Save on the western frontiers, few towns or cities were still completely contained by walls. All the older, lowland urban areas had spread well beyond their walls and many had wholly or partially dismantled them. Even some of the conservative hereditary nobility had defortified their ancestral halls or even deserted the grim stone piles to live in the new-” style manor houses.
But these nobles were not among those who had fought against the fanatic rebels of Gafnee, Morguhn and Vawn. Those nobles bided within their castellated halls, locked their gates each sundown, slept lightly and with a pillow-sword close to hand. And they distrusted all Ehleenee—for all that most of them had more than a trace of that blood in their own veins—especially the self-styled kath-ahrohs or Ehleenee of pure lineage.
Such a kath-ahrohs house had spawned her who had been Mehleena Lohgos, ere she was taken to wife by Hwahlruh, chief of Sanderz and Thoheeks of Vawn; and loud, long and fierce had been remonstrations of his Kindred at word of the projected match. But he was a stubborn man; moreover was he the son and grandson of chiefs and unaccustomed to tamely submitting to the bidding of his subchiefs. Also, he had the full support of his premier wife, the Lady Mahrnee— widow of the chief and Thoheeks of Morguhn, ere she wed her second husband—and against those two the combined Sanderz Kin stood no slightest chance, for all their ranting and raving of Ehleen plots, past, present and future.
But before her bridal year was spent, Mehleena was first and only wife, Lady Mahrnee being suddenly taken with a wasting sickness which claimed her life within two months of its onset. The servants had all loved and respected their dead mistress as cordially as they had quickly learned to hate and fear Lady Mehleena, and there were whisperings of witchcraft and poison. However, the improvable charges remained but the mutterings of older servants.
However, the mutterings increased as ill fortune seemed to stalk the house of Sanderz. In his twelfth year, Gilbuht Sanderz, eldest son of the chief and heir presumptive, drowned in the lake, for all that he had been an excellent swimmer. And that same year, his twin, Ahl, was blinded and almost killed in a freak accident. The mutterings had it that neither “accident” had occurred until after Mehleena had been delivered of her firstborn son, dark little Myron.
With one older brother dead and another disqualified for any clan office due to his blindness, the aging chief and his male kin commenced crash-course schooling in the duties, privileges and responsibilities of a chief and a tahneestos with Tim and Behrl, the two remaining. boy-children of Lady Mahrnee and Hwahltuh. More and more frequently, this training fell to the uncles and older cousins of the boys, for the health of the chief was failing. Nor was this failing remarkable to any, for Hwahltuh had counted more than threescore years when his first child was born.
But the old chief gradually fell more and more under the sway of Mehleena, for only the potions brewed by her and her cousin, Neeka, served to relieve the unbearable headaches which had taken to plaguing him. These potions cast him into a deep and lengthy slumber, and for days after his eventual wakening, he was meek and biddable as a child, seemingly incapable of formulating his own opinions or of making his own decisions, bowing to Mehleena’s will in every particular. And that weakness was Tim’s downfall.
Chapter IV
“I saw them myself, Hwahltuh!” Mehleena’s dark eyes were wide with horror and her voice strident with emotion; her soft, beringed hands were clasped tightly at her heaving bosom. “Tim and Giliahna, in her chamber, on her very bed! Clipping, they were, Hwahltuh, and…” Her voice sank to a horrified whisper. “And kissing!”
The bearded, white-haired man looked up from the arrows he had been fletching for his short, powerful bow. His bushy brows bunched and merriment shone from his light-blue eyes. “Well, Sacred Sun be praised for that much, wife. Or would it more please you to see them trading daggerthrusts or seeking to poison each other, as is the wont of siblings in some noble houses? I’d hate to go to Wind leaving the makings of a battle royal within my own house.”
“But, Hwahltuh, no.” She bent closer. “It… it was not as brother with sister, Hwahltuh, it was as man with woman, they were! Embraced, kissing, their hands… their hands, husband, moving under each other’s clothing in private places!”
Mehleena moved back, expecting violent rage. But her husband just straightened a bit on his chair, shook his head slowly and chuckled.
“Sweet Jesus save us!” burst out the stupified Ehleen woman. “Don’t you understand me, Hwahltuh? Your depraved son is about to have his incestuous way with his own blood sister, your daughter! You must do something to stop this nastiness or send him away until she be safely wed.”
“Send my heir away? Nonsense,” grunted the old chief, then voiced another throaty chuckle. “He’s a Sanderz, right enough, shows good taste in womanflesh. Randy young colt, he is, as I was, and for all she’s only thirteen, Giliahna is a handsome filly and no mistake.”
Mehleena’s earlier horror was magnified by his attitude. Hastily, she crossed herself to ward off evil and clutched her jeweled cross for comfort and strength.
“Hwahltuh, Hwahlruh, he will take her flower. Then how win you find a decent husband for her? And… and everyone knows that if a child be gotten in incest, it always is either born dead or born an idiot. Have you thought on that?”
“Hogwash!” the old man snorted derisively, casting down his arrow and split quills. “Ehleen hogwash, woman! Do I look like the spawn of idiots, eh! My great-grandfather married his sister and got my grandfather on her. If Tim wants Giliahna to wife, he’ll have her with my blessing and that of the clan. What better bloodline could he choose for breeding chiefs and warriors? And if his dalliances quicken her, he’ll have her to wife, like it or not. As for her maidenhead, pah, it’s of no importance. She’s a comely chit, wellborn and well-dowered, and there’ll be no lack of noble suitors, wife, believe me.”
He picked up the arrow again, adding, “Mehleena, love, this is not your father’s hall. We are Kindred, here, not Ehleenee, and you must always remember that our ways, our customs, are not your people’s. I have allowed you to cleave to your preferred religion since you wed me, for all that it’s proscribed the length and breadth of our great Confederation, but don’t try to force Kindred into that narrow mold, dear.
“We are free men, we Kindred. We reverence Sun and Wind as did our Sacred Ancestors back to our very beginnings on the Sea of Grass. We never have been priest-bound and saddled with those silly, childish rituals and taboos which your religion has foisted upon you Ehleenee.
“Now, please let me get back to these arrows, love. There’s not much light left and I’d like to finish them today.”
Mehleena left him. Pale and shuddering with frustrated rage and soul-sick of her—to her, justified—horror at the mortal sin her husband was countenancing under his very roof. But, heeding Cousin Neeka’s advice, she did nothing more, said nothing further… until the chiefs next headache.
By the time that Hwahlruh recovered his will, nearly a month later, Tim was beyond the borders of the Confederation : . . and Giliahna was on her way to be wed to the Prince of Kuhmbuhluhn, a man but ten years her father’s junior and recently widower of his seventh wife.
The aging chief sent a letter north with the next Confederation rider to pass through his duchy. In it, he humbly asked his son to forgive his temporary weakness to Mehleena’s importunings, begged him to return at once to his home, his father, and his family, but that letter was never answered. Nor were any others of the scores the repentant old man sent north. At length, his hurt pride surfacing, Hwahltuh stopped writing directly. Instead he entrusted weights of gold to Chief Bili, Ahrkeethoheeks Morguhn, that Tim might at least clothe himself well, own the protection of good weapons, decent armor and a well-trained destrier. Nor did the saddened Thoheeks of Vawn ever again hear directly from his heir. Only through Archduke Bili—who had been reared and war-trained in the Middle Kingdoms and who had kin and old comrades now in high places—did bits and pieces of Tim’s career trickle south, of Tim’s appointment as an ensign of dragoons in the Freefighter regiment of a well-known and renowned noble officer; of Tim’s knighting into the Order of the Blue Bear of Harzburk by King Gy, himself, on the blood-soaked field of Krahkitburk; of his defeat and capture of a famous champion in another battle; and, later, of the lieutenancy Tim purchased with said champion’s ransom.