A Wizard In Peace
Christopher Stasheff
ISBN: 0-812-56797-8
CHAPTER 1
Miles fled swiftly through the forest or as swiftly as he could, in the dark. That was still fairly quickly, for he knew the forest well, this close to home. Nonetheless, fear chilled him, and the thought of turning back flitted through his mind—but through it he went, with all his heart helping it on its way, for he fled from Salina.
Well, from the magistrate, really. The thought brought the man’s face instantly before his mind’s eye, heavy fowled and hard-eyed, glowering down from behind his high bench against the paneled wall of the courtroom, with the clerk looking on from his desk in front of the bench and the other petitioners watching from their stools. The magistrate orated, “Salina, daughter of Pleinjeanne, and Miles, son of Lige, I have given you each five years and more to find mates, and you have found none.”
“But we don’t fancy one another, Your Honor,” Miles protested.
Didn’t fancy Salina, indeed! He glanced up at her—quite plain, rawboned and scrawny, with squinting eyes, a long, sharp nose, and a tongue quick to insult and blame linked to a mind that could find every fault unerringly and instantly. She was only five years older than he, but was a shrew already. “Salina, you came of age ten years ago,” the magistrate intoned. “Miles, you came of age five years ago. If I leave you to find your own partners, you never will.”
“Give me time, Your Honor!” Salina glared at Miles in a way that made it clear she was as appalled as he at the thought of marrying, for he was no prize. He was short, a full head shorter than she, and so stocky that he seemed fat. He was round-faced, with too strong a chin and too short a nose, quiet and reticent—too quiet for Salina’s taste. She proclaimed far and wide that she loved a good quarrel. Miles hated them.
“Give me time,” she said again, “and a permit to travel, and I’ll find a man before I’m thirty.”
“By thirty, fifteen years of childbearing will be past! Eight children you could have borne in that time—and you have already wasted ten years, forgone the bearing of five more citizens for the Protector.”
Citizens and taxpayers, Miles thought sourly.
“But you, Miles.” The magistrate frowned down at him, puzzled. “You’ve always been a good boy, never any trouble. You haven’t broken a single rule in your whole life, never even gone poaching!”
Miles winced at the thought of the public punishments the reeve meted out to anyone the foresters caught. No, he had never gone poaching! He shuddered at the memory of the last flogging he had seen—a man from two villages away hanging by his wrists from the pillory while the cat-o’-nine-tails smacked across his back. His whole body had convulsed with every stroke; he had cursed at first, then begun to scream, and finally mewled before they cut him down. Miles had heard that he had lived, but hadn’t walked straight again for six months.
“What has made you so stubborn now?” the magistrate demanded. “You know the Protector decreed long ago that everyone over eighteen must be safely bound into marriage, so that the men won’t make trouble for the reeves and the women won’t raise havoc among the men. Salina shouldn’t waste her life in spinsterhood when she can bear many healthy babies nor should you, when you could be earning a living for a wife and family.”
“But I don’t love him,” Salina snapped, glaring at Miles. “Love!” the magistrate snorted. “What has love to do with it? We speak of marriage and child-rearing, and since you two have not spoken nor been spoken for, you shall marry or go to the frontier farms, so that the Protector shall have some use from you!” He banged his gavel on the bench, and that was the end of it.
Until nightfall.
As he ran, Miles wondered if perhaps he should have chosen the frontier farms after all. He remembered what he had heard of them, those places that the Protector wished to see used, so that people wouldn’t become crowded in their homelands as they increased. Some were in the north, where it was cool in summer but frigid in winter; some were in the western desert, where people broiled by day and froze by night. They were prisoners, those folk, lawbreakers—waste people for the wastelands—turning the desert into a garden or the frozen lands into oatfields for a few months of every year, making the land livable for their children, if they had any, or for settlers whom the Protector would send when the land was fertile. Then the prisoners would move on, always in the wastelands, always where the work was backbreaking and constant, always where life itself was a punishment.
But could it be worse than the punishment for trying to leave the village without a pass?
With the thought came the memory of Lasak in his shackles, the long chain stapled to the side of the courthouse, dressed in rags and striking blow after blow with sledgehammer or pickax, trimming blocks to shape for the magistrate’s walls, smashing broken blocks into cobblestones, fourteen hours a day, gray-faced and haggard, his eyes losing luster with every sunrise. He had stayed at that labor for a year, and when the magistrate released him, he did whatever he was told, looking up in fear at the slightest word from the Watch, cringing at a word from the magistrate, going when he was told, coming when he was bidden, marrying the worst shrew in town as he was ordered, and going almost eagerly out to hoe all day in the fields, glad to be away from her. His spirit hadn’t just been broken—it had been extinguished.
And here was Miles, daring to leave the village without a pass just as Lasak had, courting disaster just as Lasak had—but bound and determined that he would escape, as Lasak had not. He resolutely put the memory out of his mind—he would rather hang slowly than marry Salina. She might feel insulted at that, but she would thank him secretly, and who knew? The next husband the magistrate chose for her might be more to her taste. At least she wouldn’t be sent to the frontier farm for disobeying, not when the crime was his.
So here was Miles, fleeing through the wood, though the punishment would be far worse if he were caught, far worse than for either refusing to marry, or for poaching, or any of the hundred other things the Protector forbade. Still, the difference between giving up a few hours’ sport and a week’s meat on the one hand, and sacrificing a whole lifetime’s chance of happiness on the other, wasn’t worth thinking about.
He slipped between trees, went down almost-hidden gametrails at a trot, for, poacher or not, he knew the ways of the forest well. He, like every other village boy, had hunted every fall during the open season. He didn’t doubt that he could escape if he could be far enough away before the magistrate discovered he was missing and sent the foresters after him.
But hang, emigrate, or grind, Miles was leaving the village, and Salina would thank him for it. He would live a bachelor all his days, stay free to marry for love as the minstrels sang of it—or die trying.
The two men sat in soft chairs that tilted back and molded themselves to their occupants’ bodies. Each had a tall, iced drink on the table between them, and sipped now and then as he watched the pictures changing on the huge wallscreen in front of him. The lounge in which the men sat was lit with subdued splashes of light that illuminated the copies of great paintings hung on the walls, and other pictures the great artists had never painted, although each painting looked as though they had. The subdued light that spilled over from those pools gave a glow to the thick wine-red carpet and the golden oak of the walls.
“All right, Gar, so they all could be better off—but I haven’t seen a single one where I’d say the people were suffering,” the smaller man grumbled. “At least, not most of them.”