Peter Morwood - The Clan Wars 01

by Greylady

  Those two attempts at stopping or diverting the blizzard had frightened him more than he cared to admit. The headache they had caused had lingered for hours, spreading sluggishly like a syrup distilled from pure pain down from his temples, where a proper headache belonged, and finally into all the bones of his skull until everything hurt. Everything: his eyes, his teeth, his skin, the very hair on his scalp. Until even the passage of breath through mouth and nose burned like fire. The grating agony had faded at last, but it had left Bayrd more wary and respectful of sorcery – and those who practiced it properly – than he had ever been before. That might well have been how the three Prytenek wizards had died, pressured by Lord Gelert or his vassals into extending their powers further than their bodies could bear. And it had killed them.

  Bayrd had shivered at the thought of how close he might have come to that, and for once had not tried to explain to himself that it was just because of the cold.

  The place was a cave of sorts when he was done, walls and much of the roof of packed snow reinforced with the same lattice of hastily-plaited twigs and small branches as made up its door. That lattice was glazed now with ice, because the snow behind and around it had begun to melt in the heat of a small, hastily-lit fire, before giving up and simply freezing all over again.

  The drift had been as big as some of the houses Bayrd had lived in, and even the hollow he had carved in it was bigger than the home he shared with Mahaut during their brief marriage – though that had been rather better furnished. This boasted a fireplace at least – an untidy if functional jumble of thick logs, earth and grubbed-up rocks, everything he could find to get the fire itself up off the snow that would otherwise have put drowned it in meltwater before it was properly lit. For the rest, his shelter had two chairs that looked remarkably like saddles, a bed made of furs and blankets and the padded bards which had been keeping his horses warm, and for pets the two horses themselves, as eager to get close to the fire as any pair of house-cats.

  “Snug, eh?” said Bayrd, threading a piece of smoked but mercifully not salted meat onto a skewer of green wood. Snow was already melting in a small bronze kettle by the fire, and he was ready to persuade himself that the place was almost comfortable. Yarak thought otherwise, for though the pack-pony ignored him, the mare put her ears back and showed him her teeth. “Oh. Well, pardon me, madam. You’re used to better, of course.”

  She was, too. And so was he. There had been enough little luxuries in Hold ar’Diskan that he had grown entirely too used to them, and now that now the luxuries were gone, he realized how much he had come to regard them as a right rather than a token of his lord’s favour. He had been getting soft. Bayrd thought about that, then grinned at himself and his pretensions. It wasn’t as if he had ever been hard and tough in the first place. He liked his comforts as well as the next man or woman, but typically Alban, felt it more heroic – pronounced ‘stupid’ – not to admit such weakness. Well, when all this was over he was going to indulge himself, and anybody else who could appreciate it. “Yes, even you.”

  Yarak snorted, and nibbled disdainfully at the fodder he had gathered them from under the blanket of snow, not even grateful that Bayrd had found it himself this time instead of letting both horses forage for themselves as usual.

  “I’m talking to a horse,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Talking as if I’m expecting sensible answers. And I’m talking to myself. Ar’Talvlyn, this winter has frosted your brain.”

  Just as the meat began to toast and fill the air with a savoury smell, Bayrd’s head jerked up and out of the beginning of a cold-wearied doze. His brain might have been frosted beyond all use, but not his ears. Even through the background sizzle of his dinner, they still knew the difference between the various small, crisp noises of an icebound forest and the footfalls of…something…approaching through the crusted snow.

  There was an arrow nocked on the string of his short bow before he came up out of his cross-legged seat by the fire, though because of the strange ringing stillness of the snow-muted woods, he didn’t yet know where to aim it. The sound of those feet seemed to come from all around him. It was somehow unnatural, a high, ringing crunch unlike the heavy, plodding sound he had made as he moved. As if they were the feet of a creature both larger and lighter and more stealthy than seemed reasonable.

  Sudden nightmarish images of snow-devils flitted through his mind, stories from childhood and from more than childhood. Legends from the time when ar’Ayelbann’r kozh, the ancient Albans, lived on the open steppes. The old ones had forgotten more about harsh winters and the beings those winters conjured forth than every generation after them had ever known. Despite the cold, Bayrd could feel himself sweating, in a way he had never done even during the exertion of digging out the shelter. That had been a glow, loosening the knots in his muscles, filling him with the warm satisfaction of actually doing something after so long in the saddle.

  This… This was clammy, liquid terror.

  As much as anything else, it was a terror of being caught in this enclosed space of his own making like a beast in a trap. Bayrd held the arrow in place on the bow with the thumb of one hand and with the other scooped up his taipan shortsword, ramming it sheath and all through the belt of his tunic, then dived for the door. It went down under him and he felt his feet slip sideways on the ice which filmed it, so that instead of coming out in a poised combat crouch, he emerged rolling like a shot rabbit in a cloud of snow and little, tinkling crystals of ice.

  The bow went one way, the arrow another, and in a spasm of sheer panic at having been so suddenly disarmed, Bayrd scrabbled wildly around his belt for the taipan that the tumble had sent sliding underneath him. He found the hilt at last, and its curved blade came free with a scrape of steel. Coming up onto one knee as best he could and wiping snow from his eyes even though they were still half-blinded by the sudden sunlight after the warm dimness of his cave, Bayrd levelled the shortsword in warning towards where he thought the footsteps had last been.

  They had stopped.

  As his vision cleared, Bayrd could see a silhouette backlit against the brilliance – but not where he had expected it, and already far too close. The outline was bulky, misshapen, and huge; a head again taller than he was, and its own head rising to three tapering horns that was like nothing human or even animal that Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had ever seen. Frantically he threw himself around to face it, trying to get his balance, get his back against a tree – trying to do something structured and defensive, rather than just sprawl on the ground like the rankest amateur swordsman taken unawares. Then he blinked as that final wild squirm took him into a pool of shade and out of the full dazzling light of the sun, blinked again in sheer embarrassment, and with a sheepish grin lowered the taipan’s blade until it rested in the snow.

  The big man with the frost-covered beard who stared down at him looked very relieved at that; though certainly no more relieved than Bayrd was feeling right now. Bulky and misshapen the stranger might be, but without the sun in his eyes, Bayrd could see why. The bulk came from his furs, the weird distortion in his shape from the twenty or so dead snow-hares tied in two bundles and hung from his shoulders, and the horns that had so shockingly altered the shape of his head were nothing more than the upturned ear-flaps and conical peak of a tall fur hat. For the rest, he was tall enough, but not so much as had seemed at first. There were wide rectangular pads of woven osiers strapped to the soles of his heavy boots, and they prevented him from sinking as far into the snow as he would have done otherwise, and when he moved, shifting his weight uneasily from one foot to the other, they also produced that strange high ringing on the frozen crust which had so startled the Alban when he first heard it approaching.

  “Uh,” said Bayrd, swallowing hard. “Good day and hunting to you.”

  It wasn’t a very original conversational opening, but until his nerves stopped jangling it was the best he could manage. He glanced at the sword, no longer poised for action but still drawn, sti
ll a menace, and caught the other man looking at it too. Thinking the same thing, almost certainly, and he armed only with whatever had killed all those dead hares. Against a taipan, never mind against the heavier weapons, whatever it was couldn’t be much of a threat – and anyway, even if it was, the fellow had already chosen not to use it. There had been plenty of chances earlier, and he had not taken them, which indicated that the three braids of the distinctive kailin-eir’s hairstyle might mean nothing to him. For that, if for nothing else, Bayrd was willing to trust the man. He fumbled briefly for the scabbard, found it, and put the blade away.

  The hunter’s name was Jord Koutlan. At least, he claimed he was a hunter, though Bayrd privately suspected that ‘poacher’ would be closer to the mark. Either definition had been obvious from the burden of freshly-caught game, and since the hares had all been snared, not shot, he had been in even less danger that he had at first thought. Even without the carefully-shaped sentences in Old Alban, Koutlan’s name alone made his ancestry clear.

  But there was something Bayrd still didn’t fully understand. Even though they were sharing the fire, the shelter, and the toasted smoked meat – Koutlan even contributed one of the hares – the hunter still seemed ill at ease and reluctant to say more than courtesy required he must. And all this despite Bayrd’s having made all the proper signs of peace, made it plain that he was no threat and just a curious traveller from foreign parts, and most of all had made it plain that he could both speak and understand the man’s language, for the love of the Light of Heaven!

  Besides his own not-so-wasted afternoons of long ago puzzling his way through the old Books of Years, Bayrd had the Archivists of both ar’Talvlyn and ar’Diskan to thank for that. Once his interest was known to be genuine – rather than the all too common pose of erudition – one of the old men had even taken him to where his own private treasures were stored, amid the clan’s gold and plate, and had shown him an ancient wood and leather trunk that looked strangely out of place among the plundered magnificence of Gerin ar’Diskan’s ancestral triumphs. When the Year-Keeper unlocked and flung open its lid, Bayrd began to understand why all of his calling looked so thin and ragged. None of them had brought wealth out of Kalitz and Drosul, not even a wardrobe of new clothes. But they had brought their lives, and the work of their lives – and the lives that had gone before them, all written down on parchment.

  Arranged in neat leatherbound rows in the trunk were books. Ylvern Vlethanek’r an-Diskan, the clan and Household Books of Years, but for more years than Bayrd could count. How far back they went, he didn’t know. This one trunk was crammed three layers deep, and the writing in each book was tiny. His mind tried and failed to encompass how much history lay here, and in other trunks and boxes in other halls among the clan-holds of all Alba.

  He remembered how the old hanan-vlethanek had pulled out one book and opened it at random. The date, in a jagged diminutive of the normal script, related to events – and Bayrd had paused for a few seconds of hasty mental arithmetic – four hundred and thirty-seven years ago. Then the old man withdrew another book, this one only sixty years old. Two generations past. And another: seven generations. Almost two and a half centuries. He had shown how the lettering differed, changing from angular to rounded, from flowing to crabbed, and always there were the diacritical marks to show how the words were spoken aloud. Or had been spoken; as he silently rehearsed the sentences in his mind, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had heard the echo of voices long ago, of men and women long since dust.

  It had been an eerie sensation.

  With that still tickling at the back of his mind, Bayrd began to listen more closely to the way Jord Koutlan was speaking – at least, when he managed to persuade the big man to utter more than his grudging two or three words at a time. The pieces began slotting into place. It was not so much that each could understand what the other said at all, but that they were speaking different dialects to do it. Jord spoke in a welter of elision and abbreviation and elaboration and just plain mispronunciation, slurring some words and giving unfamiliar emphasis to others, while Bayrd…

  Bayrd spoke the language as he had learned it from the books, in the stilted, formal speech of the Archives, the high-born – in the mode and manner of High Lord Gelert and his kind, so that the abyss of rank and birth and title yawned between them from the very first. That was not enough in itself. But a stranger whose first words had been in the Lord-speech might have friendships in high places, and in token of such friendship might report back to them about any misdemeanours he had witnessed. Poaching, for one. Jord Koutlan’s wariness told Bayrd more than enough about the fearful way in which the Pryteneks regarded their overlords, and it implied that old Goel ar’Diskan had been right in everything he said.

  It was that same wariness which saw him – reluctantly – invited to spend a night or two in Koutlan’s village. There was an undertone in the way the invitation was made that suggested the big hunter was almost as frightened by the prospect of Bayrd’s acceptance as by whatever reason he might have had for a refusal. Better by far not to have made the offer in the first place – except that then this friend of the high lords, who spoke like them and probably with them, would have taken offence. It was an ugly dilemma, and rather than any real kindness it was what had prompted Jord Koutlan’s hospitality. It was an attempt at the nearest thing to a bribe that he dared to offer; warmth and comfort and someone else’s food and drink, in the hope that his guest might forget a certain matter of dead game-animals when he next came to speak to his lordly friends. Bayrd shrugged and didn’t waste his breath trying to explain that he knew none of the High Lords and had no desire to speak to any of them. There was little point, because there was no hope of being believed.

  Bayrd had already formed an impression of what he would find when they reached the village. He was expecting to see a settlement like all the others trying to survive a tyrannical overlord: a poor, frightened place, a huddle of nothing more than huts, crouched in the middle of a clearing scraped from the forest. A place unable to maintain itself in good repair because of the continuous cycle of raid and counter-raid that Gelert and his noble opponents regarded as their sporting due. A place as heavily defended as it dared to be.

  And he was wrong on all three counts.

  The village – he never learned its name – was no collection of hovels, and if the woodland had indeed been cleared to make room for the houses, not a stick of that clearance had been wasted. He found himself gazing at a neat group of sturdy timber buildings, their walls built from whole logs carefully jointed together at the corners and any spaces caulked with clay, their roofs – where the snow had melted near the fireplace smoke-holes – of thatch or split wooden shingles. But one thing was missing.

  He could see no defences.

  Even in a peaceful country, a forest-built village like this needed a fence of sorts to keep wild creatures out and domestic animals in. Bayrd knew well enough that Prytenon had not been so peaceful, even before the coming of the Albans. There were other, more dangerous things needing kept at bay than deer or wolves or the occasional sounder of wild boar. That meant a deep ditch with the spoil piled into a rampart, and a timber stockade or maybe even a dry-stone wall at the top. But this place was wide open.

  As all the ugly implications struck home, Bayrd showed his teeth in a small, silent snarl of disgust. Lord Gelert evidently permitted nothing to get in the way of his entertainment. The Alban was to learn that Gelert was not the only lord with such a notion, but this first sight of vulnerability by decree was as repellent as any of the more brutal excesses he had seen in King Daykin’s service. Raids by the lords’-men of one side or the other plainly weren’t frequent enough to ravage the land, because he knew well enough what that looked like; so it could only mean that they weren’t allowed to be too frequent. The sport had to show some profit, after all. The village’s small, solid prosperity took on a new light. It was a tethered goat being fattened up for the butcher, and once it was
fat enough to be a worthwhile target…

  Bayrd spat sourness from his mouth onto the snow, but like Jord Koutlan, thought it best to keep his opinions to himself.

  As he walked Yarak out of the forest, Bayrd could see the villagers as they watched his approach – and the terror in their eyes when he pulled his hood back from his head. The source of that terror was obvious. Though Jord Koutlan had never dared to mention it, the triple-braid formal hairstyle of an Alban kailin-eir must have looked ominously similar to the many small braids worn by Gelert and his Prytenek lord’s-men. Though his chilled and aching body cried out for the comfort of even a day out of the cold, Bayrd did not stay longer than to find new fodder for the horses. Even someone less observant or imaginative than he would have been hard put to remain in a place like this, where his very presence caused a palpable aura of fear to hang in the air like smoke everywhere he went.

  Their gratitude when he asked for directions to the next village north was just as tangible, even though they tried to hide it even more than the fear in case, again, he should take offence at their eagerness to be rid of him. That, as much as anything else, stuck in Bayrd’s throat. He had long harboured unpleasant thoughts concerning the High Lords of this country, whatever province they might hail from, and now those thoughts had begun to take on solid form. The form of an axe, or a sword, or a hard-shot arrow. Bayrd had begun to grow angry, and it was the slow, deep anger that an ar’Talvlyn could hold closer to his heart than any lover. What he would do with that anger, and when, and even against whom, was not something that concerned him now. He would know, when the time came. He would know…