A Wizard in War

1

Dicea didn’t hear the knight approaching until it was too late—even though he was laughing and joking with his men-at arms—so she was tardy turning her face to the wall, and the knight espied her. “Hola! Come here, pretty lass!” he cried, but Dicea shrank away, eyes wide. “Fetch her, Barl,” he ordered one of his men, and the soldier came, grinning and reaching out for Dicea, who cried out and tried to push herself back into the wall, forearms up to shield her torso, face down in her fists.

Anger tore through her brother, Coll. He jumped between Dicea and the soldier and cracked a fist into his jaw. The man gave one surprised grunt—after all, serfs never fought back—and slumped, eyes rolling up.

The knight turned scarlet on the instant and shouted, “Kill him!” He, too, knew that serfs couldn’t be allowed to fight back.

Four soldiers came at Coll. Panic seized him; he knew his only chance was to kill them first. He leaped on the foremost soldier and swung high, but the soldier was ready to block now, so Coll kicked his feet out from under him and seized his spear as he fell, twisting it from his grasp. He slashed with it at the soldiers. They leaped back in surprise and caution, knowing what that honed edge could do and how little use leather armor might be against it. Then they reddened and shouted, but Coll had just time enough to stab downward and kill the fallen soldier.

The knight shouted in rage, and his men echoed him, charging. Coll leaped to meet them, parrying the thrust of the soldier on the right, then stabbing him in the belly, just as though his spear were the butt of a quarterstaff. Serfs weren’t supposed to know how to fight with staves, but Coll and a few friends had practiced in secret. Now he turned on the middle soldier, stabbing upward. The man parried, beating Coll’s spear down—and Coll leaped in and cracked a fist into his chin.

The knight bellowed in anger as he saw a third man fall and spurred his horse. The charger surged forward; Coll barely managed to sidestep in time, and the rest of the soldiers came at his back.

“Behind you!” Dicea called, and Con turned just in time to dodge their charge, then slash at one of them with his spear. The knight turned his horse and came charging back, blood in his eye, intent on running Coll down.

“Flee!” his sister cried, tears in her eyes. “Oh, Coll, flee!”

Every cell in his body screamed to stay and fight, but the knight was slashing down with his sword, and sense forced its way through the haze of Colt’s rage. He leaped aside at the last second, then dodged between the peasant huts. The knight swerved to follow him, and ragged serfs stopped watching the spectacle to scramble for cover. But Coll ran a zigzag route between huts, then sprinted madly over the patch of cleared ground between the village and the woods, hearing the hooves of doom pound closer and closer behind him, imagining he could feel the charger’s hot breath on his neck. He made it into the woods ten feet ahead of the horse, though and dodged and twisted among the trees, knowing he was safe now, if not for long.

Behind him, the knight cursed as he reined in, sheering away from underbrush that was too thick for his horse. “Run, fool, run!” he bellowed. “You’ll make fine sport for the count and his knights, better than any deer! We’ll track you down and spit you like the swine you are!”

Coll ran, turning and twisting through the wood, cursing himself for a fool indeed. He had killed two soldiers, and the hunt would be on for him in earnest; the knights for miles around would gather in high spirits to track down the insolent serf who had dared strike a knight’s soldier. He had let his temper, and the anxiety that had driven him to protect his little sister, make him a dead man or, at best, an outlaw—if he managed to outsmart and outrun the knights and their hounds—and all for nothing! The knight would have Dicea after all, and would probably rape her brutally in revenge on her brother, instead of the more gentle forcing that, with men of his rank, passed for seduction—and Coll’s life was forfeit, if anyone managed to catch him.

Coll resolved to make sure they never would.

Dirk Dulaine glanced at the ship’s viewscreen in disgust. “This is how you go about choosing which planet’s people to help next? Sheer random chance?”

“Not ‘sheer.’ ” Magnus d’Armand looked up from the navigation tank across the ship’s bridge, at his friend. “I eliminated all the planets that do have firm standards of civil rights, after all.”

“Oh, fine! So you cut down the size of the pool to only those planets that do need help! And what did you do after that? Take the nearest one! Why didn’t you just throw dice, or put the names of the planets on a dart board?”

“How would you recommend I choose, then?”

“Oh, I don’t know … Maybe you could prioritize, for example?”

“An interesting thought!” Magnus stroked his chin, gazing off into space. “By what criteria should we prioritize? The degree of oppressiveness of the government?”

“Sounds good. How can you determine it?”

“A nice question. Historically, some governments have been more oppressive than others. An unchecked aristocracy, for example, tends to allow more individual exploitation than a monarchy. A king tends to keep the noblemen in check to some degree, at least, and a person wronged by his lord can apply to the Ring’s justice if he feels unjustly treated. The Roman dictatorships certainly had the potential for great abuse, but in actuality, the dictator was held in check by his fellow patricians, especially in the Senate. And the Greek tyrants, of course…”

“All right! All right! You’ve made your point!” Dirk threw up his hands. “We could debate all day and still be wrong! Any form of government could be balanced by local factors.”

“Oh, I’m not saying it wouldn’t take a lot of thought,” Magnus protested. “It would be worth it, though, if it brought us first to the ones who needed us most.”

“Yeah, but while we’re taking a year or two thrashing it out, thousands of people could be dying on the planet we finally decided to help. I see what you’re doing—better to save some now than none eventually, even if they’re not the ones who need it most.”

“Need it most? Yes, maybe we could do it that way!” Magnus clapped his hands, smiling with delight. “An index of human misery! That shouldn’t be terribly hard to compile. Herkimer, show us examples of human misery.”

An hour later, Dirk, pale and trembling, laid down his notepad and stylus. “I surrender. If my planet had had to wait for you to work your way down this list of sheer human degradation, you wouldn’t have made it to us for another five generations.”

“But your idea does have some merit to it.” Magnus looked a bit feverish himself. “There has to be some way to say which of these poor human scraps are more miserable than the others!”

“I can’t see much difference in the treatment this last dozen are getting from their lords,” Dirk contradicted. “They’re all living like animals in huts made of leftovers from the harvest, freezing in winter, soaking or parboiling in summer, and half starving all year round. They’re dying of scurvy and beriberi and half a dozen other vitamin deficiencies; their brains are only half grown due to infant malnutrition. Their lords drive them to work with whips and scourges, rape the few pretty girls they produce, and punish the slightest sign of rebellion with torturous deaths that I can’t call barbaric only because I don’t want to insult the barbarians! Just take one of them at random, Magnus, please! We’ve got to get some of these poor bastards out of their misery, or I’ll never sleep nights again!”

“Yes, I agree.” Sweat stood out on Magnus’s brow. “Still, your index of misery is a brilliant idea. We do seem to have found the dozen worst cases of all.”

“Definitely worst! At least my people had enough to eat and decent clothes to wear, and the lords only took the prettiest girls—and didn’t rape them, just seduced them. Okay, we were humiliated at every turn and treated as though we were semi-intelligent conveniences, but at least we didn’t live in misery like this! I hate to say it, but we didn’t know how good we had it!”

“No,” Magnus contradicted, “you just didn’t know how bad some other people had it, or how much worse off you could be. Well, let’s take the planet with the continual warfare for starters. There, I don’t see any sign of the fighting ever letting up, and it’s grinding the serfs to bits. What do you say we try to work a small revolution on the planet Maltroit?”

“Small revolution? A big one, please! The biggest you can manage!”

“No, that would only result in a change of masters,” Magnus objected, “not to mention another bloodbath while they switched places. A small revolution can produce a big improvement in living conditions right away, and an even bigger improvement with each generation. Herkimer, set course for Maltroit.”

Dirk sat down again, frowning. “How can a small revolution make a big difference?”

Magnus began to tell him. Dirk kept asking questions, so the explanation became more and more involved—but Magnus did manage to wrap it up as they went into orbit around Maltroit, five days later.

The guards formed a hollow square around the king’s herald and conducted him into the great hall, where Earl Insol lolled in a huge chair of carven oak. The message was quite clear: if the sentry said words that offended, the guards would become jailers, or worse. The king’s man put on an urbane smile to hide his indignation. The impudent lord wouldn’t dare defy His Majesty!

Would he?

Still, he squared his shoulders as the two guards stepped aside and pointedly did not bow as he said, “Good afternoon, my lord.”

Insol frowned; the herald should have known better than to speak first. No doubt the fool thought of himself as embodying the majesty of the king who had sent him, therefore being at least temporarily equal to the earl. “What says the king?” he demanded, brusquely and with no preamble. The herald fought the urge to scowl at the man’s rudeness. Didn’t His Lordship know he was mistreating not just the herald, but also he who had sent him? “His Majesty sends me to tell you of one Bagatelle, my lord, a dealer in cloths and fabrics.”

The earl’s eye gleamed; he recognized the name. “A common caitiff? What of him?”

“This Bagatelle appealed to our noble king of this land of Aggrand for justice, claiming his goods had been stolen, and himself beaten, by yourself, my lord Earl. His Majesty summons you to his court, that he may hear from your own lips whether or not you have flouted the King’s Peace, and dealt so roughly with one of his subjects.”

The earl sat very still for a minute. Then he said, “Summons? Did you say that this child of a king dares summon an earl twenty years his senior?”

The herald reddened; he was scarcely into his twenties himself. “His is the king!”

“And an impudent upstart he is,” the earl retorted. Then his voice became velvety smooth. “Might he not invite me? Ask me to wait up on him?”

“He has no need! He is the king, and all of his subjects must obey!” But the herald was beginning to have a very nasty feeling about all this.

“It is time this arrogant stripling learned the limits of his power!” the earl snapped. “Ho, guards! Take this impudent chatterbox to the dungeons and strip that gilded cloth from his back!”

As the guards laid hold of him, the herald went pale. “How dare you defy your sovereign lord!”

“Very easily,” the earl said with a wolfish grin. Then, to the guards, “Do not begin to flog him until I am there.” He came quite quickly, and watched, gloating, as they batted the herald from one to another with their fists, as though he were the ball in a game. He watched while the torturer flogged the youth, watched as his men dressed the poor moaning lad in grubby peasant’s leggins and led him out into the courtyard to tie him, stripped to the waist, on the back of a donkey. Then the earl caught the herald’s face in a viselike grip, squeezing on the points of the jaw. “Tell your royal master that he overreaches himself. Tell him that he may not summon his lords, but may invite them with all due courtesy. Tell him to mind his manners henceforth, or his nobles will fall upon him as they fell upon his grandfather, to whip him back within the boundaries of his own estates!”

Then he let go of the herald and swung a riding whip at the donkey’s flanks. The beast brayed in pain and alarm and leaped away, running, with the poor herald clinging to its mane for dear life. Cavalrymen rode after him, laughing and whipping the donkey if it strayed off the road that led back to the royal demesne.

“The king cannot let this insult pass, my lord,” said the oldest of his knights as he watched the donkey bear its bruised and bleeding load away.

“He cannot indeed,” the earl agreed. “He shall come against us, and we shall whip him home shrewdly.” He shrugged. “He had to be taught sooner or later, Sir Durmain. Best to have it out of the way, so soon after his coronation.” He watched the donkey out of sight, then turned to the knight. “Send reports of this event to every other duke and earl in the land, so that each may gird himself for war.”

Coll fled from the hounds, but his knees had already turned to jelly, and his whole body seemed to be liquefying with fatigue. All night he had been making his way through the woods, trying to hide his trail well enough so that the knights wouldn’t find him, but as the sun neared noon over the forest, their hounds had somehow picked up his scent They weren’t near yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Their belling was growing steadily louder.

In a last attempt to lose them, Coll jumped down into a stream. The water was icy so early in the spring, and he knew he couldn’t walk it for long without his feet turning numb. But he kept going, shivering and cursing, hoping to find something that might save him …

There it was, a boulder jutting up from the water with a low-hanging evergreen branch above it! Coll clambered up the boulder, slipping and falling back twice because his feet were already losing feeling and because he was already exhausted. Finally he stood on the boulder, trembling, and raised his spear in shaking hands—but not shaking so badly that he couldn’t catch the crosspiece of the spear in the fork of the branch. Now, if only the crosspiece would hold, and the branch, and his hands …

He couldn’t. He was too exhausted; it was all he could do to hold the spear in the fork of the branch. To haul himself up so far was beyond him.

Then the hounds’ voices suddenly became much louder, and he could hear the beaters shouting, “On, Beau! On, Merveil!” and a knight crying, “Take half of them across! Trace both sides of the bank till you find where he came out!”

Too close by far! Panic shot strength through his arms; Coll climbed up the shaft hand over hand as quickly as any squirrel, caught the branch, and pulled himself up to he trembling on it, panting. He hauled up the spear one-handed, then clung to the smaller branches, his feet lying on others, feeling his perch sway beneath him, waiting for his breath to slow, for the fear and panic to ebb. The fear didn’t, for the pack was coming closer and closer …

And going by on the bank, not five yards from where he lay hidden among the needles! Coll clung tight and prayed that there would be no breeze to carry his scent to the coursing hounds. The saints must have heard him, for the dogs went right on by, belling, their beaters calling encouragement to them.

Then they were gone.

Still Coll clung to the branches, gasping, feeling sobs in his chest, fighting not to let them out, for he knew that if they began, they wouldn’t stop, and he didn’t dare make that much noise, or the pack might come back.

They did. He clung tight, eying to breathe silently through his mouth, hoping against hope that they would go past again …

They did. He breathed a prayer of thanks to a kind and forgiving God, and went limp.

In the depths of the night, a star detached itself from the firmament and came spinning down toward earth. As it came lower and lower, a watcher on the ground would have seen it swelling into a great golden disk, not a proper star at all.

Of course, there were no watchers, if you discounted the small herd of wild horses sleeping in the spring night. The absence of witnesses was one of the reasons the ship was landing in the middle of a moor. The horses were another.

A slice of the ship’s underside separated and dropped down, forming a ramp for Magnus and Dirk.

“All right,” Dirk said, hoping his nerves weren’t showing. “How do we go about this?”

“You mean you’ve never caught a horse before?”

“Only tame ones.” Dirk held up the rope he was carrying, eyeing it with distrust. “What do you do with a wild one?”

“Convince it that you’re its friend, and that it wants to carry you where you want to go. That’s the easy part.”

“The easy part?” Dirk said with great trepidation. “What’s the hard part?”

“Getting the chance to get acquainted.” Magnus shook out his own rope, forming a lariat. “Let me show you how it’s done.” He marched off across the plain. Against his better judgment, Dirk followed.

When they came in sight of the horses, Magnus slowed down amazingly. Then, quietly and very slowly, he began to move toward the sleeping herd.

The breeze shifted, and the lone, waking horse sentry looked up, nostrils flaring, staring straight at Magnus, every muscle tense.

Magnus stared back.

Dirk could almost see the tension flow out of the horse, saw it calm amazingly, and knew that Magnus, the telepath, the expert in every psi power known to man (and in most of those known to woman, too), was reaching out with his mind to soothe and reassure the horse’s mind. More than soothe—slowly, the horse lowered its head. Then, quite relaxed, it folded its legs, lay down, and went to sleep.

“Now,” Magnus breathed, “we pick the ones we want, and set a lasso around each one’s neck.”

“You mean you do,” Dirk corrected.

The sentries saw the herald coming a mile away—or rather, saw the donkey with someone on its back. But their suspicions woke as the two horsemen who accompanied the beast turned away and rode in the direction from which they had come. The sentries told the captain of the guard, and the captain sent out two riders to see what the donkey carried. When they saw, one stayed trying to revive the herald before bringing him in, while the other rode back with the news.

The young king himself came down to see the herald as he rode through the gate. Black eyebrows drew down in anger as he looked at the man’s bruises, at the dried blood in the welts on his back. The herald managed to raise his head enough to croak, “Majesty … Earl Insol says … you exceed the limits of your power…”

“There are no limits to a king’s power!” His Majesty struck the swollen face with the back of his hand; the herald’s head rocked, and he would have fallen off the donkey if the ropes had been untied. The king turned away in disgust. “Put him to bed and see that he is tended.”

The herald croaked pathetically, and the captain said, “Majesty, do you not wish to know the rest of his message?”

“I know it from his condition,” the king snapped. “Earl Insol will not come to me—so I shall go to him, with my army! Send couriers to each of the knights of my demesne, that they must come to me straightaway with a hundred men-at-arms each!”

“As Your Majesty says.” The captain’s face was expressionless, hiding his foreboding. “Shall I also summon your lords?”

“The lords? Fool, they are more likely to march against me than for me! It was the lords who leashed my grandfather, and it is the lords who must be taught my power! It is for this that my father made more and more knights all the days of his reign. Now it is for me to use them! Earl Insol shall be the first! Summon my knights and their men, and we shall teach him the limits of his power!”

Coll crouched among the rocks, watching the lone monk amble toward the outlaw’s hill on his donkey. Coll stared at him with hungry eyes—and a hungry stomach. Oh, he had eaten better than ever he had as a serf, far better—but he would gladly have traded all his fresh meat for gruel with good companionship to sauce it.

Still, that was not to be, so he was glad to see a prospect of something better—two prospects! It seemed unbelievable, but in the month he had been hiding in the wastelands, he had come to realize that life sometimes did play tricks like this. A week since anyone worth robbing had come along that trail, and the food from the last one had run out two days before, two days in which he had eaten nothing but the little rodents who burrowed around his hill, and the occasional hawk who came to prey upon them. Now, in a sudden embarrassment of riches, there came three at once, two from the east and one from the west! The road curved around his hill, so he was sure neither saw the other, and decided he would have time to rob the monk before the knights came in sight—though he would have to use the back trail down his hill, for the knights were sure to come after him as soon as the friar went crying to them. At least they weren’t armored—but he could tell by their clothing that they were knights indeed, or, at the very least, reeves. Not that he feared them—but there was always bad luck. One alone he would have braced without a thought—he had become adept at unhorsing knights in this last month—but two was far too risky.

So! Rob the monk and be done with it, quickly. Down the hill Coll went, as nimbly as any of his ground squirrels. He knew the route well now, knew on which boulders he dared catch himself and which he dared not. At the bottom, he crouched behind a boulder set on top of another boulder—his hill was more a rock pile than an earth pile—and waited.

The monk came ambling along on his donkey, singing a ballad that had little of the sacred about it. Coll sprang down in front of him, brandishing his spear. The donkey shied, and the monk screamed, fumbling for his purse. “Don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, wild man! You may have my purse, all the copper that’s in it, even a coin or two of silver!”

“What use is money to me?” Coll snapped. “Where should I go to spend it? No, fat man, it’s your saddlebag I’m after! Bread and cheese and wine, and anything else you have stored in there that I can eat!”

“Eat? Oh, I’ve something far better for you to eat here under my robe!” The monk fumbled under his cloth—then tore it open as he drew the sword hidden beneath, revealing a chain-mail coat as the cowl fell back to show an iron helmet. “Taste steel, robber!” he shouted. “Ho, my men! Out upon him!”

Suddenly they were there, leaping out from behind boulders: a dozen armed soldiers in leather breastplate: and steel caps. In a flash, Coll realized what had happened, realized it even as he leaped back among the boulders of his hill and scrambled to get out of sight. The knight had sent his soldiers across the plain the night before, while Coll slept, then come himself at first light, before Coll might have discovered the deception.

But they were stiff from crouching all night, those soldiers, and Coll was warm and nimble. They came charging up among the rocks, shouting and slipping. Coll braced himself against one of the unstable boulders, threw all his weight against it, and the knight cried out in dismay as the huge rock rolled slowly toward him, gaining speed. He had to forget Coll to turn his donkey aside—but the soldiers didn’t. With a whoop, they converged on Coll.

With a sinking heart, Coll knew his end had come—but with a vast relief, too, that his lonely hiding was over, and a savage joy that he could take one last revenge on the knights and their lackeys. He sent up one quick prayer of contrition, begging to be forgiven for the men he was about to kill in a vain attempt to save his own life, then swung his sling twice around his head and loosed. The pebble struck the nearest soldier in the forehead, knocking him down even as the blood began to flow; then Coll dropped the weapon and blocked a slash from the next soldier, blocked it and returned it, slicing the man’s arm open. The soldier howled and fell back, but that left more room for the other eight, and they fell on Coll in a shouting mass. He blocked and slashed with his spear until it was wrenched from his hand, saw the sword coming up to thrust through his bowels even as four hands seized his arms and shoulders from behind …

The yell echoed all about him, the staves knocked the soldiers away, the tough shaggy ponies struck out with hoof and tooth—and suddenly, Coll stood alone, half the soldiers fallen and the other four backing away in fear of the two knights who rose over him on their horses. Incredibly, the smaller was saying, “Hang in there—and pick up your spear again. They won’t try anything against the three of us.”

The bigger man—not big, huge!—was answering the outraged challenge from the knight in the monk’s robe. “Who are you who dare to seize this outlaw from us!”

“Outlaws ourselves, though well-dressed ones.” The tall man dismounted. “I am an outlaw who was knighted once, though, so there’s no shame in fighting me. However, a horse against a donkey is unfair and unworthy, so we’ll fight on foot, shall we?”

The disguised knight took in the size of him, seven feet tall and broad as a wall, and took a few steps back. “You’re much bigger than I am!”

“Yes, but you’re wearing armor, and I’m not.” The huge knight leveled his sword. “En garde!”