Page 33 of A Man Rides Through


  Apparently, the overcrowded and raw-nerved populace of Orison was breaking into active rebellion against Castellan Lebbick.

  After a while, the noise receded, as if the riot were moving into the main body of the castle. But light continued to show at the rim of the wall, blazing up in gusts like a fire out of control. And when dawn came the Prince saw dirty plumes of smoke curling upward from the wound in Orison’s side, giving the castle a look of death it hadn’t had since the day the champion had first injured it.

  Again, Prince Kragen didn’t hesitate: he had spent the night preparing his response. At his signal, fifty men carrying a battering ram in a protective frame ran forward to try the gates. The walls and roof which received the arrows of the defenders made the ram look as unwieldy as a shed; but the use of the frame could be an effective tactic, as long as the gate failed before the defenders had time to ready a counterattack – or as long as they were distracted by trouble elsewhere.

  As a distraction, Prince Kragen sent several hundred soldiers with storming ladders and grappling hooks to assail the curtain-wall.

  Unfortunately, Orison’s guards proved equal to the occasion. A tub of lamp oil and a burning fagot turned the ram’s protective frame into a charnel. And the Castellan – or whoever had taken command after the riot – had obviously expected the attack on the curtain-wall; so the defense there had been reinforced.

  When Prince Kragen saw that his men were taking more than their share of losses and getting nowhere, he chewed his moustache, swore, and shook his fists at the sky – all inwardly, in the privacy of his thoughts, so that no one witnessed his frustration. Then he ordered a withdrawal.

  Rather tentatively, as if sensing the Prince’s state, one of his captains commented, “Well, they have to run out of oil sometime.”

  Prince Kragen swore again – out loud, this time. Then he instructed the captain to begin raiding the surrounding villages and trees for wood: he wanted more battering rams, more protective frames. And while that raid was underway, he set about using up the rams and frames he already had.

  If the defenders had left any of the battering rams he now sent against them alone, they would have soon learned that none of the rams had enough men with it to actually threaten the gates. This time, however – for once! – his tactics succeeded. The defenders faithfully burned every ram and frame to charcoal.

  The Prince grinned grimly under his moustache. Apparently, Castellan Lebbick – or whoever had replaced him after the riot – was still human enough to be outwitted once in a while.

  The riot which had taken place in Orison that night was an ugly one. It had a number of excuses. The castle was indeed overcrowded, badly so – a detail which became increasingly onerous for everyone as the siege wore on. And of course the siege had come at the end of a hard winter, before spring could do anybody any good; so supplies were relatively short, and everything from food and water to blankets and space was strictly – a swelling number of people said harshly – rationed. By Castellan Lebbick, naturally. Despite Master Eremis’ heroic replenishment of the reservoir.

  And Orison’s surplus population had nothing to do. Nobody really had anything to do. As long as the Alend army just sat there with all their heads crammed up the Prince’s ass – as one tired old guard put it – nobody had any outlet for long days of pent-up fear.

  Why didn’t Prince Kragen do something?

  Where was High King Festten?

  For that matter, where was the Perdon?

  How much longer was this going to go on?

  Tempers grew ragged; hostility fed on frustration and uselessness; grievances multiplied in all directions. Orison’s sewers kept backing up because the drainfields weren’t adequate to the population. And the leaders of Orison, the men in command – King Joyse, Castellan Lebbick, Master Barsonage – did nothing to ease the pressure. They all went about their lives in isolation, as if the burgeoning misery sealed within these walls were immaterial to them. Even the castle’s most comfortable inhabitants – men of position, women of privilege – were in an ugly mood; and the ugliness was spreading.

  But even ugliness couldn’t function in a vacuum: it needed a focus, a target.

  It needed the Castellan.

  He would have been a likely candidate in any case. After all, the responsibility for deciding and implementing Orison’s distress was on his shoulders. Merchants and farmers had time to become bitter about the confiscation of their goods. Mothers with sick children had cause to complain about the rationing of medicines. People with a normal need for activity – and privacy – didn’t have anyone else to blame for the lack of those necessities.

  The guards, however, were loyal to their commander. Most of them had had years to become familiar with his loyalties – to them as well as to King Joyse. And they were accustomed to taking his orders. One way or another, they worked to control the pressure building against the Castellan.

  As a result, there was no riot – no outbreak of resentment – until someone threw a spark into the tinder of Orison’s mood.

  That someone was Saddith.

  She was on her feet now, able to get around. Despite the loss of a few teeth, and the rather dramatic damage done to the rest of her face, she was able to talk. And that was what she had been doing ever since she had healed enough to climb out of her sickbed: getting around; talking.

  She had started with every man in Orison who had ever visited between her legs – or had let her know he’d like to visit. She had told those men what the Castellan had done to her, and why: she had gone to his bed out of simple pity for his loneliness, out of compassion for the pressure he was under; and he had hurt her here, and here, and here. But as her strength returned she broadened her range. She carried her injuries everywhere in public: her left hand broken and useless, the right nearly so; her face so badly battered that it would never regain its shape, one cheek crushed, one eye unable to close properly, scars in all directions. If anything, she wore her blouses unbuttoned farther than before, enabling the world to see what Lebbick had done to her there.

  And everywhere she went, her message was the same.

  You sods were quick enough for fornication when I had my beauty. If you were men now, you’d hoist Castellan Lebbick’s balls on a stick.

  His violence had no reason and no justification: it was as senseless as it was brutal. As senseless as all the other little brutalities he committed throughout the castle.

  How long would it be before some other helpless woman received the same treatment? How long would it be before brutality became the governing principle in Orison?

  How much longer will you sods and sheepfuckers permit this to go on?

  Of course, when she spoke to women – which she did often, more every day – her words were different. Her message, however, remained the same.

  Her disfigurement, as well as her intensity, made her impossible to look away from. She compelled stares and pity; nausea and indignation. It was impossible to look at her and not feel fear.

  Because of the way she talked, and the way the men who had once reveled in her talked, and the way the women who were terrified of the same fate talked, this fear took the form of a call for justice, a thinly concealed demand for retribution. With Alend just outside, rape and murder were on everybody’s mind.

  At the time, few people had any notion of how this demand came to be translated into action. One day, people were growling to each other, muttering vague threats which they had no actual intention of acting on: the next, rumors seemed to filter everywhere that voices would be raised, justice insisted upon; action taken. Come to the disused ballroom this evening, the great hall where King Joyse and Queen Madin were married, and where the peace of Mordant had been celebrated.

  Oh, yes? Whose idea was this?

  No one knew.

  We’re besieged. Is it really a good idea to challenge the Castellan at a time like this?

  Perhaps not. But it’s gone too far to be stopped. Bette
r to support it, make sure it succeeds, than take the chance he’ll be able to crush it – the chance he’ll be left alone to do something worse the next time.

  Yes. All right.

  So that evening the crowd began to gather in the high, vast, dusty ballroom. At first, it was plainly a crowd rather than a mob, despite the fact that its numbers quickly swelled to several hundred: the fear threatening to become violence was counterbalanced by uncertainty; by habits of mind learned during many years of King Joyse’s peaceful rule; by the perfectly reasonable idea that it was dangerous to weaken Orison during a siege; by the manifest presence of Castellan Lebbick’s guards all around the hall. Nevertheless, as darkness deepened outside the windows, the only light came from torches which someone had thought to provide, and the erratic illumination of the flames had a disturbing effect on faces and rationality. People began to look garish to each other, wild and strange; the air was full of grotesque shadows; the atmosphere seemed to flicker. And through the shadows and the orange-yellow light Saddith appeared, around and around in the ballroom, displaying her wounds, speaking of outrage. The seething murmur of several hundred voices took shape in fits and bursts as more and more people found occasion to say the name Lebbick.

  Lebbick.

  And the guard captain who had been detailed to preserve order made a mistake.

  He was a tough old fighter with bottomless determination and not much intelligence; and during one of King Joyse’s battles the Castellan had saved his entire family from being cut down when they were caught in the path of an Alend raid. He heard all these whimpering shitholes – they were practically puking with self-pity – start to mutter Lebbick, Lebbick, as if they had the right, and he decided that the crowd had to be dispersed.

  Even though the odds were against him, he might have succeeded if he had been able to drive people out of the ballroom back into the public halls and passages. Unfortunately, he failed to do that. Someone with more presence of mind – or maybe just a nastier sense of humor – than the rest of the mob went to the entryway which led to the laborium and called everyone else to follow.

  Fear of the Castellan and fear of Imagers formed a powerful combination. Several hundred people surged in that direction as if they had lost the capacity to think.

  Somehow, they forced the guards back. Somehow, they were swept into the laborium, where the great majority of them had never set foot in their lives. Somehow, they found themselves packed into the ruined hall where the Congery had held meetings until the champion had blasted one wall open to the world.

  Men closed the doors against the guards, shot the bolts. Torches ringed the stumps of pillars which used to hold up the ceiling. Because the curtain-wall didn’t completely seal the hole in Orison’s side, the hall was theoretically exposed to the guards defending the wall. The wall, however, had been built to protect against siege rather than against riot: its defensive positions faced outward rather than back down into the hall below. Only the archers could have taken any action. And even Lebbick’s staunchest supporters knew better than to begin slaughtering Orison’s inhabitants.

  Lebbick. Men and women shouted back and forth, made threats. Lebbick. Their mood grew uglier by the moment. They started demanding blood.

  Lebbick. Lebbick!

  Back against the wall near one of the doors stood a tall man who wasn’t shouting, didn’t make any demands. Wrapped in his jet cloak, he was nearly invisible among the shadows. But the hood of his cloak couldn’t hide the way his eyes caught the reflection of the torches, or the way his teeth gleamed when he grinned.

  “Very good so far,” he said in a conversational tone because absolutely no one could hear him. “Now the time has come. Do what I told you.”

  Around him, the confusion began to change. Something caught the attention of the mob, focused it.

  Amid the torches, Saddith stood on the dais of the Masters.

  She was just tall enough to be seen over the heads of the people nearest her.

  “Listen to me!” There was nothing left of her beauty: it had all become disfigurement and rage. Her voice rang off the stones, rang through the mob. “Look at me!”

  She raised her hands into the light.

  “Look at me!”

  The mob snarled.

  She shook her hair away from her face.

  “Look at me!”

  The mob hissed.

  She stripped open her blouse, exposing her maimed breasts.

  “Look at me!”

  The mob shouted.

  “Lebbick did this! He did this to me!”

  The mob roared.

  “Yes, my sweet little slut,” the man in the jet cloak commented. “And you deserved it. Perhaps that will teach you the folly of betraying my secrets.”

  “Now he has threatened you,” Saddith went on, as fierce as her nakedness, “for no reason except that you think this should not have been done to me!”

  Lebbick! Lebbick!

  “I went to him because I pitied him!” she shouted. “I went to offer him my love when I was beautiful and all men desired me! This is the result!”

  “No,” said the man in the jet cloak, entirely unheard. “You went to him because you were ambitious. And you went when I told you to go. I understood his need far better than you did.”

  Her voice seemed to turn the torchlight the color of blood. “He must pay!”

  Lebbick! Pay! Lebbick!

  “Think about this gambit, Joyse.” The man in the jet cloak was no longer grinning. “Save him if you can. Stop me if you can. You thought to play this game against me, but you are outmatched.”

  Then he cocked an eyebrow in mild surprise and peered over the heads of the crowd as a figure wrapped in a brown robe stepped unexpectedly up onto the dais beside Saddith.

  Lit by torches and looking like an image out of a dream, the figure turned sharply; the robe seemed to swirl through the air and float away, thrown off as the man revealed himself.

  Castellan Lebbick.

  He wore the purple sash of his authority over his mail, the purple band of his position knotted around his short, gray hair. He had a longsword in a scabbard on his hip, but he didn’t touch it; he didn’t appear to need it. His familiar scowl answered the torches blackly. The lift of his head, the thrust of his jaw, the movements of his arms and shoulders were tight with passion and command. He wasn’t tall, yet he made himself felt everywhere in the hall.

  He had never looked more like a man who beat up women.

  “All right.” His voice carried; it promised violence, like a hammer knocking chips from stone. “This has gone on long enough. Get out of here. Go back to your rooms. The Masters don’t like having their precious laborium invaded. If they decide to defend it themselves, they might translate the whole lice-ridden lot of you out of existence.”

  An interesting threat, thought the man in the jet cloak – plainly hollow, but interesting. Nevertheless everyone stared at the Castellan. He had clapped a hush over the mob. Surprise and old respect and inbred alarm did more for him than fifty guards.

  Saddith ignored his threats. She ignored his appearance, his proven capacity for harm. After what he had cost her, she had nothing left to lose, no more reason to be afraid. And she hated him – oh, she hated him. Her face was a scabbed and deformed clench of hate as she spat his name:

  “Lebbick.”

  Despite his authority and fury, he turned to look at her as though she had the power to compel him.

  “What do you wish here?” she asked thickly. “Have you come to gloat? Have you come to lay claim to your handiwork? Are you proud of it?”

  “No.” His voice was quiet, yet it could be heard throughout the hall. “I was wrong.”

  “ ‘Wrong’?” she cried.

  “It wasn’t your fault. It probably wasn’t even your idea. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

  At a calmer moment, the crowd might have been utterly astounded to hear Castellan Lebbick say something that sounded so
much like an apology, almost a self-abasement. But the people weren’t thinking as individuals: they were feeling like a mob, ugly and extreme. Lebbick, someone murmured – and another, Lebbick – a chant began, far back in the throat, through the teeth, a hunting growl, Lebbick, Lebbick.

  “ ‘Wrong’?” repeated Saddith. She was breathing hard, trying to get enough air for her vituperation. “You admit that you were wrong?” Her damaged breasts shone with sweat. “Do you think that heals me? Do you think that one small piece of my pain is made less, or one small scar is removed?” Her arms beat time to her respiration, Lebbick, Lebbick, the snarl of the mob. “I tell you, you will pay with blood!

  “Blood!” she howled, matching the rhythm in the hall: “Blood!”

  And the mob responded, “Lebbick! Lebbick!”

  The man in the jet cloak grinned with undisguised relish.

  Nevertheless Castellan Lebbick wasn’t daunted. Maybe he wasn’t even afraid. “Oh, stop it!” he snapped over the heavy shout as if the people surrounding him were nothing more than bad children and he had no time for their misbehavior. “Do you think all this surprises me? I knew it was going to happen. I’ve been ready for days.”

  His voice wielded enough of the whip to slash through the beat of his name, the outrage. Men and women faltered, began to listen.

  “I had you driven in here so I could do what I wanted with you. You didn’t know I was here. You don’t know how many of my men are here. Well, I’ll tell you. Ninety-four. All disguised. All pretending to be one of you. The person standing next to you shouting Lebbick, Lebbick like a dog with the mange is probably one of my men. If anyone raises a hand at me, he’ll be cut down where he stands. And the rest of you will be remembered!”

  It was a remarkable ploy. The man in the jet cloak was virtually certain that it was in fact a ploy, that the Castellan was in fact undefended, as vulnerable as he would ever be; but that changed nothing. It worked. Like water on hot coals, it transformed the fury of the mob back into fear.

  All the shouting stopped. Men and women glanced at each other, tried to edge away from each other. When the Castellan barked, “Now get out of here. Open the doors and get out of here. You’ve all been stupid enough for one, night,” the people near the doors undid the bolts, and the crowd began to move.