He quenched the fire, and turned. Arranha nodded at him; the others smiled. Beyond them, their shadows stretched blue across the plateau almost to the cliff beyond. In his mind, their numbers matched those shadows; he could imagine the beauty of so many voices, singing the Sunlord’s praises. This year they would fill the terraces they had built; this year they would plant for the first time, and then… then others could come. Others of his people, and in a few years children born here, would raise their voices in song to speed the turning year.
Back inside, he called the Rosemage and Arranha into his own room. “I will be going, in a few days. If it goes well—”
“It should,” said Arranha. “They were friendly enough last fall.”
“I hope it will.” Luap paused to sip from the mug of sib the Rosemage had poured him. He had not expected her to become his servant, but she had been doing him such services since autumn. At first it had felt very strange, but now he enjoyed it. “But some may object even if we take the dirt from fallow lands.”
“You can’t take it from the cursed lands,” the Rosemage said. “Remember—”
“I know.” He waved at her. Most of the old lords who poisoned their lands had done so with temporary magicks, having hoped to restore themselves to power. But a few, in the final days of the war, had chosen to use long-lasting curses which even now could not be broken. Generations, Arranha had said, would pass before that soil bore healthy growth. Luap had seen the blighted fields, black as charred wood and far less fertile… luckily they were few. He would not bring that curse back here to work its evil. “It’s still going to be difficult.”
“I had a thought,” said Arranha. Luap looked at him. From the tone it was one of those thoughts that caused them all to feel that their minds had been twisted into bread coils. He nodded, and Arranha, smiling as usual, went on. “At one time, our people had the power to make much of a small supply. As the Sunlord’s light brings increase to the fields, or one seed makes many after the growth of a crop—‘
“Argavel’s Lore,” said the Rosemage.
“Yes. And it came with the usual warning: the gods’ gifts must not be used lightly. Some of our ancestors used this too greedily, and lost it. But I asked Gird one time—”
“You asked Gird?” Luap could not keep the surprise from his voice.
Arranha nodded. “Of course: he was a farmer, and a good one. The priesthood or Esea had preserved a verse at the end of Argavel’s Lore which implied, I always thought, that the elements had been unaffected by the decree that mortals might not usurp the gods’ power of increase.”
“So?” For once, the Rosemage sounded abrupt with Arranha; Luap was glad his tediousness bothered someone else as well.
“So we could no longer make a pile of gold rings from the pattern of one, or a platter of bread from one slice… but we might, I thought, have the power to make two lumps of clay from one, or two gusts of wind from one… you see?”
“And what had Gird to do with that?” asked Luap.
“He let me try, with a lump of soil. And it worked.” Arranha looked pleased with himself. Luap felt he was supposed to get something more from this than he had yet figured out.
“So you—took a lump of soil, and you got two lumps of soil?”
“Five, altogether. It’s harder than it looks. One needs a matrix of some sort. I was using sawdust. Rockdust would be better.” Arranha smiled again, and then shook his head. “Gird was not impressed. He said you could get good soil by putting sawdust and cow droppings together, every farmer knew that much.”
At last it came together in Luap’s mind. “But you’re saying you could use some good dirt and the rockdust we have to make more? I would have to bring only one fifth what we need?”
“Better even than that. It didn’t occur to me while talking to Gird, but I should be able to use whatever you bring doubled, and then redoubled, and so forth.” Luap wondered if his face was as blank as the Rosemage’s; Arranha sighed at them. “It’s the same principle as my way of cutting stone.” How, Luap wanted to ask, but Arranha anticipated this and went on “Remember what I showed you about reflecting lines? Symmetry? This should work the same.”
“How many of us can do it, do you think?”
Arranha shrugged. “As with the stone, we don’t know. It may not be the same ones; young Aris may find multiplying earth more like healing than stonework, for instance. And it will not take many: doubling increases faster than you think.”
Luap had chosen to return to Fin Panir after Midwinter Feast, and in the Lord’s Hall before dawn. That should satisfy the new Marshal-General’s finicky notions about magery, he thought. Everyone knew by now he traveled by magery; it was ridiculous to insist that he hide the fact. Particularly since he could time his arrival to alarm no one.
That had been his intent, at least, and he depended on his lookouts’ report of the star positions to time his exit—but there was light enough in the Lord’s Hall for a very frightened junior yeoman to see his arrival, and for Luap to see the youth’s rapid flight, as well as hear it. Amused, Luap stepped from the incised platform below the altar and strode after him into the snow-streaked courtyard.
The yeomen on duty at the Council stairs were not amused. Roused from late-watch endurance by the boy’s startled cry and plunge from the Lord’s Hall door, they’d been prepared for something more dangerous than Luap: a demon, perhaps, or at least a ghost. Luap himself, familiar to them but not the boy, merely irritated them.
“You didn’t have to scare the lad,” said one, wiping his nose. “Comin’ in th’ dark like that—you could ha’ been anyone.”
Luap tried a smile, which made no difference in their expressions “I’d thought coming before dawn would be the least trouble,” he said. “I didn’t expect anyone to be there—”
“It’s after dawn,” the guard pointed out.
“Here it is. Where I was, it will be dark another span. This is nearer the sun’s rising, and I forgot how much.” Actually he was not sure how much sooner dawn came to Fin Panir, but they need not know that.
“Huh. Don’t think of everything, do you? Well, if it’s the Marshals you want, they’ll not all be up yet?”
Luap thought of the years in which Gird was always up by dawn, at work by daylight. Some of the Marshals were like that still, but some, in Fin Panir, clearly relished the chance to lie abed warm on cold winter mornings. That had begun even while Gird lived, though the old man had not been above routing younger Marshals out himself.
“Something wrong, out there?” asked the other guard. He sounded hopeful. Luap laughed.
“No—all’s going well, but I am supposed to report at intervals.” The guards moved back into the windless angle of the building, and Luap moved through dim passages to the kitchen.
“You look fresh for someone who rode all night,” said Marshal Sterin, hunched over a mug of sib. Another Marshal sat silent beside him. “Or did you come in late, and find a room?”
Luap chose a mug from the stack, and dipped himself a hot drink. “I came the mageroad,” he said, not looking at them.
“But that still leaves you a long ride—unless you can come here—” By the change in tone, Sterin didn’t like that possibility. His voice sharpened even more. “Or can you just flit from place to place at your will, regardless? I thought it was some special place you’d found, that made it possible.”
“The Lord’s Hall,” said Luap, between sips. “The same pattern, or part of it, is incised in the floor near the altar. I thought you knew that.” He could not remember which Marshals had been in Fin Panir the last time he’d come.
“Ah. So when you take the old lady, she won’t have to ride a week to your hidden cave, eh?”
“No. That’s why I came this way—” That was a reason they could accept, and even admire.
“How did you learn it worked here as well?”
Luap shrugged, and reached past them to a cold loaf; he could smell the morning’s bak
ing in the ovens. “Tried it once. I don’t know what might have happened; my thought was that if it didn’t work, I’d have come out in the cave anyway.”
“Huh. Like jumping a horse over a fence in the dark,” Sterin said, in a tone that suggested it took courage and stupidity in equal measure. Luap remembered now that he had been a stableboy before the war; he loved horses. “So—how do you like it out there? Is it good land?”
“It’s rough,” Luap said. “Mountains, narrow rocky valleys: it’s going to be hard to farm, but it’s ours.”
“There’s some won’t mind thinking of the mageborn breaking their fingernails on hard work,” said the other marshal in a carefully neutral voice.
“Work won’t hurt us,” said Luap. Let them think that, and gloat, while his people moved house-sized rocks with a finger’s touch and magery.
Both men chuckled. “You learned something, your years wi’ Gird,” said the quieter one.
“And my years as a farmer,” Luap pointed out. They looked as if they’d forgotten or never believed, but finally smiled at him. “When’s the Marshal-General available?” he asked.
“Oh—time the sun hits the side court, he’ll be done eating,” said Sterin. “You don’t want to bother him afore then—but you’d remember.” Luap nodded; anyone who’d tangled with Marshal-General Koris before he had two mugs of sib and hot breakfast inside him remembered it. That he’d been just as unpleasant to the magelords during the war, especially that morning at Greenfields, had won him a Marshal’s shirt and later advancement. No one doubted his courage, or his willingness to work (once he was up and fed) but Gird himself had learned not to disturb Koris at dawn without urgent reason.
“You want what?” The Marshal-General stared as if his froggy eyes would burst. Luap still found it difficult to believe they had chosen Koris, even though he’d been at the election. If only Cob had not been so adamant about staying with his rural grange.
“Dirt,” said Luap again, being patient. “Soil. You know: what you grow crops in.”
“You’re going to take dirt back to your mountain fortress by magery?”
Luap bit back a sarcastic remark about the practicality of taking it any other way, and nodded instead. Still, through the ensuing argument, he had a vivid mental image of a caravan loaded with dirt headed for an unknown destination. “With your permission,” he said. The Marshal-General scowled at the courtesy, and Luap cursed himself. He had forgotten how rude—honest, they called it—the Girdsmen were, in their own land. Among his people, he found himself thinking, courtesy implied no weakness; he had acquired the habit of smooth speaking. Here it could only get him in trouble.
“Well… let me ask the others.” The Marshal-General had run out of reasons, but he was not about to give in.
Luap bit his tongue to keep from explaining again that they would not take much dirt; it could inconvenience no one to take a little dirt from some disused farmstead. He could have simply taken it, without asking, except that he had promised Gird, a promise he had so far kept. But Gird would not have had to ask anyone, he would have given his answer at once, and that would have been the end of it. In his mind, Luap asked Gird, and Gird—his imagined Gird—growled assent, irritable at being disturbed for such a trivial matter. Luap felt better. Gird would have let him take the dirt, and this paltry successor to Gird’s position would accomplish nothing with his indecision.
“You will excuse me,” he said smoothly to the Marshal-General, not minding now that it ruffled the man so. “I have friends waiting, whom I have not seen in more than a season. When the Council has considered, perhaps you would let me know?”
Astonishment. Resentment. Envy. Anger. This was someone who would always end in anger, for whom anger served every need. “And where will you be,” the Marshal-General asked querulously. “Here in Fin Panir, or off in that haunt of magery?”
Already such a reputation! Luap wondered what the man would have said if he’d seen them carving the very mountains to build their terraces, and smiled to himself. That smile came into his voice; he did not trouble himself to hide it. “I will be here, in Fin Panir, some length of days, Marshal-General. Working on the chronicles, and checking the copyists’ work, as the Council requested. Should your decision take longer, I may be there awhile.”
The Marshal-General sniffed. “We shall take what time we need, to consider carefully all that might result from such a choice.”
Luap struggled not to think It’s only dirt too loud. The man’s eyes dropped again to his desk, then flicked up as if hoping to catch Luap by surprise. Luap met that glance with blandness. “I would not try to hurry you, Marshal-General.”
Now the man flushed, and he rushed into explanation. “It’s not just my decision, you know. I’m not like a king—”
“It’s quite all right, Marshal-General,” said Luap. They had no real hierarchy, having fought a revolution to end hierarchies, and had discovered the function behind tradition with dismay. Gird, taking a king’s power, had never believed he held it, and in that belief had used it casually, as if born with the rod in hand. His successors, so far, had used it nervously, uncertain how much use was needful. Even Cob, who had seemed to understand the need for a single final leader, had not pursued his original plan. Luap smiled again at the Marshal-General, and left.
For all that he felt alienated from the peasants who crowded the streets, he enjoyed the city bustle. From the palace area, he went down to the main market, noting how healthy, if rude, the population seemed these days. Red-cheeked men and women, bundled warmly against the cold, hurried to and fro, meantime trampling the snow to a dirty mess. When he came to the wider streets near the market, he found more signs of improved trade and order. An oxcart of sand almost blocked the street, and two men shoveled sand over a thick lens of ice. The inn where Gird had gotten so disastrously drunk looked busy enough; he heard singing from behind its windows. Loud voices in the streets, cheerful but coarse; half the words were those his people never used.
He had remembered where Dorhaniya’s narrow house stood, past the market, and up one of the crooked streets on the lower hill. When he knocked, Eris answered the door, as stolid as ever, but she smiled briefly.
“She’s doing better,” she said. “I’ll tell her.”
“I didn’t know she’d been sick,” Luap said.
“Oh. I thought maybe that was why you came—”
“No, I’ve been out in the new place—surely she told you?”
Eris shrugged. “I don’t pay that much mind, to be sure. She’s getting on, you know. She did say something—about a new place, and we might go—but she’ll never shift out of her own room, again, let alone move the household.”
“But—” He said no more. He had counted on Dorhaniya, old as she was; something about her eased his mind in a way no one else did. To her, he was the prince, the legitimate heir to the throne, and while she agreed he must never take the throne, she still gave him the deference, the respect, she thought due his birth.
“I’ll tell her,” said Eris again. “Please—wait here—she’ll want to see you, but she’ll want to dress.”
He waited in a stuffy little room hardly warmer than outside. Perched on a carved chair that seemed designed to poke him in the spine if he relaxed, he looked around at a room lit by sunlight reflected from a snowy back yard, perhaps a garden in summer. Gradually, he recognized the contents, the tools and supplies of a lifetime’s occupation for a woman of Dorhaniya’s class. Baskets of fine-spun yarn in neat balls, two standing tapestry frames, another hand-frame with a half-finished design placed neatly on a table under the window. He stood, after another vicious poke from the chair, and went to the table. Outlined in a circle of blue, a white G and gold L intertwined, the stitches so tiny that, as with the altarcloth, he almost believed the design painted and not embroidered. He glanced at the frames. On one, another version of the G and L design, this one set in a blue rectangle bordered with red and white interlacing. To his
eyes, it looked finished. The other, hardly begun, he could not interpret—something geometrical, he thought, in green and blue and red.
“She begs your pardon,” said Eris, behind him; Luap turned quickly. “She wants to see you, but wishes to have me put up her hair. Would you like something to drink?” She had brought a tray with a tall, narrow silver pot; the scent of the vapor rising took him straight back to childhood. What had it been called? Something he’d never tasted, but served to the adults in the afternoon. “Selon, perhaps?” said Eris, touching the pot. Luap nodded, more curious than thirsty. It looked as he remembered, darker than sib, with a hint of red, but clear. Eris poured into a cup thin as an apple petal, and shaped almost flowerlike, of five lobes. He took it, inhaled, and smiled at her. The impulse came to confide.
“I haven’t smelled this since I was a boy,” he said. Her answering smile was clearly ironic.
“I don’t doubt,” she said, in a voice that halted any further confidence. “No more trade to Aarenis or Old Aare; my lady’s had the sacks hidden in her grain-jars more than half her life. It was her husband’s, the Duke’s—part of the marriage settlement, it was, for my lady’s father craved selon, especially in cold weather. Hasn’t been any in the markets since I was a girl, not even for the richest mageborn. Yet my lady’d rather starve than sell it.” From her tone and expression, it was clear that Eris had never tasted it, and that it would never occur to Dorhaniya to share, and that Eris would resent any questions far more than her lady’s thoughtlessness.