The King's Peace

by Jo Walton

  The word monk usually means a solitary worshiper, someone who dedicates themselves whole to a the worship of a god. There was a woman who lived in the hills near Derwen when I was a child who worshiped the Moon Maid. The farmers sent her food when they had spare, and my father sent her a cut whenever he took a roebuck, for such beasts are sacred to that goddess. Mostly she lived on radishes, which she grew, and trout, which she caught. My father would send me up with the meat, for she had taken a vow to speak to neither man nor married woman. She taught me some very good hymns to the Virgin Huntress, one of which I use to this day when I want to draw out a splinter. She never said anything to try and draw me to live with her, or live like her, and never said anything to me against the worship of other gods.

  These monks were different. They came together to live in community, though each had a private cell where they slept and for their solitary worship. They did quite honestly devote themselves to worshiping their god, but the idea of converting everyone they met to similar worship was never far from their minds. Many of them seemed genuinely unhappy to know that anyone present did not follow their faith. Those who were themselves converts were quite sure in their own minds that once anyone had but heard about the faith in the way they themselves had learned of it they would immediately be converted. I found this really tedious. The faith had little appeal for me. Groveling before a god who desires everyone to praise and magnify him is no respectable thing. One must be polite to all the gods—after all, they are gods. But equally, one is a human being. There is beauty in the worship of the White God, but it has never seemed to me to be a polite or appropriate matter.

  The chief among the monks of Thansethan was a man they called Father Gerthmol. He was an Isarnagan, though he had come early to Tir Tanagiri. He was thin and stooping, and had a habit of looking very deeply into the eyes of whoever he was talking to as if he thought to see into their soul. Many of the children and younger monks quaked in his presence. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing the first time he tried it on me. I think he was not much used to looking up at people’s faces rather than down. He sent a young monk to fetch me to his office the second day I was there. She would hardly look at me but kept sneaking glances under her hood as she led me up the stairs and into his little office. I saw that she was a Jarn and probably little more than fifteen.

  Father Gerthmol was polite, except for his searching glances.

  “We put everyone to work here, everyone,” he explained. “What we need to know is what you’re good at. ‘Turn any willing hand to the task at hand, and find the task most suited to the willing hand,’” he quoted. “What can you do to help while you are here, daughter of Gwien?” He smiled with more heartiness than the situation merited. His use of that form of my name seemed a little forced. The monks took new names when they were received into the church, abandoning their old one with their old lives. Most followers of the White God kept their new names in the same way they had their old, but the monks had theirs in the open for everyone to use.

  “I have some small skills at most things, and what I do not know I will be pleased to learn.”

  This pleased him no end, for the White God sets great store by learning and knowledge for its own sake. He questioned me about my domestic and agricultural skills, and as I was about to go, he said, “If you truly like to learn, we will teach you to read.” I smiled.

  “I have this skill already; my mother taught me.” He tested me with some prayers that were lying about his desk. When he found that I could read and write as well as he could he offered me free run of the library. He begged me to spend some time talking to the monk in charge of copying manuscripts to see what was most urgent and to lend a hand. He said this with so much more sincerity than he had talked about the value to the community of the skill at bottling apples that again I was hard-pressed not to giggle. If another of the ala had been there and winked at me I could hardly have kept a straight face.

  I soon fell into a routine in my life at Thansethan almost as rigid as that of the monks. I would rise at dawn and drink minted water and eat thin gruel in the refectory. Later, as I grew larger, Thossa, the infirmarian monk, suggested to me that I should drink a preparation of elderflowers and raspberry leaves, so I took to drinking that instead. After this meal I would ride out on Apple for an hour while the monks prayed. Then I would go to the library, a delightful place, on the upper story. It was light and spacious and furnished with books. The monks had collected these from different places. I would copy manuscripts for a few hours in the best of the light. When the monks went to their noon worship I would stop copying, ease my cramped fingers, and read until their return.

  I read Memories of the White God, partly to please the monks and partly from curiosity. Although it pleased me more than hearing it all secondhand, it did not please me very much. I found the fragmentary nature of the eyewitness accounts confusing, especially in the parts where they contradicted one another. I thought it would be much improved by some connecting narrative and explanation. I suppose many devout believers thought the same thing, for Raul’s notes on such things have become popular with the priests recently. Despite the deficiencies, I did feel considerable sympathy with the White God as man; a man who believed himself the rightful king of the Vincan province of Sinea.

  Yet in some ways I felt he deserved everything that happened—either he should have led the rebellion or discouraged it altogether. I think anyone in that situation who sacrificed himself to save his people and in doing this trusted the Vincan authorities to keep their word afterwards must have been crazy. Whether he was a god or not, I found him lacking in judgment. I felt no attraction for the idea of him as the One God, creator and savior of all mankind. I must admit some of his followers had miraculous luck in the destruction of the city, after. I did little more than skim the holy books of Sinea, for I found them and their insistence on their One God who made the world and the long lists of the doings of kings who were His servants and interpreters of the law most terribly hard going.

  The shelves were full of fascinating volumes, so there was no need for me to restrict myself to theology. There were many of the Vincan classics my mother considered essential to any civilized education. There were also many books from all over the Empire on very diverse topics. I found some marvelous books on horse-breeding, and also on ancient cavalry. I read those with fascination. They had been recently recopied in a fair hand. When reading a chapter describing the use of light lance from ponies, I found a scrap of parchment in the same hand between two leaves. On one side of it was a sketch of a greathorse with a full-sized lance sketched beside it for the proportions. On the other was a design which appeared to be the organization of an ala—it was so labeled, ala, a wing, and the units pennon, feathers. There never had been an ala of a hundred and forty-four armigers, yet that was what was shown here. I realized that this must have been written by Urdo when he lived there, before he was the king.

  I read other volumes on warfare, strategy, and tactics. There was no shortage of them. I even copied one old volume of thoughts on the Narlahenan campaign. The original was crumbling, and I was glad it should be preserved. I read one book written by a missionary who had been among the Jarns in Jarnholme that gave an account not only of their life but of their gods. His attitude seemed different from that of Marchel in that while he saw their gods as opponents of the truth he did not call them demons. He wanted to persuade them to the worship of the White God, too. He had been interested in everything, from the type of trees and birds to the Jarnish manner of worship. I learned a lot in that library, and had much practice in writing fair copies.

  When the monks came back from worship I went to the afternoon meal. I grew heartily sick of porridge in my time in Thansethan, but at least there was plenty of it. There was plenty of honey to put on it. There was fruit, too, and some days fish. The monks ate no meat or cheese except at high festivals. Their high festivals were all connected with the life of the White God or t
he holy stories of Sinea. Many of them fell near the festivals I was used to, but others surprised me entirely.

  In the afternoons I would walk out of doors, walking among the tilled fields or in the pastures where the horses, half-wild, ran from me, manes tossing, beautiful, glorious, and free. Then I would turn to the little spinneys where fresh-fallen leaves crunched under my feet as they moldered down to join last years leaves, which were turning already to the earth of the woods. As autumn gave way to winter I walked more slowly, for the child weighed me down. After the first snows it was all I could do to walk out to Goldpate’s stone and back.

  When I came back I would help in the stables or with the beekeepers. If there was nothing to do there, I would sometimes help in the kitchens for a little. Before I had been there long I grew tired too quickly to stand weaving, or grinding ink, or milking the cows, though I did all those tasks in the early days. I soon learned which monks were content to talk about the task in hand and which would take any opportunity to turn the talk to their God or reproaching me for my wrongdoing. As I had done nothing wrong I found this particularly hard to bear and tried hard to avoid those monks who made a particular point of this. Most of the women who came to Thansethan to bear children were indeed guilty of oathbreaking towards their husbands, so it was a natural thing for the monks to think. If they persisted I told them briefly that I was unmarried, or walked away.

  I befriended the people who would talk about the tasks we were about, or horse-breeding, or the king. Whatever else I thought about them, I did not doubt their loyalty to Urdo. I heard many tales of him as a boy in Thansethan. Some of those who had ridden in the charge against Goldpate would talk about it. The young girl Arvlid had run ten miles to warn the monks. Goldpate, an outcast even among her own people, had made the mistake of revealing her purpose when trying to win more recruits. The monks were infuriatingly vague on the details of the battle, saying they just rode downhill, and the outlaws ran. Others said that King Custennin’s men and King Talorgen of Angas’s men did all the killing. It must have been something to see.

  I would eat more of the endless gruel before I went to bed at dusk. The monks made good thick beeswax candles, the best I ever saw. I do not know what use they put them to, but they did not waste them on visitors. Sometimes Garah and I would sit and talk in the firelight planning dream stables and discussing which bloodlines of the horses we knew would give the most perfect cavalry horse. Sometimes Garah turned the talk to the baby I was carrying, but I did not like to speak of it.

  I might have enjoyed my time at Thansethan more had it not seemed at the same time endless and bounded. I was not there of my own will. I was waiting, and forced to wait, to endure. Nothing I could do would make the time any shorter. Had it not been for the comfort of Apple and the support of Garah it would have been much harder.

  As it was I could compare my lot very favorably to that of the Jarnish prisoners. There were a great number of them at Thansethan, all men who had been captured in battle and given a choice of life or death. Those who had chosen life were brought under guard to the high altar in the sacristy, where they swore not to escape. The White God would hold anyone’s oaths. He would also punish oathbreakers severely. The White God’s mercy did not extend to those who did not keep their word. The monks would send messages to their families at home and those who had kin to care about them could hope for eventual ransom. Some, however, who were not heirs to land, or who came from poor families or none, had been there for years. They could win their freedom at any time by converting to the faith of the White God and swearing never to raise a hand against the King’s Peace. If they did this they could go freely into the Jarnish hamlets and settle there, or return home. Many of them so aware, and settled near Thansethan. If their families did not care enough to ransom them, then they would be unlikely to accept them home once alienated from the gods of their ancestors.

  I watched the prisoners occasionally. They did most of the roughest work: hauling stones, shoveling manure, plowing the fields to plant roots, hoeing for weeds, digging the manure into the soil, dragging back wood cut in coppicing the spinneys. I wondered whether I would convert if I were in their situation. Arvlid told me that they checked the conversions very carefully and tested their sincerity; they would not allow someone to convert without meaning it. As my belly grew too great in the last half month for me to sit astride Apple’s back, I comforted myself with the thought that, unlike them, I could leave. I tried not to look at the children in the school, keeping the same hours of worship as the monks. When I saw them playing in the fields, I smiled. When I saw them filing gravely into the sacristy I looked away.

  My child was born the day after the spring equinox, on the very day that Sethan had founded the monastery sixty or so years before. It was thus a high holy day for the monks and even Thossa, who had been so kind to me through the months of waiting, was cross with me for having such bad timing. In the end the birth dragged on so long that they were all in the sacristy when he was born, and only Garah and Arvlid were with me.

  Childbirth is a mystery; I put myself in the hand of the Mother. Garah made me walk up and down, up and down, squeezing my hand tightly. She had seen mares give birth, she said, and plenty of cows. She prayed to the Mother as Breda, and to the Horse Mother Riganna. Arvlid prayed to the Merciful One, but they seemed to understand each other. It was not a difficult birth, as these things go. The pain was endurable, though unlike in battle I felt every moment. The child was a fine big boy, perfectly formed though with lightish skin, of course. His first hair was very dark, and his eyes were at first the color of the sky before a sea storm. After a few days they faded and were the pale sea grey color of most Jarnish eyes. I could not like them. Nevertheless, his hands had a strong grip, and his feet kicked, and he tried to suck straight away, though there was no milk yet.

  Thossa the infirmarian came back at dawn, extremely apologetic for having missed the birth. I was glad of him, for he got rid of most of the mess—the floor was spattered with blood and gory remains so that where I had been standing looked like the worst part of a battlefield. He opened the window shutter, letting in the cold spring air, and scattered clean rushes. I lay still, exhausted and still bleeding. The baby was asleep on my stomach. Garah brought warm water and began to wash my legs and feet, where the blood was beginning to dry brown. The infirmarian dropped some rosemary into the bowl, which gave the room a clean scent again. I almost fell asleep when Garah drew a blanket up to my waist.

  Then all of a sudden Father Gerthmol was there, beaming. He picked up the child, who woke and howled a long shrill howl. He weighed him in his hands and patted his back in the practiced way of someone who has held many babies. I almost felt a pang of jealousy as he quieted.

  “Well well, safe delivered, praise be to Merciful God,” he said, handing back the baby and standing at the foot of the bed. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and wrapped the child in a corner of it. “A fine strong son, and born on holy Sethan’s day, so. What a good sign.” I smiled, warily. I wished he would go away so I could sleep. Battle never left me feeling so battered or exhausted. “So have you thought about what name to give him?”

  I shook my head.

  “So shall we be calling him Sethan, because he was born on Sethan’s own day?” I think he must have been tired, too, to be so crass and direct about it. If he had asked me at a better time, or if he had acted as if it was his place to name the child he would, after all, be rearing, I would probably have said nothing. As it was, I shook my head again. Arvlid sat down on the edge of the bed and touched the child’s cheek. It looked dark compared to her finger.

  “Well, it is the custom in Thansethan. What could be better? Sethan ap …” He hesitated. “What is his father’s name, now? Do you want to tell me?” I shook my head, this time fiercely, and drew breath. In all these months I had done my best not to think of the rape, the dedication, Ulf Gunnarsson, now that question brought the memories flooding back. If I must have
a child I must, but he would be no tie to that cursed rapist.

  “He is my son,” I said. Garah sat down on the other side of the bed and took my hand, as she had done so often throughout the ordeal. It felt good to have the two of them there supporting me, even though I knew Arvlid would say nothing against Father Gerthmol.

  “It is usual to give a child a holy name, and then his father’s name,” Father Gerthmol repeated. “What do you want to call him then?” My son would be clean of his begetting. He would start fresh. I would give him names he could be proud of.

  “Darien,” I said. “I will call him Darien.” Darien would have no grandsons of his own to carry on his name. He had died too young to do great deeds to be remembered. He would have approved. Father Gerthmol frowned and looked disgruntled. Garah squeezed my fingers. Arvlid looked politely quizzical, the name meant nothing to her.

  “Darien,” he said, pausing again. “It is a pagan name.”

  “Which is well, for I am a pagan, as you know, Father.” He bit his lip.

  “And what else will you have him called? Shall we call him Darien ap Sethan as children are called who do not know their father’s names?”

  “Why are you so keen to have your holy founder’s name as part of my son’s name, Father?” Arvlid gasped at my impertinence.

  He shifted from foot to foot and looked uneasy. “It is Sethan’s day,” he temporized.

  “He will be known as my son, that is good enough. I know his father’s name, but I will not speak it. His father is no saint, and nobody’s business but mine.”

  Garah choked a wild bark of laughter. “He can hardly be called ap Sulien!” she said. I laughed, and even Arvlid smiled. Father Gerthmol looked at us as if we were crazy women. Little Darien stirred again, and I put him to my breast.