Liar's Oath
“No, Marshal. It was my idea.”
“Good. Then you don’t tell Sim, because the way he is, he would go straight to Erial and tell her.”
Piti nodded, somewhat shamefaced, and turned to leave. Raheli called her back.
“It wasn’t a bad idea, lass, and I’m not angry. You’re one that doesn’t like angry words or bickering: that’s good. But sometimes there are things worth angry words; you must have the courage to endure the anger when it’s needed. I know you have that courage, but you may not have recognized it yet.”
Raheli was not surprised when Erial showed up later that day. Piri and Erial had been friends too long for communication to fail, no matter that certain words could not be said. Erial’s approach, like Piti’s, began obliquely.
“Marshal, do you think married women can become Marshals?”
“Become, or stay? A few wives commanded cohorts in the war, but those whose families lived preferred to return to them afterwards. I think it would be hard to do a Marshal’s work and a wife’s work as well. Even more, a mother’s work. It would be like trying to be the wife of two families. Marshals are, in a way, the grange’s wife and mother.”
Erial grinned at her. “You are, Marshal, the way you visit everyone and help those in trouble.”
“Good commanders were the same way: a cohort’s not that different from a family. It needs food, healing, comforting, and someone to resolve disputes.” Raheli wondered why Erial had started from that direction, but never missed a chance to teach. “Why did you ask—are you planning to combine the two?”
“No. You know better.” Erial scowled and looked away.
“Some like you do, to have children. Half the time I see you, you’ve got all your cousins trailing behind; for all I knew you wanted some of your own.”
“It’s because my aunt’s been sick; you know that. And they like to play marching games, but none of them remember the commands.” Nonetheless, Erial had a sheepish look; Raheli suspected she enjoyed watching her cousins more than she would admit. She had lived with her aunt since her own mother died. “No—” Erial went on, sobering, “—it’s about a friend, that I think would make a good Marshal, only she’d have to be a yeoman-marshal first, and she thinks she can’t do that and be married.”
“Piri,” Raheli said, seeing no purpose in dragging this out.
“Yes, Pir. She used to talk about it a lot, learning to do what you do, protecting the vill—all until she got silly over Sim.”
Raheli had no trouble with this one. “She’s not ‘silly over Sim’— she wants to marry him, and he wants to marry her. And I can’t agree with you: Piri would not make a good Marshal except in wartime, if then—she had a youngster’s taste for adventure, that’s all, and now she’s grown out of it.” Erial opened her mouth, shut it, and scowled fiercely as a young wildcat.
“But I know someone else who would make a fine Marshal,” Raheli went on. She hadn’t meant to, but in thinking over the prospects earlier she’d realized just how outstanding Erial was. “If someone else wanted it, that is. Even though it would mean moving to another grange for part of her training, and who-knows-where after that.” Erial turned red, then pale, and her eyes shone.
“Me?” she squeaked. It was a safe guess; there were only seven girls in the older group of junior yeomen, and Erial had to know she and Piri were by far the best.
“You.” Raheli ticked off the reasons on her fingers. “You know the drill; you learn fast; you can teach—your cousins prove that. You have no betrothed to go into a decline when you leave. You don’t stir up trouble with lads or lasses—”
“Sim’s mad at me,” Erial muttered.
“Sim’s a young lad crazy about Piri, and jealous as… as a cockerel. That’s not your fault. I’m not blind and deaf; I know how you’ve acted, and you haven’t put pressure on Piri. Sim has. And you’re the one who had that notion of being Marshal in the first place; Piri was following you, the way she always did until she veered off to follow Sim.”
“You’re saying I haven’t grown out of it?” Erial asked in a shaky voice.
Raheli chuckled. “And you’ve got the resilience, the toughness, to survive some hard years with another Marshal, among strangers. And even more important to me, while you like the work and the weaponlore, you don’t like to hurt people. Alyanya forbid, but if you ever had to fight in battle, you might like it more than I did— but you wouldn’t turn cruel. I can trust you for that. So—do you want to be a yeoman-marshal?”
“Yes!” Erial said. Then her face fell. “No… no, I can’t. There’s my cousins; if my aunt dies—”
“We’ll let Piri lead your cousins around for awhile: you’d trust her, wouldn’t you? And if your aunt dies, the grange will help; you know you can trust me. Take your chance, Erial, when it comes. Unless you don’t want it.”
“I do.” She glowed with delight; Raheli grinned at her.
“Now mind, you’ll have some problems with the lads when they hear about it, and I don’t want any nonsense. You’re not a yeoman-marshal yet; I’ll send you to—” And who would she send Erial to, who could be trusted? “—someone I trust,” she said finally. She would have to look up the rolls; they really needed a better way of training youngsters who might become Marshals. Cob would be best, but did he have an opening? “Go on,” she said. “I’ll be along after awhile to talk to your aunt and uncle about you.”
She sat at her desk, for once well content with her role as Marshal and a woman other women could come to. It wouldn’t always work out so neatly, any more than every loaf came from the oven with a perfect crust and crumb, but when it happened she could take pleasure in it. The next time she went to Fin Panir, she thought, she would bring up this matter of Marshals’ training with the Council.
Chapter Thirteen
Luap and the others had been back in Fin Panir only a few days when Raheli arrived. She wanted, she said, to see what progress Luap was making on the Life of Gird. He showed her the racked scrolls of notes, explained about the interviews.
“Did you get the ones I sent?” she asked.
“Oh, yes. You are the only source I have for his early life, you know. Can you tell me anything more about his childhood? Anything that would fit well?”
“Fit well?”
“You know—something that would show the reader that he was going to be what he became. That story about his brother dying of an attack by wolves—where was Gird then? What did he do?”
Rahi stared at him. “Arin went out with the hunters; he was the elder. Gird stayed—you know my grandparents were still alive then, don’t you?”
“I’m not sure.” Luap pulled out the scroll she had sent and looked. “No—all you said here was that Arin died, and Gird succeeded to the tenancy.”
Rahi frowned. “It’s more complicated than that. It was before I was born; Arin and his wife Issa and their children, and Gird and my mother Mali, lived with their parents. Gird’s and Arin’s. The eldest son in each cottage could be called out for a hunt; I don’t know if Arin had to go, or if he chose to, but he went with other men out to a distant sheepfold. When wolves came, he ran out after them; they tore him but were beaten off by others. Gird said when they brought him home, the steward came, and granted a sheep’s carcass to the family. Even remitted the death-duty. But within a year, his father died, and the cottage and all the family came to him. Issa and her children, his mother, his own children— for I was born later that year.”
“But Gird didn’t go out to hunt the wolf that killed his brother?”
“No—the other men had killed most of them. And he had to do the work Arin had done, as well as his own.”
“It would have made a better story,” Luap said. Rahi gave him a strange look
“It’s not a singer’s tale,” she said. “It’s what really happened.”
“Another thing I don’t understand,” Luap said, avoiding that implied criticism, “is when he actually began working against the magel
ords. From what you’ve written, and from what I heard others say, his own liege was harsher than most, deliberately cruel.”
“Indeed he was!” Rahi’s face stiffened; her scar stood out white as bone.
“Then Gird must have resented it all along; he was no man to put up with cruelty lightly. Why didn’t he join the Stone Circle
earlier?”
“Do you think he never asked himself that?” She sounded angry; Luap could not understand why. “Do you think no one else ever asked? Why did he have to wait until the count’s meanness killed his mother and his wife, until starvation and disease picked off children and friends, until his best friend died beneath the very hooves of the lords’ guard, until I—” She drew a long, shuddering breath, and flushed and paled again. “Until they killed my husband and nearly killed me, and I lost his first grandchild. Why did he wait and wait? I don’t know.” She shook her head slowly; her accent thickened. “I would not call it cowardice, nor stupidity. He knew it was wrong; he knew it was worse; he thought—as much as I can know what he thought—that the Stone Circle
way would be no better. It was throwing lives away, not saving them. He did give grain, and pull his own belt tighter, that I know, once his friend was killed. But he had sworn to follow Alyanya’s peace, and seek no mastery of steel.”
“But why?” asked Luap. He had never heard Rahi speak even this much of her father; he was fascinated.
She sat for some time in silence, her face grave. She, like Gird, had gained weight with peace and prosperity; she had grown almost massive, like a matron with many children. “You know he was once in the count’s guard,” she said finally.
“I had heard that, back during the war; someone said it was where he learned the craft of war. But others said he had been a farmer all his life. Which was it?”
“I don’t know this of myself,” Rahi said. “I don’t know if I should tell you; he never told me about it and I heard it only in bits and pieces, from my mother and the village women her age.”
“If it made him the leader he was, it should go in his life,” Luap said.
She nodded, slowly. “Very well—but understand that this is a tangled story, and I was a child when I heard it.” He waved a hand to urge her on; she continued. “Gird was big and strong, even as a boy; the count’s steward saw that and suggested he join the local guard. He trained part time, and his father had payment for his service. When he came to manhood, and would have been made a guard, the count chose to torture a boy who had stolen fruit, and Gird ran away. Arin—the same Arin the wolf killed—brought him back, and the count did not kill him, but the fine and the count’s enmity destroyed my grandther’s standing in the vill. So Gird gave up all thought of soldiering, and became a farmer in his father’s cottage; he had learned, the women said, what came of following foreign gods of war.”
“But he had been in long enough to have knowledge—” Luap prompted.
“No—it’s before you joined, but remember that he spent that winter understone, with the gnomes. He said himself that what he learned from his old sergeant in the guards was to real soldiering as his own breadmaking was to my mother’s. He knew a few things, more than the men who had just run away to live like animals in the woods—but he could not have led an army in war without the gnomish training.” She stretched, then pushed herself out of the chair to prowl around his office and peer out the windows. “I think myself, Luap, that his very slowness, his very reluctance to oppose the magelords openly is what made it work. He had no hothead enthusiasm, no boyish illusions, such as I see in the lads and lasses in my grange, who dream of glory. He had a grown man’s thought, slow but sure, and when he finally moved it was like a mountain shifting its place.”
She looked back over her shoulder at him. “Of course, it would be nice to think he had been working against them secretly his whole life. If he had organized the Stone Circle
, if he had planned it all. But if he had, that would mean he had planned to let his mother and mine die of fever, rather than risk the count’s ban against harvesting herbs in the wood. It would mean he had planned to use the anger generated by one outrage after another to rouse the peasants… that his own anger was false, assumed for one occasion and put off for another. And a false man, Luap, could not have done what he did.”
Luap felt hot. She had made no direct accusation, but he felt as he had often felt when Gird insisted on strict, literal truth where a little pruning of a tale would make it more effective. He had been thinking that she would like his story of Gird’s life, the way he had emphasized what was really important, and treated the more noisome moments lightly, as necessary contrasts to the main theme. Now he felt uneasy about that.
“Now it’s your turn,” she said, smiling. “You have said you have part of it written, the part you know from your own experience. Read it to me.”
He spread his hands. “Rahi, you’ve just told me things I didn’t know, that will make some changes necessary. Not changes in what happened, but in what the events mean. I’m not writing for the people alive now, who knew him personally, but for those in the future to whom all our time will be as dim as eight generations back is to us. So I must make it clear not only what happened, but why—not only what Gird said, but what he thought.”
She frowned at him. “I don’t see why that would change anything from the war years.”
“It would,” Luap said firmly, now determined not to let her see the Life until he had added and adjusted and rearranged the new material. “Consider his interaction with the first Stone Circle
group he met, for example. Cob has told me that they all thought he had been a soldier, not just a boy in training. It would have been different if he had been—”
“But the facts don’t change,” Rahi said. “What happened is what happened. At least for what you yourself witnessed, you should have no changes to make.”
“I can’t agree.” He laid his hand flat on the work table. “When I have had time to consider what’s already written, in light of what you’ve told me today, then I will show you—but not now.”
She looked more puzzled than angry, though he had expected anger at any confrontation. “I don’t understand, Luap. You wrote to tell me your Life was coming along well; you wanted me to see it; you clearly expected me to approve—and now you look like a man who knows someone else’s gold has found its way into his pack.”
“It’s not that!” he said, feeling his ears redden.
“I didn’t say it was—but I don’t understand why you’ve changed your mind. Da said you had notions sometimes—”
Notions. Gird had said that about old women who accused each other of being witches. He had also said it about Luap, in one of their arguments. Luap struggled to find his dignity. “I do not have notions,” he said. “I am doing my best to make Gird’s life memorable and accessible to people who never knew him. I want to do a good job. What you’ve told me today makes me realize that I haven’t done as well so far as I thought. And I’d rather show it to you when I’m more satisfied with it myself.”
“As you will.” Rahi shrugged, as if to show she didn’t care, but the tightness of her expression said otherwise. She was probably thinking notions even if she didn’t say it again.
For the rest of that visit, she remained more pleasant than he expected, if somewhat cool. She did not quarrel with the Rosemage—in fact, Luap realized, she had not quarrelled with the Rose-age in a long time. She did not upset anyone at the Council meetings, except in quietly insisting that Marshals should accept and promote girls as well as boys in barton training.
“It’s not necessary any more,” Marshal Sidis said. “You know yourself Gird only allowed it because you started it, and you were his daughter. There’s no reason for women to waste their time in training to use weapons, when there’s no war.”
“That’s not so,” Rahi said firmly. “You weren’t there, but Cob can tell you—he was. Gird came to believe it was both necessary and right
—the only fair way. Some say there’s no reason for anyone to train, when there’s no war—but without training, we’d have the same mess Gird started with. If we’re to be safe from another invasion, we must know how to fight—and for the same reasons as last time, women need to know as much as men.” She surprised herself by having little anger to control. Sidis, from the northwest, had hardly made it to the war before it was over; he had the title Marshal only because he had led his small contingent and Gird confirmed most such leaders as Marshals if they fought at all.
“The horsefolk women learn weaponskills,” she added, “and they were never conquered by the magelords.”
Sidis snorted. “No one can conquer them—they simply ride away.”
The Rosemage shook her head. “The mageborn tried, Marshal Sidis, in the early years; they wanted to settle the rich pasturelands along the upper Honneluur but the horsefolk drove them back. And it’s in our archives that the horsefolk women fought as fiercely as the men, making our defeat sure.”
“That may be,” said Sidis, “but if every glory-struck girl spends her days in the barton, who’ll be weaving and baking, eh?”
“Do the glory-struck boys spend all their days in the barton, in your grange?” Rahi wasn’t sure if it was his tone, or the dismissive gesture in which he had indicated that the girls were not serious, but now her anger stirred.
“Well, no, but—”
“And do you find they cannot learn to scythe a field or dig a ditch, because they swing a hauk at drill?”
“That’s not what I meant, Marshal Raheli!” His use of her long name was the final flick of the lash.
“Wasn’t it?” She had both hands flat on the table, the broad hands she had inherited from Gird; her mother’s had been longer. “Have you forgotten, in the years of conquest, that our people know Alyanya’s blessing comes with the gift of blood, and that women in birthing face the same death that comes in battle? Do you not think it might be well for girls to learn discipline and courage, that our people never fall to ungenerous hearts again? You sound as if you thought it was a bad habit our women picked up from the magelords.”