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Chapter Nine
“That was delicious, Tala—as always,” Kaeritha said with a deeply satisfied sigh. She laid her spoon neatly in the empty bowl of bread pudding and patted her flat stomach as she leaned back in her chair, smiling at the sturdy, middle-aged hradani woman who’d been sent along by Prince Bahnak as his son’s housekeeper.
“I’m glad you enjoyed it, Milady,” Tala said in a pronounced Navahkan accent. “It’s always a pleasure to cook for someone who knows good food when she tastes it.”
“Or devours it—in copious quantities,” Brandark observed, eyeing the empty platters on the table.
“I didn’t seem to notice you shirking your share of the devouring, Milord,” Tala replied dryly.
“No, but there’s more of me to maintain,” Brandark replied with a grin, and Kaeritha gri
“Aye,” Bahzell agreed. “For a sawed-off runt of a hradani who’s after sitting on his arse with a pen and a bit of parchment all day, you’ve a bit of meat on your bones, I suppose.”
“I’ll remember that the next time you need some obscure Sothoii text translated,” Brandark assured him.
“Hush, now, Brandark!” the third person at the table scolded. Gharnal Uthmagson was short for a Horse Stealer, but taller than Brandark and almost as massively built. Which still left him over a full foot shorter than his foster brother, Bahzell. “It’s not so very nice of you to be pointing out as how the thin air up where Bahzell’s after keeping his head keeps a man’s brain from working. It’s not as if it was after being his fault he can’t be reading for himself.”
He gri
“Speaking of obscure Sothoii texts,” Kaeritha said in the voice of an adult overlooking a children’s squabble as a smiling Tala withdrew, “I wonder if you’ve come across a copy of the war maids’ charter in your forays through Tellian’s library, Brandark?”
“I haven’t been looking for one,” the Bloody Sword replied. “I’ve done a little research on the entire question of war maids since you and Tellian discussed them the other morning, but I’ve really only scratched the surface so far. I assume there’s probably a copy of the charter and its amending documents somewhere, though. Would you like me to take a look for them?”
“I don’t know.” Kaeritha grimaced. “It’s just that I’ve realized I’m really pretty appallingly ignorant where any detailed knowledge about the war maids is concerned. Tellian’s suggestion that whatever I’m supposed to be dealing with concerns them may well be right, but my training in Sothoii jurisprudence is a bit shakier than my training in Axeman law. If I am supposed to be investigating the war maids’ claims, it would probably be a good idea to know what their prerogatives are in the first place.”
“I’m not so sure laying hands on a copy of their original charter would be enough to be telling you that,” Bahzell put in. He leaned back in a chair which creaked alarmingly under his weight.
“Why not?” Kaeritha asked.
“The war maids aren’t so very popular with most Sothoii,” Bahzell said in a tone of deliberate understatement. “Not to be putting too fine point on it, there’s those amongst the Sothoii who’d sooner see an invading hradani army in their lands than one of the war maids’ free-towns.”
“They’re that unpopular?” Kaeritha looked surprised, and Bahzell shrugged.
“An invading army is likely to be burning their roofs over their heads, Kerry. But roofs can be rebuilt, when all’s said. Rebuilding a way of life, now—that’s after being just a mite harder.”
“And that’s exactly how your typical conservative Sothoii would see having a batch of war maids move in next door,” Brandark agreed.
Kaeritha nodded in acknowledgment, yet there was still a baffled edge to her expression. As she’d told Leeana, she’d been born a peasant in Moretz, which was at least as patriarchal a society as that of the Sothoii, but she’d fled that land when she’d been even younger than Leeana was now. And she’d also been educated in the Empire of the Axe, where women enjoyed far broader choices and possibilities then were generally available to Sothoii women.
“Kerry,” Bahzell said, “I’m thinking you’ve too much of the Axewoman in you. You, if any, ought to have realized by now how hard any Sothoii is after finding it to wrap his mind round the very notion of a woman as a warrior.”
Kaeritha nodded again, more emphatically, and Bahzell chuckled. If he found his position in Balthar difficult as a hradani, Kaeritha had found hers only marginally less so … as the heckler she’d trounced outside the temple made clear. Tellian’s men, and those of the city guard, had at least taken their cue from their liege lord and extended to her the same deference and respect any champion of Tomanak might have expected. Yet it was only too obvious that even they found the concept of a female champion profoundly u
“Well, for all that our folk’ve spent the best part of a thousand years massacring one another,” Bahzell continued, “there’s much to be said for the Sothoii. But one thing no one is ever likely to be suggesting is that they’ve an overabundance of i
Kaeritha chuckled, and Brandark gri
“Aye, and some of them are stupid enough to be after thinking they invented fire for their very own selves just last week,” Gharnal agreed. His grin was a bit sharper than Brandark’s, honed on a core of deeply cherished hostility for all things Sothoii, but that represented a tremendous exercise of restraint for him.
“I won’t say there isn’t an element of the pot and kettle in that pithy description, Kerry,” Brandark said after a moment. “But there’s a lot of accuracy in it, too. The Sothoii take a tremendous amount of pride in how ’traditional’ they are, you know. Their very name—’Sothoii’—is derived from the Old Kontovaran word sothCfranos, which translated roughly as ’sons of the fathers.’ According to their traditions, they’re descended from the highest nobility of the Empire of Ottovar, and they’ve grown pretty fanatical about protecting that line of descent—intellectually, as well as physically—over the last twelve centuries or so.”
“Are they really?” Kaeritha asked. “Descended from the old Ottovarn nobility, that is?”
“That’s hard to say,” Brandark said with a shrug. “It’s certainly possible. But the significant point is that they think they are, and that pride in their ancestry is part of what produces those conservatives Bahzell and Gharnal were just talking about. And the very existence of the war maids is an affront to their view of the way their entire society—or the rest of the world, for that matter—is supposed to work. In fact, the war maids wouldn’t exist at all if the Crown hadn’t specifically guaranteed their legal rights. Unfortunately—and I suspect this is what Bahzell was getting at—calling that royal guarantee ’a charter’ is more of a convenient shorthand than an accurate description.”
Kaeritha cocked an eyebrow, and he shrugged.
“It’s actually more of a bundle of separate charters and decrees dealing with specific instances than some sort of neat, unified legal document. Kerry. According to what I’ve learned so far, the original proclamation legitimizing the war maids was unfortunately vague on several key points. Over the next century or so, additional proclamations intended to clarify some of the obscurity, and even an occasional judge’s opinion, were bundled together, and the whole mishmash is what they fondly call their ’charter.’ I haven’t actually looked at it, you understand, but I’m familiar enough with the same sort of thing among the hradani. When something just sort of grows up the way the war maids’ ’charter’ has, there’s usually a substantial degree of variation between the terms of its constituent documents. And that means there’s an enormous scope for ambiguities and misunderstandings … especially when the people whose rights those decrees are supposed to stipulate aren’t very popular with their neighbors.”