Valdemar 06 - [Exile 01] - Exile’s Honor (53 page)

“We have—but who told you of all this?” he asked, trying to make sense of the puzzle. “Who told you about Ghost-Horses and White Riders?”

If it was Laika, he was going to have a few choice words with her. That sort of story could have gotten her killed and the other three Heralds exposed.

“Oh, it was Kantis, of course,” the child told him blandly, in a tone that put the emphasis on
of course.
“Kantis has told us about the White Riders
forever,
and he promised us that some day they would come and take us where there are always good things to eat and a soft bed to sleep in, and no one would make us walk when we're tired, and that we'd all have a mum and a da, though we'd have to share—”

Before he could ask her
who
Kantis was, much less
where
he was and how he had come up with this unlikely tale and convinced them it was going to be true, she caught sight of something past his shoulder, and with a squeal of glee, ran off.

He looked around; what she had seen, and what had set the rest of the children running, was the first lot of Heralds and wagons topping the hill, brushed by the scarlet and gold of sunset. And in a moment, he was nothing more than a rock in a flood of children who found a little more energy in their weary bodies to run. They flowed around him like the largest flock of sheep in the world, faces transmuted by hope—and it was all he could do to hold back his tears.

And of course, faced with this oncoming flood of children screaming, not in fear, but with delight, the Heralds and Healers and teamsters reacted just as any decent human beings would—tumbling out of the seats and off their mounts to open their arms and their hearts, to open the boxes and bags of provisions they had brought, to stuff little hands and mouths with food and drink and toss little bodies into wagons padded with blankets, even as more little bodies were helping even littler ones to climb up as well. They couldn't understand what the children were saying, but they didn't need to know to understand what was needed.

And many of
them
were smiling with tears in their eyes. How could they not? After leaving that grim scene of battle aftermath behind them, how could they
not
want to ease their own aching hearts with the warmth of a joyful child?

And it was all sorted out in a remarkably short period of time. Those carts that
had
been drawn by children were fastened to the backs of the wagons. With the children themselves sharing out the provisions in a generous way that made Alberich marvel,
everyone
got enough to fill his empty belly. The few camp followers who had come with the children rather than fleeing, burdened with abandoned infants, were provided with seats and clean linens for the babies, and in lieu of milk, sugar-water for them to suck to at least stop their crying and ease their hunger. The last of the teamsters, finding no need for their empty wagons, asked permission to go on under guard and see what they could get out of the abandoned camp. After a moment of thought, Alberich gave his permission—although, with un-childlike forethought, the little ones were
all
carrying loot in their bundles: whatever was small, valuable, and light.

They gave it up to the Heralds without a second thought, and that pained him. Did they think they would have to
pay
for their rescue?

“No,” Laika said, when he asked her that. “No, this is just something that this mysterious Kantis told them to do.”

He relayed that information back to the army via Kantor, along with his recommendation that at least a portion of it be kept in trust for the children themselves. That was all he could do about it, but they seemed far more interested in eating and sleeping than in the jewelry and coins they'd lugged along, so he dismissed it from his mind.

As if the One God had decided to ease their way further, the full moon rose before the last light of twilight faded. With the broad track to follow, there was no chance of getting lost, and not much chance that a horse would make a misstep and hurt himself; accordingly there was never even a
thought
but that they would turn around and head back to the Border.

Bit by bit, as Laika and the other three talked to the older children, a broad picture began to form of what had happened.

One of the first Karsite orphans scooped up by the Tedrels when they first made their alliance and moved into Karse was a boy they all called Kantis. It was
he
who had somehow concocted the odd “cult” that Laika had noticed among the children—a cult that admitted no adult members, and whose members were sworn to secrecy with a solemn oath that, apparently, not even the boys who were later initiated into the Tedrel lodges ever broke.

Most of the cult that Kantis had created had a very familiar ring to Alberich, for it was virtually identical to the simple forms of Vkandis' rites that he had learned as a child from his mentor Father Kentroch, even to calling the God by the name of Sunlord. But there were more interesting additions. . . .

Kantis had, from the beginning, it seemed, included a kind of redemption story, told whenever times were particularly hard for the children. He told them all that “some day” the Keepers (as he called the Tedrel adults) would abandon them and never return. And on that day, the White Riders and their Ghost-Horses would come for them and take them all away into a new land. This would
not
be the home of the Sunlord, he had assured those who, out of bitter experience, had feared that this meant they would all have to die. No, this was a very real land, where they would all make families with a shared set of parents, where they would always have enough to eat and a warm, safe place to sleep, and where they would never have to follow the drum again.

The children stolen out of Valdemar only reinforced Kantis' stories, when they identified the White Riders as Heralds.

Somehow, he had impressed upon them the need to keep all of
this
utterly secret, even more so than the redemption story.

And somehow, he had known the very moment when the Tedrels lost their battle, for even before the remnants of the army came running back to the camp to take what they could carry and flee, he was telling the children that
now
was the time. He organized them, told them they should get what they wanted and whatever “shiny things” they could find in the adult camp, hide the ponies and donkeys until the last of the adults were gone, and prepare to march north, themselves, as soon as the last of the Keepers fled away.

Which was exactly what they had done. Those camp followers who had not run off with skirts stuffed full of valuables and some protector or alone had been bewildered by the stubborn insistence of the children on their goal, but had gone along with it, seeing no other options before them. Most of
them
were heartbreakingly young by Alberich's standards, and not yet hardened from “camp follower” to “whore.”

They must have set out from the remains of the camp about the same time that Alberich and his group set out from Valdemar. The entire story was mind-boggling. And he wanted, very badly, to meet this boy, this so-clever, so-intelligent boy calling himself “Kantis,” and speak with him.

But though he rode up and down the line, he could not actually find the boy. One child after another asserted that yes, Kantis was certainly with them—somewhere—but no one could tell him what group Kantis was with or where he'd last been seen. He might have been a figment of their collective imagination—he might have been a ghost himself—for he had somehow utterly vanished from among them the moment that they spotted Laika and Kulen.

T
HE wagons loaded with the most portable of the Tedrel wealth caught up with them much sooner than Alberich had anticipated. This was in part because the portable wealth was
very
portable indeed, and in part because the section carrying the children was moving slowly. The poor things were exhausted, and even packed together like so many turnips in a sack, once stuffed with food and water, they fell asleep. So, since the treasure wagons were going to have to catch up with the main part of the group anyway, Alberich took their pace down to a steady walk.

Laika came up beside him; now that night had fallen, he was able to relax his guard. Laika, sharing his memories of Karse, was similarly relaxed. Nighttime held no terrors for Alberich now, not after so many years in Valdemar.
If
the Sunpriests unleashed their demons—and given how quiet the night was, he rather thought that said demons were fully engaged in pursuing stray Tedrels at the moment—he didn't think they would bother to do so here. So far as the Sunpriests knew at this point, there was no one in this part of the hills but the children, and why waste their most dangerous and powerful nighttime weapon on a lot of children?

Children who couldn't escape on their own, and would soon be facing the Fires anyway. . . .

He had to unclench his jaw over that thought. And he sent up a silent prayer—not the first, and he doubted if it would be the last—that one day the Sunpriests would be answering for their transgressions, and one day it would be priests like his old mentor Kentroch, and like Father Henrick and Geri, who would be ruling in Karse again.

One of the other Heralds came riding up, looking nervously over his shoulder. “Herald Alberich, shouldn't we be putting outriders all around?” he asked. “I mean—”

“Peace; at ease be, protected we are by the priests themselves,” Alberich said, and exchanged a glance with Laika. She laughed.

“Karsites won't stir out of their doors after dark,” she said, with the air of
one who knows.
“Their priests have a habit of sending some sort of creepy-howly thing out at night, to make sure nobody's out doing something they shouldn't.”

“Even the Sunsguard stirs not,” Alberich added, with sardonic amusement. “So that now, should even a priest order them out, they will not go.”

“Caught in their own trap,” Laika said. “And serve 'em right. So by the time sun's up,
we'll
be so close to our people that even if they catch on we're here, our folks can mount a big enough rescue to squeak us across without losing so much as a hair.”

Alberich considered how much the Tedrels had drained from the country, and sighed with pain. “
If
they scout or FarSee us, we take—so far as they will know—useless mouths only. We leave—think, they will—the camp unplundered.” Privately, he doubted that even the Sunpriests would trouble themselves with FarSeeing this part of Karse; they would use their power to track down the Tedrels and Tedrel recruits. They must know that Sendar was dead, but they must also know that now was not the time to attack Valdemar themselves. Valdemar had just fought a terrible battle, and were exhausted, yes, but the Karsite Sunsguard was drained and weakened by the demands of the Tedrels. The current Son of the Sun—

He set bandits against Valdemar, then hired the Tedrels to do his work for him,
Alberich thought somberly.
And now, thanks to the drain that the Tedrels put on his resources, the Sunsguard must be even more depleted. He hasn't got the
means
to attack us.

No, the Sunsguard would be mopping up what was left, with the priests assisting, then they would all descend on the Tedrel base camp with an eye to getting back what had been drained from them.

“Believe me, there is no way the plunder in that camp can be exhausted, even by us and the Tedrels that were left,” Laika told them both. “There'll be enough there to satisfy priestly greed even after our wagons come back. It isn't only the Karsite treasury they've been draining; they've got the accumulation of some twenty or thirty years' worth of loot from other campaigns they've fought, and they've been saving it all, waiting for the day when they'd have their own land again.” She scratched her head, thinking, and added, “I'll give the bastards this much; they had discipline. Almost a quarter-century of honest pay, extortion, and booty, and they didn't spend a clipped copper coin more than they had to.
Every
fighter had his own store of loot, but beyond that, every true Tedrel war duke had a treasury tent, waiting for the day when he could finance the building of his own fortified keep in the heart of his own principality.”

Alberich was greatly pleased to hear
that.
If the wagons sent onward came back so well loaded, then perhaps the children's little hoards could be kept solely for their use when they were older.

If the ride out had been a mixed pleasure, the ride back was an unalloyed—if bittersweet—one. With all worry about encountering Sunsguard gone, under a glorious full moon and a sky full of stars, and buoyed on the energy of the successful rescue, there was nothing in the way of opening themselves up to pure aesthetic enjoyment of a tranquil ride through peaceful countryside. The teamsters, once the situation was explained to them, relaxed and sat easily on the seats of their wagons. Even the babies only whimpered a little, now and then. Timeless and dreamlike, they moved on across ground that seemed enchanted and drunk with peace. It was as if the One God was granting them all a reprieve from their grief, the sorrow that would confront them when they crossed back into Valdemar, giving their hearts a rest so that they could all bear it better when at last it came.

Just about the time when the moon was straight overhead, he heard the wagons coming up behind them, the sound of the wheels echoing a little among the hills. Since they were near to the spring they'd used on the way in, he called a halt there once the whole party was together again. The children didn't even wake up.

“More about these children, tell me,” he asked of Laika, when they were on the move again and a comfortable sort of fatigue began to set in. The moon, silvering the grass around them, turned the landscape into a strange sculpture of ebony and argent; with hoofbeats muffled by the soft earth and grass, they seemed to be moving in a dream, and he asked the question more to hear a human voice than for the information itself.