by Greylady
“Idiot.” Marc punched him in the chest – lightly, to avoid skinning his knuckles on the armour – then pulled a cloth from his belt, the taiken from the sand, and began to dry the blade. “This,” he said, “will need stripped down and rinsed in fresh water before you put it away.” As they trudged out of the sea and up the beach, he shot a critical glance at the threads of water still trickling from the joints of Bayrd’s armour, and the streaks of sand left in their wake. “You too, probably.”
Bayrd knew the sound of a subject being avoided as well as anyone. “Oiled as well. You forgot that part. At least, the sword will. I could just use a drink, and something to eat.” He produced another smile, one that felt – and he hoped looked – more honest smile than the others. “Listen, Marc-ain, I’ll tell you what happened. Sometime. When I’m more sure of it myself. Now – what about the damned alarm?”
“Oh, that.”
“Yes. That.”
“We have company. Lord Guelerd, I think.”
“We have–-? Why didn’t you tell me?” Bayrd’s stride lengthened as he accelerated away from this deserted stretch of shore and off towards the camp, and his horse, and his bow, and the Alban people who would need his help as they needed help from all of their warrior sons. Then he jerked to a near standstill as Marc reached out and caught him by the back of the belt.
“Would it have helped?” ar’Dru asked, annoyed.
“I…” Bayrd considered how he had felt in the instant that the orgasmic surge of power had stopped just short of its peak, and then begun to drain away. If the world had been ending, knowing that wouldn’t have helped either. “No,” he admitted finally. “I suppose not.”
“And it isn’t an attack,” Marc pointed out. “I’d have told you that, no matter how you felt.”
“You wouldn’t have needed to. I would have known.”
“Oh, would you? How, I wonder…?” Marc gave him a strange look, one that suggested far too many possibilities to Bayrd’s guilty mind. After four years, first of mere acquaintance when Marc reached an age to join the Ten which happened to be Bayrd’s first command, then friendship, then best-friendship and finally the slightly complicated relationship of remaining two best friends while one was sleeping with the other’s sister, he had assumed he now knew young ar’Dru well enough to pass sweeping – if private – judgments on his intelligence. Or more properly, on the lack of it, since Marc endeavoured to do nothing outside his own energetic private life without the instruction of a superior officer.
But after last night and today, when a great many of his previous certainties had been burned away in a swirl of azure flame, it occurred to Bayrd that an apparent lack of brains was nothing more than that: apparent. Because of it, Marc ar’Dru enjoyed a much quieter life than he did, with someone of higher rank always there to take the blame for what he did. That, in light of his own past half hour, was definitely not a sign of stupidity.
Bayrd felt slightly ashamed of himself, and more than slightly foolish. But he still said nothing. That would come later, if at all, because right at the moment, he had no idea what to say.
Lord Guelerd, or Gelert, or however his name was pronounced, was not quite what Bayrd had been expecting. In fact he conceded that he hadn’t known what he was expecting, except that it would be different to the Albans who stood or sat or bestrode their saddles all around him. Even there he was wrong.
Gelert had red hair, fox-bright, and he wore it oddly, in a number of thin plaits hanging loose around his head rather than the single braid of low-clan kailinin or the three of high. Unlike the Alban hairstyles, it seemed to have no meaning, even though the narrow crown of coppery red gold resting on it had significance enough for any number of warrior’s knots. For the rest, his moustache was large and equally red, and it had been greased or oiled into fang-like points that drooped down on either side of his mouth almost to his chest. The man’s armour was what caught Bayrd’s eye, familiar enough in shape to be almost an imitation of an Alban tsalaer; but instead of the customary small scales laced together, it was made of broad strips of coloured leather, or maybe fabric covering metal, with each piece linked to the next by a narrow band of mail. He felt sure that he had seen something like it before, somewhere, but when the answer was not forthcoming, he put the matter aside to ponder at his leisure.
The effect was handsome, but not so impressive as Overlord Albanak in full harness and crest-coat sitting astride his great Andarran charger and backed by a hundred other supporters and retainers equally well equipped and mounted. Gelert and some score of his followers were also on horseback, but the rest, perhaps another hundred, were on foot and carried only spears and axes. Bayrd took note of it. Axemen were dangerous enough up close – he knew that well enough from recent personal experience! – but they were easy meat if treated with the proper caution and lavish showers of arrows from a distance.
Curious to hear what was being said, Bayrd edged forward. Yarak advanced slowly at the pressure of his knee, shouldering people gently to one side rather than running them down. The crowd was sufficiently dense that it was easier to move through it mounted than on foot, and Yarak, like most other Alban warhorses, had been schooled in the gentle arts of moving through packed masses of people without doing them any harm – as well as the far from gentle arts of the battlefield which the fierce little Ferhana mare preferred.
For the past eighty years, Kalitz and Drosul and the other small kingdoms across the sea had been at peace, more or less, and though the Albans had been retained as a mercenary cadre for the sake of prestige and the training of lords’ younger sons – and as an expendable striking force if one should be required – they found themselves more often acting as policemen. Worse, they were kept as exotics, wild animals of strange appearance and interesting habits that might be spiced with danger, rather than through any real use their erstwhile liege lords had for them any more.
A glance over his shoulder told Bayrd that Marc and two or three of the others had followed his lead, falling in behind him before the passage broken by Yarak through the crowd had closed again. He suspected that there was another reason why they didn’t trouble to force their own passage; the ordinary folk would more readily clear a path for a notorious and savage duellist – even one whose duel had ended so inconclusively – than they would for anyone of lesser importance.
Bayrd was careful to judge his approach correctly: close enough for a good view, and to hear what was going on between Albanak and Lord Gelert, yet not so close that his intrusion would be noticed by any of the other high-clan lords, and especially Serej ar’Diskan. Otherwise there was every chance that he, and everybody with him, would be dismissed back to their proper place again among the common herd.
He had no need to listen long. One sentence was enough to understand the looks of surprise that he had seen on people’s faces as he rode closer. Lord Gelert was speaking Alban. It was an oddly accented, stilted and archaic form, but clear enough, even though he had an interpreter beside him to tide both himself and those to whom he spoke over any difficulties. It answered many of the questions which had been niggling at the back of Bayrd’s mind. The armour for one; and the custom, strange to see in this foreign country, of wrapping green branches around the shafts of spears as a token of peaceful parley. That was Alban, true enough; it was also apparently Prytenek. But in the present circumstances it was ironically similar to the ritual by which Lord Albanak had laid his claim to Prytenon, raising a piece of the land itself above his head on swordpoint before the eyes of all the people.
Ancestors…? Marc mouthed at him. Bayrd shrugged. It was possible, in fact it was likely. The oldest legends spoke of entire peoples wandering to and fro across the world ‘since the time before time’, that condescending term with which Alban chroniclers and clan Archivists dismissed any period of any history not written into their books. There had long been inclination toward keeping records of family doings in each clan’s Book of Years. It was the formal clan Arch
ive and its official history, as separate from what songs and stories had to say, but the practice itself had gone on for so long that its origin was not in fact recorded – except in legends and old tales, thus presenting the Year-Keepers themselves with an awkward conundrum. But given that some of the most ancient ylvern-vlethanek’n went back a thousand years, it was a wonder that no account had been set down of which clan or family, or more probably which tribe or group of tribes, had first crossed the sea to make Claim on this place. And who had they Claimed it from…?
With an odd little start, as though the memory had reached out to tap him on the back, Bayrd recalled where he had seen that strange-looking armour before. It had been a drawing in one of the older ar’Talvlyn Books of Years, ylver-vlethanek an-Dirak, Lord Aldrik’s book, from so long ago that even the man’s name had dropped from fashionable use.
The drawing had not even been one of the coloured, gilded illuminations to the text, of which there were enough in each book to keep the attention of a nine-year-old boy even when the crabbed handwriting was too difficult to read. It had been no more than a sketch in the margin of one page, some hall Archivist’s moment of boredom recorded in fading brown ink for all posterity to see. And here it was, that same armour and perhaps those same people who had worn it then, out of the Archive pages and very much alive. Very much annoyed as well. The guarding of displays of foul humour, whether from politeness or for some more convoluted reason, was plainly an Alban rather than a Prytenek custom. Neither Lord Gelert nor the men around him made any secret of the way they felt.
Bayrd listened hard. He had been fortunate in always having had something of a talent for languages; not fluency by any means, but more an ability for understanding and being understood with only the minimum vocabulary. And this was easier than most. Expression, inflection and tone were a guide as much as anything else, but after overhearing only a few exchanges, it seemed as though two pages of his own mental Archive had stuck together in the turning, for his grasp of what being said jumped from vague to clear almost at once. He grinned briefly, the private worries he could do nothing about set to one side for the time being. It looked as though those long, quiet, rather dusty afternoons with his nose buried in what the rest of the Household had dismissed as ‘just old books’ were bearing fruit at last. Many people with a head full of esoteric knowledge never had a chance to use it – but he was using this.
“… and I tell you again, Landmaster,” Gelert was saying, “that the arrangements which were made, and the payments which were agreed, concerned only the hire of soldiers. Not…not this!”
He waved his arm in a sweep that took in everything: men, women, children, horses, baggage, the hastily-constructed field-fortress on the beach…and most of all, the still-smouldering ships. “Why did you burn your ships, Landmaster? How do you and all this rabble plan to leave, once your service is discharged?” His voice sharpened. “Or do you mean to stay, invited or not?”
He shouldn’t have said ‘rabble’, thought Bayrd. But perhaps the meaning of the word has changed. That was pointless optimism; even if the meaning had changed, the delivery of the word itself remained very much the same.
“We were hired fairly, arl’th-eir Guelerd,” said Lord Albanak. “And we have come to fight. But not for your crown.” Gelert looked startled, then scandalized, but before he could draw breath to say something that he might not have lived to regret, Albanak pulled a gold coin from the small pocket in the cuff of his Colour-Robe and spun it upwards, glinting, from his thumb. “For this crown,” he said as he caught it again. “And others like them. But if you look out into the bay you will see the only ships that survived.” He spoke smoothly enough, and gave Gelert rank-honorifics enough to satisfy the man’s sense of his own importance – but even though he concealed it well, Bayrd thought it likely that the Overlord took exception to being called ‘Landmaster’.
That was what his name meant: the name born by every Alban Overlord for the past five hundred years. Ayelbann’akur was the master of the Land. But in a smaller sense, any peasant farmer who owned his own property was that. The new title of Overlord carried a much more satisfactory sense of being lord of the people, and it was fairly clear which one Albanak preferred. If a man gave up his own name, the very essence of everything he was, in favour of a title that had been borne by others before him and would continue after he was dead, then it was a very human thing and not to be condemned if that title should mean something.
“Explain what you mean by survived,” said Gelert; at least, survived was what the interpreter said. Gelert’s own word, in his odd, old-fashioned Alban, had more a meaning of ‘deliberately spared from damage’ than ‘escaped from damage’. The presence of that aspect of intent was disturbing.
“Easily done,” said Albanak, and pointed further out towards the horizon, where the Kalitzak ships could now barely be seen against the brightness of sea and sky. Gelert stood in his stirrups, shaded his eyes, and gazed out for a long time before dropping back into the saddle.
“More ships, on their way here?” The sound of suspicion was a raw edge on his voice, and the interpreter could do nothing to hide it.
“Not approaching, arl’th-eir Guelerd. Departing. There go the men to whom we entrusted our lives. They took our gold, for the purchase of all of their ships and the hire of their service to crew them. Then when we reached this shore, they stole back every ship they could, and burned the rest.”
There was muttering among the Prytenek lord’s-men as the interpreter passed this information back to them, and Bayrd could hear enough of it to realize that this supposed treachery made perfect sense to them. There were some voices raised in discord, but those were talked down by the rest.
“Very well then. We can ignore the ships.” Gelert sounded less suspicious now, but to Bayrd’s ear the difference was not worth noticing. Lord of a people sufficiently lacking in honour that they would accept such an explanation without question, he was devious enough to accept it himself while looking at it from all sides, to see what might be wrong with it. Not even something so simple as ‘is it true or false?’; he was trying to establish to his own satisfaction why Albanak would have told him such a thing in the first place.
In hope of sympathy, perhaps? Or a hope for support above and beyond the payment already agreed with his mercenaries? Even a simple explanation of the truth? Or a lie to hide the traces of some larger plan? Bayrd shook his head slowly and smiled at the weary familiarity of it all.
Before they were exiled from Kalitzim, every Alban warrior from the highest to the lowest had been forced to deal with Kalitzak and Droselan officials whose minds worked in just this convoluted fashion. It became wearing after a time, even though they had had generations to get used to it.
Albans could be devious too, as witness the Lord Albanak; but not all the time. That was what made it work. Albanak for his part was doing a skilled job – as one might who, for most of his life, had been distilling clarity from the most obscure remarks – of letting Gelert apply the doubts and assumptions of his own supple mind to a carefully simple untruth presented as unembroidered fact. That very simplicity was the bait for endless elabouration by those accustomed to look for such things.
“Do you bring your families everywhere you go?” the Prytenek demanded.
“Of course we do! They are our families!” It was not Albanak this time, but Gyras ar’Dakkur, and he spoke in a tone of astonishment that anyone should consider doing otherwise. Bayrd wondered how many of the high-clan lords had been primed to respond in such-and-such a way to such-and-such a cue. Probably most of them. That was most likely the meat of the discussion he had interrupted yesterday, with his commonplace quartermaster’s concerns over food and water, fresh fodder for the horses and all the other things far less important than this preparation to deceive – but without which, such a discussion would have been mere theory.
One of Gelert’s men rode forward this time, and irritably indicated the long, deep
ditch dug in the sand above the high water mark, and the palisade and shingle-reinforced rampart running behind it. ‘And is this customary when you reach your new liege lord’s domain, eh?’ he snapped, speaking not Alban of old or new form, but good Yuvain. This was probably the man through whom the negotiations had gone forward, and not best pleased with what had happened, for if Lord Gelert was anything like the shorter-tempered clan-lords Bayrd had encountered, a huge and possibly painful weight of blame would descend on him as soon as they were out of earshot.
“Sir,” said Albanak, “we are not a seafaring people. The mysteries of ocean navigation are still a mystery. We placed our trust in the sailors yonder,” with a dismissive wave of one arm, “to bring us to our proper destination. Given how we were betrayed when we landed here, can you blame us for suspecting that they might have gone so far as to set us down in one of your enemy’s domains instead?”
Another well-crafted complex statement: trickery, the risk of a worse deception, and in such circumstances a perfectly justified caution. There was more debate on the Prytenek side, pitched too low for Bayrd to hear some of the words themselves, but the tone was one of general agreement.
“Give them the benefit of the doubt,” seemed to be the consensus. “Let them prove themselves. They may have proved so far only that they can be cheated, but that was a seafaring matter and we didn’t hire them as sailors. Their numbers are impressive, but look at how many of this imposing crowd of people are old, or women, or children.”
They were right in that, and it included the first native-born Alban; a child brought into the world earlier this morning, with the first noise she heard apart from the delighted cooing of her parents being the distant sound of swordplay ringing in her ears. That might have been a bad omen, but Bayrd thought not. He preferred to believe it because the combat had been man to man – Alban to Alban, unfortunately – and not a full-scale battle. The baby could so easily have been born into the middle of one of those. It had happened before, and it might happen again.
