The Fugitive Prince (Bell Mountain)

by Lee Duigon

  As Hlah hiked homeward, leading Uwain’s little band from Silvertown, Sunfish one morning had something unusual to tell May when she brought his porridge.

  “I’ve had a dream,” he said, “and I don’t know what it means. But maybe you can tell me.”

  He was a big man, with a great black beard shot full of silver. May, young enough to be his daughter, thought of him as a little boy who would never get any older. Her baby son, Wulf, babbled delightedly whenever Sunfish held him in his arms: something that he loved to do. That would have astounded anyone in Obann who’d known Prester Orth.

  “Now, how can I tell you anything about your dream, you silly man?” May said.

  “All men dream, but the interpretation is of God,” he quoted from the Book of Beginnings. “I dreamed I stood inside a great dark space, jam-packed full of people, all looking up at me; and I was preaching to them. I don’t know who they were, or where I was. I’ve never seen so many people.”

  “Nor have I,” May said. “But I suppose you could preach to a great crowd of people in the city of Obann in the Temple. Only, the Temple was destroyed.” She shook her head. “I’ve never been to Obann. Hlah says you never saw so many people in one place or such great buildings—with walls like cliffs, he says. I’d love to see it, someday.”

  “I didn’t know there were so many people in the whole world,” Sunfish said. Prester Orth had preached in the great Temple many times, to overflowing crowds, but Sunfish had no memory of that. “I wish I knew the meaning of that dream. It may be that the Lord was trying to tell me something.”

  “Oh, well—eat your porridge,” May said. “Sometimes a dream is just a dream.”

  But in this case she was wrong.

  In Obann, Martis had an audience with Gurun and Obst together. “We can trust the Knight Protector,” Obst said; and they told him how Jack and Ellayne brought Fnaa to be a substitute for the king. But of the king himself they had no news.

  “I sent his hawk, Angel, to seek him,” said Gurun, “but she has not returned. I sent two of my Blays to watch over Jack and Ellayne, but they have not returned, either.”

  Before he left the city, Martis received a message from the Chief Spy to come and see him. He knew Gallgoid from when they were both in Lord Reesh’s service. He tried to forget the things he knew about him. “He was no worse than I was,” Martis said to himself. But he couldn’t warm to the man.

  “You can be here for no other reason than to seek the two children from Ninneburky,” Gallgoid said, when they were alone in his office. “I believe they went to Lintum Forest in search of King Ryons. They were seen to cross the river on the ferry. Shortly afterward two Blays took the ferry, too, sent by the queen, of course.”

  “Do you think the king has gone to Lintum Forest?” Martis asked. “Why?”

  “South of the river, there’s nowhere else to go. But I don’t know why he went. He went of his own free will, taking his dog with him, and no one saw them go. The queen doesn’t know that I know the boy in the palace is a double. Where he came from, I don’t know! Jack and Ellayne brought him, and that’s all I know. It’s a perplexing situation.”

  Lintum Forest, Martis thought: Ryons had come to Obann from there. He might have been happy to go back.

  “The king is better off, out of the city,” Gallgoid said. “Obann is full of treason. To what depth, I haven’t yet discovered.”

  Martis nodded. “There is a sham prester in Cardigal,” he said, “preaching the Thunder King’s New Temple.”

  “Of which Lord Reesh was meant to be First Prester.”

  “This is a treason with deep roots,” Martis said.

  “The people want the Temple,” Gallgoid said. “That was what they knew. They’re afraid to carry on without it—never mind what Obst says about a temple to the Lord made without human hands, inside the human heart. The people want a building they can see.”

  “And the Thunder King has built them one,” said Martis, “which he will give them, if only they submit to him. Very clever. Nasty.”

  “The city might have risen against the king by now,” Gallgoid said, “only the people are restrained by their love for Gurun. She prays for them. She’s young. She stands for the new temple in the heart—when they see her and hear her, then they’re more willing to believe in it. She’s the great obstacle between the plotters and their ambition.”

  “Then guard her well, Gallgoid.”

  The spy smiled coldly. “With my life and the lives of all my agents, Martis! She is guarded better than she knows.”

  It struck Martis as ironic that the queen’s safety should depend on such a man as Gallgoid—once upon a time, the slimiest of Lord Reesh’s servants. “But was I any better?” he asked himself. He had to admit he wasn’t.

  Late that morning, with Lintum Forest plainly in sight in all its green vastness, Angel the hawk decided to come down. The man and the giant bird were no threat to her master. The dog’s acceptance of them proved it, and Angel trusted the dog.

  She flew a little ways ahead of them and then circled down, crying out to tell Ryons she was coming. She landed on an inkbush and called to him. The dog barked, but only once; he recognized her right away.

  “There’s that hawk—” Perkin started to say. But Ryons cried, “Angel!” And just like Gurun and Chagadai—keen hawkers from opposite ends of the world—taught him, he held up his forearm and whistled. Angel came to him and settled on his arm.

  “This is my hawk!” he beamed at Perkin. “Angel, have you followed me all this way from Obann? How did you know where to find me?”

  In the language of hawks she tried to tell him that Gurun had sent her, but of course Ryons couldn’t understand that language. Nor did Perkin.

  “That’s a wise bird you’ve got there, Majesty,” said Perkin. “She probably recognized you days ago, but didn’t come down because of me and Baby. Well, it’s fitting that a king should have a hawk, along with his hound. But you should also have a noble steed.”

  “I’m not much of a rider,” Ryons said. He stroked Angel’s breast with a finger, which she liked. “But I’m so glad Angel’s here! I missed her, Perkin. I always fed her by hand, every day.” Indeed, he missed all the true friends he’d left behind in Obann, and only just now realized how much.

  “Another day, and we’ll enter Lintum Forest,” Perkin said. “King Ozias was born and raised there. It ought to be a friendly place to you.”

  As a slave of the Wallekki, who liked to stay on the move, Ryons had never been in any one place for long. He’d been in Obann for a year, which was the longest he’d been anywhere, but the city didn’t feel like home to him. He’d stayed in the forest for just a matter of weeks, and he’d been happy there. He expected to be happy there again.

  “Let’s get going,” he said. “I can hardly wait to see Helki!”

  Chapter 21

  A Change in Plan

  As they rested during the heat of the day, in a dry gully that Wytt had found for them, Jack and Ellayne were having a theological argument. It was hard for them because neither had ever studied theology. Nor were they aware that prophets and wise men had had the same argument centuries ago.

  “We saw what we saw,” Ellayne said, and not for the first time. “And all those people saw it, too. You have to believe your own eyes.”

  “Just because we saw it doesn’t mean it’s magic,” Jack said. “There’s no such thing as magic.” She was getting tired of him saying that.

  “Then why was it against God’s law to be a witch?” she demanded. She’d heard Obst say this once or twice, but she had no idea where to find it in the Scriptures.

  “That doesn’t mean that witches really can do magic,” Jack answered. “It’s against God’s law to worship idols, too, but that doesn’t mean that idols can really do anything. But it’s the same kind of law.”

  Wytt crouched beside them, watching with a twinkle in his eye. His head went back and forth from one to the other: you might have
thought he understood what they were saying. But who can say he didn’t?

  “All right—how did that man make light shoot out of his hand last night, if it wasn’t magic?” Ellayne said. It was like talking to a tree stump, she thought.

  “Just because I don’t know how he did it doesn’t mean beans,” Jack said. “I don’t know how they make matches, either, and matches aren’t magic. If I knew how, I could make light come out of my hand, too. Don’t you remember what that man Gallgoid said? The Thunder King’s servants tricked and cheated people and made them think it was magic! That business last night was just more of the same. Once a cheater, always a cheater!”

  “Oh, now that’s really smart!” Ellayne said. But it was true, what Gallgoid had said. The only thing Ellayne could say was that she’d seen this magic; but if she said that again, they’d wind up fighting about it.

  “Those were only barbarians who got fooled,” she said.

  “They’re not cuss’t stupid!” Jack answered. “Anyway, those were our own people who got fooled last night.”

  Suddenly the argument lost all interest for Ellayne. Anew thought struck her—hit her so hard, it almost took her breath away.

  “Look here,” she said. “Does it even matter whether it was real or not, if people think it’s real? Don’t you think someone ought to grab that little fat man and make him tell the truth?”

  Jack saw, right away, what she was getting at, and he abandoned their argument, too. “It’s too bad we’re so far from the city,” he said. “You’re right—somebody ought to stop that cluck before he’s got the whole nation fooled. I’ll bet Uduqu could get that man to tell how he does his trick.”

  Ellayne saw the next step. “It means we ought to go back, doesn’t it? All the way back to Obann! They’ve got to be told what’s going on out here, and we’re the only ones who can tell them. It has to be us.”

  “I thought we came out here to find the king,” Jack said.

  “Well, we can’t be in two places at once!” Ellayne shook her head. “He’s headed for Lintum Forest, anyhow. We can tell them that. He’ll be safe in Lintum Forest. He won’t be there long, before Helki finds him.”

  “They ought to send out all those Ghols on horseback and all the Attakotts on foot and catch that fake magician before he gets a chance to do his stuff again,” Jack said.

  “They’ll catch him, all right,” Ellayne said, “once we tell them.”

  After that, they really couldn’t sleep. They couldn’t bear to sit in the gully all day, waiting for the night, so they decided to risk some daytime travel and just keep going until they were so tired that they had to sleep. Ellayne said they could find their way back to Obann by the position of the sun. It didn’t occur to Jack to doubt her.

  Wytt didn’t comment on their change of plan. He would have, had he been a human being. He just went on ahead, scouting out the way. The children soon lost sight of him.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, they saw smoke ahead. “Someone has a campfire,” Jack said. It was right in front of them somewhere, so they halted.

  “If it’s Heathen with horses …” Ellayne started to say; but there was no need to finish.

  Wytt popped up from the grass. “One man, with a fire,” he reported. The man had a cart, too, with a single ox to pull it. There was no one else around for miles, Wytt said.

  “Want to sneak up and take a look?” Jack said.

  “As long as we don’t get too close.” She didn’t have to remind him of Hesket the Tinker, who’d drugged them and would have sold them into slavery. Wytt killed him while he slept.

  Wytt led them to the campfire, keeping upwind of the ox in case the beast should catch their scent and give a warning. Soon they could smell the fire. They dropped to their hands and knees and crept cautiously through the tall grass.

  Fire, cart, ox, and man were in a low depression with a spring-fed pool. Jack and Ellayne peered through the grass.

  Ellayne almost cried out. “It’s him!” she hissed through her teeth.

  It was the little fat man who’d done the magic, peaceably boiling tea in a tin cup over the fire. He wore buckskin pants and a much-stained linen tunic that had once been white. His hat lay beside him, full of blackberries. He had sandy hair as short as stubble, a reddish beard, and whistled a cheery little tune.

  “If we spy on him,” Ellayne whispered, “we might find out how he does the magic. Maybe Wytt can go through his things while he’s asleep. It’s a golden opportunity.”

  “A golden opportunity to get caught!” Jack thought. He pinched Ellayne’s elbow and signed to her that they’d better back off a ways, so they could talk. She understood, and they crawled back some fifty yards the way they’d come, stopping behind a screen of bushes.

  “We’ll never get a better chance to find out what he’s up to,” Ellayne said. “Heroes take those chances when they come.”

  A grown man with good sense would have taken Ellayne by the hand and walked away, fast. But Jack was not a grown man; and compared to some of the things that the two of them had had to do over the past year or so, spying on a fake magician didn’t seem like much. Still, he thought, they ought to do it right.

  “We won’t see anything, just sneaking around. And we can’t keep up with a wagon, either,” he said. “The only way to do this is to travel with him. Let him get used to us. If we can just stick with him for a few days, that’s how we can find out something.”

  “We can tell him we’re lost,” Ellayne said. “We’ll say we came from Lintum Forest, trying to go to Obann.”

  Together they cooked up a story. Wytt, of course, would remain in the background, unknown to the magician. If they got in trouble, Wytt could rescue them. Wytt took this in without saying what he thought of it.

  They stood up, and hand in hand like lost and weary children, walked back to the campsite.

  That was how they became fellow travelers with the man who called himself Noma: who said he came from a little village a few miles south of Caryllick and was northbound for the river. Jack and Ellayne could travel under his protection, in return for helping him set up camp and tend to his ox and wagon. Wytt would be going, too, but Noma wouldn’t know that.

  “I like to do a little peddling in the towns along the river,” Noma said, “and a little preaching, too, when the spirit moves me.”

  “Are you a reciter?” Jack asked. Noma’s camp was already made; he wouldn’t be moving on again until the morrow.

  “No, not me. I’m just a man who loves the Lord, and loves the Temple, and Ipreach for the love of preaching.”

  Ellayne bit back her question, “What temple?” She and Jack weren’t supposed to know much about anything. They’d introduced themselves as “Jack and Layne,” two boys from Lintum Forest. “Let him think we’re kind of stupid,” Jack had said. “Just a couple of hicks from the forest.”

  After the sun went down, Noma fetched a concertina out of his cart and played some songs. He didn’t do any magic. Before long, and with a smile on his face, he laid his head on his bedroll and went to sleep. After a little while, Wytt came out of hiding and stood over him, listening to him snore.

  “Is he sound asleep?” Ellayne whispered.

  “He sleeps,” Wytt said, and hopped over to cuddle with her.

  “I wonder if we ought to search his cart.”

  “Not yet!” Jack answered. “Let’s just keep watching him closely for a day or two, like we agreed. We know he’s up to no good, and that means he’ll be cautious. He might have mousetraps in there, to catch anyone going through his things.”

  Ellayne was impressed. “I never thought of that!” she said.

  “Because you’re too busy thinking about magic,” Jack said. She didn’t know Van once put a mousetrap in the breadbox, and Jack got his fingers caught when he reached into it. “Noma’s a trickster, and we’ll have to be careful.”

  Noma didn’t look dangerous, Ellayne thought. But anyone who could cast light out of his
bare hand was not to be treated carelessly.

  Jack’s last thought before falling asleep was: “Well, at least he thinks we’re stupid! We never asked him what he’s doing out here all alone, with bandits all over the country.” And a little voice in the background of his mind added, “You’ll see how stupid you’ve been, when we run into some of those bandits.”

  Chapter 22

  How Fnaa Received a Prophecy

  Zekelesh, chief of the Fazzan, took half a dozen of his men to visit Nanny Witkom’s monument and lay a wreath of flowers on it. Nanny was honored as a prophetess. Her monument stood in Lord Gwyll’s garden because she’d lived most of her life in his house and died there. There was also a monument to Lord Gwyll himself because he died in defense of the city.