And then she threw back her hood.
His heart stuttered, stopped, and broke into a wheezing jog.
She was, ah, well, she was a lot to look at. There was so much to look at, in fact, that Isaac wanted to look everywhere but.
When he dared another peek at the young woman, she was dabbing at her brow with the handkerchief in a very maidenly manner.
“How can I help you?”
She sighed, stroked the handkerchief, and sighed again.
“I am afraid, dear Oracle, that I am in love.”
Between the swooning and the sighs and the general air of maidenhood, this was not such a shot in the dark.
“And is this—the handkerchief, I mean—does this belong to your love?”
“No,” she said. “I offered it to him as token of my affections.”
“Oh?”
“He blew his nose with it.”
“Oh.”
“No, don’t you see! He touched it! With his rough hands and delicate lips and well-formed nose, dripping just a bit with sweat—”
“Oh,” he said again. He told himself he should stop saying that because it was coming very dangerously near to ‘ha.’
“So, then I don’t see why you need my help—”
“You don’t? You don’t?” She practically flung herself upon him. Isaac fell back, alarmed. “He thought I was just another one of those wenches, always prancing about with the ruffles and the leers! He didn’t even look at me! He doesn’t even know I exist!”
And with that, she buried her face once more in the handkerchief.
Isaac didn’t know what to do. Grasping, he asked, “First things first, Miss—uh, Miss, what is your name?”
“Lady,” came the muffled reply.
“L—Lady? Oh? Oh.” When he was sure he was not laughing, he cleared his throat. “And this, uh, gentleman of yours, is he a knight?”
“A chicken thief.”
“Bless you?” he asked.
“No, he’s a chicken thief. He’s been imprisoned in the stocks for stealing His Lordship’s hens.”
Poor lad, thought Isaac. It’s like a rock on one side, a landslide on the other.
But he did not say so.
Instead, he said, “Well, Miss, uh, Miss Lady, do you think he’s going to look your way twice when he has wenches throwing themselves at him right and left?”
She straightened. “No.”
“What’s that?”
“Goodness, no!’
“That’s right,” he said. “You’ve got to make him stop and stare. You’ve got to make him pay attention. You’ve got to hit him so hard he won’t know up from down. You catch my drift?” He just hoped the poor chicken thief didn’t catch hers.
“I do! I do!”
“Then you march up to those stocks and you claim him right this moment!”
Before he knew what had happened, they were both on their feet.
“So then it is true love?” Her lips were trembling. “The stars have destined us to forever?”
Isaac slumped into the arm chair.
“I mean, sure.”
“True love….” She spun around. Then she spun around again. Then her eyes narrowed. “Are you certain?”
What did it take to get this woman out of here?
“Certain? I am an Oracle, am I not?” Not.
That seemed to satisfy her, for she skipped off to the mouth of the cave.
“Miss Lady— you forgot your handkerchief.”
She turned back, wreathed in smiles. “For you, dear Oracle. A token.”
“Of affection?” he asked horrifically.
“Of appreciation.” She tittered and took flight.
He dangled it between his blackened fingers. He did need a new washrag….
“Next!”
In walked a beleaguered sort of man. (A beleaguered sort of man is difficult to tell from a haggard sort of man or a careworn sort of man or even a beleaguered man itself. The difference lies in the stoop, you see. A beleaguered man walks with the world on his shoulders. A beleaguered sort just walks as if he did.)
This one was hidden by no hood, but the ripple of light and shadows. A beard grew thick and red around his face, the rest of which Isaac could not see; for some reason though, he knew the man was not smiling.
“Yes?”
The word sunk like a coin into the well.
A tremor stirred in Isaac’s left hand.
Slowly, the man shook the cobwebs from his fingertips and squinted into the darkness.
“You’re not the Oracle.”
Isaac flinched. “You know him?”
“We’ve met.”
The man had a grave voice. It was not the kind of voice that suffered liars. So Isaac decided to tell the truth.
Well, a truth, at least.
“The Oracle is, you might say, indisposed.”
“Lovely place to be,” said the man. He unclasped his cloak and let it slide to the floor of the cave. “Tell him I must speak to him at once.”
“But he’s not here.”
“Then I will wait for his return.”
“I’m afraid that’s not possible.” Isaac grasped the man’s arm. “Now, sir, I really must show you the door—”
It slid free without a sound. In the next instant, the man balanced a sword on the dappled skin of the apprentice’s hand.
“You will release me, boy.”
“Or else?”
“Or else I will have you hanged at dawn.”
Inch by inch, Isaac turned his face to the man. He stood tall, solid, stiff as a board and just as capable of laying an old-fashioned “whack!” on the boy. A shaft of sunlight parted the cracks overhead and crowned him.
A golden crown upon his head.
Isaac fell to his knees.
“Your Eminence.” He spread himself frog-like across the floor. “Please forgive me. I didn’t mean—I mean—just—how can I serve you, my King?”
This was the end, he was sure. The gig was up. The Oracle would come home to a splatter of blood and a couple of crabs picking clean his bones. He would never get out the stain.
But then the King of Lox drew back a chair.
“May I?”
Isaac nodded frantically, then threw himself back into prostration.
The king sighed. “It is my wife…she is…well, we are expecting a child.”
Ah. That explained the aura of beleaguerment. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, perhaps, but heavier are the hands that catch the babe.
He was about to become a father.
“My congratulations, Your Eminence,” said Isaac. “It will be a blessed day in Lox.”
But the king did not seem to hear him. He had picked up Isaac’s cup and was swirling the dregs of the morning’s tea, around and around and around.
“Very well,” he said at last. “I don’t wish to trouble you anymore. I’ll just be off then.”
Isaac had finally worked up the courage to lift his nose above his haunches. Now, he said, “You have come all this way, Your Eminence. Perhaps just one for the road.”
“As you say,” he agreed, looking bored.
So Isaac gazed into the swirling pools of the sea and the roiling darkness of the skies and the tottering stack of tea cups in the sink and said thus:
“Your son shall be born within a fortnight. But bloody shall come his birth, bloody shall he go. And he will grow strong as his father and he shall exceed him, and he shall fall beneath a blood-red sky.”
Hey, that sounded pretty good. If prophecy didn’t work out, he might try his hand at poetry.
Evidently, the king agreed with him, for he had grown still. Perfectly still, in fact, except for the tip-tip-tip of one bejeweled finger upon the armrest.
The sound alarmed Isaac.
“Is that all?” said the king finally.
Isaac nodded.
“Then I thank you,” he said. “From the depths of my heart, I thank you.”
He pro
duced three pouches from his belts. One clinked, one jangled, and one sparkled pleasantly.
“And now that you have earned my gratitude, I hope that I have earned your confidence.”
“For what?” Isaac couldn’t help asking.
“For what must be done,” said the king, before sweeping out of the cave.
A chill slunk into the air. Despite himself, he heard the Oracle’s words arise in his mind.
“Everybody loves a king. Except a king, that is.”
Isaac shuddered.
“Nah,” he forced himself to say. He couldn’t let the Oracle ruin this for him now. He had just served a king, after all! And not just tea, either. He had prophesied to an honest-to-goodness king. Who had given him rubies!
Not bad, he thought, for an apprentice.
And so continued the morning. In ones and twos and threes they came before Isaac, complaining of headaches and lost cows and omens in the turnip crop. To each he gave a fortune and a pat on the back. He spoke of ascensions, and battles, and the stars. He thought a lot. He invented more.
But he got the job done. In fact, it was said thereafter that on this one day, the Oracle managed to see more questions than in all his years of prophecy.
It had been a success no doubt, but by the time Isaac waved the last customer away and released the flap on the curtain, yelling, “the Oracle must now step away for a short lunch break!” he was starving.
He was feeling pretty pleased with himself and had just thought about fixing a sandwich when someone stormed through the mouth of the cave. Two someones, to be exact. Judging by his look of superiority and her look of disdain, Isaac gathered that this must be the happy couple themselves.
“Do I believe congratulations are in order?”
“You certainly do not,” said the boy.
“Not at all,” said the girl.
“We don’t wish to marry each other,” he said.
“We hate each other,” she said.
“Time heals all wounds?”
“I’ve hated her since I was four—”
“—when he pulled my hair—”
“—and she kicked dirt in my face—”
“—and he threw up my skirts in public—”
“—and she pushed me in the water trough—”
They had a habit of finishing each other’s sentences which was very off-putting.
“So, as I said,” he said.
“We don’t wish to marry each other.”
“We hate each other.”
“And we always will.”
“But it’s only been two hours,” he protested weakly.
“Two hours or two years—”
“—it doesn’t matter—”
“—we will never—”
“—love each other—”
He really wished they would quit that.
“Well,” he said, “you are your parents’ children.”
Neither laughed. They just stood there, arms crossed, glaring at him; the girl was glaring with such focus that a vein now throbbed to her earlobe.
“Let me think…let me think….”
He felt their glares upon him and turned his back.
Let me think…let me think….
But those glares—he rolled his shoulders—why wouldn’t they look away—he scratched his neck—did they ever have to blink—
“One hour!” he cried.
“Yes?”
“Give me one hour,” he said, whirling around. “Just one hour of your time and I promise we’ll have this all sorted out for you. Deal?”
They looked at one another and nodded.
“Very good. Now you two run along and, um, try not to offend each other too much in the next hour. That’s it. There you go.”
And they were gone. Isaac relaxed his knuckles but the throbbing in his own head would not leave.
Against all odds, he was having a premonition.
The premonition shortly proved right, when, just after the clock struck one, in walked Miss Lady. Judging by her sobs, all had not gone well with her Gentleman Admired.
She said nothing. She merely stopped, snuffled, and collapsed into his arms.
Isaac was lost. He did not know what to do with his hands. He did not know where to put his chin. Everything was so wet.
So she sobbed and she sobbed and all he could do was pat her back and say “there, there.”
When that didn’t work, he took to calling the Gentleman Admired all manner of awful, terrible, good-for-nothing names. He called him a cretin, a fool, a worm, a roach, a pile of dung, and a pauper’s upper lip.
That last one seemed to brighten her up a bit, at least enough to pull herself together and tell him the story.
“H-h-he laughed! He just looked at me and la-ha-haughed!”
She had applied a good deal of makeup for the meeting, which her tears had spread like a clown’s mask from lashes to lips. And like any good clown mask, it was doing its job—he could barely hold back his laughter.
“Well, I…I mean…you do look—”
She wailed.
“—stunning!” he hurried. “When you walked through the cave, I barely knew what hit me. In fact, I still don’t have my footing.”
“Really?”
“Really,” he said, hoping that Oracles were not charged double in hell for lying. “Now, would you mind telling me exactly what happened?”
And she did, exactly. So exactly that she saturated him with details after the first five minutes. She told him how the sun had glinted off his chains as she approached, she told about the snap and release of veins in his throat, she told him how his eyes sparkled like diamonds in his heroic sockets. She told how she had relayed the prophecy of their true love and how she cared for him and how she kept the handkerchief by her bedside night after night, so that she could imagine him lying with her. She told how he had looked up at her, blinked twice, and then laughed so long and hard that the guards had thought him dead.
Thirty minutes later, she had finished. Isaac could only goggle. How did these people manage to fulfill their destinies so quickly? Didn’t anyone just sit and mull over the future these days?
“It’s a hard break, I know. But have you ever thought that maybe you’re just barking up the wrong tree?”
“I’m not a dog.”
“Assuredly not,” he said, fighting a smile.
“And it was you who told me of our fated love.”
“Yes, I did, but…”
“Surely you oracles have some degree of infallibility.”
“He do—I do, I mean.”
“But what, then?”
“Maybe I wasn’t up to snuff today. Maybe there’s someone else out there for you. Someone…cleaner, perhaps?”
She stamped her foot.
“But I don’t want another, I want him!”
“But Lady—”
“That’s Miss Lady, to you.”
He looked down at his hands.
“I’m sorry.”
“As well you should be.”
“I just think…” Something caught his attention. Something that should have been there but most definitely wasn’t.
“…that it’s awfully quiet, isn’t it?”
A shiver ran down his spine as he ran to the mouth of the cave. There was nothing there. The land bridge was empty, the shore deserted. A gull snatched its prey from the sea and flapped off into the sun. Isaac blanched. He could hear everything, even the hiss of foam against the rocks.
He swung around.
“Where has everyone gone?”
“To war.”
Oh, thank the heavens—
“To war! Did you just say ‘to war?’”
“Of course,” she said, mopping her eyes.
“Of course! Did you just say ‘of course?’”
“I do wish you would quit that,” she said. “Yes, of course. Apparently princes are popping up left and right. Just like buttercups.” She paused. “But surely you knew
that already? As the Oracle, that is?” She was looking at him like a housecat looks at a chickadee. Isaac had never felt smaller.
“Of course.”
“Of course.”
He couldn’t say anything. He couldn’t think. He mouthed like a fish on a hook.
Surely his advice hadn’t brought war to the kingdoms in one day? Surely cooler heads would prevail and—
But he was Isaac Edmundson. He was never that lucky. And knowing his unluck, the king would have already tossed out the baby with the bathwater.
He hadn’t time to think. He had made this mess and he had to clean it up now.
He grabbed Lady by the shoulders, even as the poor girl shrieked.
“Do you still want your chicken thief?”
“Of course,” she said straight away.
“Then I believe I can do something to help you, Miss Lady, if you can do something to help me, too.”
She half-rose.
“Anything.”
“I need you to fetch me a king.”
No sooner had she left, though, did Isaac Edmundson sink to the ground, lost. He fingered the tapestry, now hanging limply from the base of the loom.
I’ve broken it, he thought miserably, I’ve broken the future.
He was not an oracle. He was not a king. He was a young man without a destiny and without an ounce of luck to his name.
The plan, the plan? That was all bravado. All lies, all myths and fabrications. Saying something didn’t make it true. In fact, it just made it worse.
But that was just his unluck, wasn’t it? If he’d only remembered to draw the curtains before raiding the treasury, he wouldn’t be stuck in this mess….
And if the Oracle hadn’t outfoxed Edmund on a pair of queens.…
And if his father had maybe just owned up to his faults….
The realization doused Isaac’s loathing at once. He now felt nothing beyond an incredible self-loathing.
No skills? Ha. He had plenty of skills. He had skills coming out of his ears, if only he’d ever bothered to open them. Just as he had promised from the first, the Oracle had been teaching Isaac all his life. He had been grooming him for just this day. He’d known—he’d always known….
So what had Isaac learned?
That the whims of fishermen could lead to a lot of dead princes.
Heroes: A Raconteur House Anthology Page 7