A few days later he found a short length of barbed chain on his bunk, as they came in for inspection. The sergeant's eyes met his; he took his punishment without complaint; they both knew he had not put it there. He himself had declared for Tir, as his sergeant had suggested the previous summer, although he had not yet given his oath of iron. That would require a Blademaster, and the sergeant said they would have the chance after they'd given their final oath to the lord when training was over. The sergeant had told him what was lawful for him to know, though, and it was very little like anything the villagers taught.
So when the days lengthened again into spring, there were many things he could not share with old friends. They would have questions he could not answer—that was the best face he could put on it. Likely it would be worse. And he himself, as tall now as any of the guards, would be promoted from recruit come Summereve, when the lord was home from Finyatha.
Later he would remember that spring as one of the happiest times of his life, drenched in honey. He was young and strong and handsome; when he walked along the lanes to visit his family, with the brass badge of his lord's service shined and winking in the sun, the little children smiled and waved at him, tagging along behind. "Gird," they called. "Strong Gird . . . carry me, please?" Girls near his age glanced at him sideways; he felt each glance like a caress. Boys too old to tag him like the younger children watched nonetheless, and when he stopped to speak to someone they'd come close. "Is it hard to be a soldier, Gird?" they'd ask. And sometimes he told them tales of the barracks, and watched their eyes widen.
Once, twice, he had leave to go to the gatherings in the sheep-folds around, where the young men and girls met and danced. He was too young yet—he merely watched—but he enjoyed the music, and the respectful, if wary, glances. His old friends still joked with him, cautiously, but none ventured to wrestle or match arms. He didn't mind that; he didn't want to hurt them, and he knew now that he could.
Even at home, it was a good spring. His father's eyes still showed concern, but his older brothers were clearly proud to have a brother in the guards. Other lads his own age were still "lads" only—too young to marry, too young to inherit a farm, and most were younger sons. "Sim's boys" or "Artin's boys," they were called, in lumps like cattle. But he, Gird son of Dorthan, he had a name for himself in the village, and a nickname to match, for even the veterans called him "Strong Gird." And on his rare days off, when he helped his father and brothers on the farm, he knew he deserved that nickname: he could outlift any of them, could haul more wood and dig a longer line of ditch. Now he could handle the longest scythe they had, and mow as level a swathe as his father.
"I can't say they've spoiled you for work," his father said one of those nights, when Gird was enjoying a last few minutes by the fire before walking back to the barracks. "You're a good worker; you always were, from a little lad. You're strong, and you've no foolish ideas about it. But I still wish—" He left the wish unfinished. Gird knew what he would have said, but he had never understood it. He would never forget his family, the people of his heart. And, strong as he was, he wouldn't die in battle far away—he would come home to them. Couldn't they understand that?
"I'll be all right, Da," he said, patting his father's shoulder. "I'll be good, and someday—" But he could not name his private dream, not then. It trembled on the edge of his mind, half-visible in a cloud of wishes too vague to express. He would do something wonderful, something that made the village and the sergeant both proud of him. Something very brave, that yet hurt no one but bad men, or monsters.
"Go in peace, Gird, as long as you may," his father said. "I pray the Lady forgives your service of iron."
His father always said that, and it always annoyed him now. Alyanya, the Lady of Flowers, the Lady of Peace, the Lady whose permission they must have each spring to touch the land with plow or spade—Gird thought of her in his mind as a more beautiful form of the village maids. Rahel, maybe, with shining hair down her back, or Estil whose perfect breasts swung dizzyingly with every stroke of the scythe during haying. Those girls, those flower-scented soft-skinned girls with their springtime bodies swaying along the lanes, those girls didn't mind his "service of iron." No, he had seen them glance, seen them smile sideways at him, while farm lads his age received no flicker of eyelash at all.
And surely the Lady herself, whatever else she was, understood the need for soldiers—surely she also admired broad shoulders, strength, the courage of a man with bright weapons in his hand. The sergeant had told him an old tale about Alyanya and Tir, in which the Lady had her Warrior guardian, and was glad of his service. He had never heard such a tale at home, but it made sense, the way the sergeant told it. That the iron of plow and spade was but another form of the iron of sword and spear, and the Lady's consent to one was as gracious as her consent to the other. "Bright harvest," the sergeant's tale had sung, "born of this wedding, child of this marriage—" Girl and Lady, he thought to himself, both know and want the strong arm, the bright steel. But he did not argue with his father, as he had once the year before. His father was a farmer, born and bred, and would die as a farmer—may it not be soon! he thought piously—and he could not expect a farmer to understand soldiers' things.
He walked back through the late-spring night, with starlight glittering in the puddles alongside the lane, as happy as he could imagine being. He was Gird, the local farmer's son who had made good, had made a place for himself in the lord's household, by the strength of his arm and the courage of his heart.
Then the lord count arrived from the king's court. All the guards stood rigid in the courtyard for that: Gird in the back row, with the other recruits. Tall as he was, he had a good view of the cavalcade. A halfsquad of guards, looking somehow older and rougher than those he had met, on chunky nomad-bred horses, followed by two boys that looked younger than Gird on tall, light-built mounts. Behind them, a prancing warhorse with elaborate harness embroidered and stamped on multicolored leathers. And on the warhorse, their lord—Gird's liege lord, Count Seriast Vanier Dobrest Kelaive—a sour-faced young man in orange velvet, black gloves, tall black boots, and a black velvet cap with an orange plume. He looked, Gird thought, like a gourd going bad in storage—a big orange gourd spotted with fungus.
Immediately he suppressed the thought. This was his lord, his sworn liege, and for the rest of his life he would be this man's loyal vassal. His eyes dropped to the horse, the saddle, the tall polished boots. There were his spurs, the visible symbol of his knighthood, long polished shafts and delicate jeweled rowels. The steward came forward; the squires dismounted, handing their horses to grooms. One of them held the lord's bridle; the other steadied the off stirrup while he dismounted. Gird watched every detail. So far he had not had a chance to ride more than the mule that turned the millsweep. But in watching the horse, he heard everything, heard the steward's graceful speech of welcome, the curt response.
He knew, as did they all, that the young lord had been educated at the king's court in Finyatha; this year, at Summereve, he would take over his own domain, and the steward's rule would end. Everyone had liked that idea—or almost everyone—and had told one another tales of the steward's harshness. A young lord, they'd said, their own lord, living finally on his own domain, would surely be more generous. The steward would have to do his bidding, not make up orders of his own.
But now, seeing the young lord in person, Gird had a moment of doubt. For all the complaints he'd heard of the steward's harshness, most years no one went hungry. The sergeant had told him of other lands where brigands or war brought famine. Here, despite the fees, a hardworking family could prosper, as his had, with one brother tenanting his own cottage, and Arin soon to marry. Would things be better under the young count?
Still, Summereve, only a few days away, would bring a great day for both of them. The lord's investiture, in the moments after midnight. He could not imagine what solemn rituals gave one of the lords dominion; the sergeant made it clear that it was none of their business. Perhaps the sergeant himself had never seen. Village rumor, he remembered, had it that the lords gained their great powers when they took office. But he had never seen any lord, or anyone with powers beyond the steward's ability to ferret out the truth when someone lied. He could not begin to imagine what kind of powers their young lord might have, or use. He pulled his mind back from this speculation to his own prospects. His promotion from recruit to guard private, the next afternoon, would be part of the lord's formal court, the first occasion on which the count would show his wisdom and ability to rule well. Gird had his new uniform ready, had every bit of leather oiled and shining, every scrap of metal polished.
He let his eyes wander to the rest of the entourage. Behind the lord's horse came others equally gaudily caparisoned: young nobles in velvets and furs, sweating in the early summer heat. Young noblewomen, attended each by maids and chaperons, riding graceful horses with hooves painted gold and silver. They began to dismount, in a flurry of ribbons and wide-sweeping sleeves, a gabble of voices as loud and bright as a flight of birds in the cornfield. As the young lord passed his steward's deferential bow, and led the party into the house, Gird felt a surge of excitement. The real world, the great world of king's court, the outside world he had never seen, had come to him, to his own village, and he would be part of it.
Behind the main mass of the lord's hall lay the walled gardens. To the east, the fruit orchard, with its neatly trimmed plums and pears, its rare peach trained against a southern wall. To the west, the long rows of the vegetable garden, mounds of cabbage like a row of balls, the spiky blue-green stalks of onions and ramps, the sprawling vine-bushes of redroot. Ten-foot stone walls surrounded each garden, proof against the casual thief and straying herdbeast. But not, of course, against the daring of an occasional boy who would brag the rest of his life about a theft of plum or pear from the lord's own garden.
Meris, son of Aric, now the tanner's apprentice, had taken a plum the year before, but it was partly green. This year, he determined to take a sackful, and share them out, and they would be ripe ones, too. The lord's best plum tree, as Meris knew well (for his uncle was a skilled pruner of trees, and worked on them), was the old one in the middle of the garden, the only survivor of a row of plums grafted from scions of the king's garden in Finyatha. Its fruit ripened early, just before Summereve, medium-sized reddish egg-shaped plums with a silver bloom and yellow flesh.
It seemed to him that the young lord's arrival would be an excellent time to make his raid. The lord and his retinue would be busy, and nearly everyone else would be watching the excitement in the forecourt. So as soon as the first horns blew across the field, signaling the approaching cavalcade, Meris left off scraping the hair from the wet hide he was working on, and begged his master to let him go.
"Oh, aye, and if I don't you'll be so excited you'll likely scrape a hole in it. Very well . . . put it back to soak, and begone with you. But you'll finish that hide before supper, Meris, if it takes until midnight."
With the prospect of a belly full of his lord's best plums, a delayed supper was the last thing Meris needed to worry about. He grinned his thanks and darted from the tannery. He had hidden what he needed behind a clump of bushes on the east side of the lord's wall . . . a braided rawhide rope with a sliding loop. Other boys used borrowed ladders, and he'd heard of the smith's boy using some sort of hook tied to rope, but he had found that the looped rope could nearly always find a limb to fasten on. With a little support from the rope, and the skill of his bare feet on the rough-cut stone walls, he had always managed to get over. And the rawhide rope, without a hook or other contrivance, never attracted the suspicious attention of the guard. Once they'd found it, and he watched from the bushes as they shrugged and left it in place. A herdsman's noose, they'd said, dropped by some careless apprentice. Let the lad take his master's punishment, and braid another.
He waited, now, in the same clump of bushes, watching people stream by from the eastern fields. Soon no one passed. He heard a commotion around the wall's corner, from the village itself. Let it peak, he thought. Let the lord arrive. He waited a little longer, then glanced around. No one in sight, not even a distant flock. He swung the noose wide, as he'd practiced, and tossed it over the fence. He heard the thrashing of leaves as he pulled, and it tightened. He tugged. Firm enough.
Standing back a bit from the base of the wall, he threw himself upward, finding a toehold, and another. Whenever he found nothing, he used the rope, but most of it was skill and scrambling. At the wall's top, he flattened himself along it and gave a careful look at the hall's rear windows. Once he'd been seen by a servant, and nearly caught. But, as he'd expected, nothing moved in those windows. Everyone must be watching the forecourt, and the young lord's arrival. He pulled up his rope, and coiled it on the top of the wall. He could gain the wall from the inside by climbing one of the pears trained along it; he needed the rope only for getting in. This time, though, he planned to use it to lower the sack of stolen fruit on his way out. He checked his sack, took another cautious look around, and climbed quickly down a pear tree to the soft grass under the trees.
He heard a blast of trumpets from the forecourt, and grinned. Just as he'd planned: complete silence in the gardens, and everyone out front gaping at the lord. Silly. He was going to be there long enough for all to see, so why bother? Meris glanced around, still careful. No sign of anyone. One of the gates between the fruit orchard and the vegetable garden was open; he could see the glistening cabbage heads, the spikes of onion.