Liar's Oath

  “And there’s more forest on top, if we can find a way to that upper level.” He had no idea if the internal passages went that far. “We should be careful; these trees may take a long time to grow. But perhaps some are nut trees or have wild fruit, as these bushes do.” He had lost sight of the Rosemage, and felt an urge to follow her upstream on his own side of the stream.

  “I’ll stay here,” Arranha said, still peering at his designs in the sand. “I would like to find this out for myself.”

  Luap moved along the near bank of the creek, noticing how clear the water ran. He dipped his hand in. Cold, too, and sweet to the taste. The red rocks of the creekbed seemed to sparkle; when he looked closely he saw tiny flecks of gold. His heart pounded. It couldn’t be real gold… but perhaps it was an omen. Certainly that might explain the almost magical shimmer of the cliffs in the sunlight, those myriad flecks of glittering gold. A frog popped up from the water to perch on a rock… the frog’s skin, too, seemed dusted with gold. And the fish, hardly a hand long, that held its place in the current with its tail just waving, had speckles on its side of rose and gold.

  It had not seemed hot, when they first came into this valley, but now Luap could feel the sun’s heat reflecting from the cliff to his left. He noticed when it eased, and looked left to see another narrow cleft leading away in the direction of the one outside the stronghold. Should he explore it? No—it would take too long. He kept on his way, watching from time to time to see if he could see the Rosemage among the trees. He caught one glimpse of her, but she was still ahead of him, upstream. The sun baked him; he thought he knew now why the trees stayed on the other side. He was glad when the stream twisted, and he moved into the shade of its opposite bank for a few minutes. Here he found delicate flowering plants hanging half in the water, their starry blossoms stirred by the current. Ferns, too, clung here, and a low herb holding juicy berries just above the earth. A great rock hung out over the water on the other side, with a pine angling up from it.

  “There’s a very big fish in that pool,” the Rosemage said. Luap looked up, and saw her lying stomach-down on the rock, peering at the water. “It’s deeper than it looks.” Luap squinted and found an angle where the reflections didn’t obscure his gaze. What had seemed a pool perhaps knee-deep showed itself much deeper.

  “How big a fish?” he asked, thinking of dinner. She held her hands apart to show him. Big enough for all of them, if he could catch it.

  But he could not stop for that, and they could not stay past sunset—that much he was sure of. He scrambled past a fall of rocks and found that he was now on the same level as the Rosemage, some distance away. He could just see Arranha’s white hair glowing in the sunlight downstream. The sun had moved too fast, he thought; he dared not go much farther. Echoing his thought came the Rosemage’s call. “We should go back…” From the tone she was no more eager than he. With a last look around, he spotted yet another cleft leading to the north, winterwards. From above, he remembered, he had seen narrow ridges of rock standing on end, finlike. Did each have its cleft, and could each cleft conceal another stronghold, or part of the same one? He tried to estimate how thick the fins were… thicker than the city walls of Fin Panir, thicker than half the city, he suspected. His skin prickled, imagining those walls hollowed out for dwellings, imagining the rock full of his people, his mageborn survivors, all secure in their stone castles. But the sun’s angle warned him. He jumped down from that boulder and made his way as quickly as he could back down the stream.

  Even so the sun had disappeared behind the cliffs sunsetting when he reached Arranha. The sky, still bright, gave light enough in the larger valley, but up in the small one, under the great pines, it seemed already dusk. Far overhead, he could just see the top of sunlit cliffs, still blazing red, but he stumbled over rocks in the gloom. At first, he could not remember exactly where the entrance lay; the tree in front of it obscured it more than he had expected.

  But they found it at last, and after a last drink from the rivulet outside, came in to the silence and shadeless light of the stronghold.

  None of them said anything on the way back to the great hall. Luap, counting turns and hoping that he remembered them all, had neither breath nor attention to spare for his companions. He had not realized how far down the sloping passages had taken them; going back uphill he could feel the pull on his legs. At last they came to the level ways he remembered clearly, and then to the hall itself. There they paused.

  Arranha sank down on the dais, breathless.

  “Are you all right?” the Rosemage asked. Luap felt guilty; he had not remembered that the old man might have even more trouble with the climb than he had.

  Arranha nodded, but waited a moment to speak. “I’m… fine. Just tired. I haven’t climbed so much in years…”

  “I’m sorry,” Luap said. “I was trying to remember the turns—”

  Arranha chuckled. “And I’d rather you remembered the turns, lad, than worried about me and forgot them. But we must mark the route, next time, eh?” In a few minutes he was able to stand. “I would like to see more—I would like to explore every passage and room—but I think we should return to your cave, Luap. My bones crave a night’s sleep, with a blanket around me.”

  “We could come back and bring food,” the Rosemage said. “And blankets. Spend a day or two here—”

  “We can’t leave the horses there, untended,” Luap said. Then he and the Rosemage looked at each other, bright-eyed. “Bring them!” they both said. Luap went on. “We could explore more easily—see more—perhaps reach both ends of the valley in one day.” He wondered if a horse would fit into that inner chamber. Its head, yes, but all of it? What would happen if all the horse didn’t stand on the pattern? Surely it would all come, or all fail to come… not sever the beast. He shuddered. “Arranha’s right,” he said. “For now, we go back and have a night’s rest.”

  Although he had not thought it took so long to go from the lower entrance to the great hall, when they emerged from the cave in Fintha, the last glow of sunlight was just fading from the sky. “I thought so,” said Arranha, with some satisfaction. Luap presumed that meant his idea about distance and time, whatever it was, made sense to him.

  “I’ll feed the horses,” he said, forestalling further explanation. Once more he led the tethered horses to drink, then fed them. Even after sunset, it was much hotter and stickier here than there; he missed the clean bite of that distant air. When he climbed back to the cave entrance, the Rosemage had a fire going, and had started cooking. He gathered more fallen branches for fuel, broke a few switches of flybane and stripped the leaves from them, and went back to rub the horses with the sticky sap. Arranha peeled redroots and sliced them for the pot, quietly for once. He offered no theories about the origins of redroots, the different ways they might be peeled or sliced… Luap decided the old man was really tired.

  He himself was tired, he realized, after sitting to eat the stew the Rosemage had prepared. He was stiff from the climbing, and mentally tired from the excitement. He wanted to talk about everything he’d seen, check his memories against theirs, and at the same time he wanted to fall asleep right where he sat. He took the pot to the river to clean it, and came back to find Arranha already asleep and the Rosemage yawning as she piled turf on the fire. So he lay down and dreamed all night of the red castles of his future home.

  The next day dawned fair and hot. Luap woke early, and went down to water the horses. He wanted to escape to that cool, crisp air of the stronghold. He imagined what dawn might look like, rising above sheer red rock walls, the first sunlight spilling over the cliffs like golden wine. Here, the air lay heavy, a moist blanket on his shoulders; he was sweating already.

  “It’ll storm by nightfall,” the Rosemage said. Her shirt clung to her, already sweat-darkened. She dipped a bucket in the river upstream of the drinking horses, and put her hand in. “It’s hardly cool at all. Your country must be fierce in winter, but it’s certainly cooler
in summer.”

  “I know. I was wishing we could go back there today.” He backed Arranha’s mount out of the water, and fetched hers. “But we’re short of fodder for the horses; we need to move on to the meadows and let them graze.”

  “They could graze there if we could get them there,” she said. “If they’d fit into that chamber… but then they’d come out in the great hall. That’s no place for horses.” By the wrinkle of her nose, he knew she was thinking of the mess they could make, the damage they could do. True—that hall was no stable, and they would not have the means to clean it. And if a shod hoof damaged the pattern on the dais, could they get back? Best not to risk it. But he wanted to go back, wanted to taste that cold water again, breathe that air.

  Arranha woke as they came back up. He, too, commented on the moist heat of the morning, and the difference from the crisp air in “Luap’s country” as he called it. But he did not want to go back—not then. “At dawn, precisely, or sunset—yes. With a sandglass to measure the time.”

  So after a cold breakfast, they saddled the horses and rode back toward Fin Panir. Just after midday, when they were too far from a village to find shelter, a violent summer storm broke over them, drenching them with rain so they rode the rest of the day with the odor of wet wool. Luap tried to fill his mind with the scent of those pines.

  Raheli ran her hand along the shaft of the pike the yeoman had brought to replace one he’d broken in drill. Good seasoned wood, shaped well and rubbed smooth. She nodded her approval, and he grinned at her. He had the agility and grace of an ox, she thought, but made up for it with strength and goodwill. Now may I do as well, she thought, to amend my own faults. She had had so short a time with Gird to renew their family relationship, to feel how she might be truly an elder even without bearing… she still found herself mired in bitterness some days. She and Gird had not been meant to do new things, but to do old things well, she was sure. They had done new things because they must, not like those for whom this was their parrion.

  Yet she did new things constantly. She had been listening to the women, since her visit to Gird, and even more since his death, noticing much she’d ignored before. She had, after all, lived in the one vill all her life until the day she still thought of as the day the war started. She had never been as far as a big market town, let alone a city; she had known nothing of how city folk lived, or peasant folk across the Honnorgat. Or even peasant folk before the magelords came. She listened to old grannies tell of their grannies’ times; she listened to women who had the life she had lost, and women who wanted the life she had as a Marshal. Even mageborn women… they had not all been wealthy, arrogant mageladies who delighted in beating peasants. In fact, most of them were more human than she had imagined from meeting the Autumn Rose. She had met Dorhaniya now, and listened to stories that sounded much like those she’d grown up hearing at her own hearth.

  So the burden that women wanted to place on her—the way they wanted to see her as the women’s Marshal-General—bothered her less and less. She would not be the Marshal-General, but she could make sure that the code that bore his name remained fair to women. And that, she was convinced, began with women drilling in the bartons alongside men. Even to Gird, that had been what mattered: if the women risked the same in war, then they deserved the same from the law. Men could not argue against that, as they could if women did not willingly risk the same in times of danger. That women—as she knew from her own past—were always at risk did not help; being a victim won no respect.

  Convincing the women of all that, in peacetime, was another matter. Once she thought of it, she quit accepting so easily the excuses that came to her, and applied the hard logic of the war she’d survived. If there were war, she said firmly to the woman (or more often man) who came to explain why Maia or Pir or Mali wasn’t coming, she would learn to fight, or be killed. Have you all forgotten? Do you want to see the slaughter of untrained peasants again?

  Gradually, she had increased the number of women in her own grange and bartons who actually appeared reasonably often of drill-nights. Ailing fathers and tired husbands found they could survive a cold supper; when they complained to Raheli, she suggested tartly that they come to drill with their wives and daughters. Some couples began to do so, and that heartened others. The young girls she caught early, insisting to their mothers that such drill would not make them unfit to bear. “I am barren because my husband and I did not know how to fight,” she had said more than once. “Not because I fought in the war.”

  But it wasn’t the reluctant ones who bothered her most. She had been reluctant herself; she knew what was in their hearts. And while she didn’t share the feeling, she could understand those like Seri, who enjoyed drill for its own sake, and dreamed of using their weapons to protect others. No, the ones who bothered her were the few—usually town girls, she liked to think—who were eager to learn the drill, eager to learn weaponlore, and even more than that eager to shed someone else’s blood. Those made her shiver. How could a girl, whose life should be risked in giving life, be eager to end it? She did her best to make explanations. This one had a brutal father; that one had been estranged from her natural family from birth.

  If she had thought about it beforehand—and she hadn’t—she might have thought that girls who had no interest in boys would be like that, but the difference between those who loved women and those who loved men ran across the difference between those who liked to hurt and those who did not. She herself had been angry, after Parin’s death, after the loss of her child; she had been so angry she dreamed night after night of striking at others the blows that had struck her. She had expected to exult in mageborn blood, when her chance came… but in fact the first time she had hit an enemy she had almost dropped her weapon and apologized. The memory of that first battle in the forest, the feel of striking another human being, still came back to her on bad nights. She did not tell the young ones that—she had, after all, become good at soldiering, or she would not have survived—but she did not understand those who wanted to hurt others.

  “Marshal?” A girl’s voice brought her out of her musing. Raheli looked at her, noticing how the face had lengthened in the past year, how she had grown so much taller. This was not one of her problems, but a delight: a girl she would have been glad to have as a little sister.

  “Yes, Piri?”

  “The lads say you’ll be looking among the junior yeoman for a yeoman-marshal—”

  “Yes, from the eldest group. Whoever it is will be sent to another grange to work with that Marshal for a few years. Why?”

  “Sent away—?”

  “Yes. It would be hard on a lad to have his friends beneath him, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes, Marshal.” Piri had the dark hair and gray eyes common to this cluster of villages; now she flushed and looked down. “I just wondered, Marshal, if you ever thought of a girl.”

  “A girl? You?” Raheli was startled. Piri came to drill faithfully, but seemed perfectly suited to follow her two sisters into marriage. Had she quarreled with the boy she seemed most likely to marry?

  “No—but there’s Erial.” As if anticipating her Marshal’s reaction, Piri rushed on. “She’s better at drill than most of the boys, she never gets tired, and she doesn’t flirt.”

  “With boys,” said Raheli drily. “She flirted with you last year, until you made it clear you preferred young Sim.”

  “Well… yes… but that won’t cause any trouble because most junior yeomen are boys.”

  “And she asked you to ask me?” Raheli said.

  “No… she didn’t. I just thought…” Piri looked down. Raheli sighed. The two had been best friends as small children, then that simple relationship had been complicated for them by whatever god governed the loves of adults. Piri had a soft heart; she would not want to hurt her friend, but she felt uncomfortable with her.

  “Piri, you’re right that Erial is good in drill; she might make a good yeoman-marshal. But one thing any yeoma
n-marshal needs is a desire to take on that job. Yes, it would be easier on you if she moved away, or was busy with something like this… but none of us can live Erial’s life for her. She understands that you love Sim; you must understand that she may not want to go away.”

  “If she asked would you consider her?”

  “Piri, is she bothering you?”

  “Not really—I mean she’s not doing anything, but I know what she’s thinking about.”

  Raheli snorted. “I doubt it, child. Most of us think we can read thoughts like scrolls, and yet we have no idea what’s behind someone’s eyes.” She looked at Piri’s red face thoughtfully. “Is it Sim? Is he upset about Erial?”

  Piti turned even redder. “He did say—that when I wasn’t looking he saw her watching me.”

  “Watching you. And Sim thinks no one has a right to look at you but him, is that it? Boys! At that age, Piri, they’re like young bulls, jealous of everything. If he knew a sheep looked at you he’d probably drive it away. No, lass: from what I’ve seen, Erial understands very well that you prefer Sim; she may not like it, but she’s no worse than you are and unless you have something more than ‘Sim says she looks at me’ you have no real complaint. What did your mother say?”

  “That Sim’s a young cockerel crowing over his first pullet.” Raheli grinned; Piri’s mother had come closer than she had. Sim was much more gamecock than bull. “She said Erial’d been my friend all my life and it was silly to fuss now. But I thought maybe—”

  “You thought maybe there was an easy way out that would please Erial and Sim both, didn’t you?” Piri nodded. “Piri, the easy ways we see out of things are usually full of traps: think how we tempt an animal into a pen. We make the gate look like the easy way out of trouble. Learn to look on both sides of the gate before you walk through it. Now. About Erial. If she wants to be a yeoman-marshal, and she asks me, I’ll consider it. Not for you, but for her and the yeomen she will serve later. But she has to ask, and I don’t want you hinting to her in the meantime. Does Sim know you came about this?”