The King's Peace (10 page)

through those first months I had come through all unknowing. Most women lose many in the early days before they ever carry one to term. Men know little of such things. It is always a woman priest who will sing the charm to open a woman's womb at her wedding. It should not have been possible for me to have this life inside me, this little heart beating inside the rhythm of mine. I had done nothing to seek this conception.

For a moment I longed to bear it, to feel its mouth suck milk from my breast and hear it call me mother. But only for a moment. Where could I keep it? I could not ride as an armiger unless someone else looked after it for me. I had no husband, and such a thing was unheard of. I had just pushed away all chance of marriage with young Galba, even had such a thing been possible. I had no desire for marriage, the idea brought my nausea back. I swallowed hard. Beyond sentimental dreams I had no real desire for the child. A

day before I would have let it go without remorse. Even now it would do neither me nor it much harm to part. It would be better done sooner than later. I stood up, leaving my cooling cup, and made for the stinking barracks privy. "I am sorry my dear," I addressed it in my mind as I walked "I will have to let you go. There is more to giving life than bearing a babe, and I have nowhere in the cold world to bring you into to grow up whole.

Go back, try again, find another mother, good luck."

I wiped around the seat with leaves, and sat down over the hole. I reached out my will to loosen the hold in my womb, and found I was touching nothing. The gods would not help me. I tried again, blending my will with the place where the gods were, this time quietly using the words of a hymn to reach out. There was no response. It was as if I reached out to take up Apple's reins and found them missing. If I sought to look at the growing child I could, if I sought to unbind the thread that held it to me, I could not.

Everything I had been taught told me that if the gods refused to act, then they had good reason, or were prevented. It was their part to preserve the balance of the world, and wrong for anyone to act upon it through their own will alone. I thought back to the rape, Ulf s dedication of me to the Father of the Slain. Did that one-eyed gallows god want me to bear this child? Was the dedication strong enough for that? I tried again, calling even on the Lady of the Dead to take back the child to her realm whence it had so lately come, but nothing happened.

I stood up and left the privy, head high. That an unmarried woman should be pregnant was unlikely enough. There were bastards in the world, but they were those married women bore to men not their husbands. Such a thing was a disgrace. I would be disgraced. My mother would never forgive me. Tears came into my eyes as I realized I would have to leave the ala. I would have to go home with no prospect of leaving, no hope of glory, only an obligation to a baby. I walked on blindly out of the barracks along the street, past the tannery towards the stables. I wanted to be with Apple.

I almost knocked Amala over. She was coming out of one of the bakehouses. When I had finished apologizing she frowned at me.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing," I said, choking on words. She led me to one side, into the overgrown courtyard of a fallen-down house. She sat down on a wall and patted the stone to the side of her.

I sat. Slowly she coaxed the story out of me. Remembering Marchel's comments about gods, I left out mention of the dedication.

"Well," she said consideringly when I had finished, "it should not be possible, but certainly it has happened. But I do not think it is a disaster. The king must certainly know. Unless he disapproves I do not see that it is too terribly hard to solve. He will be leaving this ala soon to go with the rest of his household to Caer Thanbard. You can go then to Thansethan. Everyone here will think you are with the ala of Caer Thanbard. At Thansethan you can bear your child. The monks of the White God Ever Merciful teach
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reverence for all life. They take in orphans and unwanted children. You can leave it there to be brought up with the others. That's an upbringing as good as the king himself had.

You can then rejoin Urdo wherever he is, and he will find a place for you in one of the new alae he is forming, where nobody will wonder where you have been for the lost months.

You can take your groom with you, the little girl, and she will be familiar company for you.

I don't think there is any need to tell anyone else at all." Amala made a little gesture with her fingers that she used to mean that another complicated logistics problem was sorted, and I burst into floods of noisy tears.

—7—

I wept, and He said to me "Why are you weeping? Soon you will all be free."

I replied "Lord, because you are going out to die beneath their stones."

He raised me up and kissed me, and said, "Kerigano, I am dying for all of us, that all our people will live. I will open up the way and be a door, that through me everyone may come to life everlasting."

Then Maram said "Lord, are you the Promised One?"

He was still a long moment, then He smiled at us all and set His hand on the door to go out.

Then He turned, and said, "Is it not written that the Promised One is beyond death?

My children, forgive these my blood. Remember me."

(That is why afterward we wear stones in His memory, and have forgiven the stones, even as He asked us.)

Then He went out and there in the sunlight the crowd was calling for His blood, and in their hands were stones, and behind them the soldiers, waiting.

—

The Gospel of Kerigano

The stone they put over Goldpate was so big it must have been dragged down the hill by horses.

It would have been much too heavy for anyone to lift. If it was a pebble of the White God's mercy it was a mighty heavy one. It was the wrong color anyway; it was not marble but a great uneven chunk of dark granite. This was no part of their faith. Someone with rather different opinions had wanted to make sure she wasn't coming out again.

There was no writing on it in any civilized tongue but angular Jarnish runes were carved on the rough top. Traces of dark red pigment could still be seen deep in the runes despite weathering.

The Jarnish prisoners slid their eyes aside when they passed it, and made their odd version of the evil-eye sign. It was the most barbarous thing I had yet seen.

The stone lies about a mile from the east end of the monastery of Thansethan, on the monastery's boundary. It is there still, an odd memorial to stand so near, but nobody has ever dared suggest removing it. I walked out to it often in the months I stayed there.

From it I could see far out to the east over the lands the Jarns had taken for their own. To the south rolling hills swelled and hid the view, but sometimes I could see a fog lying over the valley of the Tamer where distant Caer Tanaga lay. I would gaze out in that direction, then turn back reluctantly to the square golden-stone buildings that made up the monastery of Thansethan. I could imagine Urdo's first splendid charge with a following of two kings and their households and all the monks who knew how to sit astride a horse. It was such a peaceful place, it was hard to imagine it full of battle din.

Although I despised Goldpate as a barbarian and a bloodcursed kinslayer, there were days when I could quite understand her desire to destroy the monastery and all who dwelt in it.

Thansethan was as big as a town. Within it, counting monks alone and not guests and children and prisoners, there were near two hundred people. These were severally wise and foolish, young and old, male and female, Tanagan and Jarnish, but they were all alike in their complete surety that they knew the One and Only Truth. They truly believed everyone else
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was misled, or mistaken, or deliberately deceiving. I found the smugness hard to bear, even among those monks I liked.

Once the king's party had left Garah and I were the only people sleeping in the guesthouse. We could hear the bells and bustle but were alone. The guesthouse stood within the outer walls along with the school and the infirmary and the prisoners' quarters.

The stables were within the inner walls. Unlike visitors, horses had been part of their original plans of the founder Sethan. Most of the herds roamed out in the meadows and only rarely came within. The easiest way in and out of the monastery was through the stable gate. It was a mystery to me how anyone could design a large enclosure so that there was only one way in and out, and that at a great distance from anywhere anyone would be and on the opposite side of the place from anywhere anyone would want to go.

The stable gate was a later addition, added apparently by some monk who found the clatter of horses on cobbles intolerable. They were good stables, dry and clean, with water butts standing near.

The best thing about the inside of the monastery was the water clock. I had read of such things but never seen one. It was an ingeniously designed thing, and carefully built.

It measured the divisions of the day accurately so that the monks might give worship nine times a day at the prescribed hour. It stood in the center of the inner courtyard.

When the time was near one of the younger monks would come out and wait, then when the water ran through they would ring a bell and everyone would go through into the great sacristy that took up the whole east side of the monastery. The first time I saw this I was amazed, for monks came rushing silently from every corner, from the cloister walk, down the stairs from the library, out from the kitchens and the storerooms, in from the school, the hospital, and the gardens. Only those who were actually preparing food and those whose duties had them watching the children or the prisoners did not move. It was strange to see so many brown robes swishing across towards the sacristy.

The word monk usually means a solitary worshiper, someone who dedicates themselves whole to a the worship of a god. There was a woman who lived in the hills near Derwen when I was a child who worshiped the Moon Maid. The farmers sent her food when they had spare, and my father sent her a cut whenever he took a roebuck, for such beasts are sacred to that goddess.

Mostly she lived on radishes, which she grew, and trout, which she caught. My father would send me up with the meat, for she had taken a vow to speak to neither man nor married woman. She taught me some very good hymns to the Virgin Huntress, one of which I use to this day when I want to draw out a splinter.

She never said anything to try and draw me to live with her, or live like her, and never said anything to me against the worship of other gods.

These monks were different. They came together to live in community, though each had a private cell where they slept and for their solitary worship. They did quite honestly devote themselves to worshiping their god, but the idea of converting everyone they met to similar worship was never far from their minds. Many of them seemed genuinely unhappy to know that anyone present did not follow their faith. Those who were themselves converts were quite sure in their own minds that once anyone had but heard about the faith in the way they themselves had learned of it they would immediately be converted. I found this really tedious. The faith had little appeal for me. Groveling before a god who desires everyone to praise and magnify him is no respectable thing. One must be polite to all the gods—after all, they are gods. But equally, one is a human being. There is beauty in the worship of the White God, but it has never seemed to me to be a polite or appropriate matter.

The chief among the monks of Thansethan was a man they called Father Gerthmol. He was an Isarnagan, though he had come early to Tir Tanagin. He was thin and stooping, and had a habit
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of looking very deeply into the eyes of whoever he was talking to as if he thought to see into their soul. Many of the children and younger monks quaked in his presence. I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing the first time he tried it on me. I think he was not much used to looking up at people's faces rather than down. He sent a young monk to fetch me to his office the second day I was there. She would hardly look at me but kept sneaking glances under her hood as she led me up the stairs and into his little office. I saw that she was a Jarn and probably little more than fifteen.

Father Gerthmol was polite, except for his searching glances.

"We put everyone to work here, everyone," he explained. "What we need to know is what you're good at. 'Turn any willing hand to the task at hand, and find the task most suited to the willing hand,' " he quoted. "What can you do to help while you are here, daughter of Gwien?" He smiled with more heartiness than the situation merited. His use of that form of my name seemed a little forced. The monks took new names when they were received into the church, abandoning their old one with their old lives. Most followers of the White God kept their new names in the same way they had their old, but the monks had theirs in the open for everyone to use.

"I have some small skills at most things, and what I do not know I will be pleased to learn."

This pleased him no end, for the White God sets great store by learning and knowledge for its own sake. He questioned me about my domestic and agricultural skills, and as I was about to go, he said, "If you truly like to learn, we will teach you to read." I smiled.

"I have this skill already; my mother taught me." He tested me with some prayers that were lying about his desk. When he found that I could read and write as well as he could he offered me free run of the library. He begged me to spend some time talking to the monk in charge of copying manuscripts to see what was most urgent and to lend a hand. He said this with so much more sincerity than he had talked about the value to the community of the skill at bottling apples that again I was hard-pressed not to giggle. If another of the ala had been there and winked at me I could hardly have kept a straight face.