Earth Magic Read Online Free PDF Page B

within the room.
    The great dinner boards were being unstacked and laid across their trestles to make tables for the company. Barons joined with carls to make light of the work. It was honest work for a man to do. With Morca gone, three tables had been sufficient to serve the dun, and with so few to sleep in the hall, the tables had never been struck.
    The three tables had already been increased to five and more were being laid. The benches were being carried into place. There was but one chair within the room and it was Morca’s. It stood behind the main table in the center of the dais, solid, great and heavy, as tall as Morca and wide enough to seat two ordinary men. Morca’s father, Garmund, had seen it one year in the West, known it as better than his own, and returned for it the next summer with a wagon and the strength to take it away.
    “Hey, by damn, when do we eat?” asked Morca, his voice filling the room.
    “Within the hour, Lord Morca.”
    “Ale for all. Let’s have the dirt well washed from our throats. A good raid deserves a good end.”
    “What about our guests?” called a baron, raising laughter.
    “Send them all the water they will drink,” said Morca. “I’ll have my ale upstairs.”
    He took the stairs by the wall to his rooms above, followed by Oliver and Haldane. No Get was allowed above except at Morca’s bidding, and no one at all was allowed to walk the upper porch above the portico but Morca. His wife had had permission while yet she lived, but since her fall and death, no one.
    At the head of the stairs, sitting on a three-legged stool, was an old man, the oldest man within the dun. His name was Svein. He was one of the few who had been a man at Stone Heath and lived, one of the very few who yet lived these many years later. As his proof of the battle he carried a red lightning scar on his right cheek. For as long as the boy could remember, his hair had been white, but in other days he had been known as Svein Half-White Half-Right. He had served as Lore Master for Garmund, remembering the old ways, the songs, the stories, the sayings, the wisdom the Gets had brought west to Nestor, and applying them to these new times and new ways. Now he sat his stool before Morca’s door, guarding the stair in Morca’s absence and remembering for himself all the things that younger men did not care to know. He rose when he saw Morca.
    “Woe,” he said. “Woe to you, Morca. You overreach yourself. You wish to be king in more than war. You would turn Nestor into the fourth Kingdom of the West. Your father was a good king, a right and proper king. He held to the old ways and bowed to the will of his peers.”
    It was the sort of thing he was wont to say. As the last of those at Stone Heath, he was allowed by Morca to say what he would, however rude, however contrary. Morca had that much respect for the old ways.
    “Have you been downstairs again?” Morca asked.
    “No, I have not,” the old man said and plunked back onto his stool. “I have no need. I’ve been sitting my stool and minding my business as I should, but I can hear of your alliance to Chastain well enough from here. What your father would have thought!”
    Svein pointed an accusing finger at Oliver. “It is his fault. You were a good boy until he came and now he has filled your head with gross ambitions. Garulf overrode the word of his barons and bought the Gets Stone Heath. What will your appetites buy?”
    Morca said, “Be at peace, old man. You excite yourself. Sit your stool and watch my door well. When my ale comes, pass it through. There is ale for you, too, if your watch is good and your tongue ceases its flap.”
    “There is?” Svein rose and went trotting halfway down the stair. “Ale,” he called. “Ale for me. Morca said I might have ale.”
    A fire had been laid and started on Morca’s arrival. Nestorian serfs might pass within the room under Svein’s watchful eye to do their work and leave again. The rules did