Sanctuary - Lynn Abbey [69]
Molin strained his memory and recalled her father’s chosen battle. If he’d had moments of greatness in the northern wars—and Molin humbly believed that he had—Phorixas hadn’t been one of them. A warrior cherished the victories he hadn’t earned but, if he were a wise man, he never bragged about them. The Rankan center, led by a commander’s vainglorious nephew, had collapsed when the young man panicked and got himself killed. Molin had led a desperate cross-field charge against the Nisi flank because it was attack or be cut down where they stood.
“Was your father an officer?” he asked Nadalya tactfully.
“Chief purveyor, Lord High Architect,” she replied with a blush.
“Ah,” Molin sighed.
Purveyors were the necessary evil that followed every army, keeping it supplied with food and fuel, weapons and armor, and everything else it required. There’d never been an Imperial commander who wouldn’t rather face the enemy naked than a cranky purveyor. Molin had been grateful that as a priest he’d never had to deal with the breed—until now.
“Where do we begin?” he asked cautiously.
They began with food. Molin gave away the grain Lord Serripines had hoped to sell for a tidy profit. Lord Serripines wouldn’t dare complain, not since he’d chosen to live in an undefendable villa far beyond the city walls. To satisfy the Irrune appetite for gold, Molin gave away some of the treasure the Servants had appropriated when they took over the temples. Retribution wouldn’t dare complain, either.
Then he and Nadalya got down to the hard bargaining: After a generation of wandering, the world-weary Irrune had come to the end of their road. They needed land for themselves and their herds of sheep and horses, and they expected Sanctuary to provide it.
Though Molin habitually thought of Sanctuary as a carbuncle plunked down in the middle of nowhere, it was, in fact, one of the thirty-seven Imperial cities. It did not sit in reeking isolation beside the sea; instead, it was surrounded—quite thoroughly surrounded—by a broad ring of homesteads, hamlets, and villages. No matter that most of the people living in the Sanctuary’s purview regarded the city with the same suspicions and low opinion that Sanctuary itself held for the Rankan capital, the fact remained that there were easily four times as many people living around Sanctuary as lived within its walls—and if Molin had settled the Irrune among them, he’d have doomed them all.
The nearest empty land lay southwest of Sanctuary, and it was empty for a good reason. Between Sanctuary and the Hammer there wasn’t enough high ground to forage a pig. What wasn’t saltwater marsh was bracken fen or blackwater swamp. The natives of Sanctuary called it simply—accurately—the Great Morass, and if Molin had tried to settle the Irrune there, they’d have returned in a month with blood in their eyes.
What Molin and the Irrune needed was grass-covered land which, if not empty, was at least not occupied by Imperial citizens. There was such an expanse in the foothills of the World’s End Mountains, about four days’ ride to the north and west.
“Follow the White Foal River to its source,” Molin advised, omitting any mention of the Gunderpah brigands as he went on to describe a nomads’ paradise.
If the brigands and the Irrune couldn’t stand the sight of each other—and Molin doubted they could—they’d resolve their differences with the brutal efficiency of their kinds. If the Irrune wiped out the brigands—well, the foothills were a veritable paradise for horse herders. And if the brigands drove out the Irrune? Sanctuary had little to fear from a tribe that ran from the Gunderpah brigands with their tails between their legs.
Arizak per-Mizhur had heard too many hollow promises to take Molin’s word for land that lay over the horizon. He dispensed with Nadalya’s interpretations