Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (8 page)

“Go on in, it’s al right, don’t you want to meet your Uncle Joachim and his friends?” came a laughing woman’s voice. Claudia, the lady of the manor, came through the doorway herding two boys and a girl before her.

Claudia was another shock. She was the only woman I had ever met who came close to being as beautiful as the queen.

She did not look at al like the queen, having curly russet hair, already escaping from the coiffure into which I was sure she had just combed it, and a skin so fair it was almost transluscent. She had a merry sweetness of expression and yet an air of tender concern in her eyes that made someone who saw her—or at least me—feel she must be protected at al costs from anything troublesome or sad.

She came immediately across to Joachim, wearing the tiniest firm line around her mouth as though determined not to be as shy as her children. She took his hands, looked into his eyes, and gave an almost tentative smile. I would have felt her expression, both sweet and vulnerable, was devastating if it had been turned on me. “You haven’t changed at al,” she said softly.

“Nor have you,” said Joachim. “It’s been too long. So, these are my nephews and my niece.”

Claudia brought the children forward to meet their uncle, then al of us were introduced to her and she invited us to sit down at the table. Servants came in with steaming platters.

She was the perfect hostess, serving the king first, making sure each of us had what he wanted, asking about our trip and listening attentively to our answers and, at the same time, somehow keeping her children quiet and orderly and their meat cut up in bite-size pieces.

But twice, as her husband sat beaming genialy at the other end of the table, I thought I saw her shoot a worried look toward him.

Ill

“I understand your family is also in commercial imports?” said the Lady Claudia to me.

“Was. My parents died when I was little and my grandmother kept the warehouse going, but she died while I was stil in the wizards’ school. We imported wool from the Far Islands and wholesaled it to the cloth manufacturers.”

“How interesting,” said Claudia with a bright smile. In fact it wasn’t interesting at al, which was part of the reason I had become a wizard instead of a merchant. I would probably have done an even worse job of running a wool wholesale business than my grandmother had; there hadn’t been much left over when she died and I had to sel the warehouse to pay the firm’s debts.

“And now you’re a wizard,” said Arnulf genialy. “I gather the wizards’ school keeps a fairly close eye on al of you—even tries to establish your routes when you travel.”

“Not realy,” I said in surprise. “Of course the school tries to coordinate the practice of wizardry throughout the western kingdoms, but wizards argue with each other too much to alow close oversight.” Arnulf nodded but said nothing more.

The chaplain seemed much more sober during lunch than I would have expected from someone home to see his family after a long absence. “You know, Joachim,” said Claudia when dessert was served, “I stil can’t get used to seeing you in priest’s vestments.”

Dessert was lemon pie, and one of the dishes served earlier had been rice with almonds. We didn’t have rice in the royal castle of Yurt very often, lemons even less frequently. Although I had always assumed that coming to Yurt had been the move into luxury for Joachim that it had been for me, perhaps I was wrong.

“Did he use to wear an earring when you first knew him?” Hugo asked Claudia with a wink for Dominic.

The chaplain did smile at that and brought both earlobes forward with his forefingers to show they had never been pierced.

“No,” said Claudia, also with a smile. “He always dressed very soberly, even when he was stil expected to take over the family business.”

“It’s just as wel I didn’t,” said Joachim. “My ideas of fair business practice would have lost our firm everything we had in two years. You and Arnulf would be lucky to have a cottage of your own, much less this house.”

He spoke lightly—or at least lightly for him—but Arnulf gave him a look that just managed not to be a scowl. There had been an argument here, I thought, perhaps accusations of immorality on one side and accusations of being hopelessly unworldly on the other, that stil festered after more than fifteen years.

“He’s been such an excelent Royal Chaplain,” put in King Haimeric, “that we in Yurt, at any rate, are very glad he did become a priest.”

“You wouldn’t want to try your hand at the family trade one more time, Joachim,” asked Arnulf breezily, “perhaps arrange a trade for me while al of you are in Xantium?” He spoke as though it were a joke, but Joachim took it seriously. “No.” He shot his brother an intense look. “I gave up al worldly commerce when I entered the seminary.” The topic was dropped there, and Claudia asked Ascelin about his principality as she poured us al tea. The prince shook off the air of watchfulness that had hung about him for the last hour and answered graciously. She seemed very wel informed about everyone in our party. The chaplain must have written his brother about al the people in Yurt, I thought, and I felt at a disadvantage that he had never told us nearly as much about the people here.

After lunch, Claudia went off with the children, and Arnulf took us on a tour of his grounds. As we came through the flowering orchard, I thought that we would be many miles away when the cherries were ripe.

Arnulf s foreman came up to him with a question as we were being shown a pasture where fine horses grazed beyond a white fence. The lord of the manor excused himself and went, taking Joachim with them.

“Listen carefuly,” said Ascelin as soon as they were out of earshot. “We have to get out of here as soon as we can.” This was the same surprise to the others that it had been to me.

“Don’t you think everyone here is just a little nervous, having the chaplain home again after so long?” asked the king when Ascelin tried to explain his instinctive feeling that something was about to happen.

“You heard them at lunch; he must have left after some sort of quarrel that they’re al trying hard to forget.”

“And if something here is about to explode,” said Dominic, “we’d be cowards to run away.”

“I think Ascelin’s right,” said Hugo with a frown. “It could be any number of dreadful dungs. Arnulf, after al, trades with the East, where the women grow fur on their bodies down to their knees and have two-foot tails, and where enormous horned snakes guard the pepper groves.”

“What are you talking about?” demanded Ascelin. But Dominic nodded soberly. “The boy has a point.

It’s one thing to flee a human enemy, another a monster.”

I, too, was about to protest, to tel Hugo that he knew perfectly wel that the women of the East were not furry, that he himself had suggested to me that his father was surrounded by dancing girls. But then he gave me a broad wink and I stopped in time.

“We couldn’t leave anyway,” said King Haimeric. The servants have our bags and, down in the stables, they’re reshoeing our horses. Why don’t we just ask Arnulf ifhe has any problems on which he’d like our help?”

“Al right,” said Ascelin, “but I stil want to leave as soon as our horses are ready. We should al stay close together. “That means you, too, Hugo. I wish the chaplain hadn’t gone off with him.” We moved in a group in the direction that Arnulf and his foreman had gone. I thought irrelevantly that anyone seeing us would assume we had become so accustomed to each other’s company while traveling together that we could not now bear to be separated.

But we did not find the lord of the manor. “Sire,” I said to the king, “tel the others about the bandits, about how they were apparently expecting to find something in that silk caravan. I can search more quickly by using magic.”

I left them sitting on a pasture fence and hurried back toward the house. Enormous horned snakes or not, I wished the chaplain had not gone off with Arnulf.

I found him, unexpectedly, not with the lord of the manor but with the lady. Claudia sat on a bench under a tree in the garden, singing and playing a lute, while Joachim sat at her feet, his dark eyes fixed on her face.

Surrounded by the colors and scents of a spring garden, dappled with the sunlight that made its way through the young leaves overhead, they seemed caught in a song of heart-wrenching beauty, where the afternoons were endless and the dailiness of ordinary life was so far away to be non-existent. And then I listened to the words. “So kiss me as you say good-bye,” sang Claudia. “Kiss me and ask not the reason why. But my heart shal take an eagle’s wing, away to fly.”

I froze, caught between feeling I should slip away without disturbing them and feeling that I must stop this at once.

But Joachim smiled and motioned me to join them. Claudia looked up from her lute, saw me, and stopped in the middle of a word.

“Please go on,” said Joachim. “I’d forgotten how wel you sing.”

Flustered, Claudia started again, but a completely different song. This was a seafaring tune about courage and shipwreck.

I let the melody wash over me while I probed with magic for Arnulf. I found him in the stables—either supervising the reshoeing of our horses, I thought with Ascelin’s suspicions, or else making sure we could not leave.

“Excuse me, my lady,” I said abruptly when Claudia came to the end of the song. “We’ve al been wondering, perhaps you can tel me. Why did you and your husband ask our chaplain to come visit you now?”

Joachim frowned at my rudeness. But Claudia seemed too delighted that I had not asked her what she meant by singing love songs to a priest—and her husband’s brother at that—to mind. “Its something to do with our trade caravans,” she said lightly. “We have, of course, hoped for years that Joachim would come home to visit, but there’s some business matter that made it especialy urgent now. Arnulf can explain it to you, I’m sure; I never pay much attention to business myself.”

“Maybe you should,” said Joachim, but looking at me rather than her.

“You never did,” she said softly.

“But you never had any intention of becoming a priest,” he said with a smile, scrambling to his feet, “or, in your case, a nun.” As he and I walked back toward the others, I wondered uneasily if Arnulf knew al the time what his wife was doing.

If he meant harm to us, he certainly treated us wel in the meantime. Our horses were stil not ready at the end of the day, but the first of our clothes came back clean from the laundry. Ascelin went white when we returned to our rooms and found our armor and weapons gone, but Arnulfs constable reassured him that they had just been taken away to have the rust polished off and the edges sharpened. Even our boots were gone to be resoled.

After another luxurious meal, Arnulf invited us into his study while Claudia supervised preparing the children for bed. Candlelight gleamed on polished wood and brass. I scanned the shelves quickly, looking for books of magic, but saw mostly account books, books of history and geography, and some literature. A bright fire took the chil from the spring evening.

“Joachim tels me you’re wondering why I asked him to come home now after al these years,” said Arnulf, stretching out his long legs. In the candlelight, the brothers looked more alike than ever. “I hadn’t meant to worry the rest of you with this, but maybe I could use your help.”

“What’s disappearing into thin air?” asked Ascelin intensely. He had gotten this from me.

“Wait, wait,” said Arnulf cheerfuly. At least he and Joachim sounded different. “If I’m going to tel you about this, I’d better start at the beginning.”

“And what’s that?”

Arnulf was more than wiling to answer. He had in fact, I thought, brought us to his study specificaly to tel us. I wondered abruptly if anything he said was his real concern or if he had created a story to distract us from something else.

“It’s believed,” began Arnulf, “and this, I must stress, is only a rumor, that King Solomon’s Pearl has been found again.”
IV

If the story was created for our benefit, at least the Pearl had not been, for King Haimeric seemed to have heard of it. “But I didn’t think it could be found,” the king said slowly. “I’d always heard that it had been hidden inside a golden box, inside a sealed amphora, inside a locked cabinet, inside a sunken ship, in the deepest rift of the Outer Sea.”

“That’s right,” said Arnulf, “hidden by the Ifriti a thousand years ago. But if an Ifrit had hidden it in the sea, he might be able to find it again. And the story I have heard is that it is now somewhere in the East and that someone has located its hiding place.”

“And what is this Pearl?” asked Hugo.

“Since no one has seen it for a thousand years,” said Arnulf slowly, “we have only story and legend. But the legend is that it is an enormous, flawless black pearl, permeated from its creation with the forces that shaped the earth, and which the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon as a wedding gift. Something of such perfection, something of such historical significance, would always be beyond price.

“But there is more. King Solomon, it is said, imbued this Pearl with al his wisdom and magic. It gives power to those who hold it, so that they wil always prosper, that their setbacks wil be only temporary, and they wil in the end find their hearts’ desire.”

The room was silent for a moment except for the crackling of the fire. The candle flames were reflected in the absolute black of the windows.

“But if it’s so priceless,” said Hugo at last, “why doesn’t the royal Son of David stil have it?”

“The Captivity of Babylon,” said Joachim. I wondered how much of this he had already heard.

Arnulf nodded. “Exactly. The Sons of David after Solomon long had the Pearl, but when their city was sacked and the Children of Abraham were taken as slaves to Babylon, the Pearl was lost to them.” This doesn’t sound like a very reliable magical object to me,” I said, “if it let them al be enslaved.”

“It’s years since I heard about it,” said King Haimeric slowly. “But my impression was that the Pearl was stolen from the royal treasury and that Babylon attacked shortly thereafter.”

“The Bible tels us,” commented Joachim, “that King Zedekiah had broken his covenant with the Lord.”