The King's Peace

by Jo Walton

  After a little while, when everyone had seen enough of the waterwheel, Rigg suggested that we go and see her summerhorses, and we started to walk downstream towards the quay. Elenn made a motion to put the glass away as she started off. “There is plenty more wine,” Morthu said. “Let us enjoy it while it is plentiful. Soon enough it will be winter and short rations.” He filled the glass and drank it, then filled it again and offered it to Elenn. “Will you take another cup of Narlahenan wine?” he asked her. She looked at him over the glass, her face completely composed. We all stopped walking for a moment. I wondered what Elenn was thinking. She never let any of it show. Urdo, however, looked furious. She took the glass and took a sip. She could do nothing else except throw it in his face. Then she smiled graciously and handed the glass not to Urdo as Morthu had plainly expected, but to Rigg. Rigg drained it thirstily as if it were water and handed it back to Morthu. He refilled it for ap Lothar and ap Theophilus. Ap Lothar tried to hand it to me, but I shook my head.

  “I’m not thirsty,” I said.

  “You needn’t save it for the cold winter nights, Sulien, I may not be offering it then,” Morthu said, with a comical leer and rise of his eyebrows. The ambassadors and Rigg laughed, and I wondered how much they would laugh if I cut his head off right there for making a mockery of a my lord’s hospitality.

  Urdo took the cup and held it thoughtfully. The little glass looked very fragile in his big hand. “Is this the last of it?” he asked. He had seen Morthu empty the flask out, so he knew that it was. Morthu raised his chin idly, smiling. Everyone had seen his generous hospitality already, as if he were a king himself, to offer wine to the king and queen in their own place. Then Urdo raised the glass, and said, “If this is the last of that brew then I will offer it to the gods below, that the world might always know honor, and sweetness, and all things in their proper season.” Then he poured out the wine onto the dry grass, which absorbed it quickly. He wiped the glass on his cloak and returned it to Elenn, who put it into the pocket of her overdress. As she did so she winced, and then after she had taken a step or two she winced again.

  “Are you all right?” Morthu asked, gently, sounding very concerned. “I said you should sit down, you need better care taken of you than this. You look quite worn-out.”

  Urdo stopped where he was walking with Rigg and ap Lothar and turned to look at Elenn, but she motioned him on. “I am well,” she said, and walked on. Morthu stepped forward to walk beside me and ap Theophilus. “You would hardly guess it, but when she is well our queen is accounted one of the most beautiful women in the land,” he said.

  “She seems most beautiful to me even now, second only to the Empress of all the women I have seen,” ap Theophilus said graciously. I dropped back to walk beside Elenn. She did look a little weary, but she had not lost her looks. If anything her skin had more bloom than ever.

  “I am sorry I am too tall to give you my arm to lean on,” I said.

  She smiled, and it clearly took a little effort. “I am—” she began, and then stopped. “I think you may have to all the same,” she said, in a very strange voice, and fainted. I only just caught her. Even pregnant and unconscious she was not very heavy, but heavier than she looked.

  “Urdo!” I called, urgently, cutting through the noise of the crowd. He and Rigg came running back, followed by the others. Morthu looked concerned and distressed. Ap Theophilus looked bored, or perhaps that was the natural set of his features. Ap Lothar looked worried. I had both arms full with Elenn and could do nothing. Rigg put one hand on Elenn’s belly and the other on her throat.

  She said something incomprehensible. When she spoke her own language she spoke about four times as fast as she did in Vincan, and sounded much more intelligent somehow. “Where is—” she said, urgently, in Vincan, and then a word I did not know.

  “What?” I asked.

  “She means a woman’s doctor,” ap Theophilus said.

  “Somebody who knows about borning babies,” Rigg said, even more urgently.

  “It isn’t time!” Urdo said. I have never seen him so much at a loss.

  “Is there a priest of Brioth? Of the Mother?” Rigg asked, looking round at all our blank faces.

  “I have had a baby,” I said. “Let’s take her inside.”

  “I have helped with babies borning,” Rigg said. “My sisters, my cousins, maybe that is enough. Inside, yes, and the rest of you go away.” Urdo opened his mouth to say something, but Rigg pushed my shoulder and I started to run towards the citadel. As I saw armigers in the crowd I called out to them to clear a way for me, which they did, making a clear path right to the citadel. Rigg ran beside me. After a moment Urdo caught us up.

  “I have had to leave them with Morthu. There was no choice,” he said.

  “Go back to them,” Rigg said. “There is no place for men when borning babies.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Urdo said. “In Tir Tanagiri, men can be there. And I’m the father.”

  “Fathers are not important,” Rigg said. “There is no place for men, especially not father. If it is choose between mother and baby, what do you choose, here where fathers are more important than mothers?”

  Urdo looked as if he had been run through the gut with a spear. “Is that the choice?” he asked.

  “You have four horses of summer moon,” Rigg said. “I brought them across wide ocean for you. You go and ride them, and come back and I will tell you if you have a wife, if you have a child. There is no choice for you to make. Trust the women now; it is a mystery of the Mother and not for men.”

  “I have met the Mother,” Urdo said, furious, panting alongside as we ran up through the streets of the town. “You can’t keep me away, I am the King!”

  “And did she promise you a baby?” Rigg frowned. “And what if the queen dies? You can do no good to be there, only harm.”

  “I wish I knew more about it,” Urdo said, sounding lost. Elenn dangled on my arms like a half-empty sack. “Sulien—when Darien was born who was there?”

  “Garah and Arvlid,” I said. “But Thossa was going to be, except he was busy. My father saw all of us born.”

  “Pray to the land,” Rigg said suddenly. “Pray to the land for her health and the child. Stay under the sky and pray until I send for you.”

  I think it must have been her complete certainty that swayed Urdo. He stopped where he was and let us run on. After we had gone a little way Rigg said to me, “Maybe it is not against the mystery here, maybe I know her only for a minute, but I know she would not want him to see her. This is better.”

  By the time we came to Elenn’s rooms I was exhausted. I would hardly have noticed her weight on my back, but I had never trained to run with a weight in my arms. Elenn showed no signs of consciousness. Rigg pinched her cheek, and frowned. “Put her down on the bed—is it rushes that can be burned?”

  It was, and I did. It was then that I saw the blood on my arms where I had been holding her. It was too much, too soon. I remembered what Urdo had said about having no heirs of his body. I sent a servant for Garah and for warm water for washing. Rigg and I undressed Elenn, and Rigg washed her, singing charms all the time. After a while she opened her eyes and screamed.

  Garah was there by then, looking for a clean cloth. She ran to Elenn and held her hand, soothing her. It did not work, nothing worked. Elenn screamed and screamed each time her belly rippled, which it did hard and often. Rigg sang constantly and stroked her belly, and picked her up to walk about. Garah held her hand and crooned charms, I held her up when she needed me, and I turned away everyone who came to the door, whatever they wanted. Urdo did not come. I asked her if she wanted him, and Rigg was right, she did not. She screamed until she was hoarse. I turned away priests all afternoon until Teilo came. I couldn’t turn her away, so she came in and prayed over Elenn, which did seem to calm her a little. She stayed afterwards, sitting quietly in the corner so that I almost forgot she was there.

  At last, just after nightfall, th
e baby was born. He was much too small to live. He breathed his three breaths, enough to come into the world and have a name before going on, then he died in my hands. No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t get any more breath to stay in him. Poor little thing, all blue and slimy and covered in blood, he wasn’t much bigger than one of my hands. They say all babies look alike, but he did remind me terribly of Darien. It was the pale skin, I think, but all the same it wrenched my heart. His fists were clenched and his eyes were black and he looked furious that he’d gone to the trouble of being born only to die again so quickly before getting a chance to learn anything at all. He would have been a good son to Urdo, if he had lived, I am sure of it.

  I turned to Elenn to ask for a name for him to take back with him to his next life, and saw that she was beyond giving one. Blood was pouring out between her legs. She was drained almost white. Garah and Rigg were singing hymns frantically and trying to stem the flow.

  Then Teilo was there beside me. She had lit one of the lamps, and she peered at the child. “Dead,” she said. “Well, the Lord must want it that way, but sometimes it’s hard. What name shall we give him, for what time he needs it?”

  “Emrys,” I said, probably because I had heard the name so much that afternoon, but also because it seemed to suit him in his fury and his desire to see the world he could not live in.

  “Don’t cry, child,” Teilo said to me. “It’s a good enough name, even if it is a pagan one.

  Everyone calls Teilo harsh, and I have heard her scold Urdo and Ayl as if they were little boys. Raul told me she came to Thansethan and yelled at Father Gerthmol for quarreling with Urdo, telling him he wanted to be thought holy more than he cared to be holy, and Father Gerthmol just stood there and took it. I’ve heard people say she’s been bullying people for the last sixty years. All I can say is that she was never harsh to me, and never reproached me or even tried to convert me, she just stayed there and mourned with me over the baby, and if her hymns were to the White God and mine to the Lightbringer then they felt right together that time.

  Then I thought I heard Elenn weeping, and I turned around, and she was sitting up on the bed, crying as if her heart was broken but alive beyond my hopes. I took her the dead child. Teilo and I had washed him and wrapped him in linen, and she knew at once he was dead. She wept more, and Garah and Teilo embraced her. Then she pulled Rigg towards her and kissed her. “I would be dead too, if not for you,” she said.

  “This is true,” Rigg said, “but everyone here helped. And you would be dead with me, if not for your husband. I sent him out to pray to keep him from being in. But he did pray, and he held you here. When your spirit would go out with the blood, he held you in until I could stop it. You should call him in now.”

  “But what happened?” Elenn asked. “It should have been midwinter. What happened? Did—” And then her voice changed as if she remembered. “That weasel Morthu poisoned the wine!” she said.

  “But we all drank!” Rigg said. “Hush now, don’t think these things. Sometimes it happens.”

  “That’s right,” Teilo said. “Sometimes the Lord sends these things despite everything. You are alive, praise to the Lord, and thanks to the prayers of all here, you can have other children.”

  “I’ll kill him,” she said, ignoring everyone.

  “I drank the same wine,” Rigg insisted. “I would have cramps now if herbs bring on a baby was in wine.” She patted her stomach.

  Elenn subsided, her eyes burning. She gave poor dead Emrys back to Teilo. Then she turned to me and gripped my arm almost strongly enough to break it. “Kill him for me.”

  “Elenn—” I hesitated. “Rigg says he couldn’t have done it.”

  “There might be other poisons,” she said. She lay back, drained and weak. “I saw his eyes. I know he meant me harm. How can I fight him? Kill him for me, Sulien.”

  I should have believed her. I should have done it. But Teilo pushed in front of me and knelt by the bed. She took both Elenn’s hands and forced her to look at her face. “I will speak to Morthu ap Talorgen, and I will ask him if he has poisoned you, or cursed you to lose the child,” she said. “He will not be able to lie to me. If he poisoned you, or cursed you, then we will bring him before the king for justice.”

  “That is the law,” I said, and Garah echoed me.

  Rigg shook her head. “I drank more of the wine than you. There was no poison.”

  “He has a lot to gain by killing me, killing the baby,” Elenn said. Her voice broke on the last word, and she wept. Teilo held her and stroked her hair.

  “I will speak to him,” she said.

  “If you accuse him without proof he will laugh at us all,” I said.

  “He is Angas’s and Penarwen’s brother, and they won’t stand for him being murdered,” Garah said.

  “He will answer me, or if not he will answer on the holy relics before everyone,” Teilo said, inflexible. Elenn just sobbed.

  “I want him to answer for it if he’s done it,” I said. “Just don’t burst into the hall and make a fuss.”

  Teilo snorted and stood, her knees creaking as she straightened. “I know better than that; I have been dealing with kings and kings’ houses since before Rowanna married Avren.”

  “Go to find Urdo,” Rigg said to me.

  I went towards the door.

  “Don’t say that to Urdo,” Garah said. “Don’t upset him more by accusing his nephew of poisoning, unless we need to.”

  “Thank the Lord you are alive,” Teilo said to Elenn. She came out with me. When we were in the hall she made a sign of blessing over the door. “It is a fancy she has taken, I think,” she said. “If you’re all sure the wine wasn’t poisoned, though what he was doing giving wine to the queen I’m sure I don’t know.”

  “Stirring up trouble, I think,” I said.

  “Very well, but not trying to murder her; he’s not such a fool as all that to do it where it would be so obvious. I’ll go and ask him as I said.” She went off in search of him, her stick tapping along the flags as she went.

  I went out into the citadel, amazed to find it was only early evening and most people were eating in the hall. Ap Erbin’s brother was singing his song about the woman of Wenlad as I went past. It seemed strange. It felt as if a long time had passed in Elenn’s room and it should be a different season. I saw ap Cathvan, and told him the news, and he told me Urdo was out by the stables. I should have guessed and gone there first.

  He was standing in the paddock where he had brought the summerhorses, stroking the nose of one of them. He looked up when I came around the corner of the stables, but I didn’t need to tell him anything, he had been praying the whole time and the land had told him, or the Mother. There were tears on his cheeks, and when I saw him I started to weep again. It was his child who was dead, and I should have comforted him, but it was the other way around. “He was so—he was so—” I kept saying, and he held me, and said, “Ah, Sulien, hush now, hush,” until I did.

  Then we went back to Elenn’s room. Teilo was there. I looked at her inquiringly, and she shook her head. Urdo kissed Elenn, then he took little Emrys in his hands for a moment and looked at him sadly.

  “You were right,” he said to Rigg, “I did more good where I was.”

  Then Garah gave a gasp that was halfway between laughing and crying. “I’ll never understand you men,” she said. “Aren’t you even going to say how glad you are your wife is alive?”

  “She knows how glad I am,” he said, smiling at Elenn. She smiled back, weakly. “An heir is not the important thing,” he said. “As long as you are well.”

  I crossed the room to Teilo. “He can’t deny he had malicious intentions, but he neither poisoned her nor used sorcery to make her miscarry,” she murmured to me. I should never have believed her. I should have demanded an inquiry into his intentions, or just gone and killed him anyway. But I did not.

  Elenn was looking up at Urdo. “And will you come to Thansethan with me to pray
for a son?” she asked.

  “In the spring,” Urdo said. “When you are well again. If that is what you want, we will go there in the spring.”

  40

  Foam-follower, sea-born,

  is it Manan seeking vengeance

  riding the wave tops like fields of lilies?

  Who will name the wind?

  Lifting great feet over the wave wash

  wild tossed manes, running the swan road

  swords rising red with the sun.

  Who came like the wind?

  Swords sweeping down in strong arms

  reap the defenders to lie like tide wrack

  swift steeds speeding scatheless.

  Who will blame the wind?

  —Amagien ap Ross, “The Sea Raids on Oriel”

  The monks of Thansethan, not content with a festival celebrating the end of winter and another celebrating the flowering of the land, have a festival between them to commemorate the date on which their monastery was founded by the great Sethan. It is a great celebration for them, one of the most important in the year. Because it is in the spring they celebrate spring also. They fill their sanctuary with early flowers and give gifts of food, the way civilized people do at the feast of Bel a month later. It was for this festival, which also marked the anniversary of Darien’s birth, that we set out for Thansethan.