by Mage Quest
Liveried servants hurried up to meet us as we clattered into the courtyard. A few guards loitered conspicuously near the house doors. I glanced at Joachim, wondering how it felt to be back in his childhood home after more than fifteen years away. But his face, often hard to read, now seemed to have no expression at all.
The main door swung open, and Arnulf, the lord of the manor, appeared, holding out both hands in greeting. "Joachim!" he cried. "This is delightful! I'm so glad you were able to come. And King Haimeric of Yurt, I presume? You honor us!"
Joachim's brother was a shock. He looked like the chaplain and yet not like the chaplain. He had the same hair, the same height, the same deep-set dark eyes over high cheekbones, even if he did not have the chaplain's gauntness. But the effect was as if Joachim had been taken out of his own body and someone else put in his place.
The chaplain tossed his reins to me and went to meet him. The brothers started to shake hands and embraced instead.
"Well, Joachim, at least you don't make me kiss your ring," said Arnulf with a laugh. "Does that wait until you're made bishop?"
Joachim neither laughed nor answered the comment. "It's good to see you," he said instead and turned to introduce his brother to the rest of us.
"Claudia's eager to see you too," said Arnulf, "and of course the children can't wait to meet their Uncle Joachim."
Joachim took a deep breath. "And I them."
We were shown to the guest rooms and told that lunch would be served in half an hour. The rooms seemed sybaritic after our weeks on the road, feather beds covered with clean white sheets, long windows curtained in blue, and plenty of hot water. An efficient serving maid unpacked our bags and took our clothes away to the laundry.
We had been given five rooms in the guest wing, all next to each other, while the chaplain was taken off to the family wing of the house. I took the opportunity to shave my cheeks more thoroughly than I had been able to do with cold water that morning. The soap was delicately scented with lily-of-the-valley.
I stood by the window to dry my face, enjoying the light breeze coming through the open casements and the sight of birds hopping purposefully across the lawn. I was distracted from a pleasant reverie by the sound of voices.
Joachim and his brother were strolling along the outside of the house. Arnulf spoke as they came under my window. "It's as though they'd disappeared into thin air. And nothing left—except the sign."
They continued out of my earshot without speaking again. I looked soberly after them. Sir Hugo's party had also disappeared into thin air.
There came a sharp knock, making me jump. "Come in!" I called, and Ascelin entered, ducking his head as he came through the doorway.
He closed the door behind him and motioned me away from the window. "What's going on here?" he asked in a low voice. "Is everyone here under a spell?"
Startled, I probed at once for magic and found none. As my mind slid lightly along the surface of magic's four dimensions, I could sense the presence inside the house of all our party except Joachim, as well as many minds I did not know, but none of them was a wizard. Down by the front door I found Joachim and his brother, in the courtyard the house guards, and in the stables minds I assumed belonged to the stable boys, but that was all. I came back to myself and looked up into the prince's worried eyes. "No one's under a spell here. Why did you think so?"
He shook his head. "It must be hunter's instincts. This whole house feels as though something has just happened or is about to happen, and I don't know what it is."
I had felt nothing of the sort, but then I was no hunter. Ascelin, I knew, had many years of experience in guessing or sensing where animals were hiding and when they would break into the open. I shook my shoulders to dispel a sudden chill that could have been prescience and could have been my imagination.
"We should all stay close together," said Ascelin, "and leave here as soon as we can."
"But we just got here," I protested, "and Joachim hasn't seen his family in years!" All of us had been in high good humor this entire trip, and an onset of unprecedented caution, just when we reached such a comfortable house, seemed entirely uncalled for.
"And why did his brother want him to visit now?" demanded Ascelin.
I was suddenly reminded of the bandits, who had thought that there was something specific hidden in the silk caravan and that we too were looking for it. Arnulf, I knew, was involved in some way in the luxury trade with the East. Could there be, here in this house, something valuable enough to make a castellan turn outlaw?
"I don't know if you overheard," said Ascelin, "the other day when we were at that inn, but several of the merchants were talking about very strange rumors coming out of the East, and I thought I heard one of them say that they involved the kingdom of Yurt . . . ."
Before I could respond to this startling information, there were brisk steps in the hall outside and another knock. "My lords?" It was Arnulf's constable, come to tell us that lunch was ready. A few minutes ago, I would have gone to the dining room with pleasant anticipation. Now as we walked down the wide, carpeted stairs I felt instead a stir of misgiving.
But nothing about lunch seemed ominous. The dining room was carpeted and curtained in green, and the view from the window was of bright flowerbeds with the river beyond. The table glistened with silver and crystal. Arnulf and Joachim were already there when we came in.
"Claudia said she and the children would be right down," said Arnulf. "Ah, here they are." In the hall we heard children shouting excitedly, and the door swung open with a bang. But there was immediately an abashed silence as they spotted us. For a second I saw our group as the children must see us, six strange men standing looking toward the door, three of them rather formidable warriors. Even clean and well-dressed, we felt to me like a wild and woodsy group in this delicate and gracious setting.
"Go on in, it's all right, don't you want to meet your Uncle Joachim and his friends?" came a laughing woman's voice. Claudia, the lady of the manor, came through the doorway herding two boys and a girl before her.
Claudia was another shock. She was the only woman I had ever met who came close to being as beautiful as the queen.
She did not look at all like the queen, having curly russet hair, already escaping from the coiffure into which I was sure she had just combed it, and a skin so fair it was almost translucent. She had a merry sweetness of expression and yet an air of tender concern in her eyes that made someone who saw her—or at least me—feel she must be protected at all costs from anything troublesome or sad.
She came immediately across to Joachim, wearing the tiniest firm line around her mouth as though determined not to be as shy as her children. She took his hands, looked into his eyes, and gave an almost tentative smile. I would have felt her expression, both sweet and vulnerable, was devastating if it had been turned on me. "You haven't changed at all," she said softly.
"Nor have you," said Joachim. "It's been too long. So, these are my nephews and my niece."
Claudia brought the children forward to meet their uncle, then all of us were introduced to her, and she invited us to sit down at the table. Servants came in with steaming platters.
She was the perfect hostess, serving the king first, making sure each of us had what he wanted, asking about our trip and listening attentively to our answers, and at the same time somehow keeping her children quiet and orderly and their meat cut up in bite-size pieces.
But twice, as her husband sat beaming genially at the other end of the table, I thought I saw her shoot a worried look toward him.
III
"I understand your family is also in commercial imports?" said the Lady Claudia to me.
"Was. My parents died when I was little, and my grandmother kept the warehouse going, but she herself died while I was still in the wizards' school. We imported wool from the Far Islands and wholesaled it to the cloth manufacturers."
"How interesting," said Claudia with a bright smile. In fact it wasn't
interesting at all, which was part of the reason I had become a wizard instead of a merchant. I would probably have done an even worse job of running a wool wholesale business than my grand mother had, and there hadn't been much left over when she died and I had to sell the warehouse to pay the firm's debts.
"And now you're a wizard," said Arnulf genially. "I gather the wizards' school keeps a fairly close eye on all of you—even tries to establish your routes when you travel."
"Not really," I said in surprise. "Of course the school tries to coordinate the practice of wizardry throughout the western kingdoms, but wizards argue with each other too much to allow close oversight." Arnulf nodded but said nothing more.
The chaplain seemed much more sober during lunch than I would have expected of someone home to see his family after a long absence. "You know, Joachim," said Claudia when dessert was served, "I still can't get used to seeing you in priest's vestments."
Dessert was lemon pie, and one of the dishes served earlier had been rice with almonds. We didn't have rice in the royal castle of Yurt very often, and lemons even less frequently. Although I had always assumed that coming to Yurt had been the move into luxury for Joachim that it had been for me, perhaps I was wrong.
"Did he use to wear an earring when you first knew him?" Hugo asked Claudia with a wink for Dominic.
The chaplain did smile at that and brought both ear lobes forward with his forefingers to show they had never been pierced.
"No," said Claudia, also with a smile. "He always dressed very soberly, even when he was still expected to take over the family business."
"It's just as well I didn't," said Joachim. "My ideas of fair business practice would have lost our firm everything we had in two years. You and Arnulf would be lucky to have a cottage of your own, much less this house."
He spoke lightly—or at least lightly for him—but Arnulf gave him a look that just managed not to be a scowl. There had been an argument here, I thought, perhaps accusations of immorality on one side and accusations of being hopelessly unworldly on the other, that still festered after more than fifteen years.
"He's been such an excellent royal chaplain," put in King Haimeric, "that we in Yurt at any rate are very glad he did become a priest."
"You wouldn't want to try your hand at the family trade one more time, Joachim," asked Arnulf breezily, "perhaps arrange a trade for me while all of you are in Xantium?"
He spoke as though it were a joke, but Joachim took it seriously. "No." He shot his brother an intense look. "I gave up all worldly commerce when I entered the seminary."
The topic was dropped there, and Claudia asked Ascelin about his principality as she poured us all tea. The prince shook off the air of watchfulness that had hung about him for the last hour and answered graciously. She seemed very well-informed about everyone in our party. The chaplain must have written his brother about all the people in Yurt, I thought, and I felt at a disadvantage that he had never told us nearly as much about the people here.
After lunch, Claudia went off with the children and Arnulf took us on a tour of his grounds. As we came through the flowering orchard, I thought that we would be many miles away when the cherries were ripe.
Arnulf's foreman came up to him with a question as we were being shown a pasture where fine horses grazed beyond a white fence, and the lord of the manor excused himself and went, taking Joachim with them.
"Listen carefully," said Ascelin as soon as they were out of earshot. "We have to get out of here as soon as we can."
This was the same surprise to the others that it had been to me.
"Don't you think everyone here is just a little nervous, having the chaplain home again after so long?" asked the king when Ascelin tried to explain his instinctive feeling that something was about to happen. "You heard them at lunch; he must have left after some sort of quarrel that they're all trying hard to forget."
"And if something here is about to explode," said Dominic, "we'd be cowards to run away."
"I think Ascelin's right," said Hugo with a frown. "It could be any number of dreadful things. Arnulf, after all, trades with the East, where the women grow fur on their bodies down to their knees and have two-foot tails, and where enormous horned snakes guard the pepper groves."
"What are you talking about?" demanded Ascelin.
But Dominic nodded soberly. "The boy has a point. It's one thing to flee a human enemy, another a monster."
I too was about to protest, to tell Hugo that he knew perfectly well that the women of the East were not furry, that he himself had suggested to me that his father was surrounded by dancing girls. But then he gave me a broad wink, and I stopped in time.
"We couldn't leave anyway," said King Haimeric. "The servants have our bags, and down in the stables they're reshoeing our horses. Why don't we just ask Arnulf if he has any problems on which he'd like our help?"
"All right," said Ascelin, "but I still want to leave as soon as our horses are ready, and we should all stay close together. That means you too, Hugo. I wish the chaplain hadn't gone off with him."
We moved in a group in the direction that Arnulf and his foreman had gone. I thought irrelevantly that anyone seeing us would assume we had become so accustomed to each other's company while traveling together that we could not now bear to be separated.
But we did not find the lord of the manor. "Sire," I said to the king, "tell the others about the bandits, about how they were apparently expecting to find something in that silk caravan. I can search more quickly by using magic."
I left them sitting on a pasture fence and hurried back toward the house. Enormous horned snakes or not, I too wished the chaplain had not gone off with Arnulf.
I found him, unexpectedly, not with the lord of the manor but with the lady. Claudia sat on a bench under a tree in the garden, singing and playing a lute, while Joachim sat at her feet, his dark eyes fixed on her face.
Surrounded by the colors and scents of a spring garden, dappled with the sunlight that made its way through the young leaves overhead, they seemed themselves caught in a song, a song of heart-wrenching beauty, where the afternoons were endless and the dailiness of ordinary life was so far away to be non-existent.
And then I listened to the words. "So kiss me as you say good-bye," sang Claudia. "Kiss me, and ask not the reason why. But my heart shall take an eagle's wing, away to fly."
I froze, caught between feeling I should slip away without disturbing them and feeling that I must stop this at once.
But Joachim smiled and motioned me to join them. Claudia looked up from her lute, saw me, and stopped in the middle of a word.
"Please go on," said Joachim. "I'd forgotten how well you sing."
Flustered, Claudia started again, but a completely different song. This was a sea-faring tune about courage and shipwreck.
I let the melody wash over me while I probed with magic for Arnulf. I found him in the stables—either supervising the reshoeing of our horses, I thought with Ascelin's suspicions, or else making sure we could not leave.
"Excuse me, my lady," I said abruptly when Claudia came to the end of the song. "We've all been wondering, and perhaps you can tell me. Why did you and your husband ask our chaplain to come visit you now?"
Joachim frowned at my rudeness. But Claudia seemed too delighted that I had not asked her what she meant by singing love songs to a priest—and her husband's brother at that—to mind. "It's something to do with our trade caravans," she said lightly. "We have of course hoped for years that Joachim would come home to visit, but there's some business matter that made it especially urgent now. Arnulf can explain it to you, I'm sure; I never pay much attention to business myself."
"Maybe you should," said Joachim, but looking at me rather than her.
"You never did," she said softly.
"But you never had any intention of becoming a priest," he said with a smile, scrambling to his feet, "or, in your case, a nun."
As he and I walked back toward th
e others, I wondered uneasily if Arnulf knew all the time what his wife was doing.
If he meant harm to us, he certainly treated us well in the meantime. Our horses were still not ready at the end of the day, but the first of our clothes came back clean from the laundry. Ascelin went white when we returned to our rooms and found our armor and weapons gone, but Arnulf's constable reassured him that they had just been taken away to have the rust polished off and the edges sharpened. Even our boots were gone to be resoled.
After another luxurious meal, Arnulf invited us into his study while Claudia supervised preparing the children for bed. Candlelight gleamed on polished wood and brass. I scanned the shelves quickly, looking for books of magic, but saw mostly account books, books of history and geography, and a little literature. A bright fire took the chill from the spring evening.
"Joachim tells me you're wondering why I asked him to come home now after all these years," said Arnulf, stretching out his long legs. In the candlelight, the brothers looked more alike than ever. "I hadn't meant to worry the rest of you with this, but maybe I could use your help."
"What's disappearing into thin air?" asked Ascelin intensely. He had gotten this from me.
"Wait, wait," said Arnulf cheerfully. At least he and Joachim sounded different. "If I'm going to tell you about this, I'd better start at the beginning."
"And what's that?"
Arnulf was more than willing to answer. He had in fact, I thought, brought us to his study specifically to tell us. I wondered abruptly if anything he said was his real concern, or if he had created a story to distract us from something else.
"It's believed," began Arnulf, "and this, I must stress, is only a rumor, that King Solomon's Pearl has been found again."
IV
If the story was created for our benefit, at least the Pearl had not been, for King Haimeric too seemed to have heard of it. "But I didn't think it could be found," the king said slowly. "I'd always heard that it had been hidden inside a golden box, inside a sealed amphora, inside a locked cabinet, inside a sunken ship, in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea."