“What happens to the child when you go home to your villages?”
Both of them laughed, but the laughter concealed pain. “I was born in town,” said Calos. “The lady’s service is my life, friend. As for Jochim here, he’s got no village to go back to. Flooded out, it was, when the river went running backward last autumn. His whole family died in them floods and most of the other folk in the place likewise. The rest had to beg in the lanes and I suppose most of them died over the winter and early spring. He’s lucky to get a meal every day and a bed to sleep in. He’s lucky we took him in, seeing him a likely soldier. So will you be—lucky if we take you in. Or haven’t you heard? Times are hard. If these frosts don’t lift, if the sun don’t come, if the crops don’t grow, they’ll get worse. Much worse.”
“I pray you,” whispered young Jochim, wiping a tear from his eye. “Don’t speak such ill words. The Enemy hears us.”
“Are you coming?” asked Calos. “Can we adopt the little lad?”
He wasn’t afraid to meet Alain’s gaze, dead on, searching as much as he was searched. An honest man, of his kind, not compassionate but not cruel either; he meant what he said. He did his job, and was loyal to those he had pledged his loyalty to. Maybe he was right about the child. Maybe the most a beggar’s crippled and abandoned orphan son could hope for in these days was to be treated as well as a well-kept dog.
2
CAPTAIN Lukas was a hard-living man who found the idea of a child mascot who could only say the word “dog” just as amusing as did his soldiers. That he hated the Salian interlopers need not be spoken out loud. The locals in Autun had always hated the Salians. It was in their blood. That the beloved Emperor Taillefer had been himself a Salian, had been emperor of Salia and Varre and much more land besides, and had built his famous chapel and palace in Autun and ruled from here as much as he ruled from any one place, was beside the point. That he had chosen to be buried here just went to show that Taillefer wasn’t a Salian, not really. He’d been born on an estate in what was now Varingia, so the story went, so he was really of Varre and that meant that Varre had once conquered Salia, not the other way around.
“I like it,” said the captain, laughing with his sergeants as Calos and Jochim looked on. He slapped his thigh. “Yes! Best keep him well fed, though, and get the dogs to guard him, so we can say he’s just speaking to them. All innocent!”
Alain didn’t like it, but he understood he had no viable alternative. The world could not be changed in one day or one year and it was possible it could not be changed at all. It was just possible that this trivial and even selfish act of kindness toward a crippled, illegitimate orphan outweighed a hundred more apparently momentous acts involving the great and powerful of the land. Dog, as they were all calling the boy now, was sitting in a corner slurping down porridge and had shown no fear in the barracks with men coming and going and talking in loud voices, jostling, coughing, laughing, and singing out crude jokes.
“Someone has got to wash him,” added the captain. “Calos, you take care of it, as you brought him in.”
“Jochim, you take care of it,” said Calos. “What of this man, who says he was a Lion?” He gestured toward Alain, who stood quietly to one side.
“Let me see those dogs you say come with him,” said Captain Lukas, and he strolled with exaggerated casualness over to the door and squinted along the porch. Sorrow and Rage regarded him with their dark eyes. When they saw Alain, they thumped their tails on the plank sidewalk but did not otherwise move.
The captain looked at those dogs for a long time. Then he looked at Alain. The captain recognized him. Alain saw it in the smile trapped on his lips, in the way he scratched at his forehead to give himself something to do while he considered, in the way he tapped a foot three times on the porch as he reached a conclusion.
“Best we go see the lady,” he said to the air. He turned back to beckon his sergeants closer. “I’ll need a dozen men. Sergeant Andros, you are in charge here while I’m gone.”
“There’s to be a sweep of the southwest quarter this afternoon, Captain.”
“Proceed as usual.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“If you will.” The captain indicated to Alain that they would walk together. “Surely you have come here in order to see Lady Sabella.” Without allowing Alain a chance to answer, he began issuing orders to the dozen men hurrying out to accompany them.
They stood in the dusty forecourt of what had once been a merchant’s warehouse complex but was now both barracks and stable. There were two long warehouses linked at their northern ends by a spacious hall. An open kitchen and small storage sheds fenced in the southern end of the compound. The men lived in one half of the hall, their horses in the other. There were three troops quartered here, one in each structure, about three hundred men in all if Alain’s estimate of the size of Captain Lukas’ troop was correct. Men lounged by the open doors of their living space keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the other soldiers, friends and rivals alike. Dogs slunk along at the base of each porch, looking for scraps of food or a friendly pat. They kept clear of Sorrow and Rage, but a rare bold bitch ventured up and sniffed them over. A cart laden with manure trundled past, pushed by a pair of soldiers headed out to the fields. The open dirt yard stank of sweat and shit and urine and dust and that peculiar intangible scent of men sizing each other up for weakness. A pair of men were joking in loud voices.
“Eh, those Varre boars! Look, there goes the ass-licking captain now!”
Alain glanced at the captain, but he took no mind of the words. In fact, Captain Lukas seemed not to have understood them at all. As if they were speaking in a language he could not understand, but one that Alain could. The swirl of movement, of men going about their business and dogs hanging back to allow the hounds to pass without challenging them and a horse backing nervously away from the entrance into the stables, so disoriented Alain that he felt the world spinning around him. He staggered and reached out to catch himself
they skate into Rikin Fjord across a skin of still water so clear that he dreams he can see fathoms into the deeps, down to the ancient seabed carved aeons ago out of glittering rock. But that is only an illusion. What he sees are the backs of a swarm of fish schooling around his hull.
One surfaces
No fish, these, but an entire tribe of merfolk. He leans on the rail, studying them. On deck, soldiers exclaim. Always, as they crossed the northern sea, they sailed with an escort of merfolk off their bow and behind the stern. These here, he thinks, are more like a ravening pack of wolves descending on a slaughter ground.
“Beware!” calls Deacon Ursuline, among his counselors.
Papa Otto calls from the stern. “A swarm has gathered here. I don’t like the look of these! I think they mean to do us harm!”
As if the words are sorcery, the boat heels starboard. His heels skid backward and he grabs the rail to stop himself from falling onto the deck, but just as he gets his feet up and under him, the ship heels again, seesawing to port side so abruptly that he cannot stop himself. He pitches forward, loses his hold on the railing, and plunges into the cold blue water of the fjord.
didn’t like it, but he understood he had no viable alternative. The world could not be changed in one day or one year and it was possible it could not be changed at all. It was just possible that this trivial and even selfish act of kindness toward a crippled, illegitimate orphan outweighed a hundred more apparently momentous acts involving the great and powerful of the land. Dog, as they were all calling the boy now, was sitting in a corner slurping down porridge and had shown no fear in the barracks with men coming and going and talking in loud voices, jostling, coughing, laughing, and singing out crude jokes.
“Someone has got to wash him,” added the captain. “Calos, you take care of it, as you brought him in.”
“Jochim, you take care of it,” said Calos. “What of this man, who says he was a Lion?” He gestured toward Alain, who stood quietly to one side.