Stillbright

by Daniel M Ford

  Without thinking about it, without speaking, they closed around the altar, hands reaching for it. It was a rough, three-legged thing of stone, no higher than Allystaire’s knees, no wider across than his forearm.

  Allystaire’s thoughts were drawn to the Goddess, to the tests he had passed, from following the pyre of Thornhurst’s villagers out of his own high country, to tracking the reavers and bringing them to account in blood. He thought of his honesty at the Assize, his decision to speak truth and be damned for it, giving the reaver widow a small fortune and seeing her away from Windspar’s reprisals. He thought of the times, few though they were, that he had been in the Goddess’s presence, his own Ordination, Idgen Marte’s, the raising of the altar, Torvul’s Ordination, Gideon’s. He thought of the music that accompanied Her, the burning thrill of Her touch, the power of Her kiss.

  He heard and felt the music of the day before, but not simply a harmony of notes, some kind of dazzling, powerful music he hadn’t words for. Allystaire found himself moving to the side, found Mol slipping underneath his arm to stand beside him, saw and heard the others moving as well—but none ever lifting their hand from the altar.

  There was a sound, a great crack, the altar suddenly sprang upwards beneath his hand; he felt it smoothing out and widening, the rough surface taking on the slick patina, not of marble, but of stone lovingly crafted, smoothed and sanded over countless turns. It reached well above his waist when it stopped rising, and it had expanded. No longer a block of stone, but a ring, an oval, supported by five smooth columns as thick as his arm. Mol stood at the center with her back to the door of the Temple, he to her left, and Idgen Marte on her right. He looked up and saw he was opposite Gideon, and Torvul was opposite Idgen Marte.

  The music climaxed in his mind, a note shaped and sustained by the things that they were and had been and would be: five people, broken and scarred in their own ways, inside and out, granted powers from the boundless well of compassion, love, and strength of a being he could not hope to comprehend. The Voice, the Arm, the Will, the Wit, and the Shadow; arrayed like this, he knew that it made sense. To a congregation, the Voice would be front and center and the Arm at her right, the Shadow at her left hand. The Will was behind him, the Wit behind the Shadow.

  Allystaire felt symbols appear on the smooth stone that now was a ring of red and gold, the colors of the sun. His fingers traced the outline of a carving. He stepped back and peered closely: a hammer. A fairly simple sledge, roughly like the one he carried, but not unlike a craftsman’s tool for the shaping of metal or joining of wood, he thought. When he looked up, he saw that the others were examining similar carvings spread around.

  Allystaire was about to open his mouth to speak when he heard Mol speak. “No use for all tha’ quiet,” she said. “Tell me what all o’ya see.”

  “An eye. Wide and open,” Torvul rumbled.

  “Cloud, I think.” Idgen Marte’s voice was slightly detached.

  Gideon paused, his brow furrowed. “An open palm. Yet if I turn my head, a sunburst. And if I turn my head again…” He turned to Mol. “A flame.”

  Mol smiled, and to Allystaire it was not the simple joyous expression of the girl he thought he’d known. Altogether too knowing, he thought. “That is as I expected,” she finally said, after wetting her lips. “They are symbols of what we are—and we will be different things to different folk. Even to ourselves.”

  “A hammer,” Allystaire said, even as he bent his neck to left and right, trying to see a different shape, a different sign. He glanced at the others, and shrugged. “Still a hammer.”

  “You told me once you weren’t a subtle man,” Idgen Marte jabbed, grinning. Then, with a softer smile, “But you also told me that a hammer can create as well as destroy. That it is a tool in a way a sword can never be. I think She knows that, Allystaire. As much as any of us can claim to have created all of this, you can.”

  Allystaire felt Mol’s hand slip into his. “The Shadow is right. Another man looking at this altar may see a clenched fist, or a gauntlet. Or at the Pillar of the Wit, mayhap a mountain, or a stream. The sign will mean what the supplicant needs it to mean.”

  Allystaire furrowed his brow. “Where did you learn a word like supplicant, Mol?”

  The girl smiled knowingly. “She has been teaching me. And many of the visitors have had books with them.” Then her smile dissolved into the slightly gap-toothed one he had come to know, she tugged her hand free and went to Idgen Marte, her bare feet all but soundless on the wooden floor. Mol took the warrior’s hand and then leaned against her hip, while Idgen Marte’s arm curled around her shoulder. They held the pose for a moment before Mol broke away and her face turned serious again, her childish grin transforming into an ageless-seeming wisdom.

  She didn’t say anything else. She simply knelt in front of her Pillar of the Voice and closed her eyes. Allystaire found himself doing the same. Around him, he could hear the rustling of clothing and the click of boots against wood as the others knelt. The planks were hard on his knees, but kneeling brought the hammer to his eye level, and he let his gaze unfocus as he stared in contemplation. He wondered what had brought the hammer to his hand in the first place, thought back more than a score of years to his teachers, his earliest times on campaign.

  Ladislas. Lord Harding. He first suggested the warhammer to me—but he meant a spiked hammer with a small head. Never felt right. He was no longer staring at the altar, or even seeing it. Instead he was looking, as if from a great height, upon all the battlefields of his past, all at once, and seeing all the blood that had been spilled in the wars both great and small that had consumed the baronies for a generation or more, back to the death of the last Rhidalish King, whose name he couldn’t even recall.

  My family was made by that war, and undone by those that followed. How many other families undone by this?

  No longer did he see a battlefield. Despite his tightly shut eyes, Allystaire believed that he saw his hands, and that they were the color of blood.

  For the first time since he’d left his home with equally vague senses of dread and guilt hounding his heels, he thought about the cost of everything he had done before the Goddess had found him.

  I had my rules, Allystaire told himself. I hung the rapists and the murderers. But the feebleness of his defense came to him in a flash. Yet villages still burned in my wake, and I made as many widows and orphans as any other man alive. I did what I was brought up to do, and what I taught hundreds of other men to do—kill. That I tried to make it cleaner, somehow, or that I spoke of knightly ideals to the youth in my charge does not console a single widow.

  Why me, Mother? Why? Allystaire had not allowed himself to ask that question since his Ordination. There’d be no time, no peace and quiet to reflect in, always too much to do. But now he could not avoid it.

  You know why, Allystaire, came Her voice, ringing clear and unmistakable in his mind, shaking his entire body with its majesty. I told you why. Cut adrift from the life that had been made for you, you risked everything you had, everything you were, to save the girl whose very cries had awakened me from my long slumber, and then you risked your life to save her kith and kin. All of the knights of this world make widows and orphans, my Allystaire—you realized at long last that you cared what became of them.

  Allystaire remembered, then, the fishwife he had carted off to the docks. The anger that had been coursing through him after the way Braech’s power had pressed down upon him at the Assize, turning into a fury that he’d wanted to unleash on the panders he saw working the quays.

  I was with you even before then, Allystaire, the Goddess went on. I spoke to you through my Voice, I guided and prodded you. There were so many times you could have failed, turned away, or given up, and yet, with no hope of reward save the goodness of the deed itself, you persevered. That, to use your own word, was knightly.

  Allystaire nodded, and fe
lt her presence begin to recede and the physical surroundings of the Temple coalesced around him once more. His knees ached and his hands were white knuckled and shaking from the force with which he pressed them into one another.

  He pulled himself up with one hand on the edge of the altar, knees creaking in protest. Around him, the others began to do the same, though all but Torvul hopped much more nimbly to their feet than he had.

  Allystaire stole glances at their faces. Mol’s was as unreadable as it had been before. Idgen Marte looked determined, somehow. She always does, he thought. Only Gideon, pale and rubbing at his eyes with his fingertips, seemed to show the same kind of disquiet.

  With a couple of steps, he was at the boy’s side, laying a hand on his thin shoulder. Allystaire said nothing, but Gideon spoke quietly.

  “I wondered what I might have become had I not helped you,” he murmured. “And that is what I saw. Some of it. And some of what I might do, even now, in Her service. It frightened me,” he admitted. “Her own Gift frightens me.”

  “As it should,” Allystaire said, quietly. “The only man fit to wield power is the one who is frightened by its consequences.”

  After considering this a moment, the boy said, “Then how will we know when to employ our Gifts?”

  “When it benefits someone else.”

  “That is too simple,” the boy complained. “What if it is a matter of saving two lives at the expense of one? That benefits others, yes, but it also condemns another.”

  “That’s faulty logic,” Torvul put in, having drifted over. “You’d not be the one doing the condemning.”

  “You will know when it is time to act,” Mol said, her eyes still focused on her pillar. “You will know when it is time to employ the Goddess’s Gifts. And if you fear that you won’t, look at the people She has provided to teach you.” The girl swept her hand over Allystaire, Torvul, and Idgen Marte.

  Allystaire squeezed Gideon’s shoulder then looked up towards the windows letting in the light of the risen sun. He frowned. “How long—”

  “Two turns or so,” Mol said. “Probably best to spend some time thinking about what we’ll do when the folk come for noon service.” She looked to Allystaire then, lifting her eyebrows.

  “I need time to think about what She showed me,” Allystaire replied. “I need to understand what it meant and how to…” He stopped and shook his head. “No. I know what it meant.” He looked from his companions to the altar, and said, “We have to put an end to the war.”

  Chapter 17

  A Task is Begun

  That declaration was met with a profound and extended silence that was finally broken by Torvul. “There are five of us, and more than twice that many Barons and their hosts, unless you people have misplaced one. Or more. And we’re to put an end to all their fighting? How d’ya propose we do that, exactly?”

  Allystaire shrugged. “I do not know. I cannot know how, not yet. But think, Torvul—think of what the lives of these people have become. They look old and die young, but probably outlive their sons. If their farms or homes are not destroyed in any given season of campaign, they are more than likely to face starvation in the form of taxes to pay for the next season. It has become the dominant fact of life in the baronies. A whole generation has grown up never knowing peace. It must end.”

  “That’s a noble goal,” Idgen Marte said. “But—”

  “What were we brought together for, if not noble ends?” Allystaire asked, more fiercely than he meant to. “What greater service could we render our people than to give them peace? Make no mistake,” he went on, seizing the moment, as the rest seemed a bit stunned by his sudden intensity, “this is not something we can do in a day, or even a year. It may be our undoing. Yet how can we not try? How could I not try, and call myself a paladin?”

  Torvul groaned, and Idgen Marte sighed—yet Mol was beaming her smile at him, and Gideon was as thoughtful as always.

  “Tell me it is impossible,” Allystaire said. “Fine. So is the altar we stand at, raised out of a pile of small stones into this.” He ended with a flourish at the red and gold, five-pillared oval before them.

  “We start where we can,” he said, turning towards the doors, and the large, round window above them. “Here. From this day, these wars, the Succession Strife, are over for the people of Thornhurst, and any that seek honest refuge here. If anyone carries the war to us, I will hurl it back at them till they lose their taste for it.”

  “It’s just a farming village, Ally,” Idgen Marte started.

  “And Londray was just a fishing village once, and Wind’s Jaw was just a wooden bailey. There is a warband outside, a Cold-damned good one, who will do anything I ask. With them, forty men who know how to work a shovel, and you,” he added, pointing to Torvul, “in a month, I can erect defenses that will turn any hireling band away. In three, I can give a small army pause. A year? I could find a way to break all Delondeur’s gathered strength.”

  “You know you won’t get a year, boy,” Torvul rumbled, though his hand was thoughtfully stroking his chin. “Never. Word is out. Ya’ve seen t’that.”

  “We do not need to make it a year. We need only repel an attacker once. And then when word spreads that there is a haven, and that those who are done with war will be protected?”

  “They will flock,” Mol said. “To Thornhurst, and to the Mother.”

  “They’re going to be flockin’ outside the doors soon,” Idgen Marte replied. “You said they’d come with petitions, questions?”

  “Aye,” Mol said. “I have done the best I can in that regard, and the folk generally abide my authority. Yet there are some matters that need Allystaire’s attention. Or Torvul and Gideon’s.”

  “What kind of matters?”

  Mol raised her hands, palms up. “Folk accused of theft, a stolen beehive, a dispute over land—”

  “A beehive? Can a man steal a beehive?” Allystaire’s eyes narrowed in dismayed confusion.

  “And they want him judgin’ them,” Torvul chuckled. “Course you can, if you know what you’re after. With proper plannin’ a man, or more likely a dwarf, can steal just about anything.” Then, he suddenly turned to the altar and gave a polite cough. “Theoretically, I mean, of course.”

  “Fine. Where do I see to this?”

  “Renard is arranging it even now,” Mol said. “Out front of the Temple.” Allystaire nodded and started off, boot heels loud against the wood.

  “What about us?” Gideon asked. “We are not, I assume, set to judge cases of theft or robbery?”

  “No,” Mol said. “I have felt, and so have some of the wiser farm folk, that the weather has been…wrong.”

  Allystaire stopped dead and turned around. “Wrong how?”

  “It should have rained more than it has in late summer and into fall. We’ve still some crops in the ground for late fall harvest and all our winter roots need—”

  “What can any of us do about rain?” Allystaire replied. “It could simply be a dry year.”

  Mol frowned. “It has rained to the north and the south of us, and to the east and the west. Clouds have simply passed us by,” the girl said. “It has not been natural.”

  “Braech,” Idgen Marte snapped. “You know his priests could do such a thing.”

  “Are folk likely to go hungry because of this?” Allystaire asked Mol.

  “This year, no,” Mol said. “Visitors have brought stores and much is laid by. Yet if this keeps up…”

  “No one is goin’ hungry, this year or another,” Torvul said, his face slightly flushed, his words a little sharper than Allystaire had expected. “And that salt god can go hang,” he added. He clapped a hand against Gideon’s shoulder. “Come on boy, we’ve work to do.”

  As he passed Allystaire, the boy swept up in his wake, Torvul muttered, “What can we do about rain? What can’t we do, that�
��s the only question that matters.” His voice kept on rumbling but the words were lost under the thumping of his boots, swung in the longest strides his stature would allow, as he dragged Gideon out of the Temple.

  Allystaire followed after them, his steps more measured. He heard Idgen Marte and Mol talking quietly behind him, tried not to listen or overhear, and was soon out of earshot, out of the Temple. Not sure how I feel being a judge or holding an assize, he thought, but just as quickly, he silently rebuked himself. What was the Goddess’s Gift of Truth given to you for then? he asked himself and then, with a solid nod and an impassive face, approached Renard and a small crowd at the edge of the Temple steps.

  A sturdy chair had been set out, for him, he supposed, and Renard was trying, and mostly succeeding, to keep the crowd—about a dozen or so—paired off in some way that appeared to matter. Probably the claimant and the accused, Allystaire thought. With a quiet but deep breath, he set his shoulders and stepped up behind the chair.

  “You may take this away or set it aside, Renard,” he said, patting the thick, smoothly polished wooden back with one hand. “If the folk who have come to see me must stand, then so will I.” He lifted the chair and set it a few feet away, then spread his feet and laced his hands behind his back. “Who will be first?”

  Renard pointed first at one man, then at another, and said, “You,” to both of them, and they came forward, clutching their caps.

  To Allystaire both looked older than he, but, he realized, were probably his age or younger. They weren’t tall, and neither of them could match him for breadth, but their bodies had a wiry strength to them all the same. One was as bald as a stone, and the other had raggedly trimmed brown hair that he kept pushing out of his eyes.

  Both of them started to talk at once, and all Allystaire could hear was babble about land rights and families and planting. He raised a hand even as his eyes narrowed in a mix of anger and confusion. “Stop.”

  They mumbled “Sorry, m’lord,” and took half a step back when Allystaire sighed.