A Wizard and a Warlord

9

Alea spun in alarm, trying to strike with her staff, but she didn’t have room for a proper swing and the man caught the stick in one hand while he caught her wrist in the other. Grinning, he said, “Don’t just watch, sweetheart,” and shoved his face forward for a kiss.

His breath reeked. Revolted, Alea kicked as hard as she could. The man yelped and let go to catch at his shin, hopping about.

“Ho, Arbaw! Hold her!”

Alea looked up in alarm. The soldiers from the roadside were running toward them, weaving in and out among the trunks. She blessed the trees for slowing them down even as she turned and ran.

But Arbaw snarled and caught her arm as she went past. She kicked at his other shin, but he managed to put the injured foot down in time to sidestep—and his weakened leg almost folded. Alea helped it, chopping her heel into the back of his knee. Arbaw howled and fell, but he dragged her with him. He had delayed her long enough. The other bandit-soldiers burst from the trees with howls of glee. “Well caught, Arbaw!” one called. “Answer a call of nature, and see how Nature answers!”

Gar roared as he surged up charging. He slammed into one soldier, knocking him into another, then both into a third. But the remaining two men swerved and fell on him with bellows of outrage, pulling daggers from their belts. Gar shook off his attackers and spun away from the fallen men to kick and punch with a most un-idiotic skill and grace. One soldier fell back clutching his stomach, mouth open to gasp; the other flew through the air, and so did his dagger.

It landed three feet from Alea. She plunged, snatched it up, and turned to find Arbaw’s blade hovering inches in front of her eyes. “Put it down, sweetmeat,” he grunted, “or I’ll give you another mouth.” Alea twisted to the side as she kicked him in the sweetbreads. Arbaw rolled away, clutching at himself and howling. Alea rolled the other way, pushed herself to her feet, caught up her staff, and swung it at the back of the head of one of Gar’s attackers. It cracked against his skull and the man fell. There were still two more worrying Gar like rats on a terrier; she jabbed one in the stomach with the butt of her staff. He folded as Gar slammed a huge fist into the other’s face.

“Run! ” Alea shouted, and turned to flee through the woods. She heard feet pounding right behind her and looked back in a panic, but it was only Gar.

Finally they slowed and stopped, leaning against trees and gasping. “They’re not … following…” Gar wheezed.

“How come … you missed … Arbaw?” Alea asked.

“Sloppy,” Gar said with a grimace of self-disgust. “Very sloppy. I was … too intent on … the others. ”

Alea could understand that; she had missed Arbaw, too, though she had the excuse of being a novice mind reader.

She finished catching her breath and straightened. “Two patrols is too many.”

“You’re right.” Gar nodded. “Scaring the daylights out of one and beating up the other means they’re going to remember us.”

“And be looking for us,” Alea agreed. “Not me,” he corrected. “They didn’t get close enough to realize how tall you were, but both patrols will remember the half-naked idiot who turned into an ogre. They’ll be looking for that idiot. If I change disguises, they won’t recognize either of us.”

“Well, I like that!” Alea said indignantly. “So I’m not worth noticing, am I?”

He stared at her, his gaze warming with admiration. “No man who’s alive and healthy could keep from noticing you—but saying that a woman is beautiful isn’t enough of a description for a patrol to recognize.”

“But they’ll recognize you, is that it? Because you’re the important one?”

“No, because I’m the obvious one,” Gar explained.

Alea reddened with increasing anger and snapped, “Are you really being as conceited as you sound?”

“Not a bit,” Gar assured her. “People remember ugliness more than beauty!”

“You’re not ugly!”

“Why, thank you,” Gar said softly, “though I suspect you’re the only one who would think so.”

This wasn’t going the way Alea wanted. “And I’m not beautiful.”

“You’re entitled to your own opinion,” Gar said politely. “I’m afraid I don’t share it, though.”

“All right, you might notice me—but what other man would?”

“Too many, if the patrols we’ve found are anything to go by.”

“Only because they’re starved for women! The villagers only see me as a storyteller.”

“How do you know,” Gar asked, “when they’re all noticing you?”

“You know very well how! A woman can tell the difference!”

“But she won’t listen,” Gar returned.

Alea’s lips thinned. “They can all see I’m too tall for them, way too tall! And that’s what the patrols will remember!”

“Not when they see you beside me,” Gar said. “They can only judge our heights by each other, after all, and when they see you coming down the road with me cringing beside you, they assume you’re of normal size.”

“Until they get close!”

“When they come that close, they’re more interested in making fun of the idiot.”

Alea stared, catching her breath, then said, “You really are an arrogant cuss, aren’t you?”

“It might seem that way,” Gar admitted, “but it’s really only camouflage.”

“Camo—what?”

“Camouflage,” Gar repeated, “fading into the background. Camouflage and misdirection, like songbirds.”

Alea stared, completely lost. She took a breath and said, in as reasonable a tone as she could manage, “Gar—what are you talking about?”

“It’s like birds,” Gar explained. “The male has bright colors so that the cats will attack him and not notice the female.”

Alea lifted her head slowly, bridling. “Surely because males don’t really matter!”

“That’s right, because males can’t lay eggs or bear offspring,” Gar said with a sardonic smile. “As far as evolution is concerned, we’re more expendable than you.”

“So that’s why you adopted such an odd disguise, is it?”

“One of the reasons,” Gar admitted, “but I think it’s time to change. I’m going to age remarkably, Alea.”

“Do you really think that will make a difference?” Alea snapped.

“Wait and see,” Gar told her. “Then you judge.”

The man was old and stooped, back bent under the weight of his pack, leaning heavily on his staff as he hobbled along the road. His snowy beard was long, his hair a white fringe around the felt cap that fitted his head like a helmet but his rough-hewn face really didn’t have all that many wrinkles. His limbs were probably gnarled and wasted, but no one could tell under the long dark blue robe he wore.

The woman who held his arm was a complete contrast, straight and tall, glowing with youth and health, her head a little higher than his.

The farmers looked up as they passed, saw the packs, and cried, “Peddlers!” The shout passed from one to another all across the fields. They came running with their hoes and mattocks, crying,

“Welcome, travelers!”

“What wares have you to trade?”

“What news have you? What happens in the wide world?”

The next morning, they left the village with cheery good-byes and waving hands—and several beautifully wrought little items of gold and silver in their packs. As they turned to the road ahead, Alea said, “I can see that being a peddler in this land could be very profitable, even if they don’t have money.”

“We haven’t had to pay for dinner or lodgings once,” Gar agreed, “but we’re not much richer in information than when we began. I still haven’t heard Anything about a government.”

“And every time we bring up the subject of banditry, all we hear about is General Malachi,” Alea sighed, “but never anything we don’t already know.”

“If he were as successful as his reputation,” Gar grumbled, “he would already be king!”

“He’d rule this whole world,” Alea agreed, “but is he really that bad, or is there just so little else to talk about?”

As they were leaving one village that lay within sight of the trees of a forest, though, the villagers were a bit more direct.

“Don’t go through that woodland by yourselves,” one woman warned them. “Wait for a larger party if you’ve an ounce of sense.”

“Sense?” Gar asked in his rusty approximation of an old man’s voice. He glanced up at Alea and asked again, “Sense?”

“I know, old fellow,” a man sympathized, “if you had any sense, you wouldn’t be walking the roads at your time of life anyway. But we have to make a living, don’t we?” He transferred his gaze to Alea. “You might think of settling down someplace, lass, so that he can rest in his old age.”

“I will if I find a town that wants me, and if I can persuade him to stay in one place for more than a week,” Alea said, smiling.

“Till then, though, you’ll have to do the thinking for your father.” A woman blinked tears away. “Oh, do be wise and wait for other travelers!”

“That could be a month or more,” Alea answered. “What can they take from us if we have nothing to steal?”

“Nothing but your bodies and your lives,” the villager said darkly.

“You would be forced to serve General Malachi’s bandits.” The woman shuddered. “Beware of that man, sister! If ever there was an ogre from out of the old tales, it is he!”

The patrols were still on the roads, but Gar heard their thoughts before they came into sight, giving himself and Alea time to hide—and they didn’t try to spy on the soldiers as they went past any more, but concentrated on the soldiers not spying them.

Their welcome in the next village was as joyous as ever, but Gar decided to be a smart old man instead of a foolish one and drove bargains with every bit as much zeal as Alea. They traded the porcelains of their first village for uncut gemstones, though they had to add a few wedges of copper to make their hosts happy.

Once Again Gar noticed people putting bits of metal in a collection box. This time, though, he was sure another one had put in a chip of something white.

Alea settled down to tell a story to the village children and their parents naturally stayed, too—only to keep an eye on their little ones, of course.

“Once upon a time, long ago and far away, there lived a man whose wife had died, leaving him with only one daughter…”

Murmurs of sympathy.

“After a few years, the man married again…”

“What is ‘married’? ” a young man asked.

Taken aback, Alea explained, “They lived together and reared a family.”

“Oh, bonding.” The man nodded; everyone else did, too, understanding. “ ‘Married…’ an odd word. How many children did the new wife have?”

“Two daughters.”

“The poor woman—only two. She must have loved having a third.”

“Well, she seemed to, until her husband died,” Alea said. “Then she made her stepdaughter do all the cooking and sweeping and scrubbing, and throwing out the garbage and tending the kitchen garden, while her own two girls slept as late as they wanted and spent the day amusing themselves.”

She hadn’t been prepared for the loud and instant protest, and the adults were almost as vociferous as the children.

“Her own daughters? They were all three her own daughters!” a woman said indignantly.

“And doubly precious if her husband had died,” said an older woman who looked as though she knew.

“She really made the poor lass do all the housekeeping?” one mother asked indignantly. “Well, I never! ”

“And all the cooking, too,” another woman said, shaking her head with a dark frown. “Shameful, I call it.”

But both of them were glancing out of the corners of their eyes at another older woman who reddened with anger but stood her ground, tilting up her chin. Gar wondered which child she favored.

“Now, in that country, there lived a…” Alea paused, remembering what had happened the last time she had referred to a king. “…a duke whose son was twenty-five and hadn’t married yet…”

“What’s a duke?” one of the children piped up. The parents nodded, equally puzzled.

“It’s … um … a man who owns the land that the people of a hundred villages farm,” Alea said, with a sinking feeling that already this was not going well.

“He tells them all what work to do, and when.” There, that didn’t sound quite so bad as ordering them about.

It was bad enough.

“The very idea!” one woman said indignantly. “That one man could dare to tell the people of a hundred villages what to do and not do!” a man said, equally indignant.

“Or even a dozen villages,” another man chimed in. “What a villain!” a second woman said.

“Well, every good tale must have a villain, must it not?” Alea tried not to look as nervous as she felt. That silenced them for a minute. Brows bent, faces frowned while they mulled it over, darting dark suspicious glances at Gar and Alea. Then an old woman pronounced, “No. I know tales about folk braving natural hazards, such as clashing rocks and arid deserts—or monsters such as one-eyed giants, or manticores with a thousand shark teeth and stingers in their tails.”

“Then think of a duke as a monster,” Alea said, and inspiration struck. “Think of him as a bully who lords it over other bullies.”

Their faces cleared; that, they could understand. “Like this General Malachi we’ve heard of?” the first woman asked.

“The very thing!” Alea said with relief. “He’s nothing but a bully who has herded a bunch of bandits together and made them fight for him.”

The villagers looked around nervously, but nodded with energy.

Alea decided it was time to get back to the story. “Let’s forget that the father was a duke—just think of him as a very rich man.”

The villagers turned to one another in consternation, exchanging questions and a lack of answers. Alea reined in exasperation and explained, “A rich man is one who has a great deal of…” No, they didn’t seem to use money here. “…a great number of possessions.”

“You mean he was the son of a priest?” a woman asked.

“Well … he lived with his family in a great house and wore beautiful clothes,” Alea temporized, “and never had to plow or hoe.”

“A priest indeed,” the woman said, satisfied, and everyone else nodded, chorusing agreement.

“But he did learn to reap, of course,” a man said. “Of course,” Alea said, a little unnerved. “Doesn’t everybody?”

They all nodded, agreeing with that.

“Anyway,” Alea said, “the priest decided that his son was old enough to mar … uh, to bond with a woman, past old enough, really, and told him that he must see to finding a wife, and sent messengers throughout the district for all the maidens to come to a grand feast he would give, so that his son might choose among them.”

“Why would he do that?” one of the men asked, frowning.

“Aye!” said the woman by his side. “It’s no good trying to find the right mate—these things simply happen.”

“Or fail to,” grunted one older man. He was rather ugly, and the woman’s tone softened.

“Aye, some of us must wait longer than others, Holdar. But love comes to all someday.”

“And it’s worth the waiting for,” said another man with a warm glance at the woman by his side. She returned the look, beaming, and took his hand.

“Um … Well, it may have been silly, but there are always people who have to prove for themselves what everybody knows,” Alea said.

“Well, that’s so, I suppose,” a man allowed, and the neighbors set up another chorus of agreement. Alea relaxed again, but not much, as she explained, “The son had been a bit wild, you see, and the priest wanted him tied to one woman, to settle him down.”

“He what?” a man cried, aghast.

“You don’t mean a priest would want a boy bonded to a girl for life!” a woman gasped.

“They might have fallen out of love!” another woman protested. “This priest wouldn’t have them tied together when they didn’t love one another, would he?”

Alea was stunned—here were ordinary villagers, most of them living as husband and wife with families, and they were frankly shocked at the idea of a man and woman bonding to live together for life.

“Everyone knows that’s courting disaster,” one woman declared.

That gave Alea back her poise. She smiled and said, “I’m afraid stories are often started by the mistakes people make, good woman.”

“Oh.” The woman frowned, turning thoughtful. “I hadn’t thought of that but now that you mention it, I suppose there’s some truth in it.”

Alea sighed with relief, ready to plough ahead. “Well, telling stories is her work in the world,” another woman pointed out. “But it’s so obvious a mistake, dearie! Didn’t the rest of the villagers warn them and try to talk them out of it?”

“Well … um … they thought it was none of their business,” Alea answered.

“There’s some sense in that,” a man allowed with an uneasy glance at another man. “Didn’t the priestesses tell the father it was wrong?”

“Aye, and the other priests, too!” said an old man. It struck Gar as an odd but auspicious beginning—and an excellent distraction. As Alea talked, he shifted his weight, taking a step backward—then another and another, until he was at the back of the crowd. There he strolled away with the mildly bored look of one who has heard the tale too often—strolled to the collection box, managed to pick the lock and fish out the white scrap.

It was birch bark with a name scrawled on it in the rough, clumsy letters of someone just learning to read, or who had never troubled to practice writing much. Gar was interested to discover that these peasants could at least read and write one another’s names. Beneath the name was the word “bully.” Gar wondered if it was a title or an accusation. He slipped the bark back into the box, fastened the crude lock, then went back to listen to the end of Alea’s story.

He was just in time to hear her say, “So the priest’s son and Cinderella fell in love and bonded.” The adults frowned at one another, obviously feeling something was wrong, but the children burst into a dozen questions.

“Where did they live, though?”

“Did they have children?”

“How long did they stay bonded?”

“They didn’t live in the temple, did they?” Several grim adult faces were nodding, agreeing with the children. Alea guessed at which comment they were nodding and hoped she was right. “Of course the prince called his friends together to build Cinderella her own house,” she said.

The grim adult faces cleared as the children cheered.

Alea decided to quit while she was ahead. “So they went into their new house hand in hand—and what they did after that was nobody’s business but their own.”

The grown-ups laughed and applauded, but the children looked resentful, as though they’d had a sweet taken away.

Gar had to admit that Alea had done a masterful job of adaptation to a local culture.

On the way out of town the next morning, Gar stiffened and muttered, “Watch that man!”

Alea glanced out of the corner of her eye so she wouldn’t seem to be staring. She saw a man in his doorway bending to pick up a scrap of something white that lay on his threshold. Straightening, he studied the scrap, then tore it up angrily and strode off toward the fields, his face flaming.

“What was that all about?” Alea asked out of the side of her mouth.

“I don’t know,” Gar answered, “but I’d love to find out.” As they passed the cottage, he stooped and scooped up the pieces in a single deft motion. “When we’re out of town,” he muttered, “we’ll see how we do with a jigsaw puzzle.”

A mile past the town’s fields, they stopped, laid out the pieces on a flat rock, and fitted them together.

Alea frowned. “What does it mean?”

“Well, for one thing, our peasant can’t read or write very well.” Gar pointed to the name that had been very crudely drawn. “I saw the man slip this into the postbox on the common yesterday. Somebody seems to have collected it during the night and given him an answer.” He indicated the second set of words, printed much more clearly. They read, “Not a bully. Give one bushel of wheat to the next feast.”

“It’s a fine,” Alea said, frowning, “but for what?”

“False accusation, I’d say.” Gar pursed his lips. “I think our peasant was trying to make trouble for an enemy by accusing him.”

“He could have simply told the other villagers!”

“Yes, but they would have known if he was right or wrong,” Gar said, “and might like the other man well enough to insist on really clear proof. I think our peasant tried to call in people who wouldn’t know the facts and wouldn’t take sides, but they outsmarted him and learned the truth—very quickly, too.”

Alea frowned. “Then who was his judge?”

“The hidden government that I’m sure must be here somewhere!” Gar rose with a tight, intense smile, eyes gleaming. “Perhaps we’ll find it at the next village. Let’s go!”

Exasperated, Alea watched him stride away. Then she shook her head and started after him.

By midafternoon, they had come out of the flatlands into hilly terrain. The road wound between high banks that rose farther into small mountains.

Gar suddenly stiffened. “Patrol coming!”

Alea stopped, gazing off into space and opening her mind, trying to catch the thoughts he was perceiving.

There they were, and how could she have missed them? They were talking and laughing, but their laughter had a cruel undertone, and they were discussing how they would beat the idiot and amuse themselves with his sister.

“You’re getting a reputation,” she told Gar.

“I’ve always wanted to be famous,” he answered, “but not this way. It’s time for the better part of valor.”

“You mean run?” Alea looked about her, baffled. “Where? Those hills will make slow going, and they’ll see us a mile away!”

“There are trees on that hillside.” Gar pointed to the left.

“If you want to call them that,” Alea said sourly. “They’re big enough to hide us, if we bend low,” Gar maintained. “It’s better than waiting here to try to knock over a dozen well-armed riders with quarterstaves. Let’s go while we can!”