His Own Good Sword (The Cymeriad #1) (14 page)

When the hour had finally gone he went back to the storeroom. The
guard saluted him again and opened the door for him and stood aside
so he could go in. He froze in mid-step in the doorway, his mouth
drying, his heart going cold. The prisoner lay face-down in a
spreading pool of blood on the floor before him.

For a long moment he didn’t move, just looked down stupidly at
the crumpled body, the blood, steadying himself with a hand on the
door jamb. Then he went down slowly into the room and crouched down
on his heels and ordered the guard, over his shoulder, to go get the
surgeon. Useless—the Cesino was dead—but he ordered it
anyway. The surgeon came and turned the body over and took something
from the Cesino’s bloodied hand. Verio had come with him. He
stood in the doorway and watched.

“How?” he said.

The surgeon said, “Cut his own throat. The buckle of his belt,
sir.”

“Son of a bitch,” said Verio.

Tyren stood. “See to the body,” he said.

His hands were shaking and he didn’t want Verio to see. He went
back to his office and sat down again in the desk chair and rubbed
his face with one hand, let out a long, ragged breath, tried to
return to his work and put the thing out of his mind. He cut a length
of fresh papyrus and a new quill. Then he took out the codex which
held the muster list and went through it, tracing the pages with one
finger, until he came to Sælo’s name. He sat there and
looked down at the blank papyrus and made no move. The words wouldn’t
come. He sat there a long time. He couldn’t concentrate. He
listened absently to the preparations for the mid-day meal going on
out in the mess, his thoughts straying. Finally he tossed the quill
down and pushed back the chair and stood.

He went out to the stable to saddle Risun. His hands were shaking so
badly now it took effort to cinch the saddle, to buckle the bridle
straps. He finished, finally, and took the gray horse by the reins
across the emptied yard to the gate. He called one of the guards
down.

“Tell the lieutenant I’ll return by the fifteenth hour,”
he said.

He left the fort and took Risun out onto the Rien road. He rode until
he was out of sight of the village. Then he directed Risun to the
west and rode up the embankment into the pine wood, leaving the road
behind him. He came upon the Muryn farm from the eastern side.

He dismounted at the edge of the clearing and went up to the little
flag-stone house on foot, leading Risun. A dog barked as he
approached. Two boys were waging a small war with sticks in the yard.
Twins—the mud-streaked faces were alike. They were perhaps
seven or eight years old. They looked up at the dog’s barking.
They saw Tyren, stared at him a moment, and then one of them threw
down his stick and bolted in through the low open doorway of the farm
house, shouting something rapidly in Cesino. The other stood as he
was, unmoving, his mouth hanging open in a slack circle, his own
stick forgotten in his hand.

Muryn’s wife came out from the house, wiping her hands on the
skirt of her wool tunic. The boy came behind her.

“I’m looking for Muryn,” Tyren said to the woman.

He saw the uncertainty in her eyes.

“He’s in the stable, my lord,” she said.

“I’m here, Lord Risto,” Muryn said.

He was coming over from the stable. He came unhurriedly, calmly, his
face blank.

“What can I do for you, my lord?” he said, when he’d
gotten close.

“You’re occupied, Muryn?”

“It’s nothing, my lord.”

“We can talk, then.”

Muryn studied him, briefly. Then he nodded. “Let me take the
horse for you, Lord Risto, and we can talk.”

He gave Risun’s reins to Muryn and waited while Muryn took the
horse into the stable. The woman was still standing with the boys
before the doorway. After a moment she hastened the boys gently away
with her hands and said, “Come in, lord, and rest yourself from
the ride.”

He went after her into the house. He stopped just inside the doorway
to let his eyes adjust to the dim light. There was a cook-fire
burning on the hearth at the eastward end of the room, rye loaves
rising on the hearth stones, and the smoke of the fire made his eyes
sting a little. The room was bare save for a rough-hewn wooden
trestle table at its center and some pots and jugs nestled against
the smoke-blackened wall by the hearth. There was a ladder of pine
boughs in the corner of the room, past the hearth, leading up to a
garret overhead, where the sleeping-places must be. The whole place
smelled warmly of the smoke and of earth, of rye bread and dried
herbs.

The woman had gone over to the hearth. “Have you eaten, lord?”
she said.

“I’m all right,” he said.

“We had our meal just now, lord. Let me bring you something.”

He didn’t protest further. He sat down on one of the benches
alongside the table. Muryn came in behind him and sat down at the
head of the table, to his right. The woman brought Tyren a rye loaf
and hard cheese on an earthen dish, warm, bitter brown ale in a
leather cup. He ate slowly. Muryn watched him and said nothing. There
was silence between them but it wasn’t an unpleasant silence
and Tyren found himself reluctant to break it.

He said, finally, without taking his eyes away from the dish, “You
heard of what happened, Muryn?”

Muryn said, “We had word from the village that Lord Magryn is
dead.”

“Yes.”

“And we heard you led a troop into the Outland, my lord, to
meet the rebels in battle.”

He said, “Yes.”

“You had success, I take it?”

“I had success.”

Muryn said nothing.

Tyren took the empty ale cup and turned it over and over in his
hands, absently. He put it quickly back down when he realized his
hands were still shaking. There was a tightness in his throat.

“We took a prisoner yesterday,” he said. “A farmer,
I think, by his look. Thirty years old, maybe a little more. He wore
this.”

He opened his wallet and took out the silver cloak pin and laid it
down on the board so Muryn could see it. Muryn looked at it and said
nothing.

Tyren said, “You know the man?”

Muryn said, after a pause, “I know him.”

“Has he family, that you know?”

Muryn looked up to his face, quickly. “Lord Risto—”

“Has he family, Muryn?”

There was silence a long moment. They looked at each other. Muryn’s
eyes were cold, clear, steady.

“I can tell you nothing, my lord,” he said.

Tyren shook his head. “I want you to take word to his family
that he’s dead. He took his own life, though you needn’t
tell them that if you don’t see fit. But I want them to know
he’s dead, there’s no more need to worry for him. You can
give them my sworn word he wasn’t mistreated, that he died
quickly. Do you understand me?”

Muryn looked at him. Then he inclined his head just a little and
nodded. “I understand you, Lord Risto,” he said.

The dog was barking again. One of the boys ran in suddenly through
the doorway. He spoke to Muryn in Cesino, the words coming out in
short, ragged bursts between gulped breaths. “Mægo’s
here. He’s hurt.”

The woman had sat down at the hearth to string bundles of fennel
flower. She lifted her head sharply, startled. Muryn made no move to
get up right away. He looked at Tyren, his mouth tightening. Then he
turned his face away without a word and stood and went out with the
boy into the yard. The woman laid aside her work at once to follow
him.

Tyren stood up and went after them, slowly, uneasiness knotting in
his stomach.

On the westward edge of the clearing, past the stable, the other boy
had crouched down beside something stretched out in the grass in a
dark heap—a man, Tyren saw after a moment, lying face-down,
still as a stone. Blood stained the grass round him. The short sword
sheathed across his back was Vareno steel but he was garbed in the
plain, weather-worn green-and-brown cloth of the Cesino rebels.

The boy had put an uncertain hand on his shoulder but Muryn got there
and moved the boy away and knelt down and tore off the sword-belt and
turned the man over onto his back.

Tyren recognized the high-cheekboned face at once: the Cesino, his
slave, the man he’d looked for among the dead yesterday, who’d
taken the black colt in Rien so he might come home a free man. The
ring was gone from round his throat, but it was him.

He stood there stupidly, his heart tight, his mouth dry, while Muryn
opened up the front of the Cesino’s blood-soaked tunic. There
were old, soiled bandages beneath the tunic, sodden blackly with
blood, and Muryn pulled them away so he could look at the wound: a
sword thrust, wide as Tyren’s palm, that had gone deep, just
below the rib-cage on the right-hand side. Fresh blood still ran from
it in a thin trickle. The Cesino was unconscious, his eyes sunken,
the eyelids dark, his face white as death—startlingly white
against the wine-redness of the blood.

For a moment Muryn just knelt there and looked down at it all,
frozen, his own face whitening. Then he looked up to the woman, who
stood with the boys a little way away, her right hand pressed in a
white-knuckled fist against her mouth.

“Help me, Ayne,” Muryn said.

Tyren made up his mind all at once. He moved before the woman did. He
went over and knelt on the other side of the body. Muryn looked up
sharply and questioningly into his face and he met the look without a
word, his teeth shut, not trusting himself to speak. Then he looked
down to the Cesino and slid his right arm under the Cesino’s
shoulders and lifted him, carefully. Muryn moved down to take the
Cesino’s legs and they stood together and carried the body
between them into the house.

They took him over to the hearth and the woman spread out blankets
for them to lay him on.

“Bring me clean cloths and water,” Tyren said to her,
over his shoulder.

She obeyed him wordlessly, bringing him linen cloths and water in an
earthen jug. He cleaned away the blood from the Cesino’s chest
and belly, rinsed the wound, held a cloth against it to stanch the
fresh bleeding. Then he looked up to Muryn.

“Hold him while I bandage it,” he said.

His hands were steady now as he worked. He hadn’t spent all
that time in the soldiers’ hospitals at Vione for nothing. He
owed Mureno for that.

Muryn held the Cesino upright and Tyren took another of the cloths
and tore it into long strips and wrapped up the wound tightly. He
couldn’t help but stare a little, his mouth opening, when he
saw the Cesino’s back—rows and rows of knotted scars
furrowing the sun-browned skin from shoulders to waist, the ugly,
pitted mark of a branding iron seared at the base of the Cesino’s
neck. He closed his mouth and swallowed and went on with the
bandaging. When he was done he nodded for Muryn to lay the Cesino
back down.

“More water,” he said. “He needs to drink. There’ll
be infection otherwise.”

Muryn brought him another water jug. He took it and wet a cloth and
dabbed the cloth over the Cesino’s face without wringing it
out, letting the water run down over the skin.

“Wake him,” he said to Muryn.

Muryn knelt down again and said, “Mægo.”

There was no response and they spent a little while doing that same
thing over and over: wetting the Cesino’s face, saying his name
aloud. Finally he gave a start, making a noise in his throat. He
looked up to Tyren. His gray eyes were much too bright, the pupils
dilated as with fever. He didn’t say anything, didn’t
give any indication he recognized Tyren’s face. He lay without
moving. Tyren leaned over him, slipped his right hand beneath the
Cesino’s head to lift it up, held the rim of the jug to his
lips, let the water run into his mouth, held his jaw and nose shut so
he’d swallow. He did that until the jug was nearly empty and
the Cesino was coughing a little, having swallowed wrong. Then he put
the jug down and sat back on his heels.

“He’ll need to drink often,” he said to Muryn.
“You’ll have to make him drink even if it means waking
him, do you understand?”

“Yes,” said Muryn.

“I’ll bring medicine if I can. This kind of wound—I’m
afraid there’ll be infection. I’m afraid it’s gone
too long without treatment. A mercy the blade missed the liver or
he’d have been dead a day ago.”

Muryn said, in a quiet voice, “Is it a good chance he’ll
live?”

He knew the answer, of course. Most likely the wound was septic
already. Most likely the Cesino would be dead before another day was
out. But he didn’t say that aloud.

“I don’t know,” he said.

Muryn nodded. His eyes were troubled, distant.

Tyren got up slowly to his feet. “I’d better go back,”
he said. “They’ll miss me at the fort.”

Muryn said, “Yes—of course.”

They went out to the stable. Tyren shook his head wordlessly when
Muryn made a move to do the saddling work. He saddled Risun himself
and took him out into the yard. Curiosity was gnawing at him.
Obvious, from the tightness in Muryn’s face, his voice, that he
knew the Cesino well, had known him a while.

He said to Muryn, as he mounted, “He’s close to you?”

Muryn looked up to him. “Mægo?”

“Yes.”

Muryn said, “His father—his father was a good friend.”

“Dead, I take it.”

“Yes, dead.”

Tyren said, “I swear to you I’ll do what I can for him,
Muryn.”

“I’m in your debt, Lord Risto,” Muryn said. “For
this, and for the word you brought. I thank you.”

That amused him for some reason, blackly.

“The other wouldn’t be dead and this one wouldn’t
be bleeding out on your hearth right now, if not for me. I don’t
see you’re in my debt, Muryn.”

Muryn made no reply to that. He gave no indication he’d heard.
He put a hand on Risun’s dappled neck. “Answer something
for me, now, lord,” he said.