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  The Vizerine, in deference to the vaguest of promises to his barbaric parents, had been desultorily attempting to secure a small commission for the blond boy with some garrison in a safer part of the Empire. She knew he was too young for such a post, and of an impossible temperament to fill it, even were he half a dozen years older; also, there was really no way, in those days, to ascertain if any part of the Empire would remain safe. In any open combat, the little fool—for he was a fool, she did not delude herself about that—would probably be killed, and more than likely get any man under him killed as well—if his men did not turn and kill him first. (She had known such things to happen. Barbarians in positions of power were not popular with the people.) This young, unlettered chief’s son was the sort who, for all his barbaric good looks, fiery temperament, and coming inheritance, one either loved or despised. And she had discovered, upon making inquiries into the gambling affair, much to her surprise, that no one in court other than herself seemed to love him. Well, she still did not want him to leave the court … not just now. She had only put any effort toward obtaining his commission at those moments when she had been most aware that soon she must want him as far away as possible.

  The commission had arrived while she had been away; it was on her desk now.

  No, after his marvelous ride last night to meet her, she did not want him to leave … just yet. But she was experienced enough to know the wishes that he would, with such as he, must come again. As would other commissions.

  ‘Gorgik,’ she said, when Jahor had led him in and retired, ‘I am going to put you for six weeks with Master Narbu. He trains all of Curly’s personal guards and has instructed many of the finest generals of this Empire in the arts of war. Most of the young men there will be two or three years younger than you, but that may easily, at your age, be as much an advantage as a hindrance. At the end of that time, you will be put in charge of a small garrison near the edge of K’haki desert—north of the Falthas. At the termination of your commission you will have the freedom in fact that, as of this morning, you now have on paper. I hope you will distinguish yourself in the name of the Empress, whose reign is wise and wondrous.’ She smiled. ‘Will you agree that this now terminates any and all of our mutual obligations?’

  ‘You are very generous, My Lady,’ Gorgik said, almost as flabbergasted as when he’d discovered himself purchased from the mines.

  ‘Our Empress is just and generous,’ the Vizerine said, almost as if correcting him. ‘I am merely soft-hearted.’ Her hand had strayed to the astrolabe. Suddenly she picked up the verdigrised disk, turned it over, frowned at it. ‘Here, take this. Go on. Take it, keep it; and take with it one final piece of advice. It’s heartfelt advice, my young friend. I want you always to remember the Empress’s words to you last night. Do you promise? Good—and as you value your freedom and your life, never set foot on the Garth Peninsula. And if the Vygernangx Monastery ever thrusts so much as the tiny tip of one tower over the treetops within the circle of your vision, you will turn yourself directly around and ride, run, crawl away as fast and as far as you can go. Now take it—take it, go on. And go.’

  With the Vizerine’s astrolabe in his hand, Gorgik touched his forehead and backed, frowning, from the chamber.

  ‘My Lady, his education is already erratic enough. By making him an officer, you do not bring it to heel. It will only give him presumptions, which will bring him grief and you embarrassment.’

  ‘Perhaps, Jahor. Then again, perhaps not. We shall see.’

  Outside the window, the rains, after having let up for the space of an hour’s sunlight, blew violently again, clouding the far towers and splattering all the way in to the edge of the stone sill, running down the inner wall to the floor.

  ‘My Lady, wasn’t there an astrolabe here on your desk earlier this morning …?’

  ‘Was there now …? Ah yes. My pesky little blue-eyed devil was in here only moments ago, picking at it. No doubt he pocketed it on his way down to the stables. Really, Jahor, I must do something about that gold-haired little tyrant. He is a true barbarian and has become the bane of my life!

  Six weeks is long enough for a man to learn to enjoy himself on a horse; it is not long enough to learn to ride.

  Six weeks is long enough for a man to learn the rules and forms of fencing; it is not long enough to become a swordsman.

  Master Narbu, born a slave himself to a high household in the foothills of the Falthas not far from fabled Ellamon, had as a child shown some animal grace that his baronial owner thought best turned to weapon wielding—from a sort of retrograde, baronial caprice. Naturally slaves were not encouraged to excel in arms. Narbu had taken the opportunity to practice—from a retrograde despair at servitude—constantly, continuously, dawn, noon, night, and any spare moment between. At first the hope had been, naturally and secretly and obviously to any but such a capricious master, for escape. Skill had become craft and craft had become art; and developing along was an impassioned love for weaponry itself. The Baron displayed the young slave’s skill to friends; mock contests were arranged; then real contests—with other slaves, with freemen. Lords of the realm proud of their own skills challenged him; two lords of the realm died. And Narbu found himself in this paradoxical position: his license to sink sword blade into an aristocratic gut was only vouchsafed by the protection of an aristocrat. During several provincial skirmishes, Narbu fought valiantly beside his master. In several others, his master rented him out as a mercenary—by now his reputation (though he was not out of his twenties) was such that he was being urged, pressed, forced to learn the larger organizational skills and strategies that make war possible. One cannot truly trace the course of a life in a thousand pages. Let us have the reticence here not to attempt it in a thousand words. Twenty years later, during one of the many battles that resulted in the ascension of the present Child Empress Ynelgo to the Throne of Eagles, Narbu (now forty-four) and his master had been lucky enough to be on the winning side—though his master had been killed. But Narbu had distinguished himself. As a reward—for the Empress was brave and benevolent—Narbu was given his freedom and offered a position as instructor of the Empress’s own guard, a job which involved training the sons of favored aristocrats in the finer (and grosser) points of battle. (Two of Narbu’s earliest instructors had been daughters of the mysterious Western Crevasse, and much of his early finesse had been gained from these masked women with their strange and strangely sinister blades. Twice he had fought with such women; and once against them. But they did not usually venture in large groups too far from their own lands. Still, he had always suspected that Nevèrÿon, with its strictly male armies, was over-compensating for something.) In his position as royal master at arms, he found himself developing a rich and ritual tirade against his new pupils: they were soft, or when they were hard they had no discipline, or, when they had discipline, had no heart. What training they’d gotten must all be undone before they could really begin; aristocrats could never make good soldiers anyway; what was needed was good common stock. Though Master Narbu was common stock, had fought common stock, and been taught by common stock, Gorgik was the first man of common stock Master Narbu, in six years, had ever been paid to teach. And the good master now discovered that, as a teacher, somehow he had never developed a language to instruct any other than aristocrats—however badly trained, undisciplined, or heartless they were. As well, he found himself actually resenting this great-muscled, affable, quiet, giant of a youth. First, Gorgik’s physique was not the sort (as Narbu was quick to point out to him) that naturally lent itself to horsemanship or any but gross combative skills. Besides, the rumor had gone the rounds that the youth had been put under Narbu’s tutelage not even because of his exceptional strength, but because he was some high Court lady’s catamite. But one morning Master Narbu woke, frowned at some sound outside, and sat up on his pallet. Through the bars on his window, he looked out across the yard where the training dummies and exercise forms stood in moonlight—i
t was over an hour to sunup. On the porch of the student barracks, beneath the frayed thatch, a great form, naked and crossed with shadow from the nearest porch poles, moved and turned and moved.

  The new pupil was practicing. First he would try a few swings with the light wooden sword to develop form, moving slowly, returning to starting position, hefting the blade again. And going through the swing, parry, recovery … a little too self-consciously; and the arm not fully extended at the peak of the swing, the blade a little too high … Narbu frowned. The new student put down the wooden blade against the barracks wall, picked up the treble-weight iron blade used to improve strength: swing, parry, recovery; again, swing, parry—the student halted, stepped back, began again. Good. He’d remembered the extension this time. Better, Narbu reflected. Better … but not excellent. Of course, for the weighted blade, it was better than most of the youths—with those great sacks of muscle about his bones, really not so surprising … No, he didn’t let the blade sag. But what was he doing up this early anyway …?

  Then Narbu saw something.

  Narbu squinted a little to make sure he saw it.

  What he saw was something he could not have named himself, either to baron or commoner. Indeed, we may have trouble describing it: he saw a concentration in this extremely strong, naked young man’s practicing that, by so many little twists and sets of the body, flicks of the eye, bearings of the arms and hips, signed its origins in inspiration. He saw something that much resembled not a younger Narbu, but something that had been part of the younger Narbu and which, when he recognized it now, he realized was all-important. The others, Narbu thought (and his lips, set about with gray stubble, shaped the words), were too pampered, too soft … how many hours before sunrise? Not those others, no, not on your … that one, yes, was good common stock.

  Narbu lay back down.

  No, this common, one-time mercenary slave still did not know how to speak to a common, one-time pit slave as a teacher; and no, six weeks were not enough. But now, in the practice sessions, and sometimes in the rest periods during and after them, Narbu began to say things to the tall, scarfaced youth: ‘In rocky terrain, look for a rider who holds one rein up near his beast’s ear, with his thumb tucked well down; he’ll be a Narnisman and the one to show you how to coax most from your mount in the mountains. Stick by him and watch him fast …’ And: ‘The best men with throwing weapons I’ve ever seen are the desert Adami: shy men, with little brass wires sewn up around the backs of their ears. You’ll be lucky if you have a few in your garrison. Get one of them to practice with you, and you might learn something …’ Or: ‘When you requisition cart oxen in the Avila swamplands, if you get them from the Men of the Hide Shields, you must get one of them to drive, for it will be a good beast, but nervous. If you get a beast from the Men of the Palm Fiber Shields, then anyone in your garrison can drive it—they train them differently, but just how I am not sure.’ Narbu said these things and many others. His saws cut through to where and how and what one might need to learn beyond those six weeks. They came out in no organized manner. But there were many of them. Gorgik remembered many; and he forgot many. Some of those he forgot would have saved him much time and trouble in the coming years. Some that he remembered he never got an opportunity to use. But even more than the practice and the instruction (and because Gorgik practiced most, at the end of the six weeks he was easily the best in his class), this was the education he took with him. And Myrgot was away from the castle when his commission began …

  3

  THERE WAS AN OXCART ride along a narrow road with mountains looking over the trees to the left. With six other young officers, he forded an icy stream, up to his waist in foam; a horse ride over bare rocks, around steep slopes of slate … ahead were the little tongues of army campfires, alick on the blue, with the desert below white as milk in a quarter light.

  Gorgik took on his garrison with an advantage over most: five years’ experience in the mines as a foreman over fifty slaves.

  His garrison contained only twenty-nine.

  Nor were they despairing, unskilled, and purchased for life—though, over the next few years, from time to time Gorgik wondered just how much difference that made in the daily texture of their lives, for guards’ lives were rough in those days. Over those same years, Gorgik became a good officer. He gained the affection of his men, mainly by keeping them alive in an epoch in which one of the horrors of war was that every time more than ten garrisons were brought together, twenty percent were lost through communicable diseases having nothing to do with battle (and much of the knowledge for this could be traced back to some of Master Narbu’s more eccentric saws concerning various herbs, moldy fruit rinds, and moss—and not a few of Baron Curly’s observations on botany that Gorgik found himself now and again recalling to great effect). As regards the army itself, Gorgik was a man recently enough blessed with an unexpected hope of life that all this human energy expended to create an institution solely bent on smashing that hope seemed arbitrary and absurd enough to marshal all his intelligence toward surviving it. He saw battle as a test to be endured, with true freedom as prize. He had experienced leading of a sort before, and he led well. But the personalities of his men—both their blustering camaraderie (which seemed a pale and farcical shadow of the brutal and destructive mayhem that, from time to time, had broken out in the slave quarters at the mines, always leaving one or two dead) and the constant resignation to danger and death (that any sane slave would have been trying his utmost to avoid)—confused him (and confusion he had traditionally dealt with by silence) and depressed him (and depression, frankly, he had never really had time to deal with, nor did he really here, so that its effects, finally, were basically just more anecdotes for later years on the stupidity of the military mind).

  He knew all his men, and had a far easier relationship with them than most officers of that day. But only a very few did he ever consider friends, and then not for long. A frequent occurrence: some young recruit would take the easiness of some late-night campfire talk, or the revelations that occurred on a foggy morning hike, as a sign of lasting intimacy, only to find himself reprimanded—and, in three cases over the two years, struck to the ground for the presumption: for these were basic and brutal times—in a manner that recalled nothing so much (at least to Gorgik, eternally frustrated by having to give out these reprimands) as the snubs he had received in the halls of the High Court of Eagles the mornings after some particularly revelatory exchange with some count or princess.

  Couldn’t these imbeciles learn?

  He had.

  The ones who stayed in his garrison did. And respected him for the lesson—loved him, some of them would even have said in the drunken evenings that, during some lax period that, now at a village tavern, now at a mountain campsite where rum had been impounded from a passing caravan, still punctuated a guard’s life. Gorgik laughed at this. His own silent appraisal of the situation had been, from the beginning: I may die; they may die; but if there is any way their death can delay mine, let theirs come down.

  Yet within this strictly selfish ethical matrix, he was able to display enough lineaments both of reason and bravery to satisfy those above him in rank and those below—till, from time to time, especially in the face of rank cowardice (which he always tried to construe—and usually succeeded—as rank stupidity) in others, he could convince himself there might be something to the whole idea. ‘Might’—for survival’s sake he never allowed it to go any further.

  He survived.

  But such survival was a lonely business. After six months, out of loneliness, he hired a scribe to help him with some of the newer writing methods that had recently come to the land and composed a long letter to the Vizerine: inelegant, rambling, uncomfortable with its own discourse, wisely it touched neither on his affection for her nor his debt to her, but rather turned about what he had learned, had seen, had felt: the oddly depressed atmosphere of the marketplace in the town they had passed through the day
before; the hectic nature of the smuggling in that small port where, for two weeks now, they had been garrisoned; the anxious gossip of the soldiers and prostitutes about the proposed public building scheduled to replace a section of slumlike huts in a city to the north; the brazen look to the sky from a southern mountain path that he and his men had wandered on for two hours in the evening before stopping to camp.

  At the High Court the Vizerine read his letter—several times, and with a fondness that, now all pretence at the erotic was gone, grew, rather than diminished, in directions it would have been hard for grosser souls to follow, much less appreciate. His letter contained this paragraph:

  ‘Rumors came down among the lieutenants last week that all the garrisons hereabout were to go south for the Garth in a month. I drank beer with the Major, diced him for his bone-handled knives and won. Two garrisons were to go to the Able-aini, in the swamps west of the Falthas—a thankless position, putting down small squabbles for ungrateful lords, he assured me, more dangerous and less interesting than the south. I gave him back his knives. He scratched his gray beard in which one or two rough, rusty hairs still twist, and gave me his promise of the swamp post, thinking me mad.’