In a few weeks, Gird’s troop of boys was moving around the back horse pasture with assurance. Bit by bit, as he learned from the sergeant, he transferred knowledge to the boys.
“The little groups are called squads,” he said one day. “We have enough to have three of them; it’s like pretend armies. Every squad has a leader, and marches together, and you can do real things with it.” They built a sod fort in the field, and practiced assaults. Teris, in particular, had a gift for it; he remembered everything Gird told him, the first time.
Now, rehearsing his new knowledge with his friends, Gird felt that his life as a soldier was well begun. That first summer as a recruit, he spent all his free time with them; he saw no reason why their old friendship should ever end. He wished he could show them off to the sergeant. If he could train them, he had to be learning himself, didn’t he?
But as time passed, Gird’s friends were working too hard in the fields to have time for boyish play. First one, then another, failed to turn up for drill, and then the others refused to do it. They wanted to lie in the long grass and talk about things Gird didn’t know: whose brother was courting whose sister, which family might have trouble raising the field-fee this year, all that timeless village gossip. When he tried to argue them into drill or wrestling, they simply looked at him, a look the sergeant had taught him to think mulish and stupid. He gave in, since arguing would not serve, and wished he could live in two places at once.
After harvest, he had less time off himself, and rarely came into the village all that winter. The recruits had begun to learn sword-work, and even Gird knew that he could make no excuse for teaching his friends to use edged weapons, even if they had had them to practice with. No one did; the strictest of the laws forbade any but soldiers to have weapons, and even the free smiths feared the punishment for breaking that law. Besides, the sergeant still insisted that he keep trying to learn to read and write. None of his friends could, or cared to. His father admitted that reading was a useful skill, but wasn’t at all sure that it was right for a farmer to know. Gird opened his mouth to say “But I’m not a farmer!” and shut it again. That was the whole point, and they all knew it.
There were other barriers growing, too, between them. He could not tell them what the sergeant said about Alyanya, or what he felt himself. Even the rituals of harvest had seemed a little silly; the twisted wisps of straw, the knotted yarn around the last sheaf, all that was peasant lore, far removed from his future as a soldier. He felt guilty when he listened to the other soldiers’ jests; those were his people, his family and extended kin. Yet he wished that the villagers would somehow impress the soldiers—would somehow be more soldierly, so that he could feel pride in them.
And there was the matter of soldiers’ discipline. For himself, Gird could stand a few buffets when he made a mistake, a few lashes for coming back drunk from the harvest festival trying to sing “Nutting in the Woods.” Being clouted by the others was no worse than being mauled by Rauf and the older boys when he’d been younger. For that matter, many families were almost as rough; his father had taken a belt to him more than once, and his oldest brother had pummeled him regularly before he married and moved away.
What he did not like was having to do the same to others. When Keri, a lad from one of the distant villages, mishandled a sword, and the sergeant had them all join in the punishment, Gird told himself that someone who couldn’t stand a few buffets wouldn’t stay strong in battle, but he didn’t like to think which bruise on that battered face had come from his fist. He got a reputation for being strong enough but unaggressive, a little too gentle. The sergeant shook his head at him after seeing him flinch from Keri’s punishment. “And I thought you’d be the quarrelsome sort, glad enough to clout others. Well, better this way, as long as you don’t mind killing an enemy. But mind, lad, soldiering’s not for the faint heart or weak stomach.” He was sure he would not mind a battle; it was having to hit someone helpless that made him feel sick to his stomach. This was another thing he could not share with boyhood friends; he knew they would not understand.
Past Midwinter Feast, in the slack of late winter, he found another troubling presence in the barracks. Three of the soldiers, all from Finyatha and rotated here from the count’s household, favored Liart. Gird had never heard of Liart before that second winter, when he came back from the jacks one night to find the three crouched before the hearth with something that whimpered between them. When they heard him, one of them whirled.
“Get away!” he’d said. “Or by Liart’s chain, you’ll rue it!” He had gone to the sergeant, unsure, and seen the sergeant’s face tighten.
“Liart, is it? Liart’s chain? I’ll give them Liart’s chain!” And he had stormed out, bellowing. But in the end he had gone to the steward, and come back shaken. “A god of war is a god of war,” he’d said then, in the bleak light of a winter morning. “Our lord approves, if someone chooses Liart for patron.”
Gird tried to ask, and was sworn at for his pains. Then, later, one of the other men, Kadir, explained. “Liart’s followers buy his aid with blood; ’tis said he likes it best if it comes hardly . . . d’you see?” Gird didn’t, but knew he didn’t want to know. “Liart’s chain . . . that’s the barbed chain, like the barbed whip they use on murderers, up in Finyatha. Some lords use it, more than used to. Mostly it was thieves and outlaws, in the old days, so I heard. But the thing is, Gird, don’t you be asking trouble of Liart’s followers; they’ll torment you as glad as anyone, if you bring notice to them. I’d be careful, was I you.”
A few days later he found a short length of barbed chain on his bunk, as they came in for inspection. The sergeant’s eyes met his; he took his punishment without complaint; they both knew he had not put it there. He himself had declared for Tir, as his sergeant had suggested the previous summer, although he had not yet given his oath of iron. That would require a Blademaster, and the sergeant said they would have the chance after they’d given their final oath to the lord when training was over. The sergeant had told him what was lawful for him to know, though, and it was very little like anything the villagers taught.
So when the days lengthened again into spring, there were many things he could not share with old friends. They would have questions he could not answer—that was the best face he could put on it. Likely it would be worse. And he himself, as tall now as any of the guards, would be promoted from recruit come Summereve, when the lord was home from Finyatha.
Later he would remember that spring as one of the happiest times of his life, drenched in honey. He was young and strong and handsome; when he walked along the lanes to visit his family, with the brass badge of his lord’s service shined and winking in the sun, the little children smiled and waved at him, tagging along behind. “Gird,” they called. “Strong Gird . . . carry me, please?” Girls near his age glanced at him sideways; he felt each glance like a caress. Boys too old to tag him like the younger children watched nonetheless, and when he stopped to speak to someone they’d come close. “Is it hard to be a soldier, Gird?” they’d ask. And sometimes he told them tales of the barracks, and watched their eyes widen.
Once, twice, he had leave to go to the gatherings in the sheep-folds around, where the young men and girls met and danced. He was too young yet—he merely watched—but he enjoyed the music, and the respectful, if wary, glances. His old friends still joked with him, cautiously, but none ventured to wrestle or match arms. He didn’t mind that; he didn’t want to hurt them, and he knew now that he could.