Roland Green: Knights of the Sword

“If no harm comes to our people, none will come to yours. We shall even help heal your wounded. For every man harmed, though, a life will be forfeit. If battle is forced on us, the village will be burned, over your heads or not, as the gods allow.”

Hurvo frowned. “Have you wizard or cleric with healing magic at their command?”

“Only the healing craft of those dwellers in the greenwood who must heal swiftly or die,” Darin said. He felt a certain compulsion to honesty with this self-possessed village speaker, whose refusal to change countenance had begun to remind him of Waydol.

“Let it be so, if the village consents,” Hurvo said. “I can decide myself if there is no time, but there will be a better chance of peace if I may hear the leading folk.”

The sun was westering, but darkness made neither peace bloody nor battle kindly. Nor would eagerness escape Hurvo’s sharp eyes.

Darin nodded. “Do not dally, or there will be a higher price. But you have until the sun touches the top of that tree over there.” He pointed at what appeared to be a young vallenwood, at the southwestern corner of the fields.

Hurvo nodded and led his villagers back into the shadows. Darin quickly ordered wedges thrust into the gate, to keep it open, and three or four archers climbed into the gate towers.

The rest of the men set to guarding, tending the captives, and fitting the gate bar with handles to make a more useful battering ram. Even if Dinsas yielded, there was always someone who had lost a key, run away, or been killed, leaving no gentle way to reach the valuables behind a locked door.

* * * * *

Hurvo’s argument with his village took nearly all the allowed time and most of Darin’s remaining patience as well. The leader of the raiders was sitting on the battering ram, whetting the sword he had yet to draw in anger on this raid, when Hurvo reappeared.

“We consent to your terms,” he said. Then he looked at Imsaffor Whistletrot. “Best keep that kender close by you.”

“I am of this band, and go where I please,” Whistletrot said. “If it doesn’t please you-”

“Any harm to him is harm to one of us,” Stalker said. He never raised his voice, even in battle, but Darin saw Hurvo take an exceptionally tight grip on his beard before nodding.

After that, the evening went well enough, if one can so speak of the looting of a village by a band of robbers, however moderate in their conduct. It helped that for the most part Darin’s men chose to remain sober, although he noticed a good many water bottles in the piled loot. He’d wager that most of them would leave Dinsas tomorrow morning, tied to a man’s belt and filled with ale or wine.

One man found a jug of mead and emptied it before he staggered out into the lanes again. Darin had him tossed down a disused well, then pulled up only when he was thoroughly frightened, half-drowned, and a little more sober. His chief hoped that the man would be fit to march in the morning. He had never left a living man behind on any raid, and few dead, but litters were always a burden.

Imsaffor Whistletrot was here, there, and everywhere, seldom in Darin’s sight for longer than the chief needed to assure himself that the kender was still alive. Darin vowed to pass word to the kender’s village, although, any word that implied system and order seemed odd applied to kender.

Regardless, it was not much more than a day’s march from Dinsas, though hard to find if the kender did not wish visitors. Darin thought they ought to know that the poison of hatred for nonhumans had flowed all the way from Istar to Dinsas, and to be on the watch against their once-friendly neighbors.

Then he decided to leave the warning to Whistletrot, if in fact the local kender hadn’t learned all they needed to know by their own methods. They would also have their own methods of dealing with hostile neighbors, and if it came to betting, Darin would not bet against the kender.

It was well after dark when Whistletrot reappeared for the last time. By now the village square was well lit with torches and bonfires, and the loot formed a glittering pile in the middle. The kender swung out hand over hand along a projecting rooftree to its carved head, then dropped lightly to the ground, turning a somersault in midair before landing.

Darin looked up from a plate that held meat pie, porridge, and brownfish pickled with onions. “There’s a house that hasn’t been visited, and it’s locked,” Whistletrot said.

Several men laughed. “You didn’t get in, and you call yourself a kender?” one said.

Whistletrot looked hurt. “I was told not to bring my lockpicks along on this raid. I-” He fished in the pocket of his coat. “Oh, my. I suppose I forgot to clear out my pockets before we left. Let me see.”

Quite a few things turned up in the pockets, including the lockpicks. Another was a small, shiny metal ball.

“Ha, that’s one of my bola balls,” Stalker said. Short as he was for a sea barbarian, he still managed to loom over the kender.

“It is? Come to think of it, it does look like it came off a ship. Let me hold it up to the light and-”

Stalker tapped the underside of the kender’s arm lightly with his belaying pin. The ball flew into the air. Stalker’s hand plucked it from midair and pocketed it before it could fall more than a hand’s breadth.

“You really ought to start putting your name on things you’re going to leave lying around,” Whistletrot began indignantly. “Otherwise there’ll be so much confusion-”

Darin held up a hand for silence; Hurvo had appeared in the square.

“Yes, Speaker?”

“I heard you talking of a locked house. Did the kender-ah-do as usual with it?”

“No.”

“As well for him. That is the house of Sirbones, our priest of Mishakal.”

“Then why hasn’t he come out to help us? We have enough work for three healers, I should think.”

“Ah-we have been taking our hurt to him-eh-in private. He has been busy since it was still twilight.”

Darin’s first thought was of taking a villager’s life-preferably Hurvo’s-for this piece of deceit. Then he realized that he had not said anything about Sirbones in the agreement. It would be dishonorable to punish the village for not granting what had not been asked in the first place!

Also, none of the raiders were dead or even mortally hurt. There were two who needed healing to walk-one with an arrow wound and another because one of his captives had bitten him on the thigh-and several more who would march in greater comfort if they had healing.

Darin took a deep breath. “If he is done with your folk, then let him come forth and heal mine.”

“I cannot command him. That was not part of the agreement.”

“You have a fine memory,” Darin said.

Hurvo smiled. “Not so fine for a villager, really. My great-uncle-now that was a memory. He could hold all the buying and selling of a village’s three-day fair in his head, without writing a single figure on a wooden slab. Of course, he couldn’t write in the first place, but-”

“That sounds like Uncle Trapspringer,” Whistletrot put in. “He once had to judge a contest-”

Darin made a sound that plainly declared the unwisdom of continuing this contest of marvelous uncles.

Hurvo turned and led the others toward the healer-cleric’s house, with Whistletrot riding on Darin’s shoulder.

* * * * *

The house was a small one, only two rooms with a woodpile out back and a well-mortared chimney now trickling herb-scented smoke on the night wind. The door was ajar, and in the torchlight Darin saw that it bore what looked like blue scratchings.

A closer look suggested that it was intended to be a carving of a woman holding a staff. It was hard to tell if she was intended to be clothed or not.