Lescari Revolution 03: Banners In The Wind (7 page)

'We honour our dead.' The grave-faced woman's eyes were flinty.

'Truly?' Failla threw discretion to Poldrion's demons. If these women cast her out, so be it. She'd kick down the door to the council room if that's what it took to pass on Kerith's news. 'Do you honour them or do you betray every hope of peace they died for? I'll wager each of you can relate every battle, every skirmish, every defeat or victory within twenty leagues of Ashgil these ten generations past. You tell your sons and grandsons how their forefathers died as heroes fighting in their defence. All the while, you sow the seeds of suffering to come. So warfare plagues us year after year like thistles springing up in a cornfield!'

She had to raise her voice above a rising swell of indignation. 'Would your sons be so willing to fight if they didn't learn hatred of other Lescari at your firesides? You mock the marsh-squatters? You tell your children the tale of the Triolle man who put a sign by the river saying "If you can't read this, there's a flood"?'

Now she saw the women caught between instinctive agreement and embarrassment at this echo of their prejudices. Anilt wouldn't be raised with such lies, Failla had sworn it. She wouldn't let Lathi curdle her daughter's innocence with such bile.

'The men of Sharlac are no better than brigands, so my mother told me. They share their beds with their dogs, and catch their fleas. Why else call Duke Moncan the Jackal? Marlier men grow fat as butter on their rich trade with Caladhrians, but no honest Carluse man gets even a stale slice of that loaf. Parnilesse is a byword for treachery. They'd sell their whole dukedom to Tormalin for a half-decent price. Year in, year out, Draximal steals a plough-length of good Carluse land here, a stretch of Parnilesse woodland there, thieves sneaking into the Triolle hills to steal Duke Iruvain's silver. Shake hands with them, my mother said, and you'll lose the rings on your fingers. But in Ensaimin they say the same of all Lescari.'

Her blunt declaration silenced the aggrieved protests rising to the rafters.

'I didn't know it, till I went to Vanam.' Failla shrugged. 'But no one outside Lescar gives a second thought to our rights and wrongs. No one cares a tinker's curse which duke should be High King. They think we're fools, worse than brute beasts. A fox caught in a snare might chew off its own foot but at least it does that to be free. Lescari tear each other to shreds for no one's benefit.'

She swept the room with a searing glance. 'Since we're such fools, why shouldn't they profit by selling us the weapons to kill each other? Any Lescari with wits or skills has long since fled to civilised lands to make a more worthwhile life.'

'That's wicked lies.' The dark-haired woman's voice shook with fury.

'Quite so,' Failla agreed. 'But that's what children in Ensaimin, in Caladhria and in Tormalin all learn at their grandmother's knee. So I'm wondering what lies I've been told all my life. Because I've met men and women from Marlier and Sharlac and know them to be as honest and as good-hearted as any in Carluse. I've heard the tales of suffering and injustice in Triolle and Parnilesse, no different from our own. I've met Lescari in Vanam and in towns all along the highways. They don't care if their neighbour's mother was born in Draximal or their father's of Carluse blood. They scrimp and save and send coin and cloth and pots and pans to their beleaguered kin regardless.'

'What of it?' rasped the pink-clad woman. 'What has that to do with you and your brave friends bringing mercenaries and uplanders and grasslanders to run roughshod over Ashgil?'

'They saved your brothers and sons, your husbands and fathers from being drafted into Garnot's army to die.' Failla didn't yield. 'I've seen plenty of country folk here, seeking the safety of these walls. Ask them what happened, when Garnot's militiamen surrendered as he lost battle after battle. Honest men given no choice but to follow him were set free to go home and defend their families. The exiles' army has no quarrel with them.'

She saw the ringletted girl exchange a glance with her neighbour and knew that shot had struck home.

'The Soluran could have attacked in Aft-Summer and burned the standing crops, to make sure Garnot's army starved and let Saedrin save the innocent. But the captain-general didn't begin his campaign until all your harvests were safely gathered. There's been no looting, not in Carluse or Sharlac or Triolle. The Dalasorians who've defended you, they paid for whatever supplies they asked for, didn't they? Paid with good Tormalin coin, not the duke's lead-weighted silver. You'll pay no levy to Garnot at Solstice to dress Tadira in fine new silks. Your own Guild Council will decide what dues are needed to pave your roads and restore your town's gates.'

Failla could see some of the women still wanted to protest but none could deny those particular truths. They exchanged covert glances in the grudging silence.

'You said you had urgent news,' the grave-faced woman said acidly.

'Ill news, forgive me.' Failla braced herself. 'Not all the mercenaries our noble dukes hired have been driven off. You've heard what befell Wyril?' The women's shocked faces showed her they had. 'Those renegades are now marching this way.'

'Who's to protect us with the Dalasorians gone?' cried the woman in pink.

First she resented the rebels' army. Now she objected to it leaving.

'You will protect yourselves.' Failla nodded towards the Guild Council chamber. 'When your husbands call on every household to send a man to serve in the militia, you can make sure every wife and mother understands her duty to see them answer. You can fetch water and carry messages, when the time comes to hold Ashgil's walls. Until the militiamen of Carluse, and of Triolle and Sharlac, drive off these curs snapping around your gates.'

The hazel-eyed woman was merely the first to exclaim. 'Sharlac is marching on us too?'

'They're marching to your aid,' Failla assured her, 'and the men of Triolle will fight alongside them. The common folk of those dukedoms want to live free from warfare just as fervently as you do. That cause unites you all, now that no dukes can stir up hatred and division. Tell your men to write to the guildmasters in Sharlac Town, and in Fawril and Maerdin. Send word to Triolle Town and Pannal. They all yearn for peace.'

If she could convince these women of that, if such a notion prompted thoughtful conversation with a husband or son beside a glowing hearth late at night, Failla could hope she'd done more than just warn Ashgil of the immediate threat.

'If all this is true, I don't know why we're sitting here clucking like hens.' The grave-faced woman stowed her sewing in her work bag. 'Come and tell my husband your tale.'

Failla rose with her. 'Gladly, Mistress . . . ?'

'Mistress Kinver. My husband's the master mason.'

The grave-faced woman threw open the door and Failla meekly followed.

Then, once she had told the guildsmen what threatened them, she had to find Dinant. The mercenary sergeant had commanded her escort travelling here. Failla was confident he'd agree to offer the Ashgil militia his advice. Hopefully, they'd be glad to have him.

Just as long as Tathrin didn't make a liar of her, by failing to bring Triolle's militia to their rescue. As she smiled at the startled sergeant-at-arms, who stepped back hastily as Mistress Kinver rapped on the council chamber door, Failla stifled her fears. How many more battles could her honest-hearted lover still come through unscathed?

Come the morning, though, if Kerith thought she would be taking to her heels, he was sorely mistaken. She would show him, and anyone else who doubted her, that she was as committed to the cause of freedom in Lescar as any man who could take up a sword. She would show them all she was far more than some discarded whore.

Chapter Five

Tathrin

The Ashgil Road, North of Tyrle,

in the Dukedom of Carluse,

13th of For-Winter

The column trudged sombrely along the high road, pursued by the stink of burning. Tathrin could taste wood ash tainted with lime plaster and all the lost possessions that still smouldered amid the ruins of Tyrle's narrow houses.

A more nauseating reek drifted from the pyres along the Carluse Road. The dead were still being found under broken walls, crushed by the rafters that now fuelled their funeral rites. Even with the cold weather, Tathrin hated to think of those corpses. It was thirty days and more since the town had been overrun.

They had passed on the eastern side last night. As they had camped beneath Tyrle's shattered towers, townsfolk had flocked to their fires, begging for food, for news and, most desperately of all, for any scrap of hope that their wretched lot would improve.

The Triollese had shared their bread and bacon, many going hungry themselves. Tathrin had seen two take a barrel of apples from the column's provision carts. He hadn't needed to save them from the quartermaster's wrath. Sorgrad had taken the man aside for a genially menacing word.

Tathrin had been glad to see Triolle men open their hands and hearts to the hollow-eyed Carlusians. But this morning he rode a few horse-lengths ahead of a mounted group of journeymen who didn't hide their disdain for such unfortunates. Their apprenticeships completed, they cherished ambitions of setting up their own workshops. Many of their fathers were eminent among Triolle's guildsmen, providing the coin to buy the horses the youths rode with all the awkwardness of novices.

No Lescari duke wasted his coin training mounted forces. It was quicker and cheaper to thrust a halberd into a reluctant militiaman's hands and to hire mercenary horsemen. Too late, the dukes had learned the error of their ways, as the fearsomely skilled lancers of Dalasor had helped Evord win this war.

But none of these callow youths was prepared to sacrifice his dignity by admitting defeat and dismounting. Or, from what he'd overheard, to give up the chance of fleeing at breakneck speed if danger threatened. Contempt soured Tathrin's stomach.

He gazed northwards but a rise dense with coppices blocked his view. Had Kerith warned Failla? Had she fled Ashgil or would she simply be in more danger on the open road?

Couldn't these Triollese march any faster? The guildmasters had kept him waiting a full day before they agreed to muster a militia. They had complained and protested like their journeymen sons riding behind him. No, Tathrin realised, the youths had moved on to a new topic.

'Those northern barbarians sacked Tyrle? The ones from the Mountains?'

'No doubt about it. The Soluran kept them leashed in Carluse but they slipped their collars here.'

'Did they kill Duke Garnot?'

'I wouldn't be surprised.'

Tathrin took a deep breath. He was loath to rebuke these self-important youths. Too many of the Triollese looked to them in their fathers' stead. If he sent them scurrying back before they even reached Ashgil, this militia column could dissolve into chaos.

'Didn't you see the uplanders in our streets, when the Guilds yielded to the Soluran and opened our gates?'

That peevish voice was Brimel's, journeyman and assiduous toady to Triolle's pre-eminent brewer, a man who owned half the taverns within a day's ride of the town.

'We were overrun before the noon bells,' he sneered.

Overrun by mercenaries who drank in his master's inns and tupped the whores renting the houses he owned in back alleys. Tathrin didn't doubt a share of that coin jingled in Brimel's acquisitive pockets.

'The curs infested the shrine to Maewelin.' Halarey, plump journeyman baker, couldn't have been more disgusted if he had found sewer rats in his bread troughs.

'Were they causing trouble?'

Tathrin was relieved to hear Akaver's mild tones. The lean tailor's shrewdness had impressed him before.

'Not as such,' Halarey admitted grudgingly. 'But they heaped cloth-wrapped bones in front of the goddess's statue.'

'Forbidding anyone to touch the foul things,' added Brimel, indignant. 'At least the Dalasorians burned their dead, like decent men.'

The swarthy horsemen had then raised great earthen mounds over the massed pyres of their fallen comrades and their steeds. Tathrin didn't think such rites had been seen this far south in time out of mind.

Quenel the blacksmith spoke, deceptively kind-faced. 'We went to throw them out--'

Tathrin's horse tossed its head as he gripped his reins. But no, he would have heard about any trouble. Gren and Sorgrad would have been in the thick of it.

'--only Old Mayet had a fit of the vapours at the thought of strife,' Quenel continued contemptuously.

Tathrin breathed a sigh of relief. He must thank the aged stonemason on their return to Triolle.

'You'd think the old fool would show more concern for goodwives and widows making their offerings to the Hag.' Halarey was still aggrieved.

'Especially with their daughters accompanying them,' Brimel agreed.

'Tyrle will see a crop of yellow-headed bastards next summer,' Quenel predicted with malicious satisfaction.

Tathrin turned his horse around and trotted briskly back. Those not too busy controlling their own restive mounts looked at him, startled.

'Captain Sayron?' Akaver dressed more soberly than his companions even though his father's seamstresses clothed them all.