A man groaned. “Oh no, Hazel! You’ve given her fuel for another sermon!”
“Quickly, tell another tale!” Hazel said.
“I know one of a miser who spied on the fairies at their dancing,” Alea offered.
An uneasy silence fell. The clansfolk looked at one another, then away, not quite meeting Alea’s eyes. “We’d just as soon have no tales of the fairies,” Hazel said, “nor of the Wee Folk, either.”
“Speaking of them might draw them to us,” Moira explained to Alea.
“Oh!” Alea knew enough to respect superstition—and having come from a planet where dwarves and giants were real, she wasn’t terribly certain what was superstition and what wasn’t. “Then you won’t want to hear tales of ghosts, either.”
“Oh no, ghosts are perfectly all right,” Hazel said, and the clansfolk leaned forward with relish.
Alea managed to shake off her surprise. “Well, then, I’ll tell you of a wise teacher who made a man of clay and brought him to life by magic.”
Several of the clansfolk shivered with delight, and Hazel said, “Aye! What was the teacher’s name?”
“MoHaRaL—well, that was his title,” Alea amended, remembering the tale as she had read it on Herkimer’s screen. “His people lived surrounded by others who didn’t like them, so they never knew when their enemies might attack…”
The crowd scowled and muttered, and Alea realized that this sounded far too much like their own lives. She hurried on. “So MoHaRaL went down to the river in the gray light before dawn and sculpted a huge man out of the mud of the bank, and recited magical spells that brought him to life—but since he had no soul, MoHaRaL called him by the word that meant ‘incomplete’ in his language—‘golem.’ ”
Then she was off, telling them how the golem chopped wood and carried water for everyone on the holy day when they weren’t supposed to work, and guarded the homestead at night. “Then the enemies attacked, and the golem fought them off.”
The clansfolk were listening, wide-eyed and fascinated now. “But MoHaRaL found blood on the golem’s hands and recited a spell that canceled the first, and the golem fell to the ground, lifeless once more.”
The clansfolk burst into cries of indignation.
“What? Killed the poor thing just for doing its duty?”
“How did the magician expect him to guard the homestead without fighting?”
“You can’t fight off an attack without bloodying your hands!” Alea stared at them, completely taken aback.
Hazel pointed a trembling finger at Moira. “It’s your doing! One day with you and she turns into a peace-preacher herself!”
“It’s only a story.” Alea objected.
“Yes, and what’s the moral of it?” another clanswoman countered. “That it’s wrong to fight back when your clan is attacked!”
“Aye!” said a man indignantly. “What did this magician think the golem was going to do—sing his enemies to sleep?”
“Throw them back over the wall,” Alea told him. “Knock them back with his fists! He didn’t mean for the golem to kill them!”
“Oh, aye,” said another with withering scorn. “How can you fight without killing? People always die in a battle, everyone knows that!”
Desperately, Alea said, “They’re much more likely to die when you fight with rifles!”
“And how long would we live if we put down our rifles and the Mahons kept theirs?” Hazel demanded.
“Much longer than you do by fighting, if you take their rifles away!”
The clansfolk fell silent, frowning at one another, uncertain, and Alea felt a glow of success. Even to make them stop to think about it was an achievement!
Only a small one, though. Hazel turned back to her and asked, “How do you get close enough to take away their guns?” That stopped Alea. She glanced at Moira, but the younger woman could only smile at her with sympathy. She turned back to Hazel and admitted, “I haven’t figured that out yet.”
“Well, let us know when you do.”
“Let me try another story.” Alea said quickly. “It’s about a gloomy old castle called the Tower of London. Duke Richard sent his nephews there to keep them safe, when his brother the king died. Then he had himself crowned, and no one ever saw the two boys again…”
She told them the first of the many tales of the Bloody Tower that she had read on Herkimer’s screens and was very relieved that no one saw it as an indictment of Richard III and Henry Tudor, for fighting over the crown. They could have called it a peace-sermon after all, no matter who won, the little princes lost—but they would have had to stretch.
Instead, the clansfolk seemed to have forgotten reality in place of stories for the moment. Hazel told a tale of a dragon hunter, and Ezra told of the man who saved Death from dying himself, when he’d been beaten sorely by a giant who refused to admit his time had come. The evening passed merrily until Hazel finally stood up and stretched. “While we’re waiting, I think I’ll sleep. Who wants first watch?”
The mood for storytelling was still with them when they woke up, but it shifted to tall tales. Around the campfire over their morning brew, the clansfolk rivaled to see who could invent the most impossible anecdote.
“So Marl the Smith made a rifle with ten barrels that went around and around as Geordie fired…”
“He’d still have to stop to reload some time! Besides, what would he hunt with a gun like that., Burley the Hunter, now, he noticed the branches of the trees were broken twenty feet high, but no lower, so he tracked the monster that had done it. Let me tell you, it had hoof-tracks the size of dinner plates…”
“So the farther along that pass Brandy went, the more boys there were coming out to follow her, until she brought them out of the gully and they found themselves looking at three packs of wolves, a whole fifty of them, and each one of them as big as a pony…”
They kept up the tale-telling even as they broke camp and drowned the fire, so they set off on the road in gusty high spirits that lasted a mile and a half, till they rounded a bend and found a score of clansfolk drawn up three deep across the road, rifles in their hands.
10
The Gregors stopped in their tracks, laughter dying on their lips, rifles rising.
“Good thing you’re under a peddler’s truce,” said the man in the middle of the line. “You Gregors track like bulls blundering through thickets. We heard you half a mile away.”
“We must be really bad if a Campbell can hear us,” Hazel said with an edge to her voice. “But if we hadn’t been escorting a peddler, you may be sure you wouldn’t even have guessed we were coming.”
The leader’s eyes sparked, but before he could dream up an insult, his gaze fell on Moira. He stared; then, affronted, he demanded, “What’re you doing back so soon, Moira?”
“Don’t worry, Jethro, I’m not,” Moira said, amused. “I’ve only joined this peddler for company on the road.”
“And she’s going to the Tossians,” Hazel snapped, “not to you Campbells.”
“Just like a Gregor—trying to tell everyone else what to do.” Alea thought there was something a little weary about the exchange of insults, as though it were a necessary ritual that nobody really enjoyed any more.
“Just like a Campbell, waylaying a peddler who might bypass their clan!”
“Well, as to that, we’d like to ask differently.” The clansman took off his hat as he turned to Alea. “We’ve one took bad sick, miz, and we’ve heard you’re a healer.”
Alea glanced left and right and was amazed that none of the Gregors even thought to ask how the Campbells had heard of her so soon. There was a chink in the armor of the clans, perhaps only one sentry calling out boasts to his enemy’s watchman, bragging about the healer who had chosen to honor his clan with her presence, and that watchman had told the whole clan, and another sentry had gone out to the far boundary and boasted to a third clan—the Campbells, in this instance.