Storms of Destiny (22 page)

Thia read the thing through again. She had little knowledge of politics, but even she could recognize that what she was looking at would be regarded as treason by the Royal Governor.

Treason …
She glanced around her, almost as though someone had entered and might be seeing her reading the broadside.
What have I gotten myself into?

Talis Aloro stood in the midst of the outraged crowd of Katan colonists, rejoicing in their anger.
Master Castio is in
prime form today,
she thought, gazing admiringly up at the revolutionary leader. Rufen Castio stood atop a makeshift dais in the town square of North Amis, surrounded by a crowd of nearly a hundred merchants, farmers, and laborers.

He has them hanging on his every word.

“My friends!” Castio raised his arms and shouted. “Tell me something, my friends! Who are we toiling for, as we work our fields and harvest our crops? Are we working for our wives and children, for their future?”

“NO!” roared the crowd. They surged forward eagerly, carrying Talis with them. For a moment she was squeezed between two burly laborers. The stench of ancient male sweat made her wrinkle her nose as she wriggled free and edged away from them.
Men are such pigs!

“Are we working for our aging parents so they can live their lives out in comfort beside a good fire?”

“NO!”

“My friends, are we working for our descendants, our children’s children?”

“NO!”

“Are we working for
ourselves
, my friends?”

“NO! NO! NO!”

Castio was a tall, spindly man who wore his reddish hair tied back in an unfashionable queue. He slammed one big, bony fist into the other, then raised both hands high. “You are right, my friends! We are working for none of these!

Who
are
we working for?”

“The King!” they howled, their rage so tangible Talis could almost see it rising into the air like smoke from a brushfire. “The King, curse him!”

“Curse him, and curse his viceroy!” howled the two laborers, who were so alike they must have been brothers.

“Aye! The King, my friends! The King who has given us his lecherous, scheming son for our viceroy! Do Agivir and Salesin care about us?”

“NO, NO, NONONO!”

“Our esteemed viceroy has taxed us till we groan with the burden to pay for his scandalous parties, filled with debauch-ery! We have sent delegations to Pela, to explain our position.” Castio snatched a paper from the breast of his tunic.

“My friends, today I received word about the fate of our delegation. We sent a good man, Petro Tomlia. How many of you know him—
knew
him!”

The crowd gasped and muttered.

“That’s right, my fellow Katans! Petro Tomlia was led to the block last month! The rest of our delegation now lan-guishes in a Pelanese prison! And for
what
, my friends? For
what
? For no other crime than expressing our concerns!

That’s all! For being our advocate, a good man has died! The Viceroy is a butcher, and we his cattle!”

“Butcher! Butcher! Butcher!” Talis yelled, and the crowd took up the chant, which continued for quite a while.

Finally, Castio raised a hand for quiet. “Just last month another shipload of convicts came here! Thieves and rapists and murderers set free to walk our land! By the Viceroy’s order! He doesn’t want to feed them in his prisons, so he sends them to prey on us! To butcher us!”

This time Talis didn’t have to shout, the crowd did it for her.

“Butcher!”

“Living here in a new world is not easy, my friends,” Castio continued, dropping his voice low, as though confiding in the mob, which immediately hushed, hanging on his every word. “We Katans have to work hard. Every day is a struggle, to till our land, protect our homes and livestock. We love this land, but it does not hesitate to kill us.” Castio paused.

“It is hard enough for us to keep body and spirit together.

We have no luxuries, like the Pelanese do. And who provides them with the wealth to have such luxuries, my friends?”

“We do!”

“And, my friends,” Castio’s voice was growing louder, slowly, steadily, “how does our esteemed viceroy repay the citizens of our colony for the sweat of their brows, for facing the dangers posed by the renegades he and his constables have loosed upon our new land? How does our viceroy repay us?” Castio leaned forward, his blue eyes bright with anger, “My friends, Prince Salesin
taxes
us! More each year! Today we groan under the weight of the King’s tax, but who’s to say that by midwinter we won’t be
screaming
for mercy?

And does Prince Salesin care about how we are faring? Does he listen to his people?”

“NO!”

Castio stood there for a beat, then said, simply, “My friends … we can stand here and shout our protests all day and all night, and it will make not one whit of difference to Agivir and Salesin and their lords. They have denied the colonies a proper seat on the council. The time is rapidly approaching, my fellow Katans, when we must do more than speak, more than shout. We must
act
!”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted. “Yes,
yes
,
YES
!”

They went on chanting, each “Yes!” coming with increasing fervor. Talis was relieved there was no royal garrison in North Amis. If there had been, this crowd was angry enough to march on them, and such a display would ill serve the cause.

The crowd was yelling and shaking their fists as they shouted. Castio let them go on for another long minute, then raised his arms high into the air. The crowd hushed, listening.

“My friends, remember this moment, remember this hour.

It will not be long before we will be asking for your support—your coins, your harvest surplus—and, mayhap, your very bodies and the arms you can bear. The day is coming, my friends! Soon Agivir will have no choice but to listen to us, if he wants this colony to remain loyal to the Crown! In the meantime … in the meantime, my friends, we
will
protect ourselves, our land, and our families. We will march and we will drill, and if Salesin tries his butchery on us, we will not go tamely to the slaughter, will we?”

“NO NO NO NO!”

“Our forces are gaining strength and numbers every day!

If the King will not pay heed to us, it will be time to take up our guns and march! And, my friends, if that day comes, I will be proud to march with you!”

“We’ll be ready!”

“We’ll march, Castio!”

“Fight and win for Kata!”

The shouts of the mob engulfed Talis. She looked up at Castio, saw him looking down at her. He gave her a tiny nod, and she smiled.

Carefully, she stepped back, easing herself out of the crowd. As she did so, she raised her dark red shawl and slid it over her head, hiding the thick, luxuriant waves of black hair that fell down her back, almost to her waist.

Usually Talis wore her hair braided tightly and pinned into a knot at the nape of her neck, but her guise today called for unbound hair to go with the low-necked blouse and kilted-up skirts of a tavern wench. Talis’s generous curves and enticing smile often enabled her to gain information for Castio and the Cause. Drunken Pelanese would frequently babble to an attractive, green-eyed tavern slut, where they would guard their tongues in the presence of a Katan male who might secretly be a member of one of the militia groups

that were forming all over the colony, or one of Agivir’s agents.

A few more cautious steps backward, murmuring “excuse me’s,” and she was out of the crowd. Pulling her shawl tightly about her face, Talis hurried across the weedy grass of the square, crossed the cobbled expanse of Main Street, then turned onto the unpaved stretch of churned mud that was Bay Lane. She was heading for the White Horse Tavern.

Talis was careful to keep her head down, lest she be spotted and recognized by any passersby, who would be shocked to see Gerdal Aloro’s daughter dressed like a round-heeled strumpet.

Talis lived on a large farm called Woodhaven, a league from North Amis, where her father raised sheep, cattle, emoria fiber, and vegetables. Talis, more than any of her brothers, was Gerdal’s “right-hand man,” a term he applied to her with a mixture of pride and chagrin. Her father was a royalist, still. Talis had stopped arguing politics with him three years ago, when she’d become involved with the Katan revolutionary underground.

Yesterday morning she’d found a note in the hollow of a tree on her father’s land, warning her that a certain merchant named Levons might have important information for the Cause, and that he would be in North Amis today. Generally, Talis preferred to do her spying and information gathering farther from home, when her father sent her to market with their herds and crops, but this time she’d made an exception, knowing that Castio was planning to come to North Amis and speak.

So she’d been up long before dawn, leaving a message for her father and her gentle, ailing mother: “Gone hunting on the mountain. Don’t wait supper for me.”

Since Talis was the best hunter in the family, and the flocks were migrating south, she’d hoped her father wouldn’t question her absence too much. Of course he’d be surprised and disappointed when she returned empty-handed, but there was nothing she could do about that. She wished she could have ridden into town, that would have made her journey much easier, but she’d worried that some passerby would recognize one of Gerdal’s riding horses. So she’d alternately run and walked into town, reaching it a little before noon.

Talis had been glad of the excuse to sneak into town; she hadn’t seen Castio for months and was eager to share all the news she’d accumulated. She was a bit shaken by Castio’s ve-hemence today—never before had she heard the fiery-worded orator suggest that war with Pela might prove inevitable. Talis frowned worriedly. She’d considered herself a loyal servant of the Crown until just a handful of years ago. She wasn’t sure she wanted Kata to be free of Pela … she just wanted Katans to have the rights they were guaranteed under Pelanese law.

While Agivir had ruled Kata, there had been stirrings of dissent and grumbles over the ever-present taxes. But it was Viceroy Salesin who had hit upon the idea of “cleaning out”

the Pelanese gaols by shipping convicts across the sea to Kata.

When Talis was a girl, Kata had been a safe place to live, a place where nobody locked doors and any stranger was invited in and given a hot meal and a place by the fire to sleep. Those days were no more. Too many robberies, murders, and rapes had terrorized those living on Katan farms.

Nowadays, any stranger who approached a Katan farm did so in peril of his life, in the sights of a musket-toting farmer.

Rape …
The thought made Talis shudder violently and grit her teeth to keep them from chattering. Her stomach clenched.

The young Katan revolutionary would be twenty-one on her next birthday, and she remained unpledged and unwed, much to her family’s distress. Talis frowned behind the folds of the shawl.
Marriage, marriage, that’s all they can think
of. No matter how much I do, I’ll never be any good in their
eyes unless I marry.

And that, she would never do. She hated men—well, most men, Castio being one of the rare exceptions. The very thought of the intimacies of marriage made her want to retch.
Marriage! Not likely! But all the work I do for Dad,
overseeing the farm, working alongside the slaves in the
fields, doing the buying and selling of the crops, keeping the
accounts—Goddess forfend, I manage the whole place these
days!—and yet, all Dad can think of is marrying me off.

Just last week Talis and Gerdal had had a terrible row. Her mouth tightened at the memory …

Gerdal Aloro waved his arms in frustration as he paced back and forth. The candlelight gleamed faintly on his bald-ing forehead. “Daughter, this cannot go on! People are beginning to talk! Three men have asked me if they may court
you, but you will have none of any of them. ’Tis not right!

You’re of an age to wed these past three years and more! You
need a husband to support you, daughter! Are you intending
to be a spinster?”

Talis stared at him stonily. “And if that’s what I decide? I
have told you and told you, Dad, I have no wish to marry.

Are you telling me that I’m a burden?”

“A burden, yes!” he shouted, losing the last vestige of his
temper. “A burden to your mother and me! We raised you
right! We don’t deserve such a willful daughter!”

Talis gazed at him in silence, then turned and walked out
of the room.

She had barely spoken to her father since that time.

We used to be so close,
she thought sadly.
I knew they
loved me. Now I’ve shamed them and I’m a burden, am I?

Well, that’s too bad. I work twice as hard as my brothers, but
I could work until I dropped and it would mean nothing, I
suppose. Only marriage will satisfy them. If I’m now considered a burden, then perhaps I should just leave. I could
join the Cause full-time. Nobody there would think I’m a
burden. Nobody there would nag me to marry.