The Great Book of Amber

by Roger Zelazny

  She laughed, and I realized it was the first time I had ever heard her do it. It was not the cold, mocking thing I would have guessed at from Caine's lady.

  “I want to sail while the tide is high,” she said, “and you want a story that will take all night. Which will it be, Merlin? Security or satisfaction?”

  “I'd like both, but I'll take them in order.”

  “Okay,” she said, then turned to the smaller of the two men, the one I had hit. “Jarl, go home. In the morning, tell my father that I decided to go back to Arbor House. Tell him it was a nice night and I wanted to sail, so I took the boat. Don't mention Merlin.”

  The man touched his cap to her. “Very good, m'lady.” He turned and headed back along the way we had come.

  “Come on,” she said to me then, and she and the big fellow-whose name I later learned was Drew led me down among the piers to where a long sleek sailboat was tied up. “Do much sailing?” she asked me.

  “Used to,” I said.

  “Good enough. You can give us a hand.”

  Which I did. We didn't talk much except for business while we were getting unbuttoned and rigged and casting off. Drew steered and we worked the sails. Later, we were able to take turns for long spells. The wind wasn't tricky. In fact, it was just about perfect. We slid away, rounded the breakwater and made it out without any problems. Having stowed our cloaks, I saw that she wore dark trousers and a heavy shirt. Very practical, as if she'd planned for something like this ahead of time. The belt she stowed bore a real, full-length blade, not some jeweled dagger. And just from watching the way she moved,I'd a feeling she might be able to use the thing pretty well. Also, she reminded me of someone I couldn't quite place. It was more a matter of mannerisms of gesture and voice than it was of appearance. Not that it mattered. I had more important things to think about as soon as we settled into routine and I had a few moments to stare across the dark waters and do some quick reviewing.

  I was familiar with the general facts of her life, and I had encountered her a number of times at social gatherings. I knew she knew that I was Corwin's son and that I had been born and raised in the Courts of Chaos, being half of that bloodline which was linked anciently with Amber's own. In our conversation the last time we met, it became apparent that she was aware that I had been off in Shadow for some years, going native and trying to pick up something of an education. Presumably, Uncle Caine had not wanted her ignorant of family matters-which led me to wonder how deeply their relationship might have run. I'd heard that they had been together for several years. So I wondered exactly how much she knew about me. I felt relatively safe with her, but I had to decide how much I was willing to tell her in exchange for the information she obviously possessed concerning those who were after me locally. This, because I had a feeling it would probably be a trade-off. Other than doing a favor for a member of the family, which generally comes in handy, there was no special reason for her having an interest in me personally. Her motivation in the whole matter pretty much had to be a desire for revenge, so far as I could see, for Caine's killing. With this in mind, I was willing to deal. It is always good to have an ally. But I had to decide how much I was willing to give her of the big picture. Did I want her messing around in the entire complex of events that surrounded me? I doubted it, even as I wondered how much she would be asking. Most likely she just wanted to be in on the kill, whatever that might be. When I glanced over to where moonlight accentuated the planes of her angular face, it was not difficult to superimpose a mask of Nemesis upon those features.

  Out from shore, riding the sea breeze east, passing the great rock of Kolvir, the lights of Amber like jewels in her hair, I was taken again by an earlier feeling of affection. Though I had grown up in darkness and exotic lighting amid the non-Euclidean paradoxes of the Courts, where beauty was formed of more surreal elements, I felt more and more drawn to Amber every time I visited her, until at last I realized she was a part of me, until I began to think of her, too, as home. I did not want Luke storming her slopes with riflemen, or Dalt performing commando raids in her vicinity. I knew that I would be willing to fight them to protect her.

  Back on the beach, near the place where Caine had been laid to rest, I thought I saw a flash of prancing whiteness, moving slowly, then quickly, then vanishing within some cleft of the slope. I would have said it was a Unicorn, but with the distance and the darkness and the quickness of it all, I could never be certain.

  We picked up a perfect wind a little later, for which I was grateful. I was tired, despite my day-long slumber. My escape from the crystal cave, my encounter with the Dweller, and the pursuit by the whirlwind and its masked master all Bowed together in my mind as the nearly continuous action that they were. And now the postadrenal reaction from my latest activity was settling in. I wanted nothing more than to listen to the lapping of the waves while I watched the black and craggy shoreline slide by to port or turned to regard the flickering sea to starboard. I did not want to think, I did not want to move...

  A pale hand upon my arm. “You're tired,” I heard her say.

  “I guess so,” I heard myself say.

  “Here's your cloak. Why don't you put it on and rest? We're holding steady. The two of us can manage easily now. We don't need you.”

  I nodded as I drew it about me. “I'll take you up on that. Thanks.”

  “Are you hungry or thirsty?”

  “No. I had a big meal back in town.”

  Her hand remained on my arm. I looked up at her. She was smiling. It was the first time I had seen her smile. With the fingertips of her other hand she touched the bloodstain on my shirtfront.

  “Don't worry. I'll take care of you,” she said.

  I smiled back at her because it seemed she wanted me to. She squeezed my shoulder and left me then, and I stared after her and wondered whether there were some element I had omitted from my earlier equation concerning her. But I was too tired now to solve for a new unknown. My thinking machinery was slowing, slowing...

  Back braced against the port gunwale, rocked gently by the swells, I let my head nod. Through half-closed eyes I saw the dark blot she had indicated upon my white shirtfront. Blood. Yes, blood...

  “First blood!” Despil had cried. “Which is sufficient! Have you satisfaction?

  “No!” Jurt had shouted. “I barely scratched him!” and he spun on his stone and waved the triple claws of his trisp in my direction as he prepared to have at me again.

  The blood oozed from the incision in my left forearm and formed itself into beads which rose into the air and drifted away from me like a handful of scattered rubies. I raised my fandon into a high guard position and lowered my mss, which I held far out to the right and angled forward. I bent my left knee and rotated my stone 90 degrees on our mutual axis. Jurt corrected his own position immediately and dropped a half-dozen feet. I turned another 90 degrees, so that each of us seemed to be hanging upside down in relation to the other.

  “Bastard son of Amber!” he cried, and the triple lances of light raked toward me from his weapon, to be shattered into bright, mothlike fragments by the sweep of my fandon, to fall, swirling, downward into the Abyss of Chaos above which we rode.

  “Up yours,” I replied, and squeezed the haft of my trisp, triggering the pulsed beams from its three hair-fine blades. I extended my arm above my head as I did so, slashing at his shins.

  He swept the beams away with his fandon, at almost the full extent of their eight-foot effective range. There is about a three-second recharge pause on a trisliver, but I feinted a dead cut toward his face, before which he raised f and reflexively, and I triggered the trisp for a swirl cut at his knees. He broke the one-second pulse in low fand, triggered a thrust at my face and spun over backward through a full 360, counting on the recharge time to save his back and coming up, fandon high, to cut at my shoulder.

  But I was gone, circling him, dropping and rotating erect. I cut at his own exposed shoulder but was out of range. Despil, on his b
eachball-sized stone, was circling also, far to my right, while my own second-Mandorhigh above, was dropping quickly. We clung to our small stones with shapeshifted feet, there on an outer current of Chaos, drifting, as at the whirlpool's rim. Jurt rotated to follow me, keeping his left forearm-to which the fandon is attached, elbow and wrist-horizontal, and executing a slow circular movement with it. Its three-foot length of filmy mesh, mord-weighted at the bottom, glittered in the balefire glow, which occurred at random intervals from many directions. He held his trisp in middle attack position, and he showed his teeth but was not smiling as I moved and he moved at opposite ends of the diameter of a ten-foot circle which we described over and over, looking for an opening.

  I tilted the plane of my orbit and he adjusted his own immediately to keep me company. I did it again, and so did he. Then I did the dive-90 degrees forward, fandon raised and extended-and I turned my wrist and dropped my elbow, angling my raking cut upward beneath his guard.

  He cursed and cut, but I scattered his light, and three dark lines appeared upon his left thigh. The trisliver only cuts to a depth of about three quarters of an inch through flesh, which is why the throat, eyes, temples, inner wrists and femoral arteries are particularly favored targets in a serious encounter. Still, enough cuts anywhere and you eventually wave goodbye to your opponent as he spins downward in a swarm of red bubbles into that place from whence no traveler returns.

  “Blood!” Mandor cried, as the beads formed upon Jurt's leg and drifted. “Is there satisfaction, gentlemen?”

  “I'm satisfied,” I answered.

  “I'm not!” Jurt replied, fuming to face me as I drifted to his left and rotated to my right. “Ask me again after I've cut his throat!”

  Jurt had hated me from sometime before he had learned to walk, for reasons entirely his own. While I did not hate Jurt, liking him was totally beyond my ability. I had always gotten along reasonably well with Despil, though he tended to take Jurt's side more often than my own. But that was understandable. They were full brothers, and Jurt was the baby.

  Jurt's trisp flashed and I broke the light and riposted. He scattered my beams and spun off to the side. I followed. Our trisps flared simultaneously, and the air between us was filled with flakes of brilliance as both attacks were shattered. I struck again, this time low, as soon as I had recharge. His came in high, and again both attacks died in f and. We drifted nearer.

  “Jurt,” I said, “if either of us kills the other, the survivor will be outcast. Call it off.”

  “It will be worth it,” he said. “Don't you think I've thought about it?” Then he slashed an attack at my face. I raised both arms reflexively, fandon and trisp, and triggered an attack as shattered light showered before me. I heard him scream.

  When I lowered my fandon to eye level I saw that he was bent forward, and his trisp was drifting away. So was his left ear, trailing a red filament that quickly beaded itself and broke apart. A flap of scalp had also come loose, and he was trying to press it back into place.

  Mandor and Despil were already spiraling in.

  “We declare the duel ended!” they were shouting, and I twisted the head of my trisp into a safety-lock position.

  “How bad is it?” Despil asked me.

  “I don't know.”

  Jurt let him close enough to check, and a little later Despil said, “He'll be all right. But Mother is going to be mad.”

  I nodded. “It was his idea,” I said.

  “I know. Come on. Let's get out of here.”

  He helped Jurt steer toward an outcropping of the Rim, fandon trailing like a broken wing. I lingered behind. Sawall's son Mandor, my stepbrother, put his hand on my shoulder.

  “You didn't even mean him that much,” he said. “I know.”

  I nodded and bit my lip. Despil had been right about the Lady Dara, our mother, though. She favored Jurt, and somehow he'd have her believing this whole thing was my fault. I sometimes felt she liked both of her sons by Sawall, the old Rim Duke she'd finally married after giving up on Dad, better than me. I'd once overheard it said that I reminded her of my father, whom I'd been told I resembled more than a little. I wondered again about Amber and about other places, out in Shadow, and felt my customary twinge of fear as this recalled to me the writhing Logrus, which I knew to be my ticket to other lands. I knew that I was going to try it sooner than I had originally intended.

  “Let's go see Suhuy,” I said to Mandor, as we rose up out of the Abyss together. “There are more things I want to ask him.”

  When I finally went off to college I did not spend a lot of time writing home.

  “.. . home,” Vinta was saying, “pretty soon now. Have a drink of water,” and she passed me a flask.

  I took several long swallows and handed it back. “Thanks.”

  I stretched my cramped muscles and breathed the cold sea air. I looked for the moon and it was way back behind my shoulder.

  “You were really out,” she said.

  “Do I talk in my sleep?”

  “No”

  “Good.”

  “Bad dreams?”

  I shrugged. “Could be worse.”

  “Maybe you made a little noise, right before I woke you.”

  “Oh.”

  Far ahead I saw a small Iight at the end of a dark promontory. She gestured toward it.

  “When we've passed the point,” she said, “we will come into sight of the harbor at Baylesport. We'll find breakfast there, and horses.”

  “How far is it from Arbor House?”

  “About a league,” she replied. “An easy ride.”

  She stayed by me in silence for a while, watching the coastline and the sea. It was the first time we had simply sat together, my hands unoccupied and my mind free. And my sorcerer's sense was stirred in that interval. I felt as if I were in the presence of magic. Not some simple spell or the aura of some charmed object she might be bearing, but something very subtle. I summoned my vision and turned it upon her. There was nothing immediately obvious, but prudence suggested I check further. I extended my inquiry through the Logrus...

  “Please don't do that;' she said.

  I had just committed a faux pas. It is generally considered somewhat gauche to probe a fellow practitioner in such a fashion.

  “I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't realize you were a student of the Art.”

  “I am not,” she answered, “but I am sensitive to its operations.”

  “ln that case, you would probably make a good one.”

  “My interests lie elsewhere,” she said.

  “I thought perhaps someone had laid a spell upon you,” I stated. “I was only trying to—”

  “Whatever you saw,” she said, “belongs. Let it be.”

  “As you would. Sorry.”

  She must have known I couldn't let it rest at that, though, when unknown magic represents possible danger. So she went on, “It is nothing that can do you harm, I assure you. Quite the contrary.”

  I waited, but she did not have anything further to say on the matter. So I had to let it drop, for the moment. I shifted my gaze back to the lighthouse. What was I getting into with her, anyhow? How had she even known that I was back in town, let alone that I would visit Death Alley when I did? She must have known that the question would occur to me, and if there was to be good faith on both our parts she should be willing to explain it.

  I turned back toward her, and she was smiling again.

  “The wind changes in the lee of the light,” she said, and she rose.

  “Excuse me. I've work to do.”

  “May I give you a hand?”

  “In a bit. I'll call you when I need you.”

  I watched her move away, and as I did I had the eerie feeling that she was watching me also, no matter where she was looking. I realized, too, that this feeling had been with me for some time, like the sea.

  By the time we had docked and put everything in order and headed up a hill along a wide cobbled way toward an in
n with smoke snaking from its chimney, the sky was growing pale in the east. After a hearty breakfast, morning's light lay full upon the world. We walked then to a livery stable where three quiet mounts were obtained for the ride to her father's estate:

  It was one of those clear crisp autumn days which become rarer and dearer as the year winds down. I finally felt somewhat rested, and the inn had had coffee-which is not that common in Amber, outside the palace -and I enjoy my morning cup. It was good to move through the countryside at a leisurely pace and to smell the land, to watch the moisture fade from sparkling fields and turning leaves, to feel the wind, to hear and watch a flock of birds southbound for the Isles of the Sun. We rode in silence, and nothing happened to break my mood. Memories of sorrow, betrayal, suffering and violence are strong but they do fade, whereas interludes such as this, when I close my eyes and regard the calendar of my days, somehow outlast them, as I see myself riding with Vinta Bayle under morning skies where the houses and fences are stone and stray seabirds call, there in the wine country to the east of Amber, and the scythe of Time has no power in this corner of the heart.

  When we arrived at Arbor House we gave the horses into the care of Bayle's grooms, who would see to their eventual return to town. Drew departed for his own quarters then, and I walked with Vinta to the huge hilltop manor house. It commanded far views of rocky valleys and hillsides where the grapes were grown. A great number of dogs approached and tried to be friendly as we made our way to the house, and once we had entered their voices still reached us on occasion. Wood and wrought iron, gray flagged floors, high beamed ceilings, clerestory windows, family portraits, a couple of small tapestries of salmon, brown, ivory and blue, a collection of old weapons showing a few touches of oxidation, soot smudges on the gray stone about the hearth... We passed through the big front hall and up a stair.

  “Take this room,” she said, opening a darkwood door, and I nodded as I entered and looked about. It was spacious, with big windows looking out over the valley to the south. Most of the servants were at the Baron's place in town for the season. “There is a bath in the next room,” she told me, indicating a door to my left.