“As you shall,” said the prince, gallantly bowing in the countess’s direction.
She was dressed all in pink, with ruffles that fluttered as she said, “Oh, I wish I could. Unfortunately, I’ve made plans here in Gulp for today. Will you let me join you tomorrow, Prince Izakar?”
Izzy looked at me, then at the countess, heaving a deep breath as he replied, “But of course, Countess Elianne….”
“It doesn’t really matter,” grated Sahir in an ungraceful tone. “Tomorrow will do as well.”
“Oh, good,” she replied, giving him a melting glance. “We were such a congenial group. I did hate to see it broken up prematurely.”
The countess smiled, Izzy smiled, even Sahir smiled, going to offer the countess his shoulder to lean upon. She twirled her parasol—which she did not need, it was quite cloudy—and she and Sahir wandered off in the direction, so I supposed, of the gardens.
Soaz sighed. “Sex,” he growled.
“So I’m told,” said Izzy.
“So I’m told, as well,” I giggled, and the two of us went into a fit of laughter while Soaz stared at us out of his amber eyes. Fasal Grun came out of the residence accompanied by two guards, and we became at once serious, bowing to him as he approached. He was easy to respect. He had an almost awesome dignity, and Izzy said the emperor was even more impressive.
“Has it been settled that you leave tomorrow?” he asked in a quiet voice, with only a hint of a growl in it.
“It has, Your Excellence,” said Soaz. “Prince Sahir agrees that the delay will not be inconvenient.”
“Nice of him,” said the viceroy. “Is it true that both he and you, Prince Izakar, were given warnings by the same seeress?”
“We have no way of knowing for sure,” said Izakar. “A woman from Sworp made a prophecy at my birth. She subsequently went into the desert east of Isfoin, where a similar woman gave a reading of the bones to Prince Sahir’s father. She could have been the same woman. That’s one reason I want to meet with the Seeresses of Sworp, to see what they have to say. I don’t know how it works. Do several of them have the same vision? Or do they have separate ones? Is there anything that the rest of them know that would explain about this Great Enigma business?”
“I have no idea,” said Fasal Grun. “The emperor has let it be known that he prefers I not consult the society, but in view of your proposed trip to St. Weel, he has no objection to your doing so.”
“I’m taking Nassif with me,” said Izzy. “Just to make a record of the event.”
Fasal Grun hunched his shoulders, stared at me for a moment, then waved a big hand as though shooing off flies. Evidently he cared not if I accompanied the prince.
Accordingly, we went. One of the palace servants led us to the place, not far from the residence, a shabby old building set in a kind of sculpture park where ornamental poultry stalked about and fountains either played or dribbled, depending upon their state of repair. We were met at the door by one of the seeresses, as we could tell by her dress. All of them wore high-necked gowns and tall forward curled hats with lappets down the sides. She led us into a central room, a kind of assembly hall, where the benches were arranged in circles, one within another. The central ones were crowded with the members of the society. We went down an aisle into the middle, where we were offered a bench of our own. I sat. Izzy stood, talking quietly with our guide about our reasons for coming.
When they had finished their conversation, the seeress told the others about our trip, why and how it was occasioned and what part the midwife-seeress had had in it, concluding with, “Prince Izakar of Palmia, Prince Sahir of Tavor, together with their companions, wish to consult our society for clarification of the purpose of their journey.”
Silence. No one spoke. All the seeresses sat quietly, eyes closed, some of them rocking a little back and forth, some of them holding hands in pairs or trios, most of them so still it was hard to tell if they were alive. Their robes were all alike, their hats were all alike, even their faces were similar as they were all members of the ponjic tribe, though much leaner than Izzy or I, with more delicate chins and cheekbones.
Izzy came over and sat down beside me. “It may take a long while,” he murmured. “Just relax.”
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Making their minds empty,” he said. “Evidently these visions simply drop in, as you say the language of the onchiki dropped in, as Countess Elianne says the meaning of the armakfatidi drops in.”
We sat. We waited. After a very long time, the seeress who had shown us in—I was fairly sure it was the same one—took us out into the hall and gave us some tea and biscuits and allowed us to visit the sanitary arrangement. When we had stretched and refreshed ourselves, we went back to our bench, and along about midafternoon the seeresses began to rouse, to stretch, to make casual remarks to one another, to get up and wander about.
I looked at Izzy, my eyebrows raised, and he returned the look. We had no idea if they had found out anything at all, and we were not enlightened until the group had first dispersed to the tea tables and then, after much drinking and discussion in corners, reassembled.
“There is a threat,” their spokesperson told us. “The threat begins with some person having gone on a journey. This happened in the past, it is nothing that may be prevented, for it has already occurred. The result of this journey is a threat to all our lives, all the people of the world, every nation and every tribe. Various ones of us see this journey taking place, but we cannot understand what we see! There is something about the journey that is strange, weird, contrary to good sense. This may be why our sister called it the Great Enigma.
“We are agreed that the threat may be countered, though we do not know how. Our vision tells us that our sister was correct when she directed the sultan to St. Weel.”
“What did they see?” I whispered to Izzy.
He shook his head at me, but one of the seeresses had heard me. “Child,” she said, “at the end of our seeing we saw this world empty of intelligent life. We saw brute beasts and only they.”
And that was all they told us. Izzy was somewhat downcast, and I didn’t blame him. I put my arms around him and he leaned on my shoulder, cursing in a monotone, quite unlike his usually cheerful self.
I said, “Come, Prince Izakar! We are on an adventure! You must not give way like this. We must be indomitable, as all heroes are.”
“I don’t feel at all heroic,” he said. “So far on this trip, I’ve mostly felt nauseated. Sometimes it’s the magic and sometimes it’s the food, but my stomach doesn’t know the difference.”
“You’ve been eating food prepared by Sahir’s servants,” I said. “It’s too rich for our people. We need more fruit, more fiber. A bit of stewed kale would set you up. Come now. An upset tummy is no reason for giving way like this.” I shook him a little, as I remembered my father shaking me when I was impossible.
It amused him. He smiled, though a wavering smile, and said, “Acquiring a taste for stewed kale is an enterprise surely to fail, for it’s stuffed full of fiber like reeds on the Giber and tastes like they’d serve it in jail.”
I laughed dutifully, for my father had had a taste both for kale and for the limeriki verse form, and so we walked back to the residence of the viceroy hand in hand, knowing little we had not known that morning. Someone had gone on a journey, and that fatal journey was a risk to us all. Who or why was as far as the stars, and St. Weel was not much closer.
24
Opalears: Incidents Leading to Liaisons
“Long ago, so it is written, when great Korè walked openly in the lands of the people, none were so fair to her as the kapriel who accompanied her journeys, who went with her into the forests and plains, clearing the way before her, plucking up flowers which they put into her hands. The kapriel, so it is said, remember the ways of the wild, and as animal handlers they have made a place for themselves which cannot be filled by any other people.
THE PE
OPLES OF EARTH
HIS EXCELLENCY, EMPEROR FAROS VII
Our party, numbering fifteen persons and creatures plus the imperial guards and a number of kapriel handlers, to attend to the umminhi, set out on the following morning, two wagons pulled by teams of four umminhi, full of us and our baggage, plus another wagon for the veebles, plus a saddle umminhi for Prince Izzy and a horse for Soaz. The emperor’s ersuniel guards walked beside the wagons, leading the teams that pulled us. One of the guards, a grizzled oldster, knew the way to St. Weel, and he was our guide. Oyk ranged ahead along the road, while Irk brought up the rear.
Sahir and the countess did well enough in the wagon, with Dzilobommo and Blanche. The onchiki sometimes ran alongside, sometimes rode on the horse behind Soaz, sometimes climbed in the wagon with the veebles and went to sleep. When night came, we made camp with a good deal of ceremony. Tents were pitched, fires were lit, the umminhi were attached to picket lines downwind of us, six here, seven there. In the night I heard the umminhi crying from one line to the other, a strange, mournful sound. Owaionglai. Owaionglai. The guards stood watch, turn and turn about all night, calling the hours as though we had been in a city. I was bedded in a tent with the onchiki, which I was glad of, for they were warm companions, better than a blanket.
The nights became more chill, for we were climbing. There was no way along the shore, and even if there had been, we would have eschewed it, for it would have exposed us on the seaward side, where Fasahd was. In time, we would come over the high pass and descend again almost to the level of the Crawling Sea, for St. Weel was located on the sea cliffs.
On the fourth day, we began to encounter fields of flowers, clearings packed with riotous bloom in all shades of pink and red and purple, emitting a fragrance that was overwhelming. The gervatch flower, said the oldster who guided us. It bloomed in the lands around St. Weel and nowhere else, and we must not sleep among the flowers for at night their fragrance became chokingly dense. It was at night the nectar-bats came to fertilize the flowers. Seeing these fields had the effect of making us more eager, for, as Izzy reminded us, them trees had mentioned the gervatch flower.
On the fifth evening, we looked northward across a chasm and saw the walls of St. Weel growing from the top of the sea cliffs. The place was not particularly impressive, not so tall or broad as I had imagined.
“Most of it is hidden in the cliffs,” said our guide. “All that whole rock wall is hollowed out. That bit showing there at the top is the tower, and the only way we can come at it is from below.”
The next day was spent going down into the chasm by a breakneck road, which was narrow and quite frightening to the countess. She made little sounds of fear as she separated herself from the cliffside by judicious placement of her parasol, while Blanche made unkind remarks about ’fraidy cats—not apropos of the countess at all. When we reached the bottom of the chasm, we found that the road turned right, toward the sea, and by evening we had come out from the cliffs onto the shore. Above us, the tower of St. Weel burned in the evening sun, at the top of another winding road. It was late, and we were weary, so we postponed our approach to the height until the morrow.
It proved to be an unwise decision.
We made camp, or rather, the emperor’s guards did. The umminhi were picketed back in a wooded cut in the shore cliffs, the veebles in another such, on long lines to allow them to graze. Dzilobommo oversaw preparation of an evening meal, created both from the stores we had brought from Gulp and things he had gathered along the trail: fish, for example, and the curly tops of ferns, and the roots of certain marsh plants. We let the fire go out and retired to bed. It was a clear night, and the moon was full, unfortunately, for its intrusive beams disclosed our tents to the ship which had evidently been sailing up and down the coast, looking for us.
The first we knew of it was when a guard, alerted by the sound of a keel rubbing the gravel of the shore, called out, “Ware,” in a hysterical, just-alerted voice. Luckily, the boat had come ashore some distance down the beach, and the little time this provided was decisive.
Izzy shouted something at me about getting Blanche and the countess to safety, which I tried my best to do by dragging them both, still more than half asleep, into the trees at the mouth of the chasm where we had earlier tethered the veebles. We hid behind some convenient shrubbery from which we peeked out, trying to see what was happening.
The boat which had come ashore was a fairly small one, containing only eight or ten ruffians. I knew them for Fasahd’s people, though the countess said none of them were large enough to be ersuniel. All we could see was shadowy forms and confused movement, and all we could hear were grunts and curses interspersed with yelps of pain. We were not outnumbered. Soaz, Izzy and Sahir had been trained to fight. Dzilobommo, said the countess, came from a warrior race. In addition, there were the onchiki who rushed among the attackers, cutting them about the legs and ankles, plus the ten guards the emperor had leant us, all of them well armed and armored.
I thought the battle had been decided in our favor, when Blanche suddenly whispered in my ear, pointing to our left. There three bulky shadows were slipping along the sea cliff, headed in our direction. Perhaps they had seen us run for cover, or perhaps they merely assumed that we would be out of the fray and the chasm was the only out available.
“Damn,” said the countess, picking up her parasol and twisting the handle. A very sharp blade came out of it, one that glittered in the moonlight. I had a dagger at my belt, one I had spent a tiny gem on in Palmia, with no real intention of using it for anything but trimming my nails. Nonetheless, it was a real one, quite keen. Blanche slipped upward, into a nearby tree. I knew she planned to attack from above.
It seemed time for strategy. I whispered to the countess, and the two of us separated, each behind her own shrub. When the first of the attackers came sneaking by, we let him go between us, then both attacked from the rear, I at his hamstrings, she, pulling herself erect to strike upward at his heart. The countess was quicker with her blade than I with mine, but he fell with only a gurgle. Elianne withdrew her sword and wiped it fastidiously on the grass.
Meantime, Blanche had been making odd noises, gargles and curses, which drew the other two attackers in her direction. One stayed where he was while the other went forward, both of them facing away from us. We repeated our attack on the rearmost, with similar success, though not so silently. This one had time to roar before he fell.
Now we had a real attacker to deal with, for he spun about, saw us where we crouched, lifted his ax (the moonlight showed it quite clearly) and plunged toward us. As he came beneath the tree, Blanche came down on him, clutching him about the head, using her nails on his face, biting at him in an uncivilized frenzy. He could not strike at her without striking at himself. He dropped the ax and clawed at her, and as he did so, the countess leapt out and skewered him.
“Where did you learn to do that?” I asked, very impressed by her alacrity. This was not the person who had uttered little coos of dismay all day on the way down into the chasm.
She fluttered her eyelashes at me and straightened her wig, which had become disarranged in the battle. “My father had me working with fighters from the time I was a child,” she whispered. “All rulers need to be able to protect themselves, as this attack makes clear. However, my dear Nassif, I would prefer that we say nothing at all about this to the gentlemen out there.” And she gestured toward the shore, where the fight had petered out and our comrades were dragging bodies out of the camp. She looked at the bodies we had accounted for and sniffed. “I prefer a style of courtesy not usually offered to well-trained killers. We’ll just leave them lie, shall we?”
Blanche was sitting on a stump, setting herself to rights, for she had become quite disheveled. I copied the countesses method of cleaning my blade, wiping it on the most recent corpse, and restored it to its sheath before assisting the countess in finding the other end of her parasol. When Soaz came back to see if we were all righ
t, we were assembled near the veebles, our clothing rearranged, looking properly apprehensive.
“Have there been wounds?” asked the countess, ever practical.
“Izzy is dealing with them,” said Soaz, sounding rather surprised. “Evidently his training has included medicine as well as magic. Your armakfatid is helping him, as he helped us. I had never seen one of them fight before.”
“May we assume the attack is over?”
I started to say no, we couldn’t, but Soaz beat me to it. “I think not, Countess. We should not have camped in this exposed location. Let us now get up the road, so far as we may.”
The umminhi were pulled from their pickets and rehitched. The wounded went into the wagons, including Sahir, who’d been struck on the head. The rest of us walked, Soaz and the unwounded guards before and after, the umminhi making their incomprehensible mutter, the onchiki, uncharacteristically silent, leading the veebles. The tents we left on the shore, though we took time to load all the supplies we could find in the dark. None of us felt torches would be a good idea, not if Fasahd was out there on his ship, awaiting the return of his men. There had been eleven of them altogether. Eight had attacked the camp, three had come after us, they were all dead or as good as.
We went as quietly as possible. None of us felt like talking. Above us, the tower crouched on its crag like a bird of ill omen. It had two windows in which a dull light gleamed, as they might have been eyes, watching us. It occurred to me for the first time that St. Weel might not welcome our visit, that its people might be hostile toward us. If so, we were headed into danger without way of escape, for Dzilobommo hissed from behind me, and I turned to see a web of moonlight on the sea, with a black spider shape crawling on its oar-legs toward the shore. Another boat.
I passed on the word and we began to move more quickly. Unfortunately, the wagon harness was not silent; it jingled, though not loudly. In that stillness, even the slight sound echoed like a shout.
The Family Tree Page 27