The Summer's King (29 page)

“Put down this wind!” cries Seyl. “Have you no powers?”

“It is too late!” says the vizier.

Zelline gives a soft moaning cry and falls in a faint. Iliane, very pale, her teeth chattering, seems about to do the same. Seyl seizes his wife by the wrist and begins to drag her away. He says to Rosmer, “The Lord of Grays?”

“He was aboard,” says Rosmer, “alas.”

“A clean sweep then!” says Seyl recklessly.

“What can you be thinking?” protests the vizier with a modest smile. “You are my witnesses. Could you believe that I had any hand . . .”

“Yes!” says Seyl through clenched teeth. “Yes, by the Goddess!”

He catches sight of Denwick and his wife, clinging together, their eyes fixed upon Rosmer. Poor Lord Trench, sobered, is trying to revive Zelline. Seyl drags Iliane with him and rushes from the house, panting down the stairs out into a storm of summer rain. The two kedran left to wait with the carriage have gone; now the older woman comes running up from the harbor.

“Lord! Lord! The ship, the sailboat . . .”

“Bring us away,” orders Seyl.

He settles Iliane into the carriage in frantic haste and leaps in beside her.

“Bring us to the Villa Pearl and by the north road, not the avenue!”

The second kedran comes up just in time to chase after the carriage and leap up behind as they gather speed. Even the back road to the royal villa is not empty; men and women are rushing to the harbor. Seyl, hanging from the window, brushed by overhanging boughs, sees a ghost, a young man struggling uphill from tree to tree. He shouts to the kedran to slow down and flings open the carriage door.

“Here man, get in!”

The young man scrambles in; he is wearing a tree suit, a domino covered with green silk leaves. Iliane, seeing him, chokes back a scream, then begins to wrap him in the carriage rug.

“Garvis, oh Garvis, poor boy,” she weeps, “you were not aboard!”

The young man, shocked and pale, tries to draw breath.

“Murdered!” he says at last. “All murdered! Dermat, Tam, the Old Man . . . Zaramund, my dear sister Zaramund! Goddess, what shall I . . .”

“Hold firm,” says Jevon Seyl. “Remember who you are!”

“Yes,” says Garvis at length. “I am the Lord of Grays.”

After his headlong flight from Rosmer's presence, Seyl regains his self-possession and observes the aftermath of the tragedy. He sends off two kedran at once to bring word to the Daindru. They leave Nesbath while it is still in confusion, and with them, in kedran dress, goes Garvis of Grays. Once they are on the Nesbath road to the Chameln border, he slips away, mounted on a gift horse, a trusty Chameln grey, and returns to Lien.

Seyl watches from his apartments in the villa and sees Kelen brought home, his face a mask of anguish, his white robes wet and foul as if he had cast himself into the sea. Seyl speaks later with Sharn Am Zor over the Markgraf's complicity in the murders. Kelen knew and did not know. Perhaps he knew what must happen but not the time or the place; all was left to Rosmer, and he worked so skillfully that even witnesses close at hand could not say that the vizier had worked one jot of magic. The witnesses were carefully chosen: persons of high rank.

In the twilight of the long tragic day Iliane calls her husband to another window.

“I have been watching the roses,” she says. “They are all accursed! The Goddess has put a curse upon the land of Lien.”

Jevon Seyl protests that it is her fancy, the roses were crushed by the summer rain. Yet even he believes, looking at the rose gardens. Soon there is not a rose in all the land of Lien to deck the funeral pyre of fair Zaramund. The doomed ketch
Huntress
lies fathoms deep, but the bodies of the drowned are washed down the river Bal to a beach by Lesfurth called Dead Man's Strand and there are burnt, lord and sailor alike, even the body of the Markgrafin.

So there begins a dark, unsettling era in the history of the Mark of Lien. The long revels of the court are at an end. Kelen takes Fideth of Wirth as his wife in the Maplemoon, and from that time forth she makes their life together a penance. The priesthood of the Lame God go about for good or ill; pastime and merriment are at an end. The taverns and disorderly house are shut down in Balufir; the prisons are overflowing; the Tumblers' Yard has gone dark. The Markgraf Kelen walks barefoot to Larkdel in the Ashmoon and there gives thanks at the sanctuary for that which he has craved so long: Fideth, his wife, has borne him a son: Matten of Lien.

In the spring of the following year, 1179, when the carpenters and masons were preparing for the raising of the roof trees of the great hall of Chernak New Palace, a solitary visitor came into the Chameln lands. The east wing of the palace more or less complete; Sharn Am Zor and Lorn, his queen, were already camping there, with many of their court; it was like a perpetual picnic.

Now they rode out to meet Queen Aidris and the visitor, Yorath Duaring, child of Gol of Mel'Nir and that fair, lost swan of Lien, Elvédegran. There he was at last, the child whom Hagnild Raiz stole away to his brown house in Nightwood to save him from the wrath of Ghanor, the Great King. How could anyone short of a master magician hide this Yorath? He was a giant, even among the giant warriors of Mel'Nir, a natural wonder, his hair and beard of a rich auburn, coarse and thick, his face handsome and open with a touch of melancholy, almost a wistful look. His light blue eyes seemed fixed upon some distant horizon. He talked well and pleasantly and laughed, and Sharn Am Zor puzzled over a resemblance. Who was he like, this cousin Yorath? King Gol, his father, certainly, but who else?

Yorath went off into the distant north with his companion Zengor, the white wolf, to seek a retreat in the mountains and live like a hermit. Long after their day together had passed, the king remembered. In Yorath he had caught a look of his own father, King Esher Am Zor, that unhappy man, his co-ruler murdered, his queen mad, his realm threatened by the Great King. Esher had not been a good father, and Sharn could see the reasons for this. He blew hot and cold, was preoccupied, had no natural touch with children, yet he was an honest man, and he had loved his son and heir.

Autumn had come. In the night, in the Zor palace, after the visit to the nursery and the king's couching, Sharn and his queen sat in their bedchamber, in the midst of their large golden bed. Sharn sprawled upon the pillows, and Lorn fed him green grapes. He told her of a hunting trip, his father's last gift, the last time they had spent together. It was more than a year after the time in the Hain when the children were attacked and Aidris wounded by the arrow. Aidris had been far away in Thuven Manor; Aravel's sickness had grown upon her dreadfully. It had been a bad time, and so in the spring Esher Am Zor had taken Sharn and a few followers and set out along the road to Dechar. His father did not insist, for once, upon too much riding; they took a pony trap, and Sharn was allowed to drive it. They struck out eastwards across the plain and travelled for several days, making camp at night, and came to a lonely hunting lodge upon the river Chind.

“I must go there next year in the spring,” said Sharn, “eastward to that river. Zabrandor will see that the brigands are put down.”

“And the Inchevin?” asked Lorn with a frown.

“I will try to speak with the old lord.”

“I wonder if your hunting lodge still stands?” she asked. “Is it near the Inchevin lands?”

“Nowhere near. It is on this side of the river, a place that has no name. I will have it built up again, and one year when all is quiet, I will take a hunting party . . .”

“Take Carel,” said Lorn.

“Yes,” said the king. “Yes, Carel. I do it for a memorial, you know. For my father.”

He took her hand and was silent.

CHAPTER IX

OUTLAWS

The three riders came on steadily across the plain of silvery grass; there was no wind, the tresses of hair on the spirit trees hung limp and still, not a thread stirring. Prince Sasko looked to his left at his mother, Aidris, and saw himself in her smile, in her smiling green eyes. He looked right and saw Sharn, his cousin, the very model of a king of the Zor, and riding better than ever on Redwing.

“They are coming . . .” murmured Sharn.

Sasko gripped Morrah's rein more tightly and told him to hold firm. The outriders from the northern tribes came on very fast, uttering their strange cries and hanging perilously from their saddles. Aidris lifted a hand, caught a streamer of dried flowers and gave it to her son. A rider in a blue cape came wheeling in close, and Sharn laughed and raised a hand to Tazlo. Sasko watched, as they came among the lodges and the swirling crowds, until he saw his father, in his tribal dress as High Chieftain of the Nureshen. Bajan lifted his son to the platform, and he stood between the Daindru, hearing the cheers, hearing the cheer for Dan Sasko, Heir of the Firn.

The Turmut, the second since the restoration of the Daindru, was remembered as another great success; even the quarrelsome Aroshen were gentle as lambs. It was an hour of triumph for Tazlo Am Ahrosh, son of old Kall, the High Chieftain. He proved that his years in the capital, far from his tribal home, had not been ill spent. He was the trusted servant and friend of the King of the Zor, and Sharn showed many marks of favor towards the Aroshen of Vedan.

Between the king and the young man from the north there had grown a coldness, a distance that neither of them cared to acknowledge. It was not simply that Sharn had married and had a family to claim his duty. As Merilla wisely said, the king had grown up and Tazlo's hectic vigor was no longer so much to his liking. Yet at the Turmut they were close as ever, and even Aidris was persuaded that the friendship had helped the Daindru to a new peace among the tribes.

When the folk-moot was done, the Daindru went separate ways, for there was work to do in which Aidris would have no part. Her last warlike expedition, she said, had been the Great Ambush at the Adderneck Pass. She returned with her son and the kedran of her escort to Achamar. Sharn went on with Bajan Am Nuresh and a troop of chosen riders from the northern tribes. They rode to the east, passing through the lower hunting grounds of Vedan and through the rich grazing land about Lake Oncardan, still the subject of a dispute between the Durgashen and the Aroshen. So they rode on, turning south, and followed the course of the river Chind, a thin foaming stream that fell through the gorges with a noise of thunder. After five days they camped by a ford, not far from the remote town of Threll, on the edge of the territory of the Inchevin, and there Zabrandor came to meet them with his own southerners and a troop of guardsmen from Achamar.

They had not come with any particular secrecy and were planning no ambush, but what followed worked like one. Scouts came back at nightfall from across the river; a large band of the Skivari were approaching Threll from the east, through the foothills. The scouts swore there were five hundred of the devils, some mounted on their hill ponies, some running. Rugal himself was their leader.

There followed a slow ride through the ford, then through the dark trees of a larch forest growing down to the banks of the Chind. At the gates of Threll, a knot of men with torches whispered, “Where is the king?” and when they saw him, tall and golden-haired, they smiled and gained heart. Sharn was led to a wooden watch tower in the stockade with his bodyguard; he took a short bow and his favorite black-feathered arrows.

The attack came, as expected, promptly at dawn. Rugal and his Skivari were creatures of habit, savage-looking men in pointed hats whose only tactic was to roar and hack and press on. They were soon defeated. A horseman at the tower's base sounded a horn for the retreat: Rugal's trumpeter. Sharn saw the terror from the east at last, seated upon a fat, shining little horse, brown and white. Rugal was a youngish man, very short and broad, with his black hair shaved in patches and a string of human skulls decorating his saddle. The king let loose another arrow, and again it found its mark.

“Winged him, by the Goddess!” cried Tazlo, who had come to bring word of the victory.

Rugal bore the arrow in his shoulder as if it had been a bee sting. Sharn shot again, but the chieftain was out of range. When the king and his guards came down from their eyrie, the town was littered with dead Skivari; a troop of riders from the northern tribes was pursuing the fugitives.

Sharn went about examining the dead brigands with Zabrandor and the Athaman of the town.

“Are they all Skivari?” he asked.

Many showed the features of this tribe or race: they were short, smooth-skinned, yellow-brown, with coarse straight black hair. Others were more ordinary, they could have been men of the Chameln lands. They came to a man of the Zor, tall, pale-skinned, yellow-haired, without a pointed hat. He had the look of one of the palace guards, a trumpeter. The man's right hand was tightly clasped around a small leather pouch.

“I will see that,” said the king, pointing.

He glanced up at the sky and the oak tree in the town square while the town elder brought his boot down on the dead hand. The pouch contained an eagle's claw, mounted in silver, together with a lock of white-blonde hair. On the mount were runes for good fortune and the device of a double star, the arms of the Inchevin.

“An amulet, my King,” said the Athaman. “He might have stolen it.”

They followed a guard officer to the hall where there was food and drink for the defenders of Threll.

Zabrandor said wearily, “Is this proof, Dan Sharn?”

“Almost,” said Sharn. “When Bajan and the northern tribesmen return, I will ride for Inchevin Keep.”

“Let me send a herald . . .”

“No, I will go myself,” said the king. “This lord is my uncle, my father's sister's husband. The Chameln lands are wide, and it is easy for a man to feel forgotten, here at the end of the world.”

“Inchevin was too proud,” said Zabrandor. “When he bore all the debt in that ill-fated trading venture, he might still have remained in Achamar. He could not bear to live in the palace as a pensioner of his wife.”