Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  That was probably why I was being punished, too.

  For on that night that now seemed ages ago, the black-booted intruder out the door, Alfric face down in the closet, and Father and Bayard approaching rapidly up the stairs, I was forced to think quickly.

  I would draw too many questions if I stood unharmed at the scene of the struggle. Far better to blend into the scenery.

  I lowered my head and ran into the oaken door of Alfric’s chambers.

  As a result, mine was the first body the Knights found lying in the room, the first they revived. And of course I knew nothing, and only moaned pathetically while Father rushed to my eldest brother, pulled him by the ankles into the center of the room, and slapped him awake.

  It was my first real look at Sir Bayard Brightblade. And he passed muster.

  Here was a man a full head taller than my father, and a good deal thinner; darker; moustached; thirty at the youngest but not forty yet; long hair, shoulder-length, in the Solamnic style of that time; a calm upon his countenance—his face like a handsome but expressionless mask, as though it were carved on a monument in an old landscape where there was nothing but rock and sun.

  Bayard regarded me only briefly, then looked meaningfully at my father, who scolded me bluntly, groggily.

  “Never mind the fanfare, Galen. Tell us what happened.”

  Alfric was still stirring below us. He groaned, and Father glanced anxiously his way, I began the story rapidly.

  The two Knights heard the same story as had my hapless brother—of the flitting, shadowy shape outside the window, of my concern for our guest. That in my concern for Sir Bayard’s belongings I had tried the door of the guest chambers, finding it locked, and enlisted my brother’s help as he passed by.

  “So it was all with the best of intentions, Sir Bayard, that my brother and I came into this room. In our concern, perhaps we did not notice the felon in question as he sneaked up behind us from a dark notch in the hallway, or …” and I paused meaningfully, hoping to cast a fly into Alfric’s soup, “… or perhaps he was already hiding in your room, allowed in there by a previous oversight.”

  I paused, let that settle, and continued. “Whatever way, I’m not sure. But I turned for a moment at a noise in the hallway, then back to see a black-hooded form looming over my fallen brother. Whoever it was moved quickly. He was on me before I could gather myself, before I could see anything clearly.

  “The next thing I know is that you’re waking me and I’m lying here by the doorway and Alfric face first in the wardrobe and … I’m feeling a little faint now, Father.”

  I lay back in mock exhaustion. Alfric grunted on the floor beside me.

  “I do hope,” I sighed, “that my dear Brother is intact.”

  Intact enough to wait another decade for his squire’s spurs.

  Within the next several days, things changed around the moat house—things that I noticed from the first but the others dismissed as bad climate brought about by a sudden switch in the weather. From the moment the birds hushed their singing on the night of the banquet, there remained a certain absence in the air: where you might expect the song of the nightingale, the quarrel of jays, the flapping and gurgling of pigeons, there was now only silence, and eventually it occurred to me that even though it was still high summer the birds had gone, perhaps to a warmer climate to await the passing of winter.

  Because of the time of year, we expected summer—light and heat, and the smothering damp rising from the notorious swamps scarcely a mile from our walls—but the weather was acting otherwise. In the morning we would wake to the stiffness of frost on the grounds and the trees shedding leaves prematurely. We had trouble keeping the fires lit, much less the candles, as though all light and heat were being siphoned away.

  Gileandos had studied with gnomes. He almost always ignored the obvious, preferring to notice something subtle, hidden in a situation, from which he almost always drew the wrong conclusion. When he noticed the departure of birds, the sudden drop in temperature around the moat house, he blamed events on “the precipitous action of sunspots upon marsh vapors.”

  I recall him now, staring absentmindedly through his telescope directly into the face of the sun, so that when he turned from his stargazing he no doubt saw sunspots that were never there in the first place. He was at least sixty years old, but had no doubt been stooped and graying for years, all jewelry and combed beard and slick pomades and colognes—a dandy gone nightmarishly wrong in his declining years. But to this appearance he was adding a peculiarly haunted look of late, as the gallons of gin caught up to him.

  He taught us poetry and history. Mathematics, too, until the day Alfric fainted from exhaustion in class. He also taught heraldry and rhetoric and Solamnic lore—a jack of all trades he was, lukewarm in all disciplines and running scared of sources of heat and light.

  Which is why, as usual, I paid his explanation no mind, preoccupied as he was with conjecture and rumor and superstition. Instead, I cast the Calantina, the red dice from Estwilde, and received four times running the five and the ten, steam on earth, the Sign of the Viper. I consulted the books in Gileandos’s library, read all the commentaries on the augury, but afterwards I knew no more of the mystery than I had before.

  In the meantime everyone was worked up about the events of the banquet night. Bayard, armed only with borrowed leather jerkin, shield, and sword, was ready to set out in pursuit of the thief, if only he could locate him. He was upset at the delays to his tournament plans, but being by nature a lenient sort, he still intended to take his squire with him, even though Alfric had been caught nodding while the armor changed hands. Father, on the other hand, brooded over Alfric’s part in the theft.

  Father was not a lenient sort.

  “Bayard, is the penalty for armorial neglect still death by hanging, or has the Order grown soft in the years since my retirement?”

  I remember this word for word, set to memory as I stifled a cough from the ash and old smoke. You see, there were secret passages in the moat house, passages Father had either forgotten or never knew about in the first place, that Brithelm was too spiritual and Alfric too stupid to discover. They were there, nonetheless, perfect for a boy accustomed to escapes, to dodging responsibility and punishment. I was especially fond of the entrance to the great hall concealed handily in the back of the fireplace, from where I listened to Father and Bayard.

  “Not soft, Sir Andrew, as much as understanding that squires or would-be squires can make mistakes.” I could see him lean forward in his chair, hear the leather jerkin creak and crackle as he paused for emphasis. The armor was too short for him and would have made him look comical were it not for those gray eyes and impassive face that silenced all comedy. “No,” he continued, “nowadays the Order tends toward leniency, nor am I all so sure that is wrong.”

  So it was not to be hanging. Very well. There were always accidents upon the road—bandits, hostile centaurs, even the peasants themselves, who for generations had not been altogether fond of the Order—something to do with the Cataclysm, Gileandos said, though the Cataclysm happened almost two hundred years ago.

  The peasants had long memories, evidently.

  At any rate, our local swains would welcome any excuse to waylay any Solamnic Knight who passed through their farmlands. Or so we in the castle had been told.

  “I see it as a boyish error,” Bayard continued, scratching the ear of one of our innumerable dogs that had crawled over to sit beneath his chair. Bayard raised his hand to underscore the point; the dog beside him, conditioned by its years in the moat house, flinched and whimpered.

  “But don’t forget, Bayard, that the ‘boy’ you speak of is twenty-one years old,” Father growled, his huge hands tightening on the cane he used when the colder mornings brought back the pain to his leg, recalling the hunting disaster of last winter. “And Alfric, as you know by now, isn’t the brightest of youngsters.”

  Bayard hid a smile politely and nodded. Father never
noticed, his eyes on the floor in front of him.

  “Let’s face it, he tends toward being oafish and petty and not altogether pleasant. He’s twenty-one, Sir Bayard, no boy, and not liable to grow out of such things.

  “Had he any appeal or decency as a child, he would have been a Knight by now. Had he been a peasant, he might well have been responsible for a wife and several children.”

  And had he been a dog or a horse, he would have been long dead, past causing trouble.

  My hiding place was too cramped. I shifted my position, but in doing so scraped my belt against stone, making a sound I could swear they had heard in Palanthas, in Pax Tharkas, at the ends of the world. I held my breath and waited.

  Bayard leaned back in his chair, glanced smoothly and quickly my way. I was sure he had noticed me.

  But immediately he turned back to Father, who was droning on as if nothing had happened.

  “All I am saying, Bayard,” the old man continued, “is that by twenty-one Alfric should have put away ‘boyish error.’ By his age I was a Knight of the Sword, held with a small band the Paths of Chaktamir, waded to my knees in the blood of the men of Neraka …”

  “And those, Sir Andrew, were special times, in which special men were the actors,” Bayard responded smoothly, respectfully. “I’ve heard tales of your doings at Chaktamir. That is why I believe that, regardless of how little promise they have shown, there may be merit yet in a son of yours. After all, blood will tell in such things.”

  Father reddened behind the graying red of his beard, never one to accept a compliment easily.

  “Damn it, Sir Bayard, I wanted these boys to have their ticket out of Northern Coastlund, here at the swampy end of the world. Get ’em down into Solamnia, into adventure and swordplay and righting wrongs and all. My middle son’s some kind of … monk, and the youngest has all the markings of a miscreant …”

  Bayard glanced quickly in my direction.

  “You judge them harshly because of your high standards,” he suggested, but Father wasn’t buying.

  “And the oldest … a surly lump in my larder. It’s enough to make an old man rampage.”

  “My offer still stands, Sir Andrew,” Bayard replied, a bit impatiently. “A son of yours—I say now, any son—as my squire. He’ll find me a resourceful teacher.” He leaned back and steepled his fingers, turning ever so slightly to face the fireplace.

  I shrank into the stonework of the chimney, back in the safe and ashy gloom. It was there that I suddenly had other problems. A rat, awakened or flushed from hiding by my adventures in the tunnel, scuttled across my foot and huddled, half-terrified, in the dark corner of the fireplace. I yelped, leaped, and hit my head against brick and blackened stone, showering myself in ash and cinders.

  It was then, naturally, that the dog came barreling toward my hiding place, sure that he had cornered something wild and perhaps edible. I reached out with my foot, kicked the rat into the path of the oncoming dog, and scrambled up into the passageway, the sound of snarls, shouts, and last desperate squeals fading behind me as I slid into the closet of my room, changed my sooty, incriminating clothes for an innocent nightshirt, and slipped into bed, filling the late morning and the empty wing of the castle with the sound of false snoring.

  The discussion continued in my absence, the two Knights reaching the worst possible decision.

  Father was convinced that the burglar had ambushed us from inside the room, let in by Alfric’s complete inattention. Despite Bayard’s assertion that Alfric required understanding, Father passed sentence rapidly and angrily.

  Big Brother was to seethe about under house arrest, confined within the walls of the moat house. From there, unlike the end of a rope or the depths of a dungeon, he could quite possibly savage my person with one of any number of available weapons.

  For it was Alfric’s opinion that I should have spoken out—should have taken the blame for the whole mishap.

  Such is the ingratitude of brothers.

  Needless to say, it unsettled me these days to hear my brother’s footsteps coming up the hall. Alfric was surly, blaming me cloudily for the theft of the armor, though the wine and the blow on the head had made him hazy as to what happened that fateful night.

  Haziness, however, never stayed his fist or his well-aimed foot. So I would hide for hours in the secret tunnels and alcoves, cowering in ashes and occasionally booting rats to a curious dog, for I knew that of all creatures in the moat house, I was in the greatest danger. I wore disguises, once passing quite effectively for a chimney sweep. When I was not masked or hidden, I put on the face of innocence, doubled my efforts at my chores, and kept close to either Father or Brithelm.

  I always kept my hands in my pockets, so that nobody would ask what had become of my naming ring.

  I was reduced to keeping company with Brithelm, and listening to his speculations on the gods. I tried not to fall asleep.

  “Galen, what about the nature of prophecy?” he would ask, feeding the birds in the moat house courtyard, benign smile on his face and red hair askew over a patched red robe, looking for all the world like some outrageous scarlet fowl that had taken up with the pigeons and the ground doves.

  “I don’t know, Brithelm. Watch out for that trough.”

  At the last moment my brother stepped around certain immersion, still casting corn on the ground and whistling to himself.

  “I mean, prophecy is a hall of mirrors, one reflecting on another and all reflecting back to the eye at the center of watching.”

  “You know, you’re right, Brithelm. Don’t step on the dog.”

  “These birds, Galen,” Brithelm mused, stepping over a terrier sleeping in the shadow of the trough. The dog paddled its feet, running in dreams.

  “In the Age of Light the clerics foretold disaster by following the formations of birds on the wing. Sometimes in my sanctuary …”

  “Back in ’Warden Swamp? I’ve heard that it’s overgrown and that a full cypress tree can grow there in a matter of weeks; the air is so humid that man-eating fish fly through it in search of their prey.”

  Brithelm paused, looked straight at me while he kept on walking toward the cistern. I took him by the arm, steered him gently toward the stairway that mounted the south wall of our little run-down fortress.

  “One man’s swamp …,” he began, and laughed gently, tossing a final handful of corn toward a pursuing band of pigeons, “is another’s hermitage. Sometimes in the mornings there are a dozen quail you can see in the open, little brother. They’ll eat out of your hand. And there are dark things, too, but the legends magnify them.

  “So birds are the most famous of auguries. Then there are leaves, the unruffled pool of water where you stare until you see beyond the reflections …”

  Such was the time I spent in pure malarkey, while the eldest brother plotted and schemed, whined and pleaded, though he never could remember enough to fix me with the blame for anything. Still, he bent the old man’s ear with conjecture. After a morning in superstition with Brithelm, I often caught Father scowling at me suspiciously from the head of the table at lunch, while Alfric scowled at me over bottles and venison from his seat of disgrace at the far end of the hall. It was like being caught between mirrors.

  So it went, with Father angry at Alfric’s negligence and growing suspicious of me, though the evidence never seemed to come in. Bayard, too, seemed to lose his good humor as the moat house hung for weeks in ominous suspension.

  It was not until we heard of the killing that Father lost his temper completely.

  Another group of peasants came to the moat house, a crowd this time, bearing the worst news so far. It was shortly after dawn. Bayard had already left on his daily search for the rampaging armor thief, but the peasants caught Father throwing the dogs out of his chair in the great hall so that he might hold audience in dignity.

  The oldest of the peasants, a woman of eighty if she were a day, dressed in a homespun mantle against the unnatural cold, and g
rayed and warted like a storybook witch, was their appointed speaker. And she wasted no time, launching into her speech before the last mastiff hit the floor howling.

  “It was like this, Your Knightship, and may the gods strike me and my children unto five generations if every word I speak is not the truth.”

  Red-faced and puffing, Father sat down, and put on his most interested look. I tried to guess where celestial lightning would first strike when the old harpy lied, as they always did, as she surely would.

  “I tremble to tell this, Your Knightship, but there has been murder on your lands, murder most foul and unspeakable. Murder at the hands of one of your own order.”

  She was good. Father gripped his chair in outrage. Brithelm was already standing by the fireplace, and stifled a cry of dismay. On the other hand, Alfric and I remained seated. Alfric sharpened his dagger meaningfully, while I buried my nose in a book I was not reading.

  I was listening all the while. But I cannot say that the old woman’s lament “opened my eyes to the sad plight of the peasants,” as laments are supposed to do for anyone with a speck of nobility in his soul. I knew full well that the poor led lives filled with sorrows that never touched upon ours.

  In all honesty, that was the way I preferred it.

  For it seemed that whenever those lives did touch ours, it set off Father, and his sons reaped the whirlwind. I slumped behind the table as the old bat continued serenely, already caught up in her story of gloom and random violence. If I was lucky it would be Alfric who would harvest the big trouble.

  My oldest brother, heir to all the holdings, sat there and wiped his nose on his sleeve, unaware that he stood poised on even harder times. A bulldog, taking the silence as a good sign, crept back into the room and begged for bacon by my chair.

  “It is a terrible tale I bring you,” the old bag droned on. “Yesterday, as the evening came on, a man on horseback, wearing the armor of Solamnia, rode up to the house of my nephew Jaffa. You remember Jaffa, Your Knightship? The one what lost an ear to your eldest boy in that quarrel over the taxes last year? Not that I blame the lad or that Jaffa, the gods rest him, carried hard thoughts against Master Alfric! ‘Boys are liable to swordplay,’ he would say, ‘and it never hurt my hearing none.’ ”