The Legacy of Gird by Elizabeth Moon Read Free Book Online

own garden.
    Meris, son of Aric, now the tanner's apprentice, had taken a plum the year before, but it was partly green. This year, he determined to take a sackful, and share them out, and they would be ripe ones, too. The lord's best plum tree, as Meris knew well (for his uncle was a skilled pruner of trees, and worked on them), was the old one in the middle of the garden, the only survivor of a row of plums grafted from scions of the king's garden in Finyatha. Its fruit ripened early, just before Summereve, medium-sized reddish egg-shaped plums with a silver bloom and yellow flesh.
    It seemed to him that the young lord's arrival would be an excellent time to make his raid. The lord and his retinue would be busy, and nearly everyone else would be watching the excitement in the forecourt. So as soon as the first horns blew across the field, signaling the approaching cavalcade, Meris left off scraping the hair from the wet hide he was working on, and begged his master to let him go.
    "Oh, aye, and if I don't you'll be so excited you'll likely scrape a hole in it. Very well . . . put it back to soak, and begone with you. But you'll finish that hide before supper, Meris, if it takes until midnight."
    With the prospect of a belly full of his lord's best plums, a delayed supper was the last thing Meris needed to worry about. He grinned his thanks and darted from the tannery. He had hidden what he needed behind a clump of bushes on the east side of the lord's wall . . . a braided rawhide rope with a sliding loop. Other boys used borrowed ladders, and he'd heard of the smith's boy using some sort of hook tied to rope, but he had found that the looped rope could nearly always find a limb to fasten on. With a little support from the rope, and the skill of his bare feet on the rough-cut stone walls, he had always managed to get over. And the rawhide rope, without a hook or other contrivance, never attracted the suspicious attention of the guard. Once they'd found it, and he watched from the bushes as they shrugged and left it in place. A herdsman's noose, they'd said, dropped by some careless apprentice. Let the lad take his master's punishment, and braid another.
    He waited, now, in the same clump of bushes, watching people stream by from the eastern fields. Soon no one passed. He heard a commotion around the wall's corner, from the village itself. Let it peak, he thought. Let the lord arrive. He waited a little longer, then glanced around. No one in sight, not even a distant flock. He swung the noose wide, as he'd practiced, and tossed it over the fence. He heard the thrashing of leaves as he pulled, and it tightened. He tugged. Firm enough.
    Standing back a bit from the base of the wall, he threw himself upward, finding a toehold, and another. Whenever he found nothing, he used the rope, but most of it was skill and scrambling. At the wall's top, he flattened himself along it and gave a careful look at the hall's rear windows. Once he'd been seen by a servant, and nearly caught. But, as he'd expected, nothing moved in those windows. Everyone must be watching the forecourt, and the young lord's arrival. He pulled up his rope, and coiled it on the top of the wall. He could gain the wall from the inside by climbing one of the pears trained along it; he needed the rope only for getting in. This time, though, he planned to use it to lower the sack of stolen fruit on his way out. He checked his sack, took another cautious look around, and climbed quickly down a pear tree to the soft grass under the trees.
    He heard a blast of trumpets from the forecourt, and grinned. Just as he'd planned: complete silence in the gardens, and everyone out front gaping at the lord. Silly. He was going to be there long enough for all to see, so why bother? Meris glanced around, still careful. No sign of anyone. One of the gates between the fruit orchard and the vegetable garden was open; he could see the glistening cabbage heads, the spikes of