell in love with her,” the Durrym added.

“You, too?” Cullyn asked.

“Are we rivals, then?”

“I’ve hardly seen her,” Cullyn mumbled. “Twice, perhaps.”

“When she came to your cottage?”

“You saw that?”

“I was watching. Her guards are not very observant.”

“They’re not so used to the forest,” Cullyn said. “Save for hunting, they tend to avoid the woods. When they come here, they come in numbers.”

“How strange.” Lofantyl shook his head thoughtfully. “The forest is our friend.”

He said it in such a way as to imply that he spoke not only of the Durrym, but also of Cullyn himself, as if they were somehow bonded by their love of the woodlands. Cullyn could only nod his agreement. And then ask the inevitable question: “How can you cross the Alagordar? How can you cross the Barrier, when we cannot?”

“I’ve the key,” Lofantyl answered, as if that were all that needed saying. At least, until he saw Cullyn’s incomprehension. Then: “We always lived with the land—we came to know it, and understand it, and thus made it work for us.”

“Like farming,” Cullyn interjected.

“No!” Lofantyl shook his head emphatically. “We do not parcel up the land in little bits and pieces as you do. We live with it, and take what bounty it offers—which it does in abundance.” He frowned, his tanned face wrinkling like a nut. “I’ve ventured farther than I should from the forest margins, and seen what you do. All those walls of stone; everything fenced off. How can you live like that?”

“I don’t,” Cullyn said, feeling a degree of sympathy.

“Not you, perhaps.” Lofantyl smiled an apology. “But your people …”

“It’s how they …”—Cullyn corrected himself—“we live. Each family has its own piece of land. They own it and tend it. It belongs to them.”

“How can the land belong to anyone?” Lofantyl asked. “The land is itself, not yours or mine. We only share it, live with it.”

“I suppose,” Cullyn said, struggling with concepts alien to Kandarians, “that we have a different way of thinking.” He shrugged, seeking an explanation he was not at all sure he understood himself. “What if I could cross the Alagordar and find Kash’ma Hall? Could I walk in as you did to my home? Wander round and inspect the place?”

Lofantyl nodded. “Of course, and you’d be welcome.”

“And you’d let me go, after?”

“Í would. But”—he smiled—“I doubt my father or Afranydyr would. They trust you Garm no better than you trust us.”

“So I’d be trapped?” Cullyn wondered.

“Not by me,” Lofantyl answered. “But I was too young to fight in the A’sh im’whey.” Cullyn guessed that meant the Great War. “My father did, and Afranydyr is old enough to remember some of it. They’d not let you go.”