Orsinian Tales

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I wish you’d ask me the three questions,” he said, wistful.

  “I have no questions. I have nothing to ask.”

  “Nothing to ask that I could give you, to be sure.”

  “Ah, you’ve already given me what I asked of you—not to ask me!”

  He nodded. He would not seek her reasons; his rebuffed pride, and a sense of her vulnerability, forbade it. And so in her sweet perversity she gave them to him. “What I want, Dom Andre, is to be left alone. To live my life, my own life. At least till I’ve found out…The one thing I have questions to ask of, is myself. To live my own life, to find out my own way, am I too weak to do that? I was born in this castle, my people have been lords here for a long time, one gets used to it. Look at the walls, you can see why Moge has been attacked but never taken. Ah, one’s life could be so splendid, God knows what might happen! Isn’t it true, Dom Andre? One mustn’t choose too soon. If I marry I know what will happen, what I’ll do, what I’ll be. And I don’t want to know. I want nothing, except my freedom.”

  “I think,” Andre said with a sense of discovery, “most women marry to get their freedom.”

  “Then they want less than I do. There’s something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man.”

  Did she speak, Andre wondered, of her virginity or of her destiny? She was very strange, but it was a princely and a touching strangeness. In all she said, however arrogant and naive, she was most estimable; and though desire was forbidden, she had reached straight into him to his tenderness, the first woman who had ever done so. She stood there quite alone, within him, as she stood beside him and alone.

  “Does your brother know your mind?”

  “Brant? No. My father is gentle; Brant is not. When my father dies, Brant will force me to marry.”

  “Then you have no one…”

  “I have you,” she said smiling. “Which means that I have to send you away. But a friend is a friend, near or far.”

  “Near or far, call to me if you need a friend, princess. I will come.” He spoke with a sudden dignity of passion, vowing to her, as a man when very young will vow himself entirely to the rarest and most imperilled thing he has beheld. She looked at him, shaken from her gentle, careless pride, and he took her hand, having earned the right. Beyond them the river ran red under the sunset. “I will,” she said. “I was never grateful to a man before, Dom Andre.”

  He left her, full of exaltation; but when he got to his room he sat down, feeling suddenly very tired, and blinking often, as if on the point of tears.

  That was their first meeting, in the wind and golden light on the top of the world, at nineteen. The Kalinskars went back home. Four years passed, in the second of which, 1640, began the civil struggle for succession known as the War of the Three Kings.

  Like most petty noble families the Kalinskars sided with Duke Givan Sovenskar in his claim to the throne. Andre took arms in his troops; by 1643, when they were fighting town by town down through the Molsen Province to Krasnoy, Andre was a field-captain. To him, while Sovenskar pushed on to the capital to be crowned, was entrusted the siege of the last stronghold of the Loyalists east of the river, the town and castle of Moge. So on a June day Andre lay, chin on folded arms, on the rough grass of a hilltop, gazing across a valley at the slate roofs of the town, the walls rising from a surf of chestnut leaves, the round tower, the shining river beyond.

  “Captain, where do you want the culverins placed?”

  The old prince was dead, and Brant Mogeskar had been killed in March, in the east. Had King Gulhelm sent troops across the river to the defense of his defenders, his rival might not be riding now to Krasnoy to be crowned; but no help had come, and the Mogeskars were besieged now in their own castle. Surrender they would not. Andre’s lieutenant, who had arrived some days before him with the light troops, had requested a parley with George Mogeskar; but he had not even seen the prince. He had been received by the princess, he said, a handsome girl, but hard as iron. She had refused to parley: “Mogeskar does not bargain. If you lay siege we shall hold the castle. If you follow the Pretender we shall wait here for the King.”

  Andre lay gazing at the tawny walls. “Well, Soten, the problem’s this: do we take the town first, or the castle?”

  But that was not the problem at all. The problem was much crueller than that.

  Lieutenant Soten sat down by him and puffed out his round cheeks. “Castle,” he said. “Lose weeks taking that town, and then still have the castle to breach.”

  “Breach that—with the guns we’ve got? Once we’re in the town, they’ll accept terms in the castle.”

  “Captain, that woman in there isn’t going to accept any terms.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen her!”

  “So have I,” said Andre. “We’ll set the culverins there, at the south wall of the town. We’ll begin bombardment tomorrow at dawn. We were asked to take the fort as it stands. It’ll have to be at the cost of the town. They give us no choice.” He spoke grimly, but was in his heart elated. He would give her every chance: the chance to withdraw from the hopeless fight and the chance, also, to prove herself, to use the courage she had felt heavy and shining in her breast, like a sword lying secret in its sheath.

  He had been a worthy suitor, a man of her own mettle, and had been rejected. Fair enough. She did not want a lover, but an enemy; and he would be a worthy, an estimable one. He wondered if she yet knew his name, if someone had said, “Field-captain Kalinskar is leading them,” and she had replied in her lordly, gentle, unheeding way, “Andre Kalinskar?”—frowning perhaps to learn that he had joined the Duke against the King, and yet not displeased, not sorry to have him as her foe.

  They took the town, at the cost of three weeks and many lives. Later when Kalinskar was Marshal of the Royal Army he would say when drunk, “I can take any town. I took Moge.” The walls were ingeniously fortified, the castle arsenal seemed inexhaustible, and the defenders fought with terrible spirit and patience. They withstood shelling and assaults, put out fires barehanded, ate air, in the last extremity fought face to face, house after house, from the town gate up to the castle scarp; and when taken prisoner they said, “It’s her.”

  He had not seen her yet. He had feared to see her in the thick of that carnage in the narrow, ruined streets. From them at evening he kept looking up to the battlements a hundred feet above, the smoking cannon-emplacements, the round tower tawny red in sunset, the untouched castle.

  “Wonder how we could get a match into the powder-store,” said Lieutenant Soten, puffing his cheeks out cheerfully. His captain turned on him, his hawk-eyes red and swollen with smoke and weariness: “I’m taking Moge as it stands! Blow up the best fort in the country, would you, because you’re tired of fighting? By God I’ll teach you respect, Lieutenant!” Respect for what, or whom? Soten wondered, but held his tongue. As far as he was concerned, Kalinskar was the finest officer in the army, and he was quite content to follow him, into madness, or wherever. They were all mad with the fighting, with fatigue, with the glaring, grilling heat and dust of summer.

  They bombarded and made assaults at all hours, to keep the defenders from rest. In the dark of early morning Andre was leading a troop up to a partial breach they had made by mining the outer wall, when a foray from the castle met them. They fought with swords there in the darkness under the wall. It was a confused and ineffectual scrap, and Andre was calling his men together to retreat when he became aware that he had dropped his sword. He groped for it. For some reason his hands would not grasp, but slid stupidly among clods and rocks. Something cold and grainy pressed against his face: the earth. He opened his eyes very wide, and saw darkness.

  Two cows grazed in the inner courtyard, the last of the great herds of Moge. At five in the morning a cup of milk was brought to the princess in her room, as usual, and
a little while later the captain of the fort came as usual to give her the night’s news. The news was the same as ever and Isabella paid little heed. She was calculating when King Gulhelm’s forces might arrive, if her messenger had got to him. It could not be sooner than ten days. Ten days was a long time. It was only three days now since the town had fallen, and that seemed quite remote, an event from last year, from history. However, they could hold out ten days, even two weeks, if they had to. Surely the King would send them help.

  “They’ll send a messenger to ask about him,” Breye was saying.

  “Him?” She turned her heavy look on the captain.

  “The field-captain.”

  “What field-captain?”

  “I was telling you, princess. The foray took him prisoner this morning.”

  “A prisoner? Bring him here at once!”

  “He’s got a sabre-cut on the head, princess.”

  “Can he speak? I’ll go to him. What’s his name?”

  “Kalinskar.”

  She followed Breye through gilt bedrooms where muskets were stacked on the beds, down a long parqueted corridor that crunched underfoot with crystal from the shattered candle-sconces, to the ballroom on the east side, now a hospital. Oaken bedsteads, pillared and canopied, their curtains open and awry, stood about on the sweep of floor like stray ships in a harbor after storm. The prisoner was asleep. She sat down by him and looked at his face, a dark face, serene, passive. Something within her grieved; not her will, which was resolute; but she was tired, mortally tired and grieved, as she sat looking at her enemy. He moved a little and opened his eyes. She recognised him then.

  After a long time she said, “Dom Andre.”

  He smiled a little, and said something inaudible.

  “The surgeon says your wound is not serious. Have you been leading the siege?”

  “Yes,” he said, quite clearly.

  “From the start?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked up at the shuttered windows which let in only a dim hint of the hot July sunlight.

  “You’re our first prisoner. What news of the country?”

  “Givan Sovenskar was crowned in Krasnoy on the first. Gulhelm is still in Aisnar.”

  “You don’t bring good news, captain,” she said softly, with indifference. She glanced round the other beds down the great room, and motioned Breye to stand back. It irked her that they could not speak alone. But she found nothing to say.

  “Are you alone here, princess?”

  He had asked her a question like that the other time, up on the rooftop in the sunset.

  “Brant is dead,” she answered.

  “I know. But the younger brother…I hunted with him in the marshes, that time.”

  “George is here now. He was at the defense of Kastre. A mortar blew up. It blinded him. Did you lead the siege at Kastre, too?”

  “No. I fought there.”

  She met his eyes, only for a moment.

  “I’m sorry for this,” she said. “For George. For myself. For you, who swore to be my friend.”

  “Are you? I’m not. I’ve done what 1 could. I’ve served your glory. You know that even my own soldiers sing songs about you, about the Lady of Moge, like an archangel on the castle walls. In Krasnoy they talk about you, they sing the songs. Now they can say that you took me prisoner, too. They talk of you with wonder. Your enemies rejoice in you. You’ve won your freedom. You have been yourself.” He spoke quickly, but when he stopped and shut his eyes a moment to rest, his face looked still again, youthful. Isabella sat for a minute saying nothing, then suddenly got up and went out of the room with the hurrying, awkward gait of a girl in distress, graceless in her heavy, powder-stained dress.

  Andre found that she was gone, replaced by the old captain of the fort, who stood looking down at him with hatred and curiosity.

  “I admire her as much as you do!” he said to Breye. “More, more even than you here in the castle. More than anyone. For four years—” But Breye too was gone. “Get me some water to drink!” he said furiously, and then lay silent, staring at the ceiling. A roar and shudder—what was it?—then three dull thuds, deep and shocking like the pain in the root of a tooth; then another roar, shaking the bed—he understood finally that this was the bombardment, heard from inside. Soten was carrying out orders. “Stop it,” he said, as the hideous racket went on and on. “Stop it. I need to sleep. Stop it, Soten! Cease firing!”

  When he woke free of delirium it was night. A person was sitting near the head of his bed. Between him and the chair a candle burned; beyond the yellow globe of light about the candle-flame he could see a man’s hand and sleeve. “Who’s there?” he asked uneasily. The man rose and showed him in the full light of the candle a face destroyed. Nothing was left of the features but mouth and chin. These were delicate, the mouth and chin of a boy of about nineteen. The rest was newly healed scar.

  “I’m George Mogeskar. Can you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Andre replied from a constricted throat.

  “Can you sit up to write? I can hold the paper for you.”

  “What should I write?”

  They both spoke very low.

  “I wish to surrender my castle,” Mogeskar said. “But I wish my sister to be gone, out of here, to go free. After that I shall give up the fort to you. Do you agree?”

  “I—wait—”

  “Write your lieutenant. Tell him that I will surrender on this one condition. I know Sovenskar wants this fort. Tell him that if she is detained, I shall blow the fort, and you, and myself, and her, into dust. You see, I have nothing much to lose, myself.” The boy’s voice was level, but a little husky. He spoke slowly and with absolute definiteness.

  “The…the condition is just,” Andre said.

  Mogeskar brought an inkwell into the light, felt for its top, dipped the pen, gave pen and paper to Andre, who had managed to get himself half sitting up. When the pen had been scratching on the paper for a minute, Mogeskar said, “I remember you, Kalinskar. We went hunting in the long marsh. You were a good shot.”

  Andre glanced at him. He kept expecting the boy to lift off that unspeakable mask and show his face. “When will the princess leave? Shall my lieutenant give her escort across the river?”

  “Tomorrow night at eleven. Four men of ours will go with her. One will come back to warrant her escape. It seems the grace of God that you led this siege, Kalinskar. I remember you, I trust you.” His voice was like hers, light and arrogant, with that same husky note. “You can trust your lieutenant, I hope, to keep this secret.”

  Andre rubbed his head, which ached; the words he had written jiggled and writhed on the paper. “Secret? You wish this—these terms to be kept—you want her escape to be made secretly?”

  “Do you think I wish it said that I sold her courage to buy my safety? Do you think she’d go if she knew what I am giving for her freedom? She thinks she’s going to beg aid from King Gulhelm, while I hold out here!”

  “Prince, she will never forgive—”

  “It’s not her forgiveness I want, but her life. She’s the last of us. If she stays here, she’ll see to it that when you finally take the castle she is killed. I am trading Moge Castle, and her trust in me, against her life.”

  “I’m sorry, prince,” Andre said; his voice quavered with tears. “I didn’t understand. My head’s not very clear.” He dipped the pen in the inkwell the blind man held, wrote another sentence, then blew on the paper, folded it, put it in the prince’s hand.

  “May I see her before she goes?”

  “I don’t think she’ll come to you, Kalinskar. She is afraid of you. She doesn’t know that it’s I who will betray her.” Mogeskar put out his hand into his unbroken darkness; Andre took it. He watched the tall, lean, boyish figure go hesitatingly off into the dark. The candle burned on at the bedside, the only light in the high, long room. Andre lay staring at the golden, pulsing sphere of light around the flame.

  Two days later
Moge Castle was surrendered to its besiegers, while its lady, unknowing and hopeful, rode on across the neutral lands westward to Aisnar.

  And they met the third and last time, only by chance. Andre had not availed himself of Prince George Mogeskar’s invitation to stop at the castle on his way to the border war in ’47. To avoid the site of his first notable victory, to refuse a proud and grateful ex-enemy, was unlike him, suggesting either fear or a bad conscience, in neither of which did he much indulge himself. Nonetheless, he did not go to Moge. It was thirty-seven years later, at a winter ball in Count Alexis Helleskar’s house in Krasnoy, that somebody took his arm and said, “Princess, let me present Marshall Kalinskar. The Princess Isabella Proyedskar.”

  He made his usual deep bow, straightened up, and straightened up still more, for the woman was taller than he by an inch at least. Her grey hair was piled into the complex rings and puffs of the current fashion. The panels of her gown were embroidered with arabesques of seedpearls. Out of a broad, pale face her blue-grey eyes looked straight at him, an inexplicable, comradely gaze. She was smiling. “I know Dom Andre,” she said.

  “Princess,” he muttered, appalled.

  She had got heavy; she was a big woman now, imposing, firmly planted. As for him, he was skin and bone, and lame in the right leg.

  “My youngest daughter, Oriana.” The girl of seventeen or eighteen curtsied, looking curiously at the hero, the man who in three wars, in thirty years of fighting, had forced a broken country back into one piece, and earned himself a simple and unquestionable fame. What a skinny little old man, said the girl’s eyes.

  “Your brother, princess—”

  “George died many years ago, Dom Andre. My cousin Enrike is lord of Moge now. But tell me, are you married? I know of you only what all the world knows. It’s been so long, Dom Andre, twice this child’s age…” Her voice was maternal, plaintive. The arrogance, the lightness were gone, even the huskiness of passion and of fear. She did not fear him now. She did not fear anything. Married, a mother, a grandmother, her day over, a sheath with the sword drawn, a castle taken, no man’s enemy.