Days of Blood and Fire - Katharine Kerr [117]
“Well, what if I release you from the debt?”
“There is no release. A debt is a debt until it’s paid.”
All at once Otho got up and strode off, muttering something incomprehensible. When Garin and Mic exchanged significant glances, Rhodry remembered the story of their kinsman’s exile.
“Well, you have my thanks from the bottom of my heart,” Rhodry said.
Garin smiled briefly, then turned to Mic.
“Get some food for all of us, will you? We’ve got a lot to do before we get on the road today.”
Rhodry decided that indeed there was nothing more to say and went to lead the mule to water.
Over the next few days’ worth of traveling, the land rose higher and higher in broken hills, gashed by steep ravines and white-water creeks. Through the thin soil huge black boulders pushed like knuckles on a fist. In narrow valleys they found farmsteads, round thatched houses and barns barricaded inside earthworks, where dogs rushed to throw themselves against the gates and bark savagely as they passed. Now and again they saw a farmer or his wife, too, standing guard with flail or cudgel clasped in work-gnarled hands while these strangers walked on by. Grazing in what grass there was they saw goats, never cows, rarely sheep, and each flock was guarded by two and three boys, never a single lad alone, and a pack of dogs.
Late on the second day they passed an entire fortified village, some twelve buildings surrounded by stone walls laced with timber. Brown and white goats grazed on the tops of the walls, which were covered with sod. At the gates stood armed guards, two young men dressed in the omnipresent coarse brown cloth of this part of the world. One carried a sword, the other a dwarven-style battle-ax, with a long shaft and deep-bitten curved blade. As the dwarven party passed by, the pair went tense, ready to sound an alarm, no doubt, at the least sign of trouble.
“Did these people pay fealty to Lord Matyc?” Rhodry asked.
“Hah!” Garin snorted. “I doubt me if they know he existed. You find people like this all along the Deverry border, a tough lot they are, hating lords and foreigners alike. My people do a little trading with them, now and again, but they don’t have much we want, and they don’t much like us, either.”
It was then that Rhodry realized they’d crossed the border between his native kingdom and the dwarven lands. Even though he’d known better in his mind, in his heart he’d always assumed that Deverry went on and on, right to the edge of the world, perhaps. He looked round at the glowering hills, dark with twisted pines, gashed with tumbles of rock down ravines, and realized that indeed this was a foreign land.
“But you know, that village, from what I can see of it, anyway, looks like a Deverry village, or more like a dun, with that big broch in the middle and all.”
“Well, these border folk, they came from Deverry, after those wars you had over the true king and all that,” Garin said. “They were on the losing side, I think.”
“They were,” Otho chimed in. “After Maryn took the throne, a lot of the Cantrae lords fled to what you people call Cerrgonney, and when Maryn’s grandson—I think he was a grandson? Well, one of Maryn’s descendants, anyway, but eventually he followed them to Cerrgonney to impose his peace, and some of them, the most stubborn ones, like, fled here.”
By then they were climbing a hill just beyond the village, and Rhodry paused for a look back. He could see clearly from this height into the compound, a thing of mud and pigs, small children running round half-naked among the chickens, wood houses with mangy thatch clustering round a broch built of piled stones caulked with mud. Yet flying from the broch was a crude pennant, whipping this way and that in the wind. Finally he got a look at it—a boar device.
“The final end of the enemies of the king,” Otho said with obvious relish. “Stinking whoreson bastards.”
“You sound like