by Steven Brust
“Go where? Savn, stop it. Don’t you dare go running off like that! Savn . . .”
Her voice followed him out the door, but he paid no attention. The only place he could think of to find Vlad was back at the caves, so he set off for them at once. He followed the Manor road for the first mile, then cut across to the slip. As he was about to start down it, however, he saw, some distance away, a grey-clad figure standing on the cliff itself. He broke into a run, and at about the same moment he became convinced that it was indeed Vlad, the Easterner turned and waved to him, as if he’d known he was there.
When he reached him, he said nothing, only stopped to recover his breath. Vlad stood, staring out at the river flats so far below them, dotted with people bathing, washing clothes, or just talking. Savn tried to view the scene as if it were new; the river rushing in from the right, turning sharply around the Black Rocks, foaming white, then suddenly widening into the flats, brown against tan, then narrowing gradually once more as it cut down into the plains and began turning south, toward the sea, many impossible hundreds of miles away.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” said Savn.
“Is it?” said Vlad, without turning his head.
“Don’t you think so?”
“Maybe. Nature usually doesn’t excite me very much. I’m impressed by what man makes of his world, not what we started with.”
“Oh.” Savn considered. “I guess I’m just the opposite.”
“Yes.”
“Does it matter?”
Vlad looked at him, and something like amusement glittered for a moment in his eyes. Then he turned back to watching the river. “Yes and no,” he said. “A couple of years ago I met a philosopher who told me that those like me build, while those like you take more pleasure in life.”
“Aren’t there those who like both?”
“Yes. According to this lady, they become artists.”
“Oh. Do you enjoy life?”
“Me? Yes, but I’m naturally lucky.”
“Oh.” Savn thought back to what the Easterner told him the night before. “You must be, to still be alive with people trying to kill you.”
“Oh, no. That isn’t luck. I’m alive because I’m good enough to survive.”
“Then what do you mean?”
“I’m lucky that, living the way I do, with people trying to kill me, I can still take pleasure in life. Not everyone can, and I think if you can’t, there isn’t much you can do about it.”
“Oh. I’ve never met a philosopher.”
“I hope you do some day; they’re always worth talking to.”
“Pae says such things are a waste of time.”
“Your Pae, I’m sorry to say, is wrong.”
“Why?”
“Because everything is worth examining, and if you don’t examine your view of the world, you are still subject to it, and you find yourself doing things that—never mind.”
“I think I understand.”
“Do you? Good.” After a moment he said, as if to himself, “I learned a lot from that lady. I was sorry I had to kill her.”
Savn looked at him, but the Easterner didn’t seem to be joking. They continued watching the River Flats and said nothing more for a while.
5
I will not marry a blessing priest,
I will not marry a blessing priest,
In his devotions I’d be least.
Hi-dee hi-dee ho-la!
Step on out . . .
THEY WERE CLOSE ENOUGH so that Savn could identify some of the people below, more by how they dressed and moved than by their features. There were a few whose names he knew, but he knew none of the people well, and for the first time he wondered why that was. Smallcliff was closer to Bigcliff than to either Whiterock or Notthereyet, but those were the places he had visited, and from a little traveling and from his work with Master Wag, he knew a few people who lived in each of those villages; but the dwellers below were strangers, even those he could identify and had spoken with.
Mae and Pae hardly ever mentioned them at all, except for an occasional reference Pae made to its being filthy to bathe in the same place that you wash your clothes. Yet when those from below came to visit Master Wag, they seemed pleasant enough, and Savn didn’t see any difference.
Odd, though, that he’d never thought about it before. Next to him, Vlad was watching them with single-minded concentration that reminded Savn of something he’d seen once, long ago, but couldn’t quite remember. He felt something akin to fear as he made the comparison, however.
“Vlad?” said Savn at last.
“Yes?”
“Those people are . . . never mind.”
“They are what?”
Savn haltingly tried to tell the Easterner what he’d been thinking about them, but he couldn’t seem to find the right words, so eventually he shrugged and fell silent.
Vlad said, “Are they also vassals of Baron Smallcliff?”
“Yes. He’s also the Baron of Bigcliff.”
Vlad nodded. “What else?”
“I don’t know. I know that someone else is lord over in Whiterock, though. A Dzurlord. We hear stories about him.”
“Oh? What kind of stories?”
“Not very nice ones. You have to work his fields two days of the week, even in the bad years when it takes everything to keep your own going, and he doesn’t care how hard that makes it for you, or even if you starve, and sometimes he does things that, well, I don’t really know about because they say I’m too young to know about them, but they’re pretty awful. His tax collectors can beat you whenever they want, and you can’t do anything about it. And his soldiers will kill you if you get in their way, and when the Speaker tried to complain to the Empire they had him killed, and things like that.”
“Things like that don’t happen here?”
“Well, the tax collectors can be pretty mean sometimes, but not that bad. We’re lucky here.”
“I suppose so.”
They fell silent again. Vlad continued staring down at the River Flats. Eventually Savn said, “Vlad, if you aren’t enjoying nature, what are you doing?”
“Watching the people.”
“They’re odd,” said Savn.
“So you said. But you didn’t tell me in what way they’re odd.”
Savn opened his mouth and shut it. He didn’t want to pass on what Mae and Pae said about them, because he was sure Vlad would just think he was being small-minded. He finally said, “They talk funny.”
Vlad glanced at him. “Funny? How?”
“Well, there used to be a tribe of Serioli who lived down there. They only moved away a few hundred years ago, and until then they lived right next to the people from Bigcliff, and they’d talk all the time, and—”
“And the people from Bigcliff use Serioli words?”
“Not when they talk to us. But it’s, that, well, they put their words together different than we do.”
“Can you understand them?”
“Oh, sure. But it sounds strange.”
“Hmmm,” said Vlad.
“What are you watching them for?”
“I’m not certain. A way to do something I have to do.”
“Why do you always talk that way?”
Vlad spared him a quick glance, which Savn could not read, then said, “It comes from spending time in the company of philosophers and Athyra.”
“Oh.”
“And having secrets.”
“Oh.”
A strange feeling came over Savn, as if he and Vlad had achieved some sort of understanding—it seemed that if he asked the Easterner a question, he might get an answer. However, he realized, he wasn’t certain what, of all the things he wondered about, he ought to ask. Finally he said, “Have you really spent a great deal of time around Athyra nobles?”
“Not exactly, but I knew a Hawklord once who was very similar. And a drummer, for that matter.”
“Oh. Did you kill them, too?”
&n
bsp; Vlad’s head snapped up; then he chuckled slightly. “No,” he said, then added, “On the other hand, it came pretty close with both of them.”
“Why were they like Athyra?”
“What do you know of the House?”
“Well, His Lordship is one.”
“Yes. That’s what brought it to mind. You see, it is a matter of the philosophical and the practical; the mystical and the mundane.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I know that,” said Vlad, still staring out at the River Flats.
“Would you explain?”
“I’m not certain I can,” said Vlad. He glanced at Savn, then back out over the cliff. “There are many who are contemptuous of the intellectual process. But those who aren’t afraid of it sometimes discover that the further you go from the ordinary, day-to-day world, the more understanding you can achieve of it; and the more you understand of the world, the more you can act, instead of being acted upon. That,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “is exactly what witchcraft is about.”
“But you said before you ought to get involved, and now you’re saying you should stand apart.”
“Got me,” said Vlad, smiling.
Savn waited for him to continue. After a moment Vlad seated himself on the cliff.
“Not stand apart in actions,” he said. “I mean, don’t be afraid to form general conclusions, to try to find the laws that operate in the actions of history, and to—”
“I don’t understand.”
Vlad sighed. “You should try not to get me started.”
“But, about the Athyra . . .”
“Yes. There are two types of Athyra. Some are mystics, who attempt to explore the nature of the world by looking within themselves, and some are explorers, who look upon the world as a problem to be solved, and thus reduce other people to either distractions or pieces of a puzzle, and treat them accordingly.”
Savn considered this, and said, “The explorers sound dangerous.”
“They are. Not nearly as dangerous as the mystics, however.”
“Why is that?”
“Because explorers at least believe that others are real, if unimportant. To a mystic, that which dwells inside is the only reality.”
“I see.”
“Baron Smallcliff is a mystic.”
“Oh.”
Vlad stood abruptly, and Savn had an instant’s fear that he was going to throw himself off the cliff. Instead he took a breath and said, “He’s the worst kind of mystic. He can only see people as . . .” His voice trailed off. He looked at Savn, then looked away. For a moment, Savn thought he had detected such anger hidden in the Easterner that it would make one of Speaker’s rages seem like the pouting of a child.
In an effort to distract Vlad, Savn said, “What are you?”
It seemed to work, for Vlad chuckled slightly. “You mean am I a mystic or an explorer? I have been searching for the answer to that question for several years now. I haven’t found it, but I know that other people are real, and that is something.”
“I guess.”
“There was a time I didn’t know that.”
Savn wasn’t certain how to respond to this, so he said nothing.
After a moment, Vlad added, “And I listen to philosophers.”
“When you don’t kill them,” said Savn.
This time the Easterner laughed. “Even when I do, I still listen to them.”
“I understand,” said Savn.
Vlad looked at him suddenly. “Yes, I think that you do.”
“You sound surprised.”
“Sorry,” said Vlad. “You are, I don’t know, better educated than most of us from the city would have thought.”
“Oh. Well, I learned my ciphers and history and everything because I filled the bucket when I was twenty, so they—”
“Filled the bucket?”
“Don’t they have that in the city?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of it, at any rate.”
“Oh. Well, I hardly remember doing it. I mean, I was pretty young at the time. But they give you a bucket—”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“Mae and Pae and Speaker and Bless.”
“I see. Go on.”
“They give you a bucket, and tell you to go out into the woods, and when you come back, they see what’s in the bucket and decide whether you should be trained for apprenticeship.”
“And you had filled yours?”
“Oh, that’s just a term that means they said yes. I mean, if you come back with water, then Bless will try you out as a priest, and if you come back with sticks, then, well, I don’t really know how they tell, but they decide, and when I came back they decided I should be apprenticed to Master Wag.”
“Oh. What did you come back with?”
“An injured daythief.”
“Oh. That would account for it, I suppose. Still, I can’t help wondering how much of that is chance.”
“What do you mean?”
“How often a child picks up the first thing he sees, and ends up being a cobbler when he’d be better off as a weaver.”
“That doesn’t happen,” Savn explained.
Vlad looked at him. “It doesn’t?”
“No,” said Savn, feeling vaguely annoyed.
“How do you know?”
“Because . . . it just doesn’t.”
“Because that’s what you’ve always been told?”
Savn felt himself flushing, although he wasn’t certain why. “No, because that’s what the test is for.”
Vlad continued studying him. “Do you always just accept everything you’ve been told, without questioning it?”
“That’s a rude question,” said Savn without thinking about it.
Vlad seemed startled. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Some things,” said Savn, “you just know.”
Vlad frowned, and took a step away from the cliff. He clasped his hands behind his back and cocked his head slightly. “Do you?” he asked. “When you ‘just know’ something, Savn, that means it’s so locked into your head that you operate as if it were true, even when you find out it isn’t.” He knelt down so that he was facing Savn directly. “That isn’t necessarily a good idea.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You’re so convinced that your Baron Smallcliff is invincible and perfect that you’d stand there and let him kill you rather than raising a finger to defend yourself.”
“That’s different.”
“Is it?”
“You’re changing the subject. There are things that you know way deep down. You know they’re true, just because they have to be.”
“Do they?”
“Well, yes. I mean, how do you know that we’re really here? You just know.”
“I know some philosophers who would disagree with you,” said Vlad.
“The ones you killed?”
Vlad laughed. “Well taken,” he said. He stood and walked over to the cliff again, and stared out once more. Savn wondered what he was trying to find. “But sometimes,” continued the Easterner, “when it’s time to do something, it matters whether you know why you’re doing it.”
“What do you mean?”
Vlad frowned, which seemed to be his usual expression when he was trying to think of how to say something. “Sometimes you might get so mad that you hit someone, or so frightened you run, but you don’t really know why. Sometimes you know why you should do something, but it’s all in your head. You don’t really feel it, so you have trouble making yourself do it.”
Savn nodded. “I know what you mean. It’s like when I’ve been out late and Maener asks what I’ve been doing and I know I should tell her, but I don’t.”
“Right. It isn’t always easy to act on what’s in your head instead of what’s in your heart. And it isn’t always right to. The whole trick to knowing what to do is deciding when to make yourself listen to your head, and w
hen it’s okay to just follow your feelings.”
“So, how do you do it?”
Vlad shook his head. “I’ve been trying to figure that one out myself for the last few years, and I haven’t managed. But I can tell you that it works best when you understand why you feel a certain way, and to do that, sometimes you have to take things you know and question them. That’s one of the good things Athyra and philosophers do.”
“I see what you’re getting at,” said Savn slowly.
Vlad looked at him once more. “Yes? And?”
“Some things you just know.”
Vlad seemed about to say something, but evidently decided to let the matter drop. They fell silent, and Vlad went back to scanning the area below them.
After a while the Easterner said, “Who’s that lady wearing the green hat, talking to everyone in sight?”
“I don’t know her name, but she’s their priestess.”
“Of?”
“What do you mean, ‘of’? Oh, I see. Of Trout.”
“Hmmm. No help there.”
“No help for what?”
“Never mind. Do you, also, worship Trout?”
“Worship?”
“I mean, who do you pray to?”
“Pray?”
“Who is your god?”
“Bless seems to be on good terms with Naro, the Lady Who Sleeps, so that’s who he usually asks things of.”
Vlad nodded, then pointed once more. “Who is that fellow walking down toward the water?”
“I don’t remember his name. He makes soap and sells it.”
“Where does he sell it?”
“Just there, along the river. Most of them make their own, I think, the same as we do, so he doesn’t get much business except from those who are washing clothes and didn’t bring enough.”
“There’s nowhere else he sells it?”
“No, not that I’m aware of. Why?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“We don’t wash at the river; we have wells.”
“You wash in your wells?”
“No, no, we—”
“I was kidding.”
“Oh. We go to the river to swim sometimes, but only upstream of them. You can’t swim in the Upper Brownclay; it’s too cold and fast.”
“Who’s that, just going beneath the scatterbush?”
