The Three Lands Omnibus Part 15

"So this man is a rebel," concluded Malise. "He wants to take the King's power away from him."

"Some of his power, at least," I replied uneasily, and looked over at Quentin. He had his chin on his knuckles and I could guess that, like me, he was worried about more than whether war would come to Koretia.

"You are Koretian."

I pulled myself away from my thoughts to reply to Malise, "Yes, sir. I joined the patrol five weeks ago."

"He is Emorian now, subcaptain," inserted Carle.

Malise gave a rueful smile and stood up to stretch his back. "Time was when I would scarcely talk to any man who had Koretian blood in him. When your lieutenant joined the patrol, my first thought was, *Here's a brown-skinned dog sullying the fine tradition of the patrol with his slurring speech and superst.i.tious ways.' I was sublieutenant then, and I was determined to drive Quentin out of the patrol by dirty means. I used every trick I could to get him transferred or even killed: I sent him against the worst border-breachers, I gave him orders that would endanger him if he obeyed me ... He always obeyed me. Then one day a it was shortly after I had risen to the lieutenancy and had chosen a lesser man as my sublieutenant a I looked at Quentin and thought, *When this man reaches his full power, he'll be a better soldier than I can ever be.' I nearly fell on my sword. Then I came to my senses and set about teaching Quentin to take over my job. I hope with all my spirit, lieutenant, that you never have to undergo such a disheartening experience."

"I think it unlikely that the lieutenant will ever meet anyone who might exceed him in skill," said Carle with a laugh, then turned the conversation to Quentin's acts of bravery.

I was closest to Quentin, so I was the only one who heard him say softly, "Don't be so sure." I looked over at him, and then my breath caught in my throat, for he was looking straight at me.

For a heartbeat, he held my gaze; then he stood up and went over to the other side of the balefire to examine the cut on Malise's throat. I was left alone on my side of the fire, wondering about the meaning of Quentin's look.

I've been wondering ever since then, and the conclusion I've reached is that it doesn't make any difference to my work whether Quentin thinks I'll be a good soldier or not, because I would work just as hard, no matter what level of skill or rank I was likely to achieve. Even so, I would like to believe that Quentin thinks well of me. I don't know why this is so important to me a it should be enough that I do my duty a but I suppose it does matter to me that he like me, since I admire him so much. I suppose it's all foolishness on my part.

I've spent so much time writing this entry that I have no time for further speculations, but of course one other thought remains in my mind as I go to bed: Has the Jackal G.o.d really become a man?

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

The third day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

I'm finding that I no longer have time to write in my journal regularly, since at the end of the day I'm too tired to do anything except sleep. By "end of the day," I don't mean when the day patrol ends its work, for I am usually awake for several hours after that, either playing Law Links a which is a duty for me, since I need to learn so much law a or spending the time in excruciating bouts of memorization.

There is so much to memorize as a patrol guard. There are many more whistles than Fenton ever guessed a hundreds, in fact a and I also have to memorize the names and locations of all the mountains near the pa.s.s, as well as the names and appearances of Koretians and Emorians whom I might encounter as border-breachers. These are people who have proved particularly dangerous or successful in the past twenty years; one day I found myself memorizing the description of a slave who could be none other than Fenton. I also need to learn of people who might try to cross the border in the future, such as the King's spies.

It's like being Fenton's student again, only much worse, for I've never been good at memorization. My only consolation is that Teague is far worse than I am. Carle says that he is an excellent guard otherwise, but that if his head weren't attached to his body, he'd forget to wear it every day.

It's becoming quite cold in the mountains. I wear my cloak every day now, except for last week when the winds ceased blowing for three days, as they occasionally do. Carle and I have been busy discussing our plans to rent a city house together when the patrol withdraws from the mountains at the end of the month. "If not sooner," said Carle, but when I asked why, he simply shook his head.

The fourth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Teague and Sewell have been sent back into Emor with the horse and cart. Sewell broke his leg during tonight's patrol, and Quentin thought the leg should be inspected by a physician.

It was Sewell's own fault; he and Teague were taking a shortcut back to the patrol hut after they met our mail messenger. Chatwin has been eagerly awaiting a letter from his betrothed, and they wanted to see his face when he received it. The lieutenant gave Teague and Sewell a lecture on safe climbing that made even my ears burn; then he cut up his extra tunic as a bandage for Sewell's bleeding, as we are short of supplies at the moment. Usually we have two weeks' worth of supplies on hand, but Devin, who is in charge of supplies, got into an argument recently with the peddler who delivers our goods, and I suppose that the peddler is taking his revenge by delaying delivery.

Carle helped Teague and Sewell to hook up the cart and came back swearing mildly about incompetence in young soldiers. Carle's twentieth birthyear begins this winter.

"After all that, Teague didn't even remember to deliver the letters," said Carle. "Well, if Chatwin dies of heartbreak before they remember to send the letters back, it will all be Teague's fault."

He grinned then, and we spent the next couple of hours memorizing laws. Carle has promised to start teaching me the Great Three soon.

The fifth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

I awoke at dawn today to find that it was a beautiful day: the sky was dark blue, and clear like spring water. Even with my cloak swept back so that my blades were close to hand, I was drowning in heat, and I was sorely tempted to drop the heavy cloth down a fissure. Carle reminded me, though, of the patrol regulation I memorized last month, about always wearing cloaks in the month of December, so I spent this morning sweating my way along the paths.

"You're lucky compared to the rest of us," Carle pointed out as we took a mid-morning break from our patrol, near the southernmost point of our patrol route. "You're a southerner; you'll be able to bear the mountain summers much better."

"And bear the mountain winters much worse," I retorted. We were lying on the side of a mountain, watching a flock of migratory birds make their way south.

"Ah, but we won't be here during the winter, so you have the better end of the deal," said Carle, swallowing with a gulp the remainder of our bread.

"Greedy man," I said with a laugh. "That was meant to last us until evening."

Carle grinned. "We'll dip back into the hut at noonday and pick up some more. Devin won't like it; he has been guarding our supplies this week like a hen guarding her chicks. I sometimes wonder whether Devin was meant to be a woman; he has a woman's obsession with these trivial details of domesticity. May the Chara preserve me from ever marrying someone-"

He stopped. I thought at first that it was because of the wind, which was blowing so hard from the north now that it was becoming hard for us to hear each other. Then suddenly he was on his feet, blowing one long note: it was the Immediate Danger whistle.

He followed this with a series of notes so rapid that I couldn't follow what he said. He must have guessed that this was the case, for he grabbed me and shouted, "Run! Back to the hut! I will meet you there!"

I have by now become accustomed to following orders without question and without hesitation. Even so, something made me pause when I reached the curve of the mountain, and I looked back at Carle. He was busy sending out the whistle demanding to know the locations of the rest of the day patrol, and the others were busy sending their replies back. His red hair, bright under the sunlight, made a striking contrast with the blue of the sky, but in the brief second in which I watched him, his hair was thrown into shadow as the storm-clouds rolled over us like deadly boulders.

I was racing through the tunnel when the snow arrived.

When I entered the tunnel, the first few flakes were beginning to whip against my face. By the time I reached the end of the tunnel, a journey of less than a minute, the world outside had become a wall of snow. I stood uncertainly for a minute, trying to see through the white blanket smothering the hollow before us. Then I realized that the snow was becoming heavier as I watched, so I took a blind step into the storm.

I have travelled this route eye-bound, I have travelled it at night, I have travelled it with the wind howling so hard that I had no sound to guide me a why, then, was it so much harder to find my through the snow? I suppose that in the past there was always some small sense to guide me: if not my eyes, then my ears; if not my ears, then the light cast by the stars. Now, though, there was nothing to show which direction I was headed in, and the winds kept blowing me off course.

I hadn't gone far before my face was raw from the cut of a thousand tiny ice blades striking my face. My feet were too numb to feel the ground beneath me; more than once I fell when I slipped on the snow beginning to coat the gra.s.sy ground of the hollow. I stumbled over something hard, and my heart beat fast with hope, but a moment's worth of groping showed me that I had missed the hut and was standing next to the fireside rocks. I turned around, willed myself to walk in a straight line again, and started again.

In the end, I think my lone salvation was the fact that I was in the hollow: I could not wander aimlessly forever, as I would have done if I had not reached the tunnel in time. I bounced from one end of the hollow to the other until finally, by pure chance, I found myself touching something large and flat. I raised my hands higher and touched the whipping ring.

The wind was pus.h.i.+ng me against the wall like a bully sitting on his victim. There was a great temptation to simply stay where I was and recover my breath, but I forced myself to grope along the wall. So intent was I on travelling in this manner that when I reached the end of the wall, I forgot to turn the corner and would have wandered off into oblivion again, except that hands grabbed me and dragged me a short distance to shelter.

I nearly fell to the floor as the door closed behind me. The hut was thick with smoke from the fire a I learned later that the smoke-hole had been plugged to keep the snow out a and all that I could see was the others crowded beside me. Devin thrust warm wine at my lips, and I gratefully swallowed the few drops he allowed me. The lieutenant still had his arm around me, holding me steady. He waited till I had finished swallowing, then said in a sharp voice, "Adrian a where's Carle?"

I looked over at him in bewilderment. Gradually, my numb senses began to take in who was surrounding me: Devin and Payne and Gamaliel from the night patrol, and Chatwin and Hoel from the day patrol a the latter two must have outraced me to the hut. Carle and Iain and Jephthah were nowhere to be seen.

"G.o.d of Mercy," I whispered.

Quentin gripped my arm harder; the pain brought me back to my senses. I said, "He was on Mount Sword- No, wait." This, as Quentin began to slip away. I paused a moment, trying to recover, from the depths of my memory, the whistles I had heard. Now of all times I must remember correctly. "Jephthah and Iain were on the eastern side of Mount Skycrest. Carle told them to go to the cave under that mountain a the one I discovered when you were hunting me. He said he'd meet them there."

The lieutenant whirled around, the edge of his cloak hitting mine; the snow that had clung to my cloak slid the warm floor. He was at the door to the hut before I knew that he had moved; the only reason I caught a glimpse of him at all was that he paused at the door, said, "Stay with the unit," and threw an object into Devin's hands.

It was not until he was gone into the blizzard that I saw what he had thrown, and then, like all the others present, I was stunned into silence. Quentin had given his partner the seal-ring of his lieutenancy. It is the ring he uses to seal official doc.u.ments, and it is never to be removed from his hand unless he is in imminent danger of dying and needs to deputize his power to the soldier who will take command of the unit upon his death. Devin turned the ring over and over in his hand, as though he were examining a man's will.

It is five minutes from here to the cave. The lieutenant has been gone for an hour.

Two hours. We've all been sitting silently around the fire, except for Devin, who has been occupying his mind by counting up his beloved supplies in the store room. I've been spending the time thinking about Carle. Iain and Jephthah were on the eastern slope of Mount Skycrest, twice as far from the hut as the cave. Carle must have guessed that there would be just enough time for me to get back safely; if he had come with me, he would be safe too. Instead, he ran for the cave, where he could do no good except to be trapped there with Iain and Jephthah.

Try as I might, I cannot imagine Carle, being what he is, doing anything other than what he did.

Four hours. Chatwin and Hoel have been discussing how, several times a day, the mountain winds will stop for a few minutes before starting up again.

"If the lieutenant made it to the cave, that is what he could be waiting for," said Hoel. "The cave is close enough that the four of them might be able to make it back here during the break. The snow is not the problem; the problem is the winds blowing the snow around."

"Then why should the lieutenant risk himself at all?" asked Payne. "Carle and the others could make it back on their own."

Hoel shook his head. "The pa.s.ses are tricky in the snow. You lose sight of your familiar landmarks. It takes someone like the lieutenant, who has grown up next to the mountains, to be able to find the way back from the cave."

"Then we can be sure that they will find their way back," Payne said confidently.

"If the lieutenant made it to the cave," said Devin without looking up from the supply list he was checking.

Seven-and-a-half hours. The winds died a short time ago, and everybody's head jerked up. Devin opened the door and stared out at the frosting of snow on the ground. The white blizzard blanket had fallen suddenly to the ground, and the air was clear of but a few steady flakes.

Devin was s.h.i.+fting from foot to foot. I could see that he was aching to leave in search of Quentin, but the lieutenant had placed the rest of us under his care. Devin dared not disobey orders while there was any chance that Quentin was still alive.

A minute pa.s.sed, then another. Finally Devin said, "I am going to the tunnel. I can find my way back to the hut from there."

He left, and Gamaliel took his place at the door; he is next in rank after Quentin and Carle and Devin. The rest of us strained to look over his shoulder, trying not to be too obvious about it. There was a long silence, like a pause between the songs of a Daxion bard; then Gamaliel abruptly slammed the door shut, narrowly preventing the renewed winds from blowing out our fire. Gamaliel remained on the outside of the hut as he did so.

Payne told me earlier that this was the first time in his life that he ever wished he was Koretian, so that he could pray to the G.o.ds. Well, I have managed to keep from praying to the G.o.d I renounced, but in the five minutes that followed, it was a very close thing.

The door slammed open again, the winds screamed into the room like a wailing woman, and the four of us who had been waiting scrambled forward to help the figures stumbling in. As I threw my cloak over Devin, I counted automatically in my head, and then felt relief fall over me like suns.h.i.+ne. Six men had entered the room; everyone was back safe. No one had died.

Not yet, anyway.

The sixth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

We spent most of yesterday evening rescuing Quentin and Carle and Iain and Jephthah from frostbite. "It's cold in that cave," Carle said with a grin as I wrapped a fire-warmed blanket around his feet. "It makes this hut seem like a southern summer in comparison."

Carle is the only one who thinks so. The first thing Quentin did after he got back a before Gamaliel had even been able to persuade him to strip off his wet clothing a was to go into consultation with Devin about the supplies. Two minutes later, he smothered the fire with dirt; then he removed all but one of the logs and started a much smaller fire, one that Hoel says can barely be dignified with the name of fire-embers.

There was no evening meal. The reason for this became clear after Quentin, having submitted himself patiently to Gamaliel's doctoring, called us together in council. He had Devin read out the list of supplies. The list sounded long, but Devin followed this up by telling us how much food ten men can eat in a day.

What Devin's news amounts to is this: There is no telling how long it will be before the winds die down for a few days. If we keep the fire going at its present temperature a just warm enough to keep ice from forming in the hut a then we have enough firewood to last us three weeks. That's the good news. The bad news is that we have enough food to last us three days.

The lieutenant has put us on quarter rations: this means that every day we get a few gulps of wine, as much water as we want (we have plenty of snow to melt), a handful of nuts, and two large hunks of bread. Gamaliel is looking worried. I found him reading through his doctoring manual this afternoon; he was turned to the page discussing the need for men in cold climates to eat lots of food.

"When Teague and Sewell returned to the headquarters without the rest of us, Captain Wystan must have known that his letter of warning to me went astray," said Quentin. "There is nothing he can do, though, until the winds die down; n.o.body can reach us through these storms. The best we can hope for is that the captain will retain enough faith in us to send a search party when the winds die down, as it is likely we will be in no condition by that time to make the journey back on our own. Our duty, then, is to stay alive so that the search party's efforts are not wasted."

I decided that it was characteristic of Quentin to describe our desperate attempt to stay alive as our duty rather than our natural desire. If it wasn't our duty to stay alive, I think Quentin would have us feasting on the supplies right now, rather than condemn us to the prolonged death that awaits us.

The seventh day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Eleven days' worth of food left; we're still on quarter rations. We've all been squeezed up next to the fire today, trying to ignore the cold against our backs a all but Devin, who seems to find comfort in counting our supplies over and over, and Quentin, who keeps going outside to check on the weather. We slept in pairs last night, curled up against our partners so that we could throw two cloaks and two blankets over ourselves. I only woke up twice from the cold, but I think that's because Carle insisted that I face the fire and that he protect my back with his warmth. Like everyone else, he's worried that my southern const.i.tution will prevent me from surviving.

We're all wearing our two uniforms double now, one on top of the other. Since Quentin cut up his extra tunic for Sewell, I tried to give the lieutenant my Koretian tunic, which I still have here, but he simply remarked that it was a good thing I would have extra protection. I didn't argue; it's amazing how quickly men become selfish in such situations.

Not all of us. Quentin isn't wearing his cloak, not even when he goes outside; he gave it to Iain, who has been suffering from a bad cold since his return from the cave.

The eighth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Ten days' worth of food left. I'm finding it hard to write; my hands feel like lumps of ice most of the time now, even when I'm sitting directly next to the fire, which is most of the time. We've been playing Law Links throughout today, and Jephthah, who has been to Daxis, tried entertaining us with some songs. But it turns out that all the songs he knows end with the protagonist dying, so the lieutenant made him stop.

Gamaliel has been spending most of his time with Iain, whose fever has grown worse. I heard him muttering something today about the need for isolation, but I'm not sure what he meant.

The ninth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Now I know; the rest of us have caught Iain's cold. Iain has taken a turn for the worse and is starting to become delirious. We all volunteered our blankets to Iain, but Gamaliel crossly said that having one patient was bad enough; he didn't want all of us dying from the cold. It's the first time Gamaliel has let slip his fears about Iain's state.

Nine days' worth of food left. I took an informal survey and found that five of us have fasted before: me, Quentin, Gamaliel (he says that it's part of a physician's training), Devin, and Jephthah. Iain may have fasted as well, but he wasn't in any state to ask.

The tenth day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Eight days' worth of food. Quentin caught Jephthah feeding his dinner to Iain and brought Jephthah up before the unit for disciplining.

"I know what this is going to lead to," said Quentin, "so I am going to stop it now before it spreads any further. Jephthah, you are under my command, and you are to follow my orders to keep yourself alive by eating. If I find that you have failed to do so, I will force the food down your throat. That goes for the rest of you as well."

He let Jephthah go with a reprimand; I don't suppose any of us could survive a beating at this stage. I feel absolutely no temptation to stop eating. It's all I can do to remember my honor and not take more than my fair share when the food is pa.s.sed around.

The eleventh day of December in the 940th year a.g.l.

Iain died during the night. Chatwin and Payne are now quite sick; Quentin, after consulting with Gamaliel, has raised their food allowance to half our usual rations. However, because of Iain's death, we still have eight days' worth of food left.

Jephthah borrowed my pencil and a sheet of paper earlier. He said that he wanted to write a letter to his family in case we didn't survive, but that he didn't want to bother Devin by asking for writing supplies.

Devin just found Jephthah's body in the store room. Jephthah hadn't disobeyed Quentin's orders by starving himself; he had fallen on his sword.

Quentin had us lined up against the ice-cold hut wall within minutes. I've never seen him look so grim, not even when he captured me. He spent a brief period ascertaining that none of us knew what Jephthah had planned. I was racked with guilt, but the lieutenant said I couldn't have known what a simple request for writing materials meant. After he had questioned us, Quentin didn't bother to give us a lecture. He simply made every man in the room take out his blade and place his palm on the flat, swearing that he would not take his own life by any means. This is called a free-man's oath and is the Emorian equivalent of a blood vow, treated just as seriously.