Summer King, Winter Fool

by Lisa Goldstein

  Callabrion was right, Narrion thought. He had bound himself too closely to Scathiel, the god of darkness and pain and death. He had been about to run from the battle, to leave the fighting to others. He had killed Damath, and caused King Gobro’s death. Even his attempt to return Callabrion to the heavens was motivated by greed and selfishness: if Scathiel ruled forever the earth would die, and he, Narrion, would not be able to enjoy his new-gotten wealth and power.

  And here beside him stood a man who seemed bound to Callabrion, a king of light. He had disrupted Val’s life to pursue his own ends, and yet Val seemed not to have been touched by his machinations; instead he had risen high on the ladder. They were two sides of the same conjuring stick: life and death, light and shadow.

  What would happen to him if Val won out against the Shai? Would he continue to hold his high position, or would Val take revenge for the time he had spent in exile in Tobol An? Should he change his life? Should he swear fealty to Callabrion, the god of summer? Narrion laughed harshly, and turned his attention back to the battlefield.

  Val watched as the men came up the street. A broad-shouldered man strode at the front of the procession; he turned aside and came toward them. “Andosto,” Val said when he reached them.

  “My liege,” Andosto said. “I have knelt to you once and received your favor, and I have failed you. I know I am not worthy to ask your pardon—I can only say that I will not fail a second time. You have my sword, and it is yours to claim whenever you have need of it.”

  “I thank you,” Val said. Was this the same man who had trembled in fear in his cage?

  Andosto rubbed his hand over his eyes. “I was someone else for a time, my liege,” he said, as if seeing Val’s doubts. “They made me a coward called Borno.”

  “How did you overcome their sorcery?

  “I remembered who I was,” Andosto said.

  Val watched in amazement as the other man went toward the courtyard. I remembered who I was, he had said, as if it could be that simple. Val had not been ensorcelled as Andosto had been, but he thought that he might never come to know himself that completely. Courtier, poet, soldier, actor: in the past year he had played more roles than he could count. And now he acted the part of a king, and the people around him had taken up their parts and become his courtiers and soldiers. But there was more to being a king than he had guessed. What would happen when the play ended?

  He looked out over the battlefield. In the dim light he could make out the figure of Andosto at the head of a group of soldiers, pressing toward the palace. The tide of battle began to shift as Andosto encouraged the men. All of them had heard of his exploits in the war against the Shai; some had even fought under his command. With his leadership, and with the reinforcements that had come from all over Etrara, the men began to fight with a new heart.

  “Look!” Val said. “The Shai are retreating toward the palace.”

  “The day is not yet over,” Narrion said. “I’m certain someone has gone for more men. The Shai have soldiers in most of the outlying provinces.”

  The darkness around him began to deepen: soot gray, charcoal gray, nearly black. Val strained to see the men in the courtyard but the air before him became black as pitch. Early night had fallen; he could barely make out Narrion in the gloom.

  He heard the sound of sword clashing against sword, and then silence came from the courtyard. Men put away their swords; the citizens of Etrara began to make camp, and the Shai soldiers hastened toward the palace. Could it be night already? He had heard the bells of midafternoon a few minutes ago.

  He looked up toward the heavens, searching for the constellations he knew: the Ladder, the Keys, the Palace of Sbona. But he saw nothing he recognized; unfamiliar stars arched across the sky. He shivered.

  Campfires bloomed in three or four places across the courtyard, their light shining red-gold in the black night. “Come—let’s get warm,” Narrion said, leading the way toward one of them.

  It was far too early to sleep. On their way across the courtyard Val and Narrion passed men wagering with conjuring sticks or telling stories or singing bits of old ballads. They sat at a fire and listened to a storyteller repeat the old tale of the battle of Arbono. And what stories are the Shai telling each other this night? Val thought. Tales of their own heroism, probably, accounts of battles won and enemies overcome.

  Someone looked at Val, looked again as if to make certain that the flickering light had not played tricks on him. “My liege,” he said, startled.

  Others looked as well. “King Valemar!” someone else said. All around the fire men stirred, turned toward him, whispered to their neighbors. The storyteller stopped in the middle of a sentence.

  “My liege,” one of the men said shyly. “May I ask you a question?”

  Val nodded. “Certainly.”

  “We have heard rumors—folks say that when you have gained the throne you will return Callabrion to his rightful place in the heavens. Can that be true?”

  Val hesitated. What could he promise this man? A twig in the fire snapped, sending up golden sparks. The man beside him stirred impatiently. Val nodded again. “I will try,” he said.

  “You must, my lord,” the man said, serious now. “The land cannot survive much more of this cold and darkness.”

  Val looked around the circle at the men. Their eyes shone in the firelight; their faces were grave. What had he done? He had given them his word, the word of a king. They would hold him to it, he knew. They looked capable of anything, capable even of killing him like one of the Shai kings if he could not restore summer to Etrara.

  Then one of them moved, breaking the spell. “May I continue with the tale, my liege?” the storyteller asked.

  “Of course,” Val said.

  The storyteller took up where he had left off. As Val listened he realized that the other man was altering the tale, though it was done so subtly that most of his audience had probably not even noticed. The hero of the story became not Brion, the warrior who defeated the Shai after the country had been torn by civil war, but Tarea, the daughter of King Galin who had ascended to the throne when she was just ten years old. And whenever the storyteller mentioned Queen Tarea he was always careful to add her epithet, “the daughter of Sbona.”

  The daughter of Sbona, Val thought much later that night, lying by the campfire. He pulled his cloak closer around him, listening to the men shift and settle, hearing a few of them snore.

  He knew the story, of course. Sbona had come to earth to find her children, Scathiel and Callabrion. After a month where she had searched and found nothing she saw a wooden hut standing alone in the middle of a plain. She made her way toward it and asked the man within for food.

  The man invited her inside. She saw that he had little to eat, but he served her the best that he had, and when night fell he offered her his rough pallet and said that he would sleep on the floor.

  “I am the goddess Sbona,” she said, thinking to reward him for his kindness to her. “Creator of the earth; kindler of the sun, moon and stars; mother of all. I will grant you anything you wish in exchange for your hospitality here. What is your desire?”

  The man said nothing.

  “What is your desire?” she asked a second time, and a second time the man said nothing.

  The goddess Sbona became angry. She grew in stature and reached up to the rafters, intending to bring the house down around them. “What is your desire?” she asked him for the last time.

  The man sank to his knees. She saw then that his reverence had prevented him from speaking his mind to her. She found his thoughts, and knew that his sole desire was to kiss her hand.

  She drew him up. Then she kissed him and led him to the pallet, seeing on his face his astonishment, and terror, and great delight.

  Nine months later she returned to the cottage, bringing with her the child they had conceived together. “From her line will come the rulers of Etrara,” she said, and she left the daughter with him.

&n
bsp; After she found her sons Sbona never came to earth again. Callabrion and Scathiel visited the earth separately, each one sowing his seed in every country he came to, but only the rulers of Etrara could claim descent from the goddess directly.

  A son of Sbona, Val thought, a child of the great goddess. The story showed him what his kingship meant. Sbona had cared for her children; a king must think not of himself but of his people.

  He had not had any idea of the responsibility he had taken on when he had claimed his birthright. They would follow him heedlessly into any battle, just as they had followed Callia into the war against the Shai. Even he had gone to war; he had enlisted as an officer without thinking of the justice of the cause. They had invaded a country not theirs, had sought to take it from the people who lived there.… Surely Callia could have made peace with the Shai. Surely peace was better than war.

  And yet he had asked these people to fight again. He could only hope his cause was more honorable than Callia’s. He shivered and moved closer to the fire, trying to get warm.

  The battle continued the next day. The men clashed together in the strange dusklike light; Val stood at his place by the fountain and tried to make some sense of the dim confused forms. Taja and Kotheg shouted over the sounds of battle, but neither could gain the advantage.

  When the bells of the clock tower pealed at noon he saw that the battle had turned again. The Shai had slept in comfort in the palace; they seemed rested, eager to make up for their losses and the humiliation of the day before. His own men had spent the night on hard ground, exposed to the chill of winter.

  A trumpet sounded. Val turned. Once again he saw men come marching up the Street of Stones, but this time he understood that Narrion had been right, that Scathiel’s pessimism had triumphed. Row after row of Shai soldiers headed toward them, their golden armor shining despite the dim light like a field of wheat struck by sunlight.

  It was over, then. Val had seen the men of Etrara put up a brave fight; no king could have done more. Would the Shai let him surrender? Would they take prisoners, with no one left to ransom any of them?

  Val looked around him. Taja was speaking, her words inaudible in the din coming from the courtyard. She raised her voice; Val heard a ritual opening verse and an invocation to the gods.

  The Shai soldiers came closer. Val clenched his fists impatiently. Poetry and fine phrases were all very well, he thought, but they could be dead if the Shai met them before her spell ended.

  “This is how it has to be done,” Narrion said. “Slowly, with each verse building on the one before it. I learned that if nothing else when I summoned Callabrion.”

  Taja spoke her first verse, using the word “street” as a keystone. As Val watched, a thin mist began to curl up from the cobblestones in the street. The strands of mist grew stronger, tighter, webbing themselves together. In the thick fog first one soldier and then another stumbled forward, each unable to see more than a handsbreadth in front of him.

  Taja began a second verse, and then a third. Her keystones shuttled through her poetry, acquiring new meanings, meeting each other in seemingly endless variations. The fog in the street thickened to a cloud so dense Val could no longer see the men within it.

  The men did not emerge from the cloud. Perhaps Taja had turned them all to stone; Val did not think that lay outside her power. She finished the spell and turned toward the fighting in the courtyard, ready to begin another ritual verse.

  All around them the light began to fail; the untimely evening was descending. Taja spoke a verse and Kotheg answered; Val saw with fascination that they both worked together to call up an unearthly light that welled from the ground. Taja recited another verse, weaving Kotheg’s keystones into her spell. The light around them strengthened, grew brighter.

  Kotheg answered her again, using the meter she had chosen for her verses. The courtyard became bright as day: brighter, for the sun had not shone with so strong a light for many months. Gold flared from the domes and turrets of the palace.

  Kotheg continued to speak. A sending formed above the courtyard, a vague mist that the poet-mage began to fashion into a solid apparition. Now Val saw that Kotheg had continued to use Taja’s meter, turning it against her; he had worked together with her only for as long as it had taken to learn some of her strengths. Kotheg, like Taja, knew tricks to make the other wizard’s magic his own.

  He had been watching the battle of magic as a spectator might watch a wrestling match, Val thought. Now he saw that the Shai poet-mage had been cunning indeed, had pretended to weakness in order to trap Taja. The man was even more dangerous than he had realized.

  A roiling fire formed above them; its red glare lit the courtyard. Val looked quickly at Taja. She seemed lost; she had been able to counter Kotheg’s spells but could not fight an apparition made from her own strengths. She started a verse, using the word “doorway” as her keystone. But she did not repeat the keystone in the second verse, or in the third, and by the fourth she had changed meter for no reason Val could see. Kotheg had unnerved her, Val thought.

  Taja looked at Kotheg. He had tricked her, she saw; she had thought him weak, elderly, almost a dotard. Now he had revealed his true power. His verses were strong and supple and oddly beautiful; he seemed to know an infinite number of keystones, learned over a lifetime of study.

  The fire grew larger, a vast lowering cloud of heat. Discordant noises sounded above them. She closed her eyes, feeling despair. What did she know, after all? How could she be expected to save Etrara, she who had grown up among simple fisher-folk? She had never truly studied wizardry, knew only the little things Mathary had managed to teach her and what small store of knowledge she had gleaned from the library.

  The library. She had been wrong about her knowledge; she had learned a wizardry of sorts in the dusty corridors of the library. She called up a book in her mind, a list of keystones. She spoke the keystone “leap,” feeling the power contained within the word as she said it. She saw how it would fit into the verse she had constructed so far, how it would rhyme at the end. A cloud formed to meet the fire.

  The two apparitions joined in the sky. Kotheg spoke over her spell; the fire blazed upward. She had used the keystone “leaping” a second time when she spoke of water, and now Kotheg seized on that word to describe a strong red fire leaping against the sky.

  She forced herself to become calm, to concentrate on the solid edifice of verses she was building in her mind. Sparks shot from the fire as it met the cloud. The red air above them hissed and turned black. Kotheg spoke louder. She had made him angry, she saw, and the thought delighted her.

  She finished her spell. The fire faded and died. She took a deep breath before beginning another spell. Someone shouted in the courtyard.

  She looked away from Kotheg and saw that soldiers from both sides had massed again. Andosto stood at the head of a group of men, shouting something she couldn’t hear.

  Kotheg spoke. An army of great silver cats appeared above them. The cats joined ranks and seemed to walk down from the sky, moving smoothly toward the soldiers. Muscles bunched and relaxed as they came; their fur shone nearly white in the strange light.

  The men ran from the apparition. But Andosto spoke something, encouraging them by his words to rally and stand their ground. Someone cheered. Others called out “Andosto!” and “King Valemar!”

  She turned quickly and saw that a crowd had formed outside the courtyard. To her surprise she saw Tamra, standing near an old man. Was that Callabrion?

  The crowd cheered again. The sight heartened her and she turned to face Kotheg.

  But she had missed his last keystone. The cats neared the courtyard. One of them struck out playfully at a soldier, as though it had seen a mouse; the man screamed and fell writhing to the ground.

  The bells pealed out again. Andosto was shouting now, screaming into the din. For a moment it seemed as if he would prevail against the panic cast by Kotheg’s spell, but then the soldiers broke ranks and r
an like madmen in every direction. A cat came to rest in the courtyard and made for Andosto, its tail high.

  Andosto raised his sword; Taja had never seen such a gesture of foolish bravery. The cat struck. Andosto fell.

  Kotheg was still reciting his verses. His power seemed to emanate from him like a black tide. She had missed more than one keystone, Taja saw; she did not understand the structure of his spell at all. It seemed huge, dizzyingly complex.

  Once again she felt despair, knew that she did not have the experience to counter such expert wizardry. And she felt terror as well. What would happen to them if they failed?

  She reached out, found his thoughts. They were grim, unyielding, so filled with hatred she nearly recoiled from them. She saw the plan of his entire spell, rhyme upon rhyme creating a strange intricate structure so vast she could barely grasp it all. Finally she made out his last verse and said something to counter it.

  Kotheg paused. She saw that he was unaware of what she had done, knew only that she had anticipated him somehow. For a moment his whole edifice seemed about to come crashing down. He began a verse to steady it.

  She countered him before all the words had left his mouth. The cats wavered for a moment. A sudden loud wind struck the courtyard; the cats dispersed like mist.

  Taja felt Kotheg’s fury grow until it overwhelmed him. She struggled to pull away from his mind, realized that she was caught within the coils of his power and anger. She listened helplessly as he began another spell.

  At first she did not understand what he was doing. Then she saw that he had used three keystones in his first verse, and the audacity of it astonished and terrified her. She could not imagine using more than one keystone at first; his wizardry must be strong indeed.

  He used four more words of power in his second verse. How in Sbona’s name could he possibly tie them all together?

  He didn’t intend to, she saw. She tried to cry out but his power still held her fast. One of the palace’s towers cracked and began to topple dangerously over the courtyard below.