by Mage Quest
He sat quietly by the fire, long legs stretched out before him. My study was so neat, tidied and straightened in preparation for my absence, that I hardly felt it was mine anymore. I wondered if I should put a magic lock on the door when I left and decided against it. It would open only to my own palm print, and if we didn't come back the queen might want these chambers for her new wizard.
"It's strange, Joachim," I said as I poured out the wine. "I'm ready to go, I've been eager to go for more than six weeks, yet now that we're about to leave I feel a curious reluctance. We're going off into something so different from our life here in Yurt, so hard to imagine in advance, that it could almost be death. It's as though I won't exist after tomorrow."
He sipped from the glass I handed him and looked at me from deep-set eyes. "‘I will not drink again from the fruit of the vine until I drink it new in my father's kingdom,’" he said. "Is that it?"
That was the problem with having a priest for my best friend in Yurt. He was always saying incomprehensible things. "Maybe," I answered cautiously.
Then I added, "But it's a good thing we're going, because I'm afraid I was on the point of going stale. A lot of wizards these days change posts after eight or ten years, going back to the school to serve as assistants and guest lecturers or moving up to a bigger kingdom that wants an experienced wizard."
"And are you going to move up then, Daimbert?"
The chaplain was the only person in Yurt who used my name rather than calling me Wizard; but then I was the only one who called him Joachim rather than Father.
"No, of course not. I like life here in Yurt, and, besides, I'm not nearly a skillful enough wizard that a bigger kingdom would want me. And the school is unlikely to consider me a good person to guide the student wizards."
"I talked to the bishop on the telephone this afternoon," the chaplain said in an apparent change of subject. "You'll be pleased to hear that he finally agrees with you, that magic telephones use perfectly innocuous magic and involve no pacts with the devil."
"And what else did you and the bishop talk about?" I asked, deciding not to comment that the bishop was certainly slow enough to grasp the obvious, especially since it was almost a year since his own provost had had a telephone installed in the cathedral. I wasn't particularly interested in the bishop, but it was better to talk than to sit in silence, feeling the emptiness of the unknown voyage before us.
"It really has been easier communicating with the cathedral this last year, rather than having to rely on the carrier pigeons," said Joachim, not answering my question. I wondered if he and the bishop had discussed some spiritual issue or other which they thought was unsuitable for a wizard's ears.
But after a moment of staring into the fire, Joachim spoke again. "He confirmed that the new chaplain will arrive here within the week. It's always hard to get one on short notice, but he thought that this young priest would do very well here. I'm sorry I won't be able to help him settle into his duties."
The wizards' school would certainly not send out a substitute wizard to Yurt while I was gone. For one thing, unlike priests who claimed to show each other Christian charity, wizards were well known for fighting all the time, and I would never have allowed it.
"I shall miss Yurt," added Joachim. His comment didn't seem to have anything to do with the bishop, but since it fitted in well with my own mood it seemed appropriate.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. The castle was quiet around us. My chambers opened directly onto the main courtyard, but no one came or went on this dark, damp night.
"The bishop once went to the Holy Land himself," said Joachim as though there had been no pause in the conversation. "It must be over forty years ago, when he was a young priest. He did the pilgrimage thoroughly, too, starting in the great City by the sea and visiting the holy sites there and then stopping at most of the shrines on the way. Last week he sent me the guide book he'd used, with the shrines he visited all marked. It took him over a year to reach the Holy Land."
I had met the bishop only once. As a wizard, I was always a little skeptical of claims of great authority by members of the organized Church, and our brief meeting hadn't made me take to him personally. But I knew Joachim thought of the bishop almost as a father. I, on the other hand, had lost my parents when small and certainly didn't consider the masters of the wizards' school as substitute fathers—for one thing, I knew they would have resisted any suggestion that I was their son.
"Well, it would be silly for us to go west to the City to start our trip," I said absently. "We know Sir Hugo and his party were fine when they left home. By going southeast, we'll be able to pick up the pilgrimage route well along, without a lengthy detour." But then something the chaplain had said struck me. "Wait a minute. I lived all my life in the City before coming to Yurt, and I don't remember it having holy sites."
Joachim looked up at me and smiled, something he didn't do very often. "Of course it has holy sites, even if a merchant's son and a young wizard never paid any attention to them. Christianity began in the Holy Land, but the City was the capital of an empire then, and early missionaries tried to establish the true faith there as well. Many of them were martyred in early years by imperial forces, and the places where their holy bones were laid to rest became shrines for the faithful."
"Oh, churches," I said with a shrug. "Of course the City has a lot of churches. We couldn't visit every holy shrine in the western and eastern kingdoms anyway. It would take much too long to get to the Holy Land, and you'd never keep track of them all. Besides, Yurt has its own shrine, with the Holy Toe of Saint Eusebius the Cranky, if someone just wanted to see a holy site."
Joachim didn't answer. In the black linen of his vestments, he almost merged into the shadows of the room. I wondered if he had something else on his mind but didn't like to press him. I turned on a few more magic lamps to brighten the dark corners and got up to pour more wine.
"It will be good to see my family," the chaplain said unexpectedly as I handed him his refilled glass.
"Your family?" Joachim rarely spoke of his family, although I knew he had at least one brother. I had the sense from something he had once said that he had been supposed to inherit the family business, and a certain coolness had crept into his relations with his relatives when he decided to become a priest instead, but I had never had any details.
"Yes." He glanced at me briefly, then looked away. "My brother has been asking me to visit for close to a year now. He says I should really meet his children before they grow any bigger, which is true, but I did not feel I could take the time away from my duties here. He wrote again this week and asked me to stop and see them on our way to the East. They're only a short distance off our route, so when I talked to the king about it he said we would all go there. Now I'm trying to remember how long it's been since I've seen him."
So that was what had been on Joachim's mind, I thought. I was relieved that he had not been worrying about the bishop. The bishop intermittently imagined some undue influence on the chaplain from his friendship with a wizard, although as far as I could tell I had never been able to influence Joachim in anything.
"You've seen your brother at least once since I became wizard here," I said. "You met him over in the cathedral city of Caelrhon."
"Six years ago," said Joachim with a nod. "But I haven't seen my brother's wife since I left home for the seminary, and I've never seen their children at all."
"Is there any particular reason why he wants to see you now?"
"He didn't say specifically," said Joachim, his dark eyes distant. "In his last letter he hinted at some problems coming out of the East and affecting the family business. For a moment, I even wondered if it might have something to do with Sir Hugo's disappearance, but that would be too much of a coincidence. After all, almost all luxury trade is connected to the East in some way."
I waited to give him a chance to say something more about his brother. When he didn't, and silence again stretched long betwe
en us, I used his mention of Sir Hugo to bring the topic back to the major purpose of our coming quest.
"What do you think can have happened to Sir Hugo's party?" I asked. I myself had no good ideas, in spite of six weeks of theorizing. Although Zahlfast and the other masters of the wizards' school seemed relieved that someone had volunteered to go look for Evrard, they also had no ideas.
"Death, illness, imprisonment, loss of money, loss of will to return," said Joachim, which seemed to sum up the possibilities. "If they are dead, I am glad they were first able to visit the holy sites where Christ's feet trod."
I decided not to respond to this last comment. Instead I said, "It is a perilous journey, even now."
"It must always be somewhat tense in the East," the chaplain agreed. "Politically, there are a few independent governors still left over from the fall of the Empire, then the emirs, and the royal Son of David—and that's only the beginning. It must also be complicated on a religious level, because the Children of Abraham and the People of the Prophet also have holy shrines in the Holy Land, as well of course as the Christian shrines."
"Don't they all worship the same God?" I asked. If the organized Church had always lacked interest for me, comparative religion had had even less.
"There is only one true God," said Joachim dryly.
"I've mostly been thinking about the glamour of the East," I said, deciding that now was not the time to learn more comparative religion. "All the different peoples and cultures. The spices, the flowers, the bazaars—"
"How about the different magic?" the chaplain surprised me by asking.
"Well, there certainly is only one true magic," I said self-righteously. "But you've got a point. The mages there work their spells somewhat differently than we wizards, and there are different magical creatures. The school doesn't even teach eastern magic now, although they used to have one wizard who taught it, forty or fifty years ago. They sent me an old copy of his textbook to take along, Melecherius on Eastern Magic." The thick book made a bulge in my neatly-packed saddle bag.
"I've even heard that one can still see Ifriti east of the Central Sea," I added. "I hope we can see one. It would be enormously exciting, although it would probably be dangerous too . . . It seems there may be a lot of dangers before us."
Joachim glanced at me from under his eyebrows. "Otherwise there would be less merit in the voyage." I gave him up. Tomorrow we would be leaving for places I had never seen, and experiences I could not imagine, and my best friend on the trip was filled with concerns I had no intention of sharing.
We left at dawn. Five of us were mounted, although Ascelin was too tall to ride a horse for more than short periods and would walk beside us. The king, the two princes, and Hugo all wore light armor under their cloaks. Joachim didn't, because he said it would be inappropriate for a man of God, and I didn't, because I didn't want to be bothered by the extra weight. Three pack horses, heavily laden, were ready to follow us. I thought that even though King Haimeric said he was going as a simple pilgrim, not a king, no one who saw us would doubt that our group consisted of four aristocrats, a priest, and a wizard.
The horses' breath made frosty clouds around their noses, and a paper-thin layer of ice lay on the puddles among the courtyard's cobblestones. But the sun, rising pale orange in a cloudless sky, promised warming weather. Everyone in the castle turned out to see us off. Paul and Gwennie, hand-in-hand, watched from a doorway. Behind them stood the duchess's twin daughters, three years younger than the royal heir.
The queen smiled up at the king, her cheeks dry although her eyes seemed unnaturally bright. "I know it will be hard to send messages regularly," she said, "but if you're near a telephone, do call, or if you meet someone coming this way, do write!"
I was going to miss the queen too, but I couldn't tell her. For one thing, I was quite sure she would not miss me in the slightest. All I could do was watch her say good-bye to the king and imagine it was me.
But then my eye was distracted from the royal couple by the sight of the Duchess Diana and Prince Ascelin on the far side of the courtyard. She had climbed onto a mounting block so she could reach him, and they stood with their arms around each other, paying no attention to anyone else.
"Now, are you sure you know everything you'll need to do in the rose garden this summer?" asked the king, seeming more concerned with his garden than his family. "The entire blossoming season will be over by the time we're back. Remember what I told you to do if thrips start to infest the blooms again." But then he suddenly leaned down from the saddle and kissed his wife, something I had never seen him do publicly before.
"And we're off!" cried Hugo, taking this as a signal to depart. He blew a long blast on his horn and urged his horse forward. Ascelin looked up abruptly from his wife's embrace, and the other horses all jumped and followed Hugo's. We dashed across the drawbridge and down the hill, followed by waves and cries of farewell.
We reined in our horses at the bottom and entered the woods more sedately. Ascelin, momentarily left behind, caught up again. "Warn me next time you're going to burst into a gallop like that," he said to Hugo with a grin.
"We had to start with a gallop," said Hugo. "It's the only appropriate way to start the Quest of King Haimeric and his Giant Henchmen." He made it sound like one of Paul's stories.
Dominic was having a little trouble calming his big chestnut stallion. The horse that had tried to buck off Paul and Gwennie seemed reluctant to obey the king's burly nephew either.
"Come on, Whirlwind, come on," I heard Dominic say soothingly, holding the reins tight with one gloved hand and patting the stallion's neck with the other.
"I didn't know that was your horse's name," I said in surprise, once the stallion decided it was easiest to be quiet and walk with the rest of us.
Dominic turned to me with a sudden smile, which was another surprise; he normally smiled even less than Joachim. "It didn't use to be," he said. "But Prince Paul renamed him."
Paul might not be going to the Holy Land with us, I thought, but at least Whirlwind might get a chance to race in search of treasure across the high plains.
After feeling somewhat apprehensive about this trip, once we started I enjoyed it thoroughly. We went at an easy rate, letting the king set the pace. Ascelin, on foot, had no trouble keeping up. After a day and a half, in which all the hills, streams, and woods we saw I knew by name, we passed out of the kingdom of Yurt and into new territory.
New scenes greeted us constantly as we rode: sunlit hills dappled with shadow, villages tucked into sheltering valleys, wheat fields where the new light green shoots burst from the dark earth, wild daffodils bright beneath leafless oaks, and birds tugging at last year's grass for nesting material. Any difficulty we met, a sudden cold shower of rain, a ford where the horses splashed mud on us, villagers who looked at our equipment and charged us outrageously for fresh bread, was quickly left behind and indeed forgotten. And somewhere ahead of us was the sun-warmed Central Sea, and palms and flowering lemon trees rustling in the sea breezes.
All of us, except perhaps Hugo, were sore and stiff the first few days. But then our muscles became used to the constant exercise and our legs to gripping a horse.
"I'm still not sure my old bones will make the whole journey to the East and back," said the king to me as we rode along, sounding remarkably cheerful about it. "But it's good to be off on a quest after decades of worrying about the governance of Yurt. Prince Paul will grow up to be an excellent king whether I return or not, and if by some chance I do I may have the only blue rose in the western kingdoms!"
We spent the first few nights in the castles of lords the king knew; and once we stayed in an inn, all squeezed together in one big bed in the only private room the inn afforded; but most of the time we camped. Hugo put a sign reading "Giant's Lair" on the tent he shared with Ascelin, until the prince ordered him rather sharply to take it down.
We took turns keeping watch at night. The king said that no one would atta
ck a little group of pilgrims, but Ascelin insisted, and I had to agree with him. Hugo had the final watch on the first night we camped, and he woke the rest of us at dawn. When we crawled reluctantly out of the tents, he already had water boiling for tea and bright pink ribbons braided into Dominic's stallion's mane and tail.
Ascelin also thought it was funny, from the imperfectly concealed laugh lines around his eyes and mouth, but the rest of us, who had lived for years with the royal nephew, knew enough to keep our faces perfectly sober.
"Are you responsible for these ribbons?" Dominic asked Hugo with steely calm.
"Of course," said the young man gaily. "Don't you think they add a certain spritely air?"
"I don't want my horse to have a spritely air," said Dominic, a hard twist to his mouth.
But Hugo, laughing and setting out the tin teacups, paid no attention. I didn't think it was quite as funny as he did, but I did have to admire his nerve in getting close enough to the stallion's heels to braid in the ribbons. It took Dominic nearly until we were ready to go to get them out again.
The next day when we stopped for lunch Dominic made some excuse to stand up and go over to the horses. He was gone for several minutes, and when he came back, well wrapped up in his gray cloak against the cool air, he was frowning.
"Have you examined your sword recently, Hugo?" he asked gravely. "I just noticed it when I went to check on Whirlwind, and it looked—well, I don't want to accuse our wizard of anything, but I would have to say it looked enchanted."
Hugo jumped up, and so did I. We hurried to where his horse stood grazing, a long sheath hanging from the saddle.
But something was wrong. Instead of a hilt protruding from the top, there was what looked like a big smoked sausage. I probed with magic. That was certainly what it was.