“Did you let him out?”
King Benar sighed. “Too early for jokes, Nazhuret. I wanted to show you this”—and he handed me the Sekret padded jacket, which had been ripped up one side from waist to armpit. “I’m sorry I ruined your winter clothes, but upstairs you will surely find something that fits.”
The house belonged to General Sir Hegl Skedar, who was a field commander for Gorham, and I felt no compunction about raiding his wardrobe, or his copper bath. It was not so easy, however, to find warm garb that was short enough for me without being sized for a lissome boy. Finally, I found a black wool shirt that could serve me as a long tunic, and a pair of boy’s boots much softer and finer than my own. My ragged trousers had to remain in service. A servant volunteered the use of his sheepskin vest over all, and to this day I do not know whether that loyalty was for his master’s sake or because he did not care particularly for his master.
Thus appareled, I looked like nothing Velonyan nor Rezhmian, but I did look warm. I went back to the kitchens and forced down some good breakfast I didn’t want, sitting by myself in a corner, while King Benar breakfasted with the men who had hunted him the day before. When I was through, I stood behind the king in the position of servitor until he was compelled to notice me.
“So, Nazhuret,” he said in a public voice, “you’ve given up on your brown tailored day wear. I do apologize.” There was laughter.
I leaned forward and spoke to him alone. “You must give up something too, sir. If you would do what you came to do. You must send back this army.”
His jaw made ridges along his face. “You must think me a fool, old man. I have camped around this house a good solid force of loyal soldiery.”
I worked to retain my composure. “A good solid force of soldiery, whether loyal or disloyal, is not what a mediator needs most.”
Benar looked around him, at the men at his table, where there was more gold on the uniforms than in the eggs and butter on the plates. “Perhaps this being a mediator is no longer necessary. I have found the men, the morale, the place, and the time…”
“You have found calamity,” I whispered. I did not head for the frosted door into the kitchen, but into the halls, so it would be a while before the occupiers of the house figured my intent. I donned the sheepskin, my gloves, and left by the great door, into a blast of wind.
I circled to the back, where the stable court lay, and once within I considered appropriating one of the fresh horses, but Sabia, gaunt and tireless, stamped and whinnied. I saddled her and was out into the storm. My greatest regret was that I had not the time to inform Dinaos of the king’s treachery—his treachery or my own, depending upon the views of the narrator.
Because of the blowing snow we could only walk, and there was no ring of sun in the sky to tell us in which direction to do so. I knew these parts fairly well, though, and turned the mare’s head slightly to the right. Outbuildings formed and faded again, in the blinding snow. Sabia closed her ears against her head. My own ears were freezing.
Before us, on the public street, there was the pink of frozen blood and something dead. My poor mare found the energy to dance around it. I got off and saw white over white, outlined in red. It was impossible. It was the body of my white dog, my wolf, which I had killed a week before and which had licked me last night. I wondered who had seen the poor cringing creature and slain it, and I felt a strange regret, and then I saw without possibility of error that the wounds which had caused its death were those made by my own sword days ago, yet fresh and bloody. The body was warm.
What I did next was extravagant, considering my feelings and the press for time. I skinned the wolf, head, claws and all. I scraped the skin over the snow to remove most of the blood and then thought to throw it over the pillion of my saddle. I could not keep it there; it slipped one way and then another, and finally I almost lost it over the croup. On a bloody impulse I put the bloody thing around me, tying its feet around my neck and slipping the long snout over my bare head. The mare did not object, and indeed I had begun to think of her as a more ghastly animal than the wolf. White on white in white, we stepped through the blowing snow, and my only compass was the glow in the quarter of the sky that held the sun.
It was noon or later when I heard the shot, and my first impulse was to spin the mare and ride her back in her deep hoofprints. But there had been something about that explosion, and then I had heard no whine of ball or impact in the snow or trees around me. I stood my nervous mare and waited, and up from the hill before me rose a figure covered by a sheet such as small boats use for sail. It was my little daughter and she was loading again. She waved when she knew I had seen her. I noticed that the pistol was a breechloader.
I trotted up to her. “So, you have perfected it,” I said, and found to my surprise my lips were numb.
“I wouldn’t call it perfect, Papa,” she answered, busy fitting into the thing a brass cylinder that didn’t want to go. “But it works more often than not. I had help in the foundrying.” She pointed with her nose to a figure behind the trunk of a tree. Upon his head was a cap of snow, but even with this I could recognize the flaxen boy I had seen twice; once in the flesh. He looked as if he were not sure of his welcome.
“Are you a metalworker as well as… in the third order of the void, or whatever?” I asked him, and he answered, “Ironwork is my training, but I know something of brass. Your ball-casket is a good idea, because of the expansion of the metal. It seals…”
I told him I knew that already, and looked back at Navvie, who had loaded again and tucked the gun away. I noted with interest it was muzzle-down without losing the charge. “And do you have enough shells for your lead to waste one scaring your old father?”
“I don’t have a loud voice,” she answered.
Navvie, under her canvas wrap, was dressed after the manner of a boy of Vestinglon, in shirt, trousers, and tall stockings. Her disguise was not as perfect as those her mother had taken, but it served if a man did not look twice. I thought to tell her that a boy might be shot where a woman would escape, but she was old enough to know her own business, and besides, I was not sure I was right.
“And I was not certain you would recognize my voice, sir, and take it as that of a friend.”
I looked down at the blond and ruddy fellow in his homespun and said, “I am good at remembering people who come to me glowing.”
He looked embarrassed and with one hand divested himself of his snow cap. “So you got my message.” His glance rose from my face to my own headgear. “May I ask why you killed your white wolf, sir?”
I thought how best to answer the question, and could think of nothing sensible. “I killed this wolf before you ever saw it by my side, lad.” I was about to explain further, but he nodded solemnly and stepped back, leaving me to speak with my daughter.
“Your idea hasn’t worked out, I’m sorry to say, my dear. I have been to the rebels and to the king, and all I have done is to instigate a winter campaign against the heights, led by the king himself.”
Navvie was disappointed, but tried not to show it. “Then the worse for them, Papa. I guess I will have to end as the daughter of the king of Velonya.”
“Horrid thought!”
She sniffed. “Do you think you could do worse than what is being done already?”
I shrugged, causing a rustle in the fur of the wolf. “I was speaking selfishly, Navvie.”
The young man was staring over the ground whence I had come. His eyes were unfocused. I wondered if I ought to address him or let him meditate. Then he said, “There is a small party of horsemen following your tracks, sir. They will be in sight in a few minutes.”
I didn’t know what sense the boy was using to know this, but somehow I didn’t doubt him. I cursed myself, feeling both fear for the young people and shame for my own sloppiness. “I depended on the blowing snow, children. I don’t know how they tracked the mare, but forgive me.”
“No need to suppose they’re after you,
Father, but in any case, let’s withdraw a little. I doubt three men have a chance against us.”
“The young are confident,” I said, to no one but myself, but I followed Navvie to a place behind a little rise of ground. It would hide us, were we on our bellies, but not the standing horse. I had no idea what to do with her except slit her throat, and that seemed both ungrateful and noisy.
Navvie, however, was her mother’s daughter. She soothed the beast with baby talk, and then gently she pulled one leg out from under her. The young man rubbed her with both hands on her muzzle under the eyes, and over she went, blinking but quiet. We joined the mare on the snow, and only the heels of the young people’s snowshoes stuck up above the ground. Navvie spread the canvas over as much of us as she could.
First there was nothing to see over the long slope but blowing snow. My prints were already the merest pores in the young face of winter, and I began to doubt anyone could follow such a track. “What is she called: the mare?” asked Navvie.
I answered, “Sabia. Your mother had such another. Or perhaps the same horse. Things seem to be repeating in my life.”
“Sabia! I was always told she was beautiful! And sweet.”
I glanced at Navvie’s ruddy cheeks, feeling slightly hurt by her judgment upon my horse. “This one could be beautiful, if I were not working her to death. And as for sweet—well, I never saw that in Sabia. But then, she was your mother’s horse and I was nothing to her but occasional baggage.”
“And this one is yours?”
I shrugged. “I seem to be killing this poor mare.
Let’s not talk about it. Just accept that she looks more like Arlin’s Sabia than any creature I have yet met.”
This talk about names reminded me of something. “Lad, lad. I am sorry to say I have never asked your name. Forgive my rudeness.”
The blond gave me the grin of a child. “What are names, after all? What importance…”
“Enough! What is your name? The importance is that I have asked.”
“My name is Timet, sir. Of no particular family. Born and raised in Norwess.”
“Timet of Norwess,” I said, and I laughed uproariously and rubbed my face with snow.
“Timet is a very common name, especially in Norwess,” he said, but Navvie just looked from one of us to another with some of Arlin’s dark intensity.
First the approaching party was a gray speck and then a wavering shape, like the leaf under water. Navvie passed me a small spyglass, but it fogged as I put my eye to it, and by the time I had cleared it, I could see the three riders with my fifty-five-year-old eyes, and if they were military trackers, I was a Harborman.
By the amount of gold in the gear of the leftmost rider I might have thought him the king of Velonya, but I recognized him as Dinaos and was very surprised. The neat uniform dress of the man to his right might have been that of the king’s bodyguard, but I looked twice and saw the auburn hair of Benar himself. The third rider, slightly behind, was the mute pirate, Sieben. I watched them toil onward and marveled that they were entirely alone out here.
I inquired of Timet of Norwess for support. “Do your unusual senses tell you whether any accompany them, Tim?”
He blushed like a rose. “My senses are not that unusual, sir. But there is no one with the king but those two.”
I pushed him further. “And why are they here? Can you tell me that?”
Navvie met my eyes, but she did not interrupt.
“Of course, to speak to Nazhuret of Sordaling. Why else?”
I was almost seduced by the boy’s idea of my own importance. I myself could think of a few reasons the king would flee his own army: reasons not involving me. I did not let myself get into that argument, but I said, “So then, I’ll go give them their wish.”
“We’ll cover you from here,” he said, and damned if the boy didn’t have a little bow made from a foil billet, just as Powl and I had carried thirty-five years before in our meanderings around the Sordaling suburbs. It looked to me like a charming but pathetic antique.
“We won’t need to shoot,” my daughter whispered to the boy. “Not while Count Dinaos is by.”
“Who?”
I cut off their dialogue. “Don’t shoot in any case, son. If Benar kills me and you kill him, then there is no one to rule in Velonya save the army, and that will mean the end of parliament and all my teacher and King Rudof cared for. And all I cared for, too.”
I stepped over the snowdrift before he could respond, hearing only the crunch of my feet into the deep snow and the crackle of cold air in my nostrils.
I had called the boy “son” not casually, but because I was already fond of him, and saw in him a form of what I had been at his age, except that he was taller, more comely, and even odder than I was. I was also jealous of him, as though I might wish my tiny, beautiful Rezhmian mother to have been a strapping farm girl of Norwess. I was shamed by my own jealousy, but still I felt it. I floundered through the snow toward the horsemen, who struggled in my direction, and turned my mind back to the business at hand.
The king at least must have known me, for I had been wearing the black tunic and trousers on my last brief interview with him. The wolfskin rode down my back, so only part of my face was concealed from any man sitting above me. Still, they made no answer to my call, but wheeled and backed before deciding to stop and wait for me to stomp up to them. I saw their horses drop their heads and close their brown eyes against the ice in the wind. When I came within a reasonable pistol shot, I flipped the head of the wolf off my hair, so that if I were shot it would not be out of mistaken identity.
Dinaos was the first to kick his horse closer. “By the heart of God, Nazhuret! What have you become now: a Sekret werewolf?”
I smiled up at him and felt the corners of my mouth crack. “My lord, compared with others I have met recently, I am as ordinary as a woolly sheep.” I looked past him to the face of Benar, which the cold had turned white and red, like a Yule confection.
“I’ve… we’ve been chasing after you, Nazhuret,” he said.
“Just the three of you?”
“Yes.” The king seemed resentful, as though he expected gratitude for something, but my small vanity caused me to make the king’s interests wait. “Did you track me?” I asked.
Dinaos answered, “No. There were no tracks. I didn’t expect you would leave any, being who you are. But though I’m no wizard, neither am I stupid, and I guessed how you would choose the way up to Norwess. I do know you,” he added complacently, and the king shot him a glance of distrust.
Behind me I heard Sabia scrabbling to her feet, her harness jingling. The king drove his horse closer to me. “Nazhuret,” he said thickly, as numb-mouthed from cold as I was, “I must apologize. I let Gorman overpersuade me. That, and having all those soldiers under my own command unexpectedly. It was a sort of betrayal of you.”
It was every sort of betrayal of me, but I saw no reason to tell Benar so when he was behaving so nicely. “I didn’t intend this to be a maneuver in force, and indeed it will not be. I have sent…”
I glanced up into the wind and the king’s face, but he was looking past me, his green eyes wide. “I have seen that man before!” He was pointing at my friend of the third level of the void.
“That’s Timet of Norwess,” I told them with some satisfaction.
Count Dinaos held his chin in one mittened hand and gave young Timet a heavy-lidded, judging stare.
“Fine-looking boy, isn’t he?” I called to him, a shade sharper than I had intended. The count, unabashed, continued to stare.
“Bland,” he announced at last. “But of course the young are bland.”
I tapped the leg of King Benar to get his attention. “You say you sent the division home?”
“I did.”
“And did it go where you sent it, sir?”
Benar tore his glance from the man he had seen walk right through him, shining like a mirror in the sun. He shook his head, not in re
ply to my question, but to clear his mind. I could see him already beginning to doubt Timet’s original apparition. So do men eliminate from their past all miracles.
“Go home? I surely think so. With three rebellious generals and a field marshal in manacles. I am declared Commander of the Army, with authority to make peace, subject only to ratification from parliament. Parliament wants peace like a Cantoner wants a full ship. Now, Nazhuret, the rest of it is in your hands.”
This made me laugh. I held up both hands, which were stuffed into mittens so thick they looked like the paws of a bear. “I hope not so, Benar, because my hands have lost all feeling.”
There were six of us, four mounted and two on snowshoes. My daughter and Timet made much better progress than the rest. They seemed in unusually high spirits, given the situation, and I tried to say nothing that might mar that mood. We were approaching Norwess along the steepest road, which in small seemed to be only gentle elevation, dotted with trees and farmhouses and with every waterway bridged and covered, but when regarded in large was actually a ponderous switchback up the side of a mountain. We stopped at a cow byre for dinner, and though the place was bright in fresh paint and well maintained, it was empty. I had come with less in my bags than my companions, but with Sieben’s provisions and Navvie’s usual forethought I did not go hungry or dry. The horses ate what the cows were missing.
Benar wished to scout around the place for signs of what had happened, but Dinaos and I convinced him that Timet, being local, could do it better. Navvie moved her kit over with the horses. She and the king had not gotten on since the day he called her a bastard to her face (and to mine). He had been eleven: far too old for a future king to engage in that kind of rudeness. If I remember correctly, it was because of this slip his father cracked him on the jaw so hard that he laid Benar out full length on his bedroom floor.
I stared covertly as he ate his cold dinner. Evidently his jaw had taken no permanent hurt. I wondered if I could ever like this king of Velonya. It would make things so much easier if I could.
The Lens of the World Trilogy Page 73