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The good god can do all and anything, the Writ says. He can make a square circle and create justice from men’s tyranny and grow hope from withered seed in the desert. If he could do all those things for his people, did the old gods possess a similar power for theirs? Had I glimpsed a reality that was not meant for my kind?
A boy on the edge of manhood ponders such questions and so I did that night. My meditations were not conducive to sleep. The next morning, sleepless but unwearied, I rose with the sun. As the first light touched my campsite, the good god seemed to answer a prayer, for the light played briefly on a rough outcropping of stone. For a moment, the dawn sparkled on trapped flecks of mica, and then the angle changed, and it became only a dusty outcropping. I walked to it, crouched by it, and touched it, feeling its hard reality. This, I was sure, was the mother of the small stone I’d carried in my flesh. That cruel souvenir, at least, had definitely come from this world. I mounted Sirlofty and rode toward home.
The very next night, as if to reward me for my deception of my father, a rustling in the brush at the wet end of a gully where I had decided to camp proved to be a small plainsbuck. I brought him down with a single shot. I cut his throat to bleed him out, slit his hind legs between the tendon and the bone, and hoisted him up into a stunted tree. I gutted him as he hung there and propped the chest cavity open with a stick to let the meat cool. He wasn’t large and his rack was no more than a set of spikes, but he was sufficient excuse for my expedition.
I don’t think I was exceptionally surprised when Sergeant Duril rode into camp while I was cooking the liver. ‘Nothing better than fresh liver,’ he observed as he dismounted. I didn’t ask if he had been following me for long, or why he was there. Our hobbled horses grazed together and we shared the meat as the stars came out. Autumn was advanced enough that we welcomed the fire’s warmth.
We had been in our blankets for some time, silent and pretending to sleep when he asked me, ‘Do you want to talk about it?’
I nearly said, ‘I can’t.’ That would have been the honest answer. And it would have led to all sorts of other questions and probing and worries. I would have had to lie to him. Duril wasn’t a man to lie to. So I simply said, ‘No, Sergeant. I don’t think I do.’
And that was what I learned from Dewara.
SIX
Sword and Pen
I have spoken to men who have suffered sudden severe injuries, or endured torture or extreme loss. They speak of those events distantly, as if they have set them out of their lives. So I attempted to do with my experience with Dewara. Having proved to myself that none of my encounter with the tree woman had even the most tenuous tie to reality, I moved on with my life. I resolutely left that nightmare vision behind, along with childish fears of hobgoblins under my bed or making wishes on falling stars.
It was more than the tree woman I attempted to vanquish from my thoughts. I also banished my father’s secret doubt of me from my ruminations. Dewara had been a test, to see if I could, when circumstance demanded it, question my father’s wisdom and resist the old plains warrior and become my own leader. I had only briefly defied Dewara before becoming submissive again to his guidance. I had never defied my father. But I had lied to him. I had lied to try to make him think I’d found the backbone to stand up to the Kidona. If I had thought that lie would buy me new respect from my father, it hadn’t. His attitude toward me had not changed at all that I could detect.
For a short time, I strove desperately to win his regard. I re-doubled my effort, not just at the fencing and cavalla techniques that I loved, but also on the academic studies that were my demons. My scores soared, and when he discussed the monthly reports of my progress, he praised me for my efforts. But the words were the same ones I had always heard from him. Having never suspected he doubted me, when obviously he had, I now found I could no longer believe in his praise. And when he rebuked me, I felt it doubly-hard, and in private my own disgust with myself magnified his disappointment in me.
Some part of me realized that I could never do anything that would guarantee my father’s approval. So I made a conscious decision to set those experiences aside. Spirit journeys to tree women and lying to my father did not fit with the day-to-day understanding of my existence, and so I discarded them. I think it is how most men get from one day to the next; they set aside all experiences that do not mesh with their perception of themselves.
How different would our perception of reality be if, instead, we discarded the mundane events that cannot coexist with our dreams?
Yet that was a thought that only came to me many years later. What remained of my sixteenth year demanded the full focus of my mind. My recovery from my injuries was followed by a growth spurt that astonished even my father. I ate like a starved beast at every meal. It all went to height and muscle. In my seventeenth year, I went through three pairs of boots and four jackets in eight months. My mother declared proudly to her friends that if I did not soon reach my man’s height and stop growing, she would have to hire a seamstress just to keep me decently clad.
Like almost all youths at that age, I and my own concerns seemed of the utmost importance to me. I scarcely noticed my younger brother being packed off for his first indoctrination into the priesthood, or my sister Yaril graduating to long skirts and pinned-up hair. I was too intent on whether or not I could ever make first touch on my fencing master, or improve my target scores with a long gun. I consider those years to be the most selfish of my life, and yet I think such selfishness and self-focus is necessary for a young man as deluged with lessons and information as I was.
Even the events of the greater world seldom touched me, so involved was I in my own learning and growing. The news that reached my ears was filtered through my vision of my future. I was aware that the King and the so-called Old Nobles wrestled for power and tax money. My father sometimes discussed politics with my elder brother Rosse after dinner, and even though I knew that politics were not the proper concern of a soldier, I listened. My father had a right to be heard in the Council of Lords, and he regularly dispatched messages that contained his views. He always sided with King Troven. The Old Nobles needed to lift their heads and see the King’s new vision of a realm that extended east across the plains rather than west to the sea. The Old Nobles would have cheerfully renewed our ancient strife with Landsing, all in the name of trying to win back the coastal provinces that we had lost to them. My father’s attitude was that the King’s way was wiser; all his New Nobles backed him in his eastward expansion. I gave little attention to the details of the strife. It might have to do with us, but all the debating and posturing occurred in the capital, Old Thares to the west. It was easy and fitting that, as a solider son, I nod my head and adopt my father’s opinion as my own.
I was more enthusiastic about news from the eastern borders. Tales of the Speck plague dominated. The awareness of plague had slowly permeated all our lives during the years I grew toward manhood. Yet, dreadful as the tales of decimation were, they remained stories of a distant disaster. Sometimes it reached in amongst us, as when old Percy came to my father, to ask for time to travel east to visit his sons’ graves. A soldier himself, both his boys had gone for troopers, and died of plague before they could sire sons to carry on Percy’s line and his calling. His daughter’s sons would be shoemakers like their father. He confided this to my father as if it grieved him. His personal loss made the ravages of the plague a bit more real to me. I had known Kifer and Rawly. They had been but four and five years older than I, and now they rested in distant graves near the border. But for the most part, the plague stayed where it belonged, confined to the military outposts and settlements in the foothills of the Barrier Mountains. It was but one of the many dangers of the border: snakes and poisonous insects, the erratic and irrational attacks by the Specks, the great cats and savagely aggressive humpdeer. Wariness of the disease surged in the hot summers when it flared up, consuming men like kindling. It ebbed only when the gentler days of winter arrived.
My eighteenth summer was filled with marching troops. Weekly we saw them moving past our holdings along the river road. These were solid ranks of replacements for men fallen to disease during the summer rather than the steady trickle of new soldiers off to their first assignments on the border. Westward bound funeral processions, black-draped wagons full of coffins drawn by sweating black horses, clopped and creaked past our homes on their mournful journey back to the civilized west, bearing the bodies of men from families sufficiently wealthy or noble to require that they be returned home for burial. Those we watched from a distance. My father made little noise about them, but my mother feared contagion and strictly forbade any of us to loiter along the river road when such sad processions were moving along it.
Each summer when the plague returned, wave after wave of it consumed our soldiers. My father estimated the mortality rate at between twenty-three and forty-six percent amongst able-bodied soldiers, given the information he had access to. Among the elderly, the women and the very young, the scythe of death swung even more efficiently, leaving few standing in its wake. It wasted a healthy man to skin and bone in a matter of days. Of those who survived, some recovered to lead nearly normal lives, though most were unfit for the heavy duty of a horse soldier. Some suffered an impaired sense of balance, a terrible loss for a cavalry man. The survivors that I met were unnaturally thin. The soldier sons of my father’s friends, they stopped in to visit and dine with us on their long journeys back to Old Thares. They ate and drank as any men did, and some even pushed themselves to consume more than a normal amount of victuals. Yet they could not seem to regain the strength and vitality they had once possessed. Broken bones and torn muscles seemed to befall them easily. It was a terrible thing to see young officers, once hale and hearty, now thin and listless and retiring from the military just when they should have been rising to command. They seemed weary beyond the stress of a long day in the saddle. They spoke of frontier towns full of widows and children, their common-soldier husbands fallen not to war but to plague.
Autumn came, and the wet winds of winter quenched the plague fires. The end of the year brought both my eighteenth birthday and the Dark Evening holiday. The latter was not much observed in our household. My father regarded Dark Evening as a pagan holiday, a superstitious holdover from the days of the old gods. Some still called it Dark Woman’s Night. The ways of the old gods said that a married woman could be unfaithful to her husband on that one night of the year and not be held accountable for it, for on the night of the Dark Woman, a woman must obey no will save her own. My mother and sisters did not hold with any such nonsense, of course, but I knew that they envied some of the other households in our area who still celebrated Dark Evening with masked balls and opulent feasts and gifts of pearl or opal jewellery wrapped in starry paper. In our home, the longest, darkest night of winter passed with little fanfare. My mother and sisters would set tiny boats afloat on our pond with candles on them, and my father always gave each of his women a small envelope containing a gift of money, but that was the extent of it.
I had always suspected that my birthday was so well celebrated simply because my father had forbidden a lavish Dark Evening in our household, and so my birthday became the mid-winter celebration by default. Often my mother gave a special dinner in my honour, and invited guests from neighbouring holdings. But that year, my eighteenth year, my birthday marked my entrance into manhood, and so the party was more solemn and restricted to our immediate family.
It made the occasion more formal and portentous. My father had brought Vanze home from his studies in the western monastery to preside. His voice had not even changed yet, but still he was so proud to hold the family book and wear his priest’s vest while he read aloud my verses from the Writ:
‘The second born son of every noble man shall be his father’s soldier son, born to serve. Into his hand he will take the sword, and with it he shall defend the people of his father. He shall be held accountable for his actions, for it is by his sword and his pen that his family may have glory or dwell in shame. In his youth let him serve the rightful king, and in his old age, let him return home, to defend the home of his father.’
As my brother spoke those words, I held up my father’s gifts to me for my family to see. In one hand I gripped my new cavalla sword, sheathed in gleaming black leather. In the other, I held aloft a leather-bound journal, with our family crest stamped on the front. One was my weapon, the other my accounting for my deeds. This second gift marked a significant moment for my entire family. It was not just that I had reached an age when I was expected to behave as a man; it also marked the passing of a family torch to me. My father was a New Noble, and the first to bear the title of Lord Burvelle of the East. That made me the first soldier son of this new line of nobility. For the first time in my life, the place of honour at the head of the table was mine. The book I held had come all the way from Old Thares, and my father’s crest had been imprinted on the cover by the King’s official press.
In that moment of silence, I looked down the long table at my family and considered my place in it. To my right was my father, and sitting just beyond him, my mother. To my left was my elder brother, Rosse, the heir who would inherit my father’s house and lands. Just beyond him stood my younger brother, Vanze, home to read the Holy Writ in my honour. Next to Vanze on one side of the table and next to my mother on the other side were my two sisters, elegant Elisi and kittenish Yaril. They would marry well, carrying off family wealth in the form of dowries but enriching the family with the social alliances they would bring. My father had done well for himself in the begetting of his children. He had fathered all the family that any man might hope for, and an extra daughter besides.
And I, Nevare, was the second son, the soldier son of the family. Today it became real to me. Always it had been so down the years of my bloodlines: the eldest son to inherit, the third son a gift to the good god, and the second son a soldier, to bring honour and fame to our family name. And to every nobly born soldier son on his eighteenth birthday was given such a journal as I now held in my hands, bound in good calfskin, the pages stitched firmly in place, the creamy sheets heavy and durable. My own words would hold me ‘accountable’ as the Writ said. This book and the serviceable pen kit that buckled inside it would travel everywhere I did, as surely as my sword did. The journal was made to open and lie flat, so that I could write easily in it whether at a desk or camped by a fireside. The pen kit held not only two sturdy pens and an ink supply and tips but also pencils with various weights and colours of leads for sketching terrain and flora and fauna. When this volume was filled, it would return to Widevale, to be placed on a shelf in the library as part of my family’s permanent record, alongside the journals that told of our crops and cattle and recorded births, marriages and deaths. The journal I held in my hands now would become the first volume in the first record of first soldier son to wear my father’s crest. When this book was filled and sent home, I would immediately begin my new entries in the next volume. I would be expected to record every significant event in my duty to king, country, and family.
In my Uncle Sefert’s mansion in Old Thares, an entire wall of his grand library was given over to tall shelves that held rank upon rank of such journals. Sefert Burvelle was my father’s elder brother, the eldest son who inherited the family home, title, and lands. To him came the duty of preserving the family history. My own father, Keft Burvelle, had been the second son, the soldier son of his generation. Forty-two years before my eighteenth birthday, my father had mounted his cavalla horse and set out with his regiment for the frontier. He had never returned to live at Stonecreek Mansion, his ancestral home, but all of his military journals had. His writing occupied a substantial two shelves of his brother’s library, and was rife with the telling of our military’s final battles with the plainspeople as King Troven had expanded his holdings into the Wilds.
In time, when my father had gained rank and been offered private quarters at the fort, he had sent word home that he was ready for his bride to join him. Selethe Rode, then twenty but promised to him since she was only sixteen, had travelled to him by coach, wagon and horseback, to be wed to him in the regiment chapel at Fort Renalx. She had been a good cavalry wife, bearing child after child to the lieutenant who became a captain and eventually retired as a colonel. In their youth, they had believed that all their sons would go for soldiers, for such was the destiny of the sons of a soldier son.
The battle of Bitter Creek changed all that. My father so distinguished himself in the final two charges that when King Troven heard tell of it, he granted him a holding of four hundred acres of the land so painstakingly and bloodily won from the plainspeople. With the land grant went a title and a crest of his own, making him one of the first elevated into the new nobility. The King’s new lords would settle in the east and bring civilization and tradition with them.
It was my father’s crest, not his older brother’s, sharply stamped into the fragrant leather of my new book, which I held up for my brothers and sisters to see. Our crest was a spond tree resplendent with fruit beside a creek. This journal would return here, to Widevale Mansion rather than being posted to our ancestral home at Stonecreek in Old Thares. This book would be the first volume on the first shelf set aside for the soldier sons of my father’s line. We were founding a dynasty here on the former edge of the Wilds, and we knew it.
The silence had grown long as I held the journal aloft and savoured my new position. My father finally broke it.
‘So. There it is. Your future, Nevare. It awaits only you, to live it and to write it.’ My father spoke so solemnly that I could not find words to reply.
I set my gifts down carefully on the red cushion on which they had been presented to me. As a servant bore them away from the table, I took my seat. My father lifted his wine glass. At a sign from him, one of the serving men replenished all our glasses. ‘Let us toast our son and brother, wishing Nevare many brave exploits and opportunity for glory!’ he suggested to his family. They lifted their glasses to me, and I raised mine in turn, and then we all drank.
‘Thank you, sir,’ I said, but my father was not finished. Again, he lifted his glass. ‘And.’ He spoke, and then waited until my eyes met his. I had no idea what might come next but I desperately hoped it would be a cavalla horse of my own choosing. Sirlofty was a wonderful mount, but I dreamed of a more fiery horse. I held my breath. My father smiled, not at me, but the satisfied smile of a man who had done well for himself and his family as his gaze travelled the full table. ‘And let us toast to a future that bodes well for all of us. The negotiations have been long and very delicate, my boy, but it is done at last. Show Lord Grenalter three years of honourable service on the frontier, earning a captain’s stars on your collar, and he will bestow on you the hand of his younger daughter, Carsina.’
Before I could say a word, Yaril clasped her hands together in delight and cried out, ‘Oh, Nevare, you will make Carsina and me sisters! How wonderful! And in years to come, our children will be both playmates and cousins!’
‘Yaril. Please contain yourself. This is your brother’s moment.’ My mother’s rebuke to my lively younger sister was soft-spoken, but I heard it. Despite her words, my mother’s eyes shone with pleasure. I knew that she was as fond of young Carsina as my sister was. Carsina was a lively, pleasant girl, flaxen-haired and round-faced. She and Yaril were the best of friends. Carsina and her elder sister and mother often came of a Sixday, to join the women of our house in meditation, needlework, and gossip. Lord Grenalter had served alongside my father, and indeed won his lands and family crest in the same engagements that had led to my father’s elevation. Lady Grenalter and my mother had attended the same finishing school and had been cavalla wives together. As the daughter of a New Noble, Carsina would be well schooled in all that was expected of a soldier’s wife, unlike the tales I had heard of old nobility wives, near suicidal with despair when they discovered they were expected to cope with a home on the border and plainspeople on their doorstep. Carsina Grenalter was a good match for me. I did not resent that whatever dower of land she might bring would enrich my brother’s estate rather than come to Carsina and me. That was how it had always been done, and I rejoiced for how it would expand my family’s holding. In the dim future, when I retired from the cavalla, I knew we would be welcomed home to Widevale, to finish raising our children here. My sons would be soldiers after me, and my brother Rosse would see that my daughters married well.
‘Nevare?’ my father prompted me sternly, and I suddenly realized that my musing had kept me from replying to his news.
‘I am speechless with joy at what you have won for me, Father. I will try to be worthy of the lady, and show Lord Grenalter the full nobility of my bloodlines.’
‘Very good. I am glad you are conscious of the honour he does us in trusting one of his daughters to our household. To your future bride, then!’
And again we all lifted our glasses and drank.
That was my last night as a boy in my father’s house. With my eighteenth birthday, I left behind all childish pursuits. The next morning, I began a man’s schedule, rising with the dawn, to join my father and brother at their austere breakfast and then ride out with them. Each day we rode to a different part of my father’s holdings, to take reports from the supervisors. Most of them were men my father had known in his cavalry days, glad to find useful work now that they were too old to soldier. He housed them well, and allotted each a garden patch, pasturage for a cow or two milk goats and half-a-dozen chickens. He had aided many of them in acquiring wives from the western cities, for well my father knew that although the sons of such men must go for soldiers, their daughters might very well attract cobblers or merchants or farmers as husbands. Our little river-town needed such an influx of tradesmen if it was to grow.
I had known my father’s men all my life, but in the days that followed, I grew to know them even better. Although they held no rank now, having given up their titles with their uniforms, my father still referred to them as ‘corporal’ or ‘sergeant’, and I think they enjoyed that acknowledgment of their past deeds.
Sergeant Jeffrey oversaw the care of our sheep in their rolling, riverside pasture. That spring we had had a bumper crop of lambs, with many ewes dropping twins. Not all of the ewes had the milk or patience to care for two lambs, and so Jeffrey had had his hands full, recruiting plainspeople nippers from the tamed Ternu villagers to help with the bottle feedings. The youngsters came to their tasks with enthusiasm, happy to work for a penny a day and a stick of sugar candy. My father took pride in how he had tamed the Ternu, and was now training their offspring in useful endeavours. It was, he maintained, the duty of the Gernian New Nobles to bring such benefits to the formerly uncivilized folk of the plains and plateaus. When he and my mother hosted dinner parties and gatherings, he often deliberately steered the talk to the necessity of such charity work, and encouraged other New Noble families to follow his example.
