The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (60 page)

It was surprising in a way how big the training grounds were. Land this close to the city, well, virtually adjacent to the river gate, was expensive and usually put to better, or at least more commercial, use. Somehow this space; the better part of two hundred acres; had remained free, laid out as open pasture. He did not even know who owned the land.

They stopped by a group of archers. Three instructors were trying to teach twenty recruits the elements of archery. Three Mesham targets were set up fifty yards away. Skal knew about Mesham. He didn’t know why really. It went back to one of the very few conversations he’s ever had with the old Duke. Mesham was a material made up of wool, cotton threads and animal fur, mixed in the right proportions. It was placed in Mesham tubs, soaked in water with a couple of cheap chemicals added – he could not recall the exact ones – and beaten with a cloth hammer, which was a sort of pole a foot wide at the head and four inches at the handle. It was left to soak and then pressed. Archers shot at the target, and eventually the material began to break apart. A few hundred arrows would normally do it. Then the target could be taken back, some extra wool, cotton and hair added, soaked, beaten, pressed, and it would be as good as new. An army was like that, the duke had told him; cut up by the enemy it could be beaten back into shape, made good as new.

The instructors were nervous to have the mighty observe their work. Skal could tell. They shouted more harshly, increased their level of intervention. Every arrow was wrong, it seemed; even those that struck the targets. Skal watched the recruits. Several of the twenty showed promise. One of them hit the roundel with every arrow he loosed; a natural, he supposed.

They moved on. A squad of fifty horsemen were training with lances. They were riding at wooden dummies wrapped in cloth, or would have been. At this moment they were practising riding in formation; wheeling in line, riding in line, and doing it without sticking your neighbour with your lance. Skal thought they looked ragged, but Quinnial seemed pleased.

“They are coming along, Colonel,” he said. “How long have they been training?”

“Just four days on horse, my lord,” Skal replied. “This lot have been learning infantry basics for the last two weeks.”

Quinnial nodded, smiled.

It went on for a while. They moved from group to group, pausing for no more than five minutes at each, making the instructors nervous, and moving on again. At one point Skal found himself standing next to Maryal, alone. They were watching a demonstration of sword technique with shield and short sword and Quinnial had drifted to the other side of the group to get a better view of something. The other lords had followed him, but for some reason she had stayed behind, and now they stood twenty yards from the others.

They stood in silence for a while, but the longer it went on the more Skal felt he had to say something. Quinnial and the others showed no inclination to return, and he could hardly leave her alone.

“Shall we join the others, my lady?” he asked.

Maryal did not move, nor did she acknowledge his suggestion. She continued to stand and stare at the demonstration as though she had not heard him speak.

“My lady?”

“Do I make you uncomfortable, Skal?” she asked.

Now it was his turn to remain silent. It was true enough. He was no longer the scion of a great house. He was a junior member of the aristocracy with little or no weight other than what his sword had earned him. Quinnial outranked him by several orders of magnitude, and Maryal was to be Quinnial’s wife, and a voice in his ear.

“I regret the wrong that I did you, my lady,” he said.

“I am certain of it,” she replied. “And you may live to regret it even more.”

“It was cruel,” Skal admitted. “But I did not think so at the time.”

“You did not think…?” Maryal made a scornful noise. “Whatever you are Skal, nobody ever thought that you were stupid. You always thought.”

Skal shrugged. A part of him was surprised that he had even tried to speak to her; she was in some ways quite slow witted; but some other part seemed to think that her opinion mattered. “I think differently now,” he said.

“I am sure that you do,” she said. She thought him unchanged, that his words stemmed from some craven instinct to ingratiate himself with those above him, and he was uncertain how changed he was. There were certainly ideas in his head that had been absent before his degradation, before Henfray and Fal Verdan.

“War is a great teacher. It is a place where a tanner’s apprentice may save a colonel’s life and the man standing next to you is a friend, no matter that he’s low born and a foreigner, as long as he swings a firm blade. It taught me that pride is no friend at all, and that war is a team sport.”

Maryal frowned at his words, almost as though there was a trace of doubt in her mind after all. “They say that you were a hero on the wall,” she said.

“I was there,” he said. “I killed men and was not killed. I always did have some skill with the blade. They honoured me because I was an officer, and because other men did what I told them, and died doing it.”

She frowned again, and he knew why.
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She was not accustomed to modesty from his lips, but he did not think it modest to tell the truth. There were no heroes on the wall, unless they were all heroes, those that fought and lived or died. None of them had run from the fight.

Quinnial and the others came back. There was a look of concern, Skal thought, on Quinnial’s face to see him and Maryal alone together, but it seemed to pass, and the rest of the inspection went by without further excitement. He did not speak to Maryal again.

It was evening when Tilian Henn returned. The sky was already beginning to darken, and the same bitter wind that had been harassing the men all day was hurrying the bonfires towards extinction.

“What is it?” Skal asked. As soon as he saw Tilian he knew that something required his attention. He could tell by the way the boy stood, leaning forward slightly as though about to speak, his eyes fixed on Skal’s.

“A private matter, my lord,” Tilian said.

Skal excused himself from the officers he was talking to, giving a flurry of orders that would see the day’s training wound up. He walked towards his tent and Tilian fell in behind him.

“Now,” he said when they were out of earshot of the others. “What is it?”

“The man Bruff, the Tanner; he had a wife and a child.”

“And?”

“I believe that you wished to aid them in some way, my lord,” Tilian said. “If so you must move quickly. They are being evicted from their house even as we speak.”

Skal untethered his horse and Tilian climbed up onto his own mount. They rode quickly through the river gate, turned right into the densest part of the low city and pushed their way through busy, narrow streets until they came to a row of low, dilapidated houses with the smell of a tannery strong in the air.

These were simple dwellings, rough cut tree trunks part buried in the ground with the spaces between meshed with lath and plastered with mud. The roofs were crudely beamed and covered with reed bundles cut from the river lands, a hole cut for the smoke to escape. Each house would be little more than a room, sometimes with cloths or blankets hung for privacy. They made them the same way in Bel Arac.

A scene of chaos became a tableau as they approached. Men on horseback bearing swords were a rare sight in these parts, and the poor were cautious when such strange creatures were about. There were a couple of dozen spectators but the main players were clear enough. A thin man dressed in brown, clutching a paper; two heavier men, one with blood on his face and a basket in his hand, a child in the basket; the second man with his arms wrapped around a woman to restrain her. At last Skal assumed it was a woman. She was skinny as a rake, wrapped in rags tied with an end of rope. Her copious black hair had broken free of any restraint and blew about her face like a cloud of darkness.

“What is happening here?” Skal asked.

“Nothing to concern you, sir,” the skinny man said, managing a sort of half bow.

Skal leaned on the pommel of his saddle. “I will judge that for myself,” he said.

The man flapped his hands, a gesture of frustration. Skal guessed his day was not going that well and that their arrival seemed yet another trial, another obstacle to be overcome. “Everything within the law, sir, I assure you; quite within the law.”

Tilian could restrain himself no longer. “You will address the lord of Latter Fetch as ‘My Lord’,” he said. “Or I will teach you to do so.”

Skal gestured to him. Enough.

“Forgive me, my lord,” the skinny man said, and his bow was more pronounced now. If there was one thing that worried the low born more than a man on horseback with a sword, it was a man on horseback with a sword and a title. Skal understood as much. He ignored the apology.

“Tell me what is happening,” he said.

He could see the man give up. He was going to have to explain himself to this lordling whether he wished it or no.

“I am chief clerk of the Westersept Tannery, my lord. This house is a tied house, owned by the tannery, and given as part wage to journeymen workers as the master sees fit. This house was given to a journeyman, this woman’s husband, but he is dead. According to law she may remain in the house for a month after the tenant’s death, and yet we have allowed her two months because he died in the service of the city, and for a month of that we gave her charity, food for her table, but the house is needed for another. So you see, my lord, we are well within the law, indeed, we are not even within sight of illegality.”

Skal directed his attention to the woman. She had stopped struggling. “Is this true?” he asked.

“It is, my lord,” she said. “But I could find no work, and I have a child. We will be on the street.”

Skal was surprised; not by her words, but by her accent. It was northern, the same musical rhythms he had heard as a youth. It was the way his servants had spoken at home.

“You have no family?” he asked.

“Not here, my lord. In Bel Arac I have a sister.”

Bel Arac. How old was she? It was impossible to tell behind her wind roughed hair but she could not be more than twenty-five if she had been married to Saul Bruff. She could have been one of the people he’d looked down on from the castle walls.

“Then why do you not go to Bel Arac?”

“I have not the money, and my sister is poor. We would not be welcomed there.”

“Better than the street.”

“I suppose, my lord.”

She was certainly reluctant to seek the charity of family. A carter’s fare was not so great that she could not have raised it when her husband had died. There would have been some money from his pay, some things in the house that she could have sold.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Sara Bruff, my lord.”

“How would it be, Sara Bruff, if I paid your way to Bel Arac?”

“Better than the street, my lord,” she replied. It was an impertinent answer, devoid of gratitude, and the man holding her shook her. Skal smiled.

“You do not like your sister, Sara Bruff,” he said.

“It is something that we have shared all our lives, my lord,” she said. “But I will accept your kindness gladly for Saul’s sake.”

“Your husband’s sake?”

“My son’s,” she said, but she had caught the implication of what he had said. “You knew my husband?”

“I knew his name.” The son was named for the husband. It was common enough. Skal was suddenly dissatisfied with everything that was being said and done. One of the two big men still had a grip on Bruff’s widow. “Release the woman,” he said.