“Why did you join in the beginning?” I asked, curious. It was a question we never asked. Once you had sworn to ride as Urdo’s armiger then that was enough.
“Why do you think?” he asked.
“Well, I always thought everyone joined for the excitement, or to win a glorious name for themselves.”
Masarn laughed. “And how old were you when you realized not everybody was just like you?”
I squirmed a little. “So you were fighting for the Peace all along?”
“No.” Masarn looked serious for a moment. “Now, yes, but not when I joined; I didn’t have any more idea what Peace was then than anyone else. I thought I was lucky to have a wife who had a trade, and that’s as far as I thought about anything past my own nose. I was in the city guard at Caer Tanaga, before Urdo took the crown. He asked us if any of us would like to become armigers. Garwen thought I was mad, but I did it. She kept saying that fighting wasn’t any trade for a man who likes his food the way I do, and she was right. But it was the only chance I was likely to have to be near the horses.” His face relaxed as he thought of them. “Marchel taught all of us recruits to ride. When Urdo gave me Whitefoot it was as if the world had found harmony and the White God had set me in my right place already.”
“I have always loved horses,” I said.
“They’re easier to love than people,” Masarn said, and before I could think of anything to say to that, we had arrived at Urdo’s big tent.
All our banners were flying outside it and it all looked very splendid. This big tent was made of very fine Black Isarnagan leather. Instead of being put up with whatever wood could be found around, like a normal tent, it had special support poles. It was carefully made of sewn leather, and almost entirely weatherproof. It even had a curtain that could be set up inside to make it into two rooms. It could hold twelve people, at a push. Glividen had designed it during the war. It needed a packhorse to itself, but it was worth the trouble. Most tents had barely room for two people to sit and talk, but with Urdo’s big tent there was room for a council with maps spread out, even in the rain.
I followed Masarn inside. Urdo was sitting with Cadraith, an old man with unbound hair and the long shawl of an oracle-priest, and a middle-aged woman with a shawl over her head in the Demedian manner. Darien was standing to pour wine. Everyone rose as we came in, and bowed.
“Sulien, you know Atha ap Gren,” Urdo said, presenting the woman. I blinked. I had not known her. She had dressed and washed her face, and with her hair covered she looked just like anyone else.
“I am honored to meet you,” I said, and bowed. Darien handed me a cup of wine. I smiled at him.
“And this is Inis ap Fathag,” Urdo said, introducing the old man.
I bowed, but the old man shook his head. “I shall go no more by the name of my honored father, although I have carried it all my life. I shall be known henceforward as Inis, Grandfather of Heroes.” He turned to Atha. “Do you hear that, girl? Have that worthless poet my daughter married put that into the praise song he makes over my ashes this autumn.”
Atha laughed, sounding unamused. “Will you set me impossible tasks even beyond the grave, Grandfather?”
“Ah, so you count yourself a hero?” he asked. Atha looked furious, as well she might. She had as good a claim to be considered a hero as anyone I had ever met. “Amagien will be delighted to do it. He is pulling mourning around him like a cloak. Nothing poor Conal did for him alive was good enough, but he will use his death to build the son he imagines he should have liked to have.” Inis turned back to me, and bowed in formal greeting. “I owe you a great debt, Sulien ap Gwien.”
He was bent with age, but he had been a tall man. I had often thought, looking at Lew, that Conal must have got his looks from his mother’s family. Inis was very old but he was still a handsome man, even with his hair disordered and the front of it shaved in the fashion of oracle-priests. I thought that I was seeing not only where Conal got his pretty face but also where he learned his way of talking.
I bowed again. “If one of your heroic grandchildren was Conal the Victor, then it is I who owe you a debt, for Conal saved my life.”
“You saved him from many other, more foolish, deaths,” Inis said. “And you sent the memory of his honorable death home, for which I honor you, as Conal’s wretched father Amagien bade me honor you. He stayed in Oriel writing the poem to make his son’s memory immortal.”
“Is he a very bad poet?” I asked.
Cadraith looked horrified, but Inis laughed. “I almost wish he were, for if so it would be very easy to dismiss him altogether as someone who needs no consideration. But in fact he is a good poet, when he is honest, which is seldom enough. He was a very bad father, and so poor Conal grew up thinking he could never be good enough. Conal was a very good warrior; it was his great misfortune that his cousin Darag was a better one.”
Of course, I realized, this old man was Darag’s grandfather as well. That was why Atha, Darag’s widow, addressed him so. I looked at Atha. She was frowning. “I never met Darag, but he must have shone very brightly to outshine Conal,” I said.
“He did,” Atha said flatly.
“And he is dead, and Conal is dead” Inis interrupted. “Dead, and here we are to avenge him, for what good everyone imagines it will do.”
“If you keep on like this I shall send you back to Thansethan,” Atha said between her teeth.
Urdo closed his eyes for a moment. “Have you been to Thansethan?” he asked Inis politely.
“I have just come back from a visit to the hospitable monks,” Inis said. Darien set down the wine jug. You would have had to know him to see that he was doing it with extra care. All the same Inis shot him a shrewd glance. “You need not fear, young hawk, they will do nothing for or against anyone until all is decided. Well, they will take in the queen whenever she gets so far, which is sometimes before that, but that is scarcely action to shake our path. I spoke to them about the gods of Tir Isarnagiri and about the way the worlds will go. Father Gerthmol was terrified.” He giggled, very high-pitched, almost like a woman. “I told them what a thread we are all hanging by. I think they are praying I am mad.”
“You are mad, of course,” Atha said, as if it were an accepted thing. They both laughed. The rest of us looked at them awkwardly. Masarn rubbed the sides of his head as if they hurt. “Be careful, Grandfather, you are getting near where you will lose the thread of words.”
“I have seen eighty-nine summers, forty-two of them across all the worlds. I will be dead before midwinter,” Inis said. “Of course I am mad.”
“You said the queen will escape to Thansethan?” Urdo asked, leaning forward.
“Most of the time,” Inis said. “After you are dead, of course. It’s where she wants to be, after all. They’d be fools not to take her.” He shook his head a little as if to clear it. “But every world is different,” he said, rocking on his heels a little. “You have changed so much here that it is only the great patterns and events that are certain. It is possible she will choose to die instead.”
“Is she well now?” Urdo asked.
Atha raised a hand. “The more you press him the less precise he gets,” she warned. “He really is mad, you know, and the more he thinks about this sort of question the further he gets from being able to talk sensibly.”
Inis cackled again. “She’s right, she’s absolutely right. What I see is not what is or what will be. Often enough you married Mardol’s daughter, and she was not so proud. She bore you two sons, but the monks took her in at the end just the same.”
Cadraith gasped. Urdo looked as distressed as I had ever seen him.
“Hush now, grandfather,” Atha said. “You’re getting confused.”
He looked at her. “You always die old,” he said. Atha looked as if he had slapped her.
Masarn cleared his throat. “I think the food is here,” he said. Sure enough, Talog was hesitating in the tent entrance with a large steaming bowl. It wa
s porridge, of course. We sat down to eat. Inis was mercifully quiet, rocking to and fro, though the rest of us exchanged a little chatter about the weather and the camp. When we had finished the porridge, Talog brought in two chickens, jointed and fried over the fire. I wondered where they had come from, and hoped they were bought at the roadside rather than stolen. I knew there could not have been enough for everyone. That didn’t stop me from enjoying my share. After we had finished and wiped our hands Urdo drew out a map of the southeastern part of Tir Tanagiri from the heap on his box.
“So where exactly is Ohtar?” he asked Atha.
Atha looked intently at the map. “This blue line is the river, yes?”
“The blue line is the river, this black line is the road we are on, and this circle is Caer Tanaga, where the other roads join.”
“Then he is—” Her finger circled and stabbed. “Here. Between the road and the river, and also on the river in boats, some his and some ours.”
“I wonder what our enemies are doing,” Cadraith said. Then he looked at Inis in alarm, as if afraid his question would be answered in horrible and dubious detail. Inis ignored him, ignored all of us, gnawing away on a chicken leg that seemed already bare of meat.
“The same as we are, I expect,” Urdo said, setting down his bowl. “Making camp, eating. What I wonder is what they want.”
“The kings want not to pay taxes,” Cadraith said. “Not to have to maintain the alae now the Jarnsmen aren’t such a threat. Not to have to keep to the Law when it doesn’t suit them. To rule the barbarian way their fathers ruled, and their ancestors back before the Vincans came.” He looked at Atha, who just smiled.
“They would not have gone to war for that,” I said. “They want that, yes, but they can see that the Peace is good for everyone. They remember what it was like before.”
“Do they?” Darien asked. “I don’t. Cinon is only seven years older than I am. Flavien was his father’s youngest son and a young man at the time of Foreth. I’m not sure how old Cinvar is—”
“He’s a year or two younger than I am,” I said.
“Even so, that’s not old enough to remember the wars at my father’s death,” Urdo said. “You’re right. That generation is almost gone. Of all the kings who fought then, only Guthrum and my mother are left. But Flavien and Cinvar must remember the War.”
“They remember we won it,” Masarn said.
“That’s right,” said Cadraith. “They don’t think of Peace as something that needs to be won fresh all the time, the way you said at Foreth. Even though it’s written down in your law code. My father would have loved that. He believed that, and old Duke Galba. It was the Vincan way, even though your Peace is a new Peace. But what does it mean to Cinvar, except that you stopped a Jarnish invasion?”
“That thought is nowhere in Tir Isarnagiri,” Atha said. “Each king makes the Peace, and it dies with them, and their law with it. It was an unusual thing that I kept Darag’s peace and his laws after he died, although he was my husband. Next year, when our son takes the crown, if he keeps them it will be considered amazing.”
Urdo sighed. “Still, I don’t think I pushed the kings too hard. I doubt they would have risen up, however resentful, or allied with Arling, if not for Morthu.”
“Black heart and poisoned tongue,” Inis said, in a confirmatory way, without looking up.
“What does Morthu want?” Atha asked.
“Power and importance,” I said. “He wants to make himself High King. He calls himself the grandson of Avren; he schemes and makes alliances with whoever he thinks will help him.”
“If he wanted that and was prepared to put all that effort into it he could have had a good chance at becoming Urdo’s heir,” Cadraith said. “That way he’d have got to take over something whole, not something broken.”
“I think he wants it broken,” Darien said quietly. We all turned to look at him. “I know him; I knew him when he was young, at Thansethan. He hates all of us. He thinks we killed his mother and poisoned her memory. He doesn’t want to take over the kingdom, though that’s probably what he told Arling and his other allies. He just wants death and destruction and everything broken to pieces.” He paused, and looked at Urdo. “I said years ago that I would ask your permission before fighting him. I am asking that permission now. I am a man grown, and a trained armiger.”
“You are also the person we can least afford to lose,” Urdo said slowly, with a strange expression.
“That is a heavy burden you lay on me,” Darien said.
“I know,” Urdo replied, smiling faintly. “I have been carrying it for long years without realizing how heavy it was, until now when I set it down.”
Inis laughed, and looked briefly at the two of them. “Better than any old bowl,” he said.
“It’s not as if the whole war could be settled champion against champion,” Atha said, looking at Darien speculatively and ignoring Inis entirely. “If everyone would agree to put the weight of the war on that, it might be worth risking, if we had someone very good. Darag won a war that way.”
“And hated himself for the rest of his life after, all his lives,” Inis said, rocking backward and forward, eyes tight shut.
I wondered if he were seeing into other worlds now, looking for one where his grandchildren were happy and alive. I looked away from him uneasily. Darien and Urdo were still looking at each other. I could not read their faces. “Can I fight him, if it comes to that?” I asked.
Urdo looked at me, and back to Darien. “Neither of you may challenge him. He is no fool to settle for a single combat. What happens in the field is different. Certainly if he were dead this war would be a very different matter.”
“He should be mine to kill,” Darien said, like someone who knows their argument has been incontrovertibly countered.
“He is a talker, not a famous fighter, that I have ever heard,” Masarn said. “He was in my pennon and he learned as well as most, but not better. I’d say Sulien or Darien could take him, or I could, come to that.”
“They say he knows sorcery,” Cadraith said.
“Who says so?” Urdo asked.
“He says so himself,” Atha said, surprising me. “He claims the reputation of his mother in his letters, trying to awe and overpower his would-be allies.”
“Has anyone seen him doing sorcery?” Urdo asked.
Darien stirred, but did not speak.
“He read Gunnarsson’s dreams,” I said. “You did not want to believe him an enemy. He may claim to be a sorcerer to make himself seem more powerful. I would not give him reputation he does not deserve, but better that than be caught unawares and burn like tallow the way poor Geiran did at Caer Lind.”
“Very well,” Urdo said. “We will consider that he may be a sorcerer. That is another good reason for not fighting a single combat, even if he would agree to it.”
Cadraith shifted uneasily. “We don’t know for sure that Darien’s right,” he said. “Morthu is more dangerous if he wants to destroy everything, but I’ve seen no signs of that, only of wanting to make himself High King. We’ve gone straight onto talking about combats as if we were sure that was the truth.”
“I know it is,” Darien said.
“If he is a sorcerer it makes it more likely he wants to destroy everything,” Masarn said. “It would take a powerful lot of hate to do that.”
“It’s a terrible thing to want,” Urdo said. “Even his mother just wanted to be safe, in her way, walking the path she saw in her madness. But I think Darien is right even so.”
“It makes no difference,” Atha said, glancing at Inis, who was staring at his hands in his lap and ignoring us again. “It sometimes helps to know what your enemies want, but it’s rare enough to be able to give it to them, and we would be wanting to deny him all of it in any case. If Suliensson turns out to be right we may be able to separate Morthu from his allies in negotiation. We don’t lose anything by trying.”
“He’s very good at talki
ng,” Masarn said. “He always has been.”
Urdo yawned. “Tomorrow we will meet with their leaders. At worst we will buy enough time for ap Meneth and Luth and ap Erbin to join us, and maybe Alfwin as well if he can. At best we will come to an arrangement. Raul is visiting their priests even now to see if they can help—most priests of the White God will negotiate to save lives.”
“Let’s hear what they say they want,” Cadraith said. “They might not be foolish enough to fight now they’ve seen us on the field.”
“Cinvar has lost that army,” I agreed. “He might want to slink off home himself now.”
“We will have to fight Arling,” Masarn said. “We will have to get him out of the city and fight him.”
“It does seem unlikely that he will just agree to go away,” Urdo said.
“And only six stood scatheless at the battle fought at Agned, and the bloody hand of battle brought dark death to both the islands,” chanted Inis gleefully. Then he began to cry like a baby, and Atha made apologies and led him away.
— 13 —
Lady of Wisdom,
guide thou my thoughts,
aid thou my strategy,
let my words fall clear on the air
from my lips
to listening hearts.
Let me be lucid.
Let me be heard.
—From “Charm for Rhetoric”
The ala doctor, ap Darel, woke me. He was arguing with Govien outside the tent about whether it was too early to wake me or not.
“If it’s an emergency you can call her,” Govien was insisting, loudly, right outside my tent.
“It’s not an emergency, but I’ve never seen anything like it before, and I wish Sulien would come and see,” ap Darel said firmly.
I yawned, stretched, sat up, and poked my head out. I obviously wasn’t going to get any more sleep this morning.
“Oh, Sulien,” Govien said in obvious relief. I had slept longer than usual. The sun was well up, and visible, too, in a blue sky.