by Tad Williams
“So many plots!” Isgrimnur groaned. “So many intrigues! It makes my head swim. I am not a man for such things. Give me a sword or an axe and let me deal blows!”
“Is that why you have taken to closets?” Eolair smiled, and produced from beneath his cloak a skin of sour-honey mead. “There does not seem anyone to swing at here. I think you are taking rather well to intrigue late in life, my good Duke.”
Isgrimnur frowned, and took the offered skin. He’s a born intriguer himself, our Eolair, he thought. I should be grateful, if nothing else, to have someone to talk to. For all that Hernystiri poetry-talk I’ve heard him trot out for the ladies, he’s hard as shield-steel underneath—a good ally for treacherous times.
“There’s something else.” Isgrimnur handed the skin back to Eolair and wiped his mouth. The count took a long swallow and then nodded his head.
“Out with it. I’m all ears like a Circoille hare.”
“That dead man old Morgenes found out in the Kynswood?” Isgrimnur said, “—the arrowshot one?” Eolair nodded again. “He was mine. Bindesekk by name, although by the time he was discovered I would never have known him but for a broken bone in his face that was got in an earlier service for me. Of course I said nothing.”
“Yours?” Eolair cocked an eyebrow. “And doing what? Do you know?”
Isgrimnur laughed, a short, barking sound. “Certainly. That is why I kept quiet. I sent him out when Skali of Kaldskryke took his kinsmen and departed north. Sharp-nose has been making too many new friends among Elias’ court for my liking, so I sent Bindesekk out with a message to my son Isorn. As long as Elias is keeping me here with these ridiculous errands, these shows of mock-diplomacy that he claims are so important—and if they were so important, why entrust them to a blunt old war-dog like me?—then I wanted Isorn to be on especial close watch. I don’t trust Skali any more than I would a starving wolf, and my son has troubles enough at home already, from what I hear. All the reports that have trickled down across the Frostmarch are bad—raging storms in the north, the roads unsafe, villagers forced to huddle together in the main halls. It makes for troubled times, and Skali knows that.”
“’Do you think, then, it was Skali killed your man?” Eolair leaned forward, passing the skin back.
“I don’t know, to be sure.” The duke tipped back his head for another long swallow, the muscles in his thick neck pulsing; a thin drizzle of mead spattered down his blue tunic. “What I mean is: it’s the most obvious thing, but I have many doubts.” He wiped at the stain absently for a moment. “First of all, even if he caught Bindesekk, it’s an act of treason to kill him. For all his contempt, Skali is my liege-man and I am his liege-lord.”
“But the body was hidden.”
“Not well. And why so close to the castle? Why not wait until they had reached the Wealdhelm Hills—or the Frostmarch Road
if it’s even passable—and kill him there, where I’d never find out? Also, the arrow doesn’t strike me as Skali’s way. I could see him chopping Bindesekk up in a rage with that great axe of his, but shooting him and then dropping him in the Kynswood? It doesn’t sit right, somehow.”
“Then who?”
Isgrimnur shook his head, feeling the mead at last. “That’s what worries me, Hernystirman,” he said at last. “I just don’t know. There are strange things afoot. Travelers’ tales, castle rumors…”
Eolair went to the door and unlatched it, pushing it open to allow fresh air into the small room.
“These are indeed strange times, my friend,” he said, and took a deep breath. “And, perhaps the most important question of all—where in this strange world is Prince Josua?”
Simon picked up a small piece of flint and sent it spinning into space. After describing a graceful arc through the morning air the stone descended with a muffled snap into a leafless topiary animal in the garden below. Crawling to the edge of the chapel roof, Simon marked its impact point like a skilled catapult man, noting the quiver at the haunches of the hedge-squirrel. He rolled back from the roof gutter and into the shadow of a chimney, savoring the cool solidity of the stones beneath his spine. Overhead the fierce eye of the Marris sun glared down, nearing its noon apex.
It was a day to evade responsibility, to escape Rachel’s chores and Morgenes’ explanations. The doctor had not yet found out—or had not mentioned—Simon’s thwarted foray into the military arts, and Simon was content to keep it that way.
Spread-eagled and squint-eyed in the morning brightness, he heard a faint ticking noise near his head. He opened one eye in time to see a tiny gray shadow whisk past. Rolling slowly over onto his stomach, he scanned the rooftop.
The great chapel roof spread before him, a field of humped and irregular slate tiles in whose cracks sprouted tight-coiled hanks of brown and pale green moss that had somehow miraculously survived the drought, clinging to life as grudgingly as they clung to the splintered tiles. The plain of slates marched uphill from the guttered edge to the chapel’s dome, which pushed up through the roof like a sea turtle’s shell breaching the shallow wavelets of a quiet cove. Seen from this angle the dome’s colorful glass panels—which shone inside the chapel with magical pictures of the lives of saints—looked dark and flat, a parade of crude figures across a dun-colored world. At the dome’s apex an iron knob held aloft a golden Tree, but from Simon’s viewpoint it was merely gilded, the gold leaf peeling in slender, shimmering strips that revealed the corrosion beneath.
Beyond the castle chapel the sea of roofs spread out in all directions: the Great Hall, the throne room, the archives and servants’ quarters, all pitched and uneven, repaired or replaced many times as the seasons in their passing licked at gray stone and lead shingle, then nibbled them away. To Simon’s left loomed the slender white arrogance of Green
Angel Tower; farther back, protruding above the arch of the chapel dome, the gray, squat bulk of Hjeldin’s Tower sat up like a begging dog.
As Simon surveyed the expanse of the roof-world, a flirt of gray appeared again at the edge of his vision. Turning swiftly, he saw the hindquarters of a small soot-colored cat disappear into a hole at the roof’s edge. He crawled across the slates to investigate. When he was close enough to observe the hole, he dropped back down onto his stomach, balancing his chin onto the back of his hands. There was no sign of movement now.
A cat on the roof, he thought. Well, someone might as well live up here besides flies and pigeons—I suppose he eats those scrabbling roof rats.
Simon, despite having seen only its tail and back legs thus far, felt a sudden affinity with this outlaw roof cat. Like him, the cat knew the secret passages, the angles and crannies, and went where it would without leave. Like himself, this gray hunter made its way without the concern or charity of others…
Even Simon knew that this was a terrible exaggeration of his own situation, but he rather liked the comparison.
For example, hadn’t he crept unsuspected onto this same rooftop four days ago, the day after Elysiamansa, to watch the mustering out of the Erkynguard? Rachel the Dragon, irritated by his infatuation with everything except maintenance of the household, which she felt was his true—and neglected—duty, had earlier forbidden him to go down and join the crowd at the main gate.
Ruben the Bear, the hump-shouldered, slab-muscled master of the castle smithy, had told Simon that the Erkynguard was going to Falshire, up the River Ymstrecca to the east of Erchester. The wool merchants’ guild there was causing trouble, Ruben had explained to the youth as he dropped a red-hot horseshoe into a bucket of water. Waving away the hissing steam, Ruben had then tried to describe the complicated situation: it seemed that the drought had caused such distress that the sheep of Falshire’s farmers—their main livelihood—must now be appropriated by the crown to feed the starving, dispossessed masses crowding into Erchester. The wool merchants, crying that this would ruin them—that they, too, would be made to starve—were swarming in the streets, inflaming the local folk against the unpopular edic
t.
So Simon had climbed secretly onto the chapel roof Tiasday-last to watch the Erkynguard ride out, several hundred well-armed foot soldiers and a dozen knights under the command of Earl Fengbald, whose fief Falshire was. As Fengbald rode out at the front of the Guard, helmed and corseleted, splendid in his red tunic and silverstitched eagle, several of the more cynical in the watching crowd suggested the Earl was taking so many soldiers for fear that his Falshire subjects would not recognize him, owing to his extended absences. Others suggested he might fear that they would recognize him—Fengbald had not exactly been tireless in the interests of his hereditary domain.
Simon thought back warmly on Fengbald’s impressive helmet, a gleaming silver casque crested with a pair of spreading wings.
Rachel and the others are right, he thought suddenly. Here I am daydreaming again. Fengbald and his noble friends will never know if I live or die. I must make something of myself. I don’t want to be a child forever, do I? He scratched at a slate tile with a piece of gravel, trying to draw an eagle. Besides, I would probably look foolish in armor…wouldn’t I?
The memory of the soldiers of the Erkynguard marching so proudly out the great Nearulagh Gate touched him in sore spots, but it warmed him, too; he kicked his feet lazily as he watched the cat’s cave for sign of its denizen.
It was an hour past noon before a suspicious nose appeared at the front of the hole. By this time Simon was riding a stallion through the gates of Falshire, flowers raining down from the windows above. Tugged back to attention by the sudden movement, he held his breath as the nose was followed by the rest of the beast: a small, short-furred gray cat with a patch of white running from right eye to chin. The youth stayed stock-still as the cat—a mere half a fathom from his own position—took momentary fright at something and arched its back, eyes narrowing. Simon feared it had seen him, but as he remained motionless it suddenly moved forward, bounding out of the shadow of the roof’s upcurved edge and into the broad path of the sun’s passage. As Simon watched, delighted, the gray catling found a loose piece of flint and batted it skittering across the tiles, following to hook it with an agile paw and begin the game anew.
He watched the roof cat’s antics for some time, until a particularly ridiculous pratfall—the catling had skidded to a stop with both front paws on the slate chip, tumbled head over heels into a crack between the tiles, then lay there with its tail wriggling in exasperation—forced him to reveal his position. His long-suppressed snort of laughter broke forth; the little beast leaped tumbling into the air, landed, and bolted for its hole with no more than a brief glance in Simon’s direction. This scrambling exit convulsed him again.
“Scatter, cat!” he called after the vanished creature. “Scatter, you catter! Scatter-scatter!”
As he was crawling toward the hole-mouth to sing a little song of shared outlook on roofs and stones and solitude to the gray cat—who he was somehow certain would be listening—something else caught his eye. He put his hands on the roof edge and poked his head up to look. The beginnings of a breeze traced subtle designs through his hair.
Away to the southeast, far beyond the limits of Erchester and the headlands above the Kynslagh, a deep gray mark was smeared across the clear Marris sky, as if a dirty thumb had been dragged across a newly-painted wall. The wind shredded the dark smudge even as he watched, but darker billows were rising from below, a turbulent darkness too thick for any wind to diffuse. A regular black cloud was mounting upward on the eastern horizon.
It took him a long, puzzled moment before he realized that what he was seeing was smoke, a dense plume of it besmirching the pale, clean sky.
Falshire was burning.
10
King Hemlock
Two days later, on the morning of Marris’ last day, Simon was going down to breakfast with the other scullions when he was brought up short by a heavy black hand on his shoulder. For an unreal, terrifying moment his thoughts skipped back to his throne room dream, and the ponderous dancing of the malachite kings.
This hand, though, proved to be wearing a cracked, fingerless black glove. Neither was its owner made of dark stone—although as Simon stared up in surprise at the face of Inch, it did seem that God had somehow neglected to provide enough living stuff while this Inch-person was being made, and that last-minute substitutions of some inert, imperturbable matter had been necessary.
Inch leaned down until his whiskered face was very close to Simon’s; even his breath seemed to smell more of stone than of wine or onions or anything ordinary.
“Doctor wants to see you.” He rolled his eyes from side to side. “Right away, like.”
The other scullions had scattered past Simon and the hulking Inch with curious looks and continued on their way. Simon, trying to squirm out from underneath the weighty hand, watched them go despairingly.
“Very well. I’ll be right there,” he said, and with a wiggle tugged free. “Just let me get a crust of bread that I can eat as I go.” He trotted on down the corridor toward the servants’ eating room, stealing a backward glance; Inch was still standing in the same place, following his retreat with the tranquil eyes of a bull in a meadow.
When he emerged in a short while with a heel of bread and a wedge of chewy white cheese, he was dismayed to find that Inch had waited for him. The large man fell into step alongside as he headed toward Morgenes’ chambers. Simon offered him some food, trying to smile as he did so, but Inch only stared at it incuriously and said nothing.
As they walked across the dry-rutted open ground of the Middle Bailey, threading through the flocks of writing-priests making their daily pilgrimages between the Chancelry and the Hall of Archives, Inch cleared his throat as if to speak. Simon, who felt so uncomfortable around this person that even silence made him nervous, looked up expectantly.
“Why…” Inch at last began, “…why do you take my place?” He did not turn his waxy eyes away from the priest-clogged pathway before them.
It was Simon’s heart that now took on the qualities of stone: cold, heavy, and burdensome. He was sorry for this farm animal that thought itself a man, but frightened by him, too.
“I…I haven’t taken your place.” His protestations sounded false even to his own ears. “Doesn’t the doctor still have you in to help out with carrying things, and setting things up? He is teaching me to do other things, things that are very different.”
They walked on in silence. At last Morgenes’ chambers were in view, crouched in choking ivy like the nest of a small but resourceful beast. When they were perhaps ten paces away, Inch’s hand clutched Simon’s shoulder once more.
“Before you came,” Inch said, his wide, round face moving down toward Simon’s like a basket being lowered from an upstairs window, “…before you came, I was his helper. I was going to be next.” He frowned, pushing his lower lip out and knitting his single bar of eyebrow into a steeper angle, but his eyes were still mild and sad. “Doctor Inch, I would have been.” He focused his gaze on Simon, who half-feared he would be crumpled beneath the weight of the paw on his collarbone. “I don’t like you, little kitchen boy.”
Turning him loose, Inch shuffled away, the back of his head barely visible above the mountainous rise of his bowed shoulders. Simon, rubbing his neck, felt a little sick.
Morgenes was ushering a trio of young priests out of his chambers. They were conspicuously—and somewhat shockingly, as far as Simon was concerned—drunk.
“They came for my contribution to the All Fool’s Day celebration,” Morgenes said as he shut the door behind the trio, who had already burst into ragged song. “Hold this ladder, Simon.”
A bucket of red paint was perched on the ladder’s topmost step, and when the doctor reached it he fished out a brush that had fallen in and began daubing strange characters above the doorframe—angular symbols, each one a tiny, puzzling picture. They looked to Simon a little like the ancient writings contained in some of Morgenes’ books.
“What are those for?�
� he asked. The furiously painting doctor did not reply, Simon took his hand off the rung to scratch his ankle and the ladder began to sway ominously. Morgenes had to grasp the door lintel to keep from toppling.
“No, no, no!” he barked, trying to keep the ebb and flow of the paint from overtopping the bucket’s edge. “You know better, Simon. The rule is: all questions written out! But wait until I’m down from here—if I fall off and die, there’ll be no one to answer you.” Morgenes went back to his painting, sputtering quietly to himself.
“Sorry, Doctor,” Simon said, a touch indignantly, “I just forgot.”
A few moments passed with no other sounds than the whiskery swish of Morgenes’ brush.
“Will I always have to write down my questions? I can’t hope to write as fast as I think up things I want to know about.”
“That,” said Morgenes, squinting at his last stroke, “was the general idea behind the rule. You, boy, devise questions like God makes flies and poor people—in droves. I am an old man, and prefer to set my own pace.”
“But,” Simon’s voice took on a despairing tone, “I shall be writing the rest of my days!”
“I can think of many less worthwhile ways you might spend your life,” Morgenes responded, beetling down the ladder. He turned to survey the complete effect, the arch of strange letters all along the top of the door frame. “For instance,” he said, casting a sharp, knowing eye over to Simon, “you might forge a letter and join Breyugar’s guardsmen, then spend your time having little bits of you hacked off by men with swords.”