Ranger's Apprentice, Book 8: The Kings of Clonmel: Book 8 Page 3

  In return, they asked for nothing but a place to worship their benevolent and all-loving deity, the Golden God Alseiass. They made no attempt to convert the locals to their religion. Alseiass was a tolerant god who respected the rights of other gods to attract and hold their own adherents.

  So the Outsiders, the name adopted by the followers of Alseiass, would live in harmony with the locals for several weeks.

  Then things would start to go wrong. Cattle would die mysteriously. Sheep and household animals would be found crippled. Crops and homes would be burned; wells and streams, contaminated. Armed brigands and bandits would appear in the area, attacking and robbing travelers and farmers in remote farms. As days passed, their attacks would become bolder and more vicious. A reign of terror would begin, and the villagers would go in fear of their lives. The village would find itself under siege, with nobody knowing where the next attack might fall.

  Then the Outsiders would come forward with a solution. The outlaws surrounding the village were followers of the evil Balsennis—a dark god who hated Alseiass and all he stood for. The Outsiders had seen this before, they would claim. Balsennis in his jealousy would try to bring ruin to any community where Alseiass and his followers found happiness. But Alseiass was the stronger of the two, they said, and he could cast out the followers of his dark brother and make the village safe once more.

  Of course, there was a price. To expel Balsennis, special prayers and invocations would be required. Alseiass could do it, but they would need to construct a special shrine and altar for the casting-out ceremonies. It would need to be of the purest materials: white marble, perfectly formed cedar without knots or kinks . . . and gold.

  Alseiass was the Golden God. He would draw strength from the precious metal; gold would give him the power he needed to win this contest against Balsennis.

  Sooner or later, the villagers would agree. Faced with increasingly fierce attacks and disasters, they would delve into their savings and hidden assets to provide the gold that was needed. The longer they hesitated, the worse the attacks would become. At first, animals had been slaughtered; now people would become the targets. Leaders of the community would be found murdered in their beds. Once that happened, the villagers would hand over their treasures. The shrine would be built. The Outsiders would pray and chant and fast.

  And the attacks would begin to lessen. The “accidents” would cease to happen. The outlaws would be seen less and less, and life would begin to return to normal.

  Until the day came when they had stripped the village bare and there was nothing more to plunder, and the Outsiders would disappear. The villagers would awaken to find them gone—taking with them the gold.

  The Outsiders would move on to another village, another community. And the same cycle would begin again.

  Halt had arrived in the latter part of the cycle, during which the Outsiders were praying desperately to protect the village from the onslaught of Balsennis. He had watched the chanting and mock fasting that was going on. He had also seen the secret supplies of food that the Outsiders kept hidden. The “fasting” was as false as their religion, he thought grimly.

  And he had reconnoitered into the surrounding countryside and discovered the base where the Outsiders’ accomplices were camped. These were the ones who carried out the dirty work—burning barns, mutilating animals, kidnapping and murdering local officials. The cult couldn’t work without them, but they remained unseen by the villagers.

  It was a well-organized operation. He had seen it all many years before.

  He frowned as a figure emerged from the large pavilion that served as headquarters for the cultists. It was pitched on the edge of the beach, close to where the fishing boats were drawn up beyond the tide.

  The man was tall and heavily built. His black hair was long and parted in the middle to fall on either side of his face. From this distance, Halt couldn’t make out his features, but he knew from previous observation that the man’s face was heavily pockmarked. Apparently Alseiass hadn’t protected him from that problem, Halt thought.

  He carried a staff that marked him as the leader of the group. It was a plain, untrimmed branch topped with a stone plaque that bore the Outsiders’ symbol—a rune-inscribed ring with an embossed orb at its center, joined by a thin shaft of stone to another, smaller hemisphere outside the ring. As Halt watched, the elder strode purposefully toward the largest of the houses in the village.

  “Off to ask for more gold, are you?” Halt muttered. “We’ll see what we can do about that.”

  The leader of the Outsiders met with a group of the villagers—obviously the senior members of the community—and they began an animated conversation. The Outsiders’ leader would be reluctantly informing them that more valuables would be required. Alseiass needed extra strength to defeat his old enemy, and only extra supplies of gold and jewelry would give it to him. It was a cunning ploy, Halt thought. By appearing reluctant to ask for more gold, and by not insisting when the village refused, the Outsiders deflected any charge that they were seeking the gold for themselves.

  Halt watched as the elder shrugged his shoulders theatrically, seeming to be convinced that no more wealth was forthcoming. He spread his hands in a gesture of friendship and understanding and turned sadly away from the villagers’ delegation. If he held true to well-established Outsider methods, he was promising that he and his people would continue to do their utmost to help, fasting and praying unselfishly to protect the village and its inhabitants.

  “And tonight,” Halt muttered to himself, “one of those houses will go up in flames.”

  5

  THE THREE APPRENTICES SAT IN A QUIET GLADE, THEIR ASSIGNMENT folders and pages of notes on their knees, watching Will expectantly.

  “Very well,” he began. He was a little disconcerted by the three unwavering gazes that were trained on him. He realized the boys probably assumed that he had already come up with the perfect solution to the problem they’d been set. But that wasn’t his role.

  “You’ve all read the assignment?”

  Three heads nodded.

  “You understand it fully?”

  Again, three heads, three nods.

  “So who wants to have first crack at it?”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, then Nick’s hand shot up. Will nodded to himself. He’d known Nick would be first.“Very well, Nick, let’s hear your thoughts,” he said, motioning for the young apprentice to proceed.

  Nick cleared his throat several times. He shuffled his pages of notes and then, head down, he began to read in a breakneck gabble of words.

  “ Very well the problem facing us is that we don’t have sufficient numbers at our disposal to effectively mount a standard siege operation so we have to—”

  “Whoa!” Will interrupted him, and Nick looked up nervously, sensing that he’d done something wrong.

  “Slow down!” Will told him. “Try to bring it down to a gallop, all right?”

  He saw the boy’s crestfallen face, realized that he was worried he’d be marked down for the mistake. Nick was an overachiever, Will thought to himself. His gabbled words reflected the same intensity that had caused him to hold the bow in such a viselike grip.

  “Just relax, Nick,” he said in a more encouraging tone. “Let’s say you were called upon to submit a plan like this to King Duncan.” He paused and saw the boy’s eyes widen at the enormity of the thought. He added, gently,“It’s not impossible, you know. That’s what Rangers do from time to time. But you’d hardly want to go dashing into Castle Araluen’s throne room and gabble out, ‘HulloKing Duncanletmerunthroughafewideasforyouhereandyoucantellmewhatyouthinkofthemallright?’” He managed a pretty good impersonation of Nick’s breathless, rattling delivery, and the other two boys laughed. Nick, after an uncertain moment, joined in as well.

  “No, you wouldn’t.” Will answered his own question. “When you outline a plan, you need to speak clearly and precisely, to make sure the people you’re talking to h
ave the full picture. You have to have your own thoughts organized and present them in a logical sequence. Now, take a deep breath. . . .”

  Nick did so.

  “And start again. Slowly.”

  “Very well,” said Nick. “The problem facing us is that we don’t have sufficient numbers at our disposal to effectively mount a standard siege operation. So we have to find a way to (a) recruit troops and (b) offset the inferiority in numbers, compared to the garrison.”

  He looked up expectantly. Will nodded.

  “So far so good. And your solution?”

  “I propose to recruit a ship’s crew of thirty-five Skandian sea wolves to act as an attacking army, under the command of the mounted knight already at my disposal. The Skandians’ prowess in battle would more than compensate for—”

  But once again, Will had his hands up in the air, waving them in an effort to stem the flow of words.

  “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” he cried. “Back up the oxcart a little! Skandians? Where did these Skandians come from?”

  Nick looked at him, a little puzzled by the question.

  “Well . . . Skandia, presumably,” he replied. Will noticed that the other two boys were nodding agreement, frowning slightly at Will’s interruption.

  “No, no, no,” he began, then a thought struck him and he frowned at the other two boys.

  “Did you all decide that you’d recruit a force of Skandians?” he asked, and Liam and Stuart nodded wordlessly.

  “Well, what made you think you could do that?” he asked. The boys looked at one another, then Liam answered.

  “That’s what you did.” His tone said that the answer seemed self-evident.

  Will made a helpless gesture with his hands.

  “But I knew the Skandians,” he said. “They were friends of mine.”

  Liam shrugged.“Well, yes. But I could get to know them too. I’m told I’m quite a personable type of fellow. I’m sure I could make them my friends.”

  Stuart and Nick nodded their support. Will pointed to the Assets and Resources list.

  “But there aren’t any Skandians here!” he said. “ They don’t exist! So what made you think you could just . . . produce them out of thin air?”

  Again, the boys exchanged glances. This time it was Stuart who spoke.

  “The exercise says we’re to use our initiative and imagination. . . .” Will made a gesture for him to continue.

  “So we used our initiative to imagine that there were Skandians in the area.”

  “And that we were their friends,” Liam put in.

  Will stood abruptly. For the first time, he had an inkling of what Halt might have gone through in the first year of Will’s own apprenticeship. To the young boys, it seemed so logical.

  “But you can’t do that!” he exclaimed. Then, seeing their worried faces, he calmed down a little, forcing himself to explain. “The Assets and Resources list tells you what people you can use. You can’t just invent others to suit your purposes.”

  He looked around the semicircle of crestfallen faces.

  “I mean, if you could do that, why not just imagine a dozen or so gigantic trolls who could go galumphing in and smash the walls down for you?”

  Nick, Liam and Stuart all nodded dutifully, and for one awful moment, he thought they might be taking him seriously.

  “I’m joking,” he said, and they nodded again. He sighed and sat down. They knew they were going to have to go back to the beginning, and he could see their disappointment. While he didn’t intend to do the assignment for them, he decided there was no harm in pointing them in the right direction.

  “All right, first of all, let’s look at what you’ve got. Go through the resources for me.”

  “We’ve got an acrobat troop,” said Liam.

  Will looked quickly at him. “Can you think of anything they could be used for?”

  Liam pursed his lips.

  “They could entertain the troops and raise morale,” said Nick.

  “If we had any troops,” Stuart put in.

  “When we’ve got troops!” Liam interrupted Stuart with more than a hint of anger.

  Will thought it was best to intervene before they started squabbling. He threw them a broad hint.

  “What’s stopping you getting into the castle? What’s a castle’s principal line of defense?” he asked. The boys considered the question, then Stuart answered, in a tone that indicated the answer was an obvious one.

  “The walls, of course.”

  “That’s right. High walls. Four meters high.” Will paused, looking from one face to another. “Can you see any connection between high walls and acrobats?”

  Suddenly light dawned in the three faces, in Nick’s a fraction of a second before the other two.

  “They could scale the walls,” he said.

  Will pointed a forefinger at him. “Exactly. But you’ll still need troops. Where have the original garrison gone?”

  “They’re scattered all over the fief, back to their farms and hamlets.” It was Liam this time. He frowned, taking it one step further. “We’ll need someone to move around from place to place, recruiting them—”

  “But you don’t want the enemy to notice,” Will put in quickly, hoping one of them would get the message.

  “The jongleur!” Stuart exclaimed triumphantly. “Nobody will take any notice of him moving around the countryside!”

  Will sat back, smiling at them. “Now you’re beginning to think!” he said. “Work together on this and come back this afternoon with your ideas.”

  The three boys exchanged grins. They were eager now to progress to the next stage of the plan. They stood up as Will motioned for them to go, but he stopped them with one more thought.

  “Another thing: the village. How many people in it?”

  Nick answered immediately, without needing to refer to his notes.

  “Two hundred,” he said, wondering what Will was getting at. “But there are only a few soldiers among them. Most are farmers and field-workers.”

  “I know that,” Will said. “But think about what the law says about any village with more than one hundred residents.”

  The law required that any village with a population of more than one hundred had the responsibility of training its young men as archers. That was how Araluen maintained a large force of trained archers, ready to be called up into the army if needed. He could see the boys hadn’t made that step so far. But he decided he’d given them enough help for one day.

  “Think about it,” he said, making a shooing motion for them to leave. He listened to their excited, chattering voices as they faded away and leaned back against the trunk of a large tree behind him. He was exhausted.

  “Nice work,” said Crowley, from a few meters behind him. Will, startled, sat up suddenly.

  “Don’t do that, Crowley!” he said. “You frightened the wits out of me!”

  The Commandant chuckled as he stepped into the glade and sat on a large log beside Will.

  “You handled that well. Teaching isn’t easy. You’ve got to know how much to prod them in the right direction and when to leave them to their own devices. You’ll be a good teacher when you get your own apprentice.”

  Will looked at him, slightly horrified by the prospect. There was the responsibility, not to mention the constant distraction of having a young person at his heels, asking questions, interrupting, racing off at tangents before thinking through a problem. . . .

  He stopped as he realized he was describing his own behavior as an apprentice. Once more, he felt a twinge of sympathy for Halt.

  “Let’s not do that for a while yet,” he said, and Crowley smiled.

  “No. Not just yet. I have other plans for you.”

  6

  IT WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT. SELSEY WAS DARK AND SILENT AS ITS inhabitants slept. There was no watchman. In this remote, little-known village there had never been a need for one.

  But there was a need tonight, just as Halt had expected.
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  He was crouched behind one of the fishing boats drawn up on the sand, clear of the high-water mark. His first thought had been that the Outsiders would strike at one of the houses. Then he’d realized there was a much better target for them. The fishing boats. The source of the village’s wealth. If a house were burned, the inhabitants could live under canvas while they rebuilt. Not the most comfortable situation, but life could continue.

  If the boats were destroyed, there would be no fishing, no income, while new boats were built.

  It would be in keeping with the Outsiders’ ruthlessness to attack the boats, he had decided, and now his theory was proving correct. Half a dozen shadowy figures stole from the trees fringing the beach and moved furtively across the sand toward the fishing boats.

  Four of the men stopped by a pile of fishing nets and equipment ten meters away. The other two continued, heading for the boat next to the one Halt was crouched behind. He peered around the stern as they knelt in the sand, only a few meters away—close enough for him to hear their whispered conversation.

  “How many will we do?” asked one.

  “Farrell says two should be enough to teach them a lesson.” Farrell was the black-haired man Halt had observed earlier in the day, the leader of this small band of Outsiders. “I’ll do this one. You take care of the one behind me.” The speaker jerked his head toward the boat where Halt was concealed. His companion nodded and began to crawl on hands and knees toward the bow of the boat, staying low to remain out of sight.

  Quickly Halt drew back and moved away from the stern, angling out toward the third boat in line so that he would be behind the saboteur when the man turned his attention to his task. The beach was littered with large patches of seaweed and driftwood, tossed onto the shore by the wind and tide. As he heard the man rounding the bow, Halt dropped to the sand, covered by his cloak. If the man noticed anything, he would take the motionless Ranger for yet another clump of debris. As the old Ranger adage went, If a person doesn’t expect to see someone, odds are he won’t.