FIRST, THERE WERE the rumors. The Academy was always a place for rumors.
“Sammis, did you hear about the problems on Mithrada? Parts of the planet are freezing …”
I didn’t even bother to answer. Astronomy had taught me enough
about Mithrada to show how ridiculous that was. Hot enough to boil water, not to mention the higher atmospheric pressure there.
“ … serious … they called my brother off leave …”
“ … they’re lifting the banned weapons, the big nuclear ones …”
At that point, Old Windlass walked in. We didn’t have to stand, but were supposed to become silent, immediately.
“ … rebels from Eastron … do you think?”
“ … none of them left …”
“Master Olon, our lesson is
Carnelia.
I would appreciate it if you would turn your attention to whether
Carnelia
is a tragedy in the true sense of the word. You, too, Master Kryrel.” Old Windlass—that was what we all called him, although his real name was Dr. Wendengless—would have discussed literature if the world had been crumbling and the schedule said it was time for literature.
“Uhhh …”
“Come now. Is
Carnelia
a tragedy? Yes or no? Surely, you must have
some
opinion.”
“No, sir.
Carnelia
is a comedy disguised as a tragedy.” My idea was not setting well, and all my plans for stringing along with Windlass’s fondness for classifying everything as a tragedy had vanished because I had been listening to Jeen Kryrel and thinking why the rumors about Mithrada couldn’t be correct.
“A comedy? Pardon the pun, gentlemen, but surely you jest? A comedy?”
“Yes, sir. I mean no, sir. If you take away the trappings of a court, and all the formalities, the situation is really a farce. Just because she had a single romp with the wrong nobleman, she’s threatening to commit suicide? By throwing herself into a lily pond? And she drowns in waist-deep water? How can you take that seriously?”
“Master Sammis!” There was a pause. “How do you know the water is waist-deep in the Major Royal?”
“I checked in the Archives when I was in Inequital last week with my mother. The original plans say the pond was built to a quarter rod depth. It was later bricked up to a handspan, but at the time of
Carnelia,
I assume that it was the deeper level.” Actually, I really hadn’t done all that much research. I’d been discussing it with my mother, and she had mentioned the depths. But she was always right, and Old Windlass wouldn’t know the difference.
“And where in the Archives did you find this wonderful information?”
“In the background information on the history of the Palace Major.”
Windlass really looked confused, then. Started mumbling to himself,
something about the material not being in the public domain. Finally, he looked up. “All right, Master Sammis … even if the Major Royal were only a quarter rod deep, you are missing the point through a technicality—”
Jeen was trying to keep from laughing, and Trien was grinning, and if Windlass saw them I was going to be in big trouble.
“—that Carnelia, indeed all the early Western royalty, placed an inordinate emphasis on sexual purity, perhaps because of the lower-class stigma attached to sexually transmitted diseases before the availability of modern medical techniques, and partly because of the need to ensure a clear line of royal descent in order to avoid a repetition of the chaos created by the Fylarian Fragmentation …”
I had to hand it to Windlass. He could talk his way out of anything.
“ … so you are correct in saying that in the modern context Carnelia’s actions seem farcical. But that is not the question, Master Sammis. Are her actions farcical for the time and the society in which she existed? Are they? Come now?”
“It still seems like she overreacted, but it’s hard to say, sir.” I could have argued it either way.
“Master Sammis, last week you were disciplined for your reaction to criticism by a comrade of your performance during the centreslot title game. In fact, upon one occasion you failed to place an inflated rubber bladder inside a loose section of netting in the middle of a grassy field. This failure did not affect your survival, your future, or your status. It should not have affected your self-esteem, given your overall athletic reputation, despite your size. Yet you were so threatened by a mere verbal criticism that you employed bodily violence.
“Carnelia’s whole value system and life may be threatened by her thoughtless action. Yet you, who react violently to a meaningless criticism of a generally meaningless game, are going to tell me that context is not important?”
Jeen was still grinning, but now he was laughing
at
me.
“No, sir.”
“So you might consider accepting that context is vital in evaluating value systems?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Master Kryrel …”
For some reason, freezing on Mithrada didn’t seem quite so impossible after Old Windlass finished with me.
SOME DREAMS NEVER quite go away. So it was with my dream of the crossroads with its blue and red and gold and black directions that were all the same and all different.
Some nights that dream would flash before me, and then I would dream no more. Other nights, I would find myself moved from the crossroads in one direction or another, buffeted on invisible currents that were no less strong for not being felt or seen, until I was carried almost through a black chill wall into some place or time. Almost, but not quite, carried through that barrier, as though I stood behind a curtain where I could see most of what went on.
One dream was especially vivid. Or perhaps I recalled it because it so closely paralleled what actually occurred.
I had been carried into those black chill curtains that looked into another world, or so it seemed, and stood within a tower that glittered, inside and out. The tower was suffused with an energy that made it a beacon of sorts on both sides of the black curtain. No matter how I tried to look at the walls, they refused to stay in focus, even less than the other objects and people I could see from my obscured perspective.
Yet one thing was clear. The tower did not exist. Yet it was concretely there in my night/dream vision. I could see people walking through that tower. Some few looked ordinary. Ordinary as they looked, they were suffused with the same sort of energy as the tower itself, on a lesser scale.
Far less frequently, I could see others, dressed in tight black uniforms, who radiated a far greater sense of energy. In the most vivid of these dreams, the one that stuck with me, I could see one of the men in black more clearly than the others. He was below average in height, and far smaller than the colorful and uniformed giant who stood beside him. Yet the power which suffused him left the taller figure a mere shadow beside him.
The smaller man seemed graceful, with a narrow face and sandy hair. The strange part was that he stopped talking to the giant and looked straight at me, though I was certain no one could see me, ghost shadow that I was behind the black curtains of time or space or whatever.
I could feel his green eyes burning as he fixed them on me. And then he nodded and made a sign in the air that seemed like a benediction. The giant swung his head toward the smaller man, who answered before
turning away from me and leaving me in that no-time place where reality and dreams seemed to almost meet.
The man seemed familiar, too familiar. Why had I seen him? What did the energy levels mean?
Before I could ponder the question, I stumbled from the blackness.
And was in trouble—serious trouble.
I did not wake in merely cold covers, or standing by my bed, as had happened once or twice when I had dreamed about the crossroads. I found myself standing in a winter rain, still wearing but a long nightshirt, and barefoot, at the foot of the stone walkway leading to the front door.
Whhhssssstttt
…
click, click, click,
…
The half-frozen rain pelted down in sheets, as it always did in the Ninis storms, each sheet sweeping across the road and down the valley, followed by a break in the wind, cold ice drizzle, and then another pounding sheet of ice droplets striking hard enough to raise tiny welts on unprotected skin.
Most of my skin was either barely protected or totally uncovered.
Part of my mind was protesting. It was too early in the year for such a violent and chill storm. The afternoon before I had been picking chysts from the trees along the stone fence that separated our grounds from the Davniadses’, and I had taken my tunic off. That’s how warm it had been.
The changed weather wasn’t paying any attention to my mental protests, but continued to raise welts on my skin and drench my nightshirt.
So I hurried gingerly toward the overhang of the front doorway, each bare foot planted as carefully as possible on the slick stones.
Not carefully enough, I discovered, as my bare feet slipped from beneath me and my posterior and flailing hands slapped down on the cold stones.
Scrabbling and edging along across stones that were slick as glass and cold as deep winter, I finally managed to reach the overhang and dry stones underfoot. From there getting inside was easy. I opened the heavy door and took three steps until I stood on the polished slate of the entry hall in an instant pool of water, with a few icicles hanging from the edge of my nightshirt.
Only after I was inside the house did I begin to shiver, either from relief or the accumulated impact of cold.
In those days no one in Bremarlyn locked or bolted doors. Why would we? Westron was prosperous; what little crime there might be was punished severely; and few of the lower classes traveled.
The hall was chill, chill enough that normally I would have worn a
robe, but that cold was like a warm hearth compared to what I had left outside. What chilled me most was my soaking nightshirt. I wasted little time in stripping it off and carrying it to the kitchen where I wrung it out. Still naked, I took some rags and went back into the entry hall and wiped up the puddle I had left.
According to the big clock at the foot of the formal stairs, dawn was still some time away.
During the whole episode, I heard nothing from the maid down below, or from my parents above, but that may have been because any slight noise I made had been drowned out by the wind and the sound of the ice rain on windows and walls.
Then I put the rags in the empty wash bucket, hoping that Shaera would either think she had overlooked them or not want to mention the problem when she discovered them on the morrow.
Taking my damp nightshirt with me, I tiptoed up the back stairs to my room. I opened the window briefly, got pelted by the rain again, and closed it. After laying the wet nightshirt on the stone sill, I rummaged through my closet and found my other nightshirt, which, as a proper scholar in training, I was not to wear for another day. I yanked it on and climbed under the cold quilts, and began to shiver in earnest.
How had I gotten outside? Had I been sleepwalking? Did the dream have anything to do with it? What?
Surely I would have fallen on the ice going down the walk, and I swore that the chill of the ice underfoot and the rain had been too sudden for an awakening from a nightmare. Had I been sleepwalking, wouldn’t I have wakened as soon as the cold and rain struck me, not all the way down the walk?
The questions seemed endless, but, surprisingly, shivers or not, I fell asleep before I could figure out answers that made sense.
When I woke the next morning, it was to a blaze of light. My first thought was that I had been transported to the tower of my night dream vision.
I heard nothing for a moment, but I could smell the odor of burnt sausage, which meant that Shaera was attempting breakfast. While she kept the large house spotless, she attacked cooking as if, like cleaning, it were to receive the full force of her ability and vigor. Full vigor meant high heat and overcooked meats and scorched breads.
The blaze of light came not from some dream tower, but from the sun flaring through and reflecting off the ice that coated the trees, the ground, and even the stones of the roadway.
I struggled from under my quilts, seeing that my breath did not quite turn to steam in the air of my bedroom, and went to the window.
The nightshirt was semi-frozen, and I lifted my hands.
The hall light was on, and that told me that the solar power units on the roof had begun to operate. They had been expensive, my father said, but he had always worried about relying totally on the electric current delivered through the semi-ceramic cables from the Imperial power authority. The power authority, of course, received its electricity from the satellite links, which had been the primary reason for the Westron space effort.
By pressing my nose close against the glass, I could see most of the front walk from the window. I pressed and looked. The walk was coated in ice, although it was beginning to steam as the solar cells warmed the coils beneath. There were darker patches where the ice was thinner that could have been footprints. But there was really no way to tell.
I turned and leaned against the wall, wondering which uniform I should wear to school, and realized my posterior was sore, very sore. From what I could see, lifting the nightshirt and craning over my own shoulder at the reflection of my backside, I had the beginning of a nasty bruise.
So I had not been dreaming. Now I was going crazy. First, out-of-season freezing rain, and now dreams about strange towers that left me rods from where I went to sleep.
“Sammis!”
My father’s call halted any further speculation, since I had only a few minutes before I would be expected at the table, and fewer minutes after that if I wanted a ride in the steamer that would halve the walk to the Academy. My father did not believe in making things easier, nor did he believe in making things artificially harder. If he were going my way on part of his drive to work at the Imperial offices in Bremarlyn, I could ride as far as our paths converged … if I were ready, and if he had no other plans.
I raced for the washroom, mine alone, and certainly one of the few advantages of being an only child.
As I completed washing my face, I looked into the mirror. The face of my dream, the face of the man who had looked at me through the curtains of blackness, had been my face—older, more experienced, and unlined, but my face.
That made the whole mystery less real. How could I ever see myself anywhere? It had to have been a dream.
Since the sun promised to warm the ice, I chose a midweight uniform, the same blue and silver tunic over dark blue trousers, with the black boots we all had to wear.
“Sammis!”
“Coming!” I grabbed my pack and cloak and tumbled down the front stairs, taking a quick look at the spot on the floor behind the front door. No sign of water or water damage.
Both of them were at the table. Mother was dressed to go to the city—Inequital, not Bremarlyn—with leather dress boots, wide trousers and matching jacket. Of course, she would be wearing the flynyx coat Father had given her for their anniversary and driving the gold steamer. An independent woman, my mother, despite my father’s importance as the preeminent regional solicitor of taxes and commerce. That he could also claim to be a descendent of the old dukes of Ronwic did not disturb her either. Nor did it seem to impress her. Little of pomp seemed to faze her.
I could tell she had been up early and had completed her morning workout, although she had probably not taken a run, as she usually did. Once or twice I had tried to follow her regimen and decided against it. She was only a shade taller than I was; but underneath her careful tailoring were muscles it would take years before I could match. Yet she never made an issue about it. She just got up and did it, without fail, every morning.
She had taken a degree herself, in economic theory and practice, and had published one or two monographs, claiming that it had been “just to keep her hand in,” whatever that meant. She also was far more physical than my father, both with her own exercise room in the cellars and her ongoing classes in Delkaiba—that was the old Westron martial art. All the same, I was never quite sure what she did while I was in school or on her infrequent but long and solitary “vacations.” Neither she nor my father ever mentioned it. And, somehow, my innumerable questions never quite got answered.
“Have some sausage, Sammis. Need some protein, not just starch.”
I reached for the least burned sausage on the platter.
“What do you think about this business on Mithrada?”
“What business?” I was looking for an unburned roll, preferably to avoid having to take another sausage.
“The strange reports about the project problems. You don’t discuss it in school?”
My mouth was full. So I nodded. I hadn’t paid that much attention. So the emperor wanted another planet. There was still plenty of room in Westron, and more than that in Eastron.
“Waste of money. Terrible waste of tax revenues …” mumbled my father.
My mother frowned, which was also strange. Usually she wore an exercise singlesuit to breakfast and never showed other than a pleasant
disposition. Again, she changed the subject quickly. “Are you sure that uniform is warm enough?”
“Ice storm was a freak,” I mouthed. “Melting off already.”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full.” That was Father.
“All too many freak occurrences,” murmured Mother, so softly that Father, with his bad ear that he refused to have examined, heard nothing.
I looked at her, and she shook her head minutely, as if to tell me not to ask. I didn’t. Instead, I grabbed the last roll, taking bites first from an almost ripe chyst and then from the roll.
Father pursed his lips and took a last sip from his cup.
“Coming?”
I swallowed the last mouthful, wiped my face, and nodded.
“Meet you at the steamer.”