The Deed of Paksenarrion (62 page)

Vossik shrugged. “He has the title. He has the power. What else?”

“But if he’s not really—by blood, I mean—”

“I don’t see that it matters. He’ll be better as a duke than a pirate: he’ll have to govern, expand trade, stop robbing—”

“Will he?” Haben looked around the whole group before going on. “I wouldn’t think, myself, that a pirate-turned-brigand would make a very good duke. What’s the difference between taxes and robbery, if it comes to that?”

“He’s not stupid, Haben.” Vossik looked worried. “It will have to be better than Siniava—”

“That’s my point. Siniava claimed a title—claimed to be governing his lands—but we all saw what that meant in Cha and Sibili. He didn’t cut off trade entirely, as Alured has done on the Immer, no—but would any of us want to live under someone like him? I remember the faces in those cities, if you don’t.”

“But he fought Siniava—”

“Yes—at the end. For a good reward, too. I’m not saying he’s all bad, Vossik; I don’t know. But so far he’s gone where the gold is. How will he govern? A man who thinks he’s nobly born, and has been cheated of his birthright—what will he do when we reach the Immer ports?”

They found out at Immerdzan, where the Immer widened abruptly into a bay, longer than it was wide. The port required no formal assault. It had never been fortified on the land side, beyond a simple wall hardly more than man-high with the simplest of gates. The army marched in without meeting any resistance. The crowded, dirty streets stank of things Paks had never smelled before. She got her first look at the bay, here roiled and murky from the Immer’s muddy flow. The shore was cluttered with piers and wharves, with half-rotted pilings, the skeletons of boats, boats sinking, boats floating, new boats, spars, shreds of sail, nets hung from every available pole, and festooned on the houses. She saw small naked children, skinny as goats, diving and swimming around the boats. Most of them wore their hair in a single short braid, tied with bright bits of cloth.

Beyond the near-shore clutter, the bay lay wide and nearly empty under the hot afternoon sun, its surface streaked with blues and greens she had never seen before. A few boats glided before the wind, their great triangular sails curved like wings. Paks stared at them, fascinated. One changed direction as she watched, the dark line of its hull shortening and lengthening again. Far in the distance she could see the high ground beyond the bay, and southward the water turned a different green, then deep blue, as the Immer’s water merged with the open sea.

Around the Duke’s troops, a noisy crowd had gathered—squabbling, it seemed to Paks, in a language high-pitched and irritable. Children dashed back and forth, some still sleek and wet from the water, others grimy. Barefoot men in short trousers, their hair in a longer single braid, clustered around the boats; women in bright short skirts and striped stockings hung out of windows and crowded the doorways. One of Alured’s captains called in the local language, and a sudden silence fell. Paks heard the water behind her, sucking and mumbling at the pilings, slurping. She shivered, wondering if the sea had a spirit. Did it hunger?

Alured’s captain began reading from a scroll in his hand. Paks looked for Arcolin and watched his face; surely he knew what was going on. He had no expression she could read. When Alured’s captain finished reading, he spoke to the Duke, saluted, and mounted to ride away. The crowd was silent. When he rounded the corner, a low murmur passed through them. One man shouted, hoarsely. Paks looked for him, and saw two younger men shoving a graybearded one back. Another man near them called in accented Common:

“Who of you speaks to us?”

“I do.” The Duke’s voice was calm as ever.

“You—you are pirates?”

“No. What do you mean?”

“That—that man—he says is now our duke—he is a pirate. You are his men—you are pirates.”

“No.” The Duke shook his head. Paks saw Arcolin give the others a hand signal, saw the signal passed from captains to sergeants. Not that they needed any warning; they were all alert anyway. “We are his allies, not his men. He fought with us upriver—against Siniava.”

“That filth!” The man spat. “Who are you, then, if you fight against Siniava but befriend pirates?”

“Duke Phelan, of Tsaia.”

“Tsaia? That’s over the Dwarfmounts, all the way north! What do you here?” Confusion and anger both in that voice; his eyes raked the troops.

“I have a mercenary company, that fights in Aarenis. Siniava—” The Duke’s voice thinned, but he did not go on. “We fought Siniava,” he said finally. “He is dead. Alured of the forest has been granted the Duchy of Immer, and as he aided us, so I am now aiding him.”

“He is no duke!” yelled the man. “I don’t know you—I heard something maybe, but I don’t know you. But that Alured—he is nothing but pirate, and pirate he will always be. Siniava was bad, Barrandowea knows that—but
Alured
!
He killed my uncle, years back, out there in the bay, him and his filthy ship!”

“No matter,” said the Duke. “He is the Duke of Immer now, and I am here to keep order until his own officers take over.”

The man spat again, and turned away. The Duke said nothing more to the crowd, but set the cohorts on guard along the waterfront, and had patrols in the streets leading to and from their area. All stayed quiet enough, that first day. Paks felt herself lucky to be stationed on the seawall. She could look down at the boats, swaying on the waves, and catch a breath of the light wind that blew off the water. Strange birds, gray and white with black-capped heads, and large red bills, hovered over the water, diving and lifting again.

It was the next day that the executions began. Paks heard the yells from the other side of the city, but before they could get excited, the captains explained what was going on.

“The Duke of Fall and the Duke of Immer are executing Siniava’s agents.” Arcolin’s face was closed. “We are to keep order here, in case of rioting—but we don’t expect any.” In fact, nothing happened in their quarter. The men and women went about their work without looking at the soldiers, and the children scampered in and out of the water freely. But the noise from across the city did not quiet down, and in the evening Cracolnya’s cohort was pulled out to join the Halverics in calming the disturbance. They returned in the morning, tired and grim; Paks did not hear the details until much later. But the Duke’s Company marched out of Immerdzan the following day, and the bodies hung on the wall were eloquent enough.

In Ka-Immer, rumor had arrived before they did. The gates were closed. With no trained troops for defense, and only the same low walls, the assault lasted only a few hours. This time the entire population was herded into the market square next to the seawall. While the Halverics and Phelani guarded them, Alured’s men searched the streets, house by house, bringing more and more to stand with the others. When they were done, Alured himself rode to the edge of the square. He pointed at a man among the others. His soldiers seized him, and dragged him out of the mob. Then two more, and another. Someone yelled, from across the square, and a squad of Alured’s men shoved into the crowd, flailing them aside, to seize him as well. The first man had thrown himself down before Alured, sobbing. Alured shook his head, pointed. All of them were dragged to a rough framework of spars which Alured’s troops had lashed together.

A ripple of sound ran through the crowd; the people crammed back against each other, the rear ranks backing almost into Paks’s squad. She and the others linked shields, holding firm. She could hardly see over the crowd. Then the first of the men lifted into sight, stretched on ropes slung over the framework. Paks stiffened; her belly clenched. Another. Another. Soon they hung in a row, one by the feet and the others by their arms. Alured’s men pelted them with mud, stones, fish from the market. One of them hung limp, another screamed thinly. Paks looked away, gulping back nausea. When her eyes slid sideways, they met Keri’s, equally miserable. She did not see the end, when Alured himself ran a spear into each man. She felt, through the movement of the crowd, that an end had come, and looked up to see the bodies being lowered.

But it was not the end. Alured spoke, in that strange language, gesturing fiercely. The crowd was still, unmoving; Paks could smell the fear and hatred of those nearest her. He finished with a question: Paks recognized the tone of voice, the outflung arm, the pause, waiting for an answer. It came as a dead fish, flung from somewhere in the crowd, that came near to its mark. His face darkened. Paks could not hear what he said, but his own soldiers fanned out again, coming at the crowd.

Before they reached it, the crowd erupted into sound and action. Jammed as they were against a thin line of Phelani and Halverics holding the three landward sides of the market, they somehow managed to turn and move at once. Paks’s squad was forced back, by that immense pressure. They could hear nothing but the screams and bellows of the crowd; they had been ordered to guard, not attack. But they were being overwhelmed. Most of the people had no weapons; their weapon was simply numbers. Like Paks, they were reluctant to strike unarmed men and women—but equally, they did not want to be overrun.

Behind, in the streets that led to the market, Paks could hear other troops coming, and shouted commands that were but pebbles of noise against the stone wall around them. She tried to stay in contact with the others, tried to fend off the crowd with the flat of her sword, but the pressure was against them all. A man grabbed at her weapon, screaming at her; she raised it, and he hit her, hard, under the arm. Almost in reflex, Paks thrust, running the sword into his body. He fell under a storm of feet that kept coming at her. She fended them off as best she could, pressing close to the rest of the squad as they tried to keep together and keep on their feet.

A gap opened between them and the next squad; the crowd poured through, still bellowing. Paks was slammed back into the building behind her; she could feel something—a window ledge, she supposed—sticking into her back. Faces heaved in front of her, all screaming; hands waved, grabbed at her weapon. She fought them off, panting. She had no time to look for Stammel or Arcolin; she could hear nothing but the crowd. They had broken through the ring in many places, now, and streamed away from the market, lurching and falling in their panic. A child stumbled into her and fell, grabbing at her tunic as he went down, screaming shrilly. Paks had no hand to spare for him, and he disappeared under the hurrying feet.

By the time she could move again, most of the crowd had fled. She could see Alured riding behind his soldiers as they tried to stop those in the rear. She finally saw Arcolin, and then Stammel, beyond the tossing heads. Then she could hear them. The cohort reformed, joined the others, and was sent in pursuit of the fugitives. But by sundown, barely a fifth had been retaken, mostly women and children too weak to run far, or too frightened. Paks, still shaken by the morning’s events, was sickened by the treatment of those she helped recapture. Alured was determined that none of Siniava’s sympathizers would survive, and that all would acknowledge his rank and rule. To this end, he intended, as he explained to Phelan in front of the troops, to frighten the citizens into submission.

Paks expected the Duke to argue, but he said nothing. He had hardly seemed to smile since Siniava’s death, and since reaching the coast had spent hours looking seaward. She did not know—none of them knew—what was troubling him. But more and more Paks felt that she could not live with what was troubling her. The looks of fear and loathing turned on them—the muttered insults, clear enough even in a foreign tongue—the contempt of Alured’s troops, when the Phelani would not join them in “play,” which to them meant tormenting some helpless civilian—all this curdled her belly until she could hardly eat and slept but little, waking often from troubled dreams.

Paks tried to hide her feelings, tried to argue herself into calm. She had spoken out once—that was enough for any private. As long as she wore the Duke’s colors, she owed him obedience. He was a good man; had always been honorable . . . she thought of the High Marshal and wished she had never met him. He had raised questions she didn’t want to answer. Surely the Duke’s service was worth a little discomfort, even this unease.

When they marched out of Ka-Immer, leaving a garrison of Alured’s men behind, Paks tried to tell herself the worst was over. But it wasn’t. In town after town, along the Immerhoft coast, Alured suspected Siniava’s agents, or found someone who expressed doubt that a pirate could legally inherit a dukedom. The mercenaries did not participate in the executions and tortures, but they all knew that without them Alured lacked the troops to force so many towns.

None of them knew how long it would last—where the Duke was planning to stop. Surely he would. Any day he would turn back, would march to Valdaire. But he said nothing, staring south across the blue, endless water. Uneasiness ran through the Company like mice through a winter attic.

Paks thought no one had noticed her in particular until Stammel came to her guardpost one night. He stood near her, unspeaking, for a few minutes. Paks wondered what he wanted. Then he sighed, and took off his helmet, rumpling up his hair.

“I don’t need to ask what’s wrong with you,” he began. “But something has to be done.”

Paks could think of nothing to say, any more than she had been able to think of anything to do.

“You aren’t eating enough for someone half your size. You’ll be no good to any of us if you fall sick—”

“I’m fine—” began Paks, but he interrupted.

“No, you’re not fine; neither am I. But I’m keeping my food down, and sleeping nights, which is more than you’re doing. I don’t want to lose a good veteran this way. We don’t have that many. All those new people we’ve picked up here and there. They aren’t the same.” Stammel paused again. He put his helmet back on, and rubbed his nose. “I don’t know if they ever will be—if we ever will be—what we were.” His voice trailed away.

“I keep—keep seeing—” Paks could not go on.