Despite a long day’s traveling from Verdillon, Gerick was not inclined to go upstairs once we’d finished eating. “We’ve not been anywhere in all these years,” he said, leaning across the scrubbed pine table after the barmaid took away our plates. “Don’t you want to hear some news of the world?”
He was right. Gerick and I rarely ventured beyond Verdillon’s walls and never to a town of any size. Tennice often rode into Yurevan, always returning with much to say of the newest books at his favorite bookseller’s or who was teaching philosophy at the University, but little of politics or gossip. Nothing like the news one could get in the common room of a crossroads inn.
I ordered us each a tankard of the local ale. As the daylight faded outside the smoke-grimed windows of the Fire Goat, a potboy threw a fresh log on the smoky fire, poking and fussing until it was crackling. The dancing flames revealed all sorts of folk: a ruddy, broad-faced man with a curling red beard, a solitary woman, pinched and pale, with darting black eyes and bad teeth, a heavy-set man, careworn and gray, who slumped over his supper at a table beside three noisy companions. Some eighteen or twenty patrons crowded the little room, and as the ale flowed from the landlord’s barrel, the talk grew louder and less cautious.
From the sound of it, Evard had made little progress in his attempts to bring Iskeran under Leire’s heel alongside Valleor and Kerotea. The Valloreans in the room, always distinguishable by their fair coloring and somber garb, smiled behind their hands at the stories of the Leiran king’s setbacks. A threadbare merchant pronounced unsettling rumors from Montevial of spies and executions and an entire slum quarter of the city that had been burned by a mob. Other travelers nodded their heads, confirming that the capital city of Leire was an uncomfortable place these days.
A bony man, a tinker by trade, told a harrowing and unlikely story of getting caught in a bog and being rescued by a pack of wild dogs. The fantastic tale left the company hungry for more stories.
“Come, let’s each offer a tale or a song,” said the pale woman with bad teeth. “The company will buy a tankard for the one as tells the best.”
A Vallorean tax-clerk, one of the poorly paid local functionaries reviled as traitorous tools of the cruel Leiran governor, volunteered for the competition. He redeemed his unsavory profession for the evening with a hilarious tale of two Leiran tax collectors being chased all over northern Valleor by an outlaw named ‘Red Eye.’ The pale woman had the landlord refill the man’s mug, not waiting for the voting at the end of the evening.
One rawboned farmer, his unshaven face pitted with pockmarks, kept the company in high hilarity with his tale of a Leiran merchant who had been left naked in a tree with two wolves tied to its bole while his entire stock of cloth and leather was divided among the starving populace of a Vallorean village. The company roared with delight.
Gerick listened intently to every word. While the barmaid passed another round and the listeners shouted raucously for the next story, he murmured, half to himself, “Why didn’t the villagers kill the merchant? It was stupid to let him go.” He might have been speaking of strategy in a game of draughts.
“Perhaps they didn’t think the cloth was worth a man’s life,” I said, “even a stupid man’s.”
“He’ll come back and kill them. That one” - he pointed to the farmer who had told the tale - “that one will lead the soldiers back to the village. Then they’ll all be dead.”
His conviction sent a shiver racing up my back. Sometimes Gerick seemed like a quiet, reserved boy of sixteen, and sometimes… I was relieved when the talk turned back to weather, crops, and the experiences of two hunters who had gotten themselves lost in the mountains over the winter, surviving by holing up in a bandit cave.
When pressed to contribute my own traveler’s tale to the evening’s entertainment, I told the story of my father pretending to fall ill after he’d taken Tomas and me on a ride into the wild hills near Comigor. Papa had wanted to see us find our own way back home safely while he was there to protect us. It made a good story, but short and simple enough that I could suppress my Leiran accent and keep us unremarked.
The warmth of the smoky room, the long day, and the week’s hectic preparations soon laid their tally on my eyelids. But each time I proposed retiring, Gerick would say, “Not yet. The fellow in the corner is going to sing again,” or “I want to hear more of the tinker’s stories of Vanesta.” After several rounds of this, and his failure to look me in the eye as he made his excuse, I began to suspect the reason for his reluctance.
I laid a hand on his arm. “If the dreams come, I’ll be right there. No one will hear you.”
He flushed and kept his eyes on the company. “Everyone in Prydina will hear me. And my watchdog will come running to make sure I’ve not fouled my bed… or Dar’Nethi honor… or whatever it is he’s expecting me to corrupt.”
“Maybe you won’t dream tonight.” No use trying to reconcile him to Radele’s attentions.
“Please, just one more tale. Then we’ll go up.” The skin around Gerick’s eyes was taut and smudged. When had he last slept more than two hours at a stretch? If I could just convince him to talk to me about the things that were really important…
The hour grew late. The grizzled innkeeper propped his massive chin on his hand, and the potboy snoozed in the corner, allowing half the lamps to go out untended. A tired serving maid lugged yet another round of ale to the table of four men. Two were itinerant farriers looking for work among the travelers. The third was the scrawny tinker who apparently arranged to have humorous adventures wherever he went, and the fourth was the heavyset, gray-bearded man who’d been drinking steadily all evening and saying very little. When the bearded man reached for another tankard, the tinker laid a hand on his hairy arm. “You’re single-minded in your cups this night, friend. We’ve all shared our travels until our tongues are parched and our heads empty. I think it’s your turn to tell us a tale.”
“You don’t want to hear no tale of mine.”
“And why not?”
“It’s not the tale as comfortable folks like to hear.”
The few stragglers scattered about the room urged him on. “Tell it, goodman. The company must judge the tale. Naught’s comfortable about stories of outlaws, nor naked merchants, nor tax collectors.”
“Come, friend,” said the tinker, “if you gift us with an uncomfortable tale, why then we’ll buy another round to smooth our spirits and tell yet another to finish the night.”
When the bearded man began, the words fell from his tongue reluctantly, as if it was only their ponderous weight that caused them to be spoken at all. His voice was a rumbling bass, speaking the soft slurring dialect of northern Valleor, a rugged land of rocky green hills, cold blue lakes, and bitter, hungry winters…
“I run sheep near Lach Vristal. I started twenty year ago with a breeding pair earned as my indenture price. My full twelve year I worked from dark freezing morning to dark freezing midnight for to earn my freedom and my sheep. When my debt was paid, I found me a lay and built a hold for the sheep and me.
“I got me a wife from Vristal town, and in five springs I had two sons and a daughter living, and only one babe buried. My eldest Hugh come a fine sheepman and works shoulder to shoulder with me. My daughter took all of us in hand since she was ten when her mam died of lung fever, and she’s never missed a day’s cooking nor spinning nor churning.
“My Tom, though, is a wild boy, born with only one hand. His mam spoilt him young. He spends his days running the hills and playing his whistle what he made from tonguegrass. Oh, he’ll help as he will with shearing and herding, but his heart ain’t in his work, only in his music and the hills. I told him that when he come to manhood, he’d see how he’d have to work twice as hard as a whole man just to feed himself.