The Summer's King (2 page)

Sharn Am Zor strides on without catching the eye of any suppliant. Then the miracle occurs. He checks, midway to the door of the green saloon, just as the guards are preparing to strike the ultimate gong. The king turns back, murmuring to Seyl, and approaches the suppliant.

The young man from the north looks up at the young king. Their interchange, the words they must speak, are firmly laid down by custom, and the king sweeps the custom aside.

“Your name, I pray?” he says.

Sweeping off his red bonnet the young man falls to his knees. “Tazlo Am Ahrosh, my King! Your liegeman from the loyal feoff of Vedan!”

“Come up!” says the king. “A petition?”

“My land right in the matter of . . .”

The king takes the scroll and hands it to Seyl of Hodd.

“It will be studied,” he says. “Count Ahrosh, tell me plainly—are you a good horseman?”

Tazlo smiles, a flash of white in his handsome, dark Firnish face, and says, “The best, Dan Sharn!”

“Then you can do me a service,” says the king. “Come in to breakfast, and I will explain the matter.”

As the king strides on with three men in his wake, a middle-aged woman, the widow of a carpenter, runs mad with despair. Before the servants can hold her, she flings herself, shrieking, at the king's feet. Guards and servants pluck at the sobbing woman, but the king smiles.

“Good mother,” he says, following the ritual, “what is your will?”

The woman can only shudder and sob. The guards raise her up gently; she whispers her reply: “I crave your help, my king, in the name of the Goddess!”

“Come,” says Sharn, “I will take your scroll. Be of good cheer!”

He raises his voice.

“Let all those who wait here give their scrolls into the keeping of the Third Steward. Do me the favor of leaving this room free for others who will come to me. Wait for answers in the outer ward.”

An old man waves his hat and cries, “Hold high the Daindru!”

The king goes into breakfast to the sound of the two-fold cheer for the rulers of the Chameln land.

Tazlo Am Ahrosh, following the king into the delicious reek of Lienish bread, apple curd and hot tea, has had his life changed as if by magic. He sits at the king's right hand, hears his commission, and is sent off with a guard captain, still clutching a bread roll. Long before the kedran troop, the battlemaids on their small grey horses, set out for the south, Tazlo has ridden forth. He takes his own fine Chameln grey for the first lap and wears the cockade of a royal courier on his hat. He rides breakneck out of the southern gates of the city and takes the highroad. In eight or nine days of hard riding, with changes at every relay post, he will come to the borders of the Chameln land. Somewhere along the way he must meet the runaways: Princess Merilla, the Heir of the Zor, and the young Prince Carel.

Now the king and his court hurry on to the great business of the day. It is the second quarter of the Hazelmoon in the year 1172 since the laying of the stones in the south wall, as time is reckoned in Achamar, and the Dainmut has been summoned. It is the third year since the invading armies of Mel'Nir were humbled and driven from the land. In Mel'Nir the year is given as 328 since the Farfaring; and the civil war between Ghanor, the Great King, and Valko Firehammer, Lord of the Westmark, has just worn out a second season. In Lien, it is the year 2221 of the Annals of Eildon, for Lien shares its dating with its ancient liegeland; and Kelan, the Markgraf and his lady, the fair Zaramund, have given up hope of an heir. The vizier, Rosmer, is dreaming of his grand design: the expansion of Lien into a kingdom. In the peaceful land of Athron, it is the year 37 since the Carach tree returned, and the feast of Carach Troth is not far off.

Sharn Am Zor goes straight from the bathroom beyond the green saloon, where he has been combed and put to rights like a child, to his private stableyard. His four torch-bearers, his companions of honor, are waiting beside their mounts for the king. There is Old Zabrandor, the only torch-bearer inherited from Esher Am Zor, the king's late father; there is the southern lord, Effrim Am Barr; and the two new men, Denzil of Denwick and Jevon Seyl of Hodd, who is the king's cousin. The king has many cousins, including his co-ruler, the Queen Aidris Am Firn, and a little tribe of Chameln poor relations, the children of Esher's two sisters, whose husbands came down in the world. Some, the Inchevin, remain on their rundown estates in the northeast, but the king's aunt, Parn Am Chiel, has sent her eldest son to court, and the king has advanced him modestly. The head groom who holds the king's horse is Esher Am Chiel, seventh in succession to the throne of the Zor.

The king's horse is a ten-year-old roan gelding captured in the central highlands during the fighting with Mel'Nir. It is a trooper's horse, heavily built, handsome, intelligent, and above all, docile and good-mannered. It is the first horse with which the king has had a friendly relationship. His memories of horses go back to his third year and are a long record of discomfort, misery and terror. Between his father, who forced him to ride, and his mother, who shrieked when she saw him walking a pony, Sharn's long martyrdom began and was not ended until he found this kind horse that he calls Redwing, bred in the Eastern Rift on the High Plateau of Mel'Nir and brought into the Chameln lands by an unknown trooper.

So the king, well-built and strong, often in his young life doubted if he could ever be a king because he rode so ill. He will not hunt, joust on horseback or ride at the ring, but has trained tirelessly at all the knightly pursuits that can be practiced on foot. He is an excellent archer with the longbow, the short bow and the crossbow. He loves hawking, a sport not much practiced in the Chameln lands, but now becoming more popular. He fences and handles a broadsword quite respectably. He excels in the novel pursuit of swimming, an activity that the common folk of the Chameln undertake mainly when they fall into a lake. Now there are bathing parties of lords and ladies to be seen on every strand from Lake Musna to the Danmar.

Now the king, after a quick glance at his favorite hawks in the royal mews, mounts up on Redwing. The heralds of the Zor are fretful, but the procession is only a few minutes behind time. The king, preceded by his own horseguards, moves off at last through the outer wards of the palace at a gentle pace.

It is a perfect autumn day in Achamar; the maples are beginning to turn red. From the northern wall the city sweeps down in a series of shallow terraces, each with its ringroad; and from the southern walls a watcher can see almost as far as the Danmar, the inland sea. The two royal palaces, which dominate the city, are vast irregular buildings made of oak logs, dressed and undressed. Sharn cannot look at his palace rearing up like a barn or a tribal lodge without a twinge of irritation. Let no one tell him of the beauty, the quaintness, the cool-in-summer, warm-in-winter qualities of his home: for the king, true palaces are built of stone.

He rides in a slow circle on the uppermost ringroad, thronged with citizens of the better sort who live near the palace. Ahead ride the hundred guardsmen and the heralds; behind the king and his four companions come fifty nobles, those men and women who sat down to breakfast with the king. The guardsmen wear green and gold, the courtiers are a blaze of color: the rich dyes of the Chameln land—dark red, purple, blue, emerald—lit with the springtime colors of Lien, yellow, turquoise, apricot, lilac, rose-pink. The ladies of Lien ride sidesaddle in their elaborate gowns; the ladies of the Chameln land, in breeches and jeweled tunics, sit astride on small horses, the Chameln grey. The lords and gentlemen of Lien are fine in puffed and slashed costumes and short cloaks; their Chameln counterparts are more soberly clad, their cloaks are longer, they wear short swords.

The two races of the Chameln land, the tall blond folk of the Zor and the short dark folk of the Firn, can be singled out, but there are many in Achamar who are middle-sized and brown-haired. Here and there among the courtiers and the spectators are the changelings, giant tawny men of Mel'Nir who have forsworn their country and their king for love of the Chameln lands.

The ceremonial ride ends in a round park with an enclosure for horses and a crowd of grooms and pages waiting. At this point the procession from the palace of the Firn can be seen dismounting in a similar park three streets away. The king gets down, feeds Redwing a tidbit, and leads off on foot, chatting easily with his torch-bearers. The mounted guard has quickened its pace and come to the huge courtyard outside the meeting hall, another towering structure of ancient wood, with banners of the Daindru spread out upon its flat grey facade like tribal markings upon a birch lodge.

At last a group of five other persons on foot, divided by a good distance from the mingling crowd of courtiers, can be seen converging on the courtyard. A small dark woman in Chameln dress of emerald green and grey walks ahead with a light springing step in her high-heeled boots. Behind Queen Aidris Am Firn come her torch-bearers: Bejan Am Nuresh, her consort; Jana Am Wetzerik, the kedan general; and two newcomers, Nenad Am Charn and Count Zerrah, an Athron knight. Behind the king's back, Seyl of Hodd whispers to Zilly of Denwick, who hides a grin. Seyl has murmured, “Ah . . . the bright sparks . . .” The two young men of Lien find the torch-bearers of the Firn, with the possible exception of Count Zerrah, a dull lot.

The king has eyes only for his cousin Aidris; she is one of the few persons in the world whom he trusts, one of the few for whom he can feel love. The queen comes forward eagetly, and after their ritual embrace, she takes Sharn's hands.

“Rilla and Carel!” says Aidris Am Firn. “I have heard . . .”

It is to be expected. She has heard by magic or from one of the hundreds of royal servants and soldiers crisscrossing the city.

“No cause for alarm,” says Sharn, smiling down at her. “A kedran troop has set out, and I've sent a rider, a wild young courser from Vedan, to fly ahead and meet them. Rilla has managed the escape, the hoyden. I am sure she will come to no harm.”

He likes to reassure the queen. Aidris smiles. She has a striking face, youthful and fresh, and remarkable green eyes. The queen is twenty-eight years old and has borne two children; Prince Sasko, Heir of the Firn, aged three years; and his sister, Princess Micha, one year old; both safely tucked away in the huge, beloved palace of the Firn, far from the tumult of the Dainmut. The cheers from round about are deafening. Aidris and Sharn walk hand in hand, flanked by their torch-bearers, through the long column of cheering citizens and the guards for both their escorts. They pass through the doors of the meeting hall.

The hall of the Dainmut is a vast, vaulted structure, dark as a cavern after the sunlit streets, with a fresh tang of pine garlands masking the musty reek of age. The Daindru are officially alone except for a shaman from the northern tribes who holds up an oak bough and gives them the blessing of the Goddess. They bow to him and to each other; then part and turn aside to go to their robing rooms. Aidris goes to the left, Sharn to the right, each striding down a narrow, creaking, dark corridor. Then he is in the sunlit robing room that gives on to the dias with the double throne.

Yuri and Prickett are in the robing room to meet the king, together with Iliane Seyl, Mistress of the Royal Robes and two of her ladies, blonde Xandel and dark Veldis. All three women are so wrapped and swirled in shining Lienish cloth that they almost fill the small chamber. When they sink down before the king, they billow and rustle. Sharn raises up Lady Seyl with a cool, impatient smile and stands like a rock in the ocean as everyone goes to work on him.

The king has been surrounded by beautiful women like these for as long as he can remember. His curiosity is dulled; the edge has long since been taken off his appetite. Yet he acknowledges his relationship to Iliane Seyl. As she bustles about in her seagreen gown, showing off perfect white arms, he thinks of those secret bathing parties at Alldene. Three children, three halfgrown young people, two boys and a girl, Sharn, Jevon and Iliane, among the reeds, deep in the soft grass. He has even wished that he had married Iliane himself instead of leaving her to Jevon Seyl. She raises dark eyes to him, dimpling, as she sets straight his tabard; he feels her breath upon his cheek. No, it would not do. Iliane, beautiful, high-born Iliane, is a silly goose, vain and empty-headed. As the king's mistress and the wife of his torch-bearer, she has reached her zenith. Of course her marriage to Seyl of Hodd was arranged in childhood; Iliane could count herself lucky that her husband was a good friend. They are all three good friends, old friends. The king, who is twenty-three years old, suddenly longs for times past, for the deep grass in the shade of the trees and a plunge into cool water.

Over his clothes the women have placed a long tabard of felt encrusted with jewels. A trailing robe of dark green cloth edged with golden fur is fixed to his shoulders, and a tippet of brown velvet is arranged over it. Prickett girds him with a golden belt, and Yuri, lips drawn back in concentration, sets the first of the heavy gold chains about the king's neck and fastens it into place with golden pins and twists of thread. Sharn moves a little to make sure that the garments sit well, that his hands are free for the sword and the silver dipper that he must carry.

Beyond the robing room the hall is filling up. Greater and lesser nobles are crowding the massive oaken benches tiered behind the double throne. Below them in the body of the hall jostle the merchants and their wives, dressed in their best, and further back the common folk of the city and the followers of the landowners. In the galleries under the roof are waiting women, pages, scribes, musicians. A team of nimble fellows, the climbers, perch and swing on the beams of the hall, operating the shutters that admit light and air, driving away the rooks and pigeons.

Prickett, the valet, gets the sign of readiness from the king and passes it through a shutter in the robing room to the trumpeters on the steps of the dais. There is no waiting, for Queen Aidris is ready, too. The wooden trumpets of the Chameln land blend with the silver notes of King Sharn's new trumpeters from Lien. The king and the queen enter slowly from either side of the platform and move across the old, dark boards to stand before the double throne. The twofold cheer rises for the Daindru. To a long, wild trumpet call, two honored nobles, Lingrit Am Thuven and the Countess Caddah, emerge from the shadows behind the throne and hold aloft the two ancient crowns. Shutters overhead send down beams of light upon the dark gold, the round emeralds, the yellow diamonds that encrust these treasures.