In time Gird thought the stripes would have hurt less. He walked back to his father's cottage, that bright morning, with his feet relearning the balance of walking bare, and his skin prickling with the knowledge that everyone knew he had been disgraced. Had disgraced himself, he reminded himself firmly. That first time along the lane, no one said anything, though he was aware of all the sidelong glances. He made it home without incident, to find Arin waiting for him.
"You're to clean out the cowbyre," said Arin, handing him the old wooden shovel. "He thinks it better if you keep out of sight."
Gird glanced at his mother, busy at her loom. Her expression said "I told you no good would come of it," as clearly as if she'd spoken aloud. His youngest sister Hara had obviously been told to keep quiet. He wondered if she'd been the one peeking through the hedge earlier. Probably. He took the shovel and went to work.
Across the barton, Arin was mending harness. Beyond the barton wicket, Gird could see a cluster of men in the greatfield. Midmorning now; they'd stopped work for a chat and a drink. He shoveled steadily, piling the dirty straw and manure in the basket, to drag across the barton and toss on the pile just beyond the gate. He wasn't sure why Arin was staying close—did they think he would run again? And Arin hadn't asked what happened up at the manor gates. Gird felt as touchy as after his first sunburn each spring. Every glance Arin gave him seemed to be made of flame.
At noon, Hara passed through the cowbyre with their father's lunch wrapped in a cloth; she gave Gird a cool nod that cut him to the bone. Arin stopped punching holes and lacing straps together, and stretched. He smiled; by then Gird was not sure what that smile meant.
"Come on, then, long-face. It's not what you're used to, but it is food." Arin hardly needed to wash, but Gird was muck to the knees and elbows. He remembered to flick a spatter of clean water out for grace, and washed carefully enough to please the sergeant before going in to get his bowl of mush. It hardly seemed to touch his hunger, but then the look on his mother's face tightened his throat so that he could not have swallowed another bite.
By late afternoon, he had cleared the cowbyre, and when the cowherd brought the animals back to the village, and Arin led their own three into the barton, he had the stalls spread with fresh straw. He washed up quickly, and started milking. He had always liked the cows, even the crook-horned red cow who slapped his face with her dirty great tail and did her best to tread in the bucket. His father appeared as he was milking the second, but said nothing before going on inside. Gird leaned his head into a warm, hairy flank, and let his hands remember the rhythmic squeeze and pull that brought the milk down quickly and easily. The milk smelled good, no taint of onion or wild garlic. He leaned closer, and gave himself a warm, luscious mouthful.
"I saw that," said Arin, from around the rump of the third cow. "You know better." It was the old bantering tone of their boyhood, but it didn't seem the same.
"Sorry," said Gird, wishing he weren't so conscious of the taste of that milk, the richness of it. Their milk was traded to the village cheesemaker; grown men did not drink milk. He felt he could drink the whole bucket. He finished the last quarter, and carried the bucket into the kitchen. From there he could hear the voices in the front room: his father and the steward. What now? he wondered. But his mother, square athwart the kitchen hearth, sent him back to the barton with a wave of her spoon.
He ranged around it, doing every chore he could think of, until his father called him in. It was much like the night the steward had visited to offer him the chance to train: his mother and father sitting stiffly on one side, and the steward at their single table. Arin followed him in. Kara, banished to the kitchen, was as close to the door as she could be, and not be seen by the elders.
"You should know," said the steward without preamble, "what your rashness will cost your father. He must appear at court, the afternoon of the count's investiture. I have spoken with the count, and pled what I can: your youth, your father's record of work, your brothers. But the fact is, the count is angry, and with reason. And your father, head of your family, will be fined. I came to tell him, that he might have it ready to pay, and save himself a night in the stocks."
Gird met his father's eyes. His father in the stocks? For his running away?
"You will attend as well, boy, and it may be the count will have something to say to you. He is your lord; he may do as he pleases. Remember your rank, and try—" the emphasis was scornful, "to cause no more trouble."
When the steward had gone, Gird's father patted his shoulder. "It's all right, Gird. You're here, and alive, and—it's all right." Gird knew it was not. For the first time in his life, he realized that he could do harm he could not mend. He felt at once helpless and young, and far removed from the boyish confidence of a few days before.
"What—how much is the fine?" he asked.
His father cleared his throat. "Well. They want repaid all they spent on your training. It's all in the steward's accounts, he says. Food, clothing, the coppers he sent me, even barracks room. And then a fine for oath-breaking—" Gird had never really mastered figures, but he knew he'd worn clothes worth far more than his family could have bought him. And eaten more, of better food. His father turned to Arin. "I'll have to ask you—"
Arin nodded. "Of course. Will it be enough?"
His father scrubbed at his face with both hands. "We'll see. Gird, you were too young before: come here, now, and see where our coins lie hid."
He had known it was under some stone in the fireplace; everyone hid valuables that way. But not which—and before his father levered out the stone, he would not have suspected that one. Within was a leather pouch, and in that his father's small store of coppers and silvers. His father counted it out twice.
"I saved most of your wages, for Arin's marriage-price, and Hara's dower. There's a hand of coppers, and another hand of coppers. But a fine of double the field-fee—that's a silver and a hand of coppers, and doubled—" He laid it out as he spoke, handling the coins as gingerly as if they were nettles to sting him. Gird held his breath, thinking of the hours of labor, baskets of fruit and grain, that each represented. "And the uniforms—" The last of the coppers went into a row, and his father frowned, shaking his head. " 'Tis not enough, even so. They might have let you keep the boots, at least, if we must pay for them."
"How much?" asked his mother.
"Eight copper crabs, and that's if the count holds to the steward's say. I doubt he will. It'll be a sheep, then, or a furl of cloth."
"I have a furl, set by," his mother said. "It was for—"
"No matter what it was for," said his father harshly. "It is for Gird's life, now."
"I know that," said his mother. Gird watched as she opened the press that stored her weaving, and pulled out a rolled furl of cloth. His father touched it lightly, and nodded.
"We'll hope that will do," he said.
The lord held court in the yard, with the count seated beneath an awning striped orange and yellow. None of his noble friends was with him; having sat through his investiture at midnight, they had all slept late.
Despite Gird's father's oath to the steward that they would appear, one of the soldiers came that morning to march them up to the manor gates. He had studiously ignored Gird; others had not, small children who had stared and called and been yanked back within cottages by their mothers. Gird's feet were sore, not yet toughened to going bare, and his shirt had already split. His mother had patched it the night before. He was acutely aware of the patch, of his bare feet, of the difference between Gird, Dorthan's son, peasant boy, and Gird the recruit.
That contrast was sharpened when he watched the other recruits accepted into service as they gave their oaths to the count, and pinned on the badges of guard private. None of them met his eyes, not even Keri. One by one they came forward, knelt, swore, and returned to the formation. Gird's heart contracted. For one moment he wanted to throw himself before the count and beg to be reinstated. Then his roving eye saw the stocks, with the stains of Meris's blood still dark on the wood.
Another case preceded theirs. The steward had intended it, Gird knew, as the ritual single case the new lord must judge; he had saved it back from the spring courts. Now he rushed the witnesses through their stories of missing boundary stone and suspected encroachment on someone's strip of arable. Clearly not even the plaintiff and defendant thought it was as important as before, compared with Gird and his father. The count concurred with the steward's assessment, and the loser didn't bother to scowl as he paid his two copper crabs to the winner, and another to the count.
Then it was their turn. The steward called his father forward; Gird followed two paces behind, as he'd been bidden. To his surprise, the sergeant came too.
The count's face was drawn down in a scowl of displeasure that didn't quite conceal an underlying glee. The steward began, explaining how Gird had been recruited.
"A big, strong lad, already known as a hard worker. He seemed brave enough then, as boys go—" He turned to the sergeant.
"Willing to work, yes. Obedient, strong . . . not too quick in his mind, my lord, but there's good soldiers enough that can't do more than he did. Never gave trouble in the barracks."
"And he gave you no hint of his . . . weakness?" The count's voice this day was almost silken smooth, no hint of the wild rage he'd shown before.
The sergeant frowned. "Well, my lord, he did in a way. He didn't like hurting things, he said once, and he never did give up his peasant superstitions. Flowers to the well-sprite, and that sort of thing."
"Complained of hard treatment, did he?"
"No, my lord. Not that. Like I said, a willing enough lad, when it came to hard work, not one to complain at all. But too soft. I put it down to his being young, and never from home, but that was wrong."
"Indeed." The count stared at Gird until he felt himself go hot all over. "Big lout. Not well-favored, no quality in him. Some are born cattle, you know, and others are born wolves. You can make sheepdogs of wolves, but nothing of cattle save oxen in yokes. He looks stupid enough. I can't imagine why you ever considered him; if you want to stay in my service, you'd best not make such mistakes again."
"No, my lord," said the sergeant and steward, almost in the same breath.
"Well," said the count, "to settle young oxen, put stones on the load. You had a recommendation, steward?" The steward murmured; Gird heard again the terms his father had told him. The count nodded. "Well enough, so far as it goes, but not quite far enough. Let one of my Finyathans give the boy a whipping, and if his father wants him whole, let him pay the death-gift for his life. Else geld the young ox, and breed no more cowards of him." His eyes met Gird's, and he smiled. "Do you like my judgment, boy?"
Beside him, his father was rigid with shock and fear; Gird bowed as well as he could. The death-gift for a son was a cow and its calf that year. A third of their livestock gone, or his future sons and daughters. He knew his father would pay, but the cost!
The steward muttered again; the count shook his head. "Let the father pay now. What is it to be, fellow?" Gird's father stepped forward, and laid the pouch of coins, and the furl of cloth, on the table. The steward took the pouch and counted the coins quickly.
"The cow?" he said without looking up. Gird's father nodded, and the steward noted it down. "Go fetch the cow," he said brusquely.
"Sir, she's with the cowherd—"
"Will you fetch the cow or not?" The steward's face was white. "It's all one to me whether you have grandsons from this boy."
Gird's father bowed. "I'll go now, sir, may I?" he said, his voice trembling, and backed away. The count laughed.
" 'Tis no wonder the boy's a coward, with such a father. At least he's docile." The count waved a hand, and one of the Finyathan guards went off, to return in a few moments with a long rod bound in leather. "And you, sergeant, as you erred in choosing him, I don't doubt you'd like a chance to leave your mark on him?"
Whether he wanted to or not, Gird could not tell, but the sergeant had no choice. That much was clear. Nor did he. He went to the stocks without resistance, hoping he could keep from crying out. He felt the scorn more than the blows, but the Finyathan guard, when the sergeant gave up the rod to him after four or five stripes, had evident delight in his work. The count watched, leaning on one elbow and chatting to the steward without taking his eyes off Gird's face. By the time his father came back with the cow, Gird had bruises and lumps from more than the rod. He had closed his eyes before they swelled shut, not wanting to see his former friends in the guards as they joined in.
He woke face-down in a puddle of water that had been thrown over him, with the count's waspish voice saying "Take the oaf away, and pray I forget all this." His father's arm helped him up; outside the gates Arin too waited, to help him home.
His head rang. He could not have made it without help. His mother and Kara cleaned the blood off, and muttered over the damage done to the shirt. The rest of that day and night he lay wrapped in a blanket, sipping the bitter brew his mother spooned down him at intervals. For himself, he'd have been glad to have wound-fever and die of it, to be at peace, for his old dreams tormented him like haunts, making mock of his pride. He twisted and groaned, until Arin woke and held him.
"It's all right, Girdi. It's over now." But it was not over, and wouldn't be. He was sour with his own sweat, disgusted with himself, and shaking with fears he could not express. If things had gone so wrong so fast, what was safe? Arin's reassurance meant nothing. He remembered the look on the count's face, the delight in cruelty. He might have been killed—really killed—his life had hung on the count's whim.
The next morning he forced his stiff, aching body out of bed. He was not sure he could work, but he knew he must. His mother had yet to remake his shirt from the ragged scraps left after his punishment, so she insisted he stay indoors. His father and Arin agreed. Indoors, then, he worked—back to childhood, he thought, scrubbing the stone hearth, washing dishes and pots, carrying buckets of water from the well. It was hot indoors, breathless as Midsummer usually was. Sweat stung in the welts and scrapes; he ignored it, shrugged away his mother's attempt to put a poultice on the deepest ones. She glared at him.
"You may want a fever, to get out of work, but we've no time for that, lad. Stand you there and no more shifting, while I clean this out again." He felt himself flush, but stood. What else could he do? He had forfeited his chance to adult status. Her fingers were gentler than her voice. The sharp fragrance of herbs worked its way past his misery for a few moments as she stroked the heavy ointment on his back. " 'Tis a bad world, lad, where such things happen. But you see what comes of taking iron to mend them. Remember this: no matter how bad it seems, soldiering makes it worse. It always comes hardest on those with the least. Mind your father, keep out of the lord's eye: that's best. Notice brings trouble, no matter if it seems good at first. Remember what tree the forester chooses."
He'd heard that often and often before. It was not in the Lady's ritual, but it was the village's favorite truth: notice brings trouble. As bad to be always first in reaping as always last; as bad to be richest as poorest. The tall tree catches the forester's eye, and the fattest ox suggests a feast. He had never liked it, since he could not have hidden among others even if he wanted to. What, he had wondered, was the tall tree supposed to do? But his trouble would prove the truth as far as the village was concerned, and he expected to hear it many times again.
He was young and strong and healthy; his body healed quickly and he was soon hard at work with his father. But he could not escape the knowledge that he had brought trouble to his family. They had been prosperous, for peasants: three cows, eight ewes, extra cloth laid away, the copper and silver coins that took so long to earn. His father had had a good reputation with the steward, and had no enemies in the village itself.
Now Arin could not marry until they earned the marriage-fee, but before that came the field-fee and house-fee, and the harvest taxes were coming soon. He could help with the work, but he had to eat, and he brought no more land with him, on which more crops could grow, or beasts graze.
His father said nothing of this. He had no need to say it; Gird knew precisely what it meant, what it would cost them all in labor and hunger to regain even a scrap of safety. His feet toughened quicker than his mind. Daylong in the fields he caught the tail end of comments that seemed intended for his ear. The other men said nothing near his father, but left him in no doubt what they thought. Young lout, they said, set himself up for a soldier and then shamed us all with his weakness. He knew some of them had been as sickened as he, but if they remembered it at all, they didn't say so around him. It was convenient to blame it all on him. He knew, on one side of his mind, that this had always happened so, that once he had done the same, but it still hurt. His former friends stayed away from him, whether because of their fathers' orders or their own scorn he didn't know, and soon didn't care. He was in a deep wallow of misery, just like the bullcalf in the bog Arin had mentioned.
In that first month of trouble, between the event and the harvest, only one mercy intervened. The young count and his entourage left to visit another of his holdings, and the steward conveniently forgot to put Gird on the workroll. In the required workdays, he could work his family's garden and fieldstrip, while his father and Arin worked the greatfield for the count. And he could do day-labor for anyone hiring work done, taking his pay in a meal away from home more often than hard coin. Most of this was unskilled labor, fetching and carrying. Gird carried water for the masons brought in to raise the count's orchard walls, and lugged baskets full of clay and broken rock. It was hard work, even for someone of his strength, and he soon felt the difference the change in food made. He came home so tired he could hardly eat, and fell onto the bed as soon as he'd cleaned his bowl.
At harvest, Gird could not avoid the other men and boys. Harvest time gathered in more than crops; the village people worked together and celebrated together, and the year's stories began to form into chants and tales that would be retold over and over during long winter nights. It was no fault of Gird's that his disgrace so neatly fit the measures of an old song, "The Thief's Revenge" and needed but little skill to change a few words. He never knew who sang it first, but its jangling rhymes followed him down the lanes. "He gave a cry and ran away, as fast as he could run—" jibed the little boys. "Eh, Gird, can you outrun a fox? A pig?"
Now his former friends had their own say. A shrug, a wink between them, a shoulder turned to him. Teris even said "If you were going to make such a fuss, you could at least have saved Meris," which was completely unfair. He could not have saved Meris; no one could. They hadn't. But they blamed him for Meris, and for trying and failing. Some—Amis among them—said nothing, just watched him. Were they waiting for him to defend himself, to argue? But he had nothing to say. He was too tired to argue, too hungry and too miserable.
The girls never looked his way at all, and he was sure they laughed about him in their little groups. He was careful not to watch them openly and court more ridicule, although he had come to the age where the mere sight of a girl leaning to pull a bucket from a well could send his blood pounding. It was slightly easier to ignore the girls if he wasn't with the boys. He quit trying to talk to anyone, soon, and kept to his own family.
With all they had lost, that winter was hard. They could not afford to butcher an animal for winter meat; they would need every calf and lamb next spring to pay the field-fee. Gird's scanty earnings had gone for the fall taxes, along with two of their sheep. That meant less wool next spring, for his mother to spin and weave, and less cloth to trade or sell. At least they had fodder in plenty, for that had been gathered before they lost the extra animals. And Gird roamed the wood bringing back loads of firewood and sacks of nuts. He avoided the nutting parties of the other boys and young men, avoided the last autumn gatherings of dancers at the sheepfold.
Later, he remembered that winter as the coldest, hungriest, and most miserable of his life, although he knew that wasn't true. There was no real famine; they had beans and grain enough, some cheese. Except for the ritual cold hearth at Midwinter, they had a good fire yearlong. His mother had managed a whole shirt for him, pieced out of scraps, and he had rags enough to wrap his feet. It was the sudden difference, from more than enough to barely enough, that made it seem so bleak.
Meris died in the long cold days after Midwinter. Gird had tried to visit him once, but his family, suffering under a heavy fine as well as Meris's injuries, wanted no contact with another unlucky boy. Meris had had few friends, but those boys loosed their frustrated rage on Gird when they caught him alone, and battered him into the snow. He might have fought back, to ease his own frustration and grief, but one of them got a bucket over his head. The guards heard the noise, and broke it up; when Gird wrestled the bucket off his head, the sergeant was standing there sucking his teeth speculatively. He said nothing, just watched, as Gird made it to one knee, then another, and staggered off down the lane.
That was the last direct assault, but by then Gird was convinced that everyone was against him. The next time he got a bit of work, and a copper crab, he took it to the smelly leanto behind Kirif's cottage, where a couple of other men hunched protectively over mugs of sour ale. He knew it was wrong. He didn't care. For a crab he got more ale than his head would hold, mug after mug, and his father found him snoring against the wall.
That loosed his father's tongue, where the other had not. "A sot as well as a coward! I didn't work so hard to save a drunken oaf, lad; this had best be the last time you spend our needs on your own pleasure." It didn't feel like pleasure then; his head was pounding and his stomach felt as if it never wanted food again. His father was not finished, however. He heard the full tale of his misdeeds, from the time he'd run off to follow Arin on the pighunt as a child, to the stupidity of going for a soldier, right down to his selfishness and sullenness in the past months. He had not told his father about Meris's friends attacking him, or what Teris had said; he realized that it wouldn't do any good now.
He felt almost as guilty as his father seemed to want. It was his fault, no getting around it, and if some of the consequences weren't fair, nothing ever had been. Only one of the gods cared about fair, that he knew of, and the High Lord was far away, nothing much to do with the village folk or the soldiers, either one. He went back to work doggedly, determined to pay back enough of the debt he owed so that Arin could marry within a year. He didn't visit the aleshop until after Midsummer, and then with a basket of mushrooms to trade, not good coin his family could use. And he stopped with a single mug, that put a pleasant haze between him and the other villagers.
Arin's wedding briefly lightened his miseries, for his favorite brother would include Gird in the celebration despite anything he'd done. "Besides," Arin said, "you've worked hard to get my fee together. You might have done much less; it wasn't all your fault, after all. I know I can depend on you."
For a wedding, all quarrels ceased. Oreg even donated a pig to the feast. Gird was old enough to wait in the barton with the men, to watch his brother's dance, and join the drinking afterwards, when the newlyweds were safe abed and women were cleaning up the last of the feast. This was not like Kirif's leanto; here was a cask of the strong brown brew from a neighboring village, and hearty voices singing all the rollicking old songs he'd grown up with, from "Nutting in the Woods" to "Red Sim's Second Wife." He had enough ale to soften the edges of any remarks about him, and joined his loud voice to the others without noticing anyone's complaint.
But this did not last. Arin and his wife took over the bed he had shared with Gird, as was only right; Gird slept on the floor near the hearth that winter. Arin's wife, soon with child, began to have the childsickness, waking early every morning to heave and heave, filling the cottage with the stink of her illness. Gird, now on the work rolls, had his own duties to fulfill when the required days came around; he could no longer replace his brother and free one worker for the family. When Arin's first child was born, another mouth to feed, they had not yet put by enough for the field-fee. That year was leaner than the one before.
Soon Gird felt that he would never get anywhere at all. Arin's wife lost a child, but was soon pregnant again. As hard as they all could work was barely enough to feed them; they had no chance to save towards replacing the sheep or cow Gird had cost them. Year flowed into year, a constant struggle to survive. Gird could not miss the gray in his father's hair, the cough that every winter came sooner and lasted longer.