Free The Legacy of Gird by Elizabeth Moon Page B

What, he had wondered, was the tall tree supposed to do? But his trouble would prove the truth as far as the village was concerned, and he expected to hear it many times again.
    He was young and strong and healthy; his body healed quickly and he was soon hard at work with his father. But he could not escape the knowledge that he had brought trouble to his family. They had been prosperous, for peasants: three cows, eight ewes, extra cloth laid away, the copper and silver coins that took so long to earn. His father had had a good reputation with the steward, and had no enemies in the village itself.
    Now Arin could not marry until they earned the marriage-fee, but before that came the field-fee and house-fee, and the harvest taxes were coming soon. He could help with the work, but he had to eat, and he brought no more land with him, on which more crops could grow, or beasts graze.
    His father said nothing of this. He had no need to say it; Gird knew precisely what it meant, what it would cost them all in labor and hunger to regain even a scrap of safety. His feet toughened quicker than his mind. Daylong in the fields he caught the tail end of comments that seemed intended for his ear. The other men said nothing near his father, but left him in no doubt what they thought. Young lout, they said, set himself up for a soldier and then shamed us all with his weakness. He knew some of them had been as sickened as he, but if they remembered it at all, they didn't say so around him. It was convenient to blame it all on him. He knew, on one side of his mind, that this had always happened so, that once he had done the same, but it still hurt. His former friends stayed away from him, whether because of their fathers' orders or their own scorn he didn't know, and soon didn't care. He was in a deep wallow of misery, just like the bullcalf in the bog Arin had mentioned.
    In that first month of trouble, between the event and the harvest, only one mercy intervened. The young count and his entourage left to visit another of his holdings, and the steward conveniently forgot to put Gird on the workroll. In the required workdays, he could work his family's garden and fieldstrip, while his father and Arin worked the greatfield for the count. And he could do day-labor for anyone hiring work done, taking his pay in a meal away from home more often than hard coin. Most of this was unskilled labor, fetching and carrying. Gird carried water for the masons brought in to raise the count's orchard walls, and lugged baskets full of clay and broken rock. It was hard work, even for someone of his strength, and he soon felt the difference the change in food made. He came home so tired he could hardly eat, and fell onto the bed as soon as he'd cleaned his bowl.
    At harvest, Gird could not avoid the other men and boys. Harvest time gathered in more than crops; the village people worked together and celebrated together, and the year's stories began to form into chants and tales that would be retold over and over during long winter nights. It was no fault of Gird's that his disgrace so neatly fit the measures of an old song, "The Thief's Revenge" and needed but little skill to change a few words. He never knew who sang it first, but its jangling rhymes followed him down the lanes. "He gave a cry and ran away, as fast as he could run—" jibed the little boys. "Eh, Gird, can you outrun a fox? A pig?"
    Now his former friends had their own say. A shrug, a wink between them, a shoulder turned to him. Teris even said "If you were going to make such a fuss, you could at least have saved Meris," which was completely unfair. He could not have saved Meris; no one could. They hadn't. But they blamed him for Meris, and for trying and failing. Some—Amis among them—said nothing, just watched him. Were they waiting for him to defend himself, to argue? But he had nothing to say. He was too tired to argue, too hungry and too miserable.
    The girls never looked his way at all,