"You would have the training place here, in Fin Panir?" Seri nodded. Rahi went on. "And you would have the Marshals—let's stay with that for now—learn what?"
Seri ticked the items off on her fingers. Aris was proud of her, the way she was staying calm when he knew she was bubbling inside. "First, the Marshals must be reliable, honest, hardworking that's why I said they should have grown up in one grange, and then worked in another. They have to be old enough to become yeoman-marshals first, because you don't know if they're going to misuse power until they have some. Marshals shouldn't be bullies. Then they have to know the Code, and they need to know the Commentaries, too, because the Code's always changing and it probably always will. Marshals have to get along with everyone in the city—or town—all the merchants, crafters, and farmers. They may not be the strongest, but they have to be skilled in all the weapons our people might use, and they have to be good at teaching them. They have to know something about the mageborn, and about the horsefolk, and anyone else we find, because they have to judge whether there's been fair dealing."
When she paused for breath, Aris put in, "And she wouldn't mind if they were skilled in each craft, and born with every parrion in the world." Seri flushed red.
"It wouldn't hurt," she muttered.
The Rosemage chuckled; Aris thought she looked much younger than usual. "No, it wouldn't hurt, but how long do you think they could be in such training?"
"If they're made yeoman-marshal after their first year as senior yeoman," Seri said, "and then serve four years as yeoman-marshal, they'd be the same age as someone finishing journeyman training in most crafts. Surely a Marshal must have earned the same respect as a master in a craft, and most journeymen spend four to six years before they pass the guild. . . ."
"And in that four years they would have time for law and history and languages as well as military things," Aris said. "I think—we think—that Marshals should all have knowledge of healing crafts, as well. If they lead yeomen into battle, they should know how to treat wounds and camp sicknesses."
"So new Marshals would be over twenty-six," Rahi said. "Even thirty—"
"Weren't most of Gird's Marshals, appointed in the war, over thirty?"
"Yes, but that was a special case." Rahi looked thoughtful; Aris gave Seri a warning glance. Best let Rahi think it out for herself. "I wasn't close to thirty . . . but then . . ." Aris smiled to himself. He had expected her to see their logic. "You're saying that all Marshals should have that maturity, as Gird and his first recruits did?"
"Yes, because Marshals aren't just battle commanders; courage isn't all they need." Seri looked back and forth between the two older women. Aris watched them smile at each other, as if at the antics of favorite children.
"I think, Rahi, that these two have more maturity than some gran'thers I've seen." The Rosemage shook her head. "But don't you two get above yourselves, eh? I heard about the tricks you played when you first came, Seri."
"I wouldn't do that
now
," Seri said. Aris wondered. She hadn't meant any harm, and none had followed, but she could no more forswear mischief than he could healing. Tease, prick the pompous, and then hug the hurt away—that was Seri. "And besides, I don't know enough yet—I want to learn all the things I'm talking about—"
"And be the first truly educated Marshal?" The Rosemage whistled. Seri blushed, and Rahi reached over to tousle her already tousled hair.
"I keep telling myself it's a new world these younglings live in," she said. "It's not like where I grew up, nor you either. But sometimes it does startle me. I presume you know it's going to be hard, Seri?"
"Of course." Now she looked affronted "It's supposed to be hard, or it's not any good. I'll be tired, and grumpy, and even scared—"
"And dirty and hungry and hurting, if we do it right," Rahi said, no humor at all in her voice now. "And you will be scared, I promise you that."
"And you, Aris—" The Rosemage broke that tense silence. "Do you, too, look toward being a Marshal?"
"I—I don't know. I want to learn all that Seri does, but—I'd like to spend more time healing, if I could. Teaching it, too."
"Mmm. It will be interesting. . . ." The Rosemage and Rahi shared a look Aris could not interpret, but turned the talk to other things until day's end.
Aris licked the grease from roast chicken off his fingers and reached for the bread. Seri pushed the loaf within his reach with her elbow; she was too busy eating her own chicken to free a hand. He tore off a hunk of bread, wiped his fingers, and ate that before saying anything. He had not been this hungry since coming to Fin Panir. Across the little fire, two of the yeomen with them grinned.
"I wonder what gave th' Marshal th' notion t'play this game," said one of them around a mouthful of bread.
"If I find out," said the other, "I'll knock his nob for 'im, that I will. My da told me it was more work than it sounded in songs, and he was right. We've climbed five hills a day, I'd wager, and haven't walked down but one."
"And that one muddy," said the first yeoman. "Wi' rocks at the bottom." He crunched the bone of his chicken leg and sucked the marrow noisily, then belched with satisfaction.
"Rocks!" said the second. "I'll tell you about rocks—" Then, as Aris raised an eyebrow, he fell silent. Their Marshal's blue cloak swirled past, then the yeoman resumed, in a lower voice. "Like to broke my legs, I did, and the old man says 'That's what eyes is for, lad, to look where you put your feet.' "
Aris gave Seri a long took; she blushed and wiped her mouth and fingers with bread.
He
knew where the Marshals had found that idea, and who to blame. He knew she would have confessed, challenging the man to thump her if he could, had the Marshals not told them to keep quiet about whose idea it was. Once they'd decided the idea had merit, it hadn't taken them long to put it into practice. Aris had been thinking of maneuvers in the spring, marching over soft green grass under warming skies. He had imagined himself setting up a clean tent to which the injured would come for treatment. Instead, the granges in Fin Panir, all four of them, were sent out in the cold after-harvest autumn storms, to practice moving engagements in the hills southwest of the city. Three days' march to the hills had taught them all how little they knew of supply and camp organization (the veterans enjoyed pointing it out) and the hand of days in the hills proper had been a revelation even to them.
Aris took another hunk of bread. So far he hadn't been scared, except of not keeping up, but he had been cold, wet, muddy, tired, stiff, and hungry. He hadn't been needed to heal anything worse than blisters and bruises, for which most of the yeomen had their own pet remedies. Instead of a healer's tent, he found himself carrying a staff just like everyone else, and doing the same camp chores he had done as a boy. Even though he and Seri had been with the peasant army, even though he had once lived a much harder life, the years he'd lived in Fin Panir had taken the edge off. And tomorrow they faced the three days' march back, into the teeth of the winter wind. He wondered if they'd get to sleep tonight, or if the Marshals had some surprise planned for them, as they had on other nights. He hoped not. His eyes felt gluey.
Luap hardly believed what he saw, the Rosemage and Raheli eating elbow-to-elbow at the campfire, and both enjoying it. He was not sure what he felt. On the one hand, the two of them quarreling could knot his stomach. But on the other . . . he had always been able to move one by invoking the other's opinion. What if they really agreed? What if they became (he shuddered)
friends?
The Rosemage had always gotten along with Gird better than he did himself; if she made friends with Rahi, his whole rationale for withdrawing the mageborn could fall through.
Everyone knew how those two had loathed each other; if they could become friends, so could any other mageborn/peasant pair.
Beside them were Aris and Seri, a pair he already found inconvenient. He wanted Aris to come with him; he did not want Seri. But he knew Aris wouldn't leave her behind. He needed the Rosemage; he needed Aris's healing talents. He did not need Gird's troublesome daughter or that curly-headed young warleader who should have been born early enough to fight in the war.
He had come on this uncomfortable jaunt, he told himself, simply to chronicle the training exercise. Burdened with his sack of scrolls, his inksticks and pens, his folding table and a tent to keep them dry, he had not been tempted to take part in the training itself. Instead he instructed two of his more promising clerks in the art of field mapping, wrote up each day's notes as reported by the Marshals, and tried without success to devise a better way to render rough country visible on a flat surface. It had been tiring, difficult work, carried out under difficult conditions, but it had not been the same as clambering up hill and down to hold mock battles with another group of tired, rain-soaked yeomen. He knew that, he had been there in the real war. So he had stayed away from the evening fires, to avoid making his comfortable job any more insulting than it was already.
Tonight, though, the maneuvers were over—supposedly—and they would all march toward home in the morning. So he had brought out a jug of the peach brandy his favorite cook made, in hopes of sweetening the Autumn Rose's attitude. And there she sat, dirt and grease to the ears, joking with Raheli.
He walked toward them; young Aris saw him coming, and leaped up. "Sir—Luap—"
"Sit down, lad. You've worked a lot harder than I have." Other yeomen moved aside to give him room beside Aris.
"I wanted to ask you," Seri said, direct as always. "About those maps. Did you ever talk to the gnomes about mapping?"
How could the girl be that wide awake, that full of energy? Aris looked tired to the bone, but Seri—it must be the peasant endurance, Luap thought. He remembered Raheli brimming with energy when others had been too tired to move. And Gird, despite his age, had nearly always been the first up in the mornings. "Once, after the fall of Fin Panir," he answered. "They'd come to talk to Gird, and he showed them my copy of the map they gave him." He chuckled. "They weren't impressed. I told them I had had to do it without the original; it was lost in the flood outside Grahlin that time—"
"Was that when the well exploded?"
He looked past Aris into that bright, wide-awake face, and past it to the two older women. Was that tone just a bit put on? Did Seri have some purpose besides what he heard in words? Rahi spoke up, as if he'd asked her to.
"Not exploded—but apparently the local magelord had magicked all the water in the river into it, underground, and sent it all out at once. It made an awful noise, and scared us silly."
"The water shot up in the air," Luap added. "Higher than any fountain, a column of water perhaps a man's height across. It was, only a little mud-brick fort and when the water hit, it came apart around us. On top of us."
"And the next day we had a pitched battle we never should have fought," Rahi went on. "Gird was too shaken by the flood, I think—he felt we had to hold the bridge. Cob's foot was hurt that night; he's limped ever since. And we lost others who'd been with us from the start—" She stared at the fire, her face, grim. That fiasco and Gird's sullen, drunken response in the next hands of days had almost ended the rebellion. Seri looked from Rahi to Luap.
"What I meant, sir, was that I wondered if the gnomes had solved the problems you were having with the new maps. Do they have some way of showing the land, even when it's wrinkled up, so you can tell what part of a hill sticks out?"
"Not that I know of. By the time I had them to copy, of course, they'd been soaked and torn. We had to dig them out of the wet rabble, try to uncurl them without tearing them any worse, and then redraw them. Maybe there were marks that didn't show after that." Seri looked interested, alert, and—in another place and time—Luap would have been flattered by that alert interest. He had had few chances to teach her, but those few times he had enjoyed it. She came to everything with such enthusiasm, such eagerness to learn and do well, and those Marshals who had supervised her considered themselves lucky. But now he felt her intensity as a veiled threat—she and young Aris between them were up to something, and he could not decide what. Had they anything to do with the new friendship between Raheli and the Autumn Rose?
For those two were as amiable with each other as either with anyone else, now, and from the looks they cast at the youngsters, might have been their aunts if not their mothers.
"I brought something to warm cold hearts," Luap said, holding up his jug of peach brandy. "Who'd like a sip?" The Autumn Rose held out her hand, and he gave it to her.
After a sip, she handed it on to Seri. "Be careful, girl; it's stronger than it tastes. Did Meshi make that for you, Luap?"
"Yes; she spoils me." Safer to say it himself.
"True, she does," the Autumn Rose agreed. "Do you know I found her making spiced preserves one time, and she told me she didn't have enough for everyone—but when Luap came down the stair . . ." They all laughed; Luap managed a grin.
"It comes out even—the other cooks don't like me because she's so partial, and won't give them her secret recipe for the spiced preserves. I've thought of getting it from her, and telling them, just for peace in the kitchen, but—" He shrugged, and threw his hands out; everyone laughed, but with no sting in it.
"You know what would happen then," Rahi put in. "They wouldn't like you more, and Meshi would bang you on the fingers with a spoon every time you came in the kitchen. It is good; reminds me of my mother's preserves, but there's something else in it."
"Whatever it is costs enough to put cooks at each other's throats," Luap said. "I think one of the spices must come from over the mountains." He took a sip himself, that warmed him all the way down. Perhaps it wasn't a bad thing to have Rahi and the Autumn Rose friends. It seemed less threatening than it had, just as Seri's—or was it Rahi's?—ideas about the training of Marshals to replace those retiring seemed less threatening. He looked over at the girl—not really a girl, now. She would make a formidable Marshal in her day. He glanced at Aris. Would he take Marshals' training as well, or stick with his role as healer? He tried to imagine them both in middle age, and failed.