The Summer's King

by Wilder, Cherry;

  First the king asks, “What should be done with a spy?”

  And Hazard replies, laughing, “Oh a spy should be encouraged!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The spy should be given plenty of freedom, watched most cautiously, fed harmless information . . .”

  “And then?”

  “The spy may be turned around, made into your own spy, or else arrested and imprisoned.”

  These wintry conversations with the blind poet are ended with the approach of spring. It is time for Sharn Am Zor to ride out with his queen to Chernak Hall, to go hawking again in the long valley; soon it will be warm enough for swimming. Above all, it is time to visit the site of Chernak New Palace. An army of men and women have made camp upon the plain: stone masons, bricklayers, laborers and their families. Building is going on everywhere; Denwick builds on his estate beyond the Hain; Seyl has his own hall at North Hodd on the road to Dechar.

  Jevon Seyl, heir of an ancient line, numbers among his ancestors Holy Matten, the prophet of Inokoi, the Lame God, as well as many noble men and women of Lien who ran more true to type. His ancestral land, the rich province of Hodd in the northeast corner of Lien, has come gradually into the power of the state. Seyl’s widowed mother, Lady Bergit, has no more than the old manor house and its park. Like Denzil of Denwick, a younger son with few prospects, Seyl has done better to throw in his lot entirely with King Sharn, his close friend and cousin, and found his own dynasty in the Chameln lands. For Seyl, at first sight a courtier, shows more and more the makings of a man of judgment, a chancellor for his king.

  It is fitting that he should travel into Lien as an envoy from Achamar to the court at Balufir. His mission is to greet the Markgraf Kelen in the name of the Daindru and express concern about the succession. He sets out on this small and peaceful progress with his wife Iliane, quantities of fine clothes, gifts of jewels for the Markgrafin and an escort of guardsmen and kedran. So it is that the Daindru have an excellent witness to a cruel episode in the history of the Mark of Lien.

  II

  Seyl arrives in early spring and finds all as fresh and fine as ever in Balufir, with no unusual tension at the court. Between Kelen and fair Zaramund there is not so much a coolness as the kind of resignation that grows between those long married. The Markgraf makes discreet visits to his new love, Fideth of Wirth, but she is never seen at court. On the other hand, the Lord Merl of Grays and his three sons are going about at court in great spirits. Some would say that they are proud and overbearing, at least the lord himself and his heir, Dermat. It is clear that they have a hold over Kelen and his vizier, Rosmer. Zaramund will not be put aside. Iliane Seyl, who has a gift for intrigue, comes upon a very strange rumor. Rosmer has a new candidate for the succession, a young man shut up in a tower, a giant of a fellow not quite in his right wits. In the middle of the Willowmoon, the court sets out on its annual progress through the countryside and comes to Nesbath to take the waters.

  The old town on the Dannermere, at the confluence of the two rivers, has a dreamlike beauty. Its wide streets, lined with linden trees, are filled with summer villas of pale stone. A wide promontory spreads out into the inland sea; shoals of pleasure craft complete the vistas of Nesbath as they move past on the endless blue.

  The Birchmoon passes, unusually warm; all the roses come into bloom before the Villa Pearl, the royal residence. There are displays of fireworks. There is a regatta, somewhat marred by lack of wind. The prize is carried off by Dermat, the Heir of Grays, in his magnificent new sailing boat, the ketch Huntress.

  Untroubled, Jevon Seyl observes the summer pleasures of the Lienish court. Privately, he and Iliane admit, at last, that these fine folk have become boring. Achamar, at the end of the world, now suits the Seyls better; there is more to do. Iliane misses her two little children, Jevon and Ishbel, now with their nursemaids at Zerrah; even the flattering attentions of the young men have begun to cloy.

  Seyl has an interesting encounter with the Lord of Grays on the terrace of the Villa Pearl, typically at dawn after a nightlong revel. They drink kaffee and watch the sun rise over the inland sea. Lord Merl, in an elaborate wig, the latest mode, and a bewildering effulgence of brocade and jewels, has taken off his highheeled shoes to cool his aching feet upon the tiles. Jevon Seyl, dreadfully sober, realizes that the old lord is asking for the support of the Daindru. A compact, an alliance. Some firm agreement over the succession, with the implication that Zaramund, daughter of Grays, will never be put aside. Seyl agrees that this treatment of the Markgrafin would indeed offend King Sharn and Queen Aidris. As for the succession, he will not be drawn.

  Some days later Seyl and his lady accept one of the rare invitations from Rosmer. The vizier has requisitioned an old villa near the northern tip of the promontory; he keeps somewhat apart from the rest of the court. The day is called Swan Greeting, traditionally the beginning of summer. There will be a procession to the harbor, and the Markgraf’s grand barge will sail to the floating pavilion, an artificial island anchored in the Dannermere.

  Rosmer has invited a most select company to see the festival; the Seyls meet Zelline of Grays, Duchess of Chantry, Hal, Duke of Denwick and his red-haired consort from Balbank, and merry old Lord Trench, a local dignitary who happens to be Iliane’s uncle. From the upper balcony of this villa there is a perfect view of the dusty, white tree-lined street, the small harbor for pleasure boats and the wide sweep of the inland sea. The company moves continually between the dark chamber, its old-fashioned oaken table set with dainties, for Rosmer has an excellent cook, and the bright balcony.

  Rosmer pays particular attention to Jevon Seyl, who believes he is being sounded out over his recent talk with the Lord of Grays. The two men walk in the lovely untended garden, and Rosmer confides that the villa is the property of the Raiz family. He admits, slyly, that Jalmar Raiz might not take kindly to his tenancy.

  “Jalmar Raiz has certain gifts, I will allow,” he remarks, smiling, “but his brother, Hagnild Raiz: there is a master of his craft.”

  He adds cryptically, “I had proof, living proof, of Hagnild’s magic, and the fellow slipped through my fingers. For a Duaring, he was unusually clever. Gone . . . gone . . . swum over the Bal, I don’t doubt, back home to Mel’Nir.”

  He pauses by the sundial and checks a large pocket watch. Overhead the sky is cloudless; it is exactly midday. Rosmer has changed his black scholar’s robe for one of olive-green; he wears a soft falling ruff without starch. He begins to complain of the Lord of Grays, a tyrant, holding the realm of Lien to ransom for a few paltry debts. Jevon Seyl puts in a word at last: the Daindru are concerned by rumors about the succession.

  “Have no fear,” says Rosmer gently, with his sidelong look. “The Markgrafin Zaramund will never be put aside.”

  They are hailed from the balcony by golden-haired Zelline and Iliane with dark ringlets tumbling over her smooth shoulders. The procession is approaching, the ladies cry, the refreshments have been served.

  Seyl has racked his brains ever since as to the exact sequence of events. What can he recall? The chamber, dark after the sunlight, the marvellous wine. Rosmer certainly is absent for minutes at a time but always returns unruffled. On the balcony the Duchess of Denwick gives her hearty laugh. The procession is made up of decorated carriages drawn by young men dressed as birds, animals and trees. It is pretty enough but badly organized, full of amusing mistakes.

  There is a lengthy pause in the proceedings while the royal barge is made ready. Beside it at the wharf is moored the Huntress, also hung with garlands. The Markgraf Kelen can be seen striding about on the deck of his barge, all in white with a red hat. Zaramund, his consort, is wearing blue; the ladies agree that it suits her. The sky is no longer cloudless. Seyl remembers a breeze that blows in his face, a south wind? A west wind?

  The royal barge begins to move, poled by sturdy boatmen, and then sticks fast. Denwick’s footman is sent running to the harbor to find out the cause of the delay. Eve
n before the man comes running back, Iliane points to the Huntress, which has always been ready to sail. Now Zaramund may be seen going aboard her brother’s new boat, together with a lady-in-waiting.

  The footman reports that the royal barge is unseaworthy; it has sprung a leak and is filling with water. The Markgraf is angry with his sailing master, and he has refused to sail with the Huntress, in the company of his wife’s relatives. Zaramund has saved the day, saved the ceremony by going alone. There is a good deal of mischievous amusement on the balcony when this tale is told.

  Meantime the Huntress speeds out into the inland sea, spreading her painted sails, drawing in her wake long flower garlands in honor of Swan Greeting. The floating pavilion shimmers in the haze of early afternoon about two miles from shore. The wind is blowing strongly now, a warm wind that comes in gusts. When the Huntress rounds the pavilion, rockets are fired, white and green.

  Seyl, seeing that the traditional cruise will be completed very quickly in the sailing boat, goes indoors to replenish his glass. The room is stifling; old Lord Trench sits in a corner singing to himself. Rosmer comes from the direction of the stairs, a tapestry lifts as he passes. They stand together at the end of the table, Rosmer with his cuffs turned back, his hands clasped, nothing up his sleeves. Out on the balcony Iliane begins to scream loudly.

  Jevon Seyl races out again, overturning a chair as he goes. Iliane goes on screaming until Mechtild of Denwick slaps her face briskly; Denwick is leaning perilously over the balcony shouting for his servants. Zelline stands very still, then when Seyl comes to her side, raises her hand and points.

  The Dannermere has been whipped up into grey foam-crested wavelets. Where the Huntress sailed, close hauled upon a jibe, there is a depression in the water, a patch of turbulence. There is a streak of red that Seyl recognizes with horror as the long masthead pennant. As he watches, this too is drawn under into the waters of the inland sea.

  There is hideous confusion on the wharf below; a tangle of small craft attempt to go to the rescue. Seyl sees two boatmen from the royal barge plunge into the water and begin swimming. The floating pavilion appears to have slipped its mooring in the squall and is canted crazily in the water with the few servants who let off the rockets clinging to its deck. Seyl turns his head and sees Rosmer still with his hands clasped standing on the balcony. His face is expressionless.

  “Put down this wind!” cries Seyl. “Have you no powers?”

  “It is too late!” says the vizier.

  Zelline gives a soft moaning cry and falls in a faint. Iliane, very pale, her teeth chattering, seems about to do the same. Seyl seizes his wife by the wrist and begins to drag her away. He says to Rosmer, “The Lord of Grays?”

  “He was aboard,” says Rosmer, “alas.”

  “A clean sweep then!” says Seyl recklessly.

  “What can you be thinking?” protests the vizier with a modest smile. “You are my witnesses. Could you believe that I had any hand . . .”

  “Yes!” says Seyl through clenched teeth. “Yes, by the Goddess!”

  He catches sight of Denwick and his wife, clinging together, their eyes fixed upon Rosmer. Poor Lord Trench, sobered, is trying to revive Zelline. Seyl drags Iliane with him and rushes from the house, panting down the stairs out into a storm of summer rain. The two kedran left to wait with the carriage have gone; now the older woman comes running up from the harbor.

  “Lord! Lord! The ship, the sailboat . . .”

  “Bring us away,” orders Seyl.

  He settles Iliane into the carriage in frantic haste and leaps in beside her.

  “Bring us to the Villa Pearl and by the north road, not the avenue!”

  The second kedran comes up just in time to chase after the carriage and leap up behind as they gather speed. Even the back road to the royal villa is not empty; men and women are rushing to the harbor. Seyl, hanging from the window, brushed by overhanging boughs, sees a ghost, a young man struggling uphill from tree to tree. He shouts to the kedran to slow down and flings open the carriage door.

  “Here man, get in!”

  The young man scrambles in; he is wearing a tree suit, a domino covered with green silk leaves. Iliane, seeing him, chokes back a scream, then begins to wrap him in the carriage rug.

  “Garvis, oh Garvis, poor boy,” she weeps, “you were not aboard!”

  The young man, shocked and pale, tries to draw breath.

  “Murdered!” he says at last. “All murdered! Dermat, Tam, the Old Man . . . Zaramund, my dear sister Zaramund! Goddess, what shall I . . .”

  “Hold firm,” says Jevon Seyl. “Remember who you are!”

  “Yes,” says Garvis at length. “I am the Lord of Grays.”

  After his headlong flight from Rosmer’s presence, Seyl regains his self-possession and observes the aftermath of the tragedy. He sends off two kedran at once to bring word to the Daindru. They leave Nesbath while it is still in confusion, and with them, in kedran dress, goes Garvis of Grays. Once they are on the Nesbath road to the Chameln border, he slips away, mounted on a gift horse, a trusty Chameln grey, and returns to Lien.

  Seyl watches from his apartments in the villa and sees Kelen brought home, his face a mask of anguish, his white robes wet and foul as if he had cast himself into the sea. Seyl speaks later with Sharn Am Zor over the Markgraf’s complicity in the murders. Kelen knew and did not know. Perhaps he knew what must happen but not the time or the place; all was left to Rosmer, and he worked so skillfully that even witnesses close at hand could not say that the vizier had worked one jot of magic. The witnesses were carefully chosen: persons of high rank.

  In the twilight of the long tragic day Iliane calls her husband to another window.

  “I have been watching the roses,” she says. “They are all accursed! The Goddess has put a curse upon the land of Lien.”

  Jevon Seyl protests that it is her fancy, the roses were crushed by the summer rain. Yet even he believes, looking at the rose gardens. Soon there is not a rose in all the land of Lien to deck the funeral pyre of fair Zaramund. The doomed ketch Huntress lies fathoms deep, but the bodies of the drowned are washed down the river Bal to a beach by Lesfurth called Dead Man’s Strand and there are burnt, lord and sailor alike, even the body of the Markgrafin.

  So there begins a dark, unsettling era in the history of the Mark of Lien. The long revels of the court are at an end. Kelen takes Fideth of Wirth as his wife in the Maplemoon, and from that time forth she makes their life together a penance. The priesthood of the Lame God go about for good or ill; pastime and merriment are at an end. The taverns and disorderly house are shut down in Balufir; the prisons are overflowing; the Tumblers’ Yard has gone dark. The Markgraf Kelen walks barefoot to Larkdel in the Ashmoon and there gives thanks at the sanctuary for that which he has craved so long: Fideth, his wife, has borne him a son: Matten of Lien.

  In the spring of the following year, 1179, when the carpenters and masons were preparing for the raising of the roof trees of the great hall of Chernak New Palace, a solitary visitor came into the Chameln lands. The east wing of the palace more or less complete; Sharn Am Zor and Lorn, his queen, were already camping there, with many of their court; it was like a perpetual picnic.

  Now they rode out to meet Queen Aidris and the visitor, Yorath Duaring, child of Gol of Mel’Nir and that fair, lost swan of Lien, Elvédegran. There he was at last, the child whom Hagnild Raiz stole away to his brown house in Nightwood to save him from the wrath of Ghanor, the Great King. How could anyone short of a master magician hide this Yorath? He was a giant, even among the giant warriors of Mel’Nir, a natural wonder, his hair and beard of a rich auburn, coarse and thick, his face handsome and open with a touch of melancholy, almost a wistful look. His light blue eyes seemed fixed upon some distant horizon. He talked well and pleasantly and laughed, and Sharn Am Zor puzzled over a resemblance. Who was he like, this cousin Yorath? King Gol, his father, certainly, but who else?

  Yorath went off into the distant north
with his companion Zengor, the white wolf, to seek a retreat in the mountains and live like a hermit. Long after their day together had passed, the king remembered. In Yorath he had caught a look of his own father, King Esher Am Zor, that unhappy man, his co-ruler murdered, his queen mad, his realm threatened by the Great King. Esher had not been a good father, and Sharn could see the reasons for this. He blew hot and cold, was preoccupied, had no natural touch with children, yet he was an honest man, and he had loved his son and heir.

  Autumn had come. In the night, in the Zor palace, after the visit to the nursery and the king’s couching, Sharn and his queen sat in their bedchamber, in the midst of their large golden bed. Sharn sprawled upon the pillows, and Lorn fed him green grapes. He told her of a hunting trip, his father’s last gift, the last time they had spent together. It was more than a year after the time in the Hain when the children were attacked and Aidris wounded by the arrow. Aidris had been far away in Thuven Manor; Aravel’s sickness had grown upon her dreadfully. It had been a bad time, and so in the spring Esher Am Zor had taken Sharn and a few followers and set out along the road to Dechar. His father did not insist, for once, upon too much riding; they took a pony trap, and Sharn was allowed to drive it. They struck out eastwards across the plain and travelled for several days, making camp at night, and came to a lonely hunting lodge upon the river Chind.

  “I must go there next year in the spring,” said Sharn, “eastward to that river. Zabrandor will see that the brigands are put down.”

  “And the Inchevin?” asked Lorn with a frown.

  “I will try to speak with the old lord.”

  “I wonder if your hunting lodge still stands?” she asked. “Is it near the Inchevin lands?”

  “Nowhere near. It is on this side of the river, a place that has no name. I will have it built up again, and one year when all is quiet, I will take a hunting party . . .”

  “Take Carel,” said Lorn.