Besides, while Tor had remained obstinately single, all the other sols of his generation had gotten themselves married off; and Aerin was, whatever her faults, a first sol.
And when Aerin understood at last what had happened, she laughed. So Maur did me a good turn after all, she thought. That’s the finest victory of all.
It was called Maur’s battle perhaps because it had been fought on what was now known as Maur’s plain. While much else had been forgotten, or at least become a little blurry, of the events before the seasons the City had borne with Maur’s head held in the king’s castle like an enormous jewel, everyone well remembered that at the end of the battle the stretch of earth at the foot of the king’s way was a destroyed forest, and that bodies of people and beasts, and of half-beasts and half-people, lay everywhere, with broken bits of war gear mixed with the broken landscape. And they remembered Maur’s skull rushing down on them—flaming, they said, like a living dragon, its jaws open to spew fire—and spinning past them in the darkness.
And in the morning, when they awoke, instead of low rolling hills despoiled by war, they found a plain, flat as a table, stretching from the burnt-out fire where the survivors had slept huddled together to the feet of Vasth and Kar and the pass where Aerin had paused and seen what awaited her and gathered herself and her army together. It was a desert plain, and it remained a desert; nothing grew there, nor would grow, but a little low scrub. Desert creatures came to live there, and a new sort of hunting dog was bred to run by sight, and the City dwellers came to love the wild sweet song of the britti, the desert lark. They took to holding horse races on the plain after the first few years of staring at it nervously had worn off, and the uncanniness was lost in familiarity; and then various games of skill were pursued there, mock battles and sword-play, and it became a much better practice ground than the old cramped space behind the castle and the royal stables at the peak of the City. It was a handy spot for the drilling of cavalry, and Tor paid much attention to the rebuilding of his cavalry, for he, like his wife, if perhaps no one else in the City, remembered very clearly what had happened in the months preceding Maur’s battle. The Laprun trials therefore grew in size and importance, which was all to the good; what was less good was the growing popularity of the churakak, the duel of honor, fought by those a little too proud of their ability to fight.
The first year’s harvest after the battle was a scanty one, but Arlbeth had grain set aside for just such an occurrence, and as there were fewer Damarians to be fed than when he had built his warehouses, the winter was no harder than a winter after a good harvest, although everyone was thoroughly sick of porridge by the time spring came.
But spring did come, and people stirred themselves, and many of them felt quite like their old selves, and went out to dig in the ground or refurbish their shops or look to their stock and their holdings with good heart. Those who had remained in the City over the winter, to nurse their wounds and regain their strength, went home to their villages and began the long process of rebuilding, and most of the rebuilding went on cheerfully. Tor and Aerin sent aid where they could, and some of the new villages were handsomer (and better drained) than the old ones had been.
It was during the first winter that Aerin, wandering vaguely one day in the center-court garden of the castle, felt that there was something at the gate she had entered by. She frowned at it till she remembered what it was: the great oil green surka vine was gone. She stared round at all the gates to be sure she had not mistaken it, but it was not there; and she went in search of Tor, and asked what had happened to it.
Tor shook his head. “There isn’t any surka any more—anywhere. One day—a fortnight, maybe, before Maur’s battle, they all went. I saw this one; the smoke came from nowhere, but when it cleared, the surka was a charred skeleton. It was such a weird sort of thing, and everyone was preoccupied with weird sorts of things that always turned out to be unpleasant, that the remains were rooted out and buried.
“Arlbeth said it was a sign too clear to be ignored, even if we didn’t know what it meant, and so we carried no standard during the final days of the siege of the City.” He frowned. “The surka seems to be something I want to remind people of; we’re probably better off without it. No more Merths.” He smiled at her.
“And no more Aerins,” said Aerin feelingly.
Some who had lost too much stayed on in the City when spring came; Katah had lost her husband, and she and her six children asked to stay on in the king’s castle, where she had grown up. Tor and Aerin were glad to say yes, for the castle was a little too empty; not only Perlith was gone, but Thurny and Gebeth and Orin, and many others. And Aerin found the reliable and practical Katah invaluable in sorting out which petitions and complaints to bend her royal judgment on, and which to ignore. “I have found my calling,” said poor Katah, who missed her husband: “I was meant to be a royal secretary.”
“You were meant to be the power behind the throne,” said Aerin. “I shall cover you with a velvet drape and you can whisper to me what to tell the people as they come.” Katah laughed, as she was supposed to.
Katah was not the only one that the passing of time did not heal. Galanna’s hair had gone grey during that first winter, and was white by the time the second spring after the battle came. She was quieter, and slower, and while she looked with no love upon Damar’s new queen, she caused, and wished to cause, no more trouble.
As Katah was a hard and honest worker, Aerin could contrive to steal a little time to chase dragons—whose numbers had greatly fallen off since the Northerners’ defeat—and to teach a suddenly considerable number of interested young men and women what she knew about dragon-hunting. Among other things, she found out what she had known all along, that she had a superior horse. No horse liked wearing kenet, and most of them were much nastier about it than Talat had ever been; and then there was the fact that Aerin had no idea what to tell her students to do with their reins while they were trying to pin a dragon with their spears. Somehow or other Aerin’s dragon-hunting lessons began to spill into horsemanship lessons, and she taught her pupils first about riding without stirrups, and later without reins. By trial and error she trained a few young horses to go as Talat had gone for her—to prove to herself as much as to anyone else that it could be done with other horses—and she learned to have an eye for the horses who could learn what she wished to teach them, and those who could not. Soon the queen of Damar was rumored to be an uncanny judge of horseflesh, and her opinion on this colt or that mare was frequently sought.