The Doomfarers of Coramonde by Brian Daley Read Free Book Online Page A

man,
seeing him, snatched a short bow from the cart and fumbled for an arrow.
Springbuck laid a hand to Bar and said, “I carry no quarrel to you, yet do not
nock that shaft or you force me to show you my sword. What’s come to pass in
Erub?”
    The old man was
a shrunken specimen without an excess ounce of flesh on life-weary bones. He
laid aside his bow after a moment and removed his shapeless hat from years of
habit in talking to a mounted warrior, but there was a spirited glint in his
eye.
    He swallowed
once, and admitted, “This noon a detachment of lancers came to make arrest of
our teachers, Andre deCourteney and Van Duyn. We didn’t want their new teaching
to end, and so there was fighting. But now more soldiers are coming and we must
go. The only safety lies in the keep with Van Duyn and deCourteney.”
    “What?”
exploded the Prince, baffled. “Are you so enamored of these teachings that
you’ll leave your homes and defy the regulars?”
    The toothless
mouth became, for a moment, firm and set. The grizzled chin came up, and the
man’s reply was slow and emphatic.
    “I have lived
my whole life within a day’s walk of this town,” he began. “I’ve worked hard
every day that I can remember for my overlord. I go forth in the darkness each
morning to follow his oxen in the furrows, my lot scarcely better than theirs.
I have watched my wife grow old and crooked with endless toil, she who was once
so fair and gay. Two sons have I lost to plague, two to war, one daughter to
famine and another at her birth. There is small enough difference between me
and the beasts in harness, so constant is my labor and so seldom have I given
any thought to my own life and its meaning. I just tendered my tithes and
worried about the crop.
    “Then there
came two who made me pause and wonder about the wherefores of life, who told me
about the world beyond my furrows. They quoted the words of learned men,
glorious thinkers and doers of whom we had never heard, and when they asked
what we thought of this and I spoke, they listened. All this, though I am only
an old man, stooped with the years.
    “And it was as
if I had been shut up in darkness all my life and only now let out. So now, the
Queen at Earthfast has decided to put an end to the practice of teaching here,
to make of us again what we were. But when the cavalrymen came we fought them.
Fought them! Few of them left alive, and Van Duyn brought down many with his
weapon that reaches out to kill at distances.
    “Do we love
this new learning, you ask? Well enough, I say, to leave this fief forever if
we must, rather than submit again to our overlord.”
    Springbuck was
silent, calculating what their hard life had cost these old souls. Their
children gone, life must now be spent in constant labor, since the sons and
daughters who would have cared for them in the winter of their days would never
return. It was, perhaps, the end of the man’s name forever when he died, with
no one to keep his memory alive or light incense for him at the altar of his
gods.
    In this light,
the war that Springbuck had contemplated against Fania and Strongblade was not
so brave or glittering a thing to entertain.
    While he’d been
angry at such disrespect shown for a liege, he was fascinated with what
energies had been evoked in this aged breast. The peasants were yanking at the
donkey’s harness again. And critical choices can be made as quickly and as
simply as this: the Prince unsheathed Bar and, leaning down, struck the beast
loudly across its rump with the flat of his blade. It bucked to its feet,
kicking the cart behind it, and the couple tugged it into motion once more.
    The heir to the Ku-Mor-Mai trailed behind.
    The moat
outside the castle was long dry and choked with high weeds. One of the double
doors beyond the drawbridge had been left ajar, doubtless for such latecomers
as they. The gates, like the drawbridge, were of old wood but looked sound. The
keep’s walls were worn but