The Messenger
A vignette.
“THERE’S A RIDER ON THE HILL,” THE GIRL TOLD ME, her chest heaving from her run to find me. “A man. A soldier.”
I dried my hands and went out onto the porch to look. As she’d said, a rider descended the hill track, his horse picking its way carefully. A messenger. Come to ask for more food for the army, I guessed. Our grain fields had yielded well, and the fishing had been good. We could spare a larger tithe, if we must.
The horse and rider drew closer. A memory stirred, a memory as much of the body as the mind. Could it be? “Stay here,” I said to the girl. If I walked quickly, I could meet the messenger at the edge of the village.
I stopped where the stone wall that kept the sheep out of our gardens turned to run alongside the track. I was sure now, recognizing somehow a man I’d known only briefly. The smile on his face told me he knew me, too. He drew the horse up and sat, looking down. “Gwen.”
“Galen.” Grey streaked his hair now, as it did mine. We’d conceived a daughter, twenty years ago this autumn. I hadn’t seen him since. He dismounted.
“Lena said you were a council leader,” Galen said. I knew he’d met our daughter on the Wall this past year. Fear snatched at my breath: his observation wasn’t an idle one.
“I am,” I said. “Why?” The sound of children at play drifted up the hill. Bees hummed in the heather. Summer had turned to autumn two nights past. It’ll just be a request for food, I told myself. Knowing it wasn’t.
“I ride as an Emperor’s Messenger,” he said. “You will need to call your other council leaders together.”
***
We sat in my workroom, the bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters scenting the room. Dust motes hung in the slanting light from the window. “You are sure?” Sara said. Half a year of peace. At least the crops were in.
Galen spread his hands. “As sure as we can be. You understand there is little aid to give you? Leaving should be considered. The south will be safer.”
We looked at each other, the three of us. Safer, he’d said. Not safe.
“We fought and won before,” Sara said. “We can do it again.”
“Maybe.” Galen’s eyes were the same hazel as Lena’s. She was a soldier. But so was he, and he’d survived for over twenty years. His daughter might have his luck, too.
“Leave us, please,” Gille said. He got up without demur.
“You can sit on the porch,” I told him. “Close the door.”
“Do we vote?” Gille was headwoman; the question was hers to ask. But it had been on all our minds.
“We must,” I said. Inside I was hollow, despair lurking. To fight again. To see more women die.
To perhaps lose completely this time.
She nodded. “But,” I said, “it can’t be a choice between fighting or not. Not this time.”
“Then?”
“To fight or leave,” Sara said quietly. “If the women vote to leave, then we do.”
Galen wasn’t Casyn, not in any way. He was slighter, lacking Casyn’s authority and presence. Just a soldier, a scout, bringing a message. But he came to the meeting hall, to sit quietly while we gave the women of our village the grim news of impending invasion for the second time in fewer than three years.
“It is unlikely this will be one boat of forty men this time,” Gille said. “Nor are they traders, but warriors. Consider carefully, women of Tirvan.”
“Who are these people?” Cate asked. When I’d come back from Berge I’d told the village of them, this enemy from the north, but it must have seemed a distant fear to most. Linrathe’s problem, not ours, although Callan had given assistance to our new allies.
“Northerners,” Galen said, rising. “Linrathe has had an uneasy peace with them for many years. Fear has kept them north for generations, but the stories grow old and forgotten, and their new king seeks land and more.”
“Fear of what?” someone asked. “Our army?”
“No,” I said. Only one thing made sense. “The Eastern Fever. Am I right, Galen?”
“You are,” he replied. “But no longer.”
***
We would vote the next evening, giving the village a day to discuss and debate before deciding. A quarter-moon cast little light, but the sky was cloudless. A white river of stars halved the domed night. I sat with Galen on my porch, a shawl across my shoulders.
“I told Lena I’d come, if the Emperor let me,” he said.
“Has something happened to her?” I had been uneasy since she and I had last spoken. She’d been awaiting orders, she’d told me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling she was hiding something.
“Aye,” he said. As my hand went to my mouth he added, “She is alive, Gwen.”
“Then what?” I demanded.
“There was a trial.”
“A trial? For what?” But I had been a councilwoman of my village for many years. I knew about laws and punishments. “The man she killed?”
“Aye.”
“It was self-defence.” I put a hand down onto the seat of the bench, steadying myself.
“He would have said the same. She was stealing his boat.”
“To bring warning of an imminent invasion,” I argued.
“Still,” my daughter’s father said, “she took a life, and not in war.”
Not in war. It mattered. There had been a truce, and she’d broken its terms. The price to be paid should have been death. “The Emperor was merciful?”
Galen hesitated. “Perhaps. The sentence was exile.”
Exile. “Where?” I whispered, although I knew. Exile, not banishment. Banishment would have meant Lena could have looked for refuge north of the Wall. Exile meant one thing: the Durrains. The mountains no man—or woman—had crossed in living memory.
I listened as Galen told me. “I took them there myself. Gave them what advice I could. I’ve been into the mountains, a bit, scouting.”
“Them?” She wasn’t alone. “Who is with her?”
“The man she was with, when she stole the boat.” Did a flash of hope show on my face? It must have, because Galen shook his head. “He’s no soldier, or hunter. An envoy of some sort, who negotiates between the north’s leader and their landholders, is what I understand. He won’t be of much use to her.”
“Better than being alone,” I said. “And Lena’s a skilled hunter, Galen. She’s—she was always chosen to take down a deer at the autumn cull. “
“And a fine scout, the General Turlo tells me. He trained her himself.” Words to fight despair, the way I told a woman in breech labour she was strong, she could do this. Sometimes she could. Lena was strong.
He put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m proud to call her my daughter. As good a soldier as most men, and better than many.” He smiled, ruefully. “And to think I sent her a doll, all those years ago.”
“Kira liked it,” I said. “My other daughter. She will want to know her sister’s fate.”
All my years as a midwife and healer had taught me to control my emotions. Even so, I had to brush at my eyes. There had been so many tears these past years, for sons and daughters lost and a world changed. My grief was nothing special.
The hand on my shoulder spread, grasped me more tightly. “Gwen,” Galen said quietly. His daughter too. I turned to him, letting him hold me, leaning against his spare strength. Until his fingers found my chin and tipped my face up. His kiss was gentle, and somehow over the intervening years still familiar, welcomed, wanted. A need to forget, to take comfort, rose in me. I pulled back.
“It’s not Festival,” I said.
“Those rules shouldn’t hold,” he said. “Don’t pretend, Gwen. That time is passing.”
It would have already passed, had the Emperor had his Assembly as he’d planned. Gille had told me of the plan, some time after Lena had ridden south with Casyn. We couldn’t go back to how we’d lived before. We’d broken the rules of Partition, but there had been no chance to make new ones.
Tomorrow the women of Tirvan would vote, and I had little doubt of the outcome. We would fight, and some of us would die, and I might be one of them this time. I looked at the man I’d shared Festival with once, who’d given me my firstborn, who had come to tell me of her now. He might die too. I took his hand.
“Time is always passing,” I said. “Let’s not waste it.”
This vignette takes place after the second book in the Empire’s Legacy series. While both Galen and Gwen are recurring characters in the series, this is the only story from Gwen’s point of view.
Like almost everything in my books, the sentence of exile for Lena and her companion is based in the concept of exile in the Roman world. Exile was indeed a way to avoid the death penalty in republican and imperial Rome; in republican Rome, exile to escape the death penalty was voluntary (and limited to the upper classes.) In Imperial Rome and its provinces, exile was a direct punishment, although there were degrees: exile could be temporary or permanent, sometimes citizenship was lost, and property could or could not be seized. In Lena’s case (and her companion’s), exile is permanent, and includes a loss of citizenship and property. Or does it? Exile can be revoked, but sometimes it takes a very very long time.
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Marian- I believe this is one of the stand-out sentences of the piece: “Time is always passing,” I said. “Let’s not waste it.” Oh, how true and undying are these words. They live forever to everyone living. And to everyone who have lived. Wonderful piece.
I enjoyed this. An intriguing set-up.