"I'll speak to the steward," Garig said, sounding more angry than understanding. "I'll try—but no promises. And if there's slacking tomorrow, we could all be in trouble."
The men stood awhile in the lane, grumbling softly, when Garig had gone into his cottage and slammed the door. Gird was glad enough to stand there, in the warm darkness. Inside his own cottage, Issa's sickness fouled the air, and the children bickered over their meager supper. He tried to tell himself that they were doing all right, better than some others, but it was poor comfort.
The next day, Gird worked as slowly as he could. Garig had said that the steward had consented to another evening feast, if the work took them past mid-afternoon. Mali could not come, but Issa was doing her best raking up the fallen heads of grain into baskets. He was worried about Mali. She had not looked really well since losing the one of the twins. This baby should be her last—would be, if he had to force the herbs into her himself. He grinned at that thought. Mall might be weaker, but she was as headstrong as ever.
They finished the greatfield before dark, but not long before. Gird noticed that everyone came to the feast quietly, with none of the usual songs and laughter. There was meat, sure enough—not abundance, but some, and plenty of bread and cheese. He made sure that Fori and Issa ate heartily, and stuffed himself. Tomorrow he could begin cutting their own strip, grain that would feed them and help pay the field-fee.
It was dark, the thick dark of a cloudy night, with enough wind to keep the leaves rustling uneasily.
"What?" Gird asked softly.
"We want to talk to you." That was Teris, he could tell. Gird sighed.
"Do you have nothing better to do than—"
"Shhh. Not here. Come along with us."
"Who's us?"
"I told you he'd make trouble." Tam's voice, this time.
"I'm not making trouble. I just want to know what—"
"Come on." Teris had his arm, and shook it. "We'll talk, but someplace safe."
Gird let Teris lead him along the lane, between two cottages that he was sure were Garis's and Tam's, and down between a barton wall and the gurgling stream. The night air smelled wet and green; he could pick out scents he never noticed by day.
"There's someone here needs to talk to you," Teris said. Gird felt his heart begin to pound. Someone in the dark, someone he didn't know? He remembered all at once that Teris's mother was reputed to be a dire witch, laying curses on those who crossed her. "Go on," Teris said into the darkness. "Ask him."
Someone he could not see cleared his throat and said "Teris says you know about soldiering."
"No."
"Yes," hissed Teris, "You do."
"We need—we want someone to teach us."
"Who?" asked Gird. He thought he knew already. Instead of a spoken answer, he heard the click of stone on stone, and then felt a stone pressed into his palm.
"You know," said the voice. "The farmer's only hope . . . the only thing what won't burn in the fire that's coming . . ."
"But you're not soldiers," he said. "You don't—"
"We need to know how. We're getting enough, almost, now—if we only knew how to fight, and had weapons—"
"It won't work." Even here, where he was sure no one listened, he kept his voice low. "Running at 'em in a mob, like—they'll just ride over you and ride over you—"
"We have to
try
." His eyes were more used to the dimness; he could just make out Tam's face and the gleam of his eyes. Tam's weaker eye wandered off-focus, then came back. "We can't be soldiers; we don't have the training—"
"You!" Gird snorted. Tam couldn't throw a rock straight, let along make a soldier. "You'll just be killed, and they'll take it out of your families and the rest of us. Use sense, man! You'd have to know how to march, how to use your weapons together—"
"You could teach us," said the stranger, now a hunched black shape against the faint gleam of the water. "You were teaching them to march, Teris said. It was forbidden, but that didn't stop you. And then—"
No one had brought up his cowardice to him for years. They'd accepted him, he thought, once he grew up and married, once he was bent to the same lash as the rest of them. What had they told this stranger, that his voice changed when he said "And then—?"
"I—can't," he said hoarsely. "I—I don't remember enough of it."
"You remember enough to know that an untrained mob is hopeless. You can't have forgotten it all. I didn't." Teris again, hectoring as usual.
"I—"
"You're scared still, aren't you? After all these years—"
"He was
my friend!
" It came out louder than he meant, and he muted the rest of it. "I could not be part of what did that to him.
That's
why I ran, and if you want to call that cowardice, fine." He had never explained it to his friends before. Now the words poured out of him. "If you think I feared blood or pain, why d'you think I stayed in 'til then? If you remember so well, Teris, you must remember the beatings I got. You saw my bruises."
"Well—yes. But they said—"
"
They
called it cowardice, and my father bade me accept that. 'Twas hard enough on us, without causing more trouble. And that's what's really wrong with them—that they'd think cowardice is not wanting to cause pain."
"But you haven't joined—" and the stones clicked again.
"No. I had the family to think of, not just my own but my brother's. Once already I'd caused them all trouble; my mother died of the young lord's enmity, when he refused us the herb-right in the common wood. And the Stone Circle when it started was young lads, unmarried and mostly orphans: they had no family to suffer if they were caught."
"So—?"
Gird sighed. That bleak vision of his nightmares edged nearer, tried to merge with reality. "So—who will feed my wife, my children, if I go off to teach the Stone Circle how to march in step? Who will plow the field, or tend the beasts? If it could happen, and an army of peasants took the field, who would feed
them?
Some must plow and plant, some must spin and weave, or that army would die hungry and ragged, too weak to fight the spears."
"Is that what you plant for? That army, or your family alone?"
Gird spat rudely at the stranger's feet. "I plant for the lord, like all the rest, and we live on the spillage from the tax-cart—dammit, you ask questions like the steward laying blame for a cracked pot! You know my name, but hide yours; why should I listen to you?"
The stranger's head moved, as if listening for something, then gave Gird a long, neutral stare. "You know it's getting worse. You know we have no chance to resist without the knowledge you have. And you sit there, smug as a toad, giving good reasons to a bad argument—why
shouldn't
I put a thorn in your backside? You think I have no family, or these others? Those lads who joined Stone Circle years back are fathers now, just as you are. Those that didn't rot on the spikes. You think your children will thank you, for leaving them helpless before enemies?"
"They would not thank me for throwing them in prison to starve, either."
"Take 'em with you."
"No."
"At least tell us something, something we can use."
"I—" Gird looked around; there were four or five crouched nearby. He was sure of Teris and Tam, but not the others. Was Amis there? He could not tell. "I don't think it will work, even if I taught you—even if real soldiers taught you. The best way for us is to work and keep our peace; what you do only makes the lords angrier, raises the taxes higher—"
The stranger growled, and stood. Gird stood too, and they faced one another a long moment. Then the stranger laughed softly. "It's coming, Gird, whether you like it or not—you will see, and I hope you see before you suffer more deeply than a man can stand. I lost family; I would not wish that on anyone. My name is Diamod, when you want to find me again."
Gird turned away, wondering if they would let him go. No one touched him. He felt his way along the wall of Tam's barton, and then let his feet remember the way along the lane to his own cottage. Teris. Tam. Three or four others, who had not spoken so that he could not know who they were. Did they think he would tell Garig or the steward? His heart ached at that. His hands ached to strike something, anything. He would help them, if he had no family to think of. He could imagine himself teaching them as he had taught Teris and Amis and the others. But he could not risk Mali and Issa and the children.
He got back to bed without waking anyone up, and fell into heavy sleep. Dreams troubled him. In his mind's eye, he could see them, ragged, workworn, scarred, hungry, running in uneven clumps and strings to strike at the horsemen with their poles and scythes, their sickles and clubs. Behind the horsemen, the lords' army waited, trained soldiers in good armor, with their sharp swords and pikes. But they had nothing to do, for the horsemen could deal with the peasants. At the end— He woke with a jerk and a chopped-off cry. Beside him, Mali turned over and groaned softly, then snored.
In the thick darkness of the cottage, he seemed to see the past years as a painted streamer like the ones the lords sometimes carried on horseback. Hard work and hunger now, yes—but he had known hard work and hunger as a child. Yet his children were thinner than he had been, hard as he worked. He had never accumulated the store of coppers and silvers that his father had had beneath the hearthstone when it was needed. If something did happen with his own children, or Arin's, he would not be able to do what his father had done.
The next morning, he was still thinking about it as he shoveled manure. What could he do? He could not imagine sneaking away from the village some nights, to train Stone Circle members, coming back at dawn to work, but he could not imagine taking his whole family into an uncertain future, either. He was mulling this over when he heard shouts from the lane, and the heavy roll of hoofbeats.
He went through the kitchen to find Mali and Issa and the children starting out the front door.
"Get back!" he shouted. They made way for him. He could see, now, people in the lane nearer the center of the village. Amis was headed out his front gate, and Gird moved slowly toward his own. He could hear the loud complaints, the bellowed orders of the guard sergeant, the cries of children. It must be the Stone Circle man, Diamod, he thought, but he didn't see him. Had someone seen him? Reported him? He realized suddenly that his friends might think he had, if that was indeed who the guards were after.
It looked as if the guards were trying to search each cottage and barton. The noisy crowd surrounded them, not actually resisting but somewhat obstructive. The guards, some mounted and some afoot, moved toward Gird's end of the village. Now he could see faces he recognized, guards and villagers alike. An old woman, Teris's mother, was arguing with one of the soldiers, clinging to his arm, shaking it. He wrenched free of her and she staggered away, to be caught by her daughter. A child darted out into the lane ahead of the horses, and Amis went after him. The soldier riding the lead horse yelled something at him; Amis, intent on the child, shook his head and lunged forward.
Although he was behind the others, hardly out of his own door-yard, Gird saw exactly what happened. The soldier's arm moved, and Amis turned, his shoulder already hunching against the expected blow. The soldier's mace caught Amis full in the face, that familiar flesh disappearing instantly in a mush of blood and broken bone. One tooth flew free, a chip of white spinning in the hot sunlight before it fell out of sight behind the other bystanders. Gird felt something prick his hand, and looked down to see the handle of his shovel broken like a dry stick; he opened his hand and let the pieces fall.
As if in a dream, all motion slowed. One by one those at the back of the crowd turned to run, their eyes white-rimmed, their mouths open. Even before Amis fell to the ground, they had opened a path for the soldiers, those in front scrambling back, afraid to turn, afraid . . . and the soldiers' horses, their high necks streaked with sweat, ridged with lather where the reins rubbed, setting their ironshod hooves down one by one, so slowly that it seemed they could hardly catch the terrified fugitives. Amis lay huddled, blood pooling in the lane, soaking into the dust, both hands covering his ruined face. One of the horses, bumped hard by another, placed a front hoof in the center of his back so slowly, with such precision, that Gird had to believe it was a deliberate choice. He could hear a terrible crunch over the other sounds, the thunder of hooves, the screams—
And motion returned to normal, the crowd flowing back along the lane in a panic, the leaders running flat out, arms wide. Behind, the horses surged, the soldiers yelled, their weapons slicing from side to side. Gird stepped back, between the plum trees; it was all he had time for before they were past, horses bumping and trampling over the slow and clumsy, in pursuit of the fleetest. From the corner of his eye, he saw Diamod, cause of the whole incident, slipping quietly from the back of Amis's cowbyre to make his way over the fields.
Gird swallowed the same bolus of rage and fear that he had chewed and swallowed so often before. Now it was Amis on the ground, dead or dying he was sure and then it had been Arin torn by wolves, and before that Meris.
Amis breathed in difficult, jerky snorts. Gird laid his hand against his neck; the pulse was thin, irregular. Was Amis conscious at all? He should say something. What could he say?
"Amis? Can you hear me?" Stupid enough, but something. Amis's hand twitched; Gird laid his own over it.
"You've got to
do
something!" That high voice was Eso, always ready for someone else to do something. "Get him to safety—wash his face—"
"Be still," growled a deeper voice. Amis's father. He knelt beside Gird, his face as gray as his beard. His hands shook as he reached out to his son. "Is he—?"
"He's dying—I saw the mace hit his face, and a horse trampled him—" Gird gestured at the pulped mess of Amis's back.
"And if they come back, they'll but hurt him more." Amis's father held his son's slack hand. "Gird—get a plank or bench."