The Storm's Own Son (Book 1) (11 page)

The
stone-paved road was perfectly flat and straight here on the plain. He passed slow moving carts full of produce, and was passed by riders, coaches and an occasional chariot. A troop of cavalry rode out from Piros on patrol, sunlight gleaming on their crested helmets and the points of their spears. This far from any border, Talaos thought it more likely they'd end up helping some farmer pull a wagon out of a ditch than find trouble to fight.

The town wasn't far now, and he could see
that while the road and the buildings appeared perfectly maintained, the walls were not. They looked like they hadn't had major repairs in decades. In places, ivy climbed the stones.

He reached the decorative stone plaza before the gates, with its carts and ven
dors selling wares, passed, and entered the town. Inside were clean streets with well-laid paving stones, bright plastered and whitewashed walls, and tile roofs gleaming in the sun.

Ahead was a small civic complex with a colonnaded council hall and a domed library a fraction of the size of the great library in Carai. However, this one had something very interesting, a tall tower attached to the main building by a little gallery.

Talaos ascended the steps and met a stout old woman serving as door warden. He produced his silver token as a Patronus of the library in Carai.

"Good morning," he said, "I was wondering if reading was allowed in that tower?"

She smiled and replied, "Well, it is an observatory, and not open to the public or intended as a reading area. But as a Patronus you have the right. What brings you to Piros?"

"Thank you
, and I'm just traveling through," he said, and he passed he dropped a few silver coins in the donation box next to her.  She smiled again and nodded.

Then with another thought, he stopped and asked her a question
. "Where would the history books be? I'm looking for something on the Living Prophet."

"The Living Prophet?
" she replied, a bit surprised. "Well now... I don't think we have a history specifically about him, but there are a couple of general histories on the Eastlands, in the north wing on the way to the observatory."

He thanked her and went on.
Inside, he found a main level and a small upper gallery around the dome that held books of special age or significance. He turned left to the north wing, and after a bit of searching, found the histories he wanted. He presented his token to the curator, a thin old man, and was let through the locked door to the observatory.

The interior of the tower was filled with a broad
, winding staircase that reached the level before the top. The room there held a variety of astronomical equipment in storage, clean and tidy. There was a ramp up to the open observation deck at the top. The room had several windows, all shuttered. Talaos opened one, found a chair, and set to reading.

One of the books had been written about two centuries
earlier, and was more travelogue than history, with descriptions of the cities, nations, and rulers of the time. Talaos was struck by the variety of peoples in the Eastlands, at least as diverse as in the Westlands, and by the lack of references to the Prophet until quite far in.

When he did finally come upon such, it became apparent that in those days, the Prophet's dominion
was confined to the southeastern regions of the Eastlands. The writer considered the Prophet to be a faraway, quaint and eccentric figure.

The other book was a copy of a much older text dating to Imperial times. It in turn was a history of events for
several centuries prior. There was no mention of the Living Prophet at all.

After a while, he grew restless and decided to see the view from the top of the tower.

Below, around him, were the red and brown tile roofs of Piros. Beyond that, the sunny plains with their farms and ranches. Gleaming to the east was the road he would take. To the north, he could see the road that headed toward the wine country, and old Dirion.

He remembered a bit of history. Forty years earlier, an invading army from Dirion had come down that road. Dirion was said to have fielded formidable heavy cavalry backed by vast hordes of peasant conscripts from its subject peoples. Dirion had drawn every bit of its strength to try to conquer the Republic in one blow, and that army was one of many.

With those armies had come devastation.
From what Talaos had read, old Dirion was ruled by the Imperial descendents called the old stock, and among them was an apparently hereditary aristocracy. The rest, the conquered peoples, had little enough reason for loyalty, but perhaps they were appeased when their masters unleashed them in an orgy of plunder, rape, and burning in the Republic.

There on the plain,
a force of outnumbered but disciplined infantry and swift raiding cavalry of the Republic had broken the invaders and saved the beautiful, gentle town behind them. Men had stood and fought and died for something worthy. Talaos pondered what he'd fought for, and how poorly it compared.

Ahead, far past
Piros and across the mountains, soldiers in Hunyos were fighting for causes they might or might not see as worthy. There as well, the Living Prophet was at work.  By word and deed, the Prophet had declared himself an enemy. Talaos had a new, grim thought. The Prophet had inadvertently given him a worthy cause of his own... given him a war.

~

The road was a different kind of home, but not a bad one, Talaos thought.

He'd had s
oft beds at a couple of roadside inns since Piros and a rougher one berthing in a spare room at a farm village. They'd balanced out against nights out under the open sky in whatever sort of weather.  He wasn't sure which he liked better.

A
fter a bright hot day, he wanted a bath and a shady room.  The last town before the mountains was called Amari. From what he'd heard, it had a good inn. He crested the last of a chain of low hills and there it was, with white plaster walls and red tiled roofs looking warm and inviting in the fading sun.

There was one more thing, better still
. The mountains loomed beyond that village, tall in the distance. Grassy foothills rose to forested ridges and valleys and great stony cliffs and cloud-shadowed peaks above. They were by all accounts uninhabited, save by wild beasts, and almost impossible to cross except at a few winding passes. Following the line of the road in the fading light, Talaos thought he could just make out the entrance of the pass, and on a low hill, the distant lights of the fortress.

As he drew closer, and stars began to twinkle in the east, he caught the whiff of savory smoke from a large building near the middle of
town. That was promising. He picked up his pace, passing fields and outlying farm houses.  Cheerful golden light shone forth from windows, and he heard voices trading domestic talk inside.  He mused on how distant such a life was from the one he left, and how much more distant from the one on which he'd embarked.

He reached the town itself
. There were passersby on the streets, on whatever errands of their own. After a couple of blocks, the inn rose before him, three stories with a bathhouse attached in the back, stables and storehouses beyond. As he was not keen on staying in the fortress, it would be the last civilization he'd see for several days. He meant to enjoy it.

 
The double doors of the inn were open to let in the cooling evening air, and they let out a rollicking noise of conversation and song.  The aroma of roasted, seasoned meat and fresh baked bread wafted to him, and he saw barrels of wine against a far wall.

He walked in.

The room was warm, well lit, clean and pleasant. Travelers of varying sorts stood in little groups. Barmaids in the knee-length, modest and practical dresses of the countryside scurried about. A squad of soldiers, dusty from the road, sat eating at a long table. Most of the crowd, though, looked to be locals. Talaos guessed that this place might also be the main town tavern. If the look and scent of the food was anything to go by, he could understand why.

With that,
he felt hungry at last, and he found a small table to himself. He sprawled comfortably, his pack at his side, and smiled. A sturdy woman of later middle years walked up, with a hint of authority in her manner and an apron full of pockets around her dress.  Talaos decided she must be the proprietress. She seemed to size him up in a quick, professional sort of way.  To his surprise, instead of a casual greeting, or the small courteous nod that was more common in the countryside, she gave him a half-bow.

"How can I help you, young sir?"

He smiled and gave a relaxed reply.

"A glass of wine, and some of that delicious food, thank you
..."

She beamed
with pride at that, as he went on.

"
...A hot bath drawn in an hour, my clothes washed, and a quiet, out of the way room."

"
I have a big room on the third floor, sir, under the eaves at the end, by the back stairs."

He knew she was steering him to something expensive, but wasn't of a mind to care.
"How much for all?"

She named the price, which was
indeed on the high side.  He basked in the air of the place, decided it was well worth it, and handed her the coins.

As she walked off, shouting instructions to barmaids along the way, he took a better look around the room.
He noticed a fair number of the younger women were taking better looks at him as well. That wasn't new, though the looks he occasionally got from others were. It reminded him of the kind of expressions that people sometimes gave Palaeon when they first met him, or the way people looked when they were before magistrates or patricians.

That was interesting.

His wine arrived, and as he sipped it, he noticed a young woman he'd missed, tucked back in a corner behind him. Woman, or girl? She was young enough he wasn't sure which would be the right term, but no matter, he thought, as he had no designs on her. What was striking was that she was sitting with no less than five candles of different sizes propped precariously behind her on a small shelf, and she was reading a large leather-bound book. 

Talaos
made a bemused smile. Literacy was fairly common in the Republic, but outside of libraries, reading was usually done in private.

This woman
or girl, on the other hand, was not only reading a large, lengthy book in a crowded, noisy public place, she seemed oblivious to all of it around her.

He took a closer look at her.
She had two slightly-nibbled plates of food, various papers and a neglected cup of what might be tea at her table. She was wearing a richly brocaded, but old and worn, green dress in the city style. One of the silver shoulder clasps seemed to have broken or gone loose. Absently wrapped over her shoulders and around her arm was a homespun shawl of the kind worn by farm women in small villages.  Her wild mass of wavy red-brown hair was only partially kept in check by the disheveled remnants of braids.  She had a fair oval face with a graceful chin, a small but full-lipped mouth, gentle rounded eyebrows, and big luminous brown eyes that looked so lost to the world as to be almost in a waking dream.

H
e thought it ironic that despite the scene of eccentricity she had built around herself, she was easily the most beautiful woman there.

At that
exact moment, she looked up with a start. She peered at him timidly, her cheeks flushed, and then she buried herself back in her book.

Talaos
laughed a quiet, lighthearted laugh and turned his attention to his newly arrived meal. The food was just as delicious as expected, and he paid the extra coin to get more, along with another wine. Then, as he sat, basking in contentment and waiting for the time when his bath would be ready, a new scene presented itself.

Three young women
, or again perhaps girls, walked in, wearing country dresses with more than usual amounts of embroidery. One seemed to have a permanent disapproving frown. The second was nodding in vigorous earnest agreement with the third. The third seemed to be their leader, and was certainly the prettiest, but her haughty expression merely amused Talaos.

The three
young women, for their part, clearly noticed him while doing their best to pretend otherwise.  They took up residence at a table to his side, relatively close to both his own and that of the strange young woman with the book. They whispered to each other for a bit. Then, to his mild displeasure, they started talking loudly and in artificially high coquettish voices. Talaos watched them from the corner of his eye.

The leader turned to
the girl with the book.

"Miriana, this isn't a library."

Miriana peered up from her book in surprise, then quickly looked back down.

"She's s
o odd..." said the nodding girl.

"Addled, is the word I'd use,"
interjected the leader.

"...and all the stupid things she says she sees in her head!" continued the nodding girl.

The frowning girl shook her head, and if possible, frowned more deeply. "All for attention, if you ask me. A shame. A magistrate's daughter, too..."