“She needed to.” Cob looked him up and down. “And you could use some exercise, after days spent in the saddle, I daresay. Work out the stiffness, remind your legs what they’re for?”
Luap groaned. “You—you’re as bad as Gird himself. All right.” He put off his cloak, loosened his belt, and joined the others. He had not really drilled in a long time; he had lost, he discovered, the suppleness he had had in youth and he could feel the tightness in his legs every time he leaned over.
But he recognized Cob’s purposes. His yeomen might remember the man who had helped Cob in the blizzard… they would certainly remember the man who drilled with them, claiming no special place. He caught the sidelong looks; some of them knew his name. When Binis came in from putting up the horses, Cob asked her to lead the stick drill as if she were his own yeoman-marshal. Luap saw resignation and grudging respect on her face. She proved to be a reasonably good drill leader. Luap had not drilled with sticks in years; his palms soon felt hot. But he was determined not to quit, not with Binis leading. Cob limped around, giving advice to all, until he came to Luap.
“Take a breather; you’re as old as I am, and this is young man’s work.”
Luap glared at him, half-amused and half-angry. “You got me into this.”
“So I did, but I don’t want you going back bloody-handed. I’d forgotten about the burn scars. You never did develop good calluses after that, did you?”
“Not on the one hand, no.” Luap stopped, loosened his grip, and flexed his fingers. That would hurt in the morning; it hurt now. Cob took his hands and looked at them, lips pursed.
“Lucky we’ve a cold stream. Just wait for me.” He stumped up to the front of the grange. “Binis, I want you and Vrelan to have them pair off for fighting drills. No broken bones, but a few raps in the ribs won’t hurt my yeomen.” Binis looked at Luap, and Cob turned to her. “You may not know it, yeoman-marshal, but in the war he had both hands burned. And you don’t build callus on burn scars—I saw him try, in the war. Gird himself finally told him to drill only as much as his scars would bear. If you want to argue that—” He looked as dangerous as he ever had, Luap thought, a man sure of himself and his place in the world.
“No, Marshal,” Binis said.
“Just keep in mind… Gird didn’t say pain was good, only that getting good usually involved pain. Those aren’t the same thing.”
“Yes, Marshal.” A dark flush mounted up her face; Cob put his hand on her shoulder.
“Sorry. We veterans can be rough-tongued; if I didn’t think you knew what you were doing, I wouldn’t let you supervise section drills.” He gave her a little shake and came back to Luap. “Come on, now; we’re getting those hands in cold water.”
“You should have been a healer,” Luap said. Cob had insisted that he keep his hands in cold springwater until his bones ached; then he’d put a salve on the worst places, and given Luap soft rags to wrap around his hands.
“I wish I were,” Cob said. “You know, young Seri insisted that all Marshal-candidates learn something of herblore and healing… I wish the gods would grant us just a bit of Aris’s talent.”
“I wish the gods would give everyone Aris’s talent,” Luap said. “He’s always busy—too busy—and even working all day every day he can’t possibly heal all he’d like.”
“Is there no way to misuse it?” Cob asked. “Of course I don’t accuse Aris—I know Aris—but if everyone had the power, could it be misused?”
Luap shook his head. “I don’t see how. It can’t be hoarded for self-healing; Aris can heal his own injuries, but it’s painful, as is withholding healing from others. Aside from healing someone the gods want to call—Aris told me about a child kicked in the head, whom he healed but who never completely recovered—I don’t see how anyone could misuse it. That doesn’t happen often.”
“Perhaps you’re right. I know we need more healers, more who can do what Aris does. Herblore has its place, but it can’t cure many things.” Cob turned away a moment, rummaged in a basket, and came up with a lump of soil. “Here now—smell this, and see what you think.”
Luap sniffed. It smelled earthy, alive, the way soil should smell. It was a dark, heavy clod, more clay than loam, but it would mix with the sand in the canyons, he was sure. “Good,” he said. “In fact, better than good. Where’s it from?”
“Southeast. Unclaimed land between granges, just as the Marshal-General required. I’ve found a cart and stout horse you can hire, although how you’re going to get them into your cave…”
“I gave up on that,” Luap said. “I’ll take a sackful, or maybe two, on a pack animal. I can drag the sacks into position by myself.” Or he could travel the mageroad alone, and bring back someone from the other end to help, but he did not tell Cob that. “Well see what Arranha’s mathematics does. According to him, we could start with this single clod.”
“Good. We’ll start in the morning, if that’s all right with you.” Cob leaned back in his chair. “Binis seems a bit less touchy this time.”
Luap shrugged. “She’s fine. The winter trip was my fault; it would have made anyone difficult.”
“No—there you wrong yourself. You’ve never been one to complain about that kind of thing. But we’ll see in the morning.”
They arrived at Cob’s chosen site, a meadow already greening, with new grass and pink flowers peeking through the dead grass of winter, by nightfall. Binis looked around. “Are you sure no one claims this, Marshal?”
“Very sure. I checked with the next Marshal over. There’s a village blasted by magery between us, fields poisoned and dead, so there are fewer people than some years back, and neither of our granges spread this direction. This is just outside the dead zone, but you can see the land is well alive. Luap?”
Luap dismounted and dug his dagger into the turf, bringing up a small lump of thick dark soil. It smelled rich and fertile. “It’s perfect,” he said. He pulled out the two sacks he’d bought, and unlashed the shovels from the pack pony’s saddle.
“You’re not going to dig it now,” Cob said.
“We’re camping here, aren’t we?” Luap asked. He grinned wickedly at Cob. “What was the first thing Gird taught all of us?”
“You give Vrelan that shovel and help me cook,” Cob said. “I trust your cooking.”
The next morning, Vrelan and Binis—she surprised Luap by offering—dug another narrow trench to fill the sacks with earth. “I know it’s harder this way,” Luap had said, “but a narrow trench will quickly heal; we don’t want to leave the land open to harm.” Soon they were done; Luap nicked his finger to produce a drop of blood which he squeezed into the trench. Binis stared at him, and he explained. “Alyanya’s blessed me; when I was a farmer, I blooded my blade like everyone else.”
They returned to Cob’s grange that night, and the next day Luap and Binis set off for the cave, more than a hand of days away. He felt almost smug about surprising her with his willingness to drill, to dig a jacks trench, to offer his own blood in return for the earth. “I thought you would destroy all the old ways,” she said as they rode. “Our old ways, I mean.”
“Did you ever meet Arranha?” Luap countered. She looked blank. “The priest of Esea in the High Lord’s Hall?”
“That old man in the white robe? No. They said he was a mage-lord who followed the Sunlord. That’s what the war was against, magelords and bad gods.”
Luap closed his eyes, fighting off a wave of anger. How could she be that ignorant, that stupid? “Arranha,” he said between clenched teeth, “helped Gird fight that war. Arranha is the one who took Gird to the gnomes. You do know about that?”
Binis nodded. “They hated the magelords too, so they gave him pikes.”
“No. They gave him training, and maps, and advice. Duke Marrakai of Tsaia gave him gold to buy pikes.”
“Duke Marrakai? Gird took gold from a magelord? I don’t believe it!”
“He did,” Luap said. “And his son visited Gird a
fter the war, in Fin Panir; Gird liked him.” He glanced at Binis; her lower lip stuck out, and she looked like someone determined not to believe that night follows day. She was certainly not going to believe that Gird, hero of the peasants’ war, considered a Tsaian magelord and his son friends. “But about Arranha: Gird rescued Arranha from the mageborn who hated him—the priests who really did follow bad gods, as you call them—and they became friends.” He thought a long moment. “Binis—did you ever meet Gird?”
She reddened. “No, not to speak to. I saw him a few times, in the city, but he was… you know, he was the Marshal-General, and I was a child.”
Hard to believe the years had gone that fast. Hard to believe that someone could be a yeoman-marshal, yet never have drilled with Gird, never have struck a blow in real battle. He’d known she was younger, much younger, but… We’re getting old, he thought suddenly. All of us who knew Gird; all of us who really know what that war was about, and who was on which side.
“Were you in the city the day Gird died?” Luap asked. Binis nodded. “And did you feel it?”
“I felt… something,” she said. “I remember how hot it had been, sticky. There’d been quarrels all day, up and down the street. My aunt got on me about something—I don’t really remember— and I threw a pot at her. I knew it was wrong; I knew she’d tell my da, and my uncle, and the Marshal and they’d all be down on me again. I ran out the back way, up the alley toward the old palace, and I thought I’d run out in the meadows. They wouldn’t know where to look. Everything was unfair; everybody was angry with me and it wasn’t any of it my fault.” Her voice had risen, remembering old grievances. Then her face smoothed out again, and her voice softened. “I remember… I’d run too fast, I couldn’t seem to breathe, and I felt squeezed somehow, like stones were on me. And then all at once it was over. Like a storm passing, but there wasn’t any storm. Stillness, but not sticky, not so hot. Calm, I guess you’d say. I had stopped running, and now I thought I’d go back.”
Luap was afraid to break her mood, so they rode in silence some distance until the pack pony stumbled, and he reined up and dismounted to check it. Binis stayed on her horse, and as he lifted each of the pony’s hooves in turn, she went on.
“I didn’t know what’d happened right then. Not till after I was back at our house. My aunt—she came to me as I came in, said she was sorry, and I was sorry too, for breaking a good pot. I felt— I don’t know how I felt, except that nothing hurt inside, the way it had since my mother died. All the quarrels seemed silly, but not anything to grieve over. Just put them aside and go on. Later the Marshal said something about Gird having taken a kind of curse off us, but in your Life of Gird it’s not a curse.”
“No one really knows,” Luap said. “If it was a curse, or an evil spirit, or just ourselves… but we know whom to thank for lifting it.”
“Yes, but—but I still get angry. I still see things go wrong, things happen that aren’t fair.”
“Gird didn’t heal us, the way Aris heals,” Luap said, thinking it out as he spoke. He swung back up onto his horse and nudged it into motion. “Maybe he couldn’t; maybe even the gods can’t. But he gave us a respite, and a taste of what real healing is. I think we’re supposed to do the rest.”
“Hmph.” Binis scowled again. “But we’re not Gird.”
“True enough. But Gird wasn’t Gird all along.” Which was, he realized, just the point Raheli had made about his Life of Gird. Could she be right about that? No. She had been right about many other things, but on that he would not change his mind. No amount of talking or writing would convince people who had not known him that Gird had begun as a perfectly ordinary man… they would simply decide that he had not been a hero. Just as Binis could not accept a Gird who befriended mageborn and Sunlord priests, later generations would deny either Gird’s early life, or his later accomplishments. And he could not take the chance that they might deny what Gird had done. He must make sure that Gird lived through the ages as the hero he had really been, even though that meant shaping his early life. He wasn’t pretending Gird had been perfect—he understood how people could love someone more for his faults—but Gird’s life had been entirely too unformed to last as a story.
“Cob says the magelords mistreated you,” Binis said. “So why didn’t you turn against them?”
Luap turned in the saddle to see if she was serious. She was. “Binis—what else would you call joining Gird’s army, than turning against them?” He had been so careful to keep himself out of the telling of Gird’s life—he had been trying to make Gird the center, as he should be—but if people like Binis didn’t even know what Gird’s luap had done, perhaps he should make another revision. She looked unconvinced; Luap tried again. “Binis, Cob is my friend from those days—from Gird’s army. We fought on the same side. The magelords killed my wife, my children:—” As always, tears came when he thought of that; he blinked them away. Binis was the sort to think he had pretended grief. “—And I did turn against them, the ones who had done it. I have the scars to prove it.”
“But then why did you take up with them again afterwards?” The depth of ignorance in that question took his breath away. How could he possibly explain? “I mean,” she said, putting the final peg in her assembly of faulty logic, “everyone knows you’re the mage-king’s son, and if you’d really turned against the magelords, you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
Among the rush of emotions came the cold thought that he’d never known one who needed Arranha’s classes more: even he, not the brightest of Arranha’s pupils, had learned not to use one word with two meanings in the same argument. Would she ever understand that the “them” he knew now were not the same “them” who had abandoned him in childhood and destroyed his family? Gird had known that. Raheli understood that; he realized how different she was from this sort of peasant, and how unfair he had been to blame her for the minds of those like Binis.
He even felt a trickle of pity for Binis herself, cramped into a narrow mind and unlikely to find a way out. In her, Gird’s insistence that right was right and wrong was wrong, that compromises always cost more than could be easily reckoned, had turned to a rigid system unlike anything Gird himself would approve. What could he say to open a window in her head? Gird would have used his fist, likely enough, claiming that it took hard knocks to crack thick-shelled nuts… but that was not his way, nor would Binis learn that way from him.
“The people who hurt me, who killed my family,” Luap said, “were killed in the war. I saw their bodies, many of them. The mageborn who survived were children and the very old, some women who had not even known me, let alone caused me harm. Should I hate them? Gird did not hate them.”
“But they were the same sort. Magelords!” She made it a curseword. His magery growled within him, as if it could respond of itself to an insult. He fought it down, telling himself she was only saying what she had been taught.
“Are all peasants fair, kind people?” he asked instead. “Surely you’ve known some who cheated, who stole, who were unfair—?”
“Ye-esss…” She dragged that out, as if it came unwillingly. “But they’ve been cheated by the mageborn; it’s not their fault.” She eyed him, looking for a reaction. “The Marshal-General says most real thieves and brigands are part-mageborn anyway; that’s why they’re too lazy to work and be honest.” That’s why he doesn’t trust you, half-mage, was as clear in her gaze as if written on parchment.
“You insufferable fool!” Luap’s anger roared past his knowledge that losing his temper would only cause trouble. This time it was not Gird; this time it was not someone he respected; this time— this one time, maybe—he was wholly justified, completely right, and he was not going to pretend a subservience and shame he did not feel. He would wipe that smugness off Binis’s face, that sly satisfaction in catching him off guard, that intolerable superiority. “The Marshal-General himself has mageborn blood—is that why he can’t get up until midmorning? Does that mak
e him dishonest enough to steal from the grange-sets honest peasants have sent in to buy himself fancy foods rather than eat porridge and stew with the rest? Or didn’t you know any of that?” By her expression she had not known, and didn’t believe. “Look it up in the archives,” he said bitterly. “If you can read. His grandmother was raped by a magelord, just as my mother was. It’s in the records, the great accounting Gird held after the war. His own mother reported it.”
“You made that up,” Binis said. “It can’t be true. Besides, the Marshal-General’s special: he has a right to sleep later and eat better food.”
“Really! Gird didn’t… but then you didn’t know Gird, more’s the pity.” That rush of anger over, Luap felt the first twinge of fear. Lazy, selfish, and misguided the present Marshal-General might be, but he still had to work with him. So far the Council had sided with Luap on the larger issues, but he must not strain their patience by angering the Marshal-General on minor matters. He looked at Binis with more loathing than she perhaps deserved. She was the Marshal-General’s tool, less culpable because she was both younger and subordinate. He hated her. If not for his oath to Gird, he would use his magery now, and compel her to agree. He toyed with that idea for another furlong or so, imagining sending her back to the Marshal-General as a spy, as a mageborn tool. If she had said anything more, he might have, but she had the prudence of the naturally sly, and said nothing.
So the rest of the day passed, in uncomfortable silence. She asked once, in late afternoon, what grange they would stay at that night, and he replied that they would camp. He managed not to add, with the sarcasm he felt, that she should have realized that from the supplies he’d bought in Cob’s village. He attacked the jacks trench as if it were a buried enemy, raising another blister on his hand, and she watched sullenly. They ate their supper in silence, and in silence passed the night and the morning’s rising. Binis filled in the trench without commenting.