Grand Vizier of Krar

by W. John Tucker

  Memwin checked that nobody was watching her any more. Then she ducked under the bushes one more time. She had seen that the vegetation concealed an opening in the dome. Surface earth near the bottom of the dome had crumbled away to expose some cracked masonry in which there was a gap big enough for one person to squeeze through; plenty of room for little Memwin. It had probably been the result of an earthquake as there was no sign that anyone had worked on it deliberately.

  She climbed through the gap into a dark cavity. It was the space between two shells of the dome, the outer shell and an inner shell. They had been linked by some kind of honeycomb structure, much of which had crumbled away and now provided little obstruction to Memwin. Although she had in mind that the dark cavity might just serve as a hiding place for her and Blan after their escape, she was now intrigued by what she had found. If the dome was a building and not just part of the hill, there must be a huge hollow space within it. Perhaps she and Blan could live there until the enemy gave up searching for them. She pushed on until the faint light from her entrance faded and she had to continue by touch.

  She had not gone far before she saw another glimmer of light ahead of her. This turned out to be another split in the outer shell; not big enough even for her to crawl through. Outside she could just see a crumbled wall standing half a pace away which would certainly have shielded this crack from view and possibly also from easy discovery.

  After several more paces with nothing but complete dark in front of her, Memwin decided that she had seen enough and was just about to turn back to her original entrance when her left foot met with no resistance. She felt herself falling. The inner shell had suddenly disappeared and she tumbled sideways into a strangely airy chamber.

  Memwin felt as though her lungs would burst as she tried to stifle her sneeze. It was no good; she let loose the greatest sneeze of her life followed by two others. She remained motionless for a while, expecting the loud reports of her sneezes to be heard throughout Belspire, but the echoes eventually faded and there was no other sound, so she reckoned that she was alone.

  She noticed that the floor was smooth, clearly the floor of a building, yet covered in dust and, from the smell of it, ash. She reached out to raise herself up and her hand found what she correctly guessed was the spine of a book with the stubs of many burnt pages still attached.

  Blan had taught her not to jump to conclusions. Nevertheless, Memwin was convinced that she knew what she had found. Feeling around, she found the edges of the doorway she had fallen through. Then she felt her way along the cavity to her outer entrance. As she crawled back through the bushes she grabbed as many leaves and stalks as she could to demonstrate that she had been busy collecting herbs. She then pretended to collect more herbs as she walked around the outer base of the dome. She was still within sight of the guards when she saw the other feature she needed to know about. On its southwestern side, right where the greatest avenue of the city reached the base of the dome, a great earthwork had been constructed, yet there was no sign of any entrance.

  Memwin returned to the camp convinced that she had found the perfect hiding place for Blan, the Great Library of Belspire. She wondered why her father had destroyed such a wonderful place, a place where she would have been happy to live her whole life just reading the books, studying the maps and illustrations and, like Blan, discovering and inventing all sorts of useful ideas and things. Then it occurred to her that her father had done her and Blan a favour by blocking the entrance to stop anyone else from going in and disturbing her hiding place.

  79

  The second opportunity came Memwin’s way after she left the library dome and was returning through the camp to the circus caravan. She was thinking about how she could get to talk to Blan about her new hiding place.

  Memwin was passing the tent of the circus owner when she overheard two men talking within. She sat down outside the tent, as near as she could to the voices, and pretended to busy herself sorting the herbs she had brought back from the hillside. She recognised the circus owner’s voice straight away. She then recognised the other voice. It was one of the circus cavalry guards who, by virtue of his great strength, was also a regular contestant in the gladiatorial competitions, albeit one who had never been good enough at the javelin throwing contest to actually fight for a Prize Girl.

  “Remember that you work for me, Corporal Pretsan,” the owner warned. “I consider it impertinent of you to ask me for this. If it were not for your physical prowess I would dismiss you. You would then have to find your own way back to Krar, or go back to killing peasants for Black Knight.”

  “I have never killed peasants,” Pretsan asserted indignantly. “I have always fought with honour against trained soldiers, though none of them have yet withstood me long enough to be killed.”

  “Whatever,” the owner muttered dismissively.

  “Please think on it again,” Pretsan urged. “She is no use to you now. The other gladiators won’t even look at her after what happened that first night she arrived. I was one of those who brought her in and I feel responsible for her. Let me buy her freedom. I have savings.”

  “And then I suppose you will propose to her and waltz off to live happily ever after,” the owner mocked, “and leave me short by one useful cavalry guard and a Prize Girl for whom I could get ten times the price you can afford. You are not suited to this war or this army, but while you are still bound by the contract you signed with me you will continue to work for me until I say otherwise. As for Blazznit or whatever her name is, unless you can come up with ten times what you offer for her and pay off your own contract, my answer is no.”

  “How could I possibly get so much gold?” Pretsan complained.

  “You can’t, so my answer is still no,” the owner declared with finality.

  Pretsan stormed out of the tent. He took no notice of Memwin as she jumped up and followed him.

  80

  Corporal Pretsan had heard whispers about the Queen Memwin Prophecy. He paid little attention to them. Politics did not concern him much. As a capable and robust man he saw no reason why anyone, of aristocratic birth or not, should be better than him or anyone else for that matter. The aristocracy did not bother him so long as they let him get on with his own humble life and achieve his own modest ambitions; his knowledge of politics and economics was not so sophisticated as to enable him to work out that the Kraran aristocracy and their cronies manipulated and drained his like.

  Pretsan’s parents had been poor peasants. He was the youngest of five brothers and three sisters. His two eldest brothers worked their parents’ subsistence farm, growing everything and anything they could, which was not much. The other two brothers joined a consortium to develop new farmland on the moors near their parents’ farm. As grand as this idea had seemed at the start, they ended up with a farm just as poor as that of their elder brothers. The three sisters had all married equally poor farmers and suffered similar austerity.

  Pretsan was unusually large and strong and had exceptional skills at most sports, except perhaps the ones in which weapons were thrown. He had wanted to go to the Krarisca Sports Academy and would certainly have qualified had he been able to afford the fees. Neither he nor anyone in his family or community had such money, so he reluctantly joined the army as his only option to make a living.

  With such a background, Pretsan was bemused to find an expensive piece of cotton paper on his palliasse. There was a message inscribed on it from ‘Duchess Memwin of Proequa, daughter of Duchess Fenfenwin and Prince Cakrocken Cankrar’. He doubted that it was a practical joke by one of his comrades because no one he knew would dare use Black Knight’s real name and, in any case, the whole tone of the message was way above the intellectual level of anyone he knew, even the owner of the circus.

  Of course, if there was a Duchess Memwin sneaking around the camp asking people to help Blansnette to escape, it was Corporal Pretsan’s duty to report it to his superior, the centurion in charge of his cavalry u
nit.

  That was when Pretsan made a decision which he knew would either define his future or seal his fate.

  He read the message again more carefully, and then he destroyed it.

  81

  Memwin felt empowered. What had been an obsession for finding out about herself and her mother and then, after meeting Blan, a hunger for knowledge of all kinds, had now evolved into the thrill of combining knowledge with practice in the outside world. The more she pondered a question, the more she found that ideas and stratagems came into her mind, as if from the ether around her, and grew, correcting and amending as they did so, until she conceived complicated patterns and directions she had previously not imagined. She did not know or verbalise in her mind that Blan had been through this same process, but she felt it, like an unconscious miner might wake to an infusion of oxygen as rescuers break through the rubble that had trapped him. Memwin felt a surge of empathy and love for Blan as she finally decided to approach her and reveal her plan.

  “Pretsan will help tonight, I’m sure,” Memwin whispered cryptically from beneath her drooping hat as she brought Blan her soup. “The library is open beneath the bushes beyond the eastern gate.”

  Men have been known to complain that their wives and daughters talk to each other in code, but the empathy between Blan and Memwin was of an even higher order. Blan understood exactly what Memwin was saying, and Memwin knew she would.

  “You are a blessing and my saviour,” Blan whispered as she placed her hand gently on Memwin’s shoulder. “I know what you did to the gladiators and you are forgiven.” This meant a lot to Memwin and Blan knew that it did. Whilst Memwin did not think that her actions had been wrong in the circumstances, she still felt uncomfortable about the consequences and was troubled that they might have infringed some moral rule that she had not yet been able to think through. Blan’s expression of knowledge and forgiveness released Memwin from the need to make awkward explanations, something she had been dreading, and it comforted her to know that Blan at least understood her reasoning, even if she did not necessarily agree with it.

  Nothing more needed to be said, which was just as well since the guards nearby had started to wonder why the serving child was still hanging around. Memwin quickly retreated to the kitchen tent to fetch soup for the next Prize Girl.

  Blan felt relieved. Memwin had made her move. Blan now understood that the bulbous hilltop was the ruined dome of Belspire Library and that Memwin had found a way into it. As for Pretsan, she remembered him as the abductor who had protected her from his leader. Indeed, he had seemed to fancy her.

  82

  Corporal Pretsan was glad he took the advice of the note from Memwin. He had found other sources of food that night, not eaten the food provided for the contestants. All the other contestants were making frequent visits to the latrine and complaining about their stomach. Pretsan did the same so as not to arouse suspicion. He also found an excuse to check the kitchen tent and quickly found the cause of complaint. Salts for easing constipation were always available in the camp, but the kitchen charged with supplying food for the contestants had inexplicably run out of such salts. Pretsan looked around for anyone who looked like a duchess; he did not know how old the woman was or what she looked like. When a seemingly surly girl of about six years stared back at him, as if to ask what he was doing there, he backed away and left for the arena.

  The professional soldiers and gifted amateurs who entered as contestants in the arena were too good to be put off by a little thing like an upset stomach. However, their problem proved to be just severe enough to enable Pretsan to come in as second best javelin thrower. This was the first time ever that he had won a place in the final fight.

  His opponent was just as large and strong as Pretsan. Of centurion rank, Gritsus was far more experienced and had already won many contests. He was especially skilled with the spear and net, adapted from a mosaic, found in a ruin, which depicted a retiarius from some lost civilisation. He enjoyed killing his defeated opponents in the most humiliating way, even after they had been disabled and had surrendered. After trapping them in his net and disabling them with his spear, he would take their sword and butcher them slowly to the cheers of the crowd. It was not compulsory to kill the loser, although most gladiators did so.

  Pretsan looked briefly up at the prize throne and saw the six Prize Girls. Two girls were smiling in the direction of Gritsus. Except for Blan, the other girls had their heads downcast. Blan was watching Pretsan with an unfathomable expression.

  Pretsan realised he had broken one of the golden rules of combat, ‘don’t get distracted’, when he sensed that Gritsus had moved suddenly closer, thrusting his spear and swinging his net. Instead of the armour and shield of an ancient secutor, Pretsan wore no armour but held a sword with a two-edged blade of about two-thirds of a fathome in length. However, his sporting talent came to his rescue as he rolled forward and to the left, away from the net and under the spear. Before Gritsus could draw back and thrust again, Pretsan had swung his sword. The very tip of it cut Gritsus above his right heel. Gritsus recovered quickly, spun around anticlockwise and speared Pretsan in the side before rolling away himself.

  Pretsan could feel the wet of blood as it ran down his left side where the spear had entered on its way to nicking a rib. Gritsus was also bleeding from his right heel.

  “Prepare to be butchered, Corporal Pretsan, because you are no match for me,” Gritsus mocked as he recovered his stance.

  “Are you sure you can stand up long enough to get to me, Centurion Gritsus?” Pretsan mocked in reply.

  Knowing that he did not have enough fighting experience to match Gritsus in the normal way, Pretsan started to circle around him, to give himself time to think. He realised that he would have to be prepared to take a severe injury if he were to get close enough to Gritsus to beat him. He edged closer to his opponent. With a smirk, Gritsus responded in kind.

  “Come now, my spear is waiting for you,” Gritsus taunted.

  Before Gritsus had finished speaking, Pretsan charged at him. Gritsus calmly stepped back, swung his net and readied his spear for a fatal thrust. However, at the very moment that Gritsus cast his net, Pretsan threw himself into the air, as if taking a high jump but with his legs and arms splayed out to their fullest extent. The net passed over one leg and one arm but failed to completely snare him. Meanwhile, bracing himself for the pain of the spear passing into his buttock where he had expected it to strike, he was almost relieved to feel it get caught in his powerful left calf muscle as Gritsus, taken aback by Pretsan’s bizarre action, put too much weight on his injured right heel and jerked his spear up as the pain nearly caused his foot to give way.

  With his left hand, Pretsan grabbed the net and used it to pull himself toward Gritsus as he fell. He landed heavily on Gritsus who crumpled to the ground under him. Despite a surge of pain in his leg as the spear broke and came out, Pretsan brought his sword to Gritsus’ neck.

  “Yield!” Pretsan demanded.

  “Never!” Gritsus spat. In one mighty twist he then freed both arms and grasped Pretsan around the throat with one hand. With the other hand he snatched the broken spearhead and plunged it into Pretsan’s shoulder.

  Stifling a cry of pain, Pretsan pushed himself up and away. As he did so, he started to lose balance and thrust his sword forward to steady himself. Gritsus suddenly went limp. It was only then that Pretsan realised that his sword had gone through his opponent’s heart.

  As he slowly stood up to the roaring cheers of the crowd, he hardly noticed the little girl who had run out into the arena and placed rolls of bandage and a bottle of liquid into his hand. He did, however, have the presence of mind to pour the liquid into and over his wounds and to quickly bind them up to staunch the flow of blood. Then, as men came into the arena to carry off the fallen Gritsus, Pretsan staggered over to look up at the Prize Girls. The same two smilers were still smiling, but they were now smiling at him. Blan was still watching him without ex
pression and the other three girls still had their heads bowed.

  Here was his chance to choose one of two girls who seemed anxious to please him. It was very tempting. He was not one of those soldiers who raped and pillaged the local peasant girls, nor one to enslave or cajole an unwilling partner, nor had he the time to go courting in the hope that a local girl would ignore the fact that he was an enemy soldier. There had been no female friendships for him since he left his homeland almost a year ago. Here, as victor, not only could he choose any one of six Prize Girls, but two of them were willing enough to satisfy his ethical qualms.

  Then, in the shadows, he saw the same little girl who had looked accusingly at him in the kitchen tent. He seemed to recall also that she was the one who had given him the bandages and alcohol for his wounds. She was looking at him accusingly now, or so he imagined. He limped up the steps to the dais, lifted Blan and carried her to the entertainment room below.

  “I don’t need guards here,” Pretsan commandingly declared to the six guards in the room, “I have sustained an injury which will be embarrassing for me if I am watched. I’m sure you understand, as worldly men. You would not want the victor’s enjoyment of his prize to be thus lessened, would you?”

  “We are under strict instructions to guard the girls at all times,” the leader said apologetically.

  “Am I not also a cavalry guard? Do you think I will let this girl escape me?” Pretsan asked in a tone of voice that suggested he had been insulted. Then, in a more friendly voice he added, “Go now, comrades. Go through the back way, via the kitchen, and no one will know that you have not been here all along.” He smiled in as winning a way as possible after having been speared in the rib, leg and shoulder. The leader of the guards nodded, slapped Pretsan on the back and led the others out.