was twelve when I saw the messenger who brought the first tidings of plague from the east.
Strange to say, it left little impression on me at the time. It was a day like many other days. Sergeant Duril, my tutor for equestrian skills, had been putting me through drills with Sirlofty all morning. The gelding was my father’s pride and joy, and that summer was the first that I was given permission to practise manoeuvres on him. Sirlofty himself was a well-schooled cavalla horse, needing no drill in battle kicks or fancy dressage, but I was green to such things and learned as much from my mount as I did from Sergeant Duril. Any errors we made were most often blamed on my horsemanship and justifiably so. A horseman must be one with his mount, anticipating every move of his beast, and never clinging nor lurching in his saddle.
But that day’s drill was not kicks or leaps. It involved unsaddling and unbridling the tall black horse, then demonstrating that I could still mount and ride him without a scrap of harness on him. He was a tall, lean horse with straight legs like iron bars and a stride that made his gallop feel as if we were flying. Despite Sirlofty’s patience and willingness, my boy’s height made it a struggle for me to mount him from the ground, but Duril had insisted I practise it. Over and over and over again. ‘A horse soldier has got to be able to get on any horse that’s available to him, in any sort of circumstances, or he might as well admit he has the heart of a foot soldier. Do you want to walk down that hill and tell your da that his soldier son is going to enlist as a foot soldier rather than rise up to a commission in the cavalla? Because if you do, I’ll wait up here while you do it. Better that I not witness what he’d do to you.’
It was the usual rough chivvying I received from the man, and I flatter myself that I handled it better than most lads of my years would have. He had arrived at my father’s door some three years ago, seeking employment in his declining years, and my father had been only too relieved to hire him on. Duril replaced a succession of unsatisfactory tutors, and we had taken to one another almost immediately. Sergeant Duril had finished out his many long years of honourable military service, and it had seemed only natural to him that when he retired he would come to live on my father’s lands and serve Lord Burvelle as well as he had served Colonel Burvelle. I think he enjoyed taking on the practical training of Nevare Burvelle, Colonel Burvelle’s second boy, the soldier son born to follow his father’s example as a military officer.
The sergeant was a shrivelled little man, with a face as dark and wrinkled as jerky. His clothing was worn to the point of comfort, holding the shape of a man who was most often in the saddle. Even when they were clean, his garments were always the colour of dust. On his head, he wore a battered leather hat with a floppy brim and a hatband decorated with beads and animal fangs. His pale eyes always peered watchfully from under the brim of his hat. What hair he had left was a mixture of grey and brown. Half his left ear was missing and he had a nasty scar where it should have been. To make up for that lack he carried a Kidona ear in a pouch on his belt. I’d only seen it once, but it was unmistakably an ear. ‘Took his for trying to take mine. It was a barbaric thing to do, but I was young and I was angry, with blood running down the side of my neck when I did it. Later that evening, when the fighting was over I looked at what I’d done, and I was ashamed. Ashamed. But it was too late to put it back with his body and I couldn’t bring myself to just throw it away. I’ve kep’ it ever since to remind me of what war can do to a young man. And that’s why I’m showing it to you now,’ he had told me. ‘Not so you can run tell your little sister and have your lady ma complain to the colonel that I’m learning you wild ways, but so that you can think on that. Before we could teach the plainspeople to be civilized, we had to teach them they couldn’t beat us in a fight. And we had to do that without getting down on their level. But when a man is fighting for his life that’s a hard thing to remember. Especially when you’re a young man and out on your own, ’mongst savages. Some of our lads, good honest lads when they left home, well, they wound up little better than the plainspeople we fought against before we were through. A lot of them never went home. Not jus’ the ones who died, but the ones who couldn’t remember how to be civilized. They stayed out there, took plains wives, some of ’em, and became part of what we’d gone out there to tame. Remember that, young Nevare. Hold on to who you are when you’re a man grown and an officer like the Colonel.’
Sometimes he treated me like that, as if I were his own son, telling me stories of his days as a soldier and passing on the homespun wisdom that he hoped would see me through. But most days he treated me as something between a raw recruit and a rather dim hound. Yet I never doubted his fondness for me. He’d had three sons of his own, and raised them and sent them off to enlist years before he’d got to me. In the way of common soldiers and their get, he’d all but lost track of his own boys. From year to year he might receive a message from one or another of them. It didn’t bother him. It was what he had always expected his boys to do. The sons of common soldiers went for soldiers, just as the Writ tells us they should. ‘Let each son rise up and follow the way of his father.’
Of course it was different for me. I was the son of a noble. ‘Of those who bend the knee only to the King, let them have sons in plenitude. The first for an heir, the second to wear the sword, the third to serve as priest, the fourth to labour for beauty’s sake, the fifth to gather knowledge…’ and so on. I’d never bothered to memorize the rest of that passage. I had my place and I knew it. I was the second son, born to ‘wear the sword’ and lead men to war.
I’d lost count that day of how many times I’d dismounted and then mounted Sirlofty and ridden him in a circle around Duril, without a scrap of harness to help me. Probably as many times as I’d unsaddled and unbridled the horse, and then replaced the tack. My back and shoulders ached from lifting the saddle on and off of the gelding’s back, and my fingertips were near numb from making the cavalryman’s ‘keep fast’ charm over the cinch. I was just fastening the cinch yet again when Sergeant Duril suddenly commanded, ‘Follow me!’ With those words, he gave his mare a sharp nudge with his heels and she leapt forth with a will. I had no breath for cursing him as I finished tightening the strap, hastily did the ‘keep fast’ charm over it and then flung myself up and into the saddle.
Those who have not ridden the plains of the Midlands will speak of how flat and featureless they are, how they roll on endlessly forever. Perhaps they appear so to passengers on the riverboats that wend their way down the waterways that both divide and unite the plains. I had grown up on the Midlands, and knew well how deceptive their gentle rises and falls could be. So did Sergeant Duril. Ravines and sudden crevasses smiled with hidden mouths, waiting to devour the unwary rider. Even the gentle hollows were often deep enough to conceal mounted men or browsing deer. What the unschooled eye might interpret as scrub brush in the distance could prove to be a shoulder-high patch of sickle-berry, almost impenetrable to a man on horseback. Appearances were deceiving, the sergeant always warned me. He had often told me tales of how the plainspeople could use tricks of perspective in preparing an ambush, how they trained their horses to lie down, and how a howling horde of warriors would suddenly seem to spring up from the earth itself to attack a careless line of cavalrymen. Even from the vantage of tall Sirlofty’s back, Sergeant Duril and his mount had vanished from my view.
The gentle roll of prairie around me appeared deserted. Few real trees grew in Widevale, other than the ones which Father had planted. Those that did manage to sprout on their own were indications of a watercourse, perhaps seasonal, perhaps useful. But most of the flora of our region was sparsely leaved and dusty grey-green, holding its water in tight, leathery leaves or spiny palms. I did not hurry, but allowed myself to scan the full circle of horizon, seeking any trace of them. I saw none; I had only the dry dents of Chafer’s hoofprints in the hard soil to guide me. I set out after them. I leant down beside Sirlofty’s neck, tracking them and feeling proud of my ability to do so until I felt the sudden thud of a well-aimed stone hit me squarely in the back. I pulled in Sirlofty and sat up, groaning as I reached back to rub my new bruise. Sergeant Duril rode up from behind me, his slingshot still in his hand.
‘And you’re dead. We circled back. You were too busy following our
