by Greylady
“There,” said Eskra, pointing.
‘There’, at first, was no more than a crack in the rock – at least until Bayrd looked a little closer. Then he saw something gleaming down in the darkness, a long bright shape that seemed to rise towards him, up through the shadows within the crevice like some slim fish coming to the surface of a murky pond. He took a wary step backwards and gave Eskra a thoughtful sidelong look. “Did you hide it like this?”
She shook her head. “Not I. This is how I found it. And how I chose to leave it.”
Bayrd stared suspiciously at the slender, glinting outline, still little more than a band of reflected light. “I don’t blame you,” he said. “But how did you find it in the first place? It can’t have been easy.”
Eskra looked at the crevice and what lay within it, then squared her shoulders, evidently deciding there was no right way to say what she intended. “I found it because I was searching for hidden things.” She saw the silent, sardonic question in Bayrd’s eye. “Yes. There are certain charms that can counter deliberate concealment.”
For some reason she seemed embarrassed to admit she had used any such thing. Perhaps even among practitioners of the Art Magic, such spells were regarded as cheating. “But why this was hidden and nothing else, I don’t know. And rest assured, there’s nothing else. These caverns spread for a considerable distance underneath the site of the old fortress, but I’ve seen them all. And they’re empty. Except for the sword. Now take what you came for and let’s go!”
Bayrd reached out for the sword, and it was truly a sword now, not just a gleam in the darkness. Even then he wasn’t entirely convinced that he could touch it, because it still had the shimmering, insubstantial look of something reproduced by a conjurer’s trick in a very non-magical half-silvered mirror. He had watched such entertainments, been the victim of such tricks and seen them played on others, and so was half-anticipating as his hand went out that his fingertips would bump against a smooth, slick surface.
They passed instead into a strange layer of chill that he could feel even through the leather and steel of his armoured gauntlet. It was like, and yet unlike, dipping his hand into another of the icy underground streams, and the feel of the sword, when his fingers closed at last around its hilt, was so ordinary as to be almost an anticlimax.
“Maybe it was hidden by the wizard who made it,” he said over his shoulder, half teasing and half serious. Eskra didn’t reply. She was standing to one side, watching and waiting for something – or nothing – to happen. And nothing did.
There was no sense of it being held in place, not even by the slight grip of the sprung-metal clips that were used in the Kalitzim barracks. But there was a strange, slight, clinging resistance, as though the darkness in the crevice itself was composed of something like syrup, a pressure against which he had to pull. So Bayrd pulled, and the sword came free.
“I’ve heard of swords in trees, and swords in stones,” he told Eskra. “But never before of swords in… Honey?” That was what it had felt like. Honey, thickened by cold. He glanced down at the scabbard, almost expecting to see the glistening filaments trailing back to the fissure as they would have trailed from a spoon to the honey-jar. But the scabbard was clean, and the hilt was clean, and when he eased a handspan of it out into the light, the blade was clean as well.
It gleamed at him, with just that dark grey glimmer under the shine that the story – but not the history – had mentioned. The shape was that of a modern longsword, at least to within the last hundred years or so, and only the hilt-furniture was dated. That narrow, straight crossguard was long out of style, replaced by the deep curve which was popular now. But if this sword had been built in the way of other taikenin like it, that was easily changed. Bayrd examined the pommel, and found that his guess was right. It was the securing-piece which held the grip and the guard and the locking-collar at the scabbard tight and snug against the long tang.
Brief pressure on the metal holding-peg at the end of the grip, and a few quick twists of the cunningly tapped and threaded pommel, soon released all the parts of the hilt so that what Bayrd held in his hands was no longer a sword, but a scabbard with a blade in it. As he had hoped, there was writing on the tang. Most good swordsmiths signed their work, and whoever had made this was no exception.
‘Forged was I of iron Heaven-born,’ it read, in sweeping uncial letters so neatly indented into the unpolished steel of the tang that they looked to have been written with a pen, not carved with a chisel. ‘Uelan made me,’ the inscription continued. ‘I am Isileth.’
“So that much is true,” he said, almost to himself. Then he turned to look at Eskra. “The name, I mean. But the starsteel is true as well.” And that was in the story, along with the wizard, but no mention of either had been made in the more formal chronicle of events. Bayrd didn’t say that aloud, but from the crooked smile on her face, there was no need of it.
“The truth of most things is somewhere in the middle,” she reminded him. “I said so before. A little piece from here. A little piece from there. A little fact and a little imagination to give it a sparkle. Now. Can we get out of this place?”
It was difficult to keep track of time in the caverns, but Eskra plainly thought that they had wasted enough of it. Bayrd replaced the pieces of Isileth’s hilt and carefully, almost respectfully, hooked the taiken’s scabbard to the empty place on his weaponbelt. Then he looked about him, but there was nothing more to see – except for the fortress he saw in his mind’s eye, rebuilt and restored to its ancient splendour.
His fortress.
It would have the ar’Talvlyn clan colours fluttering bravely from its gates and walls and towers, but it would be his. Bayrd’s duty had been less arduous than he had feared. There had been risks and hardships: no-one could expect to travel through an unknown, hostile country in the brutal depths of winter and come out entirely unscathed at the end of it. Or say rather, entirely unchanged. In the past weeks, Bayrd’s views had altered from what they were, so that he looked at his own folk and the peoples of the provinces through different eyes. But apart from that, he had been lucky, very lucky indeed. And – he glanced briefly at Eskra – there had been compensations he could never have imagined.
So far as he knew he was the first Alban to journey so far north into the province of Elthan and come back alive. Though that part of it still lay before him, he felt strangely unconcerned. He had completed the task he had been set and he had accomplished it with honour, so that it would not be unreasonable to presume that certain tokens of appreciation might be forthcoming as a consequence. It was seldom now that lords or Overlords asked faithful retainers to name their heart’s desire as fair reward for duty done, but if Albanak or Gerin did so, Bayrd knew he would be torn between Eskra and the fortress of Dunarat.
With the fortress and its lands in his possession, he might stand a better chance of winning the woman he wanted as his wife. And if not, well… Well, he had married without wealth before. And an optimistic man could always dream.
10. - Horselord
Bayrd was still dreaming six months later when he eased his mare Yarak from a canter to a walk, then reined her gently to a standstill and dismounted. It had been more than half a year since they had last been here, standing side by side on the rise that overlooked the valley and the forest-bordered lake, with the vast dark bulk of the ruined fortress of Dunarat hunched and brooding on the ridge above. The sun was shining warmly and the snow would not return for another five months or so, but otherwise the scene was much the same. There was one difference: people were calling the place ‘Dunrath’ nowadays. As dealings with the ordinary people of the country grew more frequent and more friendly, it become fashionable to speak Alban in the slurred fashion common to Elthan and Prytenon. And typically, the more the elder clan-lords fulminated against this corruption of the language, the more their younger warriors persisted. Mere age no longer had quite the same weight of authority as had once been the case.
> Bayrd grinned at that, an expression without much humour in it. Much else had happened in so short a time, and first, most memorable – and finally most galling – had been his return in triumph as the hero who had found Albanak-arluth’s much-needed wizard. It was a triumph that had rapidly turned sour.
There had been some who had never expected him to return; who had hoped so, loudly and to the approval of others. They were stiff-necked old men for the most part, steeped in tradition, who regarded the Art Magic as a sin and defamation worse than murder. But others had been his own age, all too plainly jealous of his preferment, envying not just his success and survival, but even the sword he brought back. They were more than willing to use the completion of this dangerous and honourable duty as a proof that he was somehow unworthy of respect.
Bringing back a sorcerer to help against the Pryteneks was one thing, they claimed – people with that sort of mind never did learn to grasp the subtle difference between the terms – but bringing back a sorcerer who was a woman, and then making no secret of his plans to marry her when she finally agreed to his repeated proposals, was something else again. That she had refused him for more than six months now should have told him something. But he was ar’Talvlyn, of a clan notoriously stubborn and patient, and he would wear down her resistance at last. Though why he wanted to bother was more than they could understand…
People had said as much in his hearing, and in hers. Better by far, they claimed, if he had studied sorcery and the Art Magic himself, since at least he was ar’Talvlyn, of an Alban clan, and one of good repute despite all its faults. That had made him laugh grimly at what they would say if he ever put their suggestion to the test. She, however, was only a renegade foreign bitch who worked against her own people and did it for gold instead of honour.
That had stopped his laughter, and started the fighting. For direct insults, if for nothing else, clan ar’Talvlyn’s patience had limits, and Bayrd’s had already been reached. He had promised Eskra his name as a defence against the words of such idiots, and until she accepted that name and all else with it, the longsword Isileth had made a more than adequate substitute.
Bayrd fought five duels in as many days. They were duels in which, with sour memories of Serej ar’Diskan, he took care not to kill or even cripple his opponents and because of that restraint was almost killed himself. At the end of it all, he was simply given a wide berth. The fights might not have restored him to a position worthy of respect, but they at least had the advantage of putting a curb on unruly tongues. The talking hadn’t stopped, he was sure of it, and there was little he could do to make it stop, short of killing everyone who even looked sideways in his direction. But it had gone behind his back again, and as a substitute for common courtesy that would have to do.
But those duels – and especially the reason for them – had other, unexpected repercussions. He could still remember how, at the time of the ar’Diskan affair, the other members of his clan had crowded around him and praised his boldness for standing up to the arrogant old clan-lord and accepting his challenge. It seemed that defending the clan name was all very well, but defending anything that clan disapproved of was not well at all. He had forgotten, or not cared to remember, how they had ostracized him for almost half a year after he had exchanged polite words with Hospodar Skarpeya. This was worse.
Ar’Talvlyn might well have been known as a clan of good repute, but that reputation had not extended to good manners, much less tolerance. Even though they had wrapped their opinions of Eskra in courtly phrases to blunt the crude edge – or disguise the crude meaning – of what they said, that meaning had been plain enough. Bayrd had taken two days of it; then he lost his temper, and one of his cousins lost an ear. As Companion and Bannerman to a high-clan lord, Bayrd had the right of challenge against anyone he pleased, even his own clan; but within an hour of the incident with Askel’s ear, he was not a member of that clan any more. They had summoned him before a hastily convened council, and would have stripped him in the old phrases ‘of name and fame, of house and hearth, of food and fire and family’ – except that Bayrd invoked the privileges of his rank and did it first.
It had only occurred to him much later that he had acted much like Lord Ared, the tragic hero of the old story Youenn Kloatr had told him on that winter afternoon in the village of Redmer. What Ared had merely threatened, as a means of gaining the acceptance of his wife, Bayrd had taken to its lawful conclusion. He had repudiated clan, and House, and family – and when in outrage they had forbidden him to call himself by their name again, he had assumed the Elthanek form instead, smiled maliciously, and defied anyone to take exception. The clan ar’Talvlyn might have proven themselves petty and small-minded enough to be an example to the rest of Alba, but they were not possessed of a death-wish. Neither then or later did he hear a word about it. That throwing away of all his own past, and any heroisms that the clan’s Book of Years had recorded, was an act which had shocked some.
It had surprised others not at all, and even gained the support of a few who followed his lead. For the most part they were the younger kailinin who deliberately spoke with the local accent, who felt leashed-in by the traditions of their elders, and who had been quietly insisting that old customs were for old times and old places. In a new time and a new Alba, it was time for new customs – or at least different ones. Bayrd found himself playing the part of a hero all over again. This time, he hoped, it would last long enough for him to add a little credit to his newly chosen name of Talvalin.
He gazed at Dunarat up on the hill, Dunrath as he supposed he had better start calling it, and smiled a small smile to himself. They were this far north so fast, and without any of the strenuous fighting that it should have entailed, because Yakez the High Lord of Elthan was behaving as an ally. Well, not quite as an ally, but certainly as a man well-disposed to the Albans.
Or should that have been, ill-disposed to Lord Gelert of Prytenon.
Almost before Bayrd and Eskra got back to the safety of ‘invader’s country’ there had been rumours of war between them, rumours that had swiftly become fact. Nothing had been confirmed as to the reason behind it, but the fact remained that in the early spring – so early as to be more like the dying days of winter – barely into what was acceptable campaigning season and with the Albans still firmly entrenched on his doorstep, Gelert had made sudden and undeclared war on his neighbour.
Bayrd suspected he knew why. After that fight at the gates of Dunrath-hold, Eskra had warned him to recover his arrows. Even though it had taken a dangerously long time to recover the distinctive Alban signalling arrows from where they had fallen far out in the ruins, he had cleared away everything that suggested anyone other than Gelert’s and Yakez’s men had been present. But he had done more than that. He had arranged matters so that the two groups of lord’s-men appeared to have quarrelled and killed one another.
It was not a memory he was proud of, since it had required hacking at some of the corpses with their own weapons to conceal the marks of his arrows. None of them had been carrying bows, and those small, neat punctures would have provoked far too many questions. Close inspection by a skilled military surgeon might have uncovered the deception, but somehow Bayrd suspected that if there was a group of Lord Yakez’s retainers riding bloody-spur back to the ruins, they would not have waited for medical assistance. Suspicion and the mutual antipathy of each lord for the other had done the rest.
So here they were in Elthan, and their march-camp was set up near Redmer village where Youenn the headman had expressed what looked like honest delight at seeing Bayrd again, along with poorly hidden surprise that he was still all in one piece. And despite the war between Prytenon and Elthan, despite the fact that they were by no means finished with Lord Gelert, two high-clan lords of Alba were once more ready and willing to kill each other over a piece of land.
The land in question was that surrounding Dunrath, to Bayrd’s annoyance; and one of the lords was his own. Gerin ar’Di
skan had laid claim to it on the strength of its having been discovered by his Companion and Bannerman, while Vanek ar’Kelayr, that notoriously quarrelsome man, was contesting his claim on the very same grounds.
Bayrd’s daydreams about that land and its fortress had come to nothing after all. Despite Lord Albanak’s praise on his return and the apparent success with which Eskra had turned aside all further sorcerous attacks – though she confessed to him privately that Gelert’s wizards, if he had any left, had not made a single attempt – they had generated nothing more solid than an old-style granting of first choice in loot or plunder after battle. Gerin ar’Diskan had suggested that, and it only confirmed something that Bayrd had suspected since before he rode away. Gerin was cheap.
There was small chance of his getting rich on plunder in this war, the award itself cost nothing but a sheet of parchment and some ink – and whatever quantity of air had been required to read its rolling phrases aloud. Though not even the Overlord had the right to interfere in matters between a clan-lord and his Companion, Bayrd thought he had sensed an odd feeling of disapproval from Albanak at such a tightfisted display. Not that it would do him any good. This was a fact of life. Some lords were generous to their retainers, most were not. Generosity in the form of rank and status drained no silver from their coffers, and until this country was quelled and settled, being given any of it as a token of appreciation was unlikely. The land was for the lords and Heads of House, and anyone else had to wait patiently for what crumbs were left.
