Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [2]
Or how tired he had become.
“Come,” he urged his escort, “it’s time to get me home to my bed.”
“You could have stayed at Land’s End. My lord father loves nothing better than to have the Lord Torchholder sleeping beneath his roof. A veritable hero and not merely of Sanctuary—as if Sanctuary could nurture a true hero—but of the Empire.”
“For all the good my heroics have done me.” Molin chuckled. “After two nights beneath your lord father’s roof, I’ve told all the stories of Imperial glory that I can remember. I’ve drunk his wine and lit his bonfire. The Imperial ancestors have been properly honored, a new Imperial year is safely begun, and I’m ready to go home.”
Atredan cocked his head in the moonlight. “You think we are all fools, don’t you, Lord Torchholder? My father, the Rankans he shelters at Land’s End … me.”
“All men are fools, Lord Larris—you, me, your lord father, and all the men and women beneath his roof. The nature of men is foolishness. Never forget it.”
“But the Serripines more than others, because Father believes Ranke will be mighty again, and that will never happen.”
“Only a fool says ‘never’ when speaking of the future.”
“There’s no future for the dead. There is no future, not for us, not for Ranke. We’re like fish in a weir. We sing praises each time it rains, but the fact is, we’re trapped, and if the rains don’t come, we die. Only sooner, rather than later.”
Molin gave Atredan a second look—he’d never before suspected that the young man had a bent for philosophy, and although he generally agreed with Atredan’s dreary assessment of Rankan prospects, he offered up a scrap of encouragement: “Sanctuary’s a coastal town, my boy. The tide comes in twice a day, no matter the rain. A man may drown, but he’ll surely never shrivel.”
“My lord father has shriveled. He hasn’t set foot in Sanctuary since the Bleeding Hand killed my mother. He lives in his own world at Land’s End with his back to the sea, waiting for an army that will never come to take back a city that was never his.”
Molin didn’t like to talk about the years when the Dyareelan fanatics had ruled Sanctuary. Neither did anyone who’d managed, somehow, to survive. The Serripines had gotten off lightly, retreating behind the walls of their fortresslike estate. But Molin would never say that to a son who’d seen his mother disemboweled, nor to her shattered husband. He temporized instead. “Your lord father feels obligated to comfort those whom the emperor has abandoned.”
And, in truth, it wasn’t Lord Serripines who made each Land’s End visit feel like an early trip to the boneyard. If the sack of Ranke had been the most unexpected event in Molin’s lifetime, the transformation of the Sanctuary hillsides from scrubland to fields and meadows should be counted a close second. The Serripines paterfamilias might have his head in the clouds where the Imperial past and future were concerned, but in the present he was a shrewd man who knew what to plant and when and—most important—who would pay the most once the fields were harvested.
Lord Serripines would have preferred to sell his harvest to Ranke—for a profit, of course—but there was no one along the eastern coast who could match the bids made in the resurgent Ilsig Kingdom to the north and west. Lord Serripines practically, but reluctantly, listened to his head, not his heart, and sold his harvest to Ilsigi sea captains, who sold it again to men who no longer paid tribute to the emperors in Ranke. Then, to assuage his guilt, Lord Serripines opened his estate to an ever-growing community of Imperial exiles and freeloaders.
The irony was not lost on Molin. With few exceptions, the elder Vion Larris Serripines was the most successful Rankan to dwell in—or near—Sanctuary in decades. He was also the unhappiest man Molin had ever met—which was a dubious accomplishment all by itself—but worse, to Molin’s jaundiced eye, was Lord Serripines’ willingness to shelter any