Liar's Oath

“And they said ?”

  “They found I could not recall the shape of the words, could not repeat them—and indeed, it was as if they slipped past my ears—and would say only that Adyan might be pleased with Gird.”

  “And then he died, while you stood there doing nothing.” That was unfair; he seized that unfairness and cloaked himself in honest resentment.

  “It was the gods’ will; none of us could move. I cried—dammit, Rahi, I told you that, and others must have—”

  “Yes.” She had turned away. He waited. Finally she turned back; her eyes were dry. “You cried; I cannot cry yet. Tears are cheap.”

  He hated her. He felt he had always hated her; he willed himself to forget the times he had been sure he loved her, when (surely) he had only loved her father, and of her father only that part she herself could not share. “Your tears,” he said formally, in as steady a voice as he could manage, “your tears you can name the worth of. It is your right. The tears of others you have no right to shame.” He felt dark, dire, brooding as a storm-cloud low over the western hills. Great, and in some sense noble, to chide her about that, standing up for the tears (he could almost feel his gathering to fall) of plain, simple men who rarely cried, whose tears tore apart the rock walls of their souls, great floods that ripped mountains asunder. He looked up to find her watching him, that flat peasant stare (how had he ever thought it attractive?), that hard mouth with no sweetness, a dried haw withered on a dead stem.

  “You’re too poetic,” she said. “You will make it all pretty, make all the patterns match at the edges, as they do in the rugs we took from the mageborn houses… better you should learn from village weavers, who leave one corner open for the pattern’s power to stay free, and able to work.”

  “You don’t understand.” She didn’t. She couldn’t. She could but she wouldn’t. He did not know which, but only that she did not understand.

  “Nor you.” Her back to him now, a back broader than a woman’s ought to be, shoulders bulking more than his own. He had an excuse, a scholar’s hours, but she had no excuse for looking (to his now critical eye) like a stubborn ox. “I’ll see you in Council,” she said, and left the room without looking back. Luap’s mouth held a dry bitterness; he made himself sit back down at the desk, but could not find words to pen. Council meetings had been going so well, until now; Raheli would ruin all that, he was sure.

  Chapter Fourteen

  And so she did. He did not know to whom she’d spoken when she left his office, or what she said, but from the way some Marshals looked at her she had spoken her mind. Whether about Gird or about him, Luap did not know. Others, who had heard she was in the city, but had not seen her yet, greeted her almost with reverence.

  “Lady,” said one, then actually blushed. “Rahi, I mean. Marshal. We’re sorry we—”

  “I know,” she said, taking his hands in hers. It was, Luap thought, a very dramatic gesture. “Were you there yourself?”

  “Not then, no—but I’d been out in the drillfields, and it didn’t take long—”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I understand.” Did she indeed, Luap wondered. Did she begin to understand what she was doing, with her fierce determination to leave Gird’s life as blocky and unshaped as it had been in actuality? Why could she not realize that no story lived without shaping, without trimming here and filling out there? The point was to have Gird remembered.

  Later that day, he hugged this certainty around him as he came into the Council meeting, expecting trouble from her, and those other Marshals who had not liked his Life of Gird as much as others. He had been able to hold them off by reminding them that Raheli, as Gird’s daughter, must have some say. He had expected her to understand his purposes a little better than she had, to defend him to the others. Now—now it was going to be difficult.

  Cob met him just outside the meeting room, and shook his head, though he smiled. “Luap, I could have told you not to try polishing clay. I know—you were trying to make the story fit the old songs, but you should have realized it would never pass Rahi.”

  Luap managed to smile back, shrugging. “I thought I’d done a good job, until she raked me over about it. I really think that of Gird, you know. I think he’s that special.”

  “Special, yes. But Gird’s old gray horse—can you imagine it tricked out in flowers and braids and a golden bridle? It was a horse for such a man: strong and brave, not a fancy magelady’s pony. So with Gird—he never wore a fine shirt to the end of his life, and knew better than to try it. You’ve put lace on a plough, Luap, and neither the lace nor the plough looks the better for it.” Then Cob’s arm came around his neck. “But I will say, Luap, that it’s the most gorgeous story I ever read, even though not much like Gird. Life would’ve been easier with your Gird running things.”

  The others, once the Council convened, took the copies of the Life which Luap had made for them, and Cob suggested that Luap explain his work.

  “You probably know already that Marshal Raheli, Gird’s daughter, doesn’t like what I’ve done.” Better get that out of the way first; they would realize he was being honest. “What I thought— what I wanted to do, was write a Life of Gird that would live through the generations, and show why we reverence him. He did more than just raise the peasants in a revolt and win the war… we know that. He tried to make a way for mageborn and peasant to live in peace with one another. He tried to devise a fair law which all could use.” He paused and drew a deep breath, looking beyond the table out the window into a darkening courtyard. “It seemed to me that Gird was too large to fit on my page; I could not find the right words for him as he really was. So I read in the archives, all the lives of the old kings and warriors, and what we know of the songs the elves make, and tried to shape what I wrote into something men and women could remember and chant by the fireside a hundred sons’ sons’ lives from now. Gird is a greater hero than any I found in the tales; it seemed to me I must show that in the way I wrote of him.” He sat down, with a nod to Raheli, now calm and composed.

  Marshal Sterin raised his hand, then stood. “I read Luap’s Life of Gird two hands of days ago. It seemed to me very fitting for what Gird accomplished: perhaps more splendid than strictly necessary, but as Luap says, making clear to the future why Gird was great. It’s true I found some of the phrases flowery, but if that is the mode in which men have always written of heroes, why not?” He sat down abruptly, as if he’d finished any argument. Raheli raised her hand, and at their nods stood in her place.

  “He’s a hero to you, to everyone: he saved everyone.” She swallowed; her lips firmed. “He didn’t save me.” Before anyone could answer that, she went on. “Oh, I know, that isn’t fair. He didn’t want it to happen; he tried to fight and was outnumbered; he saved my life after. But the plain fact is that he did not save me, and what I remember includes that. My suffering was the price of his action; he waited until afterwards to start fighting.”

  Luap closed his eyes a moment. Against the inside of his lids, he saw his wife’s face, the wife who had died—he had heard how terribly—in a village market square because he had not protected her. Gird had seen Raheli, but he had been able to heal her—or at least get her away—while his own wife… You would not be her hero, if she had lived, his conscience told him. I am no one’s hero, he thought sourly, and opened his eyes again to find Rahi watching him with all Gird’s intensity. Her face changed; he wondered what had come into his.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “Your wife—”

  “Never mind.” He waved that away; he could not tell Rahi what he’d told Gird, that he had not really loved his wife until he saw her dragged away, weeping in fear and shame. He hoped Gird hadn’t told anyone else, but he would not ask if she knew. “I can see what you’re saying, Rahi, but do you think it is valid for everyone? He did not save you, as I did not save my daughter, but does that make what he did less important? Or less important that the future should know about him?”

  Cob stood, and
looked around the table. “Most of you know that I was with Gird from the first forest camp. Except for Raheli, there’s none else can say that now. I was there the day he came, with his son Pidi and his nephew, a man near dead with grief but determined to make something come of it. And that’s when Raheli still lay near death with woundfever and childfever, so though she is his daughter, I knew him longer as a leader in war.” He grinned. “That’s to stop anyone saying he knows what Gird would have wanted. I admit I don’t. He was a plain man, and plainspoken, rough as the bark on an oak, but he knew as well as anyone the value of the old ways of saying things. And I’ve known our Luap from the day he first came, as well. To my mind, he’s served Gird honestly all these years, and endured the taunts of them that didn’t serve half as well. That’s to stop anyone saying that what I say next comes from jealousy or dislike of Luap. It’s not. I like him more now, and trust him more now, than I did that first year.”

  “Well then? What’s your complaint?” asked Sterin, a bit flushed. Luap knew, as they all did, that Sterin had hardly met Gird before the war ended. He had organized and fought with a grange far from Gird’s army; he had earned his Marshal’s rank honestly, but resented the easy familiarity of those who had been Gird’s friends.

  “It’s what I told Luap, before coming in here.” Cob grinned at Luap, who could not help smiling back. Cob and Gird were wood from the same tree; whatever elevated Gird to greatness had been added to, not changed from, the essential peasant identity. “He’s put lace on a plough; he’s made Gird all smooth and easy, even his mistakes made decorative. Gird was a hero, right enough, but he was a plain man first: good bread and water—yes, and ale—not fine pastries and sweet wine. If the future knows him as a hero just like others, what good will it do them? He can help only those that remember him as he was.”

  “If he’s remembered at all.” Luap murmured that, not having permission to speak, but Cob turned to him sharply.

  “Luap, he will be remembered. If not by your writing, then by fireside tales—and I grant—” He held up his hand. “I grant those tales and songs are likely to be even more astray. We’ve all heard some of them. But for this, for the story we most want told, I for one would like you to make it more like the man, plainer.”

  Luap nodded, expecting the vote that came. He would rewrite the Life of Gird, both now and again… and again, when some peoples’ narrow ideas had died with them. He would not falsify— he had not falsified—what had happened, but he would choose his own way of saying it.

  By the time they had settled other business, and finished the meeting, Rahi had cooled down. She came to him quietly, when the others had left.

  “I know you don’t agree,” she said. “I know you thought you were doing the best for Gird’s memory. You may think you’ll outlive all of us, and maybe you will. But think about what Cob said, not my words alone. I am not that important; what happened to me happened to many, and I believe Gird would have come to his decision even without that. It might have made a neater pattern if Gird had been different. But he wasn’t different; he was what he was, and it’s that—the man he really was—that you must celebrate. The same man who did nothing all those years is the one who led us to victory, and at his death accomplished what his life could not. It makes no pretty pattern, but it’s what really happened. He never asked anyone to believe something of him they had not seen; his Life must show what he really was, for that is what will help later.”

  Luap managed to smile. “I will do my best, Rahi.” She asked no more, but went on out. He would do his best, his very best, to make Gird’s life live in memory. She might not like it, but she might not be there to complain.

  It occurred to him then that this might be another reason to move his people to the distant stronghold. There he could produce Gird’s life as he knew was best, without interference. If—as seemed likely, given their age and health—he outlived the older survivors of the war, he might find less resistance to his version of events.

  The only problem was that he could not tell his people where he was leading them because he still had no idea where that land lay from Fin Panir. Arranha’s curious method of determining sunwise distance had not been proven right in theory, let alone accurate. Besides, it would not work for distance summerwards or winterwards. It would not help at all to start riding west in the hope of finding the place; as narrow as those clefts and valleys were, they could ride right past it and never find a thing. Perhaps he should ask one of the elves or dwarves who would be in Fin Panir for the spring Evener: surely they would know where it was. A few days later, he found time to ask Arranha’s advice. The priest’s study, with its broad work table and two chairs, looked out on the little sunlit courtyard where he often sat. But the spring sun had not melted all the snow in the corners. The old man sat by the window, wrapped in a parti-colored knit shawl, in a chair softened with pillows, looking far more frail than Luap expected.

  “Ask the Elder Races? Of course—that’s what I said in the first place.” Arranha did not look up from the scroll he was reading; Luap recognized his own handwriting. “This bit here, in your Life of Gird—are you sure this is how it happened?”

  Luap felt himself reddening. “I’m changing some things,” he said. “Surely you heard that the Council asked me to.”

  Arranha waved a dismissive hand. “That’s to be expected. Nothing would please everyone the first time around. But I don’t recall this conversation.” He pointed, and Luap craned his neck to read the passage. He sighed.

  “I was trying to make clear Gird’s reasoning,” he said. “At the time it seemed muddled, but later we could all see how it made sense.”

  Arranha looked up at him. “Luap, if you are telling the tale of people stumbling around on a dark night, you can’t bring sunrise earlier so that you can see them stumble around. I remember this; Gird’s reasoning was muddled, and it became clear later only because he himself straightened it out. If you make it too neat, it’s not real.”

  Luap threw himself into the other chair in Arranha’s study. “So I have been told,” he said, trying not to let the resentment he felt color his tone. “Evidently I misunderstood the whole purpose of writing Gird’s story. I thought the important thing was to have him remembered for what he did: freeing the peasants from oppression, establishing a new and fairer law, and his final sacrifice. I thought the details didn’t matter, so long as people understood the structure of his life. That’s why you can’t write a life in progress: it has no shape yet. The shape you think you see cannot be the real shape.”

  “That’s true enough, but—”

  “But the Council—and now you—seem to think the details of the embroidery are as important as the design. I’m sorry. I thought making the whole design clear and easy to see was more important.” He ran his hand up and down the chair’s arm, enjoying even now the smooth curves and fine texture of the carving.

  Arranha looked at him, that clear gaze which even Gird had found disconcerting. Luap remembered Gird telling the story of their first meeting, how the gaze of the old man’s eyes unsettled him. “If you had been telling the story of a more conventional hero, I might agree: leave out the little inconsistencies. But Gird was in no way conventional, as we all know. He transcended all the easy definitions; he was a tangled mat of contradictions, heroic knotted firmly to unheroic. He fits no pattern, Luap, and it is that which you must make clear. Not trim and tuck and pad the old man to fit an existing model.” He tilted his head slightly. “Why does this bother you? Why are you so determined to make Gird like any other hero of legend?”

  Luap tried to subdue his anger, knowing that would move Arranha no more than it would have moved Gird himself, though for different reasons. His hands had clenched; he opened his fingers consciously, forcing himself to calmness. “Because I think that’s what people remember. That’s why the heroes of legend are alike, because that’s what it takes for people to believe in them. If I told Gird’s story exactly as it was, some
would say he was no hero at all. They would disbelieve in his greatness precisely because it fit no pattern. Such a man, they would argue, could not have done those things; the gods would not work with someone who failed so often, and remained so muddled for so long. Even his death: think, Arranha—will any description in words of that cloud of malice and fear convince someone generations hence that Gird’s death was more than a sick old man’s vision? I can almost hear someone complaining that it was not enough, that he had done nothing to deserve the gods’ favor, that cleansing all of us from all the dark desires of our hearts was less than killing a monster of flesh and blood.”

  “But it was more, of course,” said Arranha.

  “Of course it was.” Luap heard his voice go up, and took a deep breath. “It was far more than that; we all knew it who lived through it. But later—I think of those in the future, Arranha, who will not have even the shadow of a real memory handed down from grandparents. To say that Gird was, for most of his life, as confused, frightened, and ignorant as they are will not make them believe in his greatness later. To say that he died uttering strange words, with no mark or wound upon him… well, so do many old people die, and if their families feel a sudden wave of relief and joy that the elder’s struggle is over, that’s no proof of the gods’ intervention.”

  “So you do not trust Gird’s own people to understand his real life?”

  Luap shook his head. “No, I don’t. I read all the old legends I could find, Arranha, and had the elders tell me the legends they recalled—of their own folk, not just mageborn tales. There’s a difference, of course. The mageborn legends all name their heroes prince or king, princess or queen; the peasant legends are full of younger sons and daughters, talking animals, and the wise elder. But they still follow a pattern. The young hero looks like one—it’s clear to friends and family that this is the hero. The hero never works with the evil he overcomes—he never submits to it. And he always knows what he’s doing. I’ll grant you, after knowing Gird I doubt this has always been true. But it’s what people believed to be true, believed enough to remember. If I show Gird too different from that pattern, I don’t think his legend will survive.”