Authors: R. A. MacAvoy
I fell in step behind them, like a lackey or a pet dog. It was Leoue who first noticed the movement, and he turned on me with a roar and a cavalry saber.
The king’s scream came too late; I was forced to dodge under the hiss of the blade. King Rudof put his hands over the duke’s face, obscuring his vision as I backed out of the way.
“I told you! And I told you again, Leoue! You are not to harm the boy!”
The big duke sputtered, “But he… he was… How was I to know…”
I understood his bullmastiff’s feelings, for one cannot always stop to ask credentials in the dark. I tried to apologize but was not very coherent. The king ordered him a few yards away from us. It took more than one command to pry the man away from his king.
“What is it, you piece of misery?” With these words King Rudof welcomed me. “I hope you have a new subject in mind tonight.”
I thought I did. “Sir, I could teach you. Anything I know, I could teach you.”
First he seemed amused, but then his features pulled awry. “You are expert, Nazhuret, but you are not the Earl of Daraln.”
I answered that I knew that, but added, “Once I lay Powl in the dust. I did. So stunned he was that I had to drag him into the house and pull his shoes off. Once.”
It sounded so like braggartism. Pitiful braggartism, too.
“Have you?” asked the king. “I am impressed, fellow. Perhaps you can teach me something. But will you still want to after I have killed your Powl for you?”
“You are possessed of a devil,” I said to the king, and he hit me across the face hard enough to clear my angry head.
I saw the king by the light of the tall windows behind, and I saw the field marshal ease closer, his dog-dark eyes on his master, waiting for one word.
Rudof himself stared at his own right hand. “You let me do that, churl! You stood there and allowed it.”
The accusation took me aback. “Of course I did.”
“Why?”
I shrugged. “Because you are the king. If you want to hit me, then I’ll be hit.”
Slowly he shook his head from side to side. “Oh, I am right to avoid you, Nazhuret, and your damned condescension. You let me hit you as you’d let a five-year-old child hit you. Are you amused by me, then? Are you entertained by the King of Velonya?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “I am not entertained at all. You have made me want to die.”
At this the field marshal stood forward. “I can help him there,” he said, his hand on his sword.
There was laughter from inside the big house, bright as the yellow windows against the darkness. (Yellow windows or blue, the sound is uncanny.)
“I think Nazhuret will find the sword a different matter, Leoue,” said the king, his words thickened, the hand that had hit me wiping his own face. “A random box to the ear is one thing, but—”
“No, my king,” I said in someone else’s voice. “If you want to kill me, then I’ll be killed.”
King Rudof was a dark shadow against the windows as he looked down silently. He turned and the door was opened. The light and the chatter grew much louder for a moment, and then I was standing in the night with Duke Leoue.
I expected him to spurn my company with equal fervor, but the massive man stood for two minutes unspeaking, and I myself had run out of things to say. Finally he cleared his throat.
“I cannot pronounce your name,” he stated.
“No matter, my lord. It’s a strange name,” I answered.
“It’s the devil’s name,” he corrected me, without apparent rancor. “In South language. The King of Hell. The Rezhmian horse troops would shout that name as they cut our knights off at the knees.”
I didn’t argue with him.
“You did not condemn your earl, you know,” he added, and to my amazement the Duke of Leoue sat down on the grass, grunting, and dropped his saber at his feet. “He was a traitor before you were born: parcel with Eydl of Norwess’s sedition. If the old king had not been besotted with his… his personal charm… he would have been eliminated after his return from the Rezhmian incursion.”
He turned his massive bear head in my direction. “The Rezhmians conquered us in body, but Powl they won in mind also. He came back their tool.”
This was so absurd it did not even irritate me. “Powl is never any man’s tool.”
The field marshal laughed: a deep rumble. “You have the right of it, boy. Perhaps the Southerners are his tools.”
I saw the glint of his eye whites in the darkness for just a moment. There was only the faintest sign of the hostility and contempt that had used to stamp his face when confronted with my own. “I think,” he continued, “that though we are in disagreement as to the meanings of things, we can agree surprisingly as to facts.”
I wasn’t sure what the man had in mind, but before I could question him, the air wavered with a howl like that of some animal; I could not immediately place what kind.
Then I surmised it. “He is still alive… the captive? All these miles?”
The field marshal stirred and glanced at me closer. “Of course, fellow. He will be alive until someone is ordered to kill him. The king has him under close guard.”
“What a horror,” I whispered, and the bulk of the man before me shifted like the shadow of a tree when the wind blows.
“Don’t worry, he hasn’t revealed a useful thing.”
I should have expected this out of the Duke of Leoue, but my mind had been focused on the condition of that wolf in chains, somewhere in the town or in the king’s camp. I rose to get away before Leoue managed to goad me again, when I felt his hand brush my arm. “No, excuse me. I spoke maliciously, and I cannot afford to do that. I am no longer so convinced that you had a part in the Rezhmian attack. Not a real, aware part, at any rate.”
“I am grateful for that much,” I said, and I felt obliged
to explain myself to the man. I began: “If you, Field Marshal, were suddenly told now that you
had been an infant of Falinka parentage, stolen and sold to the Velonyans, would that information
change your life’s loyalty?”
The duke chuckled. “If I were a Falonk I would be little and round and brown-skinned. And my soul would be different as well. If I were a Felonk born, questions of loyalty would not bother me. I have fought Felonk corsairs for years, boy. I know.”
He had succeeded in rousing me at last, and ironically, it was when the man had no intention of causing offense. As I tried to leave him, he put a large, restraining hand on my arm. I circled my hand out of his grip before he was aware what I was at.
“No, Nazhuret, listen to me. Forget our disagreements if you love the king.”
I stopped, out of amazement that he could pronounce my name after all. I decidedly did not love King Rudof.
“You won’t like what I have to say, but hear it anyway.”
I stood, not in reach of him, but within hearing.
“I have known Powl Inpres, Earl of Daraln, now for over thirty-five years. We were boys together.”
I could not have left the man now if he had threatened me.
“I know him. I have never met any man who could command loyalty from others so well while seeming to desire it so little.”
The truth of this statement, coming from that black bear with all his contempt and blindness, made me shudder.
“Even as a boy he was this way: always in command of himself. Cold. He had questions and answers for everything.”
“More questions, I imagine, than answers,” I said quietly, but the field marshal did not reply to or simply did not hear this.
“Eydl was under his spell for years, though his was the higher rank and Norwess’s the older honor. They were inseparable when they went South, and when they came back defeated, it was dragging a train of goods, concubines, and hoary bookmen. No shame for their failure at all.”
I was trying to imagine Powl with concubines. It was not such a difficult feat, after all. He would handle them gracefully, diffidently, without embarrassment or complication. Cold, Leoue called him. I would have used a different word, but I knew how Powl’s diffidence felt when one was under its power, and I could understand.
“Yet it was Norwess who suffered the indignity of his failure. Daraln somehow… slipped out from under. He remained in Vestinglon while Norwess took his woman home and endured his disgrace, and within a year the king was besotted again with Daraln, his wit and his stories and his scientific fancies.
“Five years later, when Norwess was accused of treason, Daraln was the unofficial tutor of Prince Rudof. He was very nearly declared regent potential.”
“He was tutor? For how long?”
The field marshal did not allow my interruption, “He survived Norwess’s disgrace and his flight with his own small reputation nearly intact—through the prince’s love for him in large part Norwess was destroyed. They were the best of friends, and Daraln the spark for their every strange idea. Yet the Duchy of Norwess is no more, and Daraln goes on.”
I couldn’t make much sense of this history. I wanted five different men’s versions before I could hear it and have an opinion as to what had happened. Still, I valued it as a piece of Powl I did not otherwise have.
“King Rudof is a clever man, boy. Don’t you think he can review the past in his mind and see where his favor might have been used to protect a man whose own interests superseded those of his country? Don’t you think he now has reason to be angry at your… Powl?”
I did not think of these matters at all. My mind was full of the news that Powl had been the king’s childhood teacher. For how many years? What had he shared with him, and what had he not?
King Rudof spoke Rayzhia. He said he had been taught by a friend.
“Whatever you think of Powl’s interests, Field Marshal, surely you admit he is not at all ambitious. Not dangerous.”
“Not dangerous?” The black bear rumbled once again. “He had created you, Nazhuret, King of Hell. If there were ten like you, it would kill Velonya.”
Having said this, Leoue rose, dusted himself, and turned his back on me.
I saw the sun rise the next morning, and I heard the bustle of the royal encampment as it packed to leave, but looking up and listening out were all I could do. Five days of forced running had so accumulated the weariness, stiffness, and cramps that I was paralyzed, and I lay on the dewy grass wet-eyed from the sun—and from despair.
My secret friend left a new plate for me, rich-smelling but beyond my power to reach. I believe it was eggs spread on black bread. Various people came to stare at me, but I could not turn my head to identify them. A blanket was thrown over me by a servant in livery, and by that sign I believed the king had been by. By the time the sun had climbed from among the tree boles to hide in the leaves, the procession had trampled and creaked its way off, leaving me in the sheep-cut grass at the edge of a village whose name I don’t remember.
Shortly after that my blanket was stolen again, and my breakfast was eaten by a dog. I didn’t object to either.
A horse approached at a good hand-gallop; I could hear it in the earth. By its angle it seemed the beast might run me over, though there is nothing a horse hates more than flesh beneath its hooves. I lay waiting without much stake in the matter.
I recognized the hoofbeats only after they had clattered still and Arlin had lifted my head in his hands.
I will call him “he” for consistency’s
sake.
“I had given you up,” I said to him, or tried to say. “I searched for days. I thought you dead.” His dark face glowered in surprise and outrage. “Dead? Why dead? You yourself told me very confidently that I would live.”
I laughed, which was both painful and exhausting. “I say a lot of things very confidently. I hope to convince God with my confidence.”
Arlin’s eyes widened owlishly. “Well, you succeeded. And I doubt I was hurt as badly as you, Zhurrie: exploded all over South Territory. I would have been back sooner, but I had sold my horse in exchange for… services… and I had to wait until I could get her back again.”
Arlin’s beautiful passionate, Velonyan features—horse-face, as the Warvalan immigrants would have called it—soothed my pain and misery as no other could have done. No other but one.
“And did you have to steal her back, old fellow?”
Arlin’s scowl was fierce, oversized, like all his expressions. “I won her back in a game of three-hand paginnak.”
“That’s what I meant—stole her,” I said, but it was affection: all affection and relief. I asked him to raise me to my feet, which he did with difficulty, remarking how much heavier I was than I looked to be. I hung my arm over Arlin’s neck and shoulder, in which position I could have only one foot on the ground, so much taller was he.
There was soot on the back of his hand and arm and on the silver velveteen of his cutaway jacket. The smell of camp grease, of onions, and of horse sweat made a cloud around him. There were unidentifiable smudges on his face.
I turned to him as well as I could and asked, “Do you do that to keep people away from you, Arlin? Roll in dead campfires, I mean. Use your clothes as a horse-wisp.”
His long mouth tightened and the ends turned up. “Nazhuret, you are quick slowly. Does my appearance repulse you?”