The Summer Palace (6 page)

Men and women alike worked at plucking and butchering the catch. Tanning the plucked hide to make tents or clothing, and cleaning the bones to make ornaments and tools, was women's work—or if the clan was fortunate enough to have a few slaves, as the Golden Spear did not just now, it was slaves' work.

Sword was curious about the slaves—he understood the concept, certainly, since several Barokanese towns had slaves, but in those cases the system was imposed by
ler
and their priests, while here in the Uplands the land felt dead, and no one seemed to communicate with
ler
at all. He asked several questions about slavery, and Fist and Dancer explained.

Any lowlander who wandered onto the plateau outside the narrow
strip conceded to the Wizard Lord was fair game for enslavement, but that was rare; most slaves were outcast Uplanders, criminals driven away by their own clans. Minor offenses were punished by fines, beatings, or other lesser penalties, as the clan elders might see fit, but each clan had certain crimes that merited exile, and humans being what they were, even so dire a threat was not always enough to keep people in line. These criminals were rare—none of the men could remember one among their own clan, though the old women named a few. Every so often, though, someone would be cast out by his clan, and such exiles could then be enslaved by whoever found them. Anyone living on the plains without a clan was assumed to be an exiled criminal; when Sword asked whether there were ever any Uplander hermits, people who
chose
to live alone, it took him several minutes to explain the concept sufficiently, whereupon Stepmother burst into raucous laughter, Dancer made noises of disgust, and Gnaw Gnaw said simply, “No. There is no such thing in the Uplands.”

“Madness,” Dancer muttered. “Lowlander madness.”

“Please, tell me more of how it is,” Sword said, ignoring Dancer.

No clan ever enslaved their own people, he was told. That was considered an abomination, to so debase a man that he would be serving his own kinsmen as a slave. Nor did Uplanders ever deliberately kill their own clansmen except in the heat of anger—to spill a helpless kinsman's lifeblood was unspeakable. No crime, not even the murder of a Patriarch, could justify the cold-blooded execution of a member of the clan. Exile was therefore the worst penalty any clan could inflict on its own members.

Once exiled, though, the criminal was fair game for any unrelated clan that came across him, to be enslaved, tortured, or killed as his captors chose. An exile who spoke convincingly enough in proclaiming his own innocence, or who otherwise demonstrated exceptional worth, might be adopted as a free man, but that was rare, as was torture or execution; slavery was the usual result. Every clan had a few nasty jobs they were eager to turn over to slaves.

A slave who served well would be permitted to accompany the
clan down to Winterhome when the snows came, which often meant a chance to slip away and live free among the Barokanese, since the Host People did not keep slaves themselves. A slave who was lazy or argumentative, though, would be more likely to find himself cast out again, forbidden access to the trail down the cliff and left to die of cold or hunger on the plain.

Sword wondered whether any of these doubly outcast criminals might slip down the path alone, after the clans were settled in their guesthouses, but the only response to this suggestion was a shrug.

“It's not our concern if they do,” Dancer said.

(That was the first time Sword realized that the Wizard Lord might have had a sound reason all along for posting those guards at the gate down in Winterhome.)

At any rate, slaves were useful for plucking and tanning, for cleaning bone, for disposing of offal, and for hauling water. Those were necessary jobs that no one enjoyed.

Carving the bones and beaks to make tools and ornaments and musical instruments, on the other hand, was what men did between hunts, and was generally considered to be great fun, a chance to display one's skill and imagination. Weaving the delicate fibers from certain feathers, binding and dyeing feathers, that was work the women enjoyed and kept for themselves. Virtually all the cloth the Uplanders used was made from feathers or
ara
hide, even the material that did not appear to be. Feathers that were used intact were generally left their natural hues of black, white, and pink, but those that were spun into thread and woven into cloth might be dyed any color of the rainbow.

This, Gnaw Gnaw explained, was all for their
summer
clothing; they did not wear so many feathers so openly when they made their way down to Winterhome. In winter they wore leather, or clothes purchased in Barokan, and kept their feathered garments packed carefully away. They didn't want the lowlanders to realize just how plentiful the feathers really were, for fear of lowering prices.

In addition to weaving and dyeing, women and children also gathered the greens and mushrooms that added a little variety to the
Uplander diet, and even did some gardening. When a few handy specimens of native species were pointed out, Sword tried to learn to recognize which were safe and which were poisonous, but was not very confident of his abilities.
Ara
meat in its various forms, and these women's gleanings, made up virtually the entire Uplander diet.

“We ate
ara
eggs at the Summer Palace,” Sword remarked.

“Did you?” Dancer was startled. “I'm sure the Wizard Lord paid a great deal for them.
Ara
eggs are rare and precious here. The birds normally breed in their winter home, far to the south, and we never see those eggs, only the chicks.”

“Sometimes, though,” Gnaw Gnaw told him, “a hen will lay here in our lands, out of season.”

“We take those when we find them,” Fist said. “They never hatch.”

“But they make excellent eating,” Stepmother said, licking her lips.

Sword nodded. “They do,” he agreed.

The men stared at him; apparently the fact that he had eaten
ara
eggs raised his status in their eyes. Most of the clan, Fist explained, never got to taste them; when they were found, the Patriarch would dole them out to a favored few clansmen as rewards.

If he had known that they were such a delicacy, Sword thought, he might have paid more attention when he ate them. As it was, he had not really registered them as anything special, merely as very large and tasty eggs. He had thought their excellence had been due to the talent of the Wizard Lord's cooks, but perhaps the eggs themselves had been responsible.

The tour and the lectures continued. The clan's water came from two sources. Wells were not practical here, no one had ever sunk a shaft deep enough to find water, but there were streams and rivers, and the Uplanders also used rainwater cisterns. Sword had not realized there were any rivers on the plateau; he did not entirely understand how they might form when the land was so flat, and he had assumed that if they existed, he would have seen waterfalls spilling over the cliffs, rather than the little trickles he was familiar with.

The clanspeople found this particular ignorance very amusing indeed.

“It does rain here, after all,” Dancer said. “The water has to go
somewhere.
”

“The rivers all flow to the east and south,” Fist explained. “The plateau is flat, yes, but it isn't
level.
It's all very slightly tilted to the east. The western cliff-edge is the highest part of the world. When the rain falls, it all runs to the east, and gradually collects into bigger and bigger streams—water is scarce up in the west, but by the time you get a hundred miles from the cliffs, the biggest rivers are a hundred feet wide and as deep as I am tall.”

“You really did a remarkable job of missing them, if you didn't see any on your way here,” Dancer said.

“Well, he was walking east,” Fist said. “He was probably midway between two streams.”

Everyone nodded agreement with this suggestion, which left Sword feeling unreasonably stupid, as if he
should
have seen them. He changed the subject, asking about the other water source Gnaw Gnaw had mentioned.

The cisterns, Sword was told, were the strange squarish structures he had glimpsed in the distance on occasion. Each consisted of a large wooden frame, twice the height of a man, lined with what amounted to an immense bag sewn of
ara
hide; rain fell into the open top and collected in the gigantic waterskin, and plugs along the base allowed water to be drawn off as needed. The plugs were of tarred bone, held in place with rawhide drawstrings.

Sword was somewhat surprised the things didn't leak so much as to be useless, but Gnaw Gnaw explained that whenever the clan passed near a cistern, the children were sent out with buckets of varnish, which they smeared all over everything they could reach, sealing cracks and reinforcing the hides. It was great fun for them, splashing sticky goo everywhere, and it kept the bird-leather cisterns functional.

Of course, getting the children clean again afterward was almost impossible, but no one really cared. Children had a tendency to be
sticky and dirty anyway, and varnish was not really any worse than some of the stuff they got into on their own. The hair would grow out in time, the skin wear clean, and the clothes would have been torn or outgrown soon enough in any case.

It all fit together into a rather appealing way of life, Sword thought. It was not, perhaps, as pleasant as his childhood in Mad Oak, but it was certainly better than what he had seen people tolerate without complaint in many towns. The people of the nightmare community of Bone Garden, for example, would probably have considered the Uplander life to be paradisial.

That thought sent Sword into an angry funk as he remembered Azir shi Azir, the Seer. She had been born and raised in Bone Garden, and had escaped and made a new life elsewhere, only to be horribly murdered by the Wizard Lord's soldiers.

Those soldiers had died, killed by Bow and Sword in retaliation, but the man who sent them, the Wizard Lord himself, still reigned down in Barokan.

“Are you all right?” Fist asked him, seeing his grimace.

“Ah,” Sword said, remembering himself. “Yes. Perhaps still a little thirsty.”

“There's a jug,” Gnaw Gnaw said, pointing. “And the river's a mile that way.”

Sword glanced at the far-off cistern that the others had pointed out while explaining its construction to him. It stood some distance to the southwest; it was hard to judge exactly how far on the vast level plain of the plateau. “Could I get water there instead?” he asked.

“No!” Fist barked, shocked.

Gnaw Gnaw held up a calming hand. “He doesn't know any better,” she told Fist. Then she turned to Sword. “No. The cisterns are too precious to be used when the rivers are flowing and nearby. It's a mile to the river, five or six to the cistern. Use the river.”

Sword nodded. “Of course,” he said. He took a jug from the row standing alongside one of the tents, then glanced around, unsure whether he was expected to find the river on his own, and whether there was anything more he needed to know—any dangers he might
encounter, biting animals or poisonous plants to avoid. In Barokan he would have been concerned about hostile
ler
when venturing outside the settlement, but that didn't seem to be an issue here.

“I'll show you,” said Whistler, picking up another jug. “Come on.”

Whistler had said nothing up to this point, and Sword glanced at the others, to see their reactions to the man's breaking his silence. They didn't seem to think anything of it.

“Thank you,” Sword said.

The two of them ambled southeastward out of the camp, leaving Sword's other five instructors behind. For a few minutes they walked in companionable silence; then Whistler asked, “Why did you come here?”

Sword threw him a quick glance. “You didn't hear what I told the Patriarch?”

“You didn't tell him
why,
” Whistler said. “You told him that you were planning to kill the Wizard Lord, but you didn't tell him why you came to the Uplands, instead of staying in Barokan.”

“The Wizard Lord has ordered that I be killed,” Sword said. “Isn't that reason enough to leave Barokan?”

Whistler shook his head. “No, it isn't. The Chosen have fought Dark Lords before—I don't know how many times, but it's happened. None of them has ever before come to the Uplands. They have always found ways to remain in the Lowlands until they could reach their foe and slay him.”

Sword did not answer immediately. They walked perhaps a dozen paces before he said, “You're right. There's something different this time. This time, the people of Barokan support the Wizard Lord.”

Whistler frowned. “I don't understand.”

“Well, you've been down in Barokan for the winter,” Sword said. “Have you talked to any of the Host People lately? Have you been to the market in Winterhome?”

“Well, not very much,” Whistler said. “I mostly stay in the guesthouse, where it's warm, or walk in the woods behind it. But I've seen the market, and spoken to a few people. I don't know what you mean.”

“You're old enough to remember back before the current Wizard Lord, aren't you?”

“Yes.” Whistler frowned again. “Are you talking about how the markets are more crowded now?”

“That's part of it,” Sword said. He sighed. “This Wizard Lord isn't like any we've had before, not in all the seven hundred years we've
had
Wizard Lords. All the others seem to have been interested in magic more than anything else—that was why they became wizards in the first place. This one, though, doesn't care about magic for its own sake. He wants to make everything
better,
for everyone in Barokan.”

“That sounds like a
good
thing,” Whistler said, puzzled. “Why do you say he's a Dark Lord, then?”