The Returning (18 page)

“This is him,” Gyaar confirmed. “I aimed for his neck, My Lord Father, and then I saw his eyes, I thought I had killed him. So . . . now . . . now he does not look so like to Gyodan.” But on the battlefield, it had been like coming face-to-face with his brother, or his brother's ghost. “Still, beyond any question, it is a Ryuu face.”

“Beyond any question.”

“Father, I would keep him.”

His father was silent a long, long time, gazing on the injured Southerner.

“If he lives, I will not order his death.” Father turned to leave. “If he lives.”

Gyaar stayed, looking for Gyodan in the stranger's face. Quite suddenly he could stand the smell no longer and strode out to stand on the walls. The air was still and damp and chill. The bodies of the southern army were being piled together while burial pits were dug on the plain. The bodies of their own burned: The priests would reek of the smoke from saying prayers for so many.

 

“I DO NOT LIKE it,” said Father, when they loosened their formal sashes and lolled back on cushions, relaxing after council.

Gyaar tucked his hands into his sleeves, for he could not be seen warming them at a brazier, and wondered if spring would ever find its way this far south. “What do you not like, Father?”

“This Downlander with a Ryuu face. This Downlander they call
Gyaar's Downlander
.”

Gyaar spilled tea over his fingers. “He is mine and I owe him my life.” He told Father of the incident in the marsh. “So like to Gyodan was he that I only gaped at him, thinking him a ghost. And he spared me.”

“And you did not tell me.”

“I . . . I have told you now.”

“And you spared him.”

“Not to kill him.”

“To do what with? The surgeon reports he is recovered. Put him into service or send him back home. Or kill him.”

“I will see he is given the choice, My Lord Father.”

An old barracks had been made over to house those recuperating from the injuries they had sustained during the fighting. Though there was no rule forbidding Gyaar contact with the Downlander, he had avoided the barracks, for he would not offend Father by consorting with the Downlander, knowing clearly Lord Ryuu's will on the matter. So he sent Father's ultimatum to the Downlander via a page. And via the page he received a report.

“He's gone, My Lord.” The child was on one knee, eyes on the floor. In his hands he held a cloth-wrapped bundle.

“Gone.”

“Yes, My Lord. As soon as I repeated your message.”

“Did he take the horse, and the weapons I sent him?”

“My Lord, he did. He would not at first, but the surgeon told him he should. The Southerner gave this into my care to pass to you.
It is all I have to give by way of thanks
. Those were his own words, My Lord.” The child held the bundle out on the flat of his still, firm little hands.

It was a knife, a plain, wood-handled hunting knife, such as Gyaar had seen on many a dead southern peasant soldier. Yet, in some way, it seemed a link to Gyodan.

 

WITH SPRING CAME Gyaar's mother and sisters, came all the court from the City. With them there, the keep became more of a palace and less of a fort.

Gyaar went to the women's quarters to visit his sisters Shi-mii and Shi-karu. Shi-ryuu was gone already to live in the household of her betrothed. His three sisters had all been just girls when he had first gone to war. Every visit home they had been more grown, and now only Shi-karu awaited womanhood.

“Oh,” said Gyaar. “I was looking for my sisters. They are little girls, most unwomanly, and uncouth.”

“Gy-aaaar.” Shi-karu hugged him. Shi-mii smiled and touched his hand. She was always restrained.

“I have some sorry news for you, my second sister.” Gyaar looked very sadly at her. “I cannot see that you will be wife to the South-Lord, for we have taken the South and there is no longer one to wed.”

Cool, collected Shi-mii threw her fan in the air and smiled.

“So who shall her husband be?” Shi-karu picked up the fan and waited until her sister should notice and take it from her. “And mine?”

“Oh, I shall find Shi-mii a fat and smelling old general,” said Gyaar. “And I shall marry you myself.”

 

“WALK WITH ME,” said Mother. As one, her ladies bowed, like the bending of leafy branches in a breeze.

If Mother asked, then Gyaar did—whatever, whatever she bade him do. Mother was both pliable and unyielding, silk and stone. Gyaar would cross Father before doing anything that might bring Mother's hard side to the fore.

He held his arm crooked, and Mother slipped her hand in. Chattering and giggling, his sisters and the gaggle of maids-in-waiting fell into step behind them. Mother pressed gently on his arm, directing him to the garden, across the lawn to the pond.

“He ran, your new slave.”

“No, Mother. He was free to go.”

They walked in an easy silence, one turn about the fish pond, a second.

“You must start looking,” said Mother.

“Looking?” said Gyaar blankly, wondering at her interest in the Downlander with his brother's face.

“There is time yet, for there is a lack of suitable brides.”

“Marriage!” Gyaar stilled in shock. A knife-sharp glance from Mother and he walked again.

“It is the war. It has left you no time to consider your future, the future of this family.”

“I would have time to consider it, Mother.”

“Is your father right? Are you really meant for the temple, and not for marriage, for children?”

“No, Mother. I do not believe that he is.”

“You have an obligation.”

To your father, your family, your people
. The words ran an echo in his head as Mother spoke them.

“All my life, all I do, is an obligation.”

She was giving him a look,
that
look.

“In this, in this one thing, I would not be driven by obligation, but rather to have a . . .”
Choice
. Gyaar did not say it, knew that he could not.

“In this one thing, of all of them, you
must
be driven by obligation.”

“My Lady Mother, of course.”

She halted, the ladies as one with her, their robes swinging and stilling. Gyaar kissed his mother's hand. “Thank you.” He backed away until he could politely turn, and retreated to the castle.

 

MARRIAGE. FATHER STILL beat him with the whip of it, a year on. The morning council done with, Gyaar untied his sash and tossed it aside. “Aah.” He pulled a cushion under his head, closed his eyes.

“You must marry soon,” said Father. “The continuation of the Ryuu line rests on you.”

Gyaar sighed. “Who is it this time?” For there had been a girl, remnant of one of the great houses of the City, whose remaining family had been negotiating with Father. But this girl had chosen suicide before betrayal of her people by marriage to the enemy, upstart Ryuus. “I do not want another death on my conscience.” He sat up and bowed from the waist.

Even Shi-karu, his flower-faced, light-stepping sister, lashed him with it when he visited her, as he did every day after council. Gyaar came as close as he ever did to losing his temper.

“I do not object to being wed.” He pushed the words out between his teeth. “I even wish to. But I do not like to be forced to it.”

“Mother says you have had time enough to reconcile your wants to the needs of the family.”

“Youngest Sister! If you love your brother, leave this topic silent between us.”

“One more word on it.” Shi-karu rapped him with her fan. “You may not wish a marriage to be arranged for
you
, but
I
wish one for myself.”

Gyaar stared at her and realized: Even Shi-karu was grown now. “If you wed, you will go away, and then who will I talk nonsense to?”

It was right, though, it was sense, that his young sister talked.

 

WHEN NEXT GYAAR visited the women's quarters, it was to congratulate Shi-mii on her impending marriage.

“You spoke true, Older Brother.” Shi-karu danced about him. “You have married her to an old general.”

“He is a war hero, and he does not smell. Shi-mii, come sit with me.”

Impassive, her reserve a wall, Shi-mii revealed nothing of how she felt.

Gyaar wrote of himself in his notebook later:
hypocrite
.

“
F
REE,” THE LORD would say. “Make yourself free.” In his mind, Cam saw the mailed arm making a slow sweep of the air: “Free of the palace, the grounds, the village.” Free of the North and the South. Free.

No
, thought Cam,
he would say ...
Then he looked up, up at the blue sky and the castle's high white walls, blinding in the sunlight, rearing to meet it. Even from a distance you could see these walls. He tapped his heels against Geyard's sides and walked him slowly eastward, following that white line to the town. When he had been here last, Dorn-Lannet had fit comfortably in the strip of land between the castle and the sea. Now it filled it, overflowed it, spreading south along the edges of the bordering sward.

The East Gate let traffic into the town. The guards waved Cam through, but they commanded the Downlander behind him to wait while they ransacked his satchel.

“That's my dinner knife!” The Downlander reached for it.

“You want in, you leave it here.”

The Downlander spat as he passed Cam. Cam moved back, then realized:
He does think I'm one of them, an Uplander.

There was an inn Cam remembered. He sat there ahorse, looking at it, his left hand clasping the stump of his right arm, like he used to do when he could not believe his arm wasn't there, when the pain nagged him nearly from his mind. “Come up,” he said to Geyard and rode on, looking for somewhere he did not know, where he would not be known. He found it just within the North Gate, a tired-looking place with a small dirt-floored yard, and a small dirt-floored taproom.

The innkeeper was a woman. “Nope,” she said. “No room.”

Cam tipped his head and looked around her, at the nearly empty taproom, up at the dark windows, vacant.

The woman eyed him up and down: mount, sword, and leather jerkin. “Left over from the war, are you? They'll take you up at the castle. They always want fighting men there.”

“No.” Cam made a cutting gesture with his hand, Uplander-fashion.

“You soldiers never pay.”

“I can work my board.”

“Huh! I took you for Uplander.” She looked hard at his hanging right sleeve. “Any so how, work your board doing what? Chopping wood? Ha-ha-ha.”

“Sure.”

The tavern emptied into the yard, to watch him, the one-armed Downlander chopping wood. He split half a dozen logs more or less true, hitting hard but unevenly so that flying splinters had them all dodging back. Then he leaned on the ax and looked at the innkeeper.

“All right, all right. You got a week's board if you get through that lot.” She jerked her head at a woodpile that stood nearly shoulder high.

Cam hefted the ax.

“Let be.” She waved her hands, laughing. “Tomorrow. Start on it tomorrow.”

Inside, he sat quietly in a corner and shook out his arm, which was stiffening from showing off with the ax. He sipped at the beer, which tasted different from that at home, tasted of his time here before, smelled of it. What would he say, the Uplander Lord? And his son, would he be there?

 

THE NEXT MORNING was wet, humid. Cam took the road that led west to the keep's gate, striding at first, but gradually slowing.

Snatches of sea showed between the houses, a jumble of pine-adorned Downlander homes side by side with white-painted Uplander dwellings. He listened to people talking, each in their own tongue, or together in a kind of broken Uplander dialect heavily sown with Downlander words.

Everywhere there was building going on. A third wall, a moat, and a maze were under construction around the farthest spread of the town. Great blocks of stone were being dragged up Mount Lannet on sleds. Lord Ryuu must be rebuilding the watchtower, for there had been one once, on the mount's summit. Had Lord Garaman maintained it, thought Cam, perhaps he would yet rule Dorn-Lannet.

There seemed a chaotic harmony to it all, until Cam spied three Downlander men on a corner, all gray and worn, each carrying Lord Garaman's banner. They paced in a circle, chanting, “
Out! Out! Out!”
and Cam was jogged aside as a group of young Uplander men encircled them, pelting them with rotten fruit and vegetables, manure, abuse. He backed away.