Servant of the Dragon

by David Drake

  Cashel pushed the dancer away and stepped back himself. The sword was bent like a fishhook. It still hung from the mounting rings on Evlatun's belt, though most of the scabbard was in bits on the floor. Besra looked from Cashel to Evlatun with what for a change was an honest expression. Evlatun would likely have found it insulting if he hadn't had so much else to be insulted about already.

  "Master Reise's a neighbor of mine!" Cashel said to the spluttering Evlatun. Reise, the hamlet's innkeeper, was far too grand a person for an orphan like Cashel to call him a friend. "Don't you treat him that way!"

  Instead of speaking, Reise made another of those little furbelows, this time to Cashel. Everybody in the borough knew that Reise was smart. His awkwardness with physical labor had made him a joke, though, in a community where any eight-year-old could yoke oxen or mend a harness.

  Reise didn't seem awkward as palace chamberlain. He'd obviously come back where he belonged.

  "Besides," Cashel added as an afterthought, "he's Garric's father. Prince Garric, I mean."

  "You're joking," Kusha said. She and all the others were staring at the chamberlain. "Surely you're joking, Master Cashel."

  Reise surveyed the three nobles with a sardonic expression. It was hard to connect this self-assured official with Reise the Innkeeper, hen-pecked, vaguely comic, and sourly angry with his life in a hamlet of sheepfarmers.

  Of course, it was hard for Cashel to connect the simple shepherd he knew he was with the fellow who'd battled demons and beaten them... which Cashel had done also. Life was a lot more complicated than it had seemed when he was growing up in Barca's Hamlet.

  "I was amanuensis to Countess Tera of Haft," Reise said to Kusha. Besra was staring at Cashel again. The musicians were interested spectators of the whole business, pleased to be entertained instead of entertainers. As for Evlatun, he'd taken a good look at what was left of his sword and now had a frightened expression. Granted that the blade was a poor grade of steel, his muscles could never have bent it double.

  "The countess gave birth the night of the riots which cost her life," Reise continued calmly. "My wife and I saved the infant, Garric, and fostered him along with my wife's daughter Sharina. So yes, I did have the honor of fostering Prince Garric."

  "But you're a servant," said Lady Besra. Her wondering tone sounded like she was saying, "But you have three heads."

  "Prince Garric felt he needed someone trustworthy to run his household when... after King Valance adopted him," Reise said. His smile was as faint and cold as a curl of condensate on smooth gray stone. "He asked me to return to Valles, where I had at one time served in the palace; and of course I was duty bound to accept."

  Kusha was motionless except for blinking twice. It was like watching the inner lids flick across the eyes of a lizard waiting for prey to come within range of a quick lunge. When she'd put the pieces of what she'd just heard into their places, she said abruptly, "Come, you lot, quickly! Master Cashel has private business to transact!"

  Thrusting out her arms like a black-clad mantis, Kusha chivied the dancers and musicians through the ladies' suite ahead of her. The violinist bent to pick up his book of tunes picked out in shaped notes; he'd dropped it, likely in the commotion when Cashel was dealing with Evlatun. Kusha whacked the poor fellow with her fan and sent him off at a run. He'd have a welt for sure across the back of his thighs.

  Cashel felt a sudden flash of concern. "Ah, Sharina's all right, isn't she, Reise? Master Reise, I mean."

  "She was fine when I conducted a delegation to see her earlier this afternoon," Reise said as coolly as if he was only the chamberlain--not Sharina's father also. "She remarked that she was looking forward to seeing you when she'd heard the group out. They were landholders with concerns relating to taxation, as I understand it."

  He changed the subject by clearing his throat. "I'm here, however, to tell you that your uncle Katchin would like to speak with you."

  "My uncle?" Cashel said. He was as amazed as Lady Kusha had been when she learned who Reise really was. "Katchin the Miller wants to see me? What's he even doing in Valles?"

  "I suspect he's trying to gain a position in the new government," Reise said. He gave Cashel a dry smile. "That's only an assumption; your uncle and I didn't exchange confidences even when we were neighbors in Barca's Hamlet."

  Cashel nodded as he let the information sink in. The miller and the innkeeper were successful businessmen in a community where most everyone else depended on farming or sheep. Katchin was probably wealthier; certainly he spent more on personal show. He'd also become bailiff for the Count of Haft's interests in the borough--not that the count had many dealings in an out-of-the-way place like Barca's Hamlet. Katchin treated Reise as his rival.

  Reise hadn't seemed to give much thought to Katchin one way or the other. Seeing Reise here as palace chamberlain, Cashel could understand why: the difference between the top and the bottom of society in Barca's Hamlet was too slight to notice for a man who'd served in the royal palace when he was a youth.

  "And strictly speaking, your uncle didn't want to see you either, Master Cashel," Reise continued. "He asked to see Prince Garric, whom he chose to call 'my old friend Garric'. I wasn't about to allow that, of course; but when he asked for you as an alternative, I felt the blood relationship made it my duty to bring the matter to your attention."

  Reise seemed calm here. Back home--back in Barca's Hamlet--the innkeeper sizzled with frustration and an anger that rarely came to the surface. In another man it'd have been something the neighbors kept in mind. With Reise, though--well, everybody knew that if Reise started screaming and flailing about with his meat cleaver, he'd manage to trip on a wash kettle and knock himself silly before he hurt anybody.

  Funny how little you know about somebody you've known all your life. Funny how little you know about yourself even.

  Cashel grinned. "He didn't ask to see Ilna, then?" he said.

  Reise grinned back, about the first time Cashel had seen that expression on his face. "He did not," Reise said. "I'd have been glad to arrange that meeting, and I might well have waited to watch it develop."

  Katchin had treated his niece and nephew as poor relations; which they were, of course. Cashel didn't let most things bother him: he liked some people better than other people, but the ones he didn't like he just tried to avoid.

  Ilna had kept herself and her brother fed and clothed since their grandmother died when they were seven. They lived in the mill. Their father had sold his rights to the business to Katchin for enough money to keep him in ale and hard cider until the winter night he froze in a ditch, but use of half the building belonged to Cashel and Ilna under the terms of their grandfather's will. Ilna had the sharp mind to figure that out, and fingers which even as a child wove tighter, faster, and better than any other woman in the borough.

  She also had a tongue like a bradawl and no hesitation about using it on anyone she thought was acting like a fool. Katchin was a fool in a lot of ways, but not so great a fool that he'd ask Ilna for a favor.

  Cashel shrugged, sobering a little. "Sure, I'll talk to my uncle," he said. He guessed it was a duty, like checking the sheep each night for fly sores. "Where do I go?"

  Reise nodded. "He's waiting in the male servants' room," he said, turning his eyes toward the door from which he'd entered the salon. "I'll bring him in, or you can see him there--or see him anywhere you please, of course, sir."

  Cashel shook his head in amazement. Garric's father calling him sir. "I'll go there," he said, walking toward the door.

  He felt the air along his spine. He'd ripped his fancy tunic flexing his muscles during the fuss with Evlatun. Duzi! He didn't like to think how much something like that cost. He didn't even know who'd bought the garment in the first place.

  Cashel had been a little surprised that his uncle hadn't come bursting into the salon if he was so close by. When he entered the waiting room he saw why. Katchin was there, all right, red-faced and puffing; but with him
were two husky palace ushers carrying ebony staffs of office with silver knobs on either end. The rods weren't a patch on a proper quarterstaff like Cashel's, but they were surely enough to keep Katchin in his place.

  Here in the palace, Katchin's place was wherever the chamberlain said it was. No wonder the miller looked mad enough to chew rocks.

  "Good afternoon, uncle," Cashel said. "I wasn't expecting to see you here."

  And Duzi knew, that wasn't half the truth.

  There were benches built into three of the room's four walls. In the center was a table; markings for the game of Bandits were inlaid into the top in light-colored wood. The stone counter along the fourth wall was for refreshments and had a hole at one end to support a wine jar. Even the servants did themselves well at palace parties, it seemed.

  Katchin twisted his mouth into a smile. He had a flowing moustache, maybe to make up for the way the hair on his head had thinned to a speckly band above his ears on either side. He ate too much and drank too much; it showed in his face, his belly and most of all in the way the flesh of his fingers puffed up around the rings he wore on every finger.

  "Well, my boy, you must have known I'd come as soon as I heard you and our Garric needed help!" Katchin said.

  "Master Cashel?" said Reise in a voice as dry as a salt-cured ham. "I'll leave the ushers at the outer door. They'll guide your visitor to wherever you tell them at the end of your interview."

  He bowed--to Cashel, not to Katchin--and stepped through a back doorway, drawing the ushers with him. One of them winked at Cashel as he left.

  Cashel surveyed his uncle. Katchin's clothing was brand new: layered tunics, the outer one striped beige and maroon crossways; a sash of gold brocade from which hung a sword that was even more of a toy than the one Cashel had just bent double; and on his head, a peaked cap with a swan's feather dyed a sort of muddy purple. Katchin looked like a juggler come to the Sheep Fair, though Cashel knew the rig-out must have cost the price of a farm in the borough.

  "I'm sorry you did that, uncle," Cashel said. "Garric hasn't said he needs your help, and I surely don't. You'd be happier back home, I guess."

  "I can't believe I'd hear ingratitude from the child I raised!" Katchin said. He probably meant it, too. Katchin didn't exactly lie, but he managed to remember events in whatever way served him best. "Prince Garric needs trusted men to help him govern. I came to him as soon as I heard his need."

  Cashel shook his head sadly. Katchin was such a little man. Cashel had never noticed it before. The bluster had made Katchin seem larger in Barca's Hamlet. Here he was just a buffoon come to the city from some sheepwalk nobody in Valles had ever heard of.

  "Uncle," Cashel said, "you ought to go home. If you won't do that, at least get rid of those silly clothes. Put on a clean wool tunic and be yourself, not a joke for the palace servants to laugh at. You saw how the ushers looked at you."

  Katchin's face went dark with a rage he couldn't swallow down. "And who are you, beggar boy, to lecture on fashion to Count Lascarg's bailiff?" he shouted.

  "I never begged," Cashel said. He didn't get angry over words, and those particular words were too foolish to get angry over anyway. "And as for what I know of fashion, well, I don't guess I could live with Ilna all these years and not know something. Merchants came all the way from Valles to buy the cloth she wove, you know."

  Katchin's moustache fluffed with the force of his breathing. He'd break something inside if he wasn't careful. "Look, Cashel, my boy," he said in forced jollity. "Just take me to see our Garric and he'll understand what he's being offered. You're a strong, honest lad, but this is a business beyond your understanding."

  Cashel smiled. "I guess you're right, uncle," he said. "But that's why you shouldn't have come to me. Garric has people to tell him who he's going to see. I don't know enough to go against what they decide."

  He gestured to the door. "Go back home, Katchin," he said. It embarrassed Cashel to say things that shouldn't have to be said at all. "You'll like being a big fish in Barca's Hamlet better than you will being bait in Valles."

  Katchin's mouth opened and closed, but fury choked his words for several moments. Finally he said, his voice breaking, "And I suppose you belong here, Cashel the Shepherd?"

  "I belong wherever Sharina is, uncle," Cashel said. A year ago he'd have been tense as a chain on a heavy drag if he'd had to talk about this sort of thing. "I guess I always did. It's just that now I know it."

  He gestured toward the door again with a scooping motion, as though he was shooing a puppy out from where it didn't belong. Choking on bile, Katchin obeyed.

  Cashel smiled at the thought he'd just had: he knew he belonged with Sharina; and Sharina knew she belonged with him, too.

  Sharina's meeting with the delegation of Western Region landholders had been moving along at approximately the speed of mortar setting on a humid day. Watching mortar set would have been a good deal more interesting.

  "It's not that the assessor sent to my parish is a bad lad," the delegate now holding the floor said. Sharina had tried to memorize their names, but she just couldn't: she was tired, sick and tired, and they were all the same. It was like trying to make individuals out of twelve peas. "He doesn't understand us, is all. Why, it's hard for us to understand him with that twang of his, not that I have any quarrel with him being a Northerner born and bred."

  A hummingbird whistled by, pausing to drink from the trumpet-shaped scarlet flower of a lotus. Another hummingbird whirred toward the first. The pair disappeared deeper into the gardens, chittering angrily at one another.

  The delegation in the tiled gazebo consisted of eleven men and one woman--a representative of each parish of the three western counties of Ornifal. They wore high-laced boots and tunics with ribbon ties down the front so that the lower half could be cinched into breeches when work required it. The delegates were substantial people in every sense--physically, they were built like so many treestumps topped with gray moss--but the Western Region was a patchwork of smallholdings unlike the great estates of northern Ornifal. All the delegates had guided a plow themselves at some time in their lives, and most of them probably still lent a hand during the furious demands of the harvest.

  The parishes of the Western Region were similar to the borough on the east coast of Haft where Sharina grew up, in fact. She could understand their concerns better than they themselves probably imagined.

  The trouble was, the twelve of them individually were so like Katchin the Miller that he could have sat at the end of the row and no one would find him out of place. Puffed up little people full of personal pride, with a vision as parochially narrow as that of the most mincing dandy among the palace courtiers.

  A different parochial vision, of course.

  "Just the same for us!" said the delegate from one of the coastal parishes: he had a rhomboid representing a turbot worked in silver thread onto the breast of his tunic, and a similar pin on his velvet cap. "'Where do I buy peat for my cook-fire?' he asked me. Peat! And when I said we burn wood here, he looked at me as if I were mad! 'You can afford wood to burn, here?' he said, and I could just see the silver eagles tumbling around in his mind!"

  "Just the same!" echoed other delegates like the chorus of a play. Three then started to tell their own detailed version of the injustice of having outsiders sent into their parishes to assess the taxes.

  Eight of those present had had their say thus far in the afternoon. The speeches could have been interchanged or even intercut sentence by sentence without making any real difference. It all boiled down to, 'Outsiders don't know how we do things here in the West.'

  A clerk brought down from an estate in the north whose waterlogged soil didn't support trees might very well be surprised that heat for homes and food came from dead limbs rather than bricks of peat cut from the bogs and dried under shelters. That didn't mean he wouldn't adapt to the new circumstances: tax assessments were made on the local value of produce, not what the produce might have brou
ght if it were transported somewhere else to be sold.

  The real problem--and the one that the delegates speaking so earnestly to Sharina, making broad flourishes with their arms to emphasize their points, had no intention of raising--was that because Garric's new assessors were from outside the local power structure, they were working for the government in Valles instead of on behalf of themselves and their cronies. Oh, they could be bribed--they were human, after all, and could be expected to have human failings. But district supervisors kept an eye on the assessors, comparing individual revenues against those of similar parishes under different men.

  Besides, it isn't nearly as easy to bribe a stranger as it is a man you've known all your life. Like any other criminal conspiracy, bribery requires that the parties trust one another. How do you trust a fellow with a funny accent and weird ideas about food?

  There was a faint chime from the nympheum in the center of the palace grounds, where the giant waterclock stood. A bronze bowl had flipped on its axis, spilling into the pool the water that had filled it drop by drop. The servant watching it struck a tuned rod. Other servants waiting at crosswalks throughout the grounds called, "The fifth hour has sounded!" their voices seeming to echo as those farther away took their cue from the ones nearest to the nympheum.

  Sharina rose to her feet. The three delegates who were speaking simultaneously fell silent, though with nervous looks at one another. They were afraid--rightly--that Lady Sharina intended to end the audience before they'd had time to say everything they wanted. Sharina had learned from months of listening to similar representations that the thing all the delegates wanted most was a chance to hear their own voices. More than a reduction in taxes, more than better roads, more than a restoration of local tolls which they'd been pocketing to the detriment of trade and communication through their bailiwick....

  "Mistress and masters," Sharina said, nodding to the woman and then to the eleven male representatives in a general sweep of her head. "During the past three hours, I have listened to your concerns. I sympathize with you, and I'll discuss what you've said with the officials in whose charge these matters lie."