could have done no different. But your witnessing that, and your speaking up, caused, well, difficulties for all the officers there. It would have been better if you had obeyed my command and stayed with Parth.”
“But that girl would have been hurt.”
“Yes. That is likely.” My father’s voice was tight. “But if she had been hurt, it would not have been your fault, or our business at all. Likely no one would have questioned her father’s right to punish the offender. The scout hurt that soldier’s son over a mere threat to his daughter; his right to punish the man was less clear to the men. And Commander Hent is not a strong commander. He seeks his men’s permission to lead rather than demands their obedience. Because you protected her and offered testimony that the threat was real, the situation had to be dealt with. That man and his family had to be banished from the fort. The common soldiers didn’t like that. They all imagined the same happening to them.”
“The commander let the soldier hit the scout,” I slowly realized.
“Yes. He did it so he would have a clear reason to banish him, independent of the insult to the scout’s daughter. And that was wrong of the commander, to take such a coward’s way out. It was shameful of him. And I witnessed it, and a bit of that shame will cling to me, and to you. Yet there was nothing I could do about it, for he was the commander. If I had questioned his decision, I would only have weakened him in the sight of his men. One officer does not do that to another.”
“Then…did Scout Halloran behave honorably?” It suddenly seemed tremendously important to me to know who had done the right thing.
“No.” My father’s reply was absolute. “He could not. Because he behaved dishonorably the day he took a wife from among the Plainspeople. And he made a foolish decision to bring the product of that union to the outpost with him. The soldier sons reacted to that. She displayed herself, with her bright skirts and bare arms. She made herself attractive to them. They know she will never be a Gernian’s rightful wife, and that most Plainspeople will not take her. Sooner or later, it is likely she will end up a camp whore. And thus they treated her that way today.”
“But-”
My father nudged his horse back into motion. “I think that is all there is for you to learn from this today. We shall not speak of it again, and you will not discuss it with your mother or sisters. We’ve a lot of road to cover before dusk. And I wish you to write an essay for me, a long one, on the duty of a son to obey his father. I think it an appropriate correction, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied quietly.
CHAPTER 2
Harbinger
I was twelve when I saw the messenger that brought the first tidings of plague from the east.
Strange to say, it left little impression on me at the time. It was a day like many other days. Sergeant Duril, my tutor for equestrian skills, had been putting me through drills with Sirlofty all morning. The gelding was my father’s pride and joy, and that summer was the first that I was given permission to practice maneuvers on him. Sirlofty himself was a well-schooled cavalla horse, needing no drill in battle kicks or fancy dressage, but I was green to such things, and learned as much from my mount as I did from Sergeant Duril. Any errors we made were most often blamed on my horsemanship, and justifiably so. A horseman must be one with his mount, anticipating every move of his beast and never clinging or lurching in his saddle.
But that day’s drill was not kicks or leaps. It involved unsaddling and unbridling the tall black horse, then demonstrating that I could still mount and ride him without a scrap of harness on him. He was a tall, lean horse with straight legs like iron bars and a stride that made his gallop feel like we were flying. Despite Sirlofty’s patience and willingness, my boy’s height made it a struggle for me to mount him from the ground, but Duril had insisted I practice it. Over and over and over again. “A horse soldier has got to be able to get on any horse that’s available to him, in any sort of circumstances, or he might as well admit he has the heart of a foot soldier. Do you want to walk down that hill and tell your da that his soldier son is going to enlist as a foot soldier rather than rise up to a commission in the cavalla? Because if you do, I’ll wait up here while you do it. Better that I not witness what he’d do to you.”
It was the usual rough chivying I received from the man, and I flatter myself that I handled it better than most lads of my years would have. He had arrived at my father’s door some three years ago, seeking employment in his declining years, and my father had been only too relieved to hire him on. Duril replaced a succession of unsatisfactory tutors, and we had taken to one another almost immediately. Sergeant Duril had finished out his many long years of honorable military service, and it had seemed only natural to him that when he retired he would come to live on my father’s lands and serve Lord Burvelle as well as he had served Colonel Burvelle. I think he enjoyed taking on the practical training of Nevare Burvelle, Colonel Burvelle’s second son, the soldier son born to follow his father’s example as a military officer.
The sergeant was a shriveled little man, with a face as dark and wrinkled as jerky. His clothing was worn to the point of comfort, holding the shape of a man who was most often in the saddle. Even when they were clean, his garments were always the color of dust. On his head he wore a battered leather hat with a floppy brim and a hatband decorated with Plains beads and animal fangs. His pale eyes always peered watchfully from under the brim of his hat. What hair he had left was a mixture of gray and brown. Half his left ear was missing and he had a nasty scar where it should have been. To make up for that lack, he carried a Kidona ear in a pouch on his belt. I’d only seen it once, but it was unmistakably an ear. “Took his for trying to take mine. It was a barbaric thing to do, but I was young, and I was angry, with blood running down the side of my neck when I did it. Later that evening, when the fighting was over, then I looked at what I’d done, and I was ashamed. Ashamed. But it was too late to put it back with his body and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I’ve kep’ it ever since to remind me of what war can do to a young man. And that’s why I’m showing it to you now,” he had told me. “Not so you can run tell your little sister and have your lady ma complain to the Colonel that I’m learning you wild ways, but so that you can think on that. Before we could teach the Plainspeople to be civilized, we had to teach them they couldn’t beat us in a fight. And we had to do that without getting down on their level. But when a man is fighting for his life, that’s a hard thing to remember. Especially when you’re a young man and out on your own, ’mong savages. Some of our lads, good honest lads when they left home, well, they wound up little better than the Plainspeople we fought against before we were through. A lot of them never went home. Not jus’ the ones who died, but the ones who couldn’t remember how to be civilized. They stayed out there, took Plains wives, some of ’em, and became part of what we’d gone out there to tame. Remember that, young Nevare. Hold on to who you are, when you’re a man grown and an officer like the Colonel.”
Sometimes he treated me like that, as if I were his own son, telling me stories of his days as a soldier and passing on the homespun wisdom that he hoped would see me through. But most days he treated me as something between a raw recruit and a rather dim hound. Yet I never doubted his fondness for me. He’d had three sons of his own, and raised them and sent them off to enlist years before he’d gotten to me. In the way of common soldiers and their get, he’d all but lost track of his own boys. From year to year, he might receive a single message from one or another of them. It didn’t bother him. It was what he had always expected his boys to do. The sons of common soldiers went for soldiers, just as the Writ tells us they should. “Let each son rise up and follow the way of his father.”
Of course, it was different for me. I was the son of a noble. “Of those who bend the knee only to the king, let them have sons in plenitude. The first for an heir, the second to wear the sword, the third to serve as priest, the fourth to labor for beauty’s sake, the fifth to gather knowledge…” and so on. I’d never bothered to memorize the rest of that passage. I had my place and I knew it. I was the second son, born to “wear the sword” and lead men to war.
I’d lost count that day of how many times I’d dismounted and then mounted Sirlofty and ridden him in a circle around Duril, without a scrap of harness to help me. Probably as many times as I’d unsaddled and unbridled the horse and then replaced the tack. My back and shoulders ached from lifting the saddle on and off the gelding’s back, and my fingertips were near numb from making the cavalryman’s “keep fast” charm over the cinch. I was just fastening the cinch yet again when Sergeant Duril suddenly commanded me, “Follow me!” With those words, he gave his mare a sharp nudge with his heels and she leaped forth with a will. I had no breath for cursing him as I
