The Wanderer Page 4

  But this was for the future. For now, Jehane held her peace, and the captain led them through winding passages to the kitchens. A female cook had charge of them there. She took two thick, lighted candles and brought them into a stone room with stone shelves for beds. These were covered with sacks of thick straw and each had a thick plaid blanket. There was a place to wash and presently a girl in an apron brought them broth, bread, a bottle of ale, and a basket of apples.

  This was a good supper. As they enjoyed it, Gael counted her bright silver coins with the shield of the royal arms of Mel’Nir and tied them up again in their cloth. She wondered aloud where the Sword Lilies would sleep. Jehane guessed that a few would remain in the fortress to guard Lord Knaar in his guest chamber, wherever that was. The rest, they decided, would have gone back to the Val’Nur pavilion.

  There was a trumpet call and another peal of bells; they heard marching feet overhead. Through a high window they could see the stars and the fields. There was a heavy bar on the inside of their door, and they slid it into place before they went to bed. Gael’s nerves were still taut as a bowstring, but after a time she relaxed in the strange room and quickly fell asleep. She dreamed of men in outlandish brown robes, herding black sheep before them.

  CHAPTER II

  SUMMER RIDERS

  Druda Strawn led the way but he let the young men go ahead on their ponies; they rode up a firm, winding way called Larch Road and came over the edge of the plateau. Jehane and Gael brought up the rear, through a stand of noble, shaggy larch trees, and saw the lads go hallooing over tussock and green reeds. Game birds rose up into the summer sky; larks were already singing. Far away to the south there was a head of cloud rising over Rift Kyrie, but here in the center of the plateau, the air was very clear. They could see the Great Eastern Rift, a little to the northeast. Then they were all on the High Ground, and training had truly begun.

  Gael was full of relief and joy—this was how things were meant to be. The episode with the attack and the questioning was like a summer storm or a flash of dark magic. That night for the first time they made camp, pitched their tents, learned about horse pickets. At the campfire they sang a marching song and a chant for good fortune.

  Now they rode out every day from their camping places, drilled with Druda Strawn, cared for their horses, practiced archery. Gael did well with the short Chyrian bow and the crossbow. One of the Naylor twins, Leem, had a natural gift, hardly wasted an arrow or a bolt. Jehane rode very well and, together with Bretlow Smith on his charger, showed them all simple exercises in dressage—walk, trot, canter, counting steps, and turning closely. Once, in the stableyard of the great inn called the Halfway House, Gael felled one of the lads to the ground for beating his pony—after that all the kern recruits respected the strength of her arm.

  It was fifteen years since the end of the Great King’s War; Ghanor, the so-called Great King, had died in his bed at his Palace Fortress on the inland sea, the Dannermere, in the year 334 of the Farfaring, as time was reckoned in Mel’Nir. As they followed the roads built on the plateau since the war, Druda Strawn tried to teach his uncouth band about the lands of Hylor, and, closer to home, of the internal strains that lay upon Mel’Nir. They knew well enough that peace reigned between their own liege, Knaar of , Lord of the Westmark, and Good King Gol, son of Ghanor; but the Southland, under the Lords of Pfolben, was almost an independent state. What of the Eastmark? Huarik, the Boar of Barkdon, last of the Eastmark’s Lords, had died during the Great War, in single combat with a hero of Mel’Nir—no less than Coombe’s own champion, Yorath Duaring—and no other lord had arisen in his place. King Gol still held many of the Eastmark lands. Recently much clamoring had arisen among the houses of the East that these, and a Lord for the Eastmark, should be restored.

  Gael was shamed to discover how little was her own learning of the lands beyond Mel’Nir’s (or even Val’Nur’s) borders—even the Naylor twins were better taught. The Druda smiled—assuredly Gael was not the only member of his troop whose knowledge was lacking—and he spoke to them in vivid pictures, deep into the night, as the campfire blazed before them.

  First came the wide Chameln lands across the inland sea, those lands which always had two rulers, the Daindru, and, nine years past, King Sharn Am Zor had been done to death by savage tribesmen. Now the Chameln were ruled by two queens: Aidris Am Firn, the old Witch-Queen, and the beautiful young Tanit Am Zor. Mel’Nir had held these lands for a time, in the years before Gael was born; as the tale was told, the old Witch-Queen Aidris had spent those years in hidden exile, training for a kedran, awaiting the moment to strike.

  Aidris in those distant days had been an enemy to Mel’Nir, but in the stories as the Druda now told them, the Queen of the Firn was a figure to admire, particularly for an impressionable kedran just taking up her training.

  True also, Aidris Am Firn had been an enemy with a sense of honor. In the slaughter of Great King’s Red Hundreds at Adderneck Pass, she had humiliated Old King Ghanor, but once she had retaken her land and her throne, once the border of the Chameln had been reaffirmed, Aidris had kept within her boundaries. The part of the story those around the fire found most impossible to believe—the Witch-Queen was a dwarf, a creature of the Firn, a tiny, slender-figured race. Even mounted on a Chameln steed, she stood no taller than the shortest of the Melniros. How could such a woman ever have gone for a soldier?

  Then there was far-off Eildon, the magic land, with its knightly orders and reclusive Priest-King. There was quiet Cayl, where once there had been no lords—until Lien had swallowed them up, reinstated the old aristocratic lines, and—so it was claimed—brought back to light Cayl’s lost honor and glory. There was gentle Athron, land of the magic Carach tree, its prince and highest lady claimed for the most beauteous in all Hylor, the most fair and comely in all their deeds and doings.

  On other nights, the Druda told darker tales. North of the River Bal lay the Kingdom of Lien, ruled by King Kelen and Queen Fideth. Here the Druda’s telling lost its playful tone, and Gael was brought back to the sharp looks he and Hem Duro had exchanged after the examination at Hackestell Fortress. Mel’Nir and its rough warriors yet held Lien to be a small, tame land—but there was also a history of magic, intrigue, and violence. Who had not heard of the Grand Vizier, the archmage Rosmer of Lien, who, not yet ten years past, had gathered in many lands—Mel’Nir’s own Balbank included—to transform Lien into a kingdom?

  The Mark of Lien had been the home of poets, actors, painters, scribes, and makers of books, a land of palaces and pleasure boats. Rosmer’s unbounded ambition had remade more than its borders. For now the Kingdom of Lien lay under the ban of a new religion: pastime and merriment were at an end.

  Rosmer had taken the life of Kelen’s truelove, Zaramund of Grays—his lovely but barren wife. He had taken Zaramund’s father, her brothers, all the core of the family who would have avenged her. In her place he set a young girl—foolish and hot-blooded—a woman who could give Kelen the heir his vizier so dearly wanted.

  But the gods take as easily as they bequeath, and the archmage had died the triumphant day Kelen rose to wear his kingly crown. As the Druda told the story, Rosmer’s life served as the final pledge that raised his liege to a king’s throne—and Kelen of Lien’s spirit was not strong enough to bear up beneath the burden of this last gruesome token.

  Life in Lien after the coronation soon turned bitter and hard. Rudderless after Rosmer’s death, the new-made king was turned by his then-young, but also penitent and implacable queen to follow the bright torches of Inokoi, the Lame God, also called the Lord of Light, and Matten his prophet. Now, instead of an archmage, the state was served by the Brotherhood of the Lame God, a fellowship who scourged the queen for her past sins—for all the world knew she had lain with Kelen and got herself with child while the king was still married to Zaramund—and preached that all the world must renounce the pleasures of earthly life and of the flesh. Queen Fideth, remorseful now, had even gone so far
as to dedicate her son, Lien’s heir, to the brotherhood’s ranks, and there were rumblings that the day Matten—the boy had been named for the great Prophet himself—inherited the Kingdom, he would take a Brown Priest’s robes, and become himself one of the Brown Order.

  This was about as much stuff from the scrolls as the band of recruits could bear—a prince, the heir to all his nation’s riches, voluntarily wearing sackcloth and spurning carnal pleasures! They could not—would not—believe it.

  They sidetracked Druda Strawn into talk of battles. Everywhere upon the plateau, he could point out memorials of his greatest hero, Yorath Duaring. The Druda had tears in his eyes when he spoke of the cruel ambush far to the west, in the very last days of the war. In the month of chaos while Ghanor of Mel’Nir lingered on his deathbed, the great Yorath was set upon and killed by rogue warriors of the Great King’s army, driven over the cliffs into the western sea, as if only the ocean could subdue his proud spirit. A sad mark of fate indeed to open Good King Gol’s reign, for Yorath Duaring had been—though every recruit knew this story, they gasped to hear it told again—Yorath Duaring had been King Gol’s only trueborn son, stolen from the cradle and brought to manhood in secret from his murderous grandsire, that unnatural grandfather who would have seen the child strangled at birth for a prophecy that touched at his own death.

  The aftermath at least was happy: Gol lost his son, but he made peace with the Lords of the Westmark, where his son had seen all his service. Knaar, after all was said, had been the noble Yorath’s bosom friend, and Valko Firehammer, Knaar’s sire, had been the father to Yorath that Gol’s own sire had denied him.

  The young recruits always eagerly clamored for stories of the lost heir of the Duaring Kings.

  Near the broad road, the “King’s Way” which traversed the plateau, was the strange ghost town of Silverlode—long deserted since its veins of silver were mined out, and since the bloody day when Huarik the Boar had lost his head to Yorath Duaring inside its tall Roundhouse, following the betrayal that triggered the bloodiest phase of the Great King’s War. Now Silverlode, in the gentleness of summer, was a place of pilgrimage. Druda Strawn led his troop there on a sunny day in Oakmoon, the Midsummer Month, and there they met other riders. A working party had arrived all the way from the Eastern Rift to clear away the weeds that rose up between the stones and to wash down the queer small buildings of brick and stone that stood about the Roundhouse. Gael thrilled to the tales of Silverlode, but in itself it was a cold, bereft place, and nothing could bring life or warmth to it.

  Inside the tall Roundhouse daylight shone down from open shutters in the roof; there was a long table with a fine red cloth and many wreaths of flowers. A group of women from the rift had arranged the greenery; now an older man, a tutor from the great house of Pauncehill, came forward and recited for them the tale of The Bloody Banquet of Silverlode. He told of Huarik of Barkdon, called the Boar, both for his house’s crest and for his savagery. This lord had plundered and raged up and down the eastern border of the High Plateau.

  The Boar made a secret pact with the mad old King Ghanor, who used his authority to summon all the lords from the Great Eastern Rift to the neutral ground of the High Plateau, calling them as if to a peace table and a field of martial games. The Rift Lords had little reason to trust Ghanor, who had not sent his soldiers to aid them in the campaign to hold Huarik from their fields, but Ghanor sent his daughter, Princess Fadola, and her husband, Mel’Nir’s vizier, as an earnest of his goodwill, so the followers of the Rift Lords put aside their wariness. In this very Roundhouse the lords and their ladies sat down to feast. As they ate and spoke and laughed, readying themselves for the tourney, their troops, housed in the compound, were treacherously brought to sleep by drugged wine. And underground, hidden within the old mine, waited fresh troops of Huarik, a secret double muster.

  Then, at the appointed hour, Huarik the Boar showed his true face. The Rift Lords were set upon as they sat at table; the Boar himself slit their throats, and they lay weltering in their own blood at the festive board. Their wives were herded away from the table; servants who intervened were struck down. Even the princess and Sholt the Vizier were appalled, stricken with fear and loathing, for they had not been privy to this awful deed. Young Knaar of Val’Nur, come up from the Rift, where he had trained with Strett of Andine at Cloudhill, was seized for ransom.

  Ah, but a warning had been given. The men of Cloudhill did not drink, and they warned others. A rescue party came in underground and climbed up, up—to the gallery yonder, where the musicians had played. They gazed down upon the frightful carnage in this great hall, and Yorath Nilson, a gangling untried warrior, a loyal man who had served in Strett of Cloudhill’s houseguard, took charge. While some stole away and opened the outer doors, crying for their life and freedom, this Nilson strode instead to the gallery railing, and there he took his stand. He cried out in a loud voice—a champion had arisen! Calling Huarik a foul and treacherous murderer, he challenged the Eastmark’s lord. Then over the rail he went, and he was so tall, such a mighty man, that it was but a little step down into the hall. There he stood, and all who beheld him in this hour believed this was truly a Godson, come to avenge the Rift Lords and their families.

  So Yorath Duaring—for that was this Nilson’s true name—matched broadswords with Huarik the Boar, and they were both mighty warriors: Huarik more experienced and crafty, Yorath with a greater reach, fresh and unafraid. So it was that they fought and marked each other with small wounds and at the last Huarik slipped in the spilt blood of his victims. He came to one knee, there, right on that spot; Yorath did what must be done. He swung a perfect blow; he struck off the head of Huarik the Boar, denying Old Ghanor the success of his treachery even as the Rift Lords’ families cried out and called arms against their king, and a new battle, a new round of Mel’Nir’s saddest and greatest war, had opened.

  Hearing this tale, none of the listening recruits could remain unmoved. Gael caught her breath; she felt the power of that moment, she looked up to the tall broken railing over which Yorath had leapt, now so many years past. Jehane, beside her on the settle, pressed her arm, sharing the excitement. As they listened to the end, Gael was in a dream between past and present … she thought of course of her own liege … and Knaar of Val’Nur was instantly set free to clasp the hand of his brother in arms. Gael thought wistfully of this lord as he was now, as she had seen him walking before the fortress at Hackestell two weeks past, and wondered if that unbent old man yet yearned for the fiery honor days of his young manhood.

  The followers of the Boar? Some were killed, taken hostage—they had lost all. Huarik’s secret muster, hidden underground, were veterans of the Chameln war, Ghanor’s men, returned from defeat in the Adderneck, already half in disgrace. Now, in a last stirring scene, they turned their allegiance to Yorath. He accepted their pledges, formed in that instant a Free Company to serve Val’Nur and protect the Rift from the troops of the Eastmark. He became Yorath the Wolf, the greatest ally of Westmark’s lord. The rest—the rest was a history Gael and the others had already heard many times over.

  As the Green Muster straggled out into the afternoon sunshine, the young men were fierce, with mock fights, flourishing their staves and practice swords. Gael Maddoc saw her chance and approached Druda Strawn as he sat alone on a stone bench in the center of the deserted town. She sat down without asking leave and began to question him about what had taken place in Hackestell.

  “Druda,” she asked, “how could it come to such a pass—the Lord Knaar attacked in this way? If we had not been at that very part of the way …”

  “You have put your finger on it, Gael Maddoc,” replied the priest. “It was a grave error, a failure in the planning of the parade. Oh, of course—it was a peaceful occasion, close to a strongly garrisoned fortress of Val’Nur—but the Eagles were too far ahead and the Sword Lilies out of sight at the bend. Guards and escort kedran are there to do just that—guard the lord and his family!�
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  “We heard no more,” she said. “We were hustled away to the maidservants’ quarters. Druda, what is known of these rebellious folk, the Black Sheep … ?”

  Druda Strawn sighed deeply.

  “I know little of them,” he said, “but I will try to learn more. It is almost certain that the two men came to attack the lord because farms they had, far away west of Krail, were flooded to make a dam.”

  “Oh,” said Gael. “What then was the talk of Lien, that Hem Duro spoke of so soft and quiet?”

  “Yes,” said the Druda, “that is indeed talk for quiet tones. Though in Coombe we are so far to the south, it can be hoped that little will come of it. Do you remember the matter I spoke of the other night?”

  “About Prince Matten, and his mother’s intention that he should join the Brown Men’s order?” The young men had found it a matter of laughter, a prince so cowed by his mother’s sins that he might swear himself to the celibate life.

  The Druda nodded. “It is a darker thing than you young folk can comprehend, if Prince Matten will cede to it. I have heard on the wind that Kelen of Lien has fallen ill, and Matten …” He paused. “The Prince is little older than your brother Bress. What say you, Gael? Is such a boy, even a prince, ready to make such choices in his own life?”

  Gael thought seriously, wondering at the Druda’s question. She thought of her own promise to train as a kedran, short months past, of the attack at Hackestell and all the things of the life to which she was now committed. “I am not sure if even one so old as myself would be ready,” she said. “But where the choice is so much bigger than oneself, there is no choice in truth but to rise to the occasion.”