The Warrior's Path (29 page)

The youngest brother had heard of giants, of course, but he had never hoped to see one, yet here one was, and he rejoiced in his good luck.

“Hail, giant,” he called out to the giant, who towered above him. “Will you lift me onto this stone table, so that I may see if my brothers have left a treasure behind for me?”

The giant bent down and picked the young man up, as a father picks up his child, and set him upon the tabletop. The youngest brother looked around him and saw with disappointment that the only object on the table was a stone the size of his foot.

“Young man,” the giant said to him in a voice so deep that the youngest brother felt his heart tremble in his chest. “If your brothers have taken a golden platter and a silver goblet from this table, they are thieves, for those things belong to me.”

The young man’s heart fell.

“I must indeed be as simple as my brothers think me,” he said to himself, when he understood his plight. Still, he was determined to do what he could to save his life.

“Friend giant,” he said, “my brothers and I never meant to do you harm. I will bring what is yours back here tomorrow, if you will let me go.”

Now giants aren’t as stupid as people believe them to be, although they may appear to be a little slow, and this giant knew that once the young man was safely home, he would have no reason to return with the golden platter and the silver goblet.

“I will let you go,” he said, “but you must swear you will return with what belongs to me, and when you do, I will reward you with a gift that is worth much more than gold or silver.”

“I swear I will return with your treasures in the morning,” said the youngest brother, greatly relieved that the giant wasn’t going to kill him. He leaped down from the stone table and ran all the way home, leaving his sheep to follow as best they could and growing more excited by the minute at the prospect of receiving a gift more valuable than gold or silver.

The young man told his brothers of his meeting with the giant and of the giant’s promise, but his brothers only laughed at him.

“Such a silly boy,” said the eldest brother.

“Such a foolish boy,” said the middle brother.

“To think that we would be taken in by such an obvious trick.”

“To think that we would give him our treasures so that he could keep them for himself and bring us back who knows what worthless thing.”

“To think we would believe that he had met a giant.”

“A giant would have eaten him on the spot.”

And the two elder brothers went on in this way until the youngest brother gave up trying to argue with them and went to bed.

But the young man couldn’t sleep, because he had sworn to return what his brothers had stolen and he meant to keep his word. He waited until he was certain his brothers were asleep. Then he took the golden platter and the silver goblet from their hiding place and went by the moon’s light out into the wilderness.

By night the wilderness was quite a different place. The wind rattled the bare branches of stunted, twisted trees. Unseen things made strange noises in the dark. Misty wraiths swirled around him and twined their tendril fingers in his hair. The young man was trembling with fear by the time he reached the giant’s table. He crept beneath it to wait for morning, and there at last he fell asleep.

When the young man awoke, it was daylight. The golden platter and the silver goblet were gone. Beside him lay a stone the size of his foot, the very stone that he had seen on the giant’s table.

“I must indeed be as simple as my brothers think me,” the young man said to himself, and he feared their anger when they discovered their treasures gone and that he had brought home to them only this worthless stone.

For a long time his brothers were angry with him. They called him a thief and other unkind things, until his tears convinced them that he had not taken their treasures for himself. For a longer time they called him foolish for allowing a stupid giant to deceive him, and for yet a longer time they teased him about the stone he kept on a shelf beside his bed. But the time came at last when they forgot they had once been rich men, and they were content to live the simple life they had always led.

One night, long after his foolishness had been forgotten, the youngest brother felt drawn to the giant’s stone. It was an ordinary stone, blue-grey in color, worn very smooth. When he picked it up, it felt warm in his hands, as if it were a living thing. On a whim he placed it under his pillow.

That night the young man dreamed. His dream took him to a crossroads, and there, beside a stone seat where weary travelers could stop and rest, he found a purse filled with gold coins. When he woke the next morning, the dream seemed so real to him that he went to the crossroads to see what he might find there.

Beside the stone seat he found the purse of gold coins, just as it had happened in his dream. He took the purse to his eldest brother and said, “Now I can make amends to you for losing your golden platter.”

His brother thanked him and forgave him and went by way of the crossroads to live in a town, where he soon became a wealthy merchant.

Not many days later the giant’s stone called him again, and the young man placed it under his pillow. Again he dreamed. His dream took him to an abandoned house that lay in ruins, and there, among the tumbled stones, he found a purse filled with silver coins. The next morning he went to that ruined house and found the purse where he had found it in his dream.

He took it to his brother and said, “Now I can make amends to you for losing your silver goblet.”

His brother thanked him and forgave him. He rebuilt the ruined house into a very grand house indeed and went to live there.

At first the young man found life more peaceful without his brothers, but as time went by he was troubled more and more by loneliness. One night he picked up the giant’s stone. It grew warm in his hands, and he placed it under his pillow.

That night he dreamed. His dream took him to the marketplace, where he saw a beautiful young girl. From the moment he first saw her in his dream, the young man loved her. The next morning, when he went to the marketplace, he found her there. For half a year he courted her, and in the spring he married her. On their wedding night, the young man placed the dreamstone beneath their pillow, and both he and his young wife dreamed of children and grandchildren, blooming gardens, thriving flocks, and every good thing that fills the heart with joy.

After I finished, I thought it might not have been the best story to tell to a band of warriors. Donal looked quite wistful, as if he had been lost in a dream of a life he had left far behind him and could never hope to live again. Kenit was still too young to want the life the young man had dreamed for himself, but he might have been thinking of the home he left, as I was thinking of my own home, our gardens and our flocks, and the love I’d known there. I wondered why I had been so impatient to leave that life behind.

Only Maara was smiling. She gazed up at the giant’s bones on Greth’s Tor and said, “I like stories about giants.”

At midnight Maara woke me. For a moment I didn’t remember where I was. I looked up and saw the branches of the oak tree against the starry sky. I heard Cael’s voice, then Donal’s deeper one. My warrior was already buckling on her armor. I got up and tried to help her, but my fingers were clumsy.

“I can do it,” she told me. “Get our pack ready.”

“What happened?”

“Hurry,” she said.

In a few minutes all of us were ready — Donal and Kenit, Cael and Alpin, Maara and me. There was no moon that night. We made do with starlight as we stumbled through the pastures to the foot of Greth’s Tor, where Laris and Taia waited for us.

“Two fires,” I heard someone say.

We walked all night, traveling north, finding our direction by the bear stars. When light began to show in the eastern sky, Laris led us into the shelter of a stand of trees that lay between two hills.

“If we’re lucky, they’ll come through here,” she said. “It’s an easy trail, and they may be trying to stay out of sight of the Tor.”

Laris took Cael aside, and they had a brief whispered conversation. Then Cael and Alpin started up the hill behind us.

“Where are they going?” I asked Maara.

“They’re going to find a vantage point. The people who were so careless with their fires last night may make the same mistake again this morning.”

We waited under the trees for a long time before Cael and Alpin returned. They had seen nothing. Laris was undecided about what to do. She called the warriors together to talk things over. The general feeling was that if we kept going north, we might miss the travelers, who could have taken another way and gone past us, or we might run into them unexpectedly and risk a confrontation before we knew their strength.

Then we heard in the distance the groaning of cart wheels and the heavy tread of oxen’s feet. At once Laris had us spread out on both sides of the cattle trail that wound through the dale. We found hiding places where we could and waited.

Whoever was approaching wasn’t trying to be quiet. I heard a man’s voice coax his beasts over a rough place. A few minutes later he spoke again, and another man answered him.

They soon came into view — two oxen pulling a two-wheeled cart with a woman and three men walking beside it. The cart didn’t appear to be heavily laden, but where the trail ran uphill, the oxen strained against their yoke. One of the men carried a pole for driving them. None carried weapons.

Laris stepped out from her hiding place and blocked the trail, and Donal too showed himself. The rest of us stayed hidden.

Laris approached the man driving the oxen, and they talked for a few minutes. Maara and I were too far away to hear what was said.

The man lifted the covering of oxhide to show Laris the contents of the cart. Once she had inspected everything, she motioned to the rest of us to show ourselves.

The strangers were traders, bringing tin and copper ingots and some finished goods, farming implements and an assortment of bowls and cooking pots. They had been traveling with another group of traders who had left them that morning to travel farther west. It was their fires we had seen. I was both relieved and disappointed.

We traveled south with the traders, even though their oxen moved so slowly, because they brought news and gossip with them. Maara seemed to want to keep her distance from them, so she and I walked on ahead.

“What would we have done if they had been cattle raiders?” I asked Maara.

“That would depend on how many there were. If we could have done so safely, we would have confronted them and made them turn back.”

“That’s all?”

“What else should we do?”

“What would prevent them from coming back another day?”

“They might try again somewhere else. If we caught them a second time, we would know they hadn’t taken our warning seriously, and we would have to make them pay for their arrogance with blood.”

“Would we kill them?”

“We would have to fight them. Blood might be spilled, and someone might die, but it would be better if no one did.”

I knew what she meant. Once begun, a blood feud was difficult to stop. Still I didn’t understand how we could protect our cattle if we didn’t fight.

“It’s like a game,” she said. “We know they’re coming, and they know we’re waiting for them. The game will prove who is stronger and more clever. They may succeed in taking a few cattle home with them, but they don’t want to fight with us. No one wants to die for a few cattle.”

“What would happen if they did outnumber us?” I asked her.

“That’s what Laris was concerned about. She wouldn’t put us in harm’s way until she knew how many they were. If we had been outnumbered, we would never have shown ourselves. Laris would have taken us back to the farmstead as fast as we could go and called for help.”

“Help? Who would help us?”

“The farmers,” she said. “At least until we could send for more of our warriors. But it’s not likely a raiding party would outnumber us by more than a few.”

“Why not?”

“Because then it wouldn’t be a raiding party. It would be war party, a real threat, and we would have to do more than just warn them away.”

Like the games I had played in childhood, cattle raiding seemed to be a game with rules that everybody understood. But if cattle weren’t worth dying for, why had Maara almost died defending them?

“Why did you have to fight last year?” I asked her.

Maara glanced back over her shoulder to see if anyone was close enough to overhear. Then she said, “Vintel made a mistake.”

“What did she do?”

“She didn’t show herself and challenge them. She didn’t give them time to take what they needed and get away. She was angry because they had killed one of our animals. She drew her sword and ran at them, and we had no choice but to follow her.”

“Were you outnumbered?”

“No,” she said. “We were evenly matched, and we took them by surprise. If we hadn’t, if we had given them time to prepare to meet us, they might have done us a lot more harm.”

I saw in my mind’s eye the image of Maara lying on a bloody litter.

“They did quite enough harm as it was,” I said.

We walked on in silence for a while. I had forgotten about cattle raiders. I was thinking about Vintel.

“Why does everyone admire Vintel’s leadership?” I asked.

“One mistake doesn’t make her a bad leader.”

“What she did was foolish.”

“Most people would consider what she did courageous.”

“Do you?”

Maara shook her head. “What Vintel showed that day wasn’t courage. Vintel loves a fight. The butchered calf gave her an excuse.”

“She risked the lives of her warriors because she loves a fight?”

“There’s a place for leaders like Vintel,” Maara said. “In time of war, she would go joyfully into battle, carrying the hearts of her warriors with her.”

“This isn’t a time of war.”

“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”

It would be our turn to watch that night, and Laris wanted to accompany the traders a little farther on their journey, so Maara and I went alone up Greth’s Tor. Before we were halfway to the top, I was stumbling from exhaustion.