In the Red Lord's Reach Page 25

  "But it's all you have, Fowsh. I'll sing, and gladly, but Simir can feed me."

  "You cannot reject fair payment, minstrel—"

  "Please. The high chief still has deer."

  Fowsh pressed his lips tight together for a moment. Then he said, "Very well. Let the high chief feed you. But it will not please my wife, I promise you."

  ****

  IT WAS AT Fowsh's fire, late that afternoon, that Alaric heard Simir was looking for him. He had eaten after all, pressed by Fowsh's wife, but only a small amount, and he was hungry enough that the summons was welcome. Still, he was sorry to leave, for though he had managed to bring a few smiles to the faces at that fire, they had been feeble ones.

  "Tell him how it is with us," Fowsh said as he walked toward Simir's tent with Alaric. "Tell him we need his wisdom now more than ever."

  "I will." They stopped within sight of the throng that still surrounded the tent. Alaric slung the lute over his shoulder and clasped Fowsh's hand. "There will be help for you. I swear it."

  Fowsh nodded and let him go on alone. But he was still standing there, watching, when Alaric looked back once before plunging into the crowd.

  My first friend in the north, Alaric thought, raising his hand in a last brief wave. Would you and your family be happy where the snow is not so deep, nor the winter wind so bitter? I know a place. I know a dozen places.

  Simir's tent was even more crowded than the space around it. Twoscore men and more sat cross-legged inside, shoulder to shoulder—gray beards, band chieftains, men of experience and toughness; Alaric knew some of them from Simir's own circle, and he recognized Nuriki and several others from the previous year. They bent together, in groups of three and four, murmuring, and few of them noticed Alaric enter. Simir did, though, and gestured for him to stay at the entry. With a few words to his close neighbors, the high chief rose from his place and picked a careful path to Alaric's side.

  "You and I must speak," he said. "Come walk with me among the deer."

  They elbowed their way past the curious, the anxious, the questioning, and every time Simir's name was called, he shook his head and waved the caller away. When the crowd would have followed them into the fringe of the herd, he stopped it with a sharp gesture.

  "They want to know what the future holds," he said at last when the deer had closed around them and replaced the babble of human voices with their own snufflings.

  "Who does not?" said Alaric.

  "You would know something if you had been listening to our councils."

  Alaric shrugged. "I didn't think your councils needed any of my northern wisdom." He smiled a little. "As well ask one of these deer for advice. You'd probably get better, at that."

  Simir looked back toward his tent. "Advice I have in plenty. Much of it would have seemed foolish, last year. Now it merely seems desperate." He shook his head. "There's not a man in that tent who didn't see his children hungry this winter, and feel his own belly gripe. Who hasn't wondered how his family—and his whole band—will survive next year." He turned to Alaric then. "We were the lucky ones. We had a larger herd and more hunters than most, even for our size. And we had you."

  "I've heard," Alaric replied softly, "that some bands have lost all their deer."

  Simir nodded. "Kata says next winter will be better, but it's too late for that. As a people, we've lost too much at this point, and there is no way to recover. No way as we are. So we must change. We must settle in one place and be farmers and shepherds, if we can."

  Alaric stared at him. "That's a change indeed. What do the nomads of the north know of farming and sheep?"

  "Most of them, nothing. But I am a farmer's son. And they can learn."

  "Well, I know little enough about planting, but isn't it late in the season to begin? Even if you had grain and plows?"

  "We'd be fools to plant here," said Simir. "The soil is thin and poorly watered, and the north wind blows cold too often in summer; we'd lose our harvest three years out of four. No, we must go elsewhere. And there is one place where the grain is in the ground already and the harvest is sure, where the sheep are fat, and their wool is heavy. We have all agreed on it—the Red Lord's valley."

  "The Red Lord's—"

  "We have five hundred warriors eager to take his castle. To make his valley ours forever."

  Alaric curled a hand about the neck of his lute; its back-bent pegbox stood close beside his ear, like a friend trying to whisper good advice. He remembered the Red Lord's castle, the massive walls and pacing guards. "It's a strong fortification," he said. "With a strong complement of soldiers."

  "No one knows that better than I. But we have no choice."

  "No," Alaric said firmly, "there is a choice. Let me carry you south. The forest is large enough to shelter all of you, and you can clear fields and plant grain there if you want. Or you can hunt. The hunting is fine, truly, once you're accustomed to it; you'd have a new life, and no need to fight the Red Lord."

  "You would carry every one of us, would you? All our hundreds, and our goods?"

  "It would take time. And I could only manage the lighter deer. But it would be so much better—"

  "No." Just the one word, but it cut Alaric off firmly. The two of them stood for a moment, looking at each other. Then Simir said, "The plan is that six of us go inside, disguised as pilgrims, and kill the Red Lord. The rest will have their best chance in the confusion that follows. Without its commander, the army will flounder."

  Alaric's fingers tightened on his lute. "Simir, this is madness. You'll be killed."

  "What must be done, must be done."

  "Can you even be sure of killing him? The man has guards, and he's no fool to let armed men inside his walls."

  "We'll use our bare hands if necessary. But it might be easier… if you decided to help us."

  Alaric felt his heart shrink within him. "Simir…"

  "You could kill him yourself and escape without a scratch. It should be simple enough for the man who defeated Berown and bedeviled three strong young men."

  The minstrel shook his head. "No, no, it isn't simple at all. I don't know the keep except for a few public rooms, and the tower where he tortures his victims. All guarded places; not private, like a bedroom or a bath. To kill him where guards are near would be to invite my own death. And I'm not as eager for that as you are for yours, Simir."

  "But you're quick. No one would catch you. They would be too startled."

  "Some people react with great speed when startled. They don't waste time in thinking."

  Simir caught him by the shoulders. "You once said you could do it."

  Alaric looked at him steadily. "I also said I was afraid. Neither of those has changed."

  Simir shook him a little, his big hands hard as manacles. "You have changed." The high chief's eyes seemed to be searching his. "Do you know yourself at all, Alaric? You've fought both a madman and a bear, you've trekked across the Great Waste, you've given all your strength to help the people of the north. You once said that your way was to run from danger. But you've stopped running! And you think you haven't changed?" He gripped Alaric's shoulders even tighter. "You're my son, Alaric, no matter what you decide. But if you help us, we'll succeed, I know it."

  "I'll help you and gladly, but not with this, Simir. There's a safe course open to us in the south—"

  "Don't you understand, Alaric? It must be the valley! These are the people of the north, the Pole Star's own people. They won't go to your southern forest. They'd rather die here." He let the minstrel go abruptly. "If you decide not to help us, we go to the valley anyway. They have made the decision already."

  "They? And what of you?"

  "I abide by the will of the majority."

  "But you're the high chief."

  "The high chief is not the Red Lord."

  Alaric clenched his fists. "You'll go, then."

  "Yes. I'll be in command." He gave a small shrug. "As much as any nomad chief could be."

 
; "And if I say no?"

  "I go anyway. And I think that you and I will not meet again."

  Alaric half turned away from him. "These are black choices, Simir."

  "Black choices indeed, my son. Life and death."

  Alaric shook his head. "Death however you look at it. One way or another, you'll water the valley grain with blood."

  "I'd water it from my own veins if I thought it would save my people."

  In a low voice, Alaric said, "The valley peasants were your people once."

  Simir stood silent for a long moment. His mouth was firm, his eyes unwavering. "Do you pity them?" he said at last.

  "I pity the ones who will die."

  "They serve him. If the travelers who died in the valley could rise up and speak, they would say there is no one innocent there. Not one."

  Alaric looked at him sadly. "You served him. If you die, shall I not pity you?"

  He caught hold of the minstrel's shoulder once more. "If the people of the north die next winter, will you have enough pity for all of them?"

  "Simir, Simir, is there no other way?"

  "We can't beg them to take us in. You know that."

  Alaric closed his eyes and felt the pulse pounding in his ears, felt the high chief's hand heavy on his shoulder, so much heavier than the lute. "A black, black course, Simir," he said in a whisper that was nearly a hiss.

  "Our chosen course. Do you follow it with us… or not?" Simir's voice was not harsh, but his face looked like a carven stone.

  Alaric curled his hand around Simir's thick wrist. "Father…"

  "Are you of the north, my son, or not?" He barely heard his own voice say, "I'll go." Simir embraced him then, and the lute twanged as his big arm brushed its strings. Those strings were speaking, Alaric knew, giving the good advice of an old friend, but he could not hear the words. Instead, his ears were filled with Simir's voice, and a different kind of music. "You are my true son, Alaric. Now come back to the tent, for we have plans to make."

  ****

  THE PLANS, ALARIC realized, had largely been made already. Most of the men in Simir's tent had been to the valley as youths, in the days when the nomads still raided, or merely in quest of the lesser Elixir plants, and they remembered all the mountain pathways and all the natural landmarks. Simir himself, with the help of those who had accompanied him the previous year, had drawn a map on deer hide to show the routes he intended, the movements, the points of assault on the castle. So certain were they all, that Alaric knew the scheme had not been hatched in a day or two, but had been germinating for years.

  The young, the old, the weak, the women and children would stay behind, too far from the valley for reprisals should the nomad army fail. The rest—every man strong enough to swing a sword or bend a bow—would be part of the attack. They would creep into the valley by night, bypass all the peasant holdings that once they would have plundered, and gather about the Red Lord's fortification. Simir and his picked company would go inside, dressed as pilgrims from the south; they even had woolen clothing, laid away for years against this day, to make the ruse plausible.

  "We may be given supper and commanded to entertain the Red Lord with tales of our wanderings," the high chief told his party. "Or we may be thrown into prison as soon as we arrive. It is even possible that one or two of us may be taken to the tower for immediate torture. But no prison, not even the tower, can hold us while Alaric is with us."

  "Can he carry even you, Simir?" someone asked.

  Alaric smiled grimly. "Not easily, perhaps. But easily enough. I'm more concerned that the Red Lord's men will recognize me."

  "That won't happen," said Simir. "Not after Kata is finished with you."

  ****

  "NO ONE WOULD know him now, not even a lover," Kata said, turning Alaric's face this way and that as she scrutinized her handiwork. She had shaved his head, even his eyebrows, and applied a stain that darkened his skin. "Leave the lute behind, and they'll never guess they've seen you before."

  "I'll take the lute," Alaric replied. "We may need music on this journey. But I won't carry it into the castle."

  "You'll stain your whole body, of course, when the time comes."

  He nodded.

  "And the rest of us will do the same," said Simir. "So that we'll all seem of a kind."

  "Yes," said Kata. She passed him two flasks of the staining powder. "Remember to make the solution thin so that the color will be even."

  "I'll remember."

  "I wish I could go with you, to be sure it was done properly. And the shaving, too; it isn't easy to shave a head."

  Simir sighed.

  "You'll need me, Simir. The fallen will need me."

  He shook his head. "No, the decision has been made, and we must stand by it. Who falls, falls. We must not risk you; those who stay behind will need you all the more if we fail."

  She looked into his eyes. "I doubt that I will be enough for them, should you fail."

  "The decision has been made," he said firmly, and he turned his back on her and strode from the tent.

  "He is tired," Alaric said softly.

  "I know," said Kata. "We are all tired. Now listen to me, my Alaric." She curled her hand around his wrist. "You must look after him. He hates the Red Lord with a passion that you and I cannot understand."

  Alaric pursed his lips. "I think I can understand it."

  "I doubt that. For all the years he has been with us, he has never forgotten what the Red Lord did to him. First love is powerful, my Alaric. That much you do know."

  He nodded.

  "Don't let him be foolish, my Alaric. The north needs him."

  "I'll do my best."

  "Act for him. He depends on you. You are all he has now. The boys, Marak and Terevli, were killed this winter, trying to steal deer from one of the southern bands. Now he can never call them back."

  "Kata," he whispered, catching at her other hand, holding it tight. "I can't be all he wants me to be."

  "But you must, Alaric. You must."

  ****

  THE WARRIORS CHOSE the strongest of the deer to carry them south, and others to feed them on the journey. The rest were left with the women and children to be divided up for some semblance of the nomads' usual circuit of the plains. The farewells were quiet, Alaric thought, chillingly quiet, and as he rode with Simir at the head of the northern host, he could not help wondering how many of the women who watched their husbands leave this day did not expect ever to see them again.

  Simir drove his army hard, but Alaric heard no complaints save from his own heart. For him, the days flew by too swiftly, and the nights seemed short as on the northern ice. He sang in the evenings, while fresh venison roasted over a score of campfires, and the men crowded near to listen, but the songs seemed empty to his own ears. He could think of nothing but the journey's end—while he rode, as he sang, while he lay bundled in furs watching the stars wheel toward dawn. He stared at the blank white face of the moon one night, long after its rising, as it floated in the darkness above him like a silver coin. He knew a dozen legends about it; some said it was a ball made of ice, some that it was the mirror of a goddess and had once borne her name, Selena. But a more ominous legend lingered with him after it passed from his view—that the bright moon was the silver shield of an ancient war god, set in the sky as a reminder to men of death in combat.

  He dreaded the end of the journey, and his dread sifted like powdered snow through his veins, chilling him more than the night air, more even than the black waters beneath the northern ice. But he said nothing, not to Simir, not to anyone else, because he knew that no one would listen.

  ****

  THE MOUNTAIN PASSES were clear by the time the nomad army reached them—not a trace of snow remained. The barren rocks that Alaric remembered were everywhere cloaked in the green of tufted grasses and hardy bushes, and the sweet fresh scent of growing things wafted gently on the breeze. The deer, surefooted as goats on the dry soil, had little trouble picking
their way among the heights, and their progress was steady if slow.

  Simir called a halt when they were less than half a day from their goal, and while the nomad army rested, he took a party of three forward to scout the valley. In case those left behind needed to be warned quickly of some danger, Alaric was one of the three.

  At dusk, the Red Lord's domain seemed quiet enough. High on a bushy mountainside, Simir and his companions could see the whole extent of the valley—the small lake bordered by fields of new grain; the peasant cottages scattered among those fields, threads of smoke drifting from their chimneys; the slow river, gleaming in the reddish light like molten gold; and the castle, many-turreted, its massive keep rising higher than the battlements and darkened by strife and age. Among the cottages, they could barely see tiny figures moving homeward with their goats and sheep.

  "All peaceful," Simir murmured.

  Alaric felt the dread rise within him, stronger than ever.

  ****

  IT WAS LATE afternoon, three days later, that all the nomad army was in place, ranged above the valley behind boulders and bushes, ready to move downward at full dark. The deer had been left behind, to keep them from giving their masters away with occasional bawling, and the men themselves were silent as the grass that cushioned their bodies. At the barest beginning of twilight, seven pilgrims, their heads all freshly shaven, their skins darkened by Kata's stain, moved down an easy slope on the southern wall of the valley. "This was the caravan route," Simir said as he fixed his woolen hood more snugly about his face. It was the route most travelers would be expected to use.

  They made no attempt to avoid the nearest cottage, nor to silence its goats, penned nearby and disturbed by their presence. A cotter peered out his window and asked them who they were, strangers traveling so late in the Red Lord's valley. Simir offered their story of pilgrimage, their intention to ask for hospitality in the castle, and the man nodded and said no more. When they were well past his home, though, they saw a child running in a field not far off—running parallel to their course, but passing them quickly—and Simir murmured that it was surely the cotter's child, sent to report the strangers to the castle.