“It is time to send you out, if you would be at your encampment before your people are sure we have killed you. Remember your contracts with us; we have delivered to you that which we promised. You have your obligation.”
At least he knew the correct response. “I acknowledge receipt of your knowledge and training; I admit my obligation, and swear to fulfill it to the length of my life.”
“Witnessed.” That brought a stir, and the chorus from all. “Witnessed.”
A chill went down his back. He fully intended to carry out all he had promised, but that “witnessed” meant uncounted gnome pikes at his back if he failed.
Chapter Twenty
He had known he missed the sun—even the thin, cold sunlight of winter—but not until he came out into that remembered beauty, and rested his gaze on a horizon impossibly distant, did he know how much. Tears stung his eyes. It had hurt, in ways he could not define, to have his vision trapped between walls so long. It had hurt to have sounds reverberating in those walls, quiet as the gnomes had been. It had hurt to smell no live wind, with its infinitely varying smells, its constantly changing pressures on his skin. They had led him out into a morning of softly falling rain, a cold spring rain that still held a threat of late snow. Between the showers that fell curtainlike here and there he could see long tawny slopes, dark patches of woodland, the soft lavender and muted burgundy of sap-swollen buds coloring what had been gray. He heard the soft whisper of the rain on sodden grass, the distant gurgle of water running away downhill, a vast silence between the sounds where nothing would echo. Cold and damp as it was, it soothed the inside of his nose, easing with smells of wet earth and rock the dry itch from a season underground with only rockdust and gnomes. His own human smell, that he had been aware of as unlike the others, disappeared into that freshness.
“We will see you at Blackbone Hill,” said Armsmaster Setik, who had come out with Gird. Arranha was staying behind awhile, but had told Gird he would follow him later. Gird wondered if Arranha knew about Blackbone Hill; the gnomes mentioned the name only when Arranha was not around.
“Yes,” said Gird, drinking in another breath of that air, wondering why the ragged, uneven landscape of duns and grays seemed so much more beautiful than the careful sculpting of the gnomes’ halls.
“You have the maps.”
“Yes.” As he looked at the land, now, the maps he had been taught to use seemed to overlay it. He would go that way, and find a tiny watercourse to lead him north and west, then leave that one by a steep-browed hill, and find another beyond the hill, and then the wood he almost thought of as his wood . . .
“And—” Setik looked up at him with an expression Gird could not interpret. “I found it most satisfying; for a human, you are—are not unlike a kapristi in some ways.”
Gird turned, surprised. The Armsmaster had been even less outgoing than his other instructors, if possible. Gird had assumed he would be glad to rid himself of a clumsy human oaf. Setik’s brow was furrowed slightly, his scars pulled awry.
“You are by nature hasty, as all the lateborn are: hasty to laughter, to anger, to hunger—but you forced foresight on yourself, and withheld haste. You have a gift for order, for discipline, for what we mean by responsibility.”
“You are a good teacher,” Gird said.
The gnome nodded. “I am, that is true. But the best teacher cannot turn a living thing from its nature: I could not make stone grow and bear fruit like a tree. I could not teach a tree to fly. Even among us, who are much alike, some have less talent for war than others. You have it, and you have what is rare with us—what war requires that the rest of our life does not need, and that is a willingness to go beyond what is required, into the realm of gift.”
Gird was both puzzled and fascinated. All he had heard, from Lawmaster Karik, showed the gnomes’ distrust of gifts, and until now he had not suspected the gnomish soldiers thought differently. Setik smiled suddenly, a change as startling as if rock split in a manic grin.
“War calls for more than fair exchange; we soldiers know what the lawgivers cannot understand. Even among us, I say, are some who freely give—and in war that giving wins battles. You have that; from what you say, it is a human trait.” Abruptly, he stopped, and his face changed back to its former dourness. “Go with the High Lord’s judgment,” he said. Gird glanced back at the entrance to the gnomes’ caves, so nearly invisible; there stood several others, watching and listening.
“You will not take thanks,” he said to Setik, “but among my people it is rude to withhold them. I will thank the gods, then, for sending me to such a good teacher of war, and ask their grace to keep my mind from scrambling together what you so carefully set apart.”
If he had believed the gnomes had any humor whatever, he would have said Setik’s black eyes twinkled. “Soldiers of one training are as brothers of one father,” the gnome murmured. “Go now, before someone asks awkward questions.”
Gird nodded, saying nothing past the lump in his throat, and headed downslope. He stepped carefully across the boundary, and did not look back until he had traveled well out of sight of that unambiguous line.
The gnomes had shown him a small, exquisitely carved model of the lands they called gnishina, all drained by the great river Gird had never yet seen, from the western plains to the sea. All his life Gird had lived among low hills and creeks whose windings made no sense to him. He had thought the world was made lumpy, like redroots in a pan, until he saw the gnomes’ country, with great mountains rising behind a line of hills.
The model made sense of what had seemed random hummocks. He had not understood the gnomes’ explanation, but the great concentric arcs of rock were obvious enough, with the river dividing them like the cleft of a cow’s hoof. Rows of hills, variously shaped by the different kinds of rock in them (he understood that much; everyone knew that red rock made rounded slopes, and white rock made stepwise ones) bowed sharply away from the river, to run almost parallel to the southern mountains as they neared them. Between the hills ran the creeks and rivers, all tributaries of the Honnorgat. These stream valleys had formed natural routes of travel. Moving a large force north or south was easiest near the Honnorgat; moving it east or west was easiest away from the great river.
Once more under the open sky, he could interpret the hills before him for what they were: the flanks of a great arch. Going north, he would cross white rock to yellow, and yellow to brown, then travel west to come back to yellow and white. Just so a man might run his finger from the side of a cow’s hoof to the cleft, then forward to the point—and find hoof wall again. More importantly, with his understanding of the whole region, and the maps the gnomes had provided, he would know where he was—where his army was—and how to get where he wanted to go. He hoped.
Human lands were scarcely less perilous than the gnome princedoms, though their perils were less uncanny. Gadilon might not trouble his gnomish neighbors, for fear of their retribution, but he had no intention of letting a peasant uprising unseat him. Gird was hardly into that domain when he saw the first patrols, seasoned soldiers whose alertness indicated respect for their new enemy. Whatever had happened while Gird was underground with the gnomes, it had ended all complacency in the outlying holdings. Gird spent an uncomfortable half-day lying flat among dripping bushes as the patrols crossed and recrossed the route he had planned to take. When dark fell, he extricated himself, muttering curses, and edged carefully around the hill and down a noisy watercourse. Here the water noises would cover any he made.