Not a comforting philosophy to take with you back into the upper chambers, where there were swords and armor to be polished, and wine and a warmer hearth, and where the truth muttered below you, scarcely heard for the crackling of the fire, like a ghost in the stables or the barracks.
Marksmen, she tells me. gray eyes for the marksman. Then was it green for the lunatic or for the poet?
Instead of the legends of eyes let me talk of monotony, of the boredom in waiting for battle. It is no quick thing, no gap between lightning and thunder, but a long waiting in which breastplate and sword shimmer uselessly, in which you worry the horses into a sleek and healthy gloss, in which you watch the sky and speculate on wonders. No time to be slow-witted, this waiting for battle, but a time to attend to tasks, to trivial duties, until the duties become reflex and you return to your thoughts alone.
But even among the thoughtful and the imaginative, there were great dangers. After all, dear brother, there was an enemy approaching, an enemy magnified by his absence. The dragonarmies grew larger, their atrocities greater, as we waited and imagined. A story passed through the ranks that the slaughter of Plainsmen had been even more horrible than first reported, that the draconians had found a way, in the dark recesses of lore and intricate magic, to breed more of their kind upon the Plainswomen — a hardier strain, maturing quickly and able to withstand extremes of climate
and that on the plains these children grew, feeding first
upon what little provision the country offered, then turning upon themselves in a frenzy like sharks, until only the largest and most hardy of the brood survived. Survived to be armed with the black bow and the terrible curved knife, which they would carry over the miles and the snow to the Tower of the High Clerist.
And in addition to the rumors of war, a nightmare closer to home, for the second night in the tower the wine ceased to flow in the quarters of the knights, and we turned to water and to mare's milk, knowing that those, too, would dry in the long weeks of waiting. We were fortunate, then, that it was cold, for the food did not spoil as readily, but even the youngest eye could pass over the stores in the larders and see there was less today, would be less tomorrow. Soon it would be biscuit, parched corn. Then horses, and some of the older footmen talked ironically of rats, providing they are stupid enough to still be here when the time comes down to them.
So you occupied your time upon other thoughts, in other pursuits. The footmen wagered, exchanging coins over the strange, many-sided dice from the east. None wagered against Sturm's friend the kender, who eagerly sought to join each game, standing on tiptoe to peer over the shoulders of the crouching footmen, once climbing the back of a rather tall archer for a closer look at the proceedings, only to be shaken off like a dog shakes off water. On that occasion I asked Breca if it would hurt to let the little fellow play, and he told me that I had yet to learn the difference between disdain and respect. Told me that compassion toward a kender was the ruin of fortunes, or some such rural proverb I scorned until later that night, when I had lost a substantial amount of money to the little creature, trying to guess under which of three walnut shells he had placed a piece of dried corn.
Indeed, I was no gambler, but I was drawn by the kender, by the sense of childhood and of play, by the sense that he felt distracted from his true business by the preparations for siege. It reminded me of how things stood with me ten years ago, when I was six and put away childish things in the service of Solamnia, and perhaps those memories lost me even more money at dice, for I challenged the kender at gaming often, trying to decide whether I pitied him or envied him.
The other outlandish folk were more distant, in keeping with the customs of their people. The dwarf was impatient for battle, at the ramparts often, wrapped in metal and furs and a sullen quiet, brandishing his wicked-looking axe and staring out over the expanse of snow for dragons, armies, movement. I had little to say to him, and suspected he preferred it that way.
Nor had I much to say to the elf maiden, exotic, distant, and a little frightening in her shining and most unfeminine armor. Golden hair, green eyes — the legend that their women are more beautiful than ours cannot be proved true or false by one example, one woman, but if it could, no doubt the elves would have sent this one for comparison.
Yet unlike many of the girls of our country, posing, giggling, bearing garlands and gloves for the knight of their fancy, for any boy at the borders of knighthood, this one, this Laurana, was not caught up in her own beauty. Indeed, she seemed to have forgotten or be forgetting such things, rapt in a story of lances and of high battle, the like of which I could not know, with all my imagining, with all my waiting. And forgive me, kind lady who copies my words to an absent brother, but now it seems that flowers and scarves, the tedious attention to hair, to the slope of a dress on the shoulders — it seems that such things are distant now, the meaningless steps to a dance I have left early, no longer able to see my partner. More important now is the memory of the elf maiden, kneeling and glittering perhaps less brightly than I remember but as brightly as I saw her at the time, above the lances she had brought for the defense of the tower, offering to instruct us in their use, had we not been so rigid and scornful and dazzled as to refuse her teaching.
For the lances were the great mystery as we waited, what Breca might have called the wild card in the deck, the painted shard of lead that served as the spot on the die. But not at all like a die so loaded, the lances seemed larger and heavier than they were, lying in the courtyard of the fortress
larger and heavier because of the legends around them.
For you remember the Song of Huma, that he took up the dragonlance, he took up the story, and the story, whatever it was, lay somewhere upon each of the weapons, so at times you might imagine that they gleamed with some light beyond polishing, beyond tricks of reflected sun or moonlight.
But I had grown up among legends, and though I had to admire the workmanship of the lances, had handled several of them in the long days of waiting, like the most Measured of our knights I believed this light, this mystery, was the play of wishes and dreams over an exquisite but finally quite ordinary weapon. And believing this I refused the instructions of elf and female in the use of the lances.
Instead of instructions, I listened to the laughter of gamblers and the songs, songs which, if not invented in secret by Breca, were invented in secret by one much like him:
Oh where the north wall is crumbling,
let us put mortar and brick,
let us stack limestone on limestone
laid down with a promise and lick,
And wherever limestone will fail us
and mortar and brick give way,
Let us stack footman on footman
laid down with the promise of pay.
And listened to the politics from on high, to the speculations of Heros and the grumbling of the foot soldiers. For something was clearly afoot, and Heros described it as a bitter dance of moons, Derek's on the wane and Sturm's waxing, power flowing like light away from one man into another.
Heros championed neither of the factions: both were, as he would say, too variable. There was Sturm on the rise, once dishonored, once the companion of dwarves and kender and elves and the vagabond mage with the hourglass eyes whom nobody had trusted or quite mistrusted, and could the road back to honor lie in the company of such a patchwork crew? Heros did not have the answer, and without certain answers it was his nature to disapprove.