His steps had shortened, as his gait wavered, face sweating cold rivulets, a swelling rising to the top of his stomach, turning to tightness and then! With a quick dart, he slammed his hands down on the nearest sill, pushed his neck forward and wretched violently, throwing a long spume of vomit out into the still afternoon air. Unseen, it slowly dispersed on its three hundred foot drop to the parkland below.
There he stood, frozen, mind focused on his gut, attentive to its independent life. He heaved and wretched again. This time there was more spume than vomit, the foam of it flecking his chin and tunic with the rest plopping lifelessly to the slate sill between his hands.
Presently, as he felt a little more revived, he reached into his sleeve and took out a handkerchief with which to dab at his spattered face. It was a good few minutes more before he felt well enough to move on, but only to the next sill, away from his spittle and spew. There, he slumped heavily down and stared at the empty wall across the gallery. He was definitely out of condition, he conceded.
Had it not been for his mind’s solicitous erasure of his recent illness he’d have known why he’d felt so low, but that wasn’t to haunt him quite yet. Cautiously, he pushed himself to his feet and turned, to rest his hands once more on the window sill.
His gaze lifted to the expansive view across the park below, beyond the Great Wall to its north and out on to the fields and grasslands of the Vale of Plenty. There were no signs of life there now, none at all. “Where’s this damned army then? Eh? Why’s there no plain evidence?”
With the acrid taste of sick filling his mouth, he pushed away from the sill, turned and carried on his way, more leisurely and spitting at times, towards the Eastern Gate. Each time he stopped, however, to look out at the scene, there was never an army to mar its somnolent spread.
When he finally reached the gallery’s end, and came to the gate’s northern arm, his spirits dared lift somewhat. There was still the view from the southern arm, of course, and the one embraced by the two, directly before the great gates. So, eschewing his apartments, and the chance to rid himself of the foul taste of sick, he carried on into the gatehouse and through to its balcony. There, he looked out along Eastern Walk.
It marched away from the gate, between the two arms and their massive sentinel towers. He could only just make out the bridge the Walk then crossed over the Eyeswin River and, beyond it, its junction with the Lost Northern Way. With immense relief, he saw it all to be quite empty.
It only left the view to the south, out to the rolling landscape of the Eyeswin Vale, nestling in the fork between its two great rivers, the Eyeswin in the east and the Suswin in the south. Back through the gatehouse and into the southern arm, he soon drew level with its first window. His anxious gaze was met with naught but the wall’s foundation crags, their tumbling escarpment and yet another empty vale.
Namweed placed his hands on the window sill, dropped his head between his arms, closed his eyes and stood there, for some minutes, enjoying the relief. He then quietly asked himself, “So, where are they now?”
~o~
The wine was a little too cold and had that definite flat taste of being a bit long in the tooth, despite its heaviness and fortification, but it slaked his thirst at least. It certainly wasn’t corked and, more to the point, admirably scoured the taste of vomit from his mouth and throat. On the other hand, the nuts and dried fruit were more than palatable and well made up for the rock hard, dusty bread that stuck in his gullet. Certainly not a feast fit for a king, no, but more than could have been expected from an unfrequented larder last stocked many months or quite possibly years ago.
King Namweed sat alone in his cold and damp apartments, and awaited his council. Although tired, his weariness seemed to have reached that point where the desire for sleep had been passed. Despite a tolerably comfortable sofa, he remained wide awake, his mind racing and beginning to shift distinctly towards scepticism. What made it hard for him to marshal his thoughts, though, was the rather blurred and dreamlike nature of some of his memories.
For example, he seemed to have a particularly vague and shifting recollection of Nephril’s words, and the circumstance of their meeting. He was sure it had been in his throne room but, strangely enough, he couldn’t actually recall much of the audience itself. In fact, even the fresher words of that Galgaverran priest seemed as though remembered but from a dream or a half read book.
Of course, he clearly remembered sending Laixac to summon his Council, yes, there was that. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he was sure that that one act marked some kind of transition, a sea change as it were. It felt as though it were a point before which all was somehow hazy and indistinct, but after which more … well, more … normal. Normal!
His eyes began to narrow, his lips to purse, brows to knit to deeper furrows and his blood to run that bit colder. There was something beginning to form in his mind, a realisation of some sort, just out of reach, the seed of which now found water in that one persisting word – normal.
His fingers had begun drumming on the worn padding of the sofa’s rather battered arm. The word ‘normal’ had slowly stolen his thoughts, had lured their gaze to more worrying memories, ones that now seemed to promise some veiled shame or guilt.
As he’d started reciting, “Fly away Pettar, fly away Paul,” there was a sudden, loud and hurried clatter of feet from beyond the door. Before he could so much as look up, startled, the door burst open and in flew Laixac; puffing and panting, red faced and sweating, robes dishevelled and awry about his gaunt frame.
He froze on the spot and stared at Namweed. “Err!” He turned a quick glance at the accusing door, ajar, almost flat against the wall, before his mouth gaped open, very, very wide. “My Lord! Err. Please … please, I … I beseech your forgiveness, my lord, I … Err. I didn’t mean to … I mean, sire. It’s truly remiss of ….”
He snapped to a low bow, a very low one, and then seemed to regain a mite more composure. “My Liege, in my great haste to return … to your immediate … I’ve been remiss … err … in observance … observance of etiquette, yes, of etiquette, my liege. Please forgive my bursting in upon you like this.” Namweed just stared at him, wide eyed, and there the two remained for some time.
It was the ridiculousness of the situation that first stirred Namweed, as though he’d floated free of himself and was even now looking down from above. It let him relax his stare, lean forward slightly and then speak, in a measured tone, to the top of Laixac’s bowed head. “My trusted and faithful servant and aide, unbend yourself. Think nothing of your indiscretion, it’s wholly understandable. I pardon your sudden and unannounced intrusion.”
Laixac rolled back into a squat and lifted his relieved face to the king. “My Lord, I’m eternally grateful for your noble generosity and am sincerely repentant.” He then lowered his gaze to the king’s feet and waited.
Namweed bent forward and took Laixac’s elbow. “Pray, seat yourself more comfortably. There’s an armchair there, set yourself down and tell me exactly what’s happened.”
When Laixac was more settled, he began, “Sire, it was my great haste to return that impelled me so urgently that I momentarily forget myself at your door, and…”
“Think nothing of it, Laixac, it is forgotten. Tell me, though, has your mission been successful?”
“It has my Lord. Your command has been executed without fault and your Council, therefore, closely follow on. That’s why I was in such haste for they come at great speed.”
The king looked relieved, rose from the sofa and moved to the window where he looked out. “No sign of our enemy, Laixac! No sign of anything in fact.” There was a long silence. “I’ve checked from every vantage around the gate and found absolutely no evidence of any army. Do you know that, Laixac? All is as it should be, all excepting the desolation of the Ambec village, what little can be seen from the castle. Oh, and the smoking mounds of course, the ones about the Lost Northern Way that you told me were their re
mains.”
Laixac looked very wary as the king continued to stare through the window. “Tell me again, Laixac, tell me what you saw, what you could really see from your place there, atop the Star Tower.”
“It was, my Lord, you are right, it was from there that I saw…”
“And over that great distance, Laixac, you were able to see what, exactly?”
Laixac was becoming nervous. “I saw a great body of men, sire, some score or maybe even more, marching as one toward the Ambec village, and…”
“And what did you actually see those men do then, eh, Laixac?”
“I saw them march out of sight to where I know the village to be, sire.”
Namweed paced slowly about the room and thought, thought hard and long, and all the while Laixac waited like a sprinter crouching at his marks. Namweed presently stopped in front of him, steepled his hands before his face and looked intently down into Laixac’s eyes. “What made you believe it was an army, eh, Laixac? Or that they’d perpetrated any act of aggression against Dica?”
“I … I saw the mounds along the road, my Lord. Smoking they were and … and I saw spears brandished at the head of their column, I’m sure of it, … and they were in bright reflecting armour, all dressed alike, as an army would be, as I’m led to believe by all the histories, and … and…”
“But how could you see, from the Star Tower, from that far distant vantage, just exactly what was burning there within those mounds?”
Laixac now realised it had only been his assumption that he was seeing the remains of the Ambecs. Had he put two and two together to deliver five to his liege lord? An answer that now had him and his royal court chasing themselves about the vastness of the castle. Wait, it wasn’t all in vain. Even if he’d been wrong, which he suspected he hadn’t, whether the answer be four or five, or even six, it had at least reawakened the king. It had blown away his dark clouds, had returned the king he remembered and loved, the one that had always made him feel somehow worthwhile.
With a little more confidence and conviction he connived, “I saw a figure roll from one of the mounds, sire, a smouldering figure that limped away towards the southwest, away from the army and down to the safety of the Eyeswin River. It could only have been an Ambec, my Lord, what else could it have been?”
The king leant back, away from Laixac, as a gesture of release. It allowed Laixac to breath once more. Namweed turned back to the window and there stared out again at the unchanged view. This time, though, his eyes saw none of it, as they turned inwards once more, engrossed in watching a floundering mind.
14 The Blood Thins
From their position before the Guardian’s door, Falmeard glimpsed lights hanging in the eternal darkness, mostly in the distance and mostly unfathomable. With the fall of night, dense clouds had quickly drifted in, obscuring the stars and hiding the moon’s ample grace. It was also getting cold, his breath forming a faint mist in the dull light of a single globe at the doorway’s lintel, a globe seemingly filled with frozen fireflies.
For a good few minutes, since Sentinar Drax had left, there’d been no sound from the building and Falmeard had found himself filling the time by absently stamping his feet against his legs’ rising chill. The sound he made bounced back from nearby unseen walls.
As though in answer, a bolt was heard being drawn back before a sliver of bright light escaped from the cracked-open door. Pettar spoke to the slit. “Greetings! ‘Tis Pettar Garradish and companions, here to visit the Guardian.”
A voice issued from within. “So ‘tis, so ‘tis. I recognise thee full well. Wait thee.”
The light vanished, followed by further rattling from within, and the door was finally drawn open by an ancient, gold-robed stick of a man. He was short, with a pallid and drawn face within which were set huge sparkling eyes of blue. “Good welcome to ya, Pettar, good welcome indeed. T’as been many a year since, certainly ‘as. Come in, come in, and be quick about it. Don’t want t’cold air a visiting wi’ thee.”
They entered a small and austere room, a vestibule of sorts, around which many cupboards and shelves were stacked with boots and sandals, with slippers, shoes, odd bits of rope and a number of open boxes containing keys and tools. Near the door, where the man now busied himself re-bolting it, a row of coat hooks ran, from which hung various robes, some capes, a waterproof hat and many aprons of a rich golden hue. At the very centre of the room, a metal spiral staircase started its ascent through a hole in the ceiling, and from where he’d leapt to its first step, the man addressed them at eye level.
“As Pettar ‘ere knows, my name’s Storbanther, an’ I’m general dogs-body around ‘ere, hence I’ve been sent to bring ya all up ta t’Guardian.” He grinned, broadly, as Pettar laughed and turned to them all.
“Don’t believe a word of it, my friends. Storbanther’s considerably more than just a doorman or escort. A veritable stalwart of the place and learned in its many disciplines, a mine of knowledge, but very modest with it, as you’ve seen.”
“Ha! Better follow me then. Come on, this way.” In single file, they stepped onto the staircase, on the heels of his fast vanishing and scrawny legs.
The room that opened out above was large but warmly lit and extremely comfortable, its wide expanse of floor cleverly broken up into various intimate pools of soft, yellow light. Each was centred on different needs; a low table surrounded by comfortable armchairs here, then a long sofa with footstools before it over there, a dining table with chairs drawn up and an enormous table stacked high with books. There were also, oddly enough, a few long but very narrow beds. Each golden pool spilled from oil lanterns hung from elegant stands, their light playfully flickering as they sputtered.
The whole effect was extremely welcoming and drew them all in to its cosy and intimate embrace, but above it all, a great gallery overhung its four walls. A stout, glossy and deeply stained cherry wood parapet ran all the way around, holding back bank upon bank of dark wooden shelves. They groaned under the weight of innumerable books, of manuscripts, scrolls and folios. Although intriguing, it failed to hold all but Nephril’s eyes long from returning to the room.
Within that pleasantly musty, charming and warm chamber, standing before its great open fire, stood the figure of a tall woman. Her iridescent blue and scarlet robes were gathered at the waist by a blue leather belt from which hung bunches of keys. Her shoulders were broad and square and her scarlet bodice’s neckline low yet modest. Her long brown hair was ornately gathered to a series of buns and tails, all tied with bone pins or shining oyster shell combs, lifting it clear of a pale and narrow face. Her broad and rounded forehead, high cheekbones and a small, almost pointed chin, all framed wide but tense lips.
In her hand was a book, loosely held open, but it was her countenance that first drew their eyes. From a somewhat stern face, but with traces of softness about the mouth, her eyes quickly held Pettar fast whilst he circled the gentle pool of light within which she bathed.
“It is but politeness to offer you all my welcome,” she said, abruptly, as she laid the book aside. “Pettar I know but your companions, well, they’re new of face to me. Perhaps you’d be so good as to introduce us.”
Falmeard noted how hard she seemed to find meeting Pettar’s eyes, especially when he replied, “Gracious and learned Principal of the Precincts of Galgaverre, Guardian of The Land of the Guardian Priests, Keeper of the Secrets, Husband to the Servants of the Living Green Stone Tree, Preserver of the Fates of Dica, your most honourable Penolith, of the line Garradish, may I humbly introduce Lord Nephril, long Master of Ceremonies to the kings of Dica, and his aide and companion Falmeard, good citizen of the Realm.” Both Nephril and Falmeard bowed their heads.
Lady Penolith’s eyes were drawn slightly narrower and closely regarded Nephril, seeming to pick amongst his ancient features. Pettar also looked his way. “Lord Nephril, I know, has many times walked within Galgaverre, although I suspect it to have been long ago, but you Falmeard, you’re at y
our first meeting with this strange land.”
He then added, a little mischievously. “My Lady Penolith? Falmeard’s a bit of a rare fish in an unfamiliar pond and so may surprise you with his questions. He’s a bit of a habit of questioning all matter of all manner of things.” Penolith drew her gaze fully on Falmeard and bore into his features with the same intensity she’d shown Nephril’s.
“Indeed!” she marvelled. “Another of your own blood perhaps, maybe a kindred spirit.”
Nephril’s rapt gaze had by then drawn itself from the library above. “Mine own Lady Penolith?” he commenced, in a rather laboured and dignified manner. “Most respected and gracious of Guardians, I do thank thee for thine hospitality and the warm welcome to thine abode.”
He continued as though thinking aloud. “It is true that many, many years have passed since last I walked in thy precincts, since last I enjoyed rich hospitality of the good folk of Galgaverre, but I suspect the nature of thine servants, of thine priests and assistants, will not have changed one iota, that the largess and generosity of thine people will not have diminished, nor become stale or sour.”
He paused, covertly winked at Falmeard, and then concluded, “I am sure that it is but a mere aberration, concomitant with enjoyment of our company, that delay in thy kind offer of meagre repast be but oversight.” His gaze then rested on Penolith who noticeably reddened.
“My most venerable Lord Nephril? You do me the kind service of reminding me of my duties as host, and I beg forgiveness.” She turned and pressed a panel set in the wall by the fireplace before inviting them to sit at her table.
Just then, Storbanther entered, although no one had noticed him leave. “I s’pose you’re all ‘ungry? I know I would be after a long journey like yours must’ve been.” He stood, slightly hunched, at Penolith’s elbow, to one corner at the head of the table.
When she was seated, she asked. “Stor’? What menu do we have for our guests?” To which he whipped out a black-backed folder and ostentatiously opened it into his cupped hands.
Leiyatel's Embrace (Dica Series Book 1) Page 13