Liar's Oath

  “But then they want to be yeoman-marshals, and the boys complain if the girls are better. They don’t think it’s fair.” Sidis said this as if it answered all objections, then reddened as he realized, from the expressions around the table, that it didn’t. Cob almost choked on a laugh. Some laughed aloud. Even Luap smiled. Sidis shifted in his chair, and finally shrugged. “All right. You’re Gird’s daughter, and no one can argue with you about what Gird said. I still think—but what does that matter?”

  “It matters,” Rahi said. “It always matters, because what you really think will change the meaning of the words you say. If you think the girls are silly and glory-struck, while boys with the same visions in their heads are sensible and brave, every child in your grange will know it… and the sensible, brave girls will find a reason to stay home. And they will be as I was, good young wives to be trampled underfoot of the first tyrant who comes to the door.” He started to speak, but she shook her head at him. “No, Marshal Sidis, you must think again. I do not want some child like me, some young girl whose mind is all on baking and weaving, as you would have it, left with no way to defend herself. Even my father, even the man who led the army to victory, could not defend me when an enemy came: that is the hard truth of it. There’s nothing glorious about a soldier’s death, but a victim’s death is worse. My father saw it that way, finally: he had seen me near death, when I had no chance to fight, and if I had died on the battlefield, it could not have been worse.”

  Cob raised his hand, and Rahi sat down. “She’s right, Sidis,” he said. “It’s the old way, after all. Some even believed that women taking up weapons caused less disruption than men, because Alyanya’s Curse could not apply.”

  “I never heard that.” It was not quite a snort, but close.

  Rahi leaned forward. “You’re not a woman. The Lady of Plenty, Alyanya of the Harvests, requires that blood be given for any use of iron or steel in planting or harvesting, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And for a man, that means his own blood on the blade: shovel, spade, plow, sickle, scythe, pruning hook, even the knife used to cut grapes. Some folk said—in our village it was said, but I know in others it was different—that Alyanya required the same for using a blade on an animal. Others said that sacrifice was to the Windsteed, or even Guthlac. A man who withheld his blood would be cursed, in his loins and his fields. But for a woman, Sidis, the Lady had already had her sacrifice of blood; a girl cut her thumb once only, to promise the blood of childbearing later, and could use an edged tool with no more concern for Alyanya’s Curse. Even in Torre’s Song, it is the wicked king who is cursed for bringing steel to flesh, while Torre herself…”

  “All right.” Sidis turned up his hand. “I submit. We shall have granges full of girls, and lads who cannot keep their minds on the drill—”

  “If you make clear to them that death follows stray thoughts as an owl hunts mice, Sidis, they should be able to follow the drill. If a girl can distract them, I would hate to have them in battle.” Cob, again, with a look at Rahi. “For that matter, look at young Seri, in training here. If it weren’t for her, I suspect Aris would wander from healing to healing, help Luap with scribes’ work, and never take drill at all. That girl would make a yeoman worthy of any grange, and she’s been nothing but good for a dreamy-minded mageborn lad with more talent than sense.”

  Rahi thought better of Aris than that, but she agreed about Seri. She knew that Seri had cheerfully dealt with a couple of lads who were at the age to see her as a girl, not a fellow-yeoman. Her Marshal had told the tale for a season afterwards. “She wasn’t angry, and she didn’t make any fuss,” he’d said. “Just bashed them once each, told them not to be silly, and got on with it. Now they’re her friends, and they’ve quit smirking at the other girls, as well. Do their courting at the dances, like they should.”

  Sidis still looked angry and stubborn; despite herself Rahi felt a twinge of pity for him. She hated being argued down, herself, and she knew he would have to come to this on his own before he would really believe it. She tried to think of some way to make it easier for him. Nothing came to her; she wished she had her father’s power. Then she remembered how often he had stopped an argument with his fist, and a snort escaped her. Sidis glared.

  “I’m sorry,” Rahi said. “It’s just—I remember Da—Gird— settling matters with his fist. I didn’t like it, but here I am doing the same thing with words. I think you’re wrong, Sidis, but you have a right to be wrong as long as it takes to change your mind. I don’t want you agreeing with me just because I’m Gird’s daughter, or Cob is one of the most senior Marshals. Gird himself thought we should talk things out, even if he stopped the talk sometimes; he was right in that.”

  “I don’t understand you,” Sidis said. “You change your mind—”

  “No. I don’t. But I won’t try to change yours by force.” He still looked confused, but he nodded. When the time came to vote on the matter, he waited until he saw how the others voted. Then he shrugged. “It worked for Gird,” he said. “So why not? We can always change it back if we’re wrong.” And he tossed his billet on the pile for retaining women’s rights in the grange organization.

  After the meeting, Rahi was packing her things for the journey back to her grange when Sidis sought her out. “I wanted you to know it wasn’t you I objected to, or any of the women who were actually veterans,” he said “But most women up where I’m from didn’t fight—in fact, most of the men didn’t fight. They see the grange drill as something imposed from outside; it’s the women who’ve pestered me to send their daughters home.”

  “So they don’t see the worth of it, eh?” Rahi sat down, and waved at him to do the same.

  “Aye. It was on the edge of the magelords’ holdings, and even I remember that things weren’t too bad until after the war started. That’s when our Duke—the Duke that was—raised the fieldfees and imposed stiffer fines. We had less bad to fight about, and more to lose, and there’s feeling now that the grange system’s as bad as the magelords’ stewards ever were.”

  Rahi whistled. “Perhaps they don’t think they need anyone at all, is that it?”

  Sidis twisted a thong and untwisted it. “That’s what it seems, most times. They’re good folk, but they don’t look ahead much, and they think they can deal with their own lives better than anyone else.” He looked troubled, someone telling an unpleasant truth about people he cared for. “I’ve wondered myself, now the magelords are gone, what we need all this drill for. I come here, and you all seem to know things—it comes clearer, like. But how I’ll explain it to them—”

  “Maybe they should do without a grange for awhile.” Rahi leaned back against the wall, watching his face. He didn’t say anything at first. “If they don’t want it, if they aren’t supporting it—maybe they have to feel the need first. Da always said you can’t convince an ox it will need water in the middle of the work when you show it a bucket at dawn. You could find another place… even here.”

  “But—” His hands worked the thong back and forth, back and forth. “It’s losing, that is. Giving up. If there’s a grange somewhere, it should stay—”

  “Not if it’s not wanted.” Rahi felt her way into this argument, hoping she was right. “We’re not here to make things worse, after all. The granges started because people wanted them. It’s true there has to be some kind of law—if those folk come to market in a town with a grange, they’ll have to abide by the Code. But if it sticks in their throats, why not let be?”

  “The other Marshals,” Sidis muttered. “They talk of their granges growing, of founding new bartons. They’ll think I did something wrong.”

  Rahi opened her mouth to deny that, and then stopped. To be honest, she thought he’d done something wrong. He’d come into the war, and then his position as Marshal, without any real conviction. And if she thought so, others might as well. She could not reassure him with her dishonesty. “If you made a mistake,” she s
aid, picking her words as carefully as she would have picked through a bundle of mixed herbs, sorting them, “—if you did something wrong, it sounds to me that your folk have made mistakes as well. You couldn’t have done all the wrong. Our whole system began with the people, the peasants. If they aren’t with us, we have nothing. Pretending we do leads right back into what the mageborn did, all that pretense about the lords protecting the people, and the people serving the lords. If the folk in your grange don’t want a grange, it won’t be a real grange no matter what you do.”

  His brows had drawn together, but his hands were still. “Some do—at least—”

  “If they want it, they will make it work. Think about it.”

  “What would you think, Raheli, Gird’s daughter, if I let the grange go—closed it, or however it’s done?”

  Rahi looked past him, seeing against the far wall of the room a stream of images from the war, and the years after. What might it have been like, to live in a village with a better lord than Kelaive? Or with no lord at all? Could there be farmers, village folk, who did not understand in their bones what the grange was for, and how it worked? Apparently so. “I would think you had tried,” she said. “I hear the truth in your voice. But it’s not my decision.” She could not tell what Sidis thought of what she said; he merely nodded and went away, leaving her to ride out of Fin Panir later that day still wondering.

  She took that uncertainty with her back to her own grange, and looked more carefully at the people who did not choose to come. She had heard no grumbling for some time, but did that mean satisfaction? Or that people grumbled where she could not hear them? She was not surprised when a letter from Fin Panir reported that Sidis’s grange had dissolved, and he himself had given up his Marshalship. She hoped they would fare well, and hoped that her words had not formed his decision.

  It was half a year before she came to Fin Panir again. Luap had finished his Life of Gird, and the Council wanted her approval. From the tone of the letter, she wondered what the other Marshals thought of it. They might have sent a copy, instead of a letter, surely it would have been easier to send the scrolls here, instead of dragging her to Fin Panir in the busiest time of the year.

  A copy of the original awaited her in Fin Panir; the young yeoman who led her to a small room opening on an interior court pointed to it. “Luap said that was for you, as soon as you arrived.” Rahi stretched out on the room’s narrow bed, and unwrapped the scroll. Luap’s fine, graceful handwriting moved in even lines; she found it easier to read than her own crabbed script. “In the days of the magelords, in the holdings of one Count Kelaive, was born a child who would grow into Gird Strongarm, the savior of his people.” Rahi wrinkled her nose at that. A bit flowery, not much like Gird himself.

  She read on, her thumb moving down the scroll and holding it open. It couldn’t be exactly like Gird, she reminded herself, because Luap hadn’t known the young Gird. Even she had only village tales to rely on. But she felt uneasy, as if a hollow bubble were opening in her chest. She could not say, at first, just what it was, but something… something was definitely wrong. She put the scroll down and lay back for a moment. Would anyone else notice it? Did it matter, when so far as she knew, no one else had survived from their village?

  She picked up another scroll, and began reading. This was set during the war; Gird was enjoying a mug of ale in a tavern—she stopped again, trying to remember. Tavern? When had they been in a tavern? The drinking she remembered had been in various camps in the woods; by the time the army was taking towns, he had not been drinking that much. She looked at the scroll more closely. It was, she decided after a bit, intended to be funny: the great war-leader relaxing with ale, becoming excited, almost starting a fight. Her shoulders felt tight; she remembered how dangerous Gird could seem, in those rare drunken rages from her childhood. It had not been funny at all. And worse than that… this was not real; she could think of no time when it really happened. She scanned along the scroll, looking for some reference, and found it. This was supposed to have happened after the capture of Brightwater, and before Shetley, but she remembered that time as clearly as the past half-year… Gird had not been in any tavern; he had been off trying to persuade brigands to join the army.

  Luap had made it up. He had made up a good story, as men often did, but then he had put it in this work, which was supposed to tell Gird’s story for all time. Rahi felt cold, then hot. How much had he made up? Was that what bothered her about the first scroll? She snatched it up, and read it carefully, with growing anger.

  “You’re not telling the truth!” Rahi’s voice went up. Luap managed not to wince visibly. He had been afraid she would not appreciate what he had done, how he had turned the story of an ordinary farmer-turned-soldier into the shape of legend.

  “I am telling the truth—I’m telling what it meant. That’s what they need to know, not every little detail.”

  “It’s a lie.” She glared at him, Gird with brown hair and breasts, the glare he remembered all too well. “You’re making it into a story… a song, like the harpers sing, that everyone knows is just a tale.”

  “Raheli, listen! If the harpers change the kind of tree a prince hid behind, because it rhymes—oak, say, instead of cedar—that helps the listener remember. It doesn’t change anything important. The prince still hid behind a tree: that’s what matters. If they say half Gird’s army wore blue, when it was one person less than half, or almost two-thirds, why does that matter? The point is that we won at Greenfields. That’s all I’m doing. I’m making sure people remember what it meant—what his kind of life meant—and they won’t make sense out of the real details. You didn’t yourself.”

  Would it work? For a moment he thought it had; her gaze flickered, as she thought about her own reaction. But then the angry glare came back.

  “You’re turning him into a lovable old gran’ther, using even his lust for ale—”

  Luap shrugged that off. “Most men like ale; it makes him more human—”

  “He was human! And his liking for ale cost us lives, you know it did.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “It is, and it would have been his point. Was his point, at the last, remember? There’s nothing good about it… I remember after—” A long pause; he wondered which after she was seeing. “After my mother died, a bad stretch then; he came home drunk and sour with it, angry with everyone—”

  “He had cause,” Luap offered, sympathy he did not really feel.

  “Everyone has cause,” Rahi said. “But some do better. He did, later. And if you make it endearing, you diminish him—what it cost him to stop it, to change.” In her eyes, I never did that, defiance but not quite pride. He knew she didn’t, had sought, without admitting it, evidence that she was as fallible as Gird. As far as he could find out, she made none of Gird’s mistakes; no drinking, no carousing, no wild flares of temper. Frustrating. He had never been able to maneuver Gird while Gird lived, and he could not maneuver Raheli, either.

  He shrugged, as close to discourtesy as he allowed himself with her. “I’ll change it back, then. You’re his daughter; it has to please you—” He expected an explosion; instead he got a flat stare, and her nostrils widened as if she’d smelled something dead.

  “I’m not… you’re trying to make me feel bad about that, and I won’t have it. He said you were slippery, and he was right about that.” If nothing else. She didn’t have to say that; it hung between them, something on which they agreed. She took a deep breath, and tried again. “I’m not asking you to improve the tale to please me; quite the contrary. I want you to tell the truth. Just the plain truth.” If you can. He heard that, as if she’d shouted it.

  “Even you don’t believe the plain truth,” he said, accenting “plain” just a little. “You weren’t here; you’re convinced it was something else than what we said.”

  She shook her head, the dark hair tossing back in a movement he remembered from his wife. His mouth dried. “You sai
d things I found hard to believe—”

  “Then ask the others! I know you did—”

  She prowled his study, a thundercloud ready to burst. “What they said made even less sense.”

  His temper flared. “Then believe what you like! If I lie, and the others talk nonsense, what will you have in the chronicles, eh? Shall we just forget him, and all he tried to do?”

  “You know I don’t mean that.” Again that level gaze. “We can’t just forget him. But—”

  He would try sweet reason, though it had never yet swayed her. “You hate having to hear it from me. You don’t trust me; you never have, not even as much as Gird himself did, and you wish you’d been here yourself. Well, so do I. Then you could tell me what to write, and— ” He stopped himself from saying and if you lie, it’s your oath forsworn, not mine.

  “I would not have said to turn a dark cloud into a dark beast,” she said firmly. “Even if I’d seen such a cloud.”

  “I’ll change it,” Luap said. He could always change it back. “I simply have no idea how to write of that cloud so anyone years hence will know what I mean.”

  “Do you know what you mean?” That with a shrewd sidelong look that took his breath away, the very look Gird had given him so often.

  “I—no. No, I don’t. It seemed—I told you—as if all the wicked thoughts and shameful fears in every heart had taken visible form, a black blight thicker than a dust storm. But what it was… I daresay only Gird himself knew. The words he spoke, that scoured it, lifted it, condensed it—those were no human words. I know that, and I’ve asked the elves—”