Surrender None Page 2

  “No!” She caught his arm, and half-dragged him down the lane to the house.

  The argument went on all evening. His father’s first reaction to the story of the plums was to reach for his belt. “I don’t brawl,” he said. “And I didn’t raise my sons to be brawlers.”

  Arin, as usual, stood up for him. “Da, that Rauf’s a bad lot, you know that. So’s the steward: they’ve got him in stocks this night, and Sikan too.”

  “And I’ll have their fathers down on me, did you think of that? Oreg’s no man to blame his own son, even if Rauf tells the tale aright. If Gird hadn’t fought back, Oreg would’ve known he owed me sommat, a bit of bacon even. And Sikan’s father—I want no quarrel with him; his wife has the only pardon for dyecraft in this village. As for this way—it’s no good. We can’t be fighting each other; the world’s hard enough without that. They’ll have to know I punished Gird, and I’ll have to go to them and apologize.”

  So it was a whipping on top of his bruises, and no supper as well as no lunch. Gird had expected as much; he saw from Arin’s wink that he would have a scrap to eat later, whatever Arin could sneak to him without being caught. But his father was as unhappy as his mother to hear of the sergeant’s offer of training.

  “It’s never good to come into notice like that. Besides, we follow the Lady: would you take sword against your own folk, Gird? Break the village peace in blood and iron?” But before he could decide whether it was safe to answer—the answer he’d thought of, while waiting for his father to come from the fields—his father shrugged. “But if the steward comes, what can I say? They have the right to take you, no matter what I think about it. The best I can hope for is that the steward forgets it.”

  The steward did not forget. Gird spent the next day wrestling with the family’s smallest scythe—still too long for him—mowing his father’s section of the meadow. He knew he’d been sent there to get him out of sight, away from the other village boys. He knew his mother had baked two sweet cakes for Rauf’s family and Sikan’s, and his father had taken them over in the early morning. It was hot, the steamy heat of full summer, and the cold porridge of his breakfast had not filled the hollows from yesterday’s fast. But above him, in the great field, his father was working, able to see if he shirked.

  He kept at it doggedly, hacking uneven chunks where his brother could lay a clean swathe. There had to be a way. He paused to rub the great curved blade with the bit of stone his father had given him, and listened to the change in sound it made on different parts of the blade. When he looked sideways up the slope to the arable, he saw his father talking to another of the village men. Gird leaned on the scythe handle, the blade angled high above him, and picked a bur from between his toes.

  When he looked again, his father had started back up the arable. Gird dared not move out of the sun to rest, but he tipped his head back to get the breeze. Something rustled in the tall grass ahead of him. Rat? Bird? He scratched the back of one leg with the other foot, glanced upslope again, and sighed. Someday he would be a man, and if he wasn’t a soldier, he’d be a farmer, and able to swing a bigger scythe than this one. Like his father, whose sweeping strokes led the reapers each year. Like his brother Arin, who had just grown out of this scythe. He grunted at himself, and let the long blade down. Surely he could find a way to make this work better.

  By nightfall, with all his blisters, he had begun to mow a level swathe. He’d changed the handles slightly, learned to get his hip into the swing, learned to take steps just the right length to compensate for the blade’s arc. The next day, he spent on the same patch of meadow. Now that he had the knack of it, he was half-hoping the steward would not come. He would grow up a farmer like his father, leading the reapers in the field, guiding his own oxen, growing even better fruit…

  It was the next day that the steward came at dusk, when his father had come in from the fields, and Gird had begun to feel himself out of disgrace as far as the family went. The children were sent to the barton out back, while the steward talked, and his father (he was sure) listened. He wanted to creep into the cowbyre and hear for himself, but Arin barred the way. He had to wait until his father called him in.

  There in the candlelight, his father’s face looked older, tireder. His mother sat stiffly, lips pressed together, behind her loom. The steward smiled at him. “Gird, the sergeant suggested that you were a likely lad to train for soldier: strong and brave, and in need of discipline. Your father will let you choose for yourself. If you agree, you will spend one day of ten with the soldiers this year, and from Midwinter to Midwinter next, two days of ten. It’s not soldiering at first, I’ll be honest with you: you’ll work in the barracks just as you’d work here. But your father’d be paid the worth of your work, a copper crab more than for fieldwork. And the following year, you’d be a recruit, learning warcraft, and your father will get both coppers and a dole off his fee. ’Twould help your family, in hard times, but your father says you must do as you wish.”

  It was frightening to see his parents so still, so clearly frightened themselves. He had never really understood them before, he felt. Behind him, in the doorway, Arin and the others crowded; he could hear their noisy breathing. Could soldiering be so bad as they thought? All his life he’d seen the guardsmen strolling the village lane, admired the glitter of their buckles, the jingle of their harness. He’d been too young to fear the ordersticks, the clubs… he’d had strong hands rumpling his hair, when he crowded near with the other boys, he’d had a smile from the sergeant himself. And the soldiers fought off brigands, and hunted wolves and folokai; he remembered only last winter, cheering in the snow with the others as they carried back the dead folokai tied to poles. One of them had been hurt, his blood staining the orange tunic he wore, but the world was hard, and there were many ways to be hurt.

  He wanted to stand on one leg and think about it, but there stood the steward, peering at him in the dimness with eyes that seemed to see clear into his heart. He’d never spoken to a lord before, exactly. Was the steward a lord? Close enough.

  “It would not be a binding oath,” the steward said, a little impatiently. Gird knew that tone; his father had it when he asked who had left the barton wicket open. It meant a quick answer, or trouble. “If you did not like it, you could quit before you started the real training…”

  Gird ducked his head, and then looked up at the steward. From one corner of his vision he could see his father’s rigid face, but he ignored it.

  “Sir… steward… I would be glad to. If my father allows.”

  “He has said it.” The steward smiled, then. “Dorthan, your son Gird is accepted into service of the Count Kelaive, and here is the pirik—” The bargain-sum, Gird remembered: not a price paid, as if he were a sheep, but a sum to mark the conclusion of any bargain. The price was somewhat else.

  The very next morning, Gird left at dawn to walk through the village to the count’s guards’ barracks. None of his friends were out to watch him, but he knew they would be impressed. The guard at the gate admitted him, sent him straight across the forecourt to the barracks. The guards were just getting up, and the sergeant was crosser than Gird remembered.

  “Get in the kitchen first, and serve the food; then you can clean for the cooks until after morning drill. I’ll see you then. Hop, now.”

  The porridge was much like their own, if cooked in larger pots and served in bigger bowls. Gird carried the dirty bowls back, and scrubbed them, under the cook’s critical eye, then scrubbed the big cookpots. Then it was chop the onions, while his eyes burned and watered, and chop the redroots until his hands were cramped, and then fetch buckets of clean water. All the while the cook scolded, worse than his oldest sister, while mixing and kneading the dough that would be dumplings in the midday stew. The sergeant came in while Gird was still washing down the long tables. “Right, lad. Now let’s see what we’ve got, here. Come along.” He led Gird out the side door of the kitchen, into a back court, a little walled enclosure like
a barton with no byres. In one corner was the kitchen well, with the row of buckets Gird had scrubbed neatly ranged along the wall.

  The sergeant was just as impressive as ever, to Gird’s eye: taller and broader than his own father, hard-muscled, with a brisk authority that expected absolute obedience. Gird looked at him, imagining himself grown into that size and strength, wearing those clean, whole, unmended clothes, having a place in the village and in his lord’s service more secure than any farmer.

  “You’re a hard worker, and strong,” the sergeant began, “but you’ll have to be stronger yet, and you’ll have to learn discipline. Begin with this: you don’t talk unless you’re told to, and you answer with ‘sir’ any time I speak to you. Clear?”

  Gird nodded. “Yes… sir?”

  “Right. You’re here to learn, not to chatter. Dawn to dusk, one day of ten… can you count?”

  “Not really, sir.”

  “Not really is no. Can’t count sheep, or cows?”

  Gird frowned. “If they’re there… but not days, sir, they don’t stay in front of me.”

  “You’ll learn. Now, Gird: when you come here, you must be clean and ready to work. If you can’t wash at home, come early and wash here. I’ll have no ragtags in my barracks. Is that your only shirt?”

  “No, sir, but th’other’s worse.”

  “Then you’ll get one, but only for this work. Do you have shoes? Boots?”

  Gird shook his head, then remembered to say “No, sir.” Shoes? For a mere lad? He had never had shoes, and wouldn’t until he wed, unless his father had a string of good years.

  “You’ll need them later; you can wear them here, but not at home. Did you have breakfast at home this morning?” Of course he had not, beyond a bit of crust; the porridge had just gone on when he walked up to the barracks. The sergeant hmmphed at that. “Can’t grow soldiers on thin rations. I’ll tell the cook, and you’ll eat here all day on your workdays. Now—about the other boys. I want no brawling, young Gird, none at all. If they tease you about going for soldier, you learn to let it pass. No threats from you, no catcalling at Rauf or Satik or whatever his name was. You’ll be where they can’t bother you, if you keep your nose clean. Hothead soldiers cause more trouble than they’re worth; you have your chance, for you and your family: earn it.”

  An answer seemed required; Gird said “Yes, sir.”

  The rest of that day was more chores and little that Gird could see as soldiering, although he did see the inside of the barracks, with the lines of wooden bunks and thin straw mattresses, the weapons hung neatly on the walls, the jacks (inside! He wondered, but did not ask, how they were cleaned. Surely they were cleaned; they smelled less than his own family’s pit.) He swept a floor that seemed clean enough already, carried more buckets of water to the cook, ate a bowl of stew larger than his father ever saw for his lunch, washed dishes until his hands wrinkled afterwards, fetched yet more water (he felt his feet had worn a groove from the well to the kitchen door) and sliced yet more redroots, had a huge slab of bread and a piece of meat for supper, and was allowed to stand silent in a corner and watch the ordered marching that preceded the changing of watch before dusk.

  He ran home along the dark lane his bare feet knew so well, bursting with excitement. Meat! He didn’t know if he would tell them, because they would see no meat until harvest… but it had tasted so good, and the stew and bread had filled all the hollows in his belly. He burped, tasting meat on his breath, and laughed.

  They were waiting, and had saved a bowl of gruel and hunk of bread for him; he felt both shamed and proud when he could give it to the others.

  “So—they’ll feed you well?” His mother wasn’t quite looking at him, spooning his share carefully into other bowls.

  “Yes. Breakfast too, but I must get there early.”

  “And do you like soldiering?” she asked, a sharpness in her voice.

  “It’s not soldiering yet,” he said, watching the others eat. “I helped the cook today, chopping onions and carrying water… I carried enough water for two days.”

  “You can carry my water tomorrow,” his mother said. His father had yet said nothing, watching Gird across the firelight as he ate.

  The time from summer to Midwinter passed quickly. One day in ten he rose before dawn, at first cockcrow, and ran up the lane to the gate where the guards now knew him by name and greeted him. Into that steamy kitchen, larger than his own cottage, where the cook—never so difficult as that first day—gave him a great bowl of porridge before he served the others. As the days drew in with autumn, that kitchen became a haven, rich with the smells of baking bread and roasting meat, savory stews, fruit pies. It was a feast-day, however plain the soldiers found the food (and he was amazed to hear them grumble), he had his belly full from daylight to dark. With a full belly, the work went easily. Hauling water, sweeping, washing, chopping vegetables, chopping wood for the great hearths. He learned the names of all the guards, and knew where everything was kept. Two of them were recruits, one from his village and one from over the fields sunrising, tall boys he would have thought men if he hadn’t seen them next to the soldiers. He began to learn the drill commands as he watched.

  The other nine days passed as his days always had, in work with his family. He was growing into the scythe, or managing it better, and he was allowed in the big field for the first time. Arin took him up to the high end of the wood, where the village pigs spent the summer rooting and wallowing, to help gather them into the lower pens. They ate their meager lunch in a rocky cleft up higher than others ever came, a place Arin had shown him the first year he went to help gather pigs. He spent a few days nutting in the woods, with his friends, laughing and playing tricks like the others. They all wanted to know what he was learning. When he explained that so far it was just work, like any work, they wondered why he agreed.

  “It will be soldiering,” Gird said, leaning back against a bank and squinting up at one of their favorite nut trees. “And in the meantime, it’s food and coppers for my family—what better?”

  “Good food?” asked Amis. He was lean and ribby, as they all were that year.

  Gird nodded. “Lots of it, too. And that leaves more—”

  “Can you take any home?”

  “No.” That had been a disappointment, and his first disgrace. Sharing food was part of his life: everyone shared, fast or feast. But when he tried to take home a half-loaf being tossed out anyway, it had brought swift punishment. “The sergeant says that’s stealing. They’re getting enough for me, he says, more than I’m worth. That may be so, though I try. But not one crust will they let me take out, or a single dried plum.” The stripes had not hurt as much as knowing he could not share; he had not told his father why he’d been punished.

  Terris made the closed-fist gesture against evil. “Gripe-hearts, is what they are. You watch, Gird, they’ll turn you against us.”

  “Never.” Gird said it loudly, though he could already sense a rift between him and his friends. “I can share from my own, when I earn my own: then you’ll see. Open heart, open hands: the Lady’s blessing.”

  “Lady’s blessing,” they all said. Gird made sure to put a handful more than his share into the common sack, that would go up to the count’s steward as their fee for nutting in those woods.

  At Midwinter Feast, he stood once more before the steward, this time in the Hall, and agreed to his next year’s service. His father had stayed home, shrugging away Gird’s concern for his cough. Two days in ten, he thought, they will not have to feed me, and there’s the coppers besides. He was proud of the thought that his pay might help with the fieldfee.

  Two days in ten made one in five. In the short days of winter, the sergeant set him to learning counting and letters. Gird hated it. Sitting with cold feet and numbed hands over a board scrawled with mysterious shapes was far harder than fetching water from the well, even when that meant breaking the ice on it first. At home he could read tallies well enough, the notched st
icks all the farmers used to keep count of stock and coin. But here were no helpful hints… you could not tell, from the words, who wrote them. Without the clue that this tally was Oder’s… when everyone knew that Oder had only a double-hand of sheep… you had to know all the words and numbers to find out what it said.

  Some of the men laughed unkindly at his struggles. “Thickhead,” said one, a balding redhead whom Gird had rather liked before. “Perhaps the knowledge could get in, if we cracked it open for you?”

  “More like his little wit would fall out,” said another. “He thinks with his hands and feet, that one, like most peasants.”

  Gird tried to concentrate on markings that seemed to jump and jiggle about in the flickering candlelight. Was the sign for three supposed to stick out this way, or that? He wiggled his fingers, trying to remember. The sergeant’s sword was on the same side as that hand… he shook his head, confused once more.

  “Here,” said the redhead, handing him two pebbles. “Put this in your hand—no, that hand—and hold it there. Now call that your left hand, eh? Stonehand. Some signs are stonehand, some are empty hand—you can remember that much, can’t you?”

  He might have, but he was angry. He clenched his teeth against the temptation. The sergeant intervened. “Let him alone, Slagin. The stone’s a good idea, but leave the rest of it. Some boys take longer, that’s all. All right, Gird, the cook needs more water.”

  By spring, the two days in ten of plentiful food had begun to show. He had always been heavier built than most of his sibs. “More like my brother,” his father had said, of an uncle dead before he was born. Now his broader frame began to carry thicker muscle. He had grown another two fingers up, and was straining the seams of his shirt. And that summer he carried a ruckbasket of plums without difficulty.

  All that year, Gird worked his two days in ten, and his family settled into the knowledge that he would almost certainly become a soldier. His father continued to teach him the crafts and skills of farming, but with less urgency. His mother let out his old shirt, and made a new one, without pleading with him to stay home. His brothers admitted, privately, that life was a bit easier when he got part of his food elsewhere, and the coppers came in on quarterdays. Rauf tried once to tease him into a fight, calling him coward when he backed off; a few months later he noticed that Rauf crossed the lane to avoid him. And his friends seemed glad to see him, when any of them had time off for foolery, which wasn’t often.