Rubrik grimaced, the torchlight turning his face into an ugly mask for a moment. "In this case, it should have," he said, annoyance overcoming his chagrin, "since I specifically stopped here on my way to the border to arrange rooms for us on this date. I—well, it doesn't matter. I managed to throw a good fright into the innkeeper himself, and he'd rather slit his own wrists now than inconvenience us further. I do have a private parlor for you to dine in, and I threw out the dice game some of the innkeeper's cronies were playing to get it, too. If you'll follow the boy, he'll see that you're served, and I'll see what I can arrange for the night."
Ulrich nodded as graciously as if this were all his idea, and put Honeybee's reins into the hands of the stableboy. He brushed off his riding robes, shook out a few wrinkles, and followed the serving-boy inside.
Karal trailed along in Ulrich's shadow, through the door into the inn itself, and crossed the crowded taproom.
Across the very crowded taproom. Every bench was full, every table loaded with full and empty plates and tankards. The floor underfoot was sticky with spilled drink, and there was just enough room for the servers to squeeze in between the patrons. He was just as glad they weren't going to eat in here; the room was hot and stuffy, and his nose was assaulted with far too many odors at once to make his stomach happy. On top of that, it was noisy, and the babble was all in Valdemaran; it made him feel three times the foreigner, and between the confusion and his exhaustion, he found his grasp of the language slipping away.
The boy brought them to a door on the other side of the crowded room, opened it quickly, and motioned them inside. Even if he had tried to say something, he could not have been heard above the babble. Ulrich went in first; Karal followed on his heels.
The very first thing he noticed was the relative silence as the boy closed the door behind them. His ears rang for just a moment. The walls must have been incredibly thick for that much of a difference in the noise level.
The "private parlor" was a smaller version of the larger room, without the noisy crowd or the heat. The table in the middle of the room showed signs of the dice game Rubrik had presumably disrupted; a scattering of gaming counters and a few empty cups, which the boy swept aside as he gestured anxiously for them to take their seats. He produced a pitcher and a pair of cups, and poured cold fresh ale for both of them before vanishing out the door.
He returned in moments with two girls behind him, both of them bearing laden trays of food. At this point, Karal would have eaten the scraps usually thrown to the dogs, but it looked as if Rubrik must have given this innkeeper a stout piece of his mind, for the repast the two girls spread out on the table was a fine one, and there was enough there for half a dozen people. Platters steamed temptingly as the servers uncovered them, watching the faces of the two Karsites anxiously for a hint of approval.
Karal approved of it all, and couldn't wait to tuck into it. A tasty broth, thick with barley and vegetables began the meal, and a berry tart with a pitcher of heavy cream concluded it. Karal didn't realize how hungry he was until he wiped up the last of his berry-flavored cream with a bit of crust, and looked up to see that he and Ulrich had done a pretty fair job of decimating a meal he had thought would serve six.
He hadn't been paying any attention to anything except the food in front of him. Now he looked around the room, following Ulrich's faintly ironic gaze.
There were no windows in the plastered white walls; this room must have been in the very center of the building. There was plenty of light, though, from a series of lanterns around the walls, in addition to the candles on the table. There was no fire in the cold fireplace, but it was hardly needed in this warm weather.
Besides the table and half a dozen stiff-backed, wooden chairs, there were three couches upholstered in brown leather placed on three sides of the room, couches of an odd shape. They had no backs, and only one fat, high arm.
"I think perhaps this room is used for other games than dicing," Ulrich said quietly, still wearing that ironic little smile. Karal blinked at him for a moment, then stared at one of the couches again—
And blushed, the blood rushing to his face and making him feel as if he was sunburned. He was not the naive horseboy he'd been when he was first taken from his parents. Between what he'd learned among the other novices, and the odds and ends he'd picked up while serving Ulrich, he had an amazingly broad education in worldly matters. Oh, he knew what those couches were for, now that Ulrich had pointed it out.
Still, a couch was a couch, and Rubrik still wasn't back. He shoved away from the table, the chair legs scraping on the polished wooden floor, and got up.
"I don't think anybody's going to bother us until Rubrik returns, Master Ulrich," he said, gesturing to the couch nearest the table. "I think you ought to get a little rest while we wait. I certainly intend to."
Ulrich's smile widened a little, and he rose, a bit stiffly, from his own chair. He took the couch that Karal indicated, lowering himself down onto it with a grimace, and took a more comfortable, reclining position. Karal waited until his master looked settled, then chose one of the other two couches and sat gingerly down on it.
The cushions were certainly soft enough, and a faint, musky perfume rising from them as he lay down confirmed his guess as to the purpose they usually served. Small wonder they were covered in smooth leather—that kind of leather was easy to clean, easier than fabric.
On the other hand, he was not going to sit around on one of those straight-backed wooden chairs until their escort returned, while there was something a lot more comfortable in the very same room.
Besides, while he and his master were in here, the careless innkeeper was not able to use the room for any other purpose. Karal found himself almost hoping that Rubrik would not be able to make any other arrangements. These couches would not make the most comfortable beds in the world—unless you were accustomed to sleeping in certain positions—but they weren't the floor, or a pile of hay, or the ground under a tree. They certainly were softer than the pallet he'd been given in the Children's Cloister.
He didn't think he dared sleep, though, much as his body cried out for rest. They were alone and unarmed, and it could be presumed that the innkeeper was not altogether happy with their presence here, whether or not he knew anything about who or what they were. So Karal decided that this very moment was a good one to review his Valdemaran vocabulary, including all the tenses of all the verbs, in alphabetical order.
He had gotten as far as the third letter of the alphabet when Rubrik returned. His arrival woke Ulrich, who had been dozing. The priest sat up slowly and moved more stiffly than he had when he went to sleep. Karal frowned; that was not a good sign. Not only because it meant his master was very, very tired, but because Ulrich generally suffered from stiff and aching joints when the weather was about to change for the worse.
"I have good news of a sort," Rubrik began. "I have excellent accommodations for you—the problem is that you might wish to decline them. Your host—is actually a hostess. She is the local Commander of the Guard—as it happens, this village is her home, she has her command-post here, and she has offered her guest room to you."
Ulrich considered this for a moment, as Karal blinked, and tried to imagine a woman in a position of military command. Women were not even permitted to serve with the Karsite army as Healer-Priests; only men could serve with soldiers. The old laws said that women who took on the "habit and guise" of men were demons, to be controlled or destroyed—whichever came soonest. Female mercenaries captured by the Karsite Army had fared rather badly, historically, something that Ulrich had never tried to conceal from his pupil.
For that matter, in Karse, the law still forbade women to hold property on their own; all property, whether it be land or goods, must be owned by a male. By Karsite standards, this Commander was doubly shocking.
On the other hand, Her Holiness had been making it clear that the days of laws forbidding women to do anything were numbered. Vkandis had made
His will clear on the subject.
I guess that eventually we'll even have women fighters in our Army, given the way that things are going. Somehow, he did not find that as horrifying as he should have. Maybe he was just tired.
Maybe being around Her Holiness Solaris had taught him he'd better never underestimate the competence of a woman.
"If the lady in question is not offended by us, I fail to see why we should take offense at her offer of hospitality," Ulrich said, finally. "I would be very pleased to meet our hostess. I have never met a female warrior face-to-face before. I believe the experience will be enlightening."
He rose carefully and smoothed out the front of his riding robe with both hands. Karal scrambled to his feet, realizing belatedly that Ulrich had just accepted the unknown woman's invitation.
"I did tell her precisely who and what you are," Rubrik replied, with a twitch of his lips. "Since she is the local Commander, I had to inform her anyway. She said something similar about you, sir."
"No doubt," Ulrich replied dryly, but followed their guide out the door, through the taproom (which was still just as noisy and crowded as it had been when they entered), and back into the night, with Karal trailing along behind.
Evidently someone had already seen to their mounts, either stabling them at the inn or bringing them on ahead, and Rubrik had (correctly) judged that, weary as they were, neither Ulrich nor his secretary were ready to climb back into a saddle again. Instead, they left the courtyard of the inn, turned into the street, and walked the short distance along a row of shops and homes to the large house at the end. The narrow two-storied buildings seemed abnormally tall and thin to Karal; each had a workshop or store on the ground floor, and living quarters above. The house at the end of the street differed in all ways from those lining it; this building had no commercial aspect to it, and it was as broad as three of the others.
It wasn't as big as the homes of several high-born nobles that Karal had seen, nor even as large as the inn, but it was quite sizable compared to its modest neighbors. The main door was right on the cobblestone street, with a single slab of stone as a step beneath it. Torches had been lit and placed in holders outside the white-painted door to light their way, and a servant opened the door before Rubrik could knock on it.
The servant ushered them into a wood-paneled hallway, lit by candlelamps. It was less of an entryway, and more of a waiting-room. They were not left to wait for the lady on the benches however—as soon as the servant shut the door, he directed them to follow him down the wide, white-painted hall to a room at the end.
Karal expected a lady's solar, or a reception room of some kind, but what the servant revealed when he opened the door was an office; businesslike, with no "feminine" fripperies about it. Their hostess was hard at work behind a plain wooden desk covered with papers—she nodded at the servant, who saluted and left. Rubrik gestured to them to go in, following and closing the door behind them.
The lady set her papers aside, and looked them both over with a frank and measuring gaze. Karal flushed a little under such an open appraisal, but Ulrich only seemed amused by her attitude. If she was as high an officer as Rubrik had indicated, there was nothing of that about her costume, at least not as Karal recognized rank-signs. Their hostess wore the same Guard uniform that they had seen before, with perhaps a bit more in the way of silver decoration.
Personally, she was quite attractive, and could have been any age from late twenties to early fifties. She had the kind of face that remained handsome no matter the number of her years, a slim and athletic build, and an aura of complete confidence. This was someone in complete authority; someone who knew that she was good at her work, and did not bother to hide that fact. Karal was intimidated by her, and he realized it immediately. The only other woman who had ever had that effect on him was Solaris, and the Son of the Sun was relatively sexless compared to this Valdemaran commander. He was very glad that he was not the one that most of her attention was centered on.
"Well," she said, slowly, lacing her fingers together. "I've faced your lot across the battlefield, my lord Priest, but never across a desk. I hope you'll understand me when I say that I find our situation a great improvement."
"I, too," Ulrich replied smoothly. "Few Valdemarans would have such understanding, however, I think. Or is it forgiveness?"
"Huh." She smiled, though, and nodded. "I don't know about your Vkandis, sir Priest, but my particular set of gods tells me that past battles are just that; past. I am something of an amateur historian, actually. I like to know the causes of things. Some day, I expect, I'll have the leisure to sit down with one of your scholars and find out just what started this particularly senseless war between us in the first place. For now—" she waved one hand at the door, presumably indicating the house beyond it, "—allow me to do my part to cement the peace by offering hospitality." Her brow wrinkled for a moment, then she recited, in heavily accented and badly pronounced Karsite, "To the hearth, the board, the bed, be welcome. My fires burn to warm you, my board is laden to nourish you, my beds soft to rest you. We will share bread and be brothers."
Karal's jaw dropped. The very last thing he had ever expected to hear from this woman was the traditional invocation of peace between feuding hill families!
She smiled broadly at his open-mouthed reaction but said nothing.
Ulrich, for his part, remained unperturbed, although Karal thought he saw his mentor's lips twitch just a little. "For the hospitality, our thanks. Our blades are sharp to guard you, our horses strong to bear you, our torches burn to light your path. Let there be peace between us, and those of our kin." He then added to the traditional answer, "And I do mean 'kin' in the broadest possible sense."
"I know that," she replied. "If I hadn't, I wouldn't have offered you the blessing." She nodded, as if she had found Ulrich very satisfactory in some way. "Well, I think I've kept you standing here like a couple of raw recruits long enough. You've covered a fair amount of ground today, and I won't keep you from your baths or beds any longer. You'll find both waiting in your room, and my servant will show you the way."
And with that, the servant opened the door again, and she nodded in what was clearly a dismissal.
It occurred to Karal that a real diplomat might have been offended at her blunt speech and curt manner, but he was just too tired to try to act like a "real diplomat."
Then again, anyone who would be annoyed at a soldier acting, like a soldier is an idiot. No, she didn't mean anything more or less than she said.
Instead of trying to analyze the encounter, he followed the servant, who led them to another room on the same floor, but on a different hallway.
It was tiled, floor and walls, with white ceramic, and contained two tubs, one a permanent fixture, and one smaller one obviously brought in so that Karal would not have to wait for his bath, both with steam rising from them. He and Ulrich had shared bathhouses often enough—they both shed clothing with no further ado. The servant came to collect their clothes as soon as they had both gotten into the tubs, indicating by pantomime that their beds lay in the next room.
Karal soaked his sore muscles, then wrapped himself in one of the towels and followed Ulrich into the bedroom. Valdemaran sleeping robes were laid out for them, a nice touch, he thought. He found his baggage, rubbed in his salve, and fell into the cot in the next room in a complete fog. Once his head touched the pillow, the fog became total darkness that did not lift until the servant woke them in the morning.
Five
After three days of what could only be described as endurance riding, Karal was finally getting used to the pace. He was also getting used to Rubrik, and it seemed that their escort was getting accustomed to them as well. His formal manner loosened a bit, and during the fourth day of travel, he began to talk with Karal directly.
At that point, Karal had to revise his opinion of their escort sharply upward, for Rubrik was even more of a scholar than he had guessed. He spoke four languages besides his o
wn, and his rattling on about the geography, husbandry, and economics of the places they passed was no mere prattling to fill empty ears. He knew this area and the conditions in it as well as its own overlords did.
And that only made Karal more curious than before. Who was this man, that he had so much information at his very fingertips? Surely he had not memorized it just to impress or occupy them.
When they left the home of the lady Guard Commander, clad in riding gear that had been freshly washed and cleaned by the lady's servants, gray skies threatened rain. The rain did not actually materialize in the morning or even the early afternoon, but toward late afternoon the clouds thickened, and the wind picked up. Ulrich's joints hurt him quite a bit at that point, so they actually stopped early for once, at least two marks before sunset.
Their stopping place was yet another inn, this one with a courtyard surrounded on three sides by the inn itself, and on the fourth by the stable. A gate in the middle of the stable led into the courtyard, and this arrangement cut the wind completely. Ulrich descended from his saddle with a gasp of pain, and Rubrik was concerned enough to ask the Priest if he thought he would require the services of a Healer.
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