The Shaman (32 page)

“No
doubt I could,” the king agreed, “and do not think I have not toyed with the notion.
But I wish to lead, not to rule—to judge, not to force people to obey my whims.
That is not my way, not what I think should be the way of men who know the
customs and history of their people, as all folk should. No, I think we may
leave your tyranny to the Vanyar.”

“So.”
Lucoyo’s eyes gleamed as he leaned back among the cushions. “Yes, I think we
may—to them, and to the nomads, who raised me and cast me out.”

Ohaern
sighed with relief. Lucoyo had only been testing the king.

Hadn’t
he?

If
he had, he might as well have tested the whole people— but the new Vanyar
slaves were doing that, and quite well, it seemed.

In
the next few weeks, as Ohaern walked among the people, he saw young men gather
around the Vanyar whenever they had a few minutes’ rest between tasks. “What is
it like to ride in a chariot?” they would ask. “How do you fight with a sword?”
And the Vanyar were glad to tell them, expanding visibly, basking in the
admiration.

“This
battle seems to have kindled a taste for warfare in the young,” Lucoyo told
Ohaern, frowning.

“Yes,
and I could wish for better ways to satisfy that taste than to ask the Vanyar,”
Ohaern answered. “We must begin a school for swordplay, Lucoyo.”

But
even that did little good; the Vanyar slaves seemed to find ways to be given
chores that brought them to overlook the central circle when Ohaern and Lucoyo
were teaching. After-times, Ohaern would overhear them telling the young men
what Ohaern was teaching them correctly—and the many more things that he was
teaching them incorrectly.

Actually,
there was little enough doubt as to how the Vanyar were being assigned to the
circle at practice times—the king, receiving word from his scouts that the
Vanyar horde had driven on to the east, bypassing Cashalo in favor of easier
prey, had released the priests of Ulahane and their most ardent worshipers.
When he sold the Vanyar slaves, many of them were bought by those selfsame
priests, and the rest were bought by the ardent worshipers.

“They
conspire against you,” Ohaern warned the king.

“Surely
my spies will bring word of it,” the king replied.

Ohaern
was worried that the king seemed so complacent—and worried more when one of
those spies was found in a waterfront gutter one morning with his throat slit.
But the king was more concerned that so anonymous a murder could be done in his
city than he was about the identity of the victim. He recruited more guardsmen
and doubled the watch about the docks—and did not seem to notice that the new
recruits were all from the young men who had so ardently listened to the Vanyar
slaves.

Then
Ohaern chanced to come into the king’s hall and find him surrounded by his
handmaidens—but with the Vanyar captain firing the brazier, for the nights had
become chill. “But why should the builders fill the places where the ebony and
marble have been taken out of the wall?” the Vanyar was saying. “Your people
fared well enough without such a bulwark for all ages past, and surely your
young men have learned enough of fighting to be a wall in their own right.”

“Do
not believe it!” Ohaern cried. “Yes, O King, your young men have been diligent
in practice at swordplay—but they can not yet stand against men who have
studied war from their cradles!”

The
Vanyar captain turned a venomous gaze on Ohaern. The smith returned it with a
look that should have frozen the man and shivered him to pieces, and for a
moment the women drew back, frightened by the unspoken menace in the air.

The
king disrupted it quickly. “I will not forbid a man to speak, Ohaern, even if
he is a slave.”

“Laudable,”
Ohaern grunted, “and I forget that you have the sense to know when not to
listen.”

“Indeed
I do,” the king returned, “but I know also when to hearken, and I have learned
that grains of wisdom may be hidden even in the prattling of a child. Are you
so wedded to your wall, Ohaern?”

“So
long as there are Vanyar roaming the valleys in their chariots, and people in
Cashalo to tell them when the roadways are clear? No, O King, I am not wedded
to the wall—but Cashalo should be wedded to its freedom, and the wall is the
ring that is the sign of that marriage!”

“Do
you accuse me of treachery?” The Vanyar rose, every muscle taut.

“No,”
said Ohaern, “I accuse you of loyalty—to your own tribe!” He turned to the
king. “He profits nothing by giving you good advice, but regains his freedom
and his rank by counseling you falsely!”

The
Vanyar captain took a step closer, his eye glinting, his lips parting in a
snarl. Ohaern’s face froze and he stepped toward the Vanyar, drawing his sword.

“No!”
the king cried, but Ohaern only reversed the sword and held it out to the
Vanyar. The captive snatched it with a cry of delight—and Ohaern drew his long
knife.

“Now
I say
no!”
the king thundered, and both men hesitated. “Give back the
sword!” he commanded, on his feet and moving toward them both. The Vanyar
glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, then reluctantly reversed the
sword and handed it back to Ohaern. The smith snatched it, sheathed both sword
and knife, and turned away, simmering.

The
wall began to come down, and the lumber of which it had been built returned to
the warehouses. Ohaern watched it go with misgiving, but the merchants to whom
the materials belonged seemed relieved and quite satisfied.

“Is
it not ironic,” asked Lucoyo, “that the slaves who tear down the wall are
Vanyar?”

“I
see no irony at all,” said Ohaern, “only a threat.”

The
irony came when he heard one of the Vanyar slaves telling some youths, “Oh, you
people of Cashalo have been noble and generous, to be sure! But you have left
us, your captives, able to rise up and strike against you.”

“Not
that we would, of course,” said another Vanyar slave, and the first nodded. “Now,
we Vanyar would have cut a captive’s hamstrings, so that he might not stand
against us—and gelded him, so that we could be sure that any children born
could only be our own!”

“Besides,”
said the second, “it makes a captive more docile, more ready to obey, less
likely to rebel.”

The
young men listened, eyes wide, nodding, hanging on the warriors’ every word. “Do
you say we should treat you thus?” one asked.

“Oh,
nay!” the Vanyar said quickly, and his partner chuckled. “We are glad indeed
that you are so merciful! But we did expect, at the least, some curses and
kicks, to remind us who was slave and who master.”

“How
would you have treated women you captured?” asked another young man.

“Why,
what are women for, youngling?” the slave returned, and his friend gave a
lascivious chuckle and answered, “They are for any man—who can pay the price!”

“Would
you sell them for bed-slaves, then?” The young men seemed horrified, but held
by morbid fascination.

“Aye,
if the price were high enough,” the slave said, “though since every Vanyar has
two or three such, none would buy, unless the woman were amazingly beautiful.”

“Which
are few, once enslaved,” his friend said judiciously. “It is for that reason
that the beauties are treated more kindly— but we get our money from letting a
man spend an hour with the woman for a fee. Strangers, of course, though even
some of our own nation find the notion appealing enough.”

“A
man who owns a beautiful slave can become rich indeed,” the other said, and
Ohaern turned away, sickened. He knew he should have beaten the Vanyar for
speaking thus, no matter what questions they were asked; he knew he should have
rebuked the youths for asking—but he also knew it would have done little or no
good, no, not even if the king himself had done the rebuking.

Instead
he went to the Street of the Lantern Houses and hauled Lucoyo out of the wallow
of delights that were now his for the asking. The half-elf squalled protest,
but Ohaern dragged him out onto the street, Lucoyo in one hand and his bow and
quiver in the other, scarcely giving the half-elf time to finish pulling on his
trews. “You have reveled long enough, archer! We must be on our way!”

“On
the road again?” Lucoyo bleated in dismay. “Go by yourself, Biri! I like it
here!”

“Will
you like it when the Vanyar come galloping down this street in their chariots,
slaying all they see?”

Lucoyo
froze in the act of belting his tunic. “So. You have seen that, too, have you?”

“If
you have, why have you stayed so long?” Ohaern looked up at the cries of
protest and saw the half-naked women denouncing him—but one began to beckon,
and several others laughed and joined her. “No, I see why. Well, I must be your
will, Lucoyo.”

“My
will
not,
rather,” the half-elf muttered, cinching his belt. “But how if
the Vanyar do not come back?”

“How
if the winter does not come back?” Ohaern grunted. “Though the Vanyar have no
need to—the men they have left as slaves will do it for them! This city may yet
be delivered up to Ulahane, archer, with or without the Vanyar—through no
weapon sharper than foul advice and depraved teaching!”

“No
weapon sharper, indeed.” But Lucoyo cast a guilty glance back at the caroling
women. An oafish grin creased his face for a minute, and he lifted a hand to
wave.

“Then,
too,” Ohaern mused, “there is the question of what fate awaits the man who has
offended Ulahane personally, in a city that Ulahane’s minions have taken.”

Lucoyo’s
hand stilled in midair, then began to wave goodbye. He turned resolutely away. “Pleasant
as they are, no woman should be constrained to such a life—especially since I
have seen what use they are put to when they have lost their beauty. Although I
had begun to realize that I could become rich by—” He slapped his own face. “No,
you have the right of it, hunter. We cannot save this town by staying.” He
looked up at Ohaern with haunted eyes. “Perhaps we cannot save it at all.”

“Perhaps
not,” Ohaern said grimly, “but it shall not be for lack of trying! We must go,
Lucoyo—to find the source of the evil that seeps into this place through its
very stones!”

“Yes,”
Lucoyo said glumly, “we must go.”

The
king was distressed to find them determined to leave and asked what he could do
to induce them to stay—but when Ohaern told him it was nothing less than
cleansing the city of all who worshiped Ulahane, the king became sad, for his
ancient law would not permit such a thing without proof of cause. He decided,
therefore, to give Lucoyo and Ohaern a farewell befitting a hero, even a
king—but Ohaern, realizing that would be as good as painting them green for all
the minions of the scarlet god to see, refused, claiming the simple life to
which he had been reared forbade such vanity, and he bade the king farewell
with heartfelt wishes for good fortune— wishes which he sadly feared would do
no good at all. Instead, he and Lucoyo slipped out of the city in Riri’s
canoe—the fisherman was glad to make them a gift of it—and drifted past the
borders of Cashalo in the last rays of the setting sun.

As
darkness drew in, they beached the canoe on a spit of sand—but before they
could step out to draw the craft up, big hands at the ends of long arms laid
hold of the bows, and a small gnarled figure drew the craft high on the bank. “It
is good to see you safe!” cried the dwerg. “I feared that sinkhole had
swallowed you up!”

Lucoyo
overcame his surprise. “It nearly did,” he said, and climbed out of the boat. “It
is good to see you again, my friend.” He stretched, looking about him. “Suddenly
I feel clean of a soil I had not known I had accumulated, O Smith!”

“I
feel it, too.” Ohaern threw his head back and drew in a deep breath of the cool
air of evening, then exhaled sharply and said, “I shall build the fire.”

“No,
I shall!” Lucoyo said quickly. “There is dross in me that needs to burn away.”

“Neither
of you shall,” the dwerg chuckled, “for I already have. Come! There is only one
hare roasting for my dinner, but I can quickly find two more.”

So
they spent the evening beginning to live again as hunter and nomad should
live—in the open by a campfire, with talk of simple things, but with a being
for whom simplicity was always underlaid by complexity. By bedtime they had
finally learned the dwerg’s name—Grakhinox—and his rank, which was only that of
smith—which was to say, an ordinary dwerg, a very ordinary person, for he came
of a people who were all smiths. And he was young, for his kind—scarcely more
than an apprentice, only a hundred fifty years old.

As
they paddled away into the morning mists, Lucoyo mused, “It would seem that
Ulahane is as much at work among the city folk as he is among the barbarians.”

“Or
as much at work among the barbarians as in the city,” Ohaern rejoined. “Do not
forget that his stronghold is Kuru.”

“A
telling point.” Lucoyo grinned. “What will happen, I wonder, when Ulahane’s
city of Kuru is beset by Ulahane’s barbarian Vanyar?”

“Whatever
occurs,” Ohaern returned, “you may be sure that the Scarlet One will delight in
every second of the carnage.”

“True,
true.” Lucoyo nodded. “After all, no matter who loses that fight, he wins.”

“Is
there no end to these plowed fields?” Lucoyo stared at the endless rows of
green shoots. The companions had been watching them drift by ever since they
had left Cashalo. They would have wondered who farmed them if they had not
passed two villages of mud huts with thatched roofs, or seen the occasional
farmer out in a field, bent over a hoe. But as the day aged toward evening,
they began to see the farmers trooping home, their mattocks over their
shoulders. The men were closer to the shore now, and looked up as they saw the
travelers pass—looked up, and grinned, and waved. Lucoyo waved back, albeit
somewhat hesitantly—he wasn’t sure it was the wise thing to do.