Binis nodded. “They hated the magelords too, so they gave him pikes.”
“No. They gave him training, and maps, and advice. Duke Marrakai of Tsaia gave him gold to buy pikes.”
“Duke Marrakai? Gird took gold from a magelord? I don’t believe it!”
“He did,” Luap said. “And his son visited Gird after the war, in Fin Panir; Gird liked him.” He glanced at Binis; her lower lip stuck out, and she looked like someone determined not to believe that night follows day. She was certainly not going to believe that Gird, hero of the peasants’ war, considered a Tsaian magelord and his son friends. “But about Arranha: Gird rescued Arranha from the mageborn who hated him—the priests who really did follow bad gods, as you call them—and they became friends.” He thought a long moment. “Binis—did you ever meet Gird?”
She reddened. “No, not to speak to. I saw him a few times, in the city, but he was . . . you know, he was the Marshal-General, and I was a child.”
Hard to believe the years had gone that fast. Hard to believe that someone could be a yeoman-marshal, yet never have drilled with Gird, never have struck a blow in real battle. He’d known she was younger, much younger, but . . . We’re getting old, he thought suddenly. All of us who knew Gird; all of us who really know what that war was about, and who was on which side.
“Were you in the city the day Gird died?” Luap asked. Binis nodded. “And did you feel it?”
“I felt . . . something,” she said. “I remember how hot it had been, sticky. There’d been quarrels all day, up and down the street. My aunt got on me about something—I don’t really remember—and I threw a pot at her. I knew it was wrong; I knew she’d tell my da, and my uncle, and the Marshal and they’d all be down on me again. I ran out the back way, up the alley toward the old palace, and I thought I’d run out in the meadows. They wouldn’t know where to look. Everything was unfair; everybody was angry with me and it wasn’t any of it my fault.” Her voice had risen, remembering old grievances. Then her face smoothed out again, and her voice softened. “I remember . . . I’d run too fast, I couldn’t seem to breathe, and I felt squeezed somehow, like stones were on me. And then all at once it was over. Like a storm passing, but there wasn’t any storm. Stillness, but not sticky, not so hot. Calm, I guess you’d say. I had stopped running, and now I thought I’d go back.”
Luap was afraid to break her mood, so they rode in silence some distance until the pack pony stumbled, and he reined up and dismounted to check it. Binis stayed on her horse, and as he lifted each of the pony’s hooves in turn, she went on.
“I didn’t know what’d happened right then. Not till after I was back at our house. My aunt—she came to me as I came in, said she was sorry, and I was sorry too, for breaking a good pot. I felt—I don’t know how I felt, except that nothing hurt inside, the way it had since my mother died. All the quarrels seemed silly, but not anything to grieve over. Just put them aside and go on. Later the Marshal said something about Gird having taken a kind of curse off us, but in your Life of Gird it’s not a curse.”
“No one really knows,” Luap said. “If it was a curse, or an evil spirit, or just ourselves . . . but we know whom to thank for lifting it.”
“Yes, but—but I still get angry. I still see things go wrong, things happen that aren’t fair.”
“Gird didn’t heal us, the way Aris heals,” Luap said, thinking it out as he spoke. He swung back up onto his horse and nudged it into motion. “Maybe he couldn’t; maybe even the gods can’t. But he gave us a respite, and a taste of what real healing is. I think we’re supposed to do the rest.”
“Hmph.” Binis scowled again. “But we’re not Gird.”
“True enough. But Gird wasn’t Gird all along.” Which was, he realized, just the point Raheli had made about his Life of Gird. Could she be right about that? No. She had been right about many other things, but on that he would not change his mind. No amount of talking or writing would convince people who had not known him that Gird had begun as a perfectly ordinary man . . . they would simply decide that he had not been a hero. Just as Binis could not accept a Gird who befriended mageborn and Sunlord priests, later generations would deny either Gird’s early life, or his later accomplishments. And he could not take the chance that they might deny what Gird had done. He must make sure that Gird lived through the ages as the hero he had really been, even though that meant shaping his early life. He wasn’t pretending Gird had been perfect—he understood how people could love someone more for his faults—but Gird’s life had been entirely too unformed to last as a story.
“Cob says the magelords mistreated you,” Binis said. “So why didn’t you turn against them?”
Luap turned in the saddle to see if she was serious. She was. “Binis—what else would you call joining Gird’s army, than turning against them?” He had been so careful to keep himself out of the telling of Gird’s life—he had been trying to make Gird the center, as he should be—but if people like Binis didn’t even know what Gird’s luap had done, perhaps he should make another revision. She looked unconvinced; Luap tried again. “Binis, Cob is my friend from those days—from Gird’s army. We fought on the same side. The magelords killed my wife, my children—” As always, tears came when he thought of that; he blinked them away. Binis was the sort to think he had pretended grief. “—And I did turn against them, the ones who had done it. I have the scars to prove it.”
“But then why did you take up with them again afterwards?” The depth of ignorance in that question took his breath away. How could he possibly explain? “I mean,” she said, putting the final peg in her assembly of faulty logic, “everyone knows you’re the mage-king’s son, and if you’d really turned against the magelords, you wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
Among the rush of emotions came the cold thought that he’d never known one who needed Arranha’s classes more: even he, not the brightest of Arranha’s pupils, had learned not to use one word with two meanings in the same argument. Would she ever understand that the “them” he knew now were not the same “them” who had abandoned him in childhood and destroyed his family? Gird had known that. Raheli understood that; he realized how different she was from this sort of peasant, and how unfair he had been to blame her for the minds of those like Binis.
He even felt a trickle of pity for Binis herself, cramped into a narrow mind and unlikely to find a way out. In her, Gird’s insistence that right was right and wrong was wrong, that compromises always cost more than could be easily reckoned, had turned to a rigid system unlike anything Gird himself would approve. What could he say to open a window in her head? Gird would have used his fist, likely enough, claiming that it took hard knocks to crack thick-shelled nuts . . . but that was not his way, nor would Binis learn that way from him.
“The people who hurt me, who killed my family,” Luap said, “were killed in the war. I saw their bodies, many of them. The mageborn who survived were children and the very old, some women who had not even known me, let alone caused me harm. Should I hate them? Gird did not hate them.”
“But they were the same sort. Magelords!” She made it a curseword. His magery growled within him, as if it could respond of itself to an insult. He fought it down, telling himself she was only saying what she had been taught.
“Are all peasants fair, kind people?” he asked instead. “Surely you’ve known some who cheated, who stole, who were unfair—?”
“Ye-esss . . .” She dragged that out, as if it came unwillingly. “But they’ve been cheated by the mageborn; it’s not their fault.” She eyed him, looking for a reaction. “The Marshal-General says most real thieves and brigands are part-mageborn anyway; that’s why they’re too lazy to work and be honest.” That’s why he doesn’t trust you, half-mage, was as clear in her gaze as if written on parchment.