The Summer Palace

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Go on.”

  “If he were slain, you could reclaim that land. The next Wizard Lord, if there even is one after two such Dark Lords in a row, may well be forbidden to leave Barokan—certainly, I will advise the Council of Immortals, the wizards who determine the rules by which the Wizard Lord is bound, to add that restriction. And in any case, the next Wizard Lord will not live in Winterhome; custom requires that each Wizard Lord choose a home where no other Wizard Lord before him has dwelled. If you found this one’s presence uncomfortable during these past few winters, that would cease to trouble you when he dies.”

  “Then you are suggesting that we should allow you to live freely in the Uplands so that you may kill the Wizard Lord at some future time.”

  “Yes. Killing him is my duty, as the Chosen Swordsman—and while you, as you say, take no side in our quarrels, I thought you might find his death convenient.”

  The Patriarch leaned back in his chair and stroked his beard. “Interesting,” he said. “Just how would you hope to approach him? I had understood, from the stories and ballads, that the Chosen operate as a team, and that most of the others serve only to get you close enough to perform the actual killing. Yet you say two of you have been captured, two have been killed, and the rest have scattered. How, then, do you expect to manage without your companions?”

  Sword dropped down to one knee again, and lowered his eyes. “O Patriarch,” he said, “while I recognize you as a man to be trusted, a man whose discretion can be relied upon, I do not know what other, less worthy ears may be listening. I do not question the men you allow to serve you here, for to do so would be to question your own judgment, but could there not be boys, women, or slaves listening outside? Children can have keen ears and loose tongues, women can let slip secrets, and what slave can be entirely trusted? What I say here might be heard by the Wizard Lord months from now in Winterhome, passed from eavesdropper to friendly Hostman, Hostman to guard, and guard to lord, and if the wrong words are spoken and transmitted in such a fashion, all my efforts might be thwarted. I would prefer, then, to say nothing of my plans at this time, and in this place.”

  The Patriarch frowned. “You ask me to take much on faith.”

  Sword bowed his head, then raised it and met the Patriarch’s gaze. “I do, I know, and therefore I will say that I spent some time in the Winter Palace, and spoke at length with the Scholar, who had been there much longer and had studied its construction. The Thief is a master at entering guarded homes, and may have taught me a few tricks.” While these facts were literally true, the implication that he knew of some secret way in, some way to get past all the Wizard Lord’s guards and defenses, was not.

  “I see.” The Patriarch did not sound entirely convinced.

  “I do not ask for your assistance in this,” Sword said, dropping his gaze again. “I ask only that you allow me to live freely on your lands, and teach me enough of your ways to survive. I know nothing of finding food and water here.”

  “An interesting proposition. But why, O Chosen Swordsman, should we not keep you as a slave for now, and release you when we make the journey down the cliffs? Regardless of how we treat you, you are still required to kill the Wizard Lord, are you not?”

  “I am. But I am a strong man, and skilled with the sword, and will not submit willingly, and if you kill me, I am of no use to you and no danger to the Wizard Lord.” He carefully kept his gaze lowered as he said this; the words were defiance enough without showing his face.

  “Ha! A good reply. Perhaps you could work for us in certain ways, though?”

  “I am glad to earn my keep in any honorable fashion, Patriarch.”

  “Then I think an accommodation can be reached. Rise, Swordsman.”

  Sword rose.

  [ 3 ]

  He was given a place to sleep in a tent shared by four of the clan’s young men—not a bed, but a patch of ground and a thin bit of carpet. Two of them were the pair who had found him out on the plain and helped him to the camp; they were known as Fist and Dancer. The other two were called Whistler and Bent Ear.

  He did not think to ask until days later, but eventually Sword discovered that the Uplanders never used true names, not because they were worried about hostile magic like the people of Mad Oak, but because they had no way of learning their own true names. They had no contact with ler who might have informed them; even during their stays in Winterhome, they did not consult the Host People’s priests. Instead they used nicknames.

  They also had clan names that described their lineage, which were used on formal occasions, but which were unsuitable for everyday use—”Second Son of the Third Daughter of the Eleventh Generation of the Blue Chalk Line of the Dragon Clan, Sired by the Eldest Scion of the Tertiary Honor Line of the Clan of the Golden Spear” did not come so easily to the tongue, in either Barokanese or Uplander, as “Fist.”

  Fist and Dancer seemed friendly enough at that first meeting; Whistler nodded an acknowledgment when introduced, but said nothing, while Bent Ear merely grunted. That night Sword was too exhausted to do anything more than roll himself up in the tattered scrap of carpet and go to sleep. In the morning, though, he felt sufficiently recovered to begin his education in Uplander life.

  The young men whose tent he shared and two wrinkled old women, called Gnaw Gnaw and Stepmother, served as his instructors in the ways of the Clan of the Golden Spear. He began asking questions as soon as he was out of his carpet, and the six of them answered—or four of the six, anyway; Bent Ear and Whistler didn’t say much.

  “Bent Ear doesn’t speak much Barokanese,” Dancer explained quietly. “We all learn it during the winters, down in the Lowlands, but among ourselves we have our own tongue. Bent Ear has no knack for languages; he sometimes has trouble understanding the dialects of other clans, let alone Barokanese.”

  “What about Whistler?” Sword asked.

  Dancer shrugged. “He just doesn’t talk much, in any tongue.”

  Sword nodded, and asked about what he should wear—would his Host People garb be acceptable?

  “You aren’t going to look like one of us in any case, so I can’t see that it matters,” Fist told him.

  “I doubt it will hold up,” Gnaw Gnaw said. “And you might want more feathers, to keep your dreams private.”

  Sword did not mention that his clothes were lined with hidden feathers; instead he said, “I can’t sense any ler at all here; I doubt dreams will be a problem.”

  “That may change, when you have been here awhile.”

  “A change of clothing would be welcome, in any case.”

  “Then you’ll need to make some.”

  “I hope someone will help me with that.”

  The Uplanders exchanged glances. “If you can find a way to pay for it, I’m sure someone will,” Dancer told him.

  Sword persevered, asking more about clothing, about food, about shelter, about everything he could think of. While his ignorance often provoked grins or outright laughter, the six of them patiently answered even his most foolish questions. The Patriarch had told them to teach him, and so they would teach him; no one dared defy the Patriarch.

  After he had breakfasted on bits of smoked ara and washed himself as well as he could with only a small pot of water and a bit of rag, all under Fist’s watchful eye, he presented himself to be trained further, and his designated teachers then led him around the encampment, explaining everything he saw.

  Each clan, Sword learned, survived by following a particular flock of ara. Each year the Uplanders came up from Barokan just as the great flocks were returning from their own winter homes in the distant south, and the clans would find and claim their flocks for that season. If there were not enough flocks, as sometimes happened, then whatever clan failed to find a flock would be forced to disband, its members finding new homes in other clans. If there were more flocks than clans, as happened somewhat more often, then lost clans might be reconstituted, or young men and women from the largest clans might fo
rm an entirely new one.

  The camp was maintained at a safe distance from the flock—not so close the birds were panicked, nor so far that the flock might slip away unnoticed. If the flock moved on, nesting too far away, the camp was packed up and relocated, as well.

  The men of the clan hunted the ara. Whenever the supplies of meat were low, a hunting party would go out and pick off any birds that had strayed from the main body, and if those were not sufficient, they would deliberately startle a group of ara and bring down the slowest.

  Men and women alike worked at plucking and butchering the catch. Tanning the plucked hide to make tents or clothing, and cleaning the bones to make ornaments and tools, was women’s work—or if the clan was fortunate enough to have a few slaves, as the Golden Spear did not just now, it was slaves’ work.

  Sword was curious about the slaves—he understood the concept, certainly, since several Barokanese towns had slaves, but in those cases the system was imposed by ler and their priests, while here in the Uplands the land felt dead, and no one seemed to communicate with ler at all. He asked several questions about slavery, and Fist and Dancer explained.

  Any lowlander who wandered onto the plateau outside the narrow strip conceded to the Wizard Lord was fair game for enslavement, but that was rare; most slaves were outcast Uplanders, criminals driven away by their own clans. Minor offenses were punished by fines, beatings, or other lesser penalties, as the clan elders might see fit, but each clan had certain crimes that merited exile, and humans being what they were, even so dire a threat was not always enough to keep people in line. These criminals were rare—none of the men could remember one among their own clan, though the old women named a few. Every so often, though, someone would be cast out by his clan, and such exiles could then be enslaved by whoever found them. Anyone living on the plains without a clan was assumed to be an exiled criminal; when Sword asked whether there were ever any Uplander hermits, people who chose to live alone, it took him several minutes to explain the concept sufficiently, whereupon Stepmother burst into raucous laughter, Dancer made noises of disgust, and Gnaw Gnaw said simply, “No. There is no such thing in the Uplands.”

  “Madness,” Dancer muttered. “Lowlander madness.”

  “Please, tell me more of how it is,” Sword said, ignoring Dancer.

  No clan ever enslaved their own people, he was told. That was considered an abomination, to so debase a man that he would be serving his own kinsmen as a slave. Nor did Uplanders ever deliberately kill their own clansmen except in the heat of anger—to spill a helpless kinsman’s lifeblood was unspeakable. No crime, not even the murder of a Patriarch, could justify the cold-blooded execution of a member of the clan. Exile was therefore the worst penalty any clan could inflict on its own members.

  Once exiled, though, the criminal was fair game for any unrelated clan that came across him, to be enslaved, tortured, or killed as his captors chose. An exile who spoke convincingly enough in proclaiming his own innocence, or who otherwise demonstrated exceptional worth, might be adopted as a free man, but that was rare, as was torture or execution; slavery was the usual result. Every clan had a few nasty jobs they were eager to turn over to slaves.

  A slave who served well would be permitted to accompany the clan down to Winterhome when the snows came, which often meant a chance to slip away and live free among the Barokanese, since the Host People did not keep slaves themselves. A slave who was lazy or argumentative, though, would be more likely to find himself cast out again, forbidden access to the trail down the cliff and left to die of cold or hunger on the plain.

  Sword wondered whether any of these doubly outcast criminals might slip down the path alone, after the clans were settled in their guesthouses, but the only response to this suggestion was a shrug.

  “It’s not our concern if they do,” Dancer said.

  (That was the first time Sword realized that the Wizard Lord might have had a sound reason all along for posting those guards at the gate down in Winterhome.)

  At any rate, slaves were useful for plucking and tanning, for cleaning bone, for disposing of offal, and for hauling water. Those were necessary jobs that no one enjoyed.

  Carving the bones and beaks to make tools and ornaments and musical instruments, on the other hand, was what men did between hunts, and was generally considered to be great fun, a chance to display one’s skill and imagination. Weaving the delicate fibers from certain feathers, binding and dyeing feathers, that was work the women enjoyed and kept for themselves. Virtually all the cloth the Uplanders used was made from feathers or ara hide, even the material that did not appear to be. Feathers that were used intact were generally left their natural hues of black, white, and pink, but those that were spun into thread and woven into cloth might be dyed any color of the rainbow.

  This, Gnaw Gnaw explained, was all for their summer clothing; they did not wear so many feathers so openly when they made their way down to Winterhome. In winter they wore leather, or clothes purchased in Barokan, and kept their feathered garments packed carefully away. They didn’t want the lowlanders to realize just how plentiful the feathers really were, for fear of lowering prices.

  In addition to weaving and dyeing, women and children also gathered the greens and mushrooms that added a little variety to the Uplander diet, and even did some gardening. When a few handy specimens of native species were pointed out, Sword tried to learn to recognize which were safe and which were poisonous, but was not very confident of his abilities. Ara meat in its various forms, and these women’s gleanings, made up virtually the entire Uplander diet.

  “We ate ara eggs at the Summer Palace,” Sword remarked.

  “Did you?” Dancer was startled. “I’m sure the Wizard Lord paid a great deal for them. Ara eggs are rare and precious here. The birds normally breed in their winter home, far to the south, and we never see those eggs, only the chicks.”

  “Sometimes, though,” Gnaw Gnaw told him, “a hen will lay here in our lands, out of season.”

  “We take those when we find them,” Fist said. “They never hatch.”

  “But they make excellent eating,” Stepmother said, licking her lips.

  Sword nodded. “They do,” he agreed.

  The men stared at him; apparently the fact that he had eaten ara eggs raised his status in their eyes. Most of the clan, Fist explained, never got to taste them; when they were found, the Patriarch would dole them out to a favored few clansmen as rewards.

  If he had known that they were such a delicacy, Sword thought, he might have paid more attention when he ate them. As it was, he had not really registered them as anything special, merely as very large and tasty eggs. He had thought their excellence had been due to the talent of the Wizard Lord’s cooks, but perhaps the eggs themselves had been responsible.

  The tour and the lectures continued. The clan’s water came from two sources. Wells were not practical here, no one had ever sunk a shaft deep enough to find water, but there were streams and rivers, and the Uplanders also used rainwater cisterns. Sword had not realized there were any rivers on the plateau; he did not entirely understand how they might form when the land was so flat, and he had assumed that if they existed, he would have seen waterfalls spilling over the cliffs, rather than the little trickles he was familiar with.

  The clanspeople found this particular ignorance very amusing indeed.

  “It does rain here, after all,” Dancer said. “The water has to go somewhere.”

  “The rivers all flow to the east and south,” Fist explained. “The plateau is flat, yes, but it isn’t level. It’s all very slightly tilted to the east. The western cliff-edge is the highest part of the world. When the rain falls, it all runs to the east, and gradually collects into bigger and bigger streams—water is scarce up in the west, but by the time you get a hundred miles from the cliffs, the biggest rivers are a hundred feet wide and as deep as I am tall.”

  “You really did a remarkable job of missing them, if you didn’t see any on
your way here,” Dancer said.

  “Well, he was walking east,” Fist said. “He was probably midway between two streams.”

  Everyone nodded agreement with this suggestion, which left Sword feeling unreasonably stupid, as if he should have seen them. He changed the subject, asking about the other water source Gnaw Gnaw had mentioned.

  The cisterns, Sword was told, were the strange squarish structures he had glimpsed in the distance on occasion. Each consisted of a large wooden frame, twice the height of a man, lined with what amounted to an immense bag sewn of ara hide; rain fell into the open top and collected in the gigantic waterskin, and plugs along the base allowed water to be drawn off as needed. The plugs were of tarred bone, held in place with rawhide drawstrings.

  Sword was somewhat surprised the things didn’t leak so much as to be useless, but Gnaw Gnaw explained that whenever the clan passed near a cistern, the children were sent out with buckets of varnish, which they smeared all over everything they could reach, sealing cracks and reinforcing the hides. It was great fun for them, splashing sticky goo everywhere, and it kept the bird-leather cisterns functional.

  Of course, getting the children clean again afterward was almost impossible, but no one really cared. Children had a tendency to be sticky and dirty anyway, and varnish was not really any worse than some of the stuff they got into on their own. The hair would grow out in time, the skin wear clean, and the clothes would have been torn or outgrown soon enough in any case.

  It all fit together into a rather appealing way of life, Sword thought. It was not, perhaps, as pleasant as his childhood in Mad Oak, but it was certainly better than what he had seen people tolerate without complaint in many towns. The people of the nightmare community of Bone Garden, for example, would probably have considered the Uplander life to be paradisial.

  That thought sent Sword into an angry funk as he remembered Azir shi Azir, the Seer. She had been born and raised in Bone Garden, and had escaped and made a new life elsewhere, only to be horribly murdered by the Wizard Lord’s soldiers.