Surrender None Page 12

  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 Garig’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.”

  Gird nodded, and backed away on his knees. He shivered, nauseated, and barely made it to the trampled verge before throwing up, the morning’s food and a life’s bile together. Then he went into the front room, where Mali stood with her fist against her mouth, white as milk, and ripped the legs off one of the benches without a word. The long plank banged against the doorpost as he went out, and he almost lost control again. Amis. Kindly, cheerful, steady Amis, who had taken him to the sheepfold gathering to meet Mali—who had farmed alongside his strip for ten years, who had never done one thing wrong but be where a mace could destroy him—

  Amis’s father and Gird wrestled Amis onto the plank; that long, lanky body felt wrong, as if it were a boneless sack of seedcorn. He was still breathing, a hoarse rattle, in and out, that bubbled the blood on his face. What had been a face. Gird thought of the cheerful brown eyes, the nose lopsided from a cow’s kick, the wide mouth.

  Amis’s wife had fainted; Mali sat beside that crumpled heap, comforting the younger children, as Gird and Amis’s father carried him through, all the way into the barton. There they sponged the blood off his back, rolled him over. Gird turned his head aside and retched again. They could do nothing. Amis’s breathing filled the barton with pain. One of his brothers came, and stood beside them, watching. Amis’s wife, finally, biting her kerchief, holding their youngest baby close. Mali came to stand behind Gird, and put a hand on his shoulder.

  Amis never woke, and when he finally quit breathing Gird could not at first turn away. Only the noise of the returning Guard, angry voices and the clash of weapons in the lane, loosened the paralysis that had locked his joints in place. He stayed calm in the turmoil that followed, giving his evidence to the steward in a slow, deep voice that came to him for that occasion. Amis had never been known as a troublemaker; his lunge at the guard’s horse was a grab for the child who had run unknowing into danger. The steward nodded, shrugged, remitted part of the death-fee, and evicted Amis’s wife to live with Amis’s father. Another family, strangers relocated from another vill, moved into it.

  And Gird put a sack of grain at the far edge of the wood, with two stones on top of it. It was gone the next day.

  PART II

  Chapter Eight

  The first scream brought him out of his musings; he looked across the ploughed strips to see nothing at first. Perhaps someone had spilled a kettle of hot water. He scratched the back of one leg with his other foot, and clucked to the oxen. They leaned into the yoke. Then another shriek, one he would have known anywhere. Raheli! He dropped the plowhandles, and started across the field at a run. Then the horses came, from between the cottages, and crashing through the back gate of his barton. Lords’ horses, with the bright orange and green and yellow he had seen going in the manor gates the day before. Another scream, and another, shriller—one of the little girls? He had yelled himself before he realized it, a deep roar of rage and pain. Up the field, another plowman answered.

  “Stop, you!” yelled one of the riders, waving something at him. Gird paid no mind, charging toward his own gate. Now he could hear a man’s voice, yelling, and more screams
down the lane. The same rider yelled “Guards! Ho!” The horsemen closed toward him, the horses plunging with excitement. Behind them now he could see footsoldiers in Kelaive’s bright orange. The sun glittered on their helmets, on riders’ buckles and saddlefittings, on the stubble of last year’s grain. Gird took a breath, slowing to see how he might get by. Now one of the riders was above him, the tall dark horse snorting and prancing.

  “Get back, fellow!” the rider said. Gird peered up at a narrow pale face. “It’s nothing to do with you. Get back to work!” The voice had fear in it, as well as arrogance. Was he armed? Gird tried to circle the horse, but the horse spun, and blocked him. “Get back!” the man said, louder. Gird looked aside; the guards were almost on him, their cudgels ready. Another scream, this one a man’s death-cry, ending in a gurgle. Gird flinched, and shivered— it had to be Parin, he was the only one inside. His belly churned; his vision blurred. Then pain stung him awake; the rider had slashed his back with a whip. He spun, fury once more driving out fear, but the guards had him, four of them. For all he could do, it was nothing—they had him face-down in the fresh-plowed furrows, choking on dirt, two of them on his back, as the screams went on—and then died away. When they let him up, the other plowmen were back at work, and the riders were gone, and the grim-faced guard sergeant gave him his warning.

  He knew before he came inside what he would find. The shattered barton gate, the ewe he had brought in for nursing lying dead in the barton, her guts strewn wide, their one pig gone, the cottage doors smashed, the great loom broken: that was bad enough. But there lay Parin, his face one curdled mess of blood and shattered bone, and there lay Raheli, naked, the slight bulge of her belly that had promised so much to her and Parin. He knelt beside her, so full of grief he could not breathe. When he felt that first warm breath on his hand, he could hardly believe it. Alive? After the blow that had split her face all down one side, and drenched her in blood? After that blade or another had bared her ribs on one side, and sliced deep into her hip? After the beating, and the rape? He looked at the body he had not seen since she became a woman. Even at that moment, he noticed—and hated himself for noticing—the white beauty of her skin, the full young breasts, the long curve of back and thigh now streaked with blood. Her breath touched his hand again, and he drew a long shaky breath of his own. Alive. He had to do something—