Not yet.
He began to understand what the older kailinin meant when they warned their younger comrades against becoming friends with anyone of an age to still go into battle. More certain than drink or women, that was the surest way to lose a friend. It explained why the senior warriors seemed somewhat distant, and why they never warmed to anyone whether blood-clan, family or merely allies of the House. The habits of a long, friendless maturity had become impossible to break so late in life. He gulped as the grief thickened in his throat, and tried to swallow what could not be swallowed. Marc ar’Dru had never known before that there were other pains than those of wounds, other aches than those of a long day in the saddle, and he did not know how to cure what was hurting now.
At least Bayrd was out of pain. It would have been ghastly beyond imagining if he had suffered such a wound as this and not died of it quickly, for no surgeon of the Alban people, and none of any other country that Marc knew, could do anything to patch up such a wound as must lie within the armour. If the great rip in the tsalaer bore true witness, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn had been all but cut in two – and the only healer left to him would have been the small red dagger riding at his belt. Putting the tsepan to its proper use was the responsibility of the first man to find him. That man would have been Marc ar’Dru, and Marc didn’t know if he could have done it.
Yesterday he hadn’t known if he could ever kill another man at all, but when that other man had an axe and no such qualms concerning him, then loosing the arrow or thrusting the spear came easier. But to do that to a friend, even a friend in agony?
No…
Now that the need for it was past, he reached out for the tsepan anyway. It would be a keepsake, something for House ar’Dru to remember its friend by – because Marc didn’t want to remember him like this, lying here like a lobster cracked open by a clumsy cook. He would go back to the camp and send out a House retainer to straighten Bayrd’s limbs, wash the blood away, and make the body look presentable. Then he and Mevn would come out together and bring Bayrd home with more respect and honour than he might receive from his own clan.
The tsepan was tightly buckled to the weapon-belt, so tightly that tugging wouldn’t move it, and even though Marc didn’t want to go any closer to the horrid gap in Bayrd’s side, he forced himself to stoop and start picking at the straps.
“Not…yet.” The sound of a voice where no other voice should have been cost Marc his balance, almost his senses, and for a few heart-stopping seconds seemed to have his sanity already.
“I don’t…don’t need that…courtesy. Not…just yet.”
It was Bayrd without a doubt, though the voice was weak and hoarse. Marc scrambled backwards on hands and heels, and when he clambered hastily to his feet his sword was out already. Ugly legends filled his mind, tales to frighten children after dark; stories of the traugarin, the walking corpses. He had loved such stories when he was a child, even though they kept him wide awake and trembling late into the night and turned his dreams to nightmares when he slept. But they had been just stories.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
“Water…” said Bayrd.
“What?”
“Thirsty… I’m very thirsty.”
To his credit, Marc steadied up enough to put his sword away and fetch the waterbottle he could see on Yarak’s saddle. But he still shuddered when he saw that it too was spattered with great drops of still-wet blood. When he came back, Bayrd was fumbling with the fastenings of his helmet, almost fighting with them, such was his haste to be out of it. When the warmask came free, Marc could see that Bayrd’s face had an unhealthy grey pallor; but it was not the face of a corpse. He had looked at enough of those already today, to know the difference when he saw it. A little colour was already seeping back around Bayrd’s mouth and below his shadowed eyes, and in any case, Marc doubted any corpse could swear like that.
“May he wander cold through the Nine Hot Hells,” ar’Talvlyn muttered, swigging more water and spitting it out as if clearing a foul taste from his mouth. The foul taste, Marc saw, had stained the water rusty brown, but his voice was already stronger than it had been. “The bastard came right out of nowhere! Mad sort of way to attack, if you ask me.”
Marc did not ask. He could think of very little that he wanted to say right now.
“I would have had him too, if he hadn’t scared the horse…”
“Had him? Had who…? Bayrd-ain, what are you talking about.” And he too must be feeling better, Marc reflected soberly, if he was already snapping at the friend whose death he had so recently been mourning.
“The wonder of it is that I’m talking at all.” Bayrd took a long, long drink, then poured some water into his cupped hand and scrubbed it onto his face and neck. “God, that’s better. Him. The one with the axe. Over – ow!” He raised one arm to point over to the left, but winced and cut the gesture short. Marc followed the line of his arm, but saw nothing. This was the place where the first rank of Alban horsemen had broken through, at such a speed that they had ridden on a little way before they turned. There was nothing to see except the feathered shafts of expended arrows and a few hoof-prints, his and Bayrd’s horse, Bayrd himself – and of course, the blood.
He almost demanded to know what game was being played, but held his tongue. There was something about Bayrd’s mood that suggested such a question would not be taken kindly; any more than, after this afternoon, the suggestion of playing the Prytenek game and treating war as sport would have been greeted with anything but contempt by an Alban clan-lord. Bayrd was looking at him, staring at him as if he was trying to read what Marc was thinking, and defying him to put what was on his mind into words. Bayrd had always been what Mevn called a great ‘looker’, putting more into a long moment’s silent consideration than many people gained from a quarter-hour of chatter; and what with the bright grey eyes in the pallid grey face, the intensity of that stare was disturbing.
“I mustn’t have hit him as hard as I thought,” he said decisively. “Obviously he got away. I’m lucky he didn’t come back and cut my throat.”
Marc raised one finger – wait one minute – and walked off to fetch his own horse. Two members of his Ten began to ride slowly towards him, but he waved them away. “Everything’s all right!” he shouted. “I’ll deal with things here. Just get yourselves out to the crest of yonder hills and establish a picket-line before this happens all over again!”
He hoped that they would attribute the shakiness of his voice to after-battle nerves – but even if they didn’t, it was his place to issue orders and theirs to obey them. Both warriors raised their arms in salute, then wheeled about and cantered away again. Marc ar’Dru watched them out of sight before he took another step.
* * * *
When Marc came back, he was leading his horse by the reins and walking rather more slowly than seemed necessary. Bayrd was sitting upright with one leg curled beneath him, leaning on the other knee. His tsalaer was off, its four lamellar panels on the ground beside him, and his mailshirt was no more than a collapsed heap of interlocked steel rings, surprisingly small and just as surprisingly heavy for its size. He glanced up at the sound of Marc’s approach, as if expecting the younger man to say something.
He did not. There was a frown notched between his eyebrows and a look of intense concentration about him, as if he had been thinking hard all the way to his horse and even harder all the way back; and now he had decided to keep quiet until the subject changed to one he knew.
As if the present matter was a subject Bayrd ar’Talvlyn was familiar with. He leaned sideways very slowly, his breath catching in little gasps of – not pain any more, just discomfort; sharp, annoying stabs up under the ribs, like a stitch brought on by running too hard. As he leaned over, a slash torn through the tunic of his leathers yawned wide, then wider still. The shirt beneath was similarly ripped, but the skin under all was totally unharmed. Bayrd ran nervously probing fingers from just above his navel around to the small of h
is back, and felt nothing wrong. Yet he had seen – or thought he had seen…
That was ridiculous. He couldn’t have imagined something which hadn’t even grazed him and yet had done that to his armour and clothing. And then there was the blood. It had come from somewhere, and from the lassitude and the occasional spells of giddiness, it must have come from him.
It was what had happened afterwards that he would have like to witness, but all his senses had been swamped by the shock of that one axe-blow. Smell and taste had both been clogged with the metallic saltiness of blood; he had felt nothing after the first thud of the ground against his back; all he could remember hearing was the thud of his own heart; and the blue-white flare as the sun fell from the sky had taken effective care of eyesight. Something had shut him in a cage whose walls were his own perceptions, and had kept him imprisoned there until it had done – what…?
The what was easy, and the how he felt uncomfortably close to understanding; but the why was more of a mystery than all the other questions put together.
“We have to talk,” said Marc at last.
“About my fortunate escape?”
“Save that excuse for those who don’t know you as well as I do. That…that was no ‘fortunate escape’, at least not unless you look at fortune – good or bad – in a very different way than I do. And I know that you don’t.” He looked at Bayrd, then bent down to the mailshirt and rummaged amongst the jumbled links until he found where the shoulders began. With a slight effort he lifted it and let it hang there while he studied the long, slightly curving gash that ran from almost centre front to almost centre back. Then he straightened the tsalaer and looked at where the scales had given way; plucked at a piece of lacing and examined how both the heavy, braided silk and the leather thongs had both been cleanly severed by a sharp cutting edge. Finally he walked right around Bayrd, staring at him the whole time.
“You didn’t escape anything,” he said. “You were dead – or at least you should have been. Bayrd-ain, my good friend, before someone with the authority to twist the information out of you asks it, tell me. What is going on?”
Bayrd rubbed at his side again, still not able to believe what his fingers told him: that the skin was whole, that there was no enormous wound, no blood, no pain. That he was alive and completely untouched. There wasn’t even a scar. “I think,” he began – then hesitated, considering and discarding one phrase after another until only the blunt truth remained. “I think that I’m a sorcerer.”
“You’re a… No. Not you. Not an ar’Talvlyn. Tell me the truth.”
“That is the truth. I think. Because I can’t think of any other explanation.”
“But you’re—”
“A warrior, yes. An Alban, yes. Of kailin rank, yes. And not dead when I should be. So what else should I be, or not be, that would rule against it?”
“But you have to study books, learn spells, do all sorts of—”
“This is sorcery, Marc. Not the Art Magic.” It was a weighty sort of declaration, but Bayrd tried to speak the words as he could best remember Hospodar Skarpeya speaking them to him.
“Is there a difference?”
“Apparently there is. You can choose to be a wizard: study the Art Magic, become expert at it, read the books, speak the spells, draw the circles… But for sorcery, you have to have the Talent. And if you have the Talent, then sorcery will find you. It seems I have the Talent.”
“But why now? Why here?”
“Father of Fires in the Pit!” Bayrd slammed his fist angrily into the ground beside him. “If I knew that, don’t you think I’d tell you? Don’t you think I’d feel a great deal happier than I do? It’s happened. That’s all I know. It’s a part of me. As much a part, as impossible to lose as…as…” He held his left hand open between them, fingers spread wide. “As much a part of me as this, and just as hard to lose. Harder. I can at least cut the hand off.”
“So what, er…” Marc squatted down on his haunches, picked up a twig and began to draw complicated abstract patterns on an area of exposed sandy soil between the tussocks of coarse grass, “What can you do…?”
“Not die of fatal wounds,” said Bayrd flatly. “That’s an impressive enough trick to start with.”
“But this, this difference between sorcery and magic. Where did you hear about that? How did you hear about it? Who told you? Not an Alban, surely?”
“I shouldn’t think so, no. It was Skarpeya.”
That name produced more of a reaction than any of Bayrd’s own revelations, so much so that he wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or irritated by it.
“Skarpeya? You mean—”
“I mean Skarpeya. The Hospodar at King Daykin’s court in Kalitzim. Unless you know any other Skarpeyas I might have met?” It was a pointless sarcasm, and Bayrd regretted it at once.
“But he was a wizard. Albans don’t speak to—”
“He still is a wizard, to the best of my knowledge. But he’s also a very good judge of horseflesh, and we spoke far more about that. Your Ten were drilling while we talked. He was greatly impressed.”
“Avert!” said Marc hastily, making the sign to do so. “Save us from the praises of such as that one!”
“From such as me, as well? Your Captain-of-One-Thousand?”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“No? The difference is hard to see. Marc-ain, I can still be your friend. Yours – and Mevn’s. Or I can be no more than your commander. The three of us have known each other long enough for… No, dammit. I outrank you, but I won’t order you, or guide you. The choice is yours, my friend. Say the word.”
Marc looked at him for a long time in silence before he spoke, and when he did so at last it was in the awkward formal speech of Old High Alban; a language made more uncomfortable still in Bayrd’s ears by its similarity to the language of Lord Gelert of Prytenon.
“Bayrd-an Talvalin,” he said, “you have been friend to House ar’Dru these four years past, and as the Chosen Son of House ar’Dru I speak for all. Whether you should grow away from us or rise above us or be made different in ways we cannot know, you are still friend to House ar’Dru – until you choose to have the friendship end. I speak it for my father, and for all my kin, but most especially I speak for my sister Mevn who was dear to you.”
Bayrd bowed, just slightly; a token of esteem between equals, and between friends. “And is dear still,” he said.
* * * *
The swirling, vicious little battle was over; to a certain extent Bayrd’s uncomfortable secrecy was over; and when they returned to the camp it seemed that the duel was over too. The red and white ar’Diskan banners had been lowered from where they had fluttered so possessively above a stretch of empty beach, and now formed the canopy above a bed. On the bed, still in his armour, lay Lord Serej ar’Diskan, and it was a bed he would never leave again.
“My father died an hour ago,” said Gerin ar’Diskan, a man stocky and dark-visaged as his father but who, even despite his loss, appeared a good deal more cheerful. Perhaps, thought Bayrd unworthily, because his long black hair had newly been bound up in the three braids. “I am the clan-lord now.” Marc and Bayrd would have climbed immediately from their horses to give him proper obeisance, but he waved them back to their saddles. “There will be enough time for that nonsense later,” he said.
Bayrd ar’Talvlyn felt a small thrill of astonishment at the casual use of that word. This was Serej’s Chosen Son, the one picked out to succeed him, and already he seemed a much more reasonable person than his father. But then, anyone would seem more reasonable than Lord Serej ar’Diskan.
“The duel this morning,” said Lord Gerin, “was a personal affair between my father and yourself, yes?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Our two clans were not involved?”
“No, my lord. Words were exchanged between your lord father and myself, and, well, he was a hot-tempered man and…”
“I know well enough,” said Gerin. �
�But since it is ill-omened to speak ill of the dead, we will speak no more at all on this matter. Although” – and again Bayrd was surprised, this time by the brief, sardonic smile which flickered across Gerin ar’Diskan’s face – “no law yet passed can enforce the way we think. Unless you intend to continue, in which case I shall name a principal from among my lord father’s personal retainers, then I declare the duel and the cause of quarrel null and void.”
“No need to continue, my lord ar’Diskan. Your lord father is dead, and the grudge between us died with him. I salute his memory sincerely, as a clan-lord of Alba, and I say only that there are now other enemies for Alban warriors to fight besides each other.”
“That was spoken like a gentleman,” said Gerin. “Indeed,” and he smiled again, “it was spoken more like a gentleman than many gentlemen of my acquaintance. Though most of those are – were – my father’s friends.”
That small correction told Bayrd enough. “To give your own words back to you, my lord: it is an ill thing to speak ill of the dead, by direct words or by implication, and it brings no honour to the speaker.”
“Then keep your honour, Bayrd ar’Talvlyn. Or add to it.”
“My lord?”
“As you say yourself, we have more enemies to fight than one another. But as you have already seen…” Gerin ar’Diskan didn’t bother to finish the sentence. It was too obvious for words. “If Lord Guelerd leaves us alone for long enough, we will do to ourselves what he cannot, and probably do it better, unless we make more lasting alliances between the clans and families.”
“Alliances, my lord?” Bayrd was caught slightly off-balance by the apparent change of subject, because Gerin was suggesting nothing new – unless, that is, he meant -
“Alliances in the past have been between partners of equal rank,” said Gerin, ilauem-arluth and Clan-Lord ar’Diskan, deliberately pitching his voice loud enough for everyone to hear. “I propose an alliance of blood and honour between the clans ar’Diskan and ar’Talvlyn.” When the murmur of astonishment died down he turned to the only member of clan ar’Talvlyn present. “Do you agree, Bayrd-eir?”
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