"Your oath to the steward's one thing," said Sergeant Mager. "It's me you've got to satisfy."
Gird, along with three other recruits, all from other villages, stood uneasily in his new orange uniform while the sergeant stalked back and forth in front of them. The other soldiers were inside, enjoying the Midwinter Feast. They were in the little back courtyard he knew so well, with an icy wind stiffening their skins.
"If you make it through training," the sergeant went on, "you'll give your oath to our lord or his guardian. You'll go where he sends you, and fight his battles, the rest of your time as soldier. Some of you—" He did not look at Gird. "—some of you started your training as boys. But you needn't think you know much yet. You all start level."
Level meant the bottom. The senior recruits, that Gird had seen cuffed and bullied by the older men, now cuffed and bullied the new ones. Gird was no longer the cook's helper, but he still hauled buckets of water, scrubbed floors, and now had his uniform to keep clean and mended, besides. The boots that went with it kept his feet from the snow, but chafed badly until he learned how to pack them with oily wool. He had never had to do anything to a bed but fall into it and fight his brothers for the cover: now he had to produce as neat a mattress, as tightly rolled a blanket, as the others. And, lacking a boy to do the work, all four new recruits washed dishes.
Yet none of them complained. Like Gird, they had all been peasants' sons, only one of them the son of a free tenant. It was worth all the abuse to have a full belly all winter long, somewhere warm to sleep. Gradually they got used to having enough to eat, a bunk each, with a warm blanket, whole clothes that fit, boots.
Gird had been hoping to move quickly into training with weapons, but the sergeant had other priorities. They would all, he said firmly, with a hard look at Gird, learn their letters well enough to follow simple orders. They would learn to keep count, so they could help the steward or his agents during tax-time. Ifor, who had been sent from the nearest trading town, could already read a little, and use the pebble-board for figuring. He didn't mind the daily session with letters that was still torture to Gird.
"You'll never make sergeant, Gird, if you don't learn this," the sergeant warned. Gird was beginning to think he didn't care, if making sergeant meant making sense of reading and writing and numbers. He could see, as clear as his hand on the table, how many legs two sheep had, but trying to think of it and write it down made the sweat run down his face. He was the slowest in this, as he was strongest in body. The sergeant insisted that it didn't have to work that way, that many strong men were quick-minded in learning to read. Gird eyed the others wistfully, wondering what the difference was inside their heads. He struggled on. He knew all the marks, now, that stood for numbers and sounds; he could read the simplest words, and write his own name in awkward, shaky letters. But it got no easier, for all his labors.
Besides that, they had to learn about their lord's domain: the correct address for the lord himself, for the steward, for the various officers who came through on inspections. The names of all the villages, and the headmen of each, and the sergeants in all the places the guard was stationed. Once in the lord's guard, they might be sent anywhere within his domain. Most men served away from their homes, at least until they were well along in service. Gird had never really considered the possibility that he might leave and never come back. Going off to war was one thing, but leaving this village—the only place he'd ever known—to make a life somewhere else—that was new and disturbing. He frowned, but said nothing. At least this was better than reading and writing. The lists went on and on. They had to know the right name for each piece of equipment in the barracks, from the tools used on the hearth to the weapons hung on the walls. Each weapon had not only a name, but a name for each part—for each movement with which it could be used—for the command given to make each movement.
When they did begin what Gird recognized as soldier's training, it was hardly different from the games boys played. Wrestling—he had wrestled with the other lads all his life. He was good at it. When the sergeant asked him if he thought he knew how, he answered briskly that he did, and stepped out. Someone chuckled, but he ignored it. They laughed at everything the new recruits did, good or bad. He eyed the balding redhead he'd been told to work with, and cocked his arm, edging in as the boys always did. Something like a tree trunk suddenly grabbed him and he felt himself flying through the air, to land hard on the cold stone floor.
"It's not a game, any more," said his partner mildly. "Try again." Some five falls later, when Gird was breathless, bruised, and much less cocky—and the other man had hardly broken into a sweat—the sergeant called a halt.
"Now you know what you don't know. Convinced?"
"Yes, sir."
"Remember: if we have to crack your head to let in wisdom, we will." The sergeant was serious, but Gird grinned at that. It made sense. His father said much the same, and he'd known all his life that his own head was considered harder than most.
Besides wrestling, there was drill. Gird found he liked that, although he had trouble with some of the sequences, and more than once turned in the wrong place and got trodden on. And pounded, when the sergeant caught up with him. But when it worked, when all the separate individuals merged into one body, and the boots crashed on the stones together, it sent shivers down his backbone. This was really soldiering, something the village folk could watch and recognize, something to show off. If the sergeant ever let them past the gates, which he had not for tens and tens of days.
One late winter day, shepherds came to ask the guard's help in hunting a pack of wolves. The steward agreed, and the sergeant, now mounted on a stout brown horse, led them all out into a miserably cold, bleak day with neither sun nor snow to commend it. Gird marched for the first time in uniform down the lane past his cottage, where his younger sister peeked through the leafless hedge and dared a shy wave. He could not wave back, not with the sergeant's eye on him, as it surely was, for all he rode ahead. But he knew she watched, and admired her older brother, and someday all the others would too. He could imagine himself receiving admiring glances from all the villagers, when he saved their stock from wolves or folokai, or protected them from brigands.
Gird enjoyed the wolf hunt, though it meant that he and the other inexperienced ones spent three whole days trudging through cold damp woods and across even colder wet pastures, looking for wolf signs. It was not until much later that he realized the sergeant never expected them to find any—that's what the gnarled old tracker with his hounds was for—but it kept them out of trouble and far away from the actual hunt. They returned in the glow of a successful hunt, behind the lucky ones who had actually killed two wolves and so got to carry them through the village (Gird and the other recruits had carried them most of the way back, while the hunters themselves told and retold exactly how each spear had gone into its prey.)
With the coming of spring, they spent more of their time outside, and more of it in things Gird recognized as soldierly. Marching drill, and long marches across the fields and pastures. Archery, not with the simple and fairly weak bows his own people used for hunting small fowl in the woods, but with the recurved bows that took all his strength to draw. They learned the use of stick and club, facing off in pairs and later with the older recruits in sections. Gird collected his fair share of bruises and scrapes without comment, and dealt as many.
Days lengthened with the turning year. Soldiers as well as farmers had to put in their due of roadwork, and Gird's weapon on that occasion was a shovel. He hesitated before jamming it into the clogged ditch: was this like a plow? Did he need to perform the spring ritual of propitiation before putting iron in Alyanya's soil? He muttered a quick apology as he saw the sergeant glare his way. It would have to do. He meant no disrespect, and he had brought (on his own time) the sunturning flowers to the barracks well. Although the sergeant had brushed them away without comment, surely the Lady would understand.
He might have known his mutter would not go unnoticed. Even as he tossed the second shovelful of wet clay and matted leaves to one side, the sergeant was beside him.
"What's that you said, Gird?"
"Just asked the Lady's peace, sir, before putting iron to 'er."
The sergeant sighed, gustily, and looked both ways to be sure the others were hard at work before he spoke. "Gird, when you were a farmer's brat, you paid attention to the Lady, and no doubt to every well-sprite, spring spirit, and endstone watcher. I've no doubt who it was tied that bunch of weeds to the wellpost."
Gird opened his mouth to say it wasn't weeds at all, but the proper flowers, picked fresh that morning, but thought better of it.
"But now you're a soldier, or like to be. You need a soldier's patron now, Gird, not a farmer's harvest matron. Gods know I'm as glad of the Lady's bounty as anyone, and I grant her all praise in harvest time. It's right for farmers to follow all the rituals. But not you. Will you stop to ask the Lady's blessing every time you draw steel, in the midst of battle? You'll have a short life that way."
"But sir—"
"You cannot be both, Gird, farmer and soldier. Not in your heart. Did your folk teach you nothing of soldiers' gods?" Gird shook his head, still shoveling, and the sergeant sighed again. "Well, 'tis time you learned. Tir will take your oath in iron, same as mine, and asks nothing but your courage in battle and your care for your comrades. The lords say he's below Esea, their god—" He peered at Gird's face, to see if he understood. Gird nodded, silently; his father had had a lot to say about Esea—a foreign god, he'd said, not like their own Lady, and not like the Windsteed. "But to us it doesn't matter," said the sergeant. "He's god enough for me, my lad, and that should be enough for you. Think about it. And no more flowers around my well, is that clear?"
"Yes, sir." He had not thought soldiers that different. Everyone knew the capriciousness of the merin, the well-sprites . . . how the water rose and fell, regardless of local rains, how even its flavor changed. Had that well in the barracks yard gone years without proper care? He was sure the water had tasted sweeter after his offering. But he could not argue with his sergeant.
After the roadwork, after the bridge repairs that followed the spring rains, the recruits had their first chance to mingle with the villagers. Gird spent most of that time helping his father and brothers with their work, but found an hour now and then to meet with his old friends. At first they were properly impressed with his growing strength and martial skills, but that didn't last long.
"It's not fair," said Teris, when Gird had thrown him easily for the third time one evening. "You're using soldier's tricks against friends, and that's not fair." He turned away. So did the others.
"But I—" Gird stared at their backs. He knew what that meant. If they shut him out, he would have no one in the village but his family. And his family, just lately, had been irritating him with complaints about his attitude. If the sergeant forbade him to remember all the Lady's rituals, his family insisted that he perform them all perfectly. He could not lose his friends: not now. "I—I will teach you," he offered. "Then it would be fair."
"Would you, truly?" Teris turned around again.
"Of course." Gird took a deep breath. The sergeant might think he knew nothing—or that's what he kept saying—but here he knew more than any of them. "We can say we have a guard unit—we can have a sergeant, a captain—"
"I suppose you'll want to be captain," said Kev.
"If he's teaching us," said Teris, shrugging, "he can be captain. For awhile."
"We need a level field," said Gird. He would teach them marching, he thought to himself. Maybe if he taught them, he wouldn't forget the commands himself. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered an oath not to teach "peasants and churls" the arts of war. But marching in step wasn't an art of war. They'd all tried it when they were little boys; they just hadn't known how to do it right. And wrestling wasn't an art of war; no one fought battles by wrestling. And archery . . . all boys played with archery. Nonetheless, he took care that the level field they decided on was well out of sight of the guard stations.
In a few weeks, Gird's troop of boys was moving around the back horse pasture with assurance. Bit by bit, as he learned from the sergeant, he transferred knowledge to the boys.
"The little groups are called squads," he said one day. "We have enough to have three of them; it's like pretend armies. Every squad has a leader, and marches together, and you can do real things with it." They built a sod fort in the field, and practiced assaults. Teris, in particular, had a gift for it; he remembered everything Gird told him, the first time.
Now, rehearsing his new knowledge with his friends, Gird felt that his life as a soldier was well begun. That first summer as a recruit, he spent all his free time with them; he saw no reason why their old friendship should ever end. He wished he could show them off to the sergeant. If he could train them, he had to be learning himself, didn't he?
But as time passed, Gird's friends were working too hard in the fields to have time for boyish play. First one, then another, failed to turn up for drill, and then the others refused to do it. They wanted to lie in the long grass and talk about things Gird didn't know: whose brother was courting whose sister, which family might have trouble raising the field-fee this year, all that timeless village gossip. When he tried to argue them into drill or wrestling, they simply looked at him, a look the sergeant had taught him to think mulish and stupid. He gave in, since arguing would not serve, and wished he could live in two places at once.
After harvest, he had less time off himself, and rarely came into the village all that winter. The recruits had begun to learn sword-work, and even Gird knew that he could make no excuse for teaching his friends to use edged weapons, even if they had had them to practice with. No one did; the strictest of the laws forbade any but soldiers to have weapons, and even the free smiths feared the punishment for breaking that law. Besides, the sergeant still insisted that he keep trying to learn to read and write. None of his friends could, or cared to. His father admitted that reading was a useful skill, but wasn't at all sure that it was right for a farmer to know. Gird opened his mouth to say "But I'm not a farmer!" and shut it again. That was the whole point, and they all knew it.
There were other barriers growing, too, between them. He could not tell them what the sergeant said about Alyanya, or what he felt himself. Even the rituals of harvest had seemed a little silly; the twisted wisps of straw, the knotted yarn around the last sheaf, all that was peasant lore, far removed from his future as a soldier. He felt guilty when he listened to the other soldiers' jests; those were his people, his family and extended kin. Yet he wished that the villagers would somehow impress the soldiers—would somehow be more soldierly, so that he could feel pride in them.
And there was the matter of soldiers' discipline. For himself, Gird could stand a few buffets when he made a mistake, a few lashes for coming back drunk from the harvest festival trying to sing "Nutting in the Woods." Being clouted by the others was no worse than being mauled by Rauf and the older boys when he'd been younger. For that matter, many families were almost as rough; his father had taken a belt to him more than once, and his oldest brother had pummeled him regularly before he married and moved away.
What he did not like was having to do the same to others. When Keri, a lad from one of the distant villages, mishandled a sword, and the sergeant had them all join in the punishment, Gird told himself that someone who couldn't stand a few buffets wouldn't stay strong in battle, but he didn't like to think which bruise on that battered face had come from his fist. He got a reputation for being strong enough but unaggressive, a little too gentle. The sergeant shook his head at him after seeing him flinch from Keri's punishment. "And I thought you'd be the quarrelsome sort, glad enough to clout others. Well, better this way, as long as you don't mind killing an enemy. But mind, lad, soldiering's not for the faint heart or weak stomach." He was sure he would not mind a battle; it was having to hit someone helpless that made him feel sick to his stomach. This was another thing he could not share with boyhood friends; he knew they would not understand.
Past Midwinter Feast, in the slack of late winter, he found another troubling presence in the barracks. Three of the soldiers, all from Finyatha and rotated here from the count's household, favored Liart. Gird had never heard of Liart before that second winter, when he came back from the jacks one night to find the three crouched before the hearth with something that whimpered between them. When they heard him, one of them whirled.
"Get away!" he'd said. "Or by Liart's chain, you'll rue it!" He had gone to the sergeant, unsure, and seen the sergeant's face tighten.
"Liart, is it? Liart's chain? I'll give them Liart's chain!" And he had stormed out, bellowing. But in the end he had gone to the steward, and come back shaken. "A god of war is a god of war," he'd said then, in the bleak light of a winter morning. "Our lord approves, if someone chooses Liart for patron."
Gird tried to ask, and was sworn at for his pains. Then, later, one of the other men, Kadir, explained. "Liart's followers buy his aid with blood; 'tis said he likes it best if it comes hardly . . . d'you see?" Gird didn't, but knew he didn't want to know. "Liart's chain . . . that's the barbed chain, like the barbed whip they use on murderers, up in Finyatha. Some lords use it, more than used to. Mostly it was thieves and outlaws, in the old days, so I heard. But the thing is, Gird, don't you be asking trouble of Liart's followers; they'll torment you as glad as anyone, if you bring notice to them. I'd be careful, was I you."
A few days later he found a short length of barbed chain on his bunk, as they came in for inspection. The sergeant's eyes met his; he took his punishment without complaint; they both knew he had not put it there. He himself had declared for Tir, as his sergeant had suggested the previous summer, although he had not yet given his oath of iron. That would require a Blademaster, and the sergeant said they would have the chance after they'd given their final oath to the lord when training was over. The sergeant had told him what was lawful for him to know, though, and it was very little like anything the villagers taught.
So when the days lengthened again into spring, there were many things he could not share with old friends. They would have questions he could not answer—that was the best face he could put on it. Likely it would be worse. And he himself, as tall now as any of the guards, would be promoted from recruit come Summereve, when the lord was home from Finyatha.
Later he would remember that spring as one of the happiest times of his life, drenched in honey. He was young and strong and handsome; when he walked along the lanes to visit his family, with the brass badge of his lord's service shined and winking in the sun, the little children smiled and waved at him, tagging along behind. "Gird," they called. "Strong Gird . . . carry me, please?" Girls near his age glanced at him sideways; he felt each glance like a caress. Boys too old to tag him like the younger children watched nonetheless, and when he stopped to speak to someone they'd come close. "Is it hard to be a soldier, Gird?" they'd ask. And sometimes he told them tales of the barracks, and watched their eyes widen.
Once, twice, he had leave to go to the gatherings in the sheep-folds around, where the young men and girls met and danced. He was too young yet—he merely watched—but he enjoyed the music, and the respectful, if wary, glances. His old friends still joked with him, cautiously, but none ventured to wrestle or match arms. He didn't mind that; he didn't want to hurt them, and he knew now that he could.
Even at home, it was a good spring. His father's eyes still showed concern, but his older brothers were clearly proud to have a brother in the guards. Other lads his own age were still "lads" only—too young to marry, too young to inherit a farm, and most were younger sons. "Sim's boys" or "Artin's boys," they were called, in lumps like cattle. But he, Gird son of Dorthan, he had a name for himself in the village, and a nickname to match, for even the veterans called him "Strong Gird." And on his rare days off, when he helped his father and brothers on the farm, he knew he deserved that nickname: he could outlift any of them, could haul more wood and dig a longer line of ditch. Now he could handle the longest scythe they had, and mow as level a swathe as his father.
"I can't say they've spoiled you for work," his father said one of those nights, when Gird was enjoying a last few minutes by the fire before walking back to the barracks. "You're a good worker; you always were, from a little lad. You're strong, and you've no foolish ideas about it. But I still wish—" He left the wish unfinished. Gird knew what he would have said, but he had never understood it. He would never forget his family, the people of his heart. And, strong as he was, he wouldn't die in battle far away—he would come home to them. Couldn't they understand that?
"I'll be all right, Da," he said, patting his father's shoulder. "I'll be good, and someday—" But he could not name his private dream, not then. It trembled on the edge of his mind, half-visible in a cloud of wishes too vague to express. He would do something wonderful, something that made the village and the sergeant both proud of him. Something very brave, that yet hurt no one but bad men, or monsters.
"Go in peace, Gird, as long as you may," his father said. "I pray the Lady forgives your service of iron."
His father always said that, and it always annoyed him now. Alyanya, the Lady of Flowers, the Lady of Peace, the Lady whose permission they must have each spring to touch the land with plow or spade—Gird thought of her in his mind as a more beautiful form of the village maids. Rahel, maybe, with shining hair down her back, or Estil whose perfect breasts swung dizzyingly with every stroke of the scythe during haying. Those girls, those flower-scented soft-skinned girls with their springtime bodies swaying along the lanes, those girls didn't mind his "service of iron." No, he had seen them glance, seen them smile sideways at him, while farm lads his age received no flicker of eyelash at all.
And surely the Lady herself, whatever else she was, understood the need for soldiers—surely she also admired broad shoulders, strength, the courage of a man with bright weapons in his hand. The sergeant had told him an old tale about Alyanya and Tir, in which the Lady had her Warrior guardian, and was glad of his service. He had never heard such a tale at home, but it made sense, the way the sergeant told it. That the iron of plow and spade was but another form of the iron of sword and spear, and the Lady's consent to one was as gracious as her consent to the other. "Bright harvest," the sergeant's tale had sung, "born of this wedding, child of this marriage—" Girl and Lady, he thought to himself, both know and want the strong arm, the bright steel. But he did not argue with his father, as he had once the year before. His father was a farmer, born and bred, and would die as a farmer—may it not be soon! he thought piously—and he could not expect a farmer to understand soldiers' things.
He walked back through the late-spring night, with starlight glittering in the puddles alongside the lane, as happy as he could imagine being. He was Gird, the local farmer's son who had made good, had made a place for himself in the lord's household, by the strength of his arm and the courage of his heart.
Then the lord count arrived from the king's court. All the guards stood rigid in the courtyard for that: Gird in the back row, with the other recruits. Tall as he was, he had a good view of the cavalcade. A halfsquad of guards, looking somehow older and rougher than those he had met, on chunky nomad-bred horses, followed by two boys that looked younger than Gird on tall, light-built mounts. Behind them, a prancing warhorse with elaborate harness embroidered and stamped on multicolored leathers. And on the warhorse, their lord—Gird's liege lord, Count Seriast Vanier Dobrest Kelaive—a sour-faced young man in orange velvet, black gloves, tall black boots, and a black velvet cap with an orange plume. He looked, Gird thought, like a gourd going bad in storage—a big orange gourd spotted with fungus.
Immediately he suppressed the thought. This was his lord, his sworn liege, and for the rest of his life he would be this man's loyal vassal. His eyes dropped to the horse, the saddle, the tall polished boots. There were his spurs, the visible symbol of his knighthood, long polished shafts and delicate jeweled rowels. The steward came forward; the squires dismounted, handing their horses to grooms. One of them held the lord's bridle; the other steadied the off stirrup while he dismounted. Gird watched every detail. So far he had not had a chance to ride more than the mule that turned the millsweep. But in watching the horse, he heard everything, heard the steward's graceful speech of welcome, the curt response.
He knew, as did they all, that the young lord had been educated at the king's court in Finyatha; this year, at Summereve, he would take over his own domain, and the steward's rule would end. Everyone had liked that idea—or almost everyone—and had told one another tales of the steward's harshness. A young lord, they'd said, their own lord, living finally on his own domain, would surely be more generous. The steward would have to do his bidding, not make up orders of his own.
But now, seeing the young lord in person, Gird had a moment of doubt. For all the complaints he'd heard of the steward's harshness, most years no one went hungry. The sergeant had told him of other lands where brigands or war brought famine. Here, despite the fees, a hardworking family could prosper, as his had, with one brother tenanting his own cottage, and Arin soon to marry. Would things be better under the young count?
Still, Summereve, only a few days away, would bring a great day for both of them. The lord's investiture, in the moments after midnight. He could not imagine what solemn rituals gave one of the lords dominion; the sergeant made it clear that it was none of their business. Perhaps the sergeant himself had never seen. Village rumor, he remembered, had it that the lords gained their great powers when they took office. But he had never seen any lord, or anyone with powers beyond the steward's ability to ferret out the truth when someone lied. He could not begin to imagine what kind of powers their young lord might have, or use. He pulled his mind back from this speculation to his own prospects. His promotion from recruit to guard private, the next afternoon, would be part of the lord's formal court, the first occasion on which the count would show his wisdom and ability to rule well. Gird had his new uniform ready, had every bit of leather oiled and shining, every scrap of metal polished.
He let his eyes wander to the rest of the entourage. Behind the lord's horse came others equally gaudily caparisoned: young nobles in velvets and furs, sweating in the early summer heat. Young noblewomen, attended each by maids and chaperons, riding graceful horses with hooves painted gold and silver. They began to dismount, in a flurry of ribbons and wide-sweeping sleeves, a gabble of voices as loud and bright as a flight of birds in the cornfield. As the young lord passed his steward's deferential bow, and led the party into the house, Gird felt a surge of excitement. The real world, the great world of king's court, the outside world he had never seen, had come to him, to his own village, and he would be part of it.