Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  Then his smile broadened. He stood, hand on the hilt of his sword.

  “Then it’s to Chaktamir.”

  “So comes to pass the most harebrained decision I have ever made,” Sir Robert di Caela concluded, sitting even more heavily in the same chair into which he had fallen an hour ago. The candles burned low, and the shadows rose in the hall of the banquet room until even the backs of chairs stretched long and ominous shadows over the floors.

  “My most harebrained decision,” he repeated.

  “We are to set off in a direction suggested by a seventeen-year-old boy of questionable honesty, who admits to trying his own fortune with the red dice of Estwilde, never quite understanding their meanings.

  “We follow the shadow that this boy saw, knowing only that it went eastward—not how far it has traveled or even if it changed directions when it was out of sight. We go on the evidence of a prophecy we no longer know we are reading correctly.”

  He turned to me and addressed me frankly.

  “You do not have the best reputation for accuracy, boy.”

  Bayard sighed and looked despairingly into the flickering candles.

  “Nonetheless, Sir Robert,” Bayard claimed hoarsely, “your daughter is missing, and Galen’s is the best guess as to her whereabouts.”

  The old man nodded firmly.

  Finally, Sir Robert turned from me, though something told me that he would like very much to dismiss me—to send me back to Coastlund in a wagon or a sack. I withdrew the Calantina dice from my tunic and held them palm up.

  Nine and …

  The light was bad, and Sir Robert began speaking again. I looked up and lost the reading.

  Nine and something. Something large.

  Sign of the Weasel? Sign of the Rat?

  Or of something entirely unexpected?

  “If I am to find my daughter, it seems that this … oracular boy is forced upon me.”

  He looked at all of us standing in front of him, shook his head in wonderment, then reddened and stood up wearily. His shadow darkened the entire south end of the hall, where the candles had guttered and burned out. He raised his sword in the ancient Solamnic salute, and his voice resonated in the high rafters of the great hall.

  “Gather the Knights remaining at Castle di Caela. Gather those encamped in the fields surrounding, and call back those within the sound of the clarion trumpet. This very night we are off to Chaktamir. And woe betide the Scorpion when we find him there!”

  While the gentlemen rummaged through armor, I made my final preparations for leaving Castle di Caela. Prospects of escape now seemed impossible.

  Nor did I want to escape, especially.

  Alone in my chambers for a “time of contemplation” before we set out, I tried to recover the reading of the Calantina—the one I had cast in the shadowy hall scarcely an hour ago. Down on my knees like an unlucky gambler, I rolled them again and again in hopes of seeing the same sign, but as is the way with history and with dice, the reading was gone forever. I cast in vain, receiving the Adder, the Centaur, the Hawk, the Mongoose, the Wyvern—not a nine among them. With each roll, the dice became more confusing.

  As is the way with prophecy.

  So I gathered my things together, taking care to put on my best tunic and the tooled gloves I had kept hidden so often throughout our journey from Coastlund.

  Enjoying my renewed appearance, my red hair watered and slicked and combed into place with my fingers, I waited for the water in the basin to settle, then looked at my reflection.

  Perfect. You never could tell who would be watching.

  Prepared, adorned, and even a little resplendent if you counted the gloves, I scurried from my quarters down to the courtyard of Castle di Caela, where perhaps a dozen more squires were saddling horses, gathering provisions, and putting all in readiness for the journey east.

  Together we busied ourselves with the final preparations, saddling and bridling Valorous, Sir Robert’s black mare Estrella, and more everyday horses for the other Knights and for my brothers. Three mules were brought from the surrounding farmlands, and that very night they were loaded with provisions and clothing and arms. Burdened and rained upon, they looked the sullenmost of all the beasts I had seen on this twisting, weather-plagued journey.

  The pack mare also went with us, although reluctantly, straightening her legs and leaning backwards against the reins, snapping at a large stable boy until he turned and, to my great satisfaction, caught her a blow across the jaw that wobbled her knees and silenced her until she could be rigged and saddled and boarded.

  For, yes, my place was on her back again. Bayard believed that she would keep me mounted despite terrain and weather and my own incompetence.

  If the poor pack mare’s load was made heavier by the addition of me to the freight on her back, then I wonder if it felt any lighter as we passed through the gates of Castle di Caela. For I felt a little lighter myself at that moment, when I turned to look back at the keep through the half light of morning and the rain that was now quite heavy.

  I could swear that I saw, through the shifting grayness, a light at Lady Enid’s window.

  I could swear that I saw Dannelle di Caela standing there, graceful and pale and framed by the light of the window. And graceful and pale, she lifted her graceful, pale arm, and waved at me departing.

  My ears were hot. Instinctively, my hand went to my hair.

  Which was wet and plastered to my head like the pelt of some repulsive drowned animal. I raised my hood, pretended not to notice her, and faced eastward.

  At the last moment before the gates closed I looked back over my shoulder as heroically, as romantically as I could manage from atop a beast of burden. But with the angle of the road and the morning shadows and the rising rain, the window was a blur of light rapidly fading, and Dannelle was obscured entirely.

  CHAPTER 17

  The road south from the castle was washed with rain already. The downpour had stripped whatever browned or reddened leaves had remained clinging to the trees, and now the countryside was bare and gray and gloomy, at last making good on the winter the skies had promised for a while.

  There were twenty of us, only six of us Knights. Sir Robert could have brought his palace guards, but the practical man within him recoiled at leaving Castle di Caela undefended. He could have brought part of his escort, but the Solamnic Knight in him recoiled at “sending an army to do a Knight’s work,” as he put it. So they were left behind.

  Though it seemed to me that this was the time for armies, for catapults and ballistae and engines of war—anything to take the Scorpion’s attention from yours truly—the task ahead of us began with twenty of us, and twenty of us only.

  Bayard rode in the lead atop Valorous. Sir Robert brought up the rear on Estrella—I believe he was back there to round up any Pathwardens trying to escape. I rode in the middle, sandwiched between brothers and soaked in the dismal morning showers.

  Alfric’s gloom was contagious. He sat atop his horse, wrapped in a bulky blue robe, the hood pulled so far over his face that he looked like a huge, animate bag of wet laundry. Even his horse, no monument to spirit to begin with, bowed its head sullenly against the cold morning rain.

  He felt swindled, he had claimed back at the gates of Castle di Caela.

  “For why,” he asked, “is everyone so sure that Enid is going to marry Bayard if we rescue her? Seems to me that it’s been decided a little too soon.”

  He fell into a sulking silence.

  But if Alfric’s gloom was contagious, Brithelm was thoroughly immune, his musings somewhere far from this road, this part of the country, as he sat benignly and unhooded to the worst the rain had to offer. Lost in thought, he was lost to the rest of us, His horse was his sole guide, as it followed my pack mare unquestioningly.

  We rode without rest until mid-morning. It was some Solamnic notion, I suppose, that you traveled farther and more efficiently when you were so miserably uncomfortable that the prosp
ect of ambush or a monster in the roadway would seem like a welcome break from the routine.

  To make things worse, neither of my brothers was speaking—to me, to each other, to anyone, as far as I could figure. Brithelm remained lost in thought behind me, his eyes on the rain and on the eastern horizon, and Alfric was ahead of me, suspicious and sulking, no doubt trying to guess what goods I had on him and what I had told the Knights.

  So I drifted in and out of slumber that morning, jogged awake by a sudden rise in the road or a dip when the pack mare slipped or sank a bit into the mud. On occasion a distant roll of autumn thunder would disturb my sleep, or the rain would drip inside my cloak and across my face, sprinkling and startling me.

  One time I was jostled awake by Bayard, who had slowed Valorous and let most of the party pass him. Reining his horse in abreast of mine, he offered me a large, coarse cotton handkerchief.

  “Whatever these vapors were that saddled you back at the castle, you haven’t shed them yet. I can hear your sniffling all the way up the column.”

  “Who’d have thought it, Sir Bayard?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “All along you’ve made fun of these dice I carry with me. And now all of us are armed and appointed and drenched by the rain, following a prophecy that’s every bit as many-sided and cloudy as any of the Calantina readings. What’s the difference?”

  “You explained the prophecy quite well for a skeptic.”

  “But you haven’t answered my question. What is the difference?”

  Bayard smiled and flicked Valorous across the withers with the wet leather reins. The big horse snorted and lurched toward the head of the column, and Bayard called back to me.

  “Maybe no difference.”

  By mid-morning of the next day, we reached the swollen eastern fork of the Vingaard River.

  There was no longer time for musing, for pondering mysteries. As I looked ahead of me into the gray rush of waters, I could see that the Vingaard had overflowed its banks. Fording would be dangerous, perhaps even deadly.

  “Flood time nearly, boys,” Sir Ramiro shouted, championing the obvious above the sound of the rain and the river. “Autumn is the flood season here anyway, and we have come at the wrong time …”

  He looked up at Bayard sullenly, thick brows cascading water.

  “… Perhaps even to the wrong place?”

  Things about us grew even more ominous, even more gloomy as the rain fell and the river rose and the overcast day permitted no sun. Here at the banks of the Vingaard, it seemed as though everything was fixed against us: the clever enemy, the night’s head start, the terrible weather. Even the land itself had betrayed us.

  I sat atop the pack mare. Things could be worse. We could be out there in mid-current.

  “Across the ford, then, young fellow?” an elegant voice boomed in my ear, and I started at the presence of Sir Robert di Caela beside me. There was the sound of more horses approaching, and soon Sir Ledyard and Brithelm had joined us.

  “Well, Galen?” Sir Robert insisted, wrapping his cloak more tightly against the mounting rain.

  “Galen?” Bayard chorused, leaning forward and stroking Valorous’s mane as the big horse shouldered its way between Ledyard’s big mare, Balena, and Sir Robert’s smaller, more graceful Estrella.

  “I don’t know,” I murmured into my hood. I crouched, curled up, and tried to look like a piece of baggage on the pack mare’s back.

  “Speak up, boy! These are old ears and clamorous raindrops!”

  “It’s just … just that I don’t think this mare of mine is going to breast that current out there. You didn’t see her in the swamp and on the mountain paths, Sir Robert. She’s far more … anxious and roundabout than she seems on level ground and a wide road.”

  “We’re all a little more jumpy at an impasse,” declared Sir Ramiro, who had approached astride his big, forgiving percheron. Water cascaded off his gray wool robe like springs coursing down from a mountain lake.

  “Get to what we need to do,” he said, smiling wickedly. “And leave me … to encourage the mare.”

  Bayard pointed toward a stretch on the river bank, almost submerged in the rising water. Sir Robert nodded, and galloped over to inform the rest of our companions.

  I could have mulled over this crossing for hours, stacked thought upon thought until I had confused myself completely and entirely, as Gileandos said I was inclined to do. But there was no time for thinking. Immediately my companions began tying together the pack mare and the mules. The Knights hitched their cloaks tightly about their legs so as not to tangle in the rushing water.

  And Sir Ramiro slapped the rump of the pack mare sharply with his enormous hand. She started and leaped toward the water.

  We were fording the Vingaard.

  The water was icy cold about my ankles. I drew my feet from the stirrups of the saddle, thought twice about it, and braved the water for the purchase on the back of my steed.

  The mare grunted, then breasted the current. To the right of all of us squires, Brithelm’s horse began to navigate the waters, and to the right of him was Sir Robert on Estrella. Beyond them was Alfric, then two other Knights, then Ledyard and Ramiro, and then Bayard, of course, active and secure atop Valorous.

  Alfric, who had been challenging Bayard’s authority at every turn of the road, was more than willing to let my protector take the rightmost path.

  The boy to the immediate right of me, a blond-haired gap-toothed monstrosity from Caergoth, grinned hatefully at me.

  “Got that mare in line?” he taunted nasally. “Or is it the rider that’s got to be pushed through the water?”

  “Those teeth will look good tangled in seaweed,” I replied, and slapped the pack mare on the rump again. We slid farther out into the current, then sagged in the water a moment as the riverbed gave way beneath the mare and she began to swim.

  I pressed my knees against her sides. I held to her mane so tightly that she snorted and shook her head at first: then I loosened my grip, but not too much, thinking of the current that could carry a drowned body almost all the way to Thelgaard Keep.

  In midstream the waters were indeed tricky, plunging into an undertow deep and powerful along the spine of the river. When we reached that point in the crossing, we were pulled more insistently, more heavily.

  One of the mules brayed behind us, and through the rain I saw a bundle slip from its back into the driving current. The gap-toothed boy reached for it in vain.

  “I’m losing hold!” he cried, and toppled into the water.

  “Brithelm!” I screamed frantically as the boy slipped downstream behind my brother.

  It sounded thin and shrill and cowardly above the roar of the river. I was almost embarrassed to have cried out, for certainly someone would haul the oaf from the water. But then a swell in the current rushed over us, knocking me from the back of the mare.

  I was dangling from the saddle by my right ankle, which had lodged in the stirrup and had twisted in all directions. But the ankle held, and the stirrup held, and my head was above the surface, gasping and coughing out the water that rushed by me and into me.

  I windmilled my arms frantically, recalling the times I had seen people swim and hoping that going through the actions would somehow give me control over the current that was dragging me southward to death. Several times I went under, and thinking too fast, I recalled the legends about going under for the third time.

  How many times had it been? Six?

  Another swell of water rolled over me.

  Seven?

  Through the glaze of river water and sunlight I saw a hand over me, large and extended somewhere up in the air I was longing to get to. My head surfaced for a moment, long enough to hear Ledyard cry out, “Here, boy!”

  Then came the dark and marbled green of the water, and the sense of coming unmoored, of being carried by the current.

  It was not too bad, really, this floating. It was for a moment like emerging from
a deep and immensely satisfying dream, or returning there. I could not figure which, and soon I ceased to bother with figuring altogether.

  Was this what the fish saw, looking up?

  The light, green and then gold where the sunlight broke upon it?

  Was this the last vision of the drowned, before the weeds entangled them and made them cold?

  I did not care, relaxing, enjoying the movement and light, preparing to forget all of them: Enid and Dannelle, my brothers and Sir Robert and …

  Bayard.

  Who pulled me by the hair from the current, up into the cold and into the painfully bright light where it hurt so much to breathe that I felt dizzy and sick.

  He draped me over the saddle, pounding on my back as he did so, and I coughed water for what must have been an hour.

  Above the water, in the dry land of harsh air and duty and of thinking too much, I forgot the current and the dangerous dreams of the river. Bayard set me gently on the southern bank of the Vingaard: I wondered about Sir Robert, the Ladies di Caela, my brothers, remembered Bayard who had drawn me from the water and from certain drowning.

  Remembered the rest of our party.

  Who had been halved by the river.

  There is, in the easternmost fork of the Vingaard River, a sudden surge in the midstream current even more powerful than the steady undertow which is the constant bane of the rivermen and of those who foolishly try to cross.

  “The Vingaard Drift,” the rivermen call it, and when they can, they defend against it by poling the boats across as you would a barge, by dropping anchor when the Drift is at its worst.

  There is no prophecy that accounts for it, no way to predict its rise and its fall. Indeed, few know of it beyond those who make the river their living.

  It so happened that the Drift had chosen to rise at the moment we crossed, sweeping many of us from our saddles into the merciless current. In the moment after Bayard caught me up from the tide that rushed around him, the huge, struggling form of Sir Ledyard followed in my wake.