Men fell from their horses, crashing to the field with their spears caught in each other's leather tunics, ripping off metal discs and probably bits of flesh. They rained blows on each other with the flats of their swords and clutched each other with bare hands.
I did realize that the combatants who spent the least amount of time lying on the ground drew the greatest approval. I am not as stupid as all that, but why these men chose to throw themselves at each other's fists and swords was what defeated my understanding.
When I murmured my confusion to Nance, she asked, “Do they not play games in your land?”
“Games, yes, but the players don't try to kill each other.”
“What do they kill?”
“They kick balls around, not each other.”
“Why would anyone kick a ball? What sort of game is that?”
Okay, let's not even think about explaining baseball.
The combatants on the field paused to take turns mounting the steps to our platform to stand below Kovat. He gave short announcements of their names and accomplishments and handed them small gold medals. The participants all had ugly wounds, winners as well as losers.
Tarvik stood facing an opponent, his feet wide apart, his hips a bit forward and his shoulders back, his arms hanging loose at his sides, his fingers only slightly curled, his chin up. He wore a leather tunic and a leather war helmet that covered his head but not his face, and high boots, but his arms and knees were exposed.
The crowd quieted and drew closer to the field to watch. Some signal was given, the waving of a banner and a scream, as best I could tell. He bowed and drew his sword in one smooth motion. My breath stopped, and maybe my heart, when he threw himself forward, diving, it appeared to me, directly onto his opponent's sword.
Templekeepers did not shout and did not show preference, Nance had warned me, but she whispered, “Well done.”
“Well done? He looks to me like he's trying to kill himself.”
“No, no! He gains a point. See there, now he is uppermost.”
“But they will murder each other!”
Nance grinned. “Sometimes but not very often. Those game swords are made of wood, not metal, and they are blunt, the edges dull. And lighter than a real sword. They bruise but don't cut very well.”
As if that information was going to console me. Okay, in a way it did. It meant I probably would not see heads actually rolling across the field separated from their bodies.
The dances were nicer to watch, and an escape for me as I looked away from the games and toward the fields beyond the games. I could hear the music in the distance, light tunes played with the tinkling of bells and the soft thumping of a drum to keep the rhythm.
Watchers lined the clearing. Beyond them, small groups gathered in the sunlight to dance. Dressed in their dull brown and gray clothing, they had tied bright ribbons in their hair and around their necks and on their wrists, really, it seemed, anywhere a bit of color could be attached. They twirled in circles around each other, moved in and out, forming patterns that reminded me of square dancing. From the distance I could not see the steps they did, but I could hear their laughter. They swung about each other holding hands, linking elbows, all very pretty and much more to my liking than the fighting.
When I looked back at the field, Tarvik stood with another man, their backs to me. Tarvik was easy to spot with his mop of yellow hair. His companion's hair was a duller shade. He was a bit taller than Tarvik, and a bit narrower. His leather tunic left bare his muscular arms.
“Is that Artur with Tarvik?” I asked Nance.
“Yes, he serves as Tarvik's companion guard. Handsome, isn't he? They fight together as a team.”
I had no idea what she meant until they pulled on their war helmets, turned to stand back to back, and drew their swords. They were then circled by a team of four other fighters with drawn swords. Artur and Tarvik turned inside the circle.
“If they can hold off the challenging team for a set amount of time, they tie. If either team drops a sword, the other gains a point.”
“Is that a fair match, four against two?”
“Not for some. But Artur and Tarvik always win.”
“What an odd game. Who thought of that?” I asked stupidly.
“It's how warriors fight in real battle, covering each other, only then they are trying to defeat their enemies, not just win points.”
Defeat. Another word for slaughter?
By day's end, Tarvik had claimed a handful of medals from his father, winning, Nance said, more than any other contender.
When he came toward us and mounted the steps to face Kovat, I turned away, unable to look at the dirt and clotted blood that covered much of him, nauseated by the thought of the pain he endured. The boy was as deranged as the rest of them, I suspected, because he was grinning as he pulled off his helmet and bowed to Kovat. He seemed extremely pleased with himself.
Turning, he put his hand over his heart, looked to the other side of where his father sat, smiled, and bowed again. Nance and I tried not to be too obvious, but hey, we had to swivel around to see. Alakar nodded and gave Tarvik a quick smile, and what's more, the girl even batted her eyelashes at him.
She really was a girl and I am not being petty. Way too young to be promised to anyone, I would have guessed her at ten except for the figure. Standing, she might have come up to Tarvik's shoulder, a little bit of a child-sized thing, except for the voluptuous bod. Nance and Alakar were about the same height. Comparison stopped there. Nance was cute. Alakar was glamorous.
“Good thing he chose her to bow to,” Nance whispered.
“Either of us would have told him to go wash,” I agreed and she giggled.
“She travels in the shadow of her mother's deathwalker. So almost anyone looks good to the silly hen, even our Tarvik.”
“About the deathwalker, get a look at his boot toes if you can.”
“Far more fun to watch my cousin play lover.”
It was hard to believe such a muddy, bloody boy could arrive at the evening banquet with clean hands and face, wearing dark red velvet with fur collar and cuffs and a fair amount of gold bangles. He even wore a crown that night, a small gold circlet inlaid with a pattern of red stones that sparkled in the candlelight.
“Garnets,” Nance said. “Tarvik's favorite jewel.”
“Garnets? He mentioned something about a garnet prince.”
“That's Tarvik's position as the heir of the line of Kovat. It's one reason he likes garnets, but the other, ah, look at him dressed in red velvet.”
“It's his favorite color?”
“It's his favorite self,” she scoffed. “He knows he's handsome and he likes showing off.”
“Then you'd think he wouldn't take chances on getting cut and scarred.”
Nance giggled. “The only thing he likes better than dressing up is doing anything that gets him top to toe muddy.”
That evening's banquet exceeded the previous one in both sound and length. Too much rich food and too much drink and more noise and shouting and arguing. As though there had not been fighting enough at the games, occasional guests fell on each other and had to be pulled apart and sometimes carried out of the hall.
“Wish they'd carry out Ober's guard with his feet in the air. Gotta have pointed toes on his boots.”
“He neither eats nor drinks,” Nance said.
“Honestly?”
“The dead don't.”
We hung in there for a while hoping he'd walk past us, but no luck, and feeling beat from the long day, we cut out. When we returned to the temple, we could still hear the noise from the castle.
Odd though. When we left the castle with our guard, the deathwalker still stood behind Ober like a frozen shadow on the wall. As we went down the path, I saw tree shadows shiver in the wind. And then between them, clear on an open stretch of starlit path, I saw another shadow, long, a hood shape at the top, for the time it took to blink and then it was gone. Not even t
ime to elbow Nance to look.
“Be careful tonight,” I said to the guard. “I think someone followed us.”
I guess no one ever said anything like that to him before, because he blinked, stared at me, then whispered, “Thank you, lady. I will be watchful.”
Nance wandered inside to her bed and fell onto it fully clothed and covered in paint and gold threads. I removed the heavy ceremonial robes and the jewels and paint required by the banquet, untied and unwound my hair and combed it out, then washed myself top to toes. Before tumbling onto my pile of blankets, I pulled on a clean linen tunic.
Perhaps I should have been surprised to hear the pounding on our courtyard gate later that night, but by now I was rather used to it.
So when Tarvik began his usual noise, I recognized it, rose quickly before he woke Nance, grabbed a blanket to toss around my shoulders and ran across the courtyard to the gate.
I unbolted it and let him in, glanced at the guard standing there at stiff attention. It wasn't fun but better than another whack on the head. To Tarvik I whispered, “Hush, Nance is asleep,” as I closed the gate.
“Did you see how often I won?” he said, his grin a bright slash in the shadows.
“Hard to miss, sitting right there at Kovat's feet.”
“But you looked away when I came up the stairs. Why did you look away?”
“You were covered with blood and dirt. Umm, I didn't mind the dirt so much.”
His eyebrows rose. “You minded the blood? But it is hard to fight without a little blood.”
“I suppose it is,” I agreed, then thought of his bow after the games, hand over heart. “Tarvik, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be calling on Alakar?”
He moved over to stand by the embers in the fire pit at the center of the courtyard. He was still dressed in the fur-trimmed velvet tunic and velvet pants and fur boots of his banquet clothing, and wearing a heavy gold necklace of chains and medallions. He'd left the crown at home.
With a shrug, he said, “Yes, perhaps no. She is always with her mother and they retire early.”
“You could have banged on their door.”
His blue eyes slid between his narrowed lids and he chewed his lower lip. What was he thinking that he did not want to say? Was Nance wrong? Were Tarvik and Alakar in love, in which case, her mother's constant presence must have annoyed both of them?
“She is very beautiful,” I said.
He nodded but still said nothing.
Reaching out, I brushed his hair back from the side of his face with my fingertips. His yellow mop felt thick and soft, reminding me of the fur of my long-haired pet cat back home, but that isn't why I touched him. I was looking for the wound beneath his hair. On his temple was a jagged cut, a raised red line of dried blood centered in a purple bruise. I caught his hands in mine, held them in front of me, and looked first at the backs of them, then at the palms. Rings gleamed on all his fingers. But even in the shadows I could see the raw scrapes.
Then I met his puzzled gaze. “Are you in such a rush to look like your father?”
He stared at me for a long moment before saying, “I think you speak out of place.”
“Right. That's me. Out of place. It's only that I don't actually care to see you injured. Don't you feel the pain?”
“Oh.” His face relaxed into a smile. “I think you have a very soft heart, Stargazer.”
“That or a very soft head.”
“I am sorry you did not enjoy the tournaments.”
He sounded so disappointed, I said quickly, “I liked the dancing.”
“There was no dancing tonight.”
“No, this afternoon. Beyond the game field I could see people dancing in circles, and they had bells and a drum and ribbons, and oh, it was very pretty to watch.”
“That would be the country dances, yes. I join them sometimes on feast days when I do not have to be at the castle.”
“Do you?” That surprised me because I remembered the day he brought me to the city, guiding his horse on a path that wound between the huts of the poor, and everyone we passed had looked at the ground as though they were afraid to look at him. “They don't mind? They let you join them?”
“I take along a couple of servants carrying a few jugs of mead, then ask them to teach me the dance they are doing.”
“That would do it.”
“You think they are afraid of me, as they are of Kovat. They really are not, Stargazer. Besides, I dance very well. Shall I show you?”
When I nodded, he said, “These are not dances to do alone. You must join me.”
“But I don't know your dances.”
“Watch.” He hummed a tune and circled around me in a series of steps, and I don't know why I was surprised to see that he could dance. He was well coordinated, light on his feet.
He took a step sideways to stand by me, shoulder to shoulder, and caught my hand in his.
“Now, you, too, Stargazer, foot out, cross over, yes, good, cross back, two steps to the side.”
Very much like square dances. Unfortunately, I'd never done much of that since grade school and didn't know any steps.
He slipped the blanket from my shoulders, dropped it on the ground, and put his arm around my waist. “I love your hair this way, hanging down,” he said.
Humming softly, he swung me around in a series of steps that pulled us together in a position more like ballroom dancing and from habit I slid my hand across his shoulder and turned to face him.
He stopped. “What are you doing?”
“Sorry, didn't mean to lead.”
“Lead what?”
“I'm out of position, right? Should be side by side or further apart and circling around each other or something.”
When I tried to back away, he held me where I was. “You know a different dance. Show it to me.”
“Umm, all right, I'm not much good at this. When you step forward, I step back. Yes, like that. Hmm, this is hard to do without music.”
“How can I tell which way to step? I need to feel you moving, oh, your dance, you must be close to each other, this close?” He pulled us together and I gave up.
I could remain stiff with a few inches between us and our noses practically touching and my back aching or I could go ahead and dance with him.
“Okay, Tarbaby, keep humming,” I said.
“What's a tarbaby?”
Oh shoot, that had slipped out somewhere between his name and calling him baby because it was late and I was tired and not thinking too clearly.
Thinking even less clearly, I said, “It's from a story.”
“Tell me,” he said, and I figured I might as well because he would pester forever until I did.
I gave him the quickie version of Joel Chandler Harris's story. “There was a clever fox and a tricky rabbit and they had this ongoing rivalry. So the fox took some soft warm tar and shaped it into a baby doll and sat it in the middle of the road, then hid himself in the bushes.”
“What's tar?” he asked.
“Hot sticky black stuff used to pave roads. It gets hard when it cools. So anyhow, the rabbit saw the tarbaby and he asked its name. It didn't answer. It couldn't, but the rabbit didn't know that, so he hit the tarbaby and his paw stuck. That made him so mad, he hit it with his other paw, then kicked it and kicked again, and when all four feet were stuck, he butted it with his head.
“The tarbaby was bait to catch the rabbit and it worked, because that's how cute the tarbaby was. So, then the fox popped out of the bushes and caught the rabbit.”
“Are you sure this story has a happy ending?” he asked.
“Listen up, stop interrupting. The rabbit was sneaky, told the fox 'please don't throw me in the briar patch' and so that's what the fox did, tossed him into the patch. That patch was home ground for the rabbit and so he escaped laughing.”
“And what happened to the tarbaby?”
“Hmm. Never thought about that.”
“Your stories have strang
e endings,” he said. “Now I want to try this dance of yours.”
“Okay, where's the music?”
He hummed softly.
I caught his free hand in mine and put my other hand on the back of his neck and relaxed so that our bodies pressed together, my face touching his cheek. He stopped and started to turn his face to me.
“No, fella, keep humming or the dancing lesson is over,” I said firmly, then guided him through some slow steps.
Had to admit to myself that I really enjoyed dancing with a guy who was the same height. He knew where our feet were, both his and mine, and I wasn't in danger of squashed toes. Or of getting a crick in my neck from looking up. Did I mention we fit together very comfortably?
Tarvik was a natural, sensed the rhythm and followed the instructions I whispered in his ear.
“Okay, step forward, now the other foot, turn slowly, pause. Again.”
And again and again, him in his fur boots and dark red velvet, me barefoot in a plain linen tunic, and although I've never been much of a dancer, he picked up on what we were doing and did it so easily that he made me believe I danced well. Whether that was true or not, the dancing plus the guy kept me warm in the cold night.
As I made a turn under his raised arm, our faces almost touched and he said, “Where is your home, Stargazer?”
Startled, I said, “Seattle.”
“What is a Seattle?”
“A big city.”
“And this is how you dance in Seattle.” He began dancing again, but from the look on his face I thought he was thinking more about Seattle than about dance steps.
We circled the fire going through any number of steps, until I was breathless and laughing and finally stumbled. He caught my elbows, held me upright, then realized how cold my skin was and rubbed his hands lightly over my arms.
Picking up my blanket from the ground where he had dropped it, he wrapped it around me. “Where's your cloak? Go get it, I'll wait.”
He looked wide awake and ready to dance until dawn. I said, “I need to sleep now. Nance said there is a procession in the morning. I think we are supposed to lead.”
Tyrant Trouble (Mudflat Magic) Page 12