I do not know what my father intended his raid to be—a sudden, fierce onslaught of warriors falling on terrified townsfolk, or an impressive entry and demands enforced by the threat of dreaded and uncanny powers. Whatever he had imagined doing, when he came there he led his troop to the city and into the streets not at a gallop, shouting and brandishing weapons, but sedately, in order. So they went all but unnoticed among the crowds and flocks and wagons and horse herds of a market day, until they were right in the central square and marketplace, where suddenly people saw them and began to scream, “Uplanders! Witchfolk!” Then some ran to escape or to bar their doors, and others scurried to save their market goods, and those fleeing were trapped in the square by those coming to see what was going on, and there was panic and havoc, stalls overturned, canopies dragging, frightened horses plunging and trampling, cattle bawling, the farmers of Caspromant brandishing their lances and cudgels at fishwives and tinsmiths. Canoc called them out of this panic, threatening not the townspeople but his own men with his power, till he got them gathered around him, some of them doggedly hanging on to goods they had grabbed from the market stalls—a pink shawl, a copper stew pot.
He told me, “I saw that in a blood-fight, we were lost. There were hundreds of those folk—hundreds!”
How could he have known what a town was? He had never seen one.
“If we went into the houses to loot, we’d be separated and they’d pick us off one by one. Only Ternoc and I had a gift strong enough to attack or defend with. And what were we to take? There was all this stuff, things, everywhere—food, goods, clothes, no end to it! How could we take all that? What were we after? I wanted me a wife, but I didn’t see how that was to be, the way things were there. And the one thing we really need in the Uplands is hands to work. I knew if I didn’t put a scare into them, and soon, they’d be all over us. So I raised up the parley flag, hoping they knew what it was. They did. Some men showed themselves at the windows of the big house over the marketplace and waved a cloth out the window.
“Then I called out, ‘I am Canoc Caspro of the True Lineage of Caspromant, and I have the gift and power to undo, which you shall see me use.’ And first I struck one of the market stalls, so it fell all to pieces. Then I turned half round, to be sure they saw what I did and how I did it, and I struck the corner of a big stone building across from the house they were in. I held my arm out steady, so they could see. They saw the wall of the building move and bulge, and stones slip down out of it, making a hole in the wall. That grew bigger, and the sacks of grain inside burst open, and the noise of the stones falling was terrible.
’Enough, enough!’ they shouted out. So I ceased to unmake the granary and turned to them again. They wanted to talk and parley. They asked me what I wanted of them. I said, ‘Women and boys.’
“There went up an awful howl at that. People in all the streets and houses around shouted, ‘No! No! Kill the witches!’ There were so many of them, their voices were like a storm of wind. My horse jumped and screamed. An arrow had just nicked his rump. I looked up into the window above the one where the men were parleying and saw an archer leaning far out the window to draw his bow again. I struck him. His body fell like a sack from the window to the stones below, and burst.
Then I saw a man at the edge of the crowd of people caught in the marketplace stoop and come up with a stone in his hand, and I struck him. I unmade his arm only. It fell to his side limp as a string. He began to scream, and there was wailing and panic where the archer had fallen. ‘I will unmake the next man who moves,’ I called aloud. And nobody moved.”
Canoc kept his men close around while he parleyed. Ternoc guarded his back. The men speaking for the town consented, under his threats, to give him five serf women and five boys. They began to argue for time to collect the tribute, as they called it, but that he forbade: “Send them here, now, and we will choose what we want,” he said, and raised his left hand a little, at which they agreed to his demand.
Then came a time that seemed very long to him, while the crowds in the side streets ebbed and then grew again, pressing closer, and he could do nothing but sit his sweating horse and keep a keen eye out for archers and other threats. At last dismal little groups of boys and women came driven through the streets to the marketplace, two here and three there, weeping and pleading, some even crawling on their hands and knees, goaded forward by whips and kicks. There were five boys in all, none of them more than ten years old, and four women: two little serf girls half dead with fear, and two older women with stained, stinking clothing who came without being driven, maybe thinking life among the witchfolk could not be worse than life as a tanner’s slave. And that was all.
Canoc thought it unwise to insist on a better selection to choose from. The longer he was here so hugely outnumbered, the nearer to the time when somebody in the mob of people shot an arrow or threw a stone that hit its mark, and then the crowd would tear them all to pieces.
All the same, he would not be bilked by these merchants.
“There are four women only,” he said.
The parleyers whined and argued.
His time was short. He looked about the marketplace and the big houses around it. He saw a woman’s face in the window of a narrow house at the corner. She wore a willow-green color that had caught his eye before. She was not hiding, but standing right in the window looking down at him.
“Her,” he said, pointing. He pointed with his right hand, but all the people gasped and cowered. That made him laugh. He moved his right hand slowly across the watching faces in a pretense of unmaking them all.
The door of the corner house opened, and the woman in willow-green came out and stood on the step. She was young, small, and thin. Her long hair lay black on her green gown.
“Will you be my wife?” Canoc said to her.
She stood still. “Yes,” she said, and came walking slowly across the ruined marketplace to him. She wore strapped black slippers. He held his left hand down to her. She stepped in the stirrup, and he swung her up into the saddle before him.
“The mules and their gear are yours!” he called out to the townsmen, mindful of the gift’s gift. From his poverty it was indeed a great gift, though the people of Dunet may well have taken it for a final insolence.
His men had each taken one of the serfs up to ride double with them, and so they set out, riding sedately, in order, the crowds falling away from them in silence, through the street, out from between the house walls, onto the northern road, seeing the mountains before them.
So ended the last raid on the Lowlands from Caspromant. Neither Canoc nor his bride ever went down that road again.
She was named Melle Aulitta. She owned the willow-green dress, the little black slippers she stood in, and a tiny opal on a silver chain around her neck. That was her dowry. He married her four nights after he brought her home to the Stone House. His mother and the housewomen had readied clothing and other things proper for a bride to have, in great haste and with a good will. Brantor Orrec married them in the hall of the Stone House, with all the members of the raiding troop present, and all the people of Caspromant, and whoever could come from the domains of the west to dance at the wedding.