Luap almost choked. Cob was grinning broadly.
“I thought that would get your attention. But I insisted on Vrelan, for his expertise in horsemanship and wilderness travel; Binis still rides like a sack of redroots.” He cleared his throat and spat.
“Marshal Cob!” That was the Rosemage; Luap was surprised that it had taken her this long to appear. He had half expected her to meet them in the upper valley. She hugged Cob, then turned to Luap. “Seri says there’s another gang of robbers holed up in those canyons somewhere; the Khartazh had a caravan attacked north of Dirgizh. We got the message yesterday. She’s taken half the regular guards the long way around, and I’m about to leave to take the high trail and try to spot them from above. She wanted me to wait until you were back in the stronghold with your guards.”
“Is Aris with her?”
“Yes, but Garin’s here if anyone in Cob’s group needs help.”
“Then I suppose we’d better set the usual doubled guard, and let you go. Who’s your second this time?”
“Liun, and he’s up on top checking all the guardposts. He’ll be down to report to you.”
“Well, then.” Luap shrugged at Cob. “I’d better get to work; come along if you like, and we’ll get something to eat as we go past the kitchens.” He felt almost pleased by the otherwise bad news. Cob would see how well Seri and the Rosemage had organized the militia; he would see busy, hardworking people, not idlers. The Rosemage turned away and strode rapidly up the passage. “Just let me tell Jens—” Quickly he gave his orders to one of the boys to provide food and a guide for Vrelan and the others. Then he headed for his own office, with Cob trailing.
It had become so natural to him that he hardly remembered his first feelings of awe and nervousness at being underground. Cob’s wide eyes and quick breathing reminded him. “It doesn’t bother you at all?” Cob asked, when Luap looked back, having just remembered Cob’s lameness. He slowed, waiting for Cob to catch up, then forced himself to stroll as if he were not in a hurry.
“Not any more. It did at first, but we’ve been here now for several years and the walls don’t cave in and the light never fails.” He pointed out store-rooms, kitchens, the great water reservoir, as they passed them, and explained where the cross-corridors went. They came at last to the corridor behind the great hall, and the chamber where Luap had chosen to do his work. His scribe had heard him coming, and was looking out the door.
“Ah, Luap: did the Rosemage find you?”
“Yes—she’s on her way. Where’s the Khartazhi message?”
“Here, my lord.” He handed over the woven pouch, like a miniature rug, in which such messages were carried. Luap opened it, and looked it over. The king begged his assistance in the capture or destruction of lawless robbers who had attacked two caravans in the past thirg—a thirg, Luap knew, was about six hands of days. The king’s captain thought the robbers might number fifty—an unusually large band. The message finished with the flowery compliments he had come to expect in any communication from the Khartazh. “We could not send a formal answer, my lord, until your return… the messenger is waiting.”
But Seri had already gone, as if she had the right to anticipate his commands. Luap wondered why some were born with the will to act, and others always awaited permission. “Then I’ll dictate it now,” he said. “Or—better—write it in my own hand. This is Marshal Cob, by the way, an old friend from Fintha. Why don’t you fetch Garin, while I’m writing, and see if he has some salve for sunburn?”
“I can go,” Cob said. “No need to bring anyone to me.” Luap saw his gaze flick around the room, noticing the thick patterned carpets, the wall hangings, the stone ink-dishes, the racks of scrolls. He smiled at Luap. “I’m glad Vrelan will see this.” Just enough emphasis on Vrelan to make his meaning clear to Luap… a visit from Binis would have been a disaster.
“I won’t be long,” Luap said. He pulled a clean scroll from the rack kept ready for him, and stirred the ink his scribe had been using. Cob nodded and withdrew; Luap hoped Garin could ease that sunburn—it almost made his own face hurt to look at it.
By the time Cob came back, he had finished that message to the king’s captain, and seen his messenger on his way. He had also approved the revised watch-lists Liun submitted, and suggested to his personal staff that they minimize the formal courtesy for the duration of Cob’s visit. The scribes flowed in and out of his office with reports, messages, requests; he dealt with them easily, as always, sensing around him the whole settlement in busy, organized activity. When Cob came in, Luap smiled at him and said “Now— you must come see what I found when I first came by the mageroad.”
Cob’s reaction to the great hall was as strong as Luap could have wished. He looked up and around. “This is… this is… it’s all magery?”
“No—not now; it’s real enough. It was done by magery, though, and not by ours. The Elder Races built it; they have never told us why, or why they abandoned it.” No sense in repeating the vague warnings he had been given; if he didn’t understand them, Cob certainly wouldn’t.
“And those are the arches.” Cob walked toward them, as Gird had, with perfect assurance that he could do so. Of course, he had not come by accidental magic. Cob looked up. “Harp, tree, anvil, hammer… and the High Lord’s circle. This is the one that appeared when Gird came?” Luap nodded.
“I’d have been scared,” Cob said.
“I was,” Luap said. “Do you want to go up and see it from above?” He nodded at the spiral stair.
Cob shook his head. “Not today; my foot’s climbed as far as it wants. Let’s go find one of those kitchens full of food, eh?”
Luap smiled, and led him slowly back the way they had come. Cob seemed to notice everything. “Big as this place is, I’m surprised your people are moving out into the canyons: why do the work to dig out a separate dwelling?”
“Convenience, mostly. It may not look it, but the lower terraces are a half-day’s walk down the canyon: it’s easier to live beside the fields. And it’s like the old palace at Fin Panir… living in a small house is easier. To have privacy here, you have to spread out into all the levels, but when you’ve done that, you’re a long way from the kitchens or the bathing rooms, or even a way out. Some things we have to do here, but families, in particular, seem to want their own dwelling.”
“Ah. And do they make these dwellings the old way, or by magery?”
“By magery, for the most part. Most are small, one room deep and several wide, just in from the rockface. You saw the way this stone breaks, leaving wide arches? They build within that, using magery to help shape the broken stone into blocks and then lift them to form walls.” He grinned at Cob. “They’re very odd-looking houses, by eastern standards, but they’re comfortable. Tomorrow or the next day I’ll take you visiting.”
By the next morning, all the travellers had rested and were eager to satisfy their curiosity. Some went out to the terraces in the main canyon to see how the mageborn farmed; some explored the passages of the stronghold itself, getting lost repeatedly. All climbed the spiral stairs at least once, to look out over the tangle of canyons and have the locals point out where they had been riding the day before.
“When will Seri and Aris be back?” Cob asked Luap at the midday meal. Luap shrugged.
“I don’t know. It depends on which canyon the robbers are in. Look—” He put his hand down on the table. “This—my hand—is the mountain we’re in—as if we were in the wrist. On the west end, six fingers stick out, with canyons between them—they could be in any one of those. That’s why the Rosemage went up here—”
He pointed to his knuckles, “—to see if she could spot them from above and let Seri know.”
“Why not have a permanent settlement there, and then you’d know?”
“It’s the size: you don’t realize how far away that is. And those canyons face west, picking up all the summer winds, very hot and dry: you can’t farm in them.” Luap reached for
another slice of bread. “We’re very few, you know, in a very large land.”
“So you do this king’s work for him, catching his robbers… ?”
“They’d prey on us if they could; some tried.” Luap remembered those early encounters with an echo of the same fear he’d felt then: his people were so few, so vulnerable. “Once the Khartazh realized we were settlers, not brigands, it made sense for us to help keep those canyons clean of trouble.”
“Ummm.” Cob blew on his stew, as if it were still hot. “And what do you get from this agreement?”
That was, of course, the problem. “Not a great deal yet,” Luap admitted. “But we can grow more food here than they can in the desert below the mountains. We take in fresh food to Dirgizh— the nearest town—for trade; they have superb weavers and smiths.”
“Do they know you’re mageborn?”
Luap pursed his lips. “They know we do some magery; I’m not at all sure they understand what ‘mageborn’ means to you and me. The king’s ambassador, when he first came, saw Aris healing. They have legends, they say, of the builders of this stronghold, and at first thought we might be those beings, or their descendants. We haven’t tried to conceal our powers, but neither have we tried to exaggerate them.” Much. He thought Cob would probably not approve his strategy of subtly encouraging the Khartazh to think the powers they saw were the least of those actually held.
“They’re a very formal society,” he went on. “A very ancient, complex empire by their own account, and their craftsmanship and language support that. In our encounters with them, we have had to adopt a more formal, ornate style than is common in Fin Panir.” He let himself chuckle. “I confess I rather like it—it’s like a dance, making intricate patterns.”
Cob looked at him. “I can see you would like that, but do the patterns mean anything?”
“All patterns hold power,” Luap said. Cob’s eyes widened; he realized he’d quoted a proverb learned from the king’s ambassador. “The elves say that,” he said, which was also true. “That’s what they said when I asked how the mageroad works, why the magery alone wouldn’t do, or why those without magery could not use the patterns. Patterns hold power, and those with power can both find, and use, the power in patterns.”
“The patterns of language and manners as well?” Cob asked. “Are you saying that those with the most elaborate manners have the most power?”
“I—never quite thought of that,” Luap said. He liked the idea; certainly it had been true in Fintha before the war. Would the peasants, who now had the power, develop more elaborate manners because they had it? Or did it work only the other direction? “I did think that the patterns show where the power is, in a way. The Khartazh, for instance: they have different ways to say something depending on the ranks of the people involved. That reveals the way their society is organized; if you know there are eight ways to say something, you know there are at least eight different ranks.”
“Or eight different crafts,” Cob said. “Each has its own special terms.”
Luap wondered if he were missing the point on purpose, and decided not to pursue it. He wanted Cob to see how much they had accomplished, how well they were doing, not quibble over the interpretation of Khartazh social structure and language. “Would you like to see the farm terraces this afternoon, or would you rather visit one of the outlying homesteads?” Either one of those should provide plenty of innocuous conversation, he thought.
Cob frowned thoughtfully. “I’d like to see the farmland, I suppose. See what you’ve made of those two sacks of earth. But—is it all in the sun?”
“Not all of it. We’ll take care of your sunburn.” Luap asked the cooks for a loaf to take along, and led Cob down the side-canyon, back across the bridge, and into the shade of the pines.
“We can stay in the shade, here, while I explain what we did. In another glass, the sun will be off this terrace, and you can dig in it if you wish.” He leaned against a tree-trunk and Cob leaned beside him. “Gird was right, in what he said: there was not a flat bit of earth in this canyon larger than my hand. But there was water—the stream—and Arranha knew how terraces worked. Now the little terraces you know—the ditches and dykes every farmer uses to keep wet fields drained and slow runoff on slopes—are the same idea, but we had to build bigger ones. The rocks came from the walls, by magery as I told you before. Then we had to shape and place them, some by magery and most by hand. That left us with a series of rock walls across the canyon—and notice all the terraces are fan-shaped, with curving walls.”
“Because straight ends wouldn’t stand flood?”
“Right. The canyon widens downstream—it doesn’t look much like it, but it does—so the terraces reflect that shape. But what we had when I came to you for soil was a lot of broken rock heaped into the walls that now form the lower edge of each terrace. Look upstream there—” Luap pointed; Cob leaned out to see a curving, breast-high wall. “Downstream, the terraces are lower; the stream falls less rapidly. That wall is thicker than it looks—Arranha told us how far back to slope it so that it would hold. But that left us with spoon-shaped hollows to fill with soil. We had broken rock for the base, and plenty of sand—good drainage—but nothing with which to make good soil for grain and vegetables.”
“So you brought two sacks of earth, about enough for two healthy redroot plants…”
“And doubled it by magery. And doubled that. And doubled that. I know—” Luap held up his hands at the look on Cob’s face. “I know, it seems impossible. It did to me. The only reason I rode off with two sacks was that Binis was with me, and I wanted to be free of her more than I distrusted Arranha’s numbers. The short of it is that the mageborn used to have the power of doubling many things, but lost it—for misuse, of course. Some fool couldn’t resist doubling gold and jewels, and another tried to increase crops. But earth was not under the ban: we could double a clod of dirt to two clods, and that two to four clods, and so on. Arranha said it would be enough, so we tried it. And it worked.”
“But doesn’t it take—I mean, I thought the larger the magery, the more power it took—the more it cost you.”
“That’s true. Supposedly the doubling should have been the same no matter what amount we doubled. But we couldn’t think of it like that, so as the amounts grew larger, it was harder. What we had to do was double small amounts many times.” Luap grinned as he remembered just how difficult and time-consuming that had been. He explained to Cob, who after awhile began to see the humor in magicians having to haul one sack of soil a few feet, double it, and haul it another few feet and do it again. “And when I think that I almost dumped it out loose—that would have been a real mess. If we’d had to move it shovelful by shovelful from one terrace to another—”
“How long did it take?”
“Longer than I planned for. We didn’t make a full crop that year.” He pointed. “We didn’t finish upstream from that one, or go farther downstream than—the third, there, with the tall tree beside it.”
“What about wood? I notice you haven’t cut this area recently.”
“We get most of our wood up on top—the very top of the mountain is heavily forested. Down here, we use the trees for shade— as you see—and as shelter for the herbs we need. Aris has found that some of the natives are also medicinal, but we have gardens of the same ones you’d find in Fintha.”
“But as your population grows, will you have enough cropland?”
Luap shrugged. “If not we’ll spread into neighboring canyons, as I said. This year we should have a good surplus. In another few years, the fruit trees should be bearing, too.”
Cob nodded; if he was the friendliest of the Marshals, he was also the one Luap respected most, and most wished to have respect him. The rest of that visit went as Luap had hoped, although he and Cob were both disappointed that the Rosemage, Aris, and Seri did not return until the last day before the caravan must return.
“It was all very complicated,” the Rosemage
said. “They asked if we could give testimony at the trial, and then there was a message from the caravaners, sent north from Vikh, the next town south. Had you arrived safely, they wanted to know. The captain had to hear all about Cob and the new trail—he thought we would fly them in by magery, I think. Anyway, it all took much longer than we expected, or we’d have come back by the mageroad, if only for a day. We have messages from their king, by the way.”
“And I have a letter for you, from Raheli,” Cob said. He handed it to the Rosemage, who opened it and began reading.
“I wish I’d known,” she said ruefully. “This needs an answer— I wish I could take time off and visit her—”
Luap, who had opened the king’s message pouch, shook his head. “Not now, I’m afraid—he wants to send his heir to visit. We’ll have a lot of work to do beforehand.”
“One thing after another,” the Rosemage said, shrugging. “Tell her I will come as soon as I can, Cob—and I wish we’d had more time.”
But if they would return safely by the overland route, they must leave now. Cob would not take the mageroad and leave others to travel the hard way, and they all knew how the Marshal-General would react to the sudden eruption of horses, mules, and people into the High Lord’s Hall. The Rosemage went with them to the edge of the mountains, and watched until they were safely down into the desert below.
“We’ll be back,” Cob bellowed cheerfully from halfway down.
“Or someone will.”
“They grow rich and fat,” one of the blackcloaks grumbled. “Year after year, and for how long? Their horses foul our valley; their caravans clatter and gabble, loud as a village fair. Let us have a good feast now, and forget the rest.”
“Are you truly one of us, or a half-mortal fool?” hissed the black-cloaked leader. “We have no reason to hurry: the fatter they grow, the greater the feast to come. The more folk who come, the more kingdoms or empires involved, the more chaos will follow their downfall. We shall topple not one princeling in a canyon, but all with whom he trades, if we bide our time and prepare. Will the eastern lands blame Khartazh? Will Khartazh believe it a plot of Xhim? Some mortals, at least, will think it a plot of the sinyi. Dasksinyi may turn against irsinyi… all is possible. In the meantime, we observe. We listen. We gather from their idle talk much we can pass to others.”