“I know,” she said, taking his hands in hers. It was, Luap thought, a very dramatic gesture. “Were you there yourself?”
“Not then, no—but I’d been out in the drillfields, and it didn’t take long—”
“It’s all right,” she said. “I understand.” Did she indeed, Luap wondered. Did she begin to understand what she was doing, with her fierce determination to leave Gird’s life as blocky and unshaped as it had been in actuality? Why could she not realize that no story lived without shaping, without trimming here and filling out there? The point was to have Gird remembered.
Later that day, he hugged this certainty around him as he came into the Council meeting, expecting trouble from her, and those other Marshals who had not liked his Life of Gird as much as others. He had been able to hold them off by reminding them that Raheli, as Gird’s daughter, must have some say. He had expected her to understand his purposes a little better than she had, to defend him to the others. Now—now it was going to be difficult.
Cob met him just outside the meeting room, and shook his head, though he smiled. “Luap, I could have told you not to try polishing clay. I know—you were trying to make the story fit the old songs, but you should have realized it would never pass Rahi.”
Luap managed to smile back, shrugging. “I thought I’d done a good job, until she raked me over about it. I really think that of Gird, you know. I think he’s that special.”
“Special, yes. But Gird’s old gray horse—can you imagine it tricked out in flowers and braids and a golden bridle? It was a horse for such a man: strong and brave, not a fancy magelady’s pony. So with Gird—he never wore a fine shirt to the end of his life, and knew better than to try it. You’ve put lace on a plough, Luap, and neither the lace nor the plough looks the better for it.” Then Cob’s arm came around his neck. “But I will say, Luap, that it’s the most gorgeous story I ever read, even though not much like Gird. Life would’ve been easier with your Gird running things.”
The others, once the Council convened, took the copies of the Life which Luap had made for them, and Cob suggested that Luap explain his work.
“You probably know already that Marshal Raheli, Gird’s daughter, doesn’t like what I’ve done.” Better get that out of the way first; they would realize he was being honest. “What I thought—what I wanted to do, was write a Life of Gird that would live through the generations, and show why we reverence him. He did more than just raise the peasants in a revolt and win the war . . . we know that. He tried to make a way for mageborn and peasant to live in peace with one another. He tried to devise a fair law which all could use.” He paused and drew a deep breath, looking beyond the table out the window into a darkening courtyard. “It seemed to me that Gird was too large to fit on my page; I could not find the right words for him as he really was. So I read in the archives, all the lives of the old kings and warriors, and what we know of the songs the elves make, and tried to shape what I wrote into something men and women could remember and chant by the fireside a hundred sons’ sons’ lives from now. Gird is a greater hero than any I found in the tales; it seemed to me I must show that in the way I wrote of him.” He sat down, with a nod to Raheli, now calm and composed.
Marshal Sterin raised his hand, then stood. “I read Luap’s Life of Gird two hands of days ago. It seemed to me very fitting for what Gird accomplished: perhaps more splendid than strictly necessary, but as Luap says, making clear to the future why Gird was great. It’s true I found some of the phrases flowery, but if that is the mode in which men have always written of heroes, why not?” He sat down abruptly, as if he’d finished any argument. Raheli raised her hand, and at their nods stood in her place.
“He’s a hero to you, to everyone: he saved everyone.” She swallowed; her lips firmed. “He didn’t save me.” Before anyone could answer that, she went on. “Oh, I know, that isn’t fair. He didn’t want it to happen; he tried to fight and was outnumbered; he saved my life after. But the plain fact is that he did not save me, and what I remember includes that. My suffering was the price of his action; he waited until afterwards to start fighting.”
Luap closed his eyes a moment. Against the inside of his lids, he saw his wife’s face, the wife who had died—he had heard how terribly—in a village market square because he had not protected her. Gird had seen Raheli, but he had been able to heal her—or at least get her away—while his own wife . . . You would not be her hero, if she had lived, his conscience told him. I am no one’s hero, he thought sourly, and opened his eyes again to find Rahi watching him with all Gird’s intensity. Her face changed; he wondered what had come into his.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Your wife—”
“Never mind.” He waved that away; he could not tell Rahi what he’d told Gird, that he had not really loved his wife until he saw her dragged away, weeping in fear and shame. He hoped Gird hadn’t told anyone else, but he would not ask if she knew. “I can see what you’re saying, Rahi, but do you think it is valid for everyone? He did not save you, as I did not save my daughter, but does that make what he did less important? Or less important that the future should know about him?”
Cob stood, and looked around the table. “Most of you know that I was with Gird from the first forest camp. Except for Raheli, there’s none else can say that now. I was there the day he came, with his son Pidi and his nephew, a man near dead with grief but determined to make something come of it. And that’s when Raheli still lay near death with woundfever and childfever, so though she is his daughter, I knew him longer as a leader in war.” He grinned. “That’s to stop anyone saying he knows what Gird would have wanted. I admit I don’t. He was a plain man, and plainspoken, rough as the bark on an oak, but he knew as well as anyone the value of the old ways of saying things. And I’ve known our Luap from the day he first came, as well. To my mind, he’s served Gird honestly all these years, and endured the taunts of them that didn’t serve half as well. That’s to stop anyone saying that what I say next comes from jealousy or dislike of Luap. It’s not. I like him more now, and trust him more now, than I did that first year.”
“Well then? What’s your complaint?” asked Sterin, a bit flushed. Luap knew, as they all did, that Sterin had hardly met Gird before the war ended. He had organized and fought with a grange far from Gird’s army; he had earned his Marshal’s rank honestly, but resented the easy familiarity of those who had been Gird’s friends.
“It’s what I told Luap, before coming in here.” Cob grinned at Luap, who could not help smiling back. Cob and Gird were wood from the same tree; whatever elevated Gird to greatness had been added to, not changed from, the essential peasant identity. “He’s put lace on a plough; he’s made Gird all smooth and easy, even his mistakes made decorative. Gird was a hero, right enough, but he was a plain man first: good bread and water—yes, and ale—not fine pastries and sweet wine. If the future knows him as a hero just like others, what good will it do them? He can help only those that remember him as he was.”
“If he’s remembered at all.” Luap murmured that, not having permission to speak, but Cob turned to him sharply.
“Luap, he will be remembered. If not by your writing, then by fireside tales—and I grant—” He held up his hand. “I grant those tales and songs are likely to be even more astray. We’ve all heard some of them. But for this, for the story we most want told, I for one would like you to make it more like the man, plainer.”
Luap nodded, expecting the vote that came. He would rewrite the Life of Gird, both now and again . . . and again, when some peoples’ narrow ideas had died with them. He would not falsify—he had not falsified—what had happened, but he would choose his own way of saying it.