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‘A whip?’
‘It goes a little further than that. Serfs are lazy, Sparhawk. There’s no question about that. And they’ve perfected the art of either pretending to be stupid or feigning illness or injury. It’s always been a sort of game, I guess. The masters knew what the serfs were up to, and the serfs knew that they weren’t really fooling anybody. Actually, I think they all enjoyed it. Then, a few years ago, the masters suddenly stopped playing. Instead of trying to coax the serfs to work, the gentry began to resort to the knout. They threw a thousand years of tradition out the window and turned vicious overnight. The serfs can’t understand it. Kotyk’s not the only noble who’s been mistreating his serfs. They say it’s been happening all over western Astel. Serfs tend to exaggerate things, but they all seem to be convinced that their masters have set out on a course of deliberate brutality designed to eradicate traditional rights and to reduce the serfs to absolute slavery. A serf can’t be sold, but a slave can. The one they call “Sabre” has been making quite an issue of that. If you tell a man that somebody’s planning to sell his wife and children, you’re going to get him just a little bit excited.’
‘That doesn’t match up too well with what Baron Kotyk was telling me,’ Patriarch Emban put in. ‘The baron drank more than was really good for him last night, and he let a number of things slip that he otherwise might not have. It’s his position that Sabre’s primary goal is to drive the Tamuls out of Astel. To be honest with you, Sparhawk, I was a bit sceptical about what that thief in Esos said about this Sabre fellow, but he certainly has the attention of the nobles. He’s been making an issue of racial and religious differences between Elenes and Tamuls. Kotyk kept referring to the Tamuls as “godless yellow dogs”.’
‘We have Gods, your Grace,’ Oscagne protested mildly. ‘If you give me a few moments, I might even be able to remember some of their names.’
‘Our friend Sabre’s been busy,’ Tynian said. ‘He’s saying one thing to the nobles and another to the serfs.’
‘I think it’s called talking out of both sides of your face at once,’ Ulath noted.
‘I believe the empire might want to give the discovery of Sabre’s identity a certain priority,’ Oscagne mused. ‘It’s embarrassingly predictable, but we brutal oppressors and godless yellow dogs always want to identify ring-leaders and troublemakers.’
‘So that you can catch them and hang them?’ Talen accused.
‘Not necessarily, young man. When a natural talent rises to the surface, one shouldn’t waste it. I’m sure we can find a use for this fellow’s gifts.’
‘But he hates your empire, your Excellency,’ Ehlana pointed out.
‘That’s no real drawback, your Majesty,’ Oscagne smiled. ‘The fact that a man hates the empire doesn’t automatically make him a criminal. Anyone with any common sense hates the empire. There are days when even the emperor himself hates it. The presence of revolutionaries is a fair indication that something’s seriously wrong in a given province. The revolutionary’s made it his business to pinpoint the problems, so it’s easier in the long run to just let him go ahead and fix things. I’ve known quite a few revolutionaries who made very good provincial governors.’
‘That’s an interesting line of thought, your Excellency,’ Ehlana said, ‘but how do you persuade people who hate you to go to work for you?’
‘You trick them, your Majesty. You just ask them if they think they can do any better. They inevitably think they can, so you just tell them to have a go at it. It usually takes them a few months to realise that they’ve been had. Being a provincial governor is the worst job in the world. Everybody hates you.’
‘Where does this Ayachin fit in?’ Bevier asked.
‘I gather he’s the rallying point,’ Stragen replied. ‘Sort of the way Drychtnath is in Lamorkand.’
‘A figurehead?’ Tynian suggested.
‘Most probably. You wouldn’t really expect a ninth-century hero to understand contemporary political reality.’
‘He’s sort of an enigma, though,’ Ulath pointed out. ‘The nobility believes he is one sort of man, and the serfs believe he’s another. Sabre must have two different sets of speeches. Just exactly who was Ayachin anyway?’
‘Kotyk told me that he was a minor nobleman who was very devoted to the Astellian Church,’ Emban supplied. ‘In the ninth century, there was a Church-inspired invasion from Eosia. Your thief in Esos was right about that part, at least. The Astels believe that our Holy Mother in Chyrellos is heretical. Ayachin’s supposed to have rallied the nobles and finally won a great victory in the Astel marshes.’
‘The serfs have a different story,’ Khalad told them. ‘They believe that Ayachin was a serf disguised as a nobleman and that his real goal was the emancipation of his class. They say that the victory in the marshes was the work of the serfs, not the nobility. Later, when the nobles found out who Ayachin really was, they had him murdered.’
‘He makes a perfect figurehead then,’ Ehlana said. ‘He was so ambiguous that he seems to offer something to everyone.’
Emban was frowning. ‘The mistreatment of the serfs doesn’t make any sense. Serfs aren’t very industrious, but there are so many of them that all you have to do is pile on more people until you get the job done. If you maltreat them, all you really do is encourage them to turn on you. Even an idiot knows that. Sparhawk, is there some spell that might have induced the nobility to follow a course that’s ultimately suicidal?’
‘None that I know of,’ Sparhawk replied. He looked around at the other knights, and they all shook their heads. Princess Danae nodded very slightly, however, indicating that there might very well be some way to do what Emban suggested. ‘I wouldn’t discount the possibility though, your Grace,’ he added. ‘Just because none of us know the spell doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. If someone wanted turmoil here in Astel, there’s probably nothing that would have suited his purposes better than a serf uprising, and if all the nobles started knouting their serfs at about the same time, it would have been a perfect way to set one off.’
‘And this Sabre fellow seems to be responsible.’ Emban said. ‘He’s stirring the nobles against the godless yellow dogs – sorry, Oscagne – and at the same time he’s agitating the serfs against their masters. Was anyone able to pick up anything about him?’
‘Elron was in his cups last night too,’ Stragen said. ‘He told Sparhawk and me that Sabre creeps around at night wearing a mask and making speeches.’
‘You’re not serious!’ Bevier asked incredulously.
‘Pathetic, isn’t it? We’re obviously dealing with a juvenile mind here. Elron’s quite overwhelmed by the melodrama of it all.’
‘He would be,’ Bevier sighed.
‘It does sort of sound like the fabrication of a third-rate literary fellow, doesn’t it?’ Stragen smiled.
‘That’s Elron, all right,’ Tynian said.
‘You’re flattering him,’ Ulath grunted. ‘He trapped me in a corner last night and recited some of his verse to me. “Third-rate” is a gross overstatement of his talent.’
Sparhawk was troubled. Aphrael had told him that someone at Kotyk’s house would say something important, but, aside from the revelation of some fairly unsavoury personality defects, no one had directly told him anything of earth-shaking note. When he thought about it Aphrael had not, in fact, promised that whatever was so important would be said to him. Quite possibly, it had been revealed to one of the others. He brooded about it. The simplest way to resolve the question would have been to ask his daughter, but to do that would once more expose him to some offensive comments about his limited understanding, so he decided that he’d much prefer to work it out for himself.
Their map indicated that the journey to the capital at Darsas would take them ten days. It actually did not, of course.
‘How do you deal with people who happen to see us when we’re moving this way,’ he asked Danae as they moved along at that accelerated pace later that day. He looked at his blank-faced uncomprehending friends. ‘I’ve got a sort of an idea of how you convince the people who are travelling with us that we’re just plodding along, but what about strangers?’
‘We don’t move this way when there are strangers around, Sparhawk,’ she replied, ‘but they wouldn’t see us anyway. We’re going too fast.’
‘You’re freezing time then, the same way Ghnomb did in Pelosia?’
‘No, I’m actually doing just the opposite. Ghnomb froze time and made you plod along through an endless second. What I’m doing is –’ She looked speculatively at her father. ‘I’ll explain it some other time,’ she decided. ‘We’re moving in little spurts, a few miles at a time. Then we amble along for a while, and then we spurt ahead again. Making it all fit together is really very challenging. It gives me something to occupy my mind during these long, boring journeys.’
‘Did that important thing you mentioned get said?’ he asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘What was it?’ He decided that a small bruise on his dignity wouldn’t really hurt all that much.
‘I don’t know. I know that it was important and that somebody was going to say it, but I don’t know the details.’
‘Then you’re not omniscient.’
‘I never said that I was.’
‘Could it have come in bits and pieces? A word or two to Emban, a couple to Stragen and me and quite a bit more to Khalad? And then we sort of had to put them all together to get the whole message?’
She thought about it. ‘That’s brilliant, father!’ she exclaimed.
‘Thank you.’ Their speculations earlier had borne some fruit after all. Then he pushed it a bit further. ‘Is someone here in Astel changing the attitudes of the people?’
‘Yes, but that goes on all the time.’
‘So when the nobility began to mistreat their serfs, it wasn’t their own idea?’
‘Of course not. Deliberate, calculated cruelty is very hard to maintain. You have to concentrate on it, and the Astels are too lazy for that. It was externally imposed.’
‘Could a Styric magician have done it?’
‘One by one, yes. A Styric could have selected one nobleman and turned him into a monster.’ She thought a moment. ‘Maybe two,’ she amended. ‘Three at the most. There are too many variables for a human to keep track of when you get past that.’
‘Then it’s a God – or Gods – that made them all start mistreating their serfs here a few years back?’
‘I thought I just said that.’
He ignored that and went on. ‘And the whole purpose of that was to make the serfs resentful and ready to listen to someone inciting them to revolution.’
‘Your logic is blinding me, Sparhawk.’
‘You can be a very offensive little girl when you set your mind to it, did you know that?’
‘But you love me anyway, don’t you? Get to the point, Sparhawk. It’s almost time for me to wake the others.’
‘And the sudden resentment directed at the Tamuls came from the same source, didn’t it?’
‘And probably at about the same time,’ she agreed. ‘It’s easier to do it all at once. Going back into someone’s mind over and over is so tedious.’
A sudden thought came to him. ‘How many things can you think about at the same time?’ he asked her.
‘I’ve never counted – several thousand, I’d imagine. Of course there aren’t really any limits. I guess if I really wanted to, I could think about everything all at once. I’ll try it sometime and let you know.’
‘That’s really the difference between us, isn’t it? You can think about more things at the same time than I can.’
‘Well, that’s one of the differences.’
‘What’s another?’
‘You’re a boy, and I’m a girl.’
‘That’s fairly obvious – and not very profound.’
‘You’re wrong Sparhawk. It’s much, much more profound than you could ever imagine.’
After they crossed the river Antun, they entered a heavily forested region where rocky crags jutted up above the treetops here and there. The weather continued blustery and threatening, though it did not rain.
Kring’s Peloi were very uncomfortable in the forest, and they rode huddled close to the Church Knights, their eyes a bit wild.
‘We might want to remember that,’ Ulath noted late that afternoon, jerking his chin in the direction of a pair of savage-looking, shaved-headed warriors following so closely behind Berit that their mounts were almost treading on his horse’s hind hooves.
‘What was that?’ Kalten asked him.
‘Don’t take the Peloi into the woods.’ Ulath paused and leaned back in his saddle. ‘I knew a girl in Heid one summer who felt more or less the same way,’ he reminisced. ‘She was absolutely terrified of the woods. The young men of the town sort of gave up on her – even though she was a great beauty. Heid’s a crowded little town, and there are always aunts and grandmothers and younger brothers underfoot in the houses. The young men have found that the woods offer the kind of privacy young people need from time to time, but this girl wouldn’t go near the woods. Then I made an amazing discovery. The girl was afraid of the woods, but she was absolutely fearless where hay-barns were concerned. I tested the theory personally any number of times, and she never once showed the slightest bit of timidity about barns – or goat-sheds either, for that matter.’
‘I really don’t get the connection,’ Kalten said. ‘We were talking about the fact that the Peloi are afraid of the woods. If somebody attacks us here in this forest, we’re not going to have time to stop and build a barn for them, are we?’
‘No, I suppose you’re right there.’
‘All right, what is the connection then?’
‘I don’t think there is one, Kalten.’
‘Why did you tell the story then?’
‘Well, it’s an awfully good story, don’t you think?’ Ulath sounded a bit injured.
Talen came galloping forward. ‘I think you’d better come back to the carriage, Sir Knights,’ he laughed, trying without much success to control his mirth.
‘What’s the trouble?’ Sparhawk asked him.
‘We’ve got company – well, not company exactly, but there’s somebody watching us.’
Sparhawk and the others wheeled their mounts and rode back along the column to the carriage.
‘You’ve got to see this, Sparhawk,’ Stragen said, trying to stifle his laughter. ‘Don’t be too obvious when you look, but there’s a man on horseback on top of that crag off to the left side of the road.’
Sparhawk leaned forward as if speaking to his wife and raised his eyes to look at the rocky crag jutting up from the forest floor.
The rider was about forty yards away, and he was outlined by the sunset behind him. He was making no attempt to conceal himself. He sat astride a black horse, and his clothing was all of the same hue. His inky cape streamed out from his shoulders in the stiff wind, and his broad-brimmed hat was crammed tightly down on his head. His face was covered with a bag-like black mask with two large, slightly off-centre eye holes in it.
‘Isn’t that the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever seen in your life?’ Stragen laughed.
‘Very impressive,’ Ulath murmured. ‘At least he’s impressed.’
‘I wish I had a crossbow,’ Kalten said. ‘Berit, do you think you could nick him a little with your longbow?’
‘It might be a little chancy in this wind, Kalten,’ the young knight replied. ‘It might deflect my arrow and kill him instead.’
‘How long’s he going to sit there?’ Mirtai asked.
‘Until he’s sure that everybody in the column has seen him, I expect,’ Stragen said. ‘He went to a lot of trouble to deck himself out like that. What do you think, Sparhawk? Is that the fellow Elron told us about?’
‘The mask certainly fits.’ Sparhawk agreed. ‘I wasn’t expecting all the rest, though.’
‘What’s this?’ Emban asked.
‘Unless Sparhawk and I are mistaken, your Grace, we are privileged to be in the presence of a living legend. I think that’s Sabre, the masked whatever-you-call-it, making his evening rounds.’
‘What on earth is he doing?’ Oscagne sounded baffled.
‘I imagine that he’s out wronging rights, depressing the oppressed and generally making an ass of himself, your Excellency. He looks as if he’s having a lot of fun, though.’
The masked rider reared his horse dramatically, and his black cape swirled around him. Then he plunged down the far side of the crag and was gone.
‘Wait,’ Stragen urged before the others could move.
‘For what?’ Kalten asked.
‘Listen.’
