Once again Gird found himself handling gold coins, this time in daylight, openly. Coins of both kingdoms were minted with the same values: Tsaian crowns were traded in Finaarenis often enough to cause no comment. He let his fingers rummage among them, enjoying the feel, and looked up to see a wary expression on Marrakai's face.
"They're so—heavy," Gird said. "And they feel—they feel so different against my skin. It's no wonder some men become misers, and want to touch gold all the time."
"Had you never felt gold before?" asked Mesha.
"Once. Someone tried to bribe me." Gird poured the coins from his hand back into the leather bag Marrakai had handed him.
"You cannot be bribed?" Mesha asked.
Gird met his eyes. "Between this gold and my heart is the memory of my daughter, raped and bleeding, her dead husband, my closest friend, struck down for nothing. I could be bribed, I daresay, but not with gold." The young man looked alarmed, but Marrakai smiled.
"I have trusted the right man, then. Fare well with that gold, and your memories."
Mesha, on the way to the Marrakai border, shared knowledge as precious as the gold he carried. "My father says I cannot tell you what I did to be banished from court and my inheritance, but he said nothing about what I
saw
." He explained the kinds of magicks the lords might use, and the tools needed for each, and the cost. He knew nonmagical counters for some of them, because the Marrakai, having lost their magicks early, had had to defend themselves from rival mages.
"It's said the best defense is a pure heart, but none of us has one pure enough, if we even knew what the gods meant by it. Men were not made perfect, I say, and come nearest perfection as fools when they deny their mistakes."
Gird nodded. "I've made plenty. It's a rare young man sees that, but you have a rare father."
"He's—different." Mesha walked on some strides before explaining that. "I knew that before I knew why; I could see it in the way others treated him. They're afraid of him, although they have greater powers."
"I hope for your peoples' sake that you are different the same way," said Gird.
Mesha looked at him, started to speak, and then, after several minutes of silence, tried again, his face turning red even as he spoke. "What is it like, being a peasant?" When Gird did not answer at once, he turned away, ears flaming, and hurried on. "The harpers sing of simple country joys, of the delights of the farm. My father's people seem happy enough, but they would not tell me, would they? I asked my father, and he said go and try it—but my tutor brought me back."
Gird thought at least part of Mesha's curiosity was genuine interest, something he had had no chance to pursue in a place he was so well known. He looked, to see the young man staring at the ground as he strode along.
"I liked farming," Gird said. "It's hard work, but I grew up with it; I was good at it. Have you ever milked a cow? Swung a scythe? No? Well, it came natural to me. Digging's no fun, but it has to be—plowing, planting, harvesting, all that's the good part. Seeing Alyanya's grace fill the baskets and barrels. Weather's weather, the same for all. What's bad comes from other men—from the lord taking more and more in field-fee every year, from death-fee and marriage-fee, from losing the right to gather herbs and firewood in the forest, all that. Having to take grain to
his
mill, instead of using our handmills, and having to buy ale from his brewery, instead of brewing our own. Going hungry, when there's no need but to pay the taxes, seeing our children thin and sick, while his plump younglings ride by on fat ponies, trampling our fields."
Gird looked over to see how Mesha was taking this; the young man's face was sober, neither angry nor disapproving.
"Never think the troubles of peasants are little ones, Mesha. Hunger gnaws at you; the hunger of your family, of your children, hurts worse than your own. To feel the winter wind strike through ragged clothes, to have no fire in the house, and then the steward comes, smelling of meat and new-baked bread, to demand a special tax because the lord's courting a lady, or his lady has had a child, that's the bad part of it. Our lord, Kelaive, said peasants were lazy cowards: said it with his plump belly full of food we raised, with his well-fed soldiers around him, and we listened, shivering in a cold wind, or baked by summer sun. The steward said we should understand his greater problems. Greater than hunger? Greater than cold, than sickness, with healing herbs denied? Can there be worse than choosing which child shall have a crust of bread?" He could say no more; he felt the blood beating in his ears, the breath storming through his lungs.
"I'm sorry," Mesha said.
"It's all right," said Gird, blindly walking on.
"It is not, and it is not right that I did not know." Mesha sounded angry now, and not with Gird. "My father is a better man than that. I know it." But Gird heard the uncertainty in his voice.
"I hope so," he said, carefully making his voice light and easy. "As you will be."
"I would tell you of things my father has done, but I see now that it is not enough, not for me. I must
know
how our people live. He has asked me before to take over a village, but I wouldn't—"
Gird was surprised to find himself relaxed again, "You are young, Mesha. When I was young, I did not look for pain. I trained as a guard under that very steward—not looking, not seeing. My family—I thought they were fools, and I would show them all. After all, as a guard I ate their food, wore their clothes, brought money home—real coppers—to my father. And boasted of it. That's what hurt worst, later—that I had boasted, while my sisters and brothers went hungry and I was full."
"You—you do not hate me?" That was a boy's voice, a boy's naked desire to have an older man's respect.
"No. I do not hate you, or even—by this time—Kelaive. I hate what made Kelaive greedy and cruel, what made my father cringe before even his steward, what has kept you—who would, I daresay, be just and generous if you could—from knowing what you need to know." Gird smiled at the young man's worried face. "Be at peace, Mesha, while you can; long life brings enough battles to every man's door."
Once he crossed the border into Finaarenis, Gird began arranging transportation for the promised pikes. It would have been easier to sneak them across country before the summer's war erupted; the gnomes had advised him to go to Marrakai first. But he wasted little energy on regret. Before the leaves fell, all his pikes were over the border.
Meanwhile, his people told him, the war had hardly slowed for harvest. The king's army had split, one column going to Blackbone Hill, where they found only ruin. The other had started west along the River Road, but when it reached the lands controlled by Sier Segrahlin, the sier had refused the king's army passage. Rumor had it that the king and the sier would not mend their quarrel, whatever it had been, until an enemy army lay at the gates of Finyatha.
"We could arrange
that
," said Gird, laughing.
"Could you?" Arranha, to Gird's surprise, had come to Brightwater. He wore the same face Gird remembered, and seemed content to live with Gird's army and to endure the nervous glances of the other yeomen who distrusted anyone who had been a lord.
"We must someday," Gird said. "But having fought the sier, I would prefer not to do it again, if we can avoid it."
Arranha smiled at him. "You are acquiring prudence, then? I thought he might give you trouble. If his powers last, if he is not killed by a rock falling on his head, or lung-fever—"
"Can he be killed so? When my bowmen aimed at lords, the arrows flew astray."
"As I understand that form of magic—and it is not my own—one must know of the attack to defend against it, like a man holding up a shield over his head. If someone surprises him, he has only the strength of his bone."
Arranha had brought additional reminders and suggestions from the gnomes. "Not free gifts of information, you understand. I was told that they consider this to fall under the original contract; they're pleased with what you accomplished at Blackbone Hill."
Gird snorted. "They damn nearly got us killed at Blackbone Hill; they didn't tell me what they were doing, or that they'd been talking to the miners—"
Arranha laughed gently. "But you survived."
Another surprise of that homecoming was Selamis. After Gird had scolded him for not letting go his aristocratic background, he had seemed to fit in better. Once more, he was almost unnoticeable. Gird had begun to make use of his special knowledge, taking it for granted that Selamis would know which lord was related to whom, and what the news the traders brought meant. But until he left for Marrakai's domain, the other marshals had still been wary of Selamis. Several had come to him privately, and asked him not to make Selamis a marshal, or give him command. Gird had had no intention of doing that anyway. Now, however, they all seemed at ease with him. The marshals had discovered how handy it was to have someone able and willing to write and keep accounts—and someone whose face everyone knew, but who had no actual command. Selamis, Gird heard with some surprise, had stopped a street brawl—and he had patched up a quarrel between two of the newer marshals—and he had convinced the ranking merchants that the Brightwater yeoman-marshal was worth hearing.
"I thought you were crazy," Ivis said, on Gird's first night back. "A lord's son, troublemaker in his village—I know, you said he wasn't, but we had one in our village and you never did. Now—he's not that bad. You know what Cob's been calling him?"
Cob leaned over and punched Ivis. "Hush. Gird won't approve."
"What, then?"
"Luap," said Ivis, snorting with glee. "You know—the lords' own term for a bastard who can't inherit. Rank but no power. Cob's been calling him our luap."
Gird looked hard at Cob, who had the grace to blush. "It's not as bad as it sounds," he said defensively. "He's the one taught me the word, and made a joke about it. Spends all his time with us high-ranking folk, marshals and you, and has no command of his own. So I took it up, and he just grinned."
"Joke or not, I don't like it."
"Why not?" That came from the subject of discussion himself, who flung a leg over the bench, clapped Gird hard on the shoulder, and faced him squarely. "No one's ever liked the name my father gave me: you said yourself Selamis was a strange name. I am a luap: my father's bastard, and your trusted assistant in all but command. They'll tell you I've practiced, and learned fighting, but I'm still best at keeping accounts."
"Yes, but—" Gird shook his head, uneasy about something in the guileless, open face in front of him. If it didn't bother the man, it should. But this was one argument he lost; he found that many of the yeomen had fallen into the habit of speaking of "the luap" or "that marshal's luap." With Gird's return, and Selamis's return to Gird's side, it quickly became "Gird's luap." Gird still called him Selamis, though he sometimes slipped.
Later that fall, the lords changed their strategy. They had not been able to trap Gird's army all summer, and he had inflicted sharp losses on them. So they turned their attention ever more strongly to the land which supplied him with soldiers and supplies, forcing the evacuation of farming villages, burning them out if they resisted, stripping the countryside of resources. They had armed soldiers supervise the harvest, after which the fields were burnt; for hands of days the sky was streaked with smoke, and ash dusted travelers. Livestock they drove to the lords' fortified towns or dwellings, and any they could not confine under guard were slaughtered to feed the soldiers.
This work proceeded at different rates in various parts of the kingdom. Some lords were loathe to lose the produce of villages they had established, and counted instead on quartering more of their own soldiers among them. Some did not have the resources to reduce or move more than one or two villages that autumn. Those that survived could choose to try escape, or wait and hope that the coming spring would change things. But Gird found more and more refugees wandering, some seeking him and some looking for any safe place to spend the winter.
His own force controlled the valley lying south and east of Brightwater. This provided a large grain harvest—large, that is, until he measured it against his increasing needs. The town of Brightwater, all the little villages, his army—the grain would feed so many only if it were carefully managed, and by his own laws (he felt the teeth of a joke in this) he could not seize it. Some, of course, would not trust him, and yield it willingly. His own followers had sometimes less patience than he did; he found himself scolding his own as often as the others about the need for fairness, the evils inherent in bullying.
"It's not the same thing," Ivis argued, one dank late-autumn day, when a cold rain had blackened the falling leaves to a silent dark carpet. "If we're fair in distribution—in famine law—and all share equally, then it's not bullying. Bullying benefits the taker—"
"So it does—and so it does here." Gird blew his nose noisily on a bit of dirty fleece and rubbed it on his sleeve. His head was pounding, his ears felt full of water, and he was sure this was more than a fall chill. He could not feel this sick with a mere chill. "It benefits us—the takers—because then we have more to distribute fairly, and our own share—as well as others—is larger."
"But it benefits
everyone
."
"No. Not the ones who lose—who have larger shares now. Our way is right, Ivis, and better than theirs—I know that. But part of our way is
how
we do what we do, not just what we do."
"If we all starve it won't do them any good—"
"We aren't starving yet. Besides, while I won't bully our people, I don't have anything against taking from our enemies."
"I thought you said we weren't ready to assault their fortified places."
"A grain caravan isn't fortified." Gird did not bother to explain, the way his throat was hurting, that he'd suggested to outlying bartons that they attack grain caravans. Some of them were successful—successful, too, at running off herds being moved from the deserted villages. More and more bartons began even bolder actions: ambushing any guard unit unwary enough to camp outside walls, or travel carelessly along the roads and trails. Clashes between small groups of rebels and small units of guards soon convinced the guards to move only in larger numbers.