He had little chance to gape. He and the others were promptly herded into the fort, where they waited in an untidy line in the huge dirt yard—the outer court—as Chatelaine Dhuoda and her retinue set up a table and began to call the company forward one by one. Alain found himself in a group of young men, and soon it was his turn to stand before Sergeant Fell.
“Can you ride a horse? Ever handled a spear? Worked with horses, perchance? No, of course not.” The burly sergeant motioned for the next man in line to step forward.
“But, sir—” Alain began desperately. Had it not been promised him, to learn the arts of war?
“Go on, go on! We haven’t time to train new recruits into men-at-arms, not now. Count Lavastine is already gone out to hunt the Eika and we’re marching out with a second force in twenty days. Get into the other group and don’t waste my time, lad.”
Chastened, Alain retreated to the other line, this one composed of women as well as men, lads his age, and girls not quite women, folk of varying degrees and ages and stations. He came in time and in his turn before Chatelaine Dhuoda. She asked him a few questions. He did not truly hear himself answer. Though her hair was veiled by a clean linen cloth, it showed a tendency to come free of its confines, wisps of reddish, coarse hair curling at her ears and on her forehead.
“What an accent!” she said to the young cleric in the plain brown robe of a frater who sat next to her, marking out the list for Count Lavastine. “Well, boy, Master Rodlin can use you in the stables. Who is next?”
“But Brother Giles taught me the letters. I can write all of them in a neat hand.”
At this, the frater looked up with interest. He had a fierce gaze, like a hawk. “Can you read?” he demanded.
“No … no, I can’t read yet, but I’m sure I could assist with the clerics. I can count—” The frater had already looked away dismissively, toward the next candidate. Alain turned desperately back to Chatelaine Dhuoda. None of this was going as he had dreamed it would. “Surely you remember my Aunt Bel telling you I was meant to be confirmed as a—”
“Move on!” said Dhuoda. A young woman stepped forward to take Alain’s place, so Alain had no choice but to do as he was told.
He found the stables and was at once put to work at a job any idiot could manage: filling a cart with manure and hauling it out to the fields. His only companion at this task was a halfwit called Lackling, a boy of about his age who was as thin as a stick, with bandy legs and a misshapen jaw through which he could not form true words. He was skittish and as likely to stare at the clouds or stroke the donkey as to keep to his work, but Alain did not have the heart to be angry at him, poor creature.
“I see you get along well enough with our Lackling,” said Master Rodlin that evening after the two boys had been given a hasty supper of cheese and bread and an onion. “You can share the loft with him. Make sure the new lads don’t tease him too much. He’s a harmless creature and the animals trust him, for I suppose they know he’s as dumb-witted as they are.”
Lackling made an odd snuffling noise and picked up the crumbs of bread from the dirt floor of the stables. With his treasure in his hands he went just outside and stood, hand out and open, staring at the sky and shuffling nervously back and forth.
Master Rodlin grunted, not without pity. “Thinks the birds will come and feed from his hand,” he said. “But Deacon Waldrada says it is our duty as good Daisanites to shelter the weak. And the lad was born here, in the shadow of the fort. His mother died birthing him, for it was a hard birth and perhaps it would have been best had the child died as well, poor dumb creature.”
“I was born here,” said Alain. “In Lavas Holding, I mean.”
Rodlin looked at him with a keener interest. “Who was your mother?”
Now Alain flushed. “I don’t know.”
“Ah,” said Rodlin knowingly. “Fostered out, were you? In a town like this there’s always a woman or two who can’t admit whose child she bore and so gives it away.”
“She didn’t give me away. She died birthing me.”
“Had she no kin? What about your father?”
Alain hung his head, seeing the expression on Master Rodlin’s face change from curiosity to a thin incurious smile: identified and dismissed as some whore’s unwanted bastard.
“Go on, then,” continued the stable master. “You’ll do well enough in the stables. Just don’t go into the kennels.”
“There’re no hounds in the kennels.”