by Segoy Sands
“Your brother has killed men well loved for their merit and station. Some in high places do not find that forgivable. Two months ago, he drove in the skull of the king’s son with a mace. Now that was rash. Etiquette requires that we do not kill officers and nobleman. But Cole Dunlan lacks etiquette, and that’s a shame, as he’s one of the few talented young people of his generation. He’s young yet. And immaturity loves revolt. You see, I am his friend. I am one of the few with the king’s ear to counsel clemency. He can be suitably punished. But that alone will never do. He must become educated. He must be given the opportunity to mature his mind. Before the Grael, it was vendetta after vendetta, every clan chief a petty tyrant bent on glory, tearing the land apart. Who paid for that? The people. They grumble now about the petty tax that buys them stability. But how much did the old feuds cost them? You call King Risard and his men northern invaders. You’re a northerner yourself. Do you know your history, your geography? We have a library here, fine enough for bedes and yemes. Open the books. Learn.” He kept his eyes on the fire. He knew he would look like a tall demon to her against the flames. “You know who I am?”
She spat on the floor.
“The commoners follow whatever seems pure and simple, and so they bow to bullies and liars. Some of us have to be realists. More would be merrier, but a realist is in fact an exception to the norm. When a liar dies, the people call him honest. When an honest man dies, they call him a fraud. He tells them they can’t have the world neat and pretty and polished. They can’t have full consensus and full certainty before they choose a side. No one likes to hear that. He tells them we don’t die whole, with the sum total of life in our grasp, but confused with more unfinished plans than legs on a millipede. We’re not blinded by the supernal light when we die. No, we see details. We see our own ten thousand paths of avoidance. We hear, as if for the first time, the accuracy, and the good will, in the voices of our critics.”
He spoke this way sometimes to a woman after they made love. He would stand naked by the fire and think aloud. Often, of course, they were either sleeping or bored. Often they misunderstood what he meant to say, and understood what he didn’t.
“Your brother will accept my invitation to discuss the terms of your release. Until then you’ll be afforded every civility. I hope you’ll take this time to educate yourself. Some think that knowledge is neutral. They are mistaken. Knowledge is an action in the world. We would like to hide ourselves from action, but inaction is shadow and action is the only good.”
He waited. The fire crackled, built high though it was early April. He was often cold. His fingers. His toes. One of the things he liked about Tercera was that its former proprietors had also been cold. Despite the temperate clime, the building had over a dozen hearths, seven tiled geothermal baths, and one steam vent. He’d been lucky to come into such an estate. The local vineyards could soon be encouraged to produce true vintages; the orchards produced the finest fruit in the land.
“The struggle for power is the struggle for people’s minds, and, as people are little inclined toward finer understanding, it is a struggle to appeal to prejudices. The Spiral is anciently adept at this. They keep the people dull and ignorant, fill their bellies, empty their heads. The Orroch do not know they have rulers, or that they wear chains. But men and women of superior ability have no chance to gain enough of a popular base to make more than a nuisance of themselves.”
There. A slight drop of temperature in the metallum at his neck. A subtle tingling. It wasn’t a matter of finding the one idea that triggered her, but a certain combination of intolerable statements. He smiled at his skill in eliciting responses. Even if she were a mature bíseanna, no difference. He’d draw her out. But when he turned, he found he’d begun to congratulate himself prematurely, because another girl was standing beside her. Two such striking specimens in one morning was unprecedented. How long had the newcomer had been listening? Obviously she wished him to know she was a Calyxe, or she would have made a clumsier entrance, and come in silks not braccae.
Sisters of the Spiral hid behind piety, humility, and artful beauty, but this Calyxe had short hair, a long neck, a sensuous mouth, and experienced eyes. This puzzled him agreeably. He resumed his high-backed seat, an ornament of Ojeidan excess set too near the drafty lilac-tinted windows. The hall was well-appointed, but the former occupants had made too many sacrifices of function to form. He tolerated the decorative filigrees, but he’d had the voluptuous divans and couches removed.
“Are you hurt?” the Calyxe knelt beside the naked girl, frowning deeply. Looking up angrily at him, she said, curtly, “Send a cow.”
Maidservants offended the sisters. Their disgust for female subservience was said to be so strong that they counted Orroch society, as it existed outside their order, hideously backward. Cows, they called the house maids. In the past they had visited Tercera often, ostensibly to consult with Lady Leir, one of Duenne’s wives, Orroch-born, reputedly his favorite, a generous patroness. During those visits, Xander’s sources informed him, they’d rarely scrupled to order Leir’s maids about. And now where was Leir? An aging menial on a nearby estate, and nothing to them.
“We need but wait,” he assured her. “New clothes are being brought to replace the rags in which she arrived.”
“We will not wait,” the Calyxe said. “I will find a suitable room, and expect her clothes immediately. You and I will speak.”
“Come to dinner,” he said, graciously, “once you have settled yourselves.”
A short while after the two young women left the room, while Xander sat mulling the implications of a Calyxe in his house, his factotum Devere appeared, with a perfectly correct bow.
“Joggen awaits you.”
“Excellent,” he replied, absentmindedly, and took himself with something less than the usual focus down to the sword hall, where a spartan old man was warming up with well-practiced forms. He was not as tall as Xander, and had a shorter reach, but was grounded and poised, with a blunt, fearless face. To many Orroch, Joggen Glee’an was a hero, even if he did use the foreigner’s weapon. He was also a traitor who served the Bootlicker. In brief, Joggen was an intelligent man who had lived long enough to adapt to changing fortunes, a swordsman who knew how and when to change his stance, from enemy of the Grael Court to member of the family. He had a daughter, Jordan, though god knows how that had come about, given his preferences. She was still a great beauty, though near forty years old. And lovely Jordan, who lived under a thatched roof somewhere in the valley, had all she might need, including an uncommonly gifted boy, Spenser. Joggen wouldn’t try to kill his grandson’s father.
At midday, they met for swordplay.
Joggen was, and had always been, his master in the spada, from when he was no more than a Cora recruit. He selected Xander for merely practical reasons: he was long, lean, and quick. His reasons for using the spada in the first place, and for imparting its uses to proteges, were likewise practical. A formal duel by spada was the only way to fight face to face with Grael aristocrats. In battle they were heavily guarded and would choose to directly engage only at great advantage. But they were honor bound to answer formal challenges, and defeat in a duel to the touch - the laws customarily allowed no more - was worse than death to them. Joggen and his students caused an outrage as the first Orroch men with the gall to gain access to the court at Ganalon, under minor diplomatic pretexts, to challenge its blademasters. Xander fondly remembered his first glimpse of Ganalon, as Joggen’s pupil and second. Between the two of them, they humiliated more than a dozen nobles, and, before the court dared acknowledge their deeds by punishing them, went back to a life of anonymous and nondescript border raids.
Or, so they had intended. But to fight like the enemy was to begin to think like the enemy. Joggen wasn’t the first to ever play the game too deep. Most men did, eventually, in Xander’s experience, whatever their arena, defined by skills they had thought to merely add to their abilities. To have a skill was to l
ose abilities. That was true for any man, in any place - each investment a divestment, starting with childhood. A mythical few stepped out of history to reverse that process.
If a man lacked the courage to be a sage, he had better choose an arena where the skills to be traded for were sharp and many. In the Grael Court, a man of superior abilities could go far, even a foreigner. There were men from Var and Skår around Risard, and all of them refined, impeccable, cosmopolitan, unafraid to think and choose for themselves, unhampered by old village thinking. Joggen would deny it, but to wield the Grael blade was to love it, and to love it was to grow free.
Long, slender, fine-pointed, with a sweeping quillion to protect the hand, the spada would normally only kill with a thrust. It was no weapon for the battlefield but for elegant dueling. Duels to the death were rare in the extreme, and to wound an opponent by some unfortunate slip was a swordsman’s shame. In battle, of course, the Grael no more used the rapier than the Orroch used the skylla. Despite the many differences between the mannerbund klaast matches and courtly duels, both were essentially forms of ritualized single combat. On the actual field, Grael and Orroch alike favored pole weapons, hacking weapons, and bows. And, because the Orroch relied far too much on mounted warriors, the Grael had exercised a long-standing advantage in their sophisticated deployment of archers and infantry. So, although it was commonplace among the Orroch to scorn the foreigner’s fancy and effeminate weapons, particularly the rapier, in reality the defeats they’d suffered had less to do with their opponent’s flamboyant swordplay than with their own weak strategies. They had tried to meet a new reality with an old way of thinking. As Xander saw it, hating the Grael for being ‘too civilized’ had done the Orroch no service. The bold heroic talk that scorned modern methods was a rhetoric of failure.
He and Joggen mainly used light practice blades with blunted ends, but every session involved a few bouts with the spada. For over seven years now, this had been their routine. The old man had no love for him, maybe, but unlike most, he would not brand him a deviant or traitor. Quite possibly, Joggen was the only Orroch worldly enough to recognize the rational value of courtly connections. In countless inns on both sides of the Tourmaline, men drank to the death of the Bootlicker, the Stick, the Prick, the turncoat. Few had the sword-sense to understand how cold logic flowed to the most interesting position. This morning as always, sword-sense translated into exquisite pressure, a constant turning of the tables, a give and take that was an end in itself.
They moved round the room in circles, each riding the center of a precarious balance, foils never ceasing to test each other’s fringes, searching for an opening through beat and beat parry, balestra, counter-riposte, counter-time, and glide. As in needlework, the opening in fact was nothing. One searched for the opening only to continue to weave, feet moving into passe arriere, passe avante, cross over moving into flèche, or balestra into lunge, attacking in swift coupé, croisé, or glisé. So much was in the footwork, the timing, the ability to anticipate and unbalance the opponent. So much was in the pristine attention, the relaxed precise awareness. In every encounter, the swordsman was there, a potential presence that came to reside, transiently, in one or the other of the pair. The one who wanted the strike, the one with expectations in his heart, was not the swordsman. In every encounter there was always the subtle difference between the quiet soul listening for the music of relationship and the idiot who wanted to make a point. In the conversation of the blades, one listened like a poet. One forgot oneself, but remained alert to a song of compassion without emotion. One was both in time and outside time. Otherwise, one was a fake, an egoist.
Joggen was inventive today, executing a series of compound ripostes that finally produced the smallest of openings for an unhesitating lunge that Xander had to evade passato-sotto, hand to the floor to dodge under the strike, sword arm straightened for the anticipated counter-strike. To an observer, their dance might look harmless. But perhaps the most important lesson Joggen had ever taught him was to lure the opponent into second-guessing himself. Give them nothing but illusions and illusions of illusions. Undermine their sense of reality. Doubt started there. What was doubt? Wasted energy, wasted time. To doubt was to be unwary. And the rule of thumb was to beware an old man with a blade.
After several rounds, they paused.
“You have guests?” Joggen asked.
Xander mopped his brow. “A small bundle.”
“A bíseanna, too?”
He had to smile at the casual way Joggen asked what he already knew.
The old man smiled back. “A small bundle of some importance, then.”
“Judge for yourself at dinner. Hollens will be there, with Lady Tarin.”
The old man grunted. Lord Ester Hollens was the son of Lord Etien Hollens, a lord Joggen had shamed in Renard’s court, in the open for the world to see, in accordance with all the requirements of etiquette. Somewhat worrisomely, Hollens had recently taken an interest in Tercera, frequently acting as royal courier, for all appearances motivated by an adulterous interest in Lady Djuna Tarin, of Gieppi, which was the second most beautiful of Ojeidan estates. That Djuna was not the second most beautiful of Ojeidan noblewomen could perhaps explain why her husband, Sangre Tarin, had been away from Gieppi for nearly two years. She, at any rate, was well within her rights to take a young lover. Grael ladies did so routinely, at slighter pretexts. And it was always more than bed sport, of course. A woman like Djuna needed information. Through Hollens, she knew the goings-on at Ganalon.
“Again,” Joggen bowed.
This time the old man waited patiently for Xander’s attack. The mood was good. There was zest in it. For half an hour or more, they forgot their earthly selves.
*
Lady Tarin followed the housewoman into Tercera’s glass-domed dining room and made a shallow curtsy as she was announced. Xander, at the head of the table, blatantly watched for her reaction to the two younger ladies, both seated close enough to Hollens for easy conversation. The first was obviously trained - short-haired, dark, sleek, almost androgynous - but the second gave her pause, a wild thing forced into fineries, her hair elegantly coiffured, her green eyes dulled by a Guild nostrum that left her morbidly interested in the host at the head of the table, none other than the wicked, wanton Bootlicker himself.
“What a relief it is to visit Tercera,” Hollens was saying as Lady Tarin brushed past him in a shoulderless carnelian gown that accentuated her modest bosom. “The baths are unrivaled in all of Aurland, the wine sheer fancy, the air rarefied, and Xander the most tactful, and tactical, of hosts. An intimate table like this, where one can speak carelessly, and dine sensibly, is a most welcome change from the excesses of court. Tonight, I’ll suffer no effluviums of the stomach or head.”
“Shhhh,” Lady Tarin held a finger to her painted lips. “It mustn’t get out that we live better here.” She took a seat to the right of Xander, two chairs down, next to Martin Vance, a gray-headed old soldier with a bulbous, fleshy nose. Vance owned a neighboring estate, and, as a captain general in the army, spent nearly as much time in the capitol as Hollens, whose eye she held mockingly. “A flood of artists, intellectuals, and inamorato will descend on us.”
Obero, the humble bede and steward of Xander’s library, cleared his buzzard-like throat. He had probably outlasted several changes of Tercera’s ownership. The fact that Xander afforded him a seat on the right indicated he was of noble birth, and in that case quite possibly an aurumnus. Across the table, the first three places were occupied by young men of his company, all so appealing one had to speculate about the full scope of his leanings. Of course they would all be sons of nobles, but as much hostages as the Orroch girl, selected from the families Xander trusted least, and no doubt more loyal to him now than to their own fathers. As they were lieutenants, they went by their family names. The one closest to Xander was Lyons, big, blond, and phlegmatic. To his left sat Peake, who had that shadowed look in his eyes that men get when they mis
take the dreamlike proceedings of a battlefield for murder on a mass scale. Finally, next to the Spiral sister, sat Dale, a diminutive, convivial, rose-cheeked fellow, so much in his wine that he seemed ready to spout poetry. A follower of Bax, that one.
“At our age, my lady, a slower life is preferable is it not?” Vance said, drolly.
His Lavana, who loathed Ojeida, and him, was at court. “Would but our spouses agreed with us.”
Ever the dull blade, Vance did not even attempt a lame rejoinder. She plunged on, speaking to the room in general. “What news from Ganalon? If both Lord Vance and Lord Hollens grace Lord Xander’s table, something is undoubtedly afoot.” Her eyes fell on the two young women seated near Hollens, then rested ever so briefly on Joggen. “I don’t understand why we can’t simply send you, Lord Xander, to speak to their young leaders, and come to some agreeable understanding, just the way you did with their older leaders.”
Hollens and Vance laughed stiffly. “Precisely,” Hollens jested. “His Majesty has sent me - and Lord Vance, I’m sure - to discuss the border.”
“Borders are lacerations, not places,” Xander quipped dryly. “A king traces an imaginary line between one place and the next, and pours his fortune - or rather the people’s fortune - into it.”
“Oh, I don’t think the border officials would agree!” Vance boomed, winking at Hollens.
The Calyxe smiled. She was more fully blossomed than the hostage, but the insignia of the four simple green sepals sewn into her leather vest warned against overly familiar advances. To be a Calyxe, she must be able to bíseach by herself, if need be, with none to raise the coning with her. Usually they traveled in pairs, but this one, who had not deigned to notice a noblewoman, appeared to be alone. She kept her hair short and militant, but Lady Tarin knew there was nothing severe about the bliss that overflowed her open channels.