Gifts Read Online Free PDF Page A

escape or to bar their doors, and others scurried to save their market goods, and those fleeing were trapped in the square by those coming to see what was going on, and there was panic and havoc, stalls overturned, canopies dragging, frightened horses plunging and trampling, cattle bawling, the farmers of Caspromant brandishing their lances and cudgels at fishwives and tinsmiths. Canoc called them out of this panic, threatening not the townspeople but his own men with his power, till he got them gathered around him, some of them doggedly hanging on to goods they had grabbed from the market stalls—a pink shawl, a copper stew pot.
    He told me, “I saw that in a blood-fight, we were lost. There were hundreds of those folk—hundreds!”
    How could he have known what a town was? He had never seen one.
    “If we went into the houses to loot, wed be separated and they’d pick us off one by one. Only Ternoc and I had a gift strong enough to attack or defend with. And what were we to take? There was all this stuff, things, everywhere—food, goods, clothes, no end to it! How could we take all that? What were we after? I wanted me a wife, but I didn’t see how that was to be, the way things were there. And the one thing we really need in the Uplands is hands to work. I knew if I didn’t put a scare into them, and soon, they’d be all over us. So I raised up the parley flag, hoping they knew what it was. They did. Some men showed themselves at the windows of the big house over the marketplace and waved a cloth out the window.
    “Then I called out, ‘I am Canoc Caspro of the True Lineage of Caspromant, and I have the gift and power to undo, which you shall see me use.’ And first I struck one of the market stalls, so it fell all to pieces. Then I turned half round, to be sure they saw what I did and how I did it, and I struck the corner of a big stone building across from the house they were in. I held my arm out steady, so they could see. They saw the wall of the building move and bulge, and stones slip down out of it, making a hole in the wall. That grew bigger, and the sacks of grain inside burst open, and the noise of the stones falling was terrible. ‘Enough, enough!’ they shouted out. So I ceased to unmake the granary and turned to them again. They wanted to talk and parley. They asked me what I wanted of them. I said, ‘Women and boys.’
    “There went up an awful howl at that. People in all the streets and houses around shouted, ‘No! No! Kill the witches!’ There were so many of them, their voices were like a storm of wind. My horse jumped and screamed. An arrow had just nicked his rump. I looked up into the window above the one where the men were parleying and saw an archer leaning far out the window to draw his bow again. I struck him. His body fell like a sack from the window to the stones below, and burst. Then I saw a man at the edge of the crowd of people caught in the marketplace stoop and come up with a stone in his hand, and I struck him. I unmade his arm only. It fell to his side limp as a string. He began to scream, and there was wailing and panic where the archer had fallen. ‘I will unmake the next man who moves,’ I called aloud. And nobody moved.”
    Canoc kept his men close around while he parleyed. Ternoc guarded his back. The men speaking for the town consented, under his threats, to give him five serf women and five boys. They began to argue for time to collect the tribute, as they called it, but that he forbade: “Send them here, now, and we will choose what we want,” he said, and raised his left hand a little, at which they agreed to his demand.
    Then came a time that seemed very long to him, while the crowds in the side streets ebbed and then grew again, pressing closer, and he could do nothing but sit his sweating horse and keep a keen eye out for archers and other threats. At last dismal little groups of boys and women came driven through the streets to the marketplace, two here and