by Moore, John
“No man understands how women think, Your Highness.”
“But this could backfire on me. She might later feel I’ve been leading her on, when I have no romantic interest in her.”
“No?” Pollocks looked at him speculatively. “None at all?”
Charlie had a momentary flashback, of Xiao stepping from behind the screen, her skin oiled and gleaming in the candlelight. “No.”
“I understand that once you get to know her, she has a nice personality,” said Pollocks. “Very caring and supportive.”
“Supportive, right.” Charlie thought of Xiao’s breasts, high and firm, and the way her bare bottom had brushed against his thighs. He tried to push the vision of her body out of his head, but all that replaced it was the rememberance of her dark eyes, the way she looked at him, and the lilt of her voice when she spoke. “I don’t care.”
“I’m told she’s kindhearted, cheerful, outgoing, and likes children and pets.”
“Then we have nothing in common.”
“They say opposites attract.”
“Shut up, Pollocks.” The prince mounted his horse and gave it a little spur. It fought the reins at first, but soon settled into a steady pace, with the second horse in the string following calmly. Pollocks had asked Charlie to assign himself some bodyguards, saying that feelings against the prince regent were running high enough that protection might be needed. Charlie had decided to travel light and rely on fast horses to outrun trouble. Very shortly he passed a group of workmen repairing a stone bridge over a streambed, one of the public works projects. They looked at Charlie resentfully, which was a good thing. But the streambed was dry, which was a bad thing. He rode up into the mountains, where the scenery changed a bit. The snowcaps had receded, and the streams were milky with melt water. He looked grudgingly at the water as it flowed away from Damask. He changed horses every hour, with no stops to rest, and got to the temple a little earlier than on the previous visit, passing the old tunnel entrance again, skirting the edge of Lake Organza, whose cold, clear waters reflected a cloudless blue sky, and again he looked off to the coast, with Noile Harbor in the far distance. This time, when he rode to the front steps, there were no crowds. To his surprise a number of signs around the entrance made it clear that the Temple of Matka was now closed to visitors. Yet two monks were waiting to take his horse, and a third monk to lead him to the High Priestess.
“You’re late,” said the monk.
“Huh? I wasn’t aware that I had an appointment.”
“You didn’t. But the High Priestess knew you were coming, of course.”
“If she predicted I would come, she should have been able to predict what time I would arrive.”
“She did. But you are late. You should have gotten here earlier.”
Charlie had never been able to win an argument with a monk.
This time they took him to a temple building with a roof garden, floored with terra-cotta tile, where Xiao was sitting on a cushion in the lotus position, with her eyes closed and her head bowed. She was wearing a caftan. Charlie was disappointed. Although he told himself he was here strictly on Damask business, he had still rather been hoping she’d take him to her room and do the naked oil thing again. The High Priestess did not look up as he mounted the stairs. When his shadow fell across her she murmured, “Oh, man. Like, I need a toke.”
A monk was standing behind her with a handful of rice paper slips. “Just a few more to go.” He held a slip toward her.
“The answer is no,” said Xiao. Her eyes were still closed. “No, her husband isn’t cheating on her. Of course he’s lost interest in her, she’s gotten as big as a house, what did she expect?”
The monk looked at the slip. “Ah, perhaps we should provide something a little more cryptic for this one?”
“Oh, give me those.” Xiao snatched the rest of the slips from him and held them to her forehead. “Yes, no, no, yes, Tuesday, yes, no, bottom drawer on the second cabinet, no, no, no, yes, it was thirsty.” She crumpled the slips and handed back a wad of paper. “There. If they can’t handle the truth, that’s their own problem.”
“I see Your Worship is tired.” The monk bowed and withdrew. “We can resume later. In the meantime, His Highness the Prince Regent of Damask is here.” He bowed toward Charlie and descended the stairs.
Xiao bounced to her feet and in a moment was in Charlie’s arms, hugging him tightly, and when Xiao hugged, she tended to put her whole body into it. Charlie once again had the feeling his brain cells were punching out on the time clock and taking an extended lunch break. Xiao did not have the regal bearing, the fine features, or the classical beauty of Catherine Durace. But she was certainly cute enough, and when she wriggled her lithe little body against him, the prince found it difficult to think of any other woman, or even to remember why he was there. He wondered if she was wearing anything under her caftan.
It wasn’t until she stepped away from him that he was able to collect his thoughts. “I need your help, Xiao.”
“You want to know about the Weapon of Magical Destruction,” said Xiao promptly. She was still holding his hand. She didn’t let go of it.
Charlie, of course, was surprised and not a little taken aback. He tried not to show it. “You know about the WMD? Yes, of course you would know. I expected that. That’s why I came up here. But you know that already, right?” Xiao was looking at him with her head cocked, giving Charlie the feeling that he was babbling. “What I mean is, you’re a seeress. You knew that I knew that you would know. Right?”
“Either I’m still stoned or you are,” said Xiao. “What are you going to do with a Weapon of Magical Destruction?”
“Destroy it. I don’t like any weapon a prudent man can’t run away from.”
“Good answer. But since you can’t find the WMD anyway, what difference does it make?”
“Because I don’t want anyone else to find it, either. So how about you just fill up your bong with your magic herbs, wave your hands around your crystal ball or whatever kind of hand-waving you do, and tell me where it is?”
“Sorry,” said Xiao definitely. “Can’t help you.”
“What! What do you mean?”
“Your secret lies behind a door that is closed to me.”
Charlie gave her a narrow look. Once again Xiao had made the transition from air-head to coolly calculating in a suspiciously short span of time. “What happened to all that seeing-the-paths stuff you told me last time?”
“There are some paths I cannot travel. Thessalonius is a powerful and clever sorcerer. If he chose to hide something, he would hide it not only from sight, but from all other perception as well.”
Charlie zeroed in on this. “You talk about Thessalonius as if he were still alive. Do you know that for a fact?”
Xiao thought for a while. “Thessalonius has also closed the door on his path. I would not be able to find him, either.”
It sounded plausible enough. That didn’t mean it was true. When you lived with the wealthy and powerful, you heard plenty of lies. Charlie had learned early in life that all the best liars were totally convincing. “I won’t push it,” he said finally. He let go of Xiao’s hand. “If you say you can’t see the future of the WMD, I’ll accept that. But what about the king? He was coming up here on a regular basis. What did you talk about?”
We talked about you, Xiao managed to keep herself from saying. “We talked about the future of Damask.”
“Didn’t he say anything about a super weapon?”
“Not to me.”
“But you could do your seeress stuff and find out what he was up to, right?”
“That’s in the past. I am able to see the future. The king is dead. His path has ended.”
“So has mine, it seems like.” Charlie looked for a chair, didn’t find one, and finally sat down on a low wall than ran around the edge of the roof garden. Small red maples in barrels were scattered around the tiles. Strange herbs grew in wooden planters. “I’ve r
eached a dead end. It was a waste of time coming up here.”
“Not quite,” said Xiao. She took both of his hands and pulled him to his feet. A light breeze had sprung up, blowing wisps of her long black hair across her face. She tossed her head to fling it back. It swirled around her in a dark cloud, to settle softly around her shoulders in a most alluring way, an effect that no doubt took months of practice to achieve. “There is still something for you to learn.”
“There’s always something to learn,” said the prince. “Life is a continuing education, and nature is the world’s classroom. Et cetera, et cetera. But if you don’t mind, I’d just as soon dispense with the philosophy and move along with the prognostication. If you can really do the things you say, you must have known what Dad was doing. You must have seen something about a WMD. Some little clue. Something that could give me a hint.”
“There is nothing I can say. Now follow me.” She was walking backward and pulling on his hands, her eyes always looking into his, weaving her way through the potted trees without looking at them.
“Why don’t we go to that room with the smoke and candles and zither music? Maybe that will help.”
“It won’t. Besides, I’m off that stuff now. I need to get my head straight before I leave.”
“You’re leaving?” Although he couldn’t explain why, Charlie felt a pang of loss.
“I told you I was nearing retirement age. Too long have I listened to the people here, and too long have I realized their secrets. Such knowledge becomes a burden too heavy for one person to hold. Even now, a ship waits in Noile Harbor to carry me away from these lands.”
“Uh, right. You mentioned that before. I guess I wasn’t expecting you to leave so soon.” Xiao let go of Charlie’s hands and turned to walk down the stairs. Charlie followed her. “So, you’re having a little going away party, I guess? I brought you a gift, did I mention that?”
“This way.” Xiao opened a door at the bottom of the stairs. “Enter here. At the end of the corridor is another door. It is unlocked. Enter it. When you come back I will be gone.”
Charlie looked inside the door. The corridor was long and dark. He couldn’t see the far end. “Great, we’re getting mysterious again. Before I go in, I want to know—”
His words were cut off by Xiao’s kiss. She flung herself into his arms and pressed against him as though she were trying to wrap her body around his. Through the thin material of her caftan he could feel every inch of her, and he knew at once that she really was wearing nothing underneath it. Her small round breasts were flattened against him so he could feel her nipples digging into his chest, and her soft, rich mouth was slightly open to cover his own. She held the kiss just long enough for the heat of her body to penetrate his clothes, and then she pulled away and said, a little breathlessly, “I just wanted to make sure you were still wearing your getting-out-of-a-tight-spot device.”
Charlie was also breathing hard. He pulled the chain out from under his shirt and looked at the little charm. “All you had to do was ask.”
“I like my way better.”
Charlie internally conceded that he liked her way better also. Aloud, he said, “And what is this supposed to be good for?”
“Sorry,” said Xiao. “That I cannot tell you. But . . .”
“When the time comes, I’ll know. Yeah, yeah, right.”
“If you know the answer, don’t ask the question of a seer. You’re just wasting her time and your own.”
“Seers and sorcerers. Everything they say is a waste of time. Why can’t you both just give straight answers? The seeress could say, ‘Three weeks from now a man will hold a sword to your throat.’ The magician could say, ‘Here, take this getting-out-of-a-tight-spot device. Activate it and the sword will melt.’ Or whatever it does. Then we all know just where we stand.”
“Listen,” said Xiao. “I could give you all sorts of complicated stories about how if you knew the device would let you win a swordfight, you’d be getting into all sorts of swordfights that you’d normally avoid, and thus you’d choose a path you wouldn’t have chosen. But the simple answer is this: It’s magic. You can’t figure it out with logic. The sorcerers just make them that way and sorcerers are all strange people. Who knows what’s going on inside their heads?”
Once Charlie thought about it, it didn’t seem that strange. He knew there were writers who proudly wrote incomprehensible books and musicians who wrote cryptic songs. “All right,” he said finally. “I suppose sorcerers’s spells don’t have to make sense.”
“Promise me you’ll keep it with you,” Xiao said.
“I promise.”
“I’m a High Priestess of Matka, remember. You don’t want to break an oath to a High Priestess.”
“I said I promised, okay? Obviously you think I’m going to get in some sort of tight spot. If you could just give me a hint . . .”
“At the end of the hallway,” Xiao reminded him, pointing down it, “there is a door.”
“Yeah, I remember.” The prince hesitated, trying to think of something more to say. “Okay, well, I guess this is goodbye then.”
Xiao gave him a quirky little smile. “The door. Go.”
“Right. I’m going.” Charlie stepped into the corridor. He stopped to look over his shoulder. The High Priestess was gone.
Before entering the corridor, he paused for a few minutes to let his libido cool back down, and since he also had the suspiciousness quickly learned by anyone holding a government post, he jammed a stone in the frame to keep the door from closing behind him. There was, indeed, another door at the far end of the corridor, although by the time he reached it, the darkness was deep enough that he was groping his way along the walls. He found the handle by feel. As there was no light coming under the door, he presumed that whatever lay behind it was also in darkness. He was wrong. Behind the door lay a thick black curtain, and once he slipped past that he was in a room that was well lit with wax candles and even had a small fire burning in a grate. Many of the candleholders had been taken down from the walls and put on a table, because a man was sitting there working over a pile of papers.
He looked up as Charlie entered, but did not rise, merely acknowledging the prince regent with a nod of the head. He was a big man—even sitting down he looked big—with powerful arms and shoulders. Charlie identified him as someone who had spent his boyhood wielding a sword, and his manhood directing other men to wield swords. His beard was shot through with gray and close-cut in the military style. He’d cut the insignia off his military tunic, and the stripes off his wool twill riding breeches, and then tried to conceal them all under a faded green traveling cloak. Charlie had never seen him before. He recognized him immediately.
“General Fortescue,” he said.
Fortescue nodded. “Prince Regent.” Charlie was surprised at how old Fortescue was. Then he checked himself. No, I know he’s only thirty-six. But decades of battle have aged him. Like his beard, Fortescue’s hair was also streaked with gray, and the lines in his forehead were prematurely deep. He held up a slip of rice paper and pondered it. “Amazing what these women can tell you.”
“You mean their prophecies make sense to you?”
“Always. Unfortunately, half of the time they only make sense after the fact. When the battle is over, you read them and say to yourself, ‘Damn, I misinterpreted this. Now I understand what it really means.’ ”
“Right.”
“They so often have a certain ambiguity to them. Of course, I don’t want to blame the girl because I fail to interpret her words correctly. She gives us what information she has. It’s up to us to make use of it.”
“Right.”
Fortescue stood up, stretched, then poured himself a goblet of brown liquid from a green bottle. “Port wine, Your Highness?”
“Thank you, General.” Charlie knew that protocol meant he had to accept. To refuse a drink might imply that he thought Fortescue was trying to poison him. “So you’ve been coming here
for a long time?” He accepted a goblet and took a tiny sip. The general drained his own glass and filled it again.
“Of course. But I keep my visits a secret. My opponents also visit the Temple of Matka, but it gives me an advantage if they don’t know that I know what they know.”
Charlie had to take a moment to decipher this. “Right.”
Fortescue sat back down. Charlie selected a chair and sat across the table from him. The general produced another slip of paper and showed it to Charlie. “But the High Priestess prophesied that we should meet. And when I heard you were also here, I thought it was important that we do so. I’ve paid a good deal of money to your uncles, Your Highness, with more yet to be paid. I’m sure they are honorable men, but—well—sometimes the message conveyed is not the message that is received.” Fortescue tossed off his port and smiled at Charlie, his words and gestures conveying that hearty, man-to-man, let’s-skip-the-rigmarole-and-put-our-cards-on-the-table attitude that helped build confidence among his officers. It would have had the same effect on the prince if Charlie had not heard his father, time after time, use the same tone with visiting dignitaries he was trying to con. “It is worth the cost, of course, for nothing is more expensive than war. But I wanted to make sure that you were comfortable with your role in this.”
“I appreciate your taking a personal interest, sir.” Charlie felt his way carefully through the conversation. “My uncles are fomenting civil unrest even as we speak, and I have succeeded in alienating the nobility. Under the threat of losing their holdings, they will be more than pleased when you step in and remove me. And without means to feed the unruly mobs, they’ll be happy to have you restore order.”
“Good man. I’ll have plenty of men standing by. In a situation like this, it’s important to go in with a good show of force. One’s opponents are not inclined to resist when they know from the start that resistance is useless.”