by David Keck
In an airless moment, he was thrust out in front of the furious Mornaway man. It suited Durand well.
'Take hold then," Waer said, and Durand did, one fist in the man's collar, the other in the man's belt. He felt Waer's knuckles turn against his hip and ear as the big man took hold as well, breathing garlic and sour wine into Durand's face.
They jostled while some village reeve or bailiff waited to shout the word.
Then it began.
The Host Below had made Waer of ship's cables and bridge timbers. Durand's first heaves left the man rooted to Creation.
"Moryn's told me the games you've been playing," Waer growled.
Even as the man spoke, he was twisting.
Durand crooked his leg to hold him, and they staggered together. "Bastards," Waer grunted.
Suddenly, he pivoted, and Durand found himself whipped against the earth. Only a desperate twist saved him from the kind of flat fall, hips and shoulders, which would lose him the match.
As it was, he had lost a point. The bailiff told them, "go."
Now, it was all straining. Durand tried to wrench the Mornaway man one way and then the other, but the man might have been an oak.
They bridged against each other, straining.
Waer shot kicks at Durand's legs.
Each boot gave Durand a bruise and a chance to throw.
Somehow, Waer reversed him. Durand could hardly breathe as he got to his feet.
The bailiff was shaking his head, "Just shoulders. Just shoulders."
Now, rage had hold of Durand. There was nothing like coming to a fight in a blind fury and getting tossed around like a fool.
He opened his hands and beckoned Waer in.
Now, Durand scrambled for any advantage, breathing in the knot of the man's jaw like a forge and bellows. For an instant, Durand felt he had his man.
Then Waer dropped: a tricky maneuver.
Like a pickaxe, the man's shoulder chopped Durand in the guts. Waer drove harder, lifting. With sheer main strength, he wrenched Durand free of the ground.
In that reeling instant, with the air rammed from his lungs, Durand decided that he would not go easy. He locked himself onto Waer's shoulders. He drove his knee into the man's ribs. He pitched Waer off balance.
Together, they went down—Durand first—Durand losing.
But, as the ground knocked the wind through Durand's teeth, he held on to Waer's neck, whipping the big man over.
It was an awkward fall: head and neck and shoulder caught.
As Durand opened his hands, Waer did not move.
Durand struggled loose amidst the suddenly silent ring of onlookers. He got up. Waer was still.
In the hush, the bailiff stepped into the circle, bending low over the sprawl of knees and elbows.
Durand wavered, slapping at the dirt marring the old coat. He could feel whatever impetus that rage had given him dying as his friends closed in, silently helping him from the stinking coat.
The man lying in the dirt was a lord's companion and liegeman to the duke.
19 Ashes
Waer did not move. No one looked from the wellborn wrestler—maybe corpse—face down and arms sprawled. No one spoke.
Finally, mere was the smallest motion: His arm shifted, crooking at its elbow. The whole gathered crowd took their first breath.
Then Lamoric's lads were slapping Durand's back.
Ouen squeezed his shoulder. "Lad, I thought the lot of us were going to have to run for it."
"Hard head and stiff neck," Badan muttered, clucking his tongue.
The others either cursed the downed man or thanked Heaven he hadn't snapped his neck. Durand strained to find Lamoric where he stood with Coensar beyond the circle. A great deal depended on how Lamoric reacted.
But, as Durand looked, every face was turning toward the castle gates.
It was Lord Moryn.
He and many of the duke's liegemen were rumbling over the drawbridge. The lean lord's mantle flapped after him. At the edge of the circle, Moryn stopped, surveying the spectacle. His man, Waer, was awake, if not on his feet. Some of the crowd glanced to Durand; Moryn gave him a hard look.
Then the Knight in Red stepped forward. "You have interrupted your feast?" Lamoric asked. "My man, Waer, had no business interfering." "I am surprised to hear you say it." Moryn closed his eyes for an instant. "Waer is rash. He left without a word. I came when I learned." "Not in time, however," Lamoric said. "What do you say?" said Moryn.
"You have chosen your moment well, my Lord. This fellow of yours had ample opportunity to reach me before you could arrive. If Sir Durand here had not been so quick, he would have done."
Durand wondered. Around him, the other retainers were fidgeting like pageboys.
Fire glittered in the slits of Moryn's eyes.
"Do you say you had no intention of loosing a thug to lame your enemy? Of hobbling your opponent before you must meet him in the field? Of finding an accident to preserve your reputation among your father's men?"
Moryn snapped his blade into the chill air. It glittered with his eyes. 'To face a creature such as you, a man needs no such tricks."
Lamoric left his own blade lie in its scabbard. "I commend your cleverness, Lord Moryn. Waer is a loyal man. He is rash. He would not need an order, just a well-chosen word. And you can sleep, an innocent"
Moryn's blade twitched. Lamoric's hand drifted toward his own. There was a sound at the High Ashes gate.
A second delegation of wellborn soldiers stepped into the autumn night. This time, Durand found himself looking at half the barons of Mornaway, with Duke Severin stalking at their head.
"Gentlemen!" the old duke said, showing some sign of the warrior he must once have been. "Peace. There is bad blood, but I will not see it spilt. You are guests. I am told that a time and place has been agreed, and I believe that time will come soon enough to satisfy anyone's honor."
Lord Moryn was nodding. He sheathed his sword.
"I have agreed that we will fight before the Herald of Errest" Moryn said.
Lamoric hooked his thumbs in his belt.
"Good, good," Severin said. "Now. There is food prepared and waiting. Men have labored. Beasts have died to fill our stomachs. It is not fitting that we should ignore their sacrifice."
Moryn nodded, and, with his men gathering up the disoriented Waer, withdrew beyond the stockade.
Durand left.
It was all too much. Lamoric was half mad, but Durand was no better himself. Serving men stared up at him. He walked toward the walls. Unless he wanted to swim the new moat, there was nowhere to go but to the open ground above the castle ditch.
Yet again, he had survived a mistake. The fight with Waer had been stupid and dangerous, and it had done nothing to untie the knot of his frustration. He understood nothing. In the space of a heartbeat, he had lost Deorwen.
Everything had gone wrong so quickly.
"Durand!" A voice behind him.
Heremund bandied down the grassy ringwork. Durand remembered an ape once at a fair.
"I reckoned Waer was it," the skald gasped. "But there is something else."
Durand knotted his fists for a moment, then turned. Anger was stupid.
"What made you blunder in like that?" Heremund demanded. "What made you bolt?"
Heremund's avid brown eyes looked closely into Durand's face, then it seemed that realization dawned.
"Ah. A mistake, yes? Nothing to do with Lamoric."
Durand exhaled through his nostrils, eyes shut.
"I see," Heremund said.
"Then let me be a while."
Heremund nodded deeply, but, as Durand turned to continue his walk, the skald trotted alongside. "First there's old Traveler," he said. 'Then you in the hills over that horse's neck. And that stag by the hut."
"Heremund," Durand said.
'The Traveler don't turn up for everyone, boy. Some hear a rapping. There's a staff-heel click as they choose to murder or not—a wife, a
child—to cheat or not, to pick up or set aside.
There's only the tapping, and a prickling on the neck to say that someone's there."
Durand remembered the forest at Gravenholm and the rapping in the dark.
"You, though," said Heremund. "You meet the man himself."
Heremund looked round them both. "I see you crashing through a dance, hooking dancers with your arms, changing the spin of the whole thing."
Durand remembered the news after Traveler's Night that sent him careering down the road to Red Winding and Bower Mead and High Ashes and God knew where.
"Little good it's done me," said Durand.
"Don't know," Heremund muttered. "Maybe it ain't done. Maybe it's hardly got started." He was shaking his head.
"Your talk has the ring of doom about it. I—"
Just then, a tremor passed through the whole of Creation. A footfall. Durand steadied himself. Very faintly, bells moaned on the air. The throb spoke from some shrine in the castle and another somewhere beyond the valley rim. Durand stood facing the Glass and the strange island. Rings spread across the surface.
"Hells," Heremund breathed, casting about
In the midst of the river, something—a black pane of. shale—slid from the broad back of the isle. A cold wind tossed Durand's cloak and rustled in the skeleton branches of the trees above the valley. The weather was changing.
"Hells," said Heremund. He gaped at the dim sky. "Hells, hells."
Durand caught hold of the little man. He could hear shouts now. Animals screamed. "What does it mean?" he demanded. He felt as though Creation had changed. The world's horizon seemed like the prow of some vast ship on a vaster ocean.
He shook his head.
"Someone's being a fool," Heremund gasped.
As he turned under the black valley rim, waiting for God knew what, someone moved in the camp. Durand would have known the walk from seven leagues. Only twenty paces from him, Deorwen stood before Bertana's pavilion, looking into the vault of Heaven.
'This dance of yours," Durand said. "I'll tell you this for nothing: I'm not the one swinging partners round." With this, he freed the skald and darted for Deorwen's back, once again dodging the web of guy lines between the knights' pavilions. She stared up until he had come close enough to touch her.
"Deorwen," he said.
Her eyes were still wide from the sky.
"Oh, Durand. No."
He caught her elbow. For an instant, she looked at his hand as though it was some foreign creature, then she pulled free and darted back into Bertana's pavilion.
Durand pushed after her, ducking into a crowded space of red walls and strewn herbs. There were chests and trunks. Lady Bertana stood, and bearded Coelgrim crossed to meet him. After a bewildered instant, Durand spotted a bright slit of twilight where a second flap had just closed.
He found no sign of Deorwen back under the eerie Heavens. Shadowy people stared up among the tents, holding the Eye of Heaven between themselves and the whole of Creation.
The girl had vanished as completely as if she had never been.
Durand held his hands loose and eyes tight shut. Every dark thought shot through his skull. It was an effort to breathe. Tents and ropes webbed him round, walls and ditches and moats and rivers blocked and barred him. He turned his eyes to Heaven, where the Eye beyond the valley rim touched strange ripples in the clouds, as though someone had pitched a stone into the firmament.
He heard Coelgrim step into the space behind him, the cool weight of an axe now in his hands, but Durand did not even bother to turn.
"Your lady is safe," he breathed. "You needn't worry on my account."
Without waiting for the man's answer, Durand stalked away, tripping over stakes and ropes and tethers. Again, he went for open ground.
He had to get free.
Water brimmed in the ditches. Another push, and he would swim for it, spending the night in the freezing forest wastes. He teetered along the fathoms-deep castle ditch. He would get himself beyond the sight of men, alone for once beyond the curve of the castle's wall.
Finally, he stumbled round the far side where the split Glass poured back into its channel.
There, he found a silent figure, pale against the river dark.
For a death-cold instant, Durand thought of Cerlac and the Glass that brimmed with spirits. He thought of the washerwoman. He thought of the blue-shirted peasant and the Traveler himself.
The figure was turning, a long, pale face coming into view. But it was not Cerlac or any of these others; instead, the man was Agryn. A Holy Ghost, perhaps, but not the dead from Hesperand.
The knight's dark eyes narrowed.
"What was all that?" Durand asked.
"I don't know." The strange dial dangled from the knight's fingers.
"What did it mean?" With the river and the gloom and Agryn being so still and the shadows of his past with the Septarim, such a man might know anything.
"I cannot say," answered Agryn. He stared at Durand for a moment "I was never one of the Septarim. Nearly, once. The Heavens are a looking glass, they say. Or a pool, more like."
Durand had heard stories of bare monasteries and long rows of knights waiting still as corpses upon their biers, cool as wax and old as foundation stones.
"You have been in an accident," the knight said.
Durand did not know where to begin, but Sir Agryn raised a knuckle toward Durand's face and fists. There were scrapes. Mud. "Waer came for Lamoric. I was lucky."
"Let us hope Lamoric has your luck tomorrow."
Durand stopped for a moment, then had to nod. Lamoric could lose. The whole surge of events that had carried Durand here could ebb away.
"If Lamoric fails, we will be turned out, penniless, scattered before the wind," said Agryn. "Winter will be hard when taxes have emptied every strongbox." He turned his eye on Durand. "It is a hard road for a knight without lord or land."
His long face studied the dimming horizon. Suddenly, Durand wondered how many winters this man had seen, alone on the road.
"Why did you leave them?" Durand wondered. "My Holy Ghosts?" He paused. "For my wife." Now, Durand was surprised. "I didn't know you were—" "Dead of fever, when Carondas was king." Old King Carondas had been buried in Ferangore sixty winters.
Again, there was the dry laugh. "She was among the wise women who came to cleanse me of this life. I lay down on the bier. She carried dead man's balsam. I left my brethren and God and the king. I left with her, so heartsore was I at the thought of letting her go."
"God," said Durand.
"I was meant to serve the kings of Errest. The Powers called. In turning from that calling," said Agryn, "I turned the Eye of Heaven from me. A man cannot slip the doom allotted him. We will see what becomes of Lamoric, and all of us whose fates are bound to his."
Durand nodded. They had not lost yet. Nothing was finished.
"If the Herald's fair, we've got a—"
The man fixed Durand with a dark eye. "The Herald of Errest stood with Einred's sons at Lost Princes; walked the Halls of Heaven; rode before the grieving king at the Plain of the Skull and the Waste of Fettered Bones; winded the Crusader Horn at the black gates of the Burning City. Servant to ten kings. He keeps the Roll of Errest and the fame of all peers living and dead. His ruling will be the mandate of Heaven."
Durand rubbed the back of his neck, eyes on the turf. "I am sorry," said Agryn. "No." The man was right.
Durand closed his eyes, his mind spinning. Deorwen returned to his thoughts.
"But the Powers, I feel them, nearly, in this," Agryn confessed. "As I did in those days long ago. Perhaps there is cause to ... to hope in this."
Durand heard anxious ages in the man's voice: battles enough to make Coen's striving seem the trial of a moment.
When he looked again on Agryn, the austere warrior's eyes were fixed on the valley wall.
"The Eye of Heaven has left us," he said. "Night has fallen."
On the riverbank
, he sank to his knees. Durand left the man to pray. The Glass filled with stars.
He would not wait forever. He would find Deorwen and leam what was in her mind. If it must be done in secret, he would allow her that.
Among the camp's canvas alleys, he passed grooms currying horses. Some tents were dark, but when he came upon Bertana's, it smoldered like a banked fire. He read the shadows thrown against its red skin, picking out Coelgrim's shape and the softer form of Bertana. He saw the shadows stop, as if they had heard him. There was no sign of Deorwen.
Reasoning that the grooms were nearby enough to have seen where she had gone, he walked into the warm fetor of the tethered horses.
"Have you seen a girl?" he asked.
The nearest boy looked at him across a mare's back, his face like an apple. He held a rough blanket.
"Here," Durand said, hauling the blanket over the mare's back. "Have you seen a girl? From the Lady's tent."
"The red hair?" the boy asked.
Durand stared into the boy's face. "Aye."
rrhe boy nodded quick and stuck a finger across the camp toward a tall pavilion glowing like a horn lantern among the dark peaks of its neighbors. "That one," he said.
Durand looked at the pale glow and took a deep breath. 'Thank you," he said, then, with a nod to the boy, he walked toward the illuminated pavilion.
He would set it straight. She might be afraid for her honor. Women were. There was always a woman or two among the camp followers who would whore for pennies, and here he had come tramping out of the woods with her alone and she was no whore. A woman might take pains to make it clear.
The dark tents at the heart of the camp made his going hard, and he was sure there was more rope in a camp like this than in all the ships at Acconel quay. He skirted a quagmire where some fool had penned his mounts among the tent stakes.