Once A Hero

by Michael A. Stackpole

  His curiously split attitude slammed me in the face. Here he was willing to put his reputation and his honor on the line in arguing before the Consilliarii that I should be allowed to be his vindicator. In doing that he openly proclaimed me his best friend, a person in whom he had no doubts. He trusted me and honored me with the selection, and that honor and trust I held dear.

  Yet, at the same time, among his own people he set me apart. He held me at arm's length. He praised me and honored me above all of the Sylvan Nation by his choice, yet he still felt it was right and suitable to point out that I was still just a Man.

  More's the pity, he likely did not know he had done anything to hurt me.

  Worse yet, I was thinking, I held similarly conflicting views of other Men, including some in my command.

  Calarianne stood. "The argument offered by Lomthelgar is correct and persuasive. We are not the Reithrese. We do not revel in morbidity. Executing the Man for a crime he has not committed and has no intention of committing would be an act of veneration for the Dark Goddess. We shall not be party to such action."

  She looked over at Aarundel. "Your selection for vindicator stands. You will be well represented."

  Lomthelgar popped up from his crouch and spryly stepped closer to the center of the chamber than where I stood. "Listen well, for this is the First Time: as another's voice, he speaks for himself."

  That announcement, which I could not understand, started a new debate, and I found myself wanting to be away from all the noise and the voices. I worked my way to the right to where—as I had seen from above when entering the legislatorium—I could gain access to a stairway spiraling down the massive oak that held the seat of Sylvan government. I wanted very much to be alone, and, by chance or out of fear, I met no one as I traveled to the ground.

  The stairs were long, and I managed to do a lot of thinking on the trip to the island below. The island itself was deserted, and sitting there between two small rootlets of the grand tree, I managed a lot more thinking. I didn't like all of it, but I've found that when you finally sit down to do the thinking that must be done, chances are there's not much of it that will make you smile.

  "I have been told what my brother said. I am grieved."

  I looked up at where she stood with one hand still on the bark banister of the stairway. "Why? He said what he saw as the truth."

  "But you have been hurt by it."

  I gathered my knees to my chest with my arms and smiled without looking into her eyes. "The hurt was in the hearing and because of what the words have made me think about. It is difficult to discover you have been deceiving yourself."

  Larissa walked away from the trunk of the tree, then settled herself on the ground two body lengths away from me. She arranged her skirts delicately, and I drank in the beauty of her until I realized how dangerous it could be. As if sensing my thoughts, she deflected me with a question. "How is it that you consider yourself deceptive, when I have heard nothing from my brother or you to indicate this is so?"

  I tightened the grip of my hands on the opposite forearms. "When I left the Roclaws two decades ago, I left with nothing but the horse between my legs, the clothes on my body, and the blade at my belt. I wanted it that way. I wanted nothing—not because I was spurning my homeland or because I hated my family. I wanted nothing so that all I did, all I became would be because of me. I wanted to be different, not burdened with possessions and titles and lands. I just wanted to be Neal Roclawzi, a warrior known across the face of Skirren for the things I had done."

  "An admirable goal, and one you have accomplished."

  "An admirable goal, but one I have not attained." I shook my head. "I own little more than my horse, my armor, my weapons—and I thought I had succeeded. Here, however, I have learned that I have acquired many things that I didn't realize I had gathered, and I realize that I have wanted many other things."

  I tipped my head back and looked up toward the legislatorium. "Up there I learned that I had acquired an inflated view of myself. I learned that I wanted to be considered an equal by your brother and your people, and I realize that I was foolish or vain enough to think I was worthy of such consideration."

  "You are."

  "Thank you for saying that, but yours is a minority opinion." I bit back pain. "The damnable thing is that your opinion is the only one that really matters to me right now."

  I wanted to reach out to her, take her and hug her, to leech serenity and warmth from her, but I stopped myself. "Aside from wanting to be elevated to standing within an elder race, I find I also want you, but total success in that regard will be fatal."

  Larissa smiled slightly and blushed, then plucked at a piece of clover growing amid the grasses. "You heap upon yourself too many burdens, Neal Roclawzi, and you do not take stock of your successes. You are the first Man ever to walk in Cygestolia. You are the first Man ever to be accorded the honor of being a vindicator. You are the first Man ever to argue within the legislatorium and the first to win a victory there."

  "But all of those things are an offshoot of my being the first to visit."

  "However, the fact of your visit did not bring with it any of the others. Those are mantles you have won, and no one will ever take them away from you." She closed her right hand into a fist. "Ten of your generations from now there will still be Consilliarii in the legislatorium who will remember you and your words."

  She rose onto her knees and leaned forward; her long-fingered white hands sank deep in the greensward to steady her. "To you, to the rest of the world, the Sylvan Nation appears to have one mind and one voice. It is defined for you in the verses of the Eldsaga. We are a cold, superior people who place no value on Humanity. This is how most Men see us, and it is not without good reason that they do so. Half a millennium ago our troops marched forth to destroy the fledgling empire your ancestors had created. My grandfather has told me tales of that time, horrible, brutal tales. Through them I know why Men fear us, and because of them I admire your courage in coming here and your bravery in befriending my brother.

  "My family is not like all others here. The chamber in which you sleep was built nearly four centuries ago when Lomthelgar ordered it fashioned after the halls and castles he had seen and razed. While others crusading through the Eldsaga saw Men as half-witted beasts whose civilization was nothing but a crude imitation of our own, my grandfather felt the truth was otherwise. Others looked at the things that were similar between Elves and Men, then decried Men for being unable to match us—making us superior and consigning Men to inferiority. My grandfather looked at the differences and used them to mark Man's creativity. He fashioned your chamber in homage to what he had seen, and as physical proof of his vow to get all of us to see in Mankind what he did."

  Passion and bitterness wove through her words as she explained things to me. "Though we were taught that Men were worthy of respect, that is not what made my brother respect you enough to bring you here and make you his vindicator. You earned that respect in his eyes. You have proved to him that Lomthelgar was right. In your argument in the legislatorium, you proved to many others that at least one Man is capable of thought and worthy of respect."

  I nodded briefly. "But not worthy of his sister?"

  Larissa clutched her hands together over her heart. "I cannot tell you that I would consider you worthy of any sylvanesti if I did not feel the love for you that I do in my heart. If my brother had come home with a woman he had won, I cannot say that I would welcome her. Inasmuch as my feelings for you conflict with how I would treat another Man and a sylvanesti being together, I know the attitudes that would condemn them are wrong. Because they are wrong, I know I must change them, but change does not come immediately.

  "As much as I want to go over to you and embrace you, I will not and cannot." Frustration seaming her brow, she frowned heavily. "I know the laws that keep us apart are wrong, but to flaunt them also seems wrong and would serve no purpose but to have you terminated and me exiled. Others wo
uld point to us as an example not of an injustice, but of justice done because we proved ourselves unable to respect the laws of society."

  Everything she said bored into my chest through the wound Aarundel's words had opened, but they did no more rending and tearing. They touched me deeply and awakened the part of me that I let loose only in battle. I began to reshape my perceptions along the lines of combat, spying out strengths and weaknesses along the enemy line. I ran through dozens and dozens of strategies in my mind, all the while my competitive and predatory hunger growing more and more ferocious.

  I saw my situation paralleling that of the Red Tiger's war to overthrow Reithrese overlords. As I fought in his army, I did not fight for myself—I fought for others. I fought for generations of Men who would someday remember us only as characters in songs half-forgotten and best left unsung. I fought so they could live lives dictated by them, not to them.

  So it was here in Cygestolia. I fought here so the whole of the Elven Nation would see in my example what Mankind truly was. Though I knew us deserving of respect, I also knew I had to earn it. That meant I had to do battle in their arena, by their rules, as much as it would hamper and hurt me.

  It would be the true test of a hero, a challenge unlike any other.

  A challenge before which I would not surrender.

  I smiled as I stretched my arms and legs. "It is my understanding, my Lady Larissa, that as vindicator I am to be your partner in a dance—a dance in which we will not touch. Despite that handicap, I want my performance to be worthy of your people, your brother's wedding, and above all, my partner. Will you find me someone to instruct me?"

  She smiled and rose to her feet. "My grandfather has already volunteered to be your teacher. You have a week in which to learn the steps to the torris."

  I stood and waved her toward the stairs ahead of me. "Then let us go find him and get started. This I vow: in a week's time your people will see a dance they will never, ever forget."

  My prediction almost came true in a way I had not intended.

  The torris is not a simple bow-and-wheel-your-partner dance with four steps that are repeated over and over. It's symbolic of a number of things, from life and nature to Sylvan history to bits and pieces of the lives of the dancers and the lives of those for whom they dance. I know of at least three different schools of swordsmanship that contain fewer independent moves than the torris, but I have to admit that I never worked so hard to learn them as I did this dance.

  The different parts of the dance were individually very difficult for me because many of them relied upon a flexibility and fluidity of motion I could not easily reproduce. Lomthelgar, with wisdom born of eight or ten centuries of life, managed to draw parallels between some of the motions and things I might do in combat. Very quickly I found the dance built up of encounters in a series of shadow-fencing duels. Not only did this approach make the whole thing possible for me to master, but also allowed me to feed my defiance directly into my lessons.

  Lomthelgar started me learning by using the Dreel as my partner. Shijef seemed as enamored of the pairing as I was, which provided me the perverse delight in commanding him to follow Lomthelgar's orders. There were one or two moves—the low sweeping ones—which the Dreel performed with more skill than I did. This made Shijef happy and, therefore, intolerable at certain points.

  After only two days Lomthelgar pressed Shijef into other duties. Given two sticks, the Dreel was to beat out a consistent rhythm. This he did without fail, which allowed me to get down the timing for the steps. Lomthelgar also had me count to myself in sets of six, so I found myself hitting my steps correctly even when Shijef sped up or slowed down to confuse me.

  By the final day Lomthelgar brought Larissa and me together to dance, but he did not allow us to see each other. First I performed blindfolded, and then she did. Lomthelgar hemmed and hawed, picking out little problems in our performances, but I knew from his criticisms that we had succeeded in learning apart how to dance together. And the next day we would each see the other dancing, and that, in and of itself, would make the dance more special than even I dared imagine.

  My duties as vindicator were not limited to learning how to dance. Aside from being fitted for appropriate clothing and taking meals with various kin and allies of Aarundel's family, I had to assist him in the forging of the insignii nuptialis he would give Marta during the ceremony. Marta's brother would forge the wedding token for Aarundel, but both Marta and Larissa would help him, and both of them had a far better idea of what they were going to do than I did.

  The process began at a forge set back in a rocky cavern on the eastern side of the Cygestolia valley. A smith smelted down silver-bearing ore and poured it into a baked-clay mold that made two silver bars, and two rings, with a long strand of threadlike silver twisting between them. We watched him fill the molds one day, then returned the next when he shattered the mold and severed the two sets of silver pieces.

  Aarundel and I, because we were to work on the gift being given to Marta, obtained the smaller of the two sets and only a third of the silver thread. The piece we would create for her would be more delicate than the piece being given to Aarundel, which did not mean it would be any less work. Had the task of creating the item been left to me, I would not have known where to begin, but my friend did. As he noted, one nice thing about being so long-lived was that each elf-child had the chance to study different trades for years, obtaining a level of expertise a Man could only get over a lifetime, just to choose yet another career to make his life's work.

  The first thing he set me to doing was making a short length of silver chain. Aarundel handed me an iron pipe roughly a quarter of an inch in diameter. Fixed to one end was a cross bar and running perpendicular to it was a groove cut through the top of the pipe. Viewing the pipe from the end made it appear to be a broken circle. The gap between the two sides of the circle ran straight down the cylinder and the edge appeared to be slightly worn.

  As instructed, I coiled the silver thread around the pipe and wound it tightly. Satisfied with my work when I showed it to him, Aarundel handed me a device that looked akin to an arrow with onty half a broadhead on it. I inserted the broken arrow into the pipe, fitting the triangular blade into the slot. With a hammer I gently tapped it down, and the blade cut each turn of the thread. Once through, I turned the whole assembly upside down, and two dozen links of silver poured into my left hand.

  These I linked together, closing them with a very small set of tongs. By the time I had all that done, which shouldn't have taken so long except that it required more delicacy than my normal work, Aarundel had sized, filed, and set the ring with two small lapis ovals. He drilled a small hole between them and linked the chain in there at that point.

  "Half-done," he announced proudly.

  I had my doubts, because we had the armlet yet to finish. I assisted him in working it by holding the bar of silver in place while he hammered it into a sheet, and by positioning the crimp-molds correctly while he raised an edge around the whole armlet. He decorated the armlet with four oval gemstones: opal north and south, lapis east and west. The drill produced a hole near the cuff, into which we ran the chain's last link.

  Aarundel smiled as he wiped sweat from his brow. "Drawn from the same metal, yet shaped by different hands and forces, they are just like Marta and me. We come from one people, yet we have been hammered into who we are by all manner of forces. In the wedding we shall be magically bound together, and our marriage will last as long as it takes for the metal to wear away to nothing on our flesh."

  I tapped the bracelet at the end opposite the cuff, where the edge came to a gentle point. "Good thing the metal is thick, for a love like yours should take forever to die,"

  "Spoken truly as a vindicator"—he smiled—"and as a friend."

  "My honor." I nodded and slapped him on the back. "Are we done?"

  "One more thing." Aarundel turned the piece over and, using a small gouge, worked his mark into the me
tal. "There, I have signed it. Now you must."

  I worked carefully and inscribed the six-line symbol for the Roclaws, then added my initial in the heart of the mountain. "Satisfactory?"

  Aarundel looked at it and laughed. "When my grandfather was young, the mark of the Roclawzi was one that inspired terror and hatred. I am glad it now betokens a friend."

  "A friend to the death, Aarundel. No one and no thing will stand between us."

  "Agreed, unless," he smiled slyly, "you fail at the torris. In that case, I will have to kill you."

  "Do not worry on that account." I quickly ran my right hand through one of the complex twitch-jerks that made the dance difficult. "If I fail, I will kill myself—if embarrassment does not kill me first."

  Elven wedding traditions are different from those of Men in a number of ways that I found annoying. The bride and groom spend the week before the ceremony apart, except for when they meet to see the silver poured for their wedding tokens. Aarundel and I attended a number of functions with his in-laws, to the point of all but living with them. From what Aarundel told me, a great deal of the conversations involved politics and other things of concern to the Elves.

  My job during these gatherings was to stand around and look the part of the vindicator. This meant I ate a lot because I could not understand what was being said. I also needed a lot of energy for my dancing lessons, and it would have been rude of me to refuse food. In fact, the various hosts and hostesses seemed to be relieved to be able to deal with me as easily as setting a bowl of something in front of me.

  Sylvan cuisine is not bad, but it's not Man-food. Because they view fire as that which makes metal malleable, and because cookfires would use up an incredible amount of wood. Elves prepare food in an unusual way—though the results are quite remarkable and very edible. They combine all sorts of vegetables and herbs and spices together in huge cauldrons, pour over them juices and vinegars and let them marinate. Things added to this plant-mash right before serving are crispy, and meat soaked in it becomes tender and delicious without firing.