The Blue Sword (3 page)

Dedham stared at her. “He didn’t tell you—? Good God. It’s Corlath himself. He’s coming. He never comes near here, you know—none of the real Hillfolk do if they can help it. At best, if we want badly enough to talk to him, we can catch one of his men as they pass through the foothills northeast of here. Sometimes.”

“You see,” broke in Sir Charles, “it makes us hope that perhaps he wishes to cooperate with us—not the Northerners. Jack, did you find out anything?”

Dedham shrugged. “Not really. Nothing that we didn’t already know—that his coming here is unprecedented, to say the least—and that it is in fact him. Nobody had any better guesses than ours about why, suddenly, he decided to do so.”

“But your guess would be—” prompted Sir Charles.

Dedham shrugged again, and looked wry. “You know already what my guess would be. You just like to hear me making an ass of myself. But I believe in the, um, curious things that happen out there—” he waved the sugar spoon—“and I believe that Corlath must have had some sort of sign, to go to the length of approaching us.”

A silence fell; Harry could see that everyone else in the room was uncomfortable. “Sign?” she said tentatively.

Dedham glanced up with his quick smile. “You haven’t been here long enough to have heard any of the queer stories about the old rulers of Damar?”

“No,” she said.

“Well, they were sorcerers—or so the story goes. Magicians. They could call the lightning down on the heads of their enemies, that sort of thing—useful stuff for founding an empire.”

Sir Charles snorted.

“No, you’re quite right; all we had was matchlocks and enthusiasm. Even magic wanes, I suppose. But I don’t think it’s waned quite away yet; there’s some still living in those mountains out there. Corlath can trace his bloodlines back to Aerin and Tor, who ruled Damar in its golden age—with or without magic, depending on which version you prefer.”

“If they weren’t legends themselves,” put in Sir Charles.

“Yes. But I believe they were real,” said Jack Dedham. “I even believe they wielded something we prosaic Homelanders would call magic.”

Harry stared at him, fascinated, and his smile broadened. “I’m quite used to being taken for a fool about this. It’s doubtless part of the reason why I’m still a colonel, and still at the General Mundy. But there are a number of us old soldiers whose memories go back to the Daria of thirty, forty years ago who say the same thing.”

“Oh, magic,” said Sir Charles disgustedly, but there was a trace of uneasiness in his voice as well. “Have you ever seen lightning come to heel like a dog?”

Dedham through his politeness looked a little stubborn. “No. I haven’t. But it’s true enough at least that the men who have gone up against Corlath’s father and grandfather were plagued by the most astonishing bad luck. And you know the Queen and Council back Home would give their eyeteeth to push our border back the way we’ve been saying we would for the last eighty years.”

“Bad luck?” said Lady Amelia. “I’ve heard the stories, of course—some of the old ballads are very beautiful. But—what sort of bad luck?”

Dedham smiled again. “I admit it does begin to sound foolish when one tries to explain it. But things like rifles—or matchlocks—misfiring, or blowing up; not just a few, but many—yourself, and your neighbor, and his neighbor. And their neighbors. A cavalry charge just as it reaches full stretch, the horses begin to trip and fall down as if they’ve forgotten how to gallop—
all
of them. Men mistake their orders. Supply wagons lose their wheels. Half a company all suddenly get grit in their eyes simultaneously and can’t see where they’re going—or where to shoot. The sort of little things that always happen, but carried far beyond probability. Men get superstitious about such things, however much they scoff at elves and witches and so on. And it’s pretty appalling to see your cavalry crumple up like they’re all drunk, while these madmen with nothing but swords and axes and bits of leather armor are coming down on you from every direction—and nobody seems to be firing at them from your side. I assure you I’ve seen it.”

Richard shifted in his chair. “And Corlath—”

“Yes, Corlath,” the colonel continued, sounding still as unruffled as when he thanked Lady Amelia for his cup of tea, while Sir Charles’ face was getting redder and redder and he whuffled through his mustache. It was hard not to believe Dedham; his voice was too level, and it rang with sincerity. “They say that in Corlath the old kings have come again. You know he’s begun to reunite some of the outlying tribes—the ones that don’t seem to owe anyone any particular allegiance, and who live by a sort of equal-handed brigandry on anyone within easy reach.”

“Yes, I know,” said Sir Charles.

“Then you may also have heard some of the other sort of stories they’ve begun to tell about him. I imagine he can call lightning to heel if he feels like it.”

“This is the man who’s coming here today?” said Lady Amelia; and even she now sounded a little startled.

“Yes, Amelia, I’m afraid so.”

“If he’s so blasted clever,” muttered Sir Charles, “what does he want with us?”

Dedham laughed. “Come now, Charles. Don’t be sulky. I don’t suppose even a magician can make half a million Northerners disappear like raindrops in the ocean. We certainly need him to keep the passes through his mountains closed. And it may be that he has decided that he needs us—to mop up the leaks, perhaps.”

Lady Amelia stood up, and Harry reluctantly followed her. “We will leave you to discuss it. Is there—is there anything I could do, could arrange? I’m afraid I know very little about entertaining native—chieftains. Do you suppose he will want lunch?” She spread her hands and looked around the table.

Harry suppressed a smile at the thought of proper little Lady Amelia offering sandwiches, with the crusts neatly trimmed off, and lemonade to this barbarian king. What would he look like? She thought: I’ve never even seen any of the Freemen, the Hillfolk. All the natives at the station, even the merchants from away, look subdued and … a little wary.

“Oh, bosh,” said Sir Charles. “I wish I knew what he wanted—lunch or anything else. Part of what makes all this so complicated is that we know the Free Hillfolk have a very complicated code of honor—but we know almost nothing about what it consists of.”

“Almost,” murmured Dedham.

“We could offend them mortally and not even know it. I don’t know if Corlath is coming alone, or with a select band of his thousand best men, all armed to the teeth and carrying lightning bolts in their back pockets.”

“Now, Charles,” Dedham said. “We’ve invited him here—”

“—because the fort is not built for receiving guests of honor,” Dedham said easily as Sir Charles paused.

“And,” Sir Charles added plaintively, “it doesn’t look quite so
warlike
here.” Dedham laughed. “But four o’clock in the morning,” Sir Charles said.

“I think we should be thankful that it occurred to him to give us any warning at all. I don’t believe it’s the sort of thing he’s accustomed to having to think of.” The colonel stood up, and Richard promptly took his place behind him. Sir Charles was still pacing about the room, cup in hand, as the ladies prepared to leave. “My apologies for spoiling your morning to no purpose,” said Colonel Dedham. “I daresay he will arrive sometime and we will deal with him, but I don’t think you need put yourselves out. His message said merely that he desired an audience with the Homelander District Commissioner—not quite his phrase, but that’s the idea—and the general in command of the fort. He’ll have to make do with me, though; we don’t rate a general. The Hill-kings don’t go in much for gold plate and red velvet anyway—I think. I hope this is a business meeting.”

“I hope so too,” murmured Sir Charles to his teacup.

“And—at the moment—we can’t do much more than wait and see,” said the colonel. “Have some more of this excellent tea, Charles. What’s in your cup must be quite cold by now.”

H
arry and Lady Amelia took their leave, and the older woman closed the breakfast-room doors with a sigh. Harry smiled. Lady Amelia turned back to her in time to see the smile, and returned it ruefully. “Very well. We will leave the men to do their uncomfortable waiting alone. I am going to visit Mrs. McDonald, you are going to go riding with Beth and Cassie and bring them back here for luncheon.”

“Perhaps under the circumstances—” began Harry, but Lady Amelia shook her head.

“I see no reason why you should not. If he is here, those girls have very pretty manners, and are just whom I would invite if we were to give a formal dinner. And—” here her smile broadened and became as mischievous as a girl’s—“if he has brought his thousand best men, we shall be terribly short of women, and you know how I dislike an unbalanced table. I shall have to invite Mrs. McDonald as well. Have a pleasant ride, dear.”

Harry changed into her riding-clothes, mounted her placid pony, already bridled and saddled and held for her by one of the Residency’s many servants, and rode off in a thoughtful mood toward her meeting with her two friends. She wondered first what and how much she should tell Cassie and Beth; and, second, found herself hoping that this Corlath would stay at least long enough for her to see him. Would a witch-king look any different than any other man?

The sun was already hot. She pushed her hat back long enough for a cautious squint at the sky. It was more dun-colored than blue, as if it, like everything else near Istan, were faded by the fierceness of its sun. It looked as hard as a curved shell overhead, and brittle, as if a thrown lance might pierce it. The placid pony shuffled along, ears flopping, and she stared out over the sands. The woods to the west of her father’s house were old, hundreds of years old, tangled with vine and creeper. Ancient trees had died and, not having room to fall, crumbled where they stood. No landlord had thought the old forest worth clearing and the land put to use; but it had made a wonderful jungle for herself and Dickie as children, to be bandits in, and hunt dragons through. Its twisted shadows had always been welcome to her; when she grew older she liked the feeling of great age that the forest gave her, of age and of a vast complicated life that had nothing to do with her and that she need not try to decipher.

The desert, with the black sharp-edged mountains around it, was as different from what she was accustomed to as any landscape could be; yet she found after only a few weeks in Istan that she was falling by degrees in love with it: with the harsh sand, the hot sun, the merciless gritty winds. And she found that the desert lured her as her own green land never had—but what discovery it lured her toward she could not say.

It was an even greater shock to realize that she was no longer homesick. She missed her occupation; and even more she missed her father. She had left so soon after the funeral that it was difficult to believe that he was dead, that he was not still riding around his estate in his shabby coat, waiting for her to return. Then she found that she remembered her parents together again; as if her mother had died recently, or her father five years ago—or as if the difference, which had been so important, no longer mattered. She didn’t dream of honeysuckle and lilac. She remembered them with affection, but she looked across the swirled sand and small obstinate clumps of brush and was content with where she was. A small voice whispered to her that she didn’t even want to go Home again. She wanted to cross the desert and climb into the mountains in the east, the mountains no Homelander had ever climbed.

She often speculated about how other people saw the land here. Her brother never mentioned it one way or another. She was accustomed to hearing the other young people refer to “that hateful desert” and “the dreadful sun.” Beth and Cassie didn’t; they had lived in one part or another of Daria for most of their lives—“except the three years our mother took us Home, to acquire polish, she said”—and to both of them, Darian sun and Darian weather, whether it be on the fertile red earth of the south, with the eternal fight against the jungle to keep the fields clear, or the cool humid plateaus of the orange plantations, or the hot sand of the northeast Border, were simply things that were there, were part of their home, to be accepted and adjusted to. Harry had asked them how they liked the Homeland, and they had had to pause and think about it.

“It was very different,” Cassie said at last, and Beth nodded. Cassie started to say something else, stopped, and shrugged. “Very different,” she repeated.

“Did you like it?” pursued Harry.

“Of course,” said Cassie, surprised.

“We’ve liked all the places we’ve lived,” said Beth, “once we made some friends.”

“I liked the snow in the north,” offered Cassie, “and the fur cloaks we had to wear there in the winter.”

Harry gave it up.

The older people at the station seemed to put up with the land around them as they would put up with any other disadvantage of their chosen occupation. Darian service, civilian and military, bred stoicism in all those who didn’t give up and go Home after the first few years. The Greenoughs’ making-the-best-of-it attitude was almost as tangible as mosquito netting.

Harry had once won an admission from Mr. Peterson, Cassie and Beth’s father. There were several people to dinner at the Residency that evening, among them the Petersons. Mr. Peterson had been seated across from her at dinner, and had not appeared to pay any attention to the conversation on the other side of the table. But later in the evening he appeared at her side. She was surprised; he spoke rarely enough at social gatherings, and was notorious around the station for avoiding young unattached ladies, including his daughters’ friends.

They sat in silence at first; Harry wondered if she should say anything, and if so, what. She was still wondering when he said: “I couldn’t help hearing some of what that young chap next to you was saying at dinner.” He stopped again, but this time she waited patiently for him to continue and did not try to prompt him. “I wouldn’t pay too much attention, if I were you.”

The young chap in question had been telling her about the hateful desert and the dreadful sun. He was a subaltern at the fort, had been there for two years and was looking forward to his escape in two more. The subaltern had continued: “But I wouldn’t want you to think we have no change of seasons here. We do: we have winter. It rains steadily for three months, and everything gets moldy, including you.”

Mr. Peterson said: “I rather like it here. There are those of us who do.” He then stood up and wandered away. She had not spoken a word to him.

But she remembered what he said later as she realized that she too was becoming one of those who liked it here. She pondered who else might belong to their select club. It was a game, and she amused herself with it when she ran out of polite conversation. She took mental note of all those who did not complain of the heat, the wind, the unequal rainfall; and then tried to separate those like herself who actually enjoyed being scratchy with blown sand and headachy from glare, from those like Cassie and Beth who were merely cheerfully adaptable.

Harry at last settled on Colonel Dedham as the most likely member of her club, and began to consider if there was any way to broach the subject with him. She thought that perhaps there was a club rule that read, Thou shalt not speak. But her chance came at last, less than a fortnight before Corlath’s messenger arrived at the Residency at four a.m.

It was at another small dinner party at the Greenoughs’. When the gentlemen brought themselves and an appalling reek of Sir Charles’ finest cigars into the drawing-room to join the ladies, Colonel Dedham came across the room and tossed himself down on the window-seat beside Harry. She had been looking out at the mysterious white pools the moon poured across the desert.

“Open the window a bit,” he said, “and let some of this smoke out. I can see poor Amelia being brave.”

“Cigars should be like onions,” she said, unfastening the catch and pushing back the pane. “Either the whole company does, or the whole company does not.”

Dedham laughed. “Poor Melly! She would spoil many a party, I fear. Have you ever smoked a cigar?”

She smiled, with a glint in her pale eyes, and he reflected that some of the young men had labeled her cold and humorless. “Yes, I have: that is how I know. My father was used to giving dinners for his hunting friends, and I would be the only woman there. I was not going to eat in my room, like a punished child, and I liked to stay and listen to the stories they told. They permitted themselves to become accustomed to my presence, because I could ride and shoot respectably. But the smoke, after a few hours, would become unbearable.”

“So your father—?” prompted Dedham.

“No, not my father; he taught me to shoot, against his better judgment, but he drew the line at teaching me to smoke. It was one of his friends—Richard’s godfather, in fact. He gave me a handful of cigars at the end of one of these very thick evenings and told me to smoke them, slowly and carefully, somewhere that I could be sick in private. And the next time the cigars went around the table, I was to take one for myself—and he’d help me stand up to my father. It was the only way to survive. He was right.”

“I shall have to tell Charles,” said Dedham, grinning. “He is always delighted to find another cigar-lover.”

Her gaze had wandered again to the moonlight, but now she turned back. “No, thank you, Colonel. I am not that. It was the stories that made it worth it. I only appreciate smoke when I’m seeing things in it.”

“I know what you mean, but you must promise
not
to tell Charles that,” he replied. “And for heaven’s sake call me Jack. Three months is quite long enough to be called Colonel more often than business demands.”

“Mmm,” she said.

“Cassie and Beth do it very nicely. Say ‘Jack.’ ”

“Jack,” she said.

“There, you see? And for your next lesson I will walk across the room and ask you to say it again, and you will see how quickly I turn around and say ‘Yes?’ ”

She laughed. It was hard to remember that Dedham was a few years older than Sir Charles; the latter was portly and dignified and white-haired. Dedham was lean and brown, and what hair he had left was iron grey. Sir Charles was polite and kind; Dedham talked to one like a friend.

“I see you staring out of the windows often, at our Darian wilds. Do you see yew hedges and ivy-grown oak and, um, cattle and sheep in green pastures?”

She looked down at her lap, a little uneasily, because she had not thought she was noticed; but here was her chance. She looked up. “No. I see our Darian wilds.”

He smiled a little at the “our.”

“You’re settling in, then? Resigned to too much sun all of the time—except for when there is too much rain? But you haven’t seen our winter yet.”

“No—no, I haven’t. But I’m not resigned.” She paused, surprised at how hard it was to say aloud, and her club’s first law floated across her mind. “I like it. I’m not sure why, but I like it here.”

The smile disappeared and he looked at her thoughtfully. “Do you?” He turned and looked out of the window himself. “There aren’t many of us who do. I’m one—you must have guessed that I love the desert. This desert. Even in winter, and the three weeks of jungle after the rain stops and before the sun gets a good hold again. Quite a lot of my griping about being the oldest colonel still active is noise only; I know that if they promoted me they’d almost certainly promote me away from here—to one of the more civilized parts of this uncivilized land. Most of Daria is not like this, you know.” He paused. “I don’t suppose that means very much to you.”

“But it does.”

He frowned a little, studying her face. “I don’t know whether to say you’re very fortunate or very unfortunate. We’re strangers here, you know—even I, who’ve been here forty years. This desert is a little piece of the old Damar. It’s not even really under our jurisdiction.” He smiled wryly. “Not only can we not understand it, we are not able to administer it.” He nodded toward the window. “And the mountains beyond. They stand there, looking at you, and you know you’ll never climb them. No Homelander ever has—at least to return to tell the tale.”

She nodded. “It is not a comfortable passion.”

He chuckled. “No; not a comfortable passion.”

“Is that why no one ever mentions it? One hears enough for the other side.”

“God! Don’t I know it. ‘Only four hundred and ninety-six days till I get out of this sand pit.’ Yes, I suppose so. It’s a strange country, especially this corner of it, and if it gets too much in your blood it makes you strange too. And you don’t really want to call attention to it.”

She recalled that conversation as she rode; and now she saw Cassie and Beth jogging toward her. She was thinking again of Corlath, and trying to recall what little she knew of the Free Hillfolk. Jack had been reluctant to talk about them, and his evasiveness led her to believe that he knew quite a lot about them, because he was always open about saying he didn’t know something. He was trying to spare her, perhaps, from her uncomfortable passion.

Oh, glory, she thought, and with a quick leap her curiosity transformed itself into excitement: I do hope he’s there when we get back.

The question of what to tell her friends died painlessly. As soon as their ponies came abreast Beth said: “Is he here yet?”

Harry was expecting a good-morning-and-how-are-you and for a moment didn’t know who was meant.

“Corlath,” said Cassie. “Jack came to our house to see Daddy before breakfast, told him to go up to the Residency, that they would need him there.” Mr. Peterson and Jack Dedham were the only people in the station who knew Hill-speech even passably fluently. Most Darians who had much contact with Homelanders learned Homelander. Harry had picked up a few Darian words, but only a few; no Homelander had thought to write a Darian grammar for general use, and when she inquired further was told that there was no need for her to learn it. The only person who encouraged her, and who had taught her the words she did know, was Jack Dedham, and he had not the time to spare for more. Sir Charles was reasonably articulate in Darian speech, but uncomfortable about it. He felt a responsible commissioner should know the language of those he oversees, but it made him no happier to fulfill his own expectations. He kept an interpreter near at hand.