Samaren learns some surprising things from and about his benefactor (post-revolution)

[guardiansverse]

"Break it and I'll break your arm."

It still astonished Saul sometimes, how rarely Detrich threatened him; one of many sources for astonishment, though perhaps the most baffling one, after the mere fact of having been allowed to live under the man's roof for three months now. He dropped his hand an inch away from touching the unstrung bow on its stand. One reason for that rarity, he had learned, was that Detrich never made threats he was not fully prepared to make good on. Saul had marked that character in him and had learned its value well. His hand had fallen almost instantly at the sound of the Land's Own's voice,

"I like the look of it," he said, turning instead to look at Detrich's back where he sat on the camp stool, reassembling a rifle in quick, precise movements. "What is it?"

"A horseback archer's bow. From the tribal days, before the Hyemi were a landed nation." Detrich spoke without turning back to the weapons' rack. He finished the rifle, put it down neatly in a row next to its three siblings, and picked up a notebook to scribble something onto the weapon's blueprints. He stared briefly into the distance, muttered some numbers under his breath, and segued on from them more loudly: "It's ancient and rare. I could more easily buy another you than another like it."

Saul stopped his doubtful snort, but didn't flinch. Children weren't bought and sold in Hyem - he was long past being surprised by this - and anyway he didn't think Detrich could find another like him anywhere in his peaceful country.

He took the bow carefully in hand, while Detrich was busy mumbling more maths and something about gunpowder chemistry, though of course he was not fool enough to think the Land's Own didn't notice him holding the old, gorgeously carved wood and horn. Detrich noticed everything. The weapon was the lightest bow he'd ever handled. He brought it up and held it vertical, imagined it strung and humming, imagined shooting from horseback...

"A whole army of riders?" The thought was scarcely conceivable, and exhilarating. He struggled not to remember how long it had been since he'd been in battle, not wanting to ruin the sweet imagining. "Where did they find that many horses? Who could afford to feed them all?"

Detrich at last glanced up from his papers and back over his shoulder, brows arching. He neatly folded the pages into the notebook, neatly tucked his pen into its pocket in the leather binding, and rose to join Saul by the weapons rack. He rolled his shoulders as he went, reaching up to undo a button in the collar of his uniform shirt. "Have you ever used a recurve bow?"

"No, only crossbows and guns."

"It's a very different tool." His dark eyes scanned the rack. Detrich had a particular look when examining his tools, both dispassionate and cutting. "All life was on horseback in the steppes days, not only warfare. The Dzirnian steppes are eight thousand miles East to West. Wealth was measured in horses. Children, boys and girls, rode before they walked. There was no Land's Own Guardian then - "

"What?" Saul started. He was still getting used to the idea of a Detrich's Land's Own position, and now this?

"They had a Guardian of the Herds. The tribes did not read and write, but their contemporaries' histories tell us that this Guardian had power over horses such as I now have over the land in Hyem." Detrich selected another bow, similarly shaped to the relic weapon, but much plainer, and much, much newer. "Or at least, Yulinus of Aldeb does, and he isn't as given to dog-headed barbarians as most of them."

"Dog-headed what?"

"Watch closely." Seemingly effortless, still in his uniform jacket, Detrich strung the bow and picked an arrow. He was slow on the draw, letting Saul take in the details of his stance and movement. "This one will shoot three hundred yards and further. Some of the power comes form the siyah - the endpiece on the arms. More comes from the construction. The bow is made of sinew, horn, and wood, which work against each other to provide tension. The best sinew would be ibex - see them painted on the old bow? - but we haven't those in Hyem."

Saul did not know what an ibex was, a third what would be embarrassing. "Can't you bring some over from the steppes?"

Detrich smirked. "When we go home, look at some maps and ask me again."

He let the arrow fly before Saul could snap a retort, which he did not have anyway. It streaked as sure, and as straight and deadly as one of his prize falcons. Two hundred yards away, the man-shaped wicker target died with its throat pierced through.

Saul gave a shout of excitement - straw was a poor substitute, but it was a beautifully precise wound, and he could picture the spurting and gurgling easily. He glanced back. Detrich looked pleased with his shot, though it was hard to see sometimes, with him. As far as Saul could tell - and it had taken him some time to piece this together - Detrich enjoyed doing things well, but what exactly it was that he did well didn't quite matter. Shooting, papers, the strange foreign names whose writings he was always citing: to him it was all one. Just different seeds to sow in a field of endless skill.

Still, that look was close enough to satisfaction that he gambled. "Let me try."

He held himself painfully still as Detrich considered. Three months: he could never truly stop thinking of how long it had been since his last battle. In his own house, the Land's Own had made clear, weapons were used only with his approval. Saul had learned an early lesson on Detrich's approach to threats around this decree, and supposed that it did make him soft that he was unwilling to spend another cold night on the doorstep. But if he could only endure the wait - he was a master of endurance - he would never have gotten to as much as see a recurve bow back in Ilyiga, never mind touch and shoot one -

"Ask properly next time. But here," Detrich said, just when he thought he would choke on his own unbearable patience. He put the bow into Saul's almost trembling hands unstrung. "Only used crossbows, have you? See if you can string it. You should be strong enough by now."

One thing Saul was confident that Detrich enjoyed was watching his strength grow with time. He leaned into it, and the bow was not too hard to string. Detrich watched and nodded approval as he took up a stance, testing its balance, the shape that it asked of his body, then nocked arrow to string. It was different to any other weapon he'd ever tried, and his blood pulsed with it.

"Good - good. Relax your shoul- perfect. Always a perfect damned prodigy." Those last words very low, not truly for his ears, breathed out in satisfaction edging into awe. Saul had heard their like, words and tone, a thousand times. No one said them quite like Detrich. "I suppose it might be in your blood, too. The Jebethan empire spread as far West as Samar at its peak, and their archers were the best in the world..."

"Can I shoot?"

"You can hold a moment. It's your own people's history. You could stand to know two words of it."

Saul grunted frustration. The bowstring in his hand was desperate with energy and tension.

"How do you know all of those things?" Detrich called him a prodigy for taking up a weapon and knowing, almost instantly, how to use it and use it best; but Detrich would know where the weapon was made, how it was crafted, could name its component woods from their grain and explain how its metal had been poured. He knew its cost, and how many families could eat on that cost for a day, a week, a month. And he would know what peoples had used the weapon, where, when, and how those people had lived, the wars they had fought and gods they worshipped: peoples, wars, and gods dead a hundred, a thousand years.

Something in Detrich's eyes clouded at the question. He leaned in, looking along Saul's line of fire as though he saw through the distance into another place altogether, another time.

"I studied at university in the capital," he said, vague and quiet. "For two years, when I wasn't much older than you are now."

"Before you were Land's Own?"

"Before I was a soldier."

Saul tried to picture that and failed. There was no Detrich who was not a soldier. The man only took off his uniform to sleep, and even that not as a rule, since he caught snatches of sleep in his office chair almost more often than he spent proper full nights in his bed.

"Why did you go, if you meant to be a soldier?" It was the only question he could fathom asking.

Detrich gave a visible start. It was a rare enough reaction that Saul nearly jumped at it, instantly ready. There were the arrows right under his hand, and a whole rack of weapons behind him. But Detrich was very close and with access to his back. But he was pulling back and Saul had the bow and it was solid enough for one good strike - but nothing happened, except that a silence settled and stretched, thick as congealed blood. After a painfully frustrating minute he thought that perhaps Detrich was waiting for him to apologize. He didn't understand the demand - he rarely understood, even when he recognized it - and Detrich had never made it of him before, which made him even more frustrated in his sudden uncertainty. The arrow was already in his grasp... he dropped from the archery stance and looked angrily back at the Land's Own. "Well, why did you?"

Detrich leaned closer in again to nudge him back to drawing the bow. His face had sealed around a look that Saul recognized well from wearing it himself so often, the look of closing a shutter on memory that had risen unasked for and useless, good only to revive anger that had gone stale. "Let me give you the advice I was given, lad," he said, a strange, hoarse edge to his voice. "Don't ask questions. Just shoot."

Saul never needed to be told twice. The arrow flew with greater might and speed than he'd thought his own arm had put into it, found its mark in the wicker man's thigh and sank fletching-deep. Not the killing shot he'd aimed for, but a crippling one nonetheless. Detrich muttered an oath and something more about downright unnatural talent.

"I would tell you to practice, but by tomorrow you'll do it better than me." He held out a hand. Saul gave the bow back by rote, without thinking. The shot, the power and the praise glowed in his mind. "Next you'll want to try it from horseback."

"Could I?!"

"Not without a properly trained horse, and where you might find one, I can't begin to think. Back on the steppes, perhaps, where they keep the craft alive."

Saul considered. "Perhaps I will go to the steppes someday."

Detrich's mouth quirked within his beard. "Look at some maps, Saul."

"What does the distance matter? Since I'm in exile, I might as well go as far as I can." There could never be joy in exile, he knew, and there would never be contentment, just as he would never truly stop feeling hunger. But there might be challenge. Discovery. And that would be something, if Detrich was right in saying that he might live to be thirty, forty years old, maybe even more.

Detrich looked at him strangely, some emotion that Saul thought he should be able to name, but could not quite. He had seen the look on older people before, studying him, but not on the Land's Own. It was something like unhappiness and something like anger, though neither at them aimed at him. Something that perhaps a man had to be older than sixteen to feel. "Don't say perhaps someday," Detrich said tonelessly. "Someday comes, and is not what you thought it would be."

Saul understood nothing of that, but put it in the back of his mind, along with the note to look at the maps Detrich had mentioned. He looked back at Detrich, meeting that odd look with a probing one of his own. He still had unanswered questions. The university in the capital, two years...

"Here, try again," Detrich said abruptly, and handed him the bow back; and he forgot.