A Song for Arbonne (52 page)

It seems, on the evidence, that she has indeed proven unwilling, has chosen the astonishing, surely terrifying option of flight alone to another country rather than trust her husband to guard and shelter her from his father and their king. And what, he wonders, whether one considers it by the light of day or the blue shining of this moon, do all these things say about the character and strength of Ranald, duke of Garsenc, who is even now riding, however unwillingly, in the wake of his king across the mountain pass towards a slaughter in Arbonne?

In the end it is precisely as easy as any experienced soldier might have predicted it would be. The three Arbonnais corans in the watch-tower on the southern slopes of the range are accustomed to traffic from the north during the month of the Lussan Fair, and utterly confident—as they have every right to be—of the truce that always accompanies a fair.

Ademar halts his full company out of sight and sends five corans down towards the tower. They are greeted with courtesy by the guards, offered shelter and food and straw for the night. The three Arbonnais are killed even as these offers are being made. On the instructions of the king, as the signal is given and the rest of the company rides up, the three guardsmen are decapitated and castrated and the wooden buildings beside the stone tower are set on fire.

They ride more swiftly then, to be ahead of any message in the flames. A short time later they sweep down upon the nearby hamlet of Aubry like a wild hunt out of the shepherds' night terrors: fifty howling men on horses, swords out, torches in their free hands, burning and slaying without warning, without reason offered, without respite. This raid in a time of truce is a message, and the message is to be made as unambiguous as it can be.

Ranald, aware that he is being watched by the king and by the Elder who is here as his father's representative, makes a point, slightly sickened, of seeking out those few villagers who have some sort of weapon in their hands as they stumble from the huts amid the screaming of animals and small children. He is a very good fighter, once a celebrated one, though his brother latterly might have had the reputation, travelling the world in search of tournaments and wars. But it was Ranald who first taught Blaise anything about swordsmanship, and it was Ranald de Garsenc who, the year he turned nineteen, was named King's Champion in Gorhaut by Ademar's father, Duergar.

That had been, he has often thought, easily the best time of his life. Honoured by the king and the court for his prowess, excited by the attention of women of high rank and low, continually gratified by his own smooth, effortless skills, immersed in the oblivious, expansive confidence of youth, and free—more than anything else, free of his father for a little while.

Then his uncle, Ereibert de Garsenc, had died and Ranald had become duke, with all the defining burdens and powers of rank, and the specific implications of being near to an often-disputed throne. A new champion had been named ceremoniously, even as Ranald, returned to Garsenc Castle in the south, and his father, again, began to tell him what to do. More than ten years ago, that was. For all those years he has mostly been doing what Galbert tells him. He wonders what he could point to, if he tried, that has given him real pleasure in that time.

Certainly not this slaughter, or the meaning of it, in a time of truce. Ranald de Garsenc is hardly a sentimental man, and he has no trouble with warfare, or even the idea of conquest here in Arbonne. This isn't a war though, not yet. This is something ugly and vengeful. It is supposed to be his own revenge, he knows. He has not been consulted on the issue; he has only ridden, as required by his king, to deliver a message in blood and fire.

There is a small temple to the goddess Rian not far from the village, the northernmost temple in Arbonne, the nearest to Gorhaut. That is why they are here. The thirty or forty inhabitants of Aubry, awakened in the middle of the night, are killed, down to the last child. Like the guardsmen in the burning tower, the men—mostly shepherds and farmers—are decapitated and their genitals are hacked off. Ademar of Gorhaut knows exactly how to say what he thinks of the men in woman-ruled Arbonne. Then they ride on to the temple.

Under the light of Escoran at its full and the just-risen crescent of Vidonne, the eight priestesses of Rian in that small sanctuary are taken from their beds and are burned alive. The soldiers are made free of them first, by order of the king. Ademar moves his big horse restlessly back and forth, watching first one cluster of corans with a woman and then another. There is a great deal of screaming and a growing roar from the swiftly gathered bonfire of dry autumn wood. At one point, his pale yellow hair reddened in the firelight, Ademar looks over at Ranald and laughs.

"Do you not want a woman, my lord of Garsenc? A gift from your king, solace for your great loss?" He shouts it so others can hear.

Ranald, his sword still in his hand, though unnecessarily now, says, "Not before you, my liege. I will follow in this, as in all things."

Ademar throws his head back and laughs again. For a moment, Ranald is afraid the king will indeed dismount and join his corans among the pinioned women, but Ademar only slashes his horse again and moves nearer to where the Elder that Galbert has sent is watching the pyre. Ranald watches the king go, a bleakness in his heart. He knows what he should do. He knows he will not do it. In the mingling of firelight and the moons his eyes briefly meet those of Fulk de Savaric. Both men look away without speaking. He has seen burnings before, has ordered a number of them himself on the Garsenc lands, following his father's regime of having one such spectacle every year or so to keep the serfs and villagers properly subdued. He has watched impassively, time after time, setting an example. He has never seen eight women burned at once, though. The numbers shouldn't matter, but, when it finally begins, it appears that they do make a difference.

Through the screaming and the terrified noises of the farm animals all around, Ranald hears his father's designated Eider intone the ritual of denunciation and the formal curse of Corannos, and then, his voice rising in genuine triumph, invoking the god's gift of fire to eradicate heresy.

A scourging of the god, Galbert called this raid in the throne room of Cortil, when the king came out from a meeting with his High Elder and announced that he would be riding for Arbonne that same night.

The screaming continues among the flames until the smoke stops it, which is what always happens. The women slowly begin to turn black and the smell of burning flesh is strong. Ademar decides to leave. Having done what he came to do, his fury slaked for the moment, the king of Gorhaut leads his corans back towards the mountain pass. As they go past the still-smouldering outbuildings beside the lone watchtower one coran begins to sing, and soon almost all of them are doing so—a song of Gorhaut victorious in battle, the chosen warriors of Corannos in his most beloved land.

Three guardsmen in a tower, a hamlet of shepherds and farmers, eight priestesses raped and set on fire. A scourging of the god.

It is a beginning.

The west wind blew the smoke the other way, so he was able to see, quite clearly from the ridge at the fringe of the forest, exactly what was happening below. He watched the massacre in the village without expression, and felt a disturbing but unmistakable stirring in his loins when he saw men he knew dragging the women out from the temple, some naked, some in night-robes that were quickly ripped away. He was quite close, actually, though hidden among the trees. He heard not only the screams but the shouted jests of the corans. He recognized the king immediately, and a moment afterwards saw his own liege lord, the duke of Garsenc. These were, in fact, the men he had been riding north to find.

He was bothered by the burning, though in itself that would not have been enough to make him pause. He did pause, however, silent and watchful on his horse above Aubry, as the corans of Gorhaut finished their games and their work and the screaming died away. Nor did he move, though it was clearly past time to ride down, when he saw the king make a sudden, sweeping gesture and fifty horsemen swiftly remount and ride away, east and north towards the pass.

He was trembling, in fact, confused and unsettled by his own hesitation, visited, as he had been all day, by thoughts he would never have entertained before this morning. Habit and fear, the compulsions of his discipline, had sent him riding north from Lussan at midday to carry news to Cortil of what he had seen on the tournament ground that morning. He had stopped at a roadside inn for ale, and had then lingered there absurdly long, telling himself over and over that it was time to get up in the saddle again, that his tidings were critical, dangerous, that he was even at risk of suspicion if he delayed too long.

It was very nearly day's end, though, when he left that inn, riding at a gallop but not straining his horse. It was a long way to Cortil, he told himself, he had to be careful not to exhaust his mount. In the darkness under Escoran's blue light he had approached Aubry, preparing to bypass it on the road towards the pass, when he heard the sounds of horses and shouting men and stopped at the forest's edge to see, astonishingly, the king he had been riding north to warn.

And he stayed up there watching, motionless, as they slaughtered the people of a village and a temple and rode away. He wasn't especially shocked by what the corans were doing to the priestesses, nor even, really, by the burning of the women after they were done, though no halfway normal man could really
enjoy
such a thing. That wasn't what kept him silent up on the ridge. He had seen worse, or as bad at any rate, in the brutal years of war against Valensa, especially among the farms and towns on either side of the border. The longer a war went on, his father had told him once, the more terrible the things one saw, and did. It seemed to him to have been a true thing to say; he felt that way about much of what his father had told him over the years.

It wasn't even, though this was a part of it, the thrill he had felt that morning, straight up his spine and tingling in his hair, when Blaise de Garsenc had raised the banner of the kings above his tent and gone forth to battle. He had always thought—and had once or twice even said, though only to trusted friends—that the youngest of the de Garsenc was much the best of the three of them.

That wouldn't have made the difference, not in and of itself. A coran in Gorhaut learned, early, to keep his thoughts where they belonged: away from any actions he might be ordered to perform. His own sworn liege lord was Ranald, duke of Garsenc, and if the duke took most of his own orders from the father in Cortil, well, the corans of Garsenc were not expected to have any thoughts at all about that.

He would have gone down with his tidings, he realized finally, still sitting silently on his horse long after the king's company had gone, watching the burning fires spread from two of the wooden houses to a third, if it hadn't been for the one additional thing, drawn slowly up from his own history during this long day like a bucket from a well.

There was no sound now save the cackle of the flames and the wailing, very faint, of a child or an animal that was somehow not yet dead. After a moment that crying also stopped and there was only the rising sound of wind and the fires, growing to a roar as the last of the wooden houses caught.

What had kept him here, rooted to this ridge, watching his king and liege lord and corans he had known for years, was the memory of his father's last year.

His own family home had been a small tract of farmland proudly entered in their own name on the baron's records since the last plague had made labour scarce and left too many farms untended. A small bit of land, but his father's own, after a grinding lifetime of brutally labouring for someone else. It had been in the good grainlands in the north of Gorhaut, that farm. Or, to speak properly now, in the north of what had
been
Gorhaut. It was Valensa now, since the treaty that had surrendered land kept safe by King Duergar's own sword and the corans of the king and the courage of farmers and villagers fighting for what was theirs.

He had fought at Iersen Bridge himself. Fought and won in ice and blood among the army of Gorhaut, though grieving solely for his king after swords were sheathed and spears laid aside. A season later, no more than that, back in the south at Garsenc Castle where he served the young duke as an anointed coran, to the vast pride of his family, he had learned that his parents, along with all the other farmers and the inhabitants of entire villages of the north, were being told to pack and travel south to wherever they would, wherever they could find shelter.

It was only for a time, they were advised by the messengers of the new king, Ademar. The new king, in his wisdom, had taken thought for them, the messengers said—there would be wider, richer lands for all of them very soon. In the meantime, his father's lifelong dream and prayer of his own farm was gone, handed over to the Valensans they had been fighting for fifty years. Just like that.

His parents had actually been among the fortunate, in a way of thinking, finding a place with his mother's sister's husband east of Cortil; working for someone else again, but with a roof over their heads at least. He had seen his father twice there, but though the old man said little at the best of times, after the northern fashion, his eyes didn't convey any sense of good fortune to his son.

Everyone knew where the promised new lands were supposed to be. It was common talk in the country as much as in the taverns and castles. His father had said only one thing about that, at the end of his second visit, his last, to the farmyard hut that was now his parents' home.

They had been walking out together, he and his father, at twilight, looking out over the grey moorland in a drizzle of rain. "What," his father had said, turning aside to spit into the mud, "do I know about olive trees?"