by Brian Daley
He giggled again, a thing seldom heard from grim Eliatim. “But I keep digressing. Let us tally what you’ve learned from my lessons, for in one wise I’ve been honorable; I was engaged to teach you the arts of war and I have done it as best I could. Mayhap if you’ve paid sufficient attention you’ll yet keep your life.”
And he advanced, all jocularity gone in the application of his trade. The Prince circled warily, knowing that at his best he was not likely to match the other, who was himself something of a magician in matters of bared blades.
Then, unlooked for, came a violent gust of wind, so strong and cold that it might have come from the straining lungs of an intervening deity, to blow out the little lantern and hurl a leafy branch into the face of shocked Eliatim. He gave a startled curse and brought his free hand up involuntarily. Springbuck knew that his chance had miraculously come. He had only to mount Fireheel and wheel into the nearby wood to escape under mantle of night and storm. He’d already gathered the gray’s reins in hand when he stopped, for he was no longer alone with his foe in the darkness. Rather, he saw those of whom the blademaster had spoken, his mother—or, more accurately, as he had no recollection of her, the pale death mask on her coffin—Micko and Duskwind. And over all was the death of Hightower, merciless officiation of Archog.
And all at once he felt the desire to sneak away, to escape like some hunted animal and leave more unavenged deaths behind him, driven out before another emotion, as one incoming wave is broken and scattered by the next. Shame drained his fright; fury made him contemptuous of his own helplessness.
Springbuck stood like a stone statue while the other struck flint to rekindle the lantern. When it was done, Eliatim was astounded to see the son of Surehand waiting, an unfamiliar light in his eye, but the martial instructor quit his mocking, relieved laughter only when the Prince brought Bar slowly to guard.
As he was accustomed, Eliatim took the fencing distance that gave him maximum advantage: close enough for him to hit, far enough to render many of the shorter Springbuck’s moves overextensions. The Prince felt a despair coming over him, born of countless humbling experiences at Eliatim’s hands. Tension began to rob him of his natural fluidity.
Swords crossed tentatively in the wavering light, the master-of-arms waiting his pupil out. At length, Springbuck began an attack-in-advance, feinting a disengage and hoping to turn a final disengage into a lunge, but harbored little confidence of success; sure enough, Eliatim’s blade was elusive lightning. Another thrust from the Prince was met with a quick croise, and the son of Surehand was lucky to escape with a slash along his upper arm which would have been serious, had he not been wearing leathers. Springbuck changed lines of engagement several times, and Eliatim, all cool control, followed suit almost indifferently.
Springbuck made a feint and was met with a flickering extension, but this was no news; Eliatim’s defense was as strong as his offense, and the stop-thrust was his heart’s delight. The Prince felt that Eliatim indeed foresaw his every thought, and decided that a second-intent attack launched from a false one would be foolish.
Springbuck’s heart was pounding, sweat slick on his face. He could think of no feasible maneuver of the blade that he had not tried on Eliatim a hundred times in vain. But this time, he thought as Eliatim gave his blade a ringing beat, a faulty try would be met with deadliest rebuke.
Eliatim deceived the parry with which Springbuck replied to his beat, dropping his point just low enough for the nervous parry to pass over it in derobement, then deliberately forfeited his chance to attack in return, laughing at the Prince’s hasty retreat.
Now Eliatim brought forth his virtuosity. His casual changes of tempo had Springbuck flinching in anticipation. The threat of his bind and the menace of his false attacks made the younger man feel humiliatingly inadequate. But the new determination flared in Springbuck again; how he wanted to see laughing Eliatim die!
He thought of the parrying dagger in his left boot top, and it occurred to him that if he could bring it into play unexpectedly, the main-gauche might give him an advantage for one critical exchange; but again, possibly not, since Eliatim fought in the new profiled style, forcing Springbuck to do the same.
Determined not to be drawn out, but rather to wait out his chance, the Prince tried to put aside his preoccupations and fence from the subcortical. In that combat, as in lovemaking and music, immediate past, present and immediate future took on a peculiar fusion. Neither man made much use of his edge, and their weapons joined in whirling motion, springing apart again to punctuation of steel vibrating, chiming in notes almost too high to be heard.
In his surrender to reflexes, coming as it did in close pursuit of his decision to fight it out with Eliatim, Springbuck found that a new and radical thought had blossomed in his mind: all his life, Eliatim had been coaching him to lose this particular match.
The Prince had been taught patience, counseled prudence—and infused with hesitation. Certainly he’d become a superior swordsman, but he’d been ingrained with responses that made him prey to Eliatim.
And on the heels of this thought—his mind insulated now from the exertions of hand and eye to keep him alive—came insight. He must depart utterly from his conservative style of swordplay, or die.
He could think of only one tactic to meet the need, though he considered and discarded a desperate flèche. He’d seen it only once, brought back from southern parts by Lord Roguespur and called—what was it?—the “ballestra.”
Inspiration became motion. He poised his body and released it like a gyrfalcon from the gauntlet. With barely adequate stance, he pushed off with his left foot, right preceding him in search of purchase.
He skimmed forward, fleet and lethal as the Angel of Death, the untried move coming to him with surreal ease, into an immediate lunge. The actions came as one, executed virtually as the idea occurred to him.
Eliatim’s defense was there, but calculated to stop another feint or convictionless attack. Bar slid by and found his throat, and the blademaster’s point shot past the Prince’s ear. Abruptly, Springbuck stood very close indeed to the great Eliatim as crimson gushed into Bar’s blood channels and across its basket hilt. He barely retained the presence of mind to pull his sword free, and gaped in wide-eyed amazement His adversary sank to the unheeding surface of the Western Tangent, corpse-face covered with steaming blood and disbelief.
The Prince slowly wiped Bar clean on Eliatim’s sleeve and returned it to its scabbard.
“I shall go Doomfaring now, in earnest,” he whispered through persistent rain, “and what final lessons you have taught me tonight, I shall never forget!”
And his sudden laughter rang above the wind.
I galloped out of Earthfast, with running in my head, and putting leagues behind before the Queen’s guard knew I’d fled.
I killed a man in darkness, to live until the day, and whether that were wrong or not, I can’t, unbiased, say.
But he was dead and I alive, and you may take from me. That as I fought, I knew that’s how I wanted things to be.
—From the Antechamber Ballads, personal compositions attributed to Springbuck
Chapter Five
So many gay swordes, so many altered wordes, and so few covered boardes, saw I never so many empty purses, so few good horses, and so many curses, saw I never.
—John Skelton, “The Manner of the World Nowadays”
He cast Eliatim’s body back into the trees from which it had emerged. The horses presented a knottier problem.
Determined to take his own gray favorite now that fate had given him the chance, he took the heavy, overgilt saddle from Fireheel and hid it, too, among the pines. He gave brief thought to taking along Eliatim’s bow and quiver, but since his poor vision rendered him an inferior archer, he decided to forego the trouble.
He then transferred the reconnaissance saddle to the powerful, long-legged Fireheel, blew out the little lantern and hurled it in the general direction of its owner. Pi
cking up his dampened cloak and resuming it with a slight shiver, he mounted and took the reins of the riderless horse in his right hand. His way lit by occasional bolts from above, he trotted off eastward.
Thoughts buzzed around each other, vying for his attention. He knew that he’d been lucky in his duel with his late instructor. Still, he perceived that there was more substance to the encounter than that. He’d thought for himself, taken a gamble when the situation demanded, won on the resources of eye and hand and brain alone. It was possible, he thought, that he’d been undersold to himself all along.
Eliatim’s other words came back to him, particularly those that made reference to his mother. Had Bey, as Eliatim had implied, caused the death of that Lady, to clear the path for Fania?
The Tangent, raised above the surrounding ground and gently pitched to either side, drained itself of water quickly as the rain abated. Some traffic moved there already: farmers on foot or with carts bringing goods to market, a troop of traveling players bearing torches, forming a swirl of color and motion and song, an officious dispatch rider hastening past them all, various merchants.
Springbuck, relieved at the lack of troops on the Tangent, was the only one bound eastward and so, the way being wide, went quickly. The solution to the problem of his extra horse came to him at dawn, when he encountered a band of tinkers camped at the roadside.
Rather than being bound toward Kee-Amaine, they were about to swing southward. There was brief haggling, and the Prince rode on with a considerable sum of money and some provisions, comfortably sure that the roncin’s brands and cropping would be promptly obliterated.
He loosened his cloak as the sun warmed him. Elation over his victory against Eliatim swept into him again. He reappraised himself in light of his own simple and profound decision to stand and fight. He was exhilarated but steady, confident but unimpulsive.
Fireheel happily increased their distance eastward, and a new Springbuck rode into the day, of a far different mettle than he with whom Fania’s forces had been so sure they could cope.
* * * *
It was two days later, and well along in the afternoon, when he reined in magnificent Fireheel on the summit of a low hill to gaze upon Erub.
His hunger had been growing for hours, his provisions gone since breakfast. He would have preferred to spend his nights in some inn or tavern on the way, if only to sleep on a bench by the hearth, but had avoided the Tangent since that first dawn for fear of apprehension, skirting the odd farm or crofter’s hut he’d spied.
Seeing the end of the narrow, rutted road was good compensation for this, though. The little town was in a valley spread below, and on a rise beyond stood an undersized castle of antiquated design. He knew from his own research at Earthfast that the castle was untenanted.
A silence hung over Erub as he rode past the crude daub-and-wattle hut that was its outermost limit. He saw no one living, but came upon the dead and all-but-dead in numbers. There were villagers scattered here and there, war arrows in them or the bitter, evident tales of sword and lance wounds.
He rode with hand close to hilt and, coming closer to the square at the center of town, encountered a remarkable thing: soldiers of Coramonde, light cavalrymen, lay slain near an improvised barricade. Of these, many bore injuries from scythe or pitchfork or were pierced with hunting shafts. Many others, though, had odd wounds through their vests of ring mail, small, rounded holes; one had such an opening fairly between his eyes and a huge and hideous gap torn in the back side of his skull. An eldritch smell, unlike anything the Prince had ever scented before, hung in the air.
He decided to continue on to the castle, wondering if the lancers had been sent to find him or to interfere with the school that Andre deCourteney had set up. He knew that word of his escape could have outraced him via dispatch riders on the Tangent, if those in Earthfast knew where to look.
He passed through the town without seeing anyone who might have given him information, but on the track leading up to the little castle he came up to an elderly couple urging a recalcitrant donkey to pull a cart loaded with their personal possessions, bedding and household goods of questionable value. The donkey remained stubbornly seated.
The old man, seeing him, snatched a short bow from the cart and fumbled for an arrow. Springbuck laid a hand to Bar and said, “I carry no quarrel to you, yet do not nock that shaft or you force me to show you my sword. What’s come to pass in Erub?”
The old man was a shrunken specimen without an excess ounce of flesh on life-weary bones. He laid aside his bow after a moment and removed his shapeless hat from years of habit in talking to a mounted warrior, but there was a spirited glint in his eye.
He swallowed once, and admitted, “This noon a detachment of lancers came to make arrest of our teachers, Andre deCourteney and Van Duyn. We didn’t want their new teaching to end, and so there was fighting. But now more soldiers are coming and we must go. The only safety lies in the keep with Van Duyn and deCourteney.”
“What?” exploded the Prince, baffled. “Are you so enamored of these teachings that you’ll leave your homes and defy the regulars?”
The toothless mouth became, for a moment, firm and set. The grizzled chin came up, and the man’s reply was slow and emphatic.
“I have lived my whole life within a day’s walk of this town,” he began. “I’ve worked hard every day that I can remember for my overlord. I go forth in the darkness each morning to follow his oxen in the furrows, my lot scarcely better than theirs. I have watched my wife grow old and crooked with endless toil, she who was once so fair and gay. Two sons have I lost to plague, two to war, one daughter to famine and another at her birth. There is small enough difference between me and the beasts in harness, so constant is my labor and so seldom have I given any thought to my own life and its meaning. I just tendered my tithes and worried about the crop.
“Then there came two who made me pause and wonder about the wherefores of life, who told me about the world beyond my furrows. They quoted the words of learned men, glorious thinkers and doers of whom we had never heard, and when they asked what we thought of this and I spoke, they listened. All this, though I am only an old man, stooped with the years.
“And it was as if I had been shut up in darkness all my life and only now let out. So now, the Queen at Earthfast has decided to put an end to the practice of teaching here, to make of us again what we were. But when the cavalrymen came we fought them. Fought them! Few of them left alive, and Van Duyn brought down many with his weapon that reaches out to kill at distances.
“Do we love this new learning, you ask? Well enough, I say, to leave this fief forever if we must, rather than submit again to our overlord.”
Springbuck was silent, calculating what their hard life had cost these old souls. Their children gone, life must now be spent in constant labor, since the sons and daughters who would have cared for them in the winter of their days would never return. It was, perhaps, the end of the man’s name forever when he died, with no one to keep his memory alive or light incense for him at the altar of his gods.
In this light, the war that Springbuck had contemplated against Fania and Strongblade was not so brave or glittering a thing to entertain.
While he’d been angry at such disrespect shown for a liege, he was fascinated with what energies had been evoked in this aged breast. The peasants were yanking at the donkey’s harness again. And critical choices can be made as quickly and as simply as this: the Prince unsheathed Bar and, leaning down, struck the beast loudly across its rump with the flat of his blade. It bucked to its feet, kicking the cart behind it, and the couple tugged it into motion once more.
The heir to the Ku-Mor-Mai trailed behind.
The moat outside the castle was long dry and choked with high weeds. One of the double doors beyond the drawbridge had been left ajar, doubtless for such latecomers as they. The gates, like the drawbridge, were of old wood but looked sound. The keep’s walls were worn but substantial, thou
gh rather low by modern standards.
Springbuck brought up the rear into a courtyard where plants had pushed up insistently through defeated cobblestones. There was much debris in sight—broken tools, a useless wagon wheel, forgotten benches—and after three nights in the open, he was sourly willing to wager that the roof of the place leaked.
The little courtyard was filled with villagers dashing to and fro. Standing atop a wagon at the center of it all, giving commands to bring them to some semblance of order, was the man known as Van Duyn, whom Springbuck recognized from his one previous visit to Earthfast. He was a tall, lean man with gray-white hair and a dour look about him that had made the Prince wonder if anything ever quite satisfied him. His face was creased with worry, and a strange metal framework secured a circle of glass before each of his eyes. Springbuck had once reflected on a possible connection between this and Yardiff Bey’s single ocular, but it was said that Van Duyn’s lenses simply helped him see more clearly. A small part of the Prince wondered now if he might be able to acquire such a device for himself.
Springbuck began to understand the discomfort of his father, the Protector Suzerain, at hearing the thoughts of Van Duyn; the man could well bring disaster and chaos to Coramonde. What caused usually docile commoners to respond to him so readily, to jump with a will to his every order and stand by him so staunchly?
“See that you use the barbed arrows first,” the outlander was saying, just as the Prince caught his eye. “Are you a Queen’s man, sir?” Van Duyn snapped curtly. “With some new mandamus of arrest?”
Thankful that his war mask hid his features, the son of Surehand responded, “I was unaware of your predicament when I came to hear your new teachings.”