The Summer's King (3 page)

For a few moments only Sharn feels the cap of leather slip onto his head and the immense weight of the crown. It is a weight too great for Queen Aidris to bear even for a short time, and Lingrit, her chancellor, supports the crown upon her head. Then the crowns are upheld a second time and carried away. Two other favored personages, Iliane Seyl and Sabeth of Zerrah, both beautiful women, come forward and set simple diadems of gold and pearls upon the heads of the Daindru. At last the king and the queen sit down upon the double throne, holding their swords of office. Aidris Am Firn carries a silver bough for her office as Lady of the Groves, just as the king bears a silver dipper as Lord of the Wells.

The cheers and shouting rise to a thunderous climax that seems to shake the hall; the king and the queen smile and nod to their subjects. Sharn can see very clearly in memory two men seated stiffly upon the throne as he sits now: his father, Esher Am Zor, and Racha Am Firn, father of Aidris. The Daindru has prevailed: they reign in Achamar as they have done for a thousand years. There are tears of joy still among the citizens as there were at the coronation two years past. A kedran with a strong sweet voice, below the dais, begins to sing the last verse of a battle song, an anthem for the restoration of the Daindru, and the whole multitude take up the strain:

Far off, far off in Achamar

The fires are lit,

The king and queen have come home,

O let me live till that moon!

The ceremony lasts six hours. The closest advisors of the queen and the king have worked hard to cut it to this length. The Daindru are no longer forced to remain before their subjects for ten, twelve, twenty hours at a time, eating and sleeping on the double throne with only a gold screen hiding them now and then so that they might answer calls of nature. Queen Charis Am Firn, grandmother of the present queen, almost gave birth before the Dainmut on one occasion, and at another meeting her co-ruler, King Vavar Am Zor, was seized by a fit of apoplexy.

Even now, with hourly pauses, brief forays to the robing room, Sharn Am Zor is tormented by the ceremony. Aidris talks to him, they smile, they listen to the loyal addresses, accept oaths of fealty, name officeholders. More than two hours after noon, a trio of lesser lords from the town of Winnstrand on the Danmar are permitted to read a loyal address. They are liegemen of Sharn Am Zor, for the town lies within one of his personal feoffs. After the usual expression of love and fealty, the third lord appeals to the king. On behalf of his fellow lords he urges the king to marry and secure the succession of the Zor.

Sharn is furious. After enduring the discomfort of the long meeting, now he is harassed by these presumptuous fools. Aidris, seeing his handsome face dark as a thundercloud, clasps his hand firmly on the throne bench.

“Hold firm!” she whispers.

“Curse them!” he says aloud.

He leaps to his feet before the loyal address is done and speaks in a voice taut with anger. “Good lords of Winnstrand, I see you are all old men. You cannot earn the respect due to your grey beards if you do not respect your king and liege. I will marry when it pleases me. My sister, Princess Merilla Am Zor, is my heir, and my brother, Prince Carel, is in good health, too. Do not think that because I am your king I can be commanded in any matter!”

Aidris quickly rises, and she too is inwardly cursing the clumsy lords of Winnstrand.

“Sharn Am Zor is my co-ruler and my dear cousin,” she says firmly. “If it please the lords of Winnstrand and any other lords or citizens who presume to consider the matter of the king's marriage: I will advise the king. I will find out and set forth for him the names and estates of any maidens fit to be honored as his wife!”

There is a murmur of satisfaction. The Winnstrand lords are rebuked. Sharn, still furiously angry, asks Aidris for the ending of the ceremony, and she nods. He gestures to the trumpeters, and they blow up “The Daindru Goes Out.” The Dainmut is at an end. The king stalks perfunctorily through the closing ceremonies; he disrobes so hastily that the floor of the robing room is covered with scattered seed pearls and scrapings of felt. He leaves the meeting hall down his private corridor at the double; his horse guards are thrown into confusion when he appears.

Still the king strides on without a page or an esquire, let alone a courtier. Seyl and Denwick, seeing how things have gone, are trying to extricate themselves from the hall. Sharn, already at the stabling park, setting the grooms into confusion this time, mounts Redwing. Behind him he leaves cheering citizens, cursing guardsmen and grooms, disturbed horses. His two closest followers continue to fight their way after him, and indeed they catch up on their own horses, trotting back to the Zor palace followed by a demoralized guard escort.

Inside the meeting hall Aidris Am Firn bids the trumpeters sound the call for order and has the heralds cry out for a peaceful departure. She and her consort Bajan stay an hour or so longer, talking to those greater or lesser landowners who have come from a distance.

The city of Achamar now prepares for a great feast. The tables are being decked in each of the royal palaces for a hundred nobles and their servants. In the meeting hall itself, as soon as the merchants and citizens have made place, the trestles are flung up and food brought in from the High Reeve's Hall nearby to feast three hundred lesser lords. Merchants of any worth provide a banquet table in their houses, and in every city square oxen or sheep are roasting and barrels of apple wine are tapped.

“Well, Zilly,” says the king, close to home, as they catch a whiff of roast meat. “Are you for the feast? Are you, Seyl?”

Someone must preside at the banquet table in the palace, but the king cannot be reminded of his duty. Seyl says with a smile, “I will dine, my king, and so will Iliane.”

“Take the head of the table then,” says the king. “Zilly, bring me some good company to the bend in the path by the old elm. I'll get out of this rig.”

He goes by swift and devious ways to his chambers again. Yuri and Prickett await him, panting a little. They have run and jostled through the crowded streets while the king rode home on the ringroad. Sharn Am Zor begins to strip off his clothes; again beads jingle on the polished floor. He splashes his face in a bowl of perfumed water held by Yuri.

“I will have a tray,” he says, “and the stirrup cup . . .”

“They are ordered, Sire,” says Prickett.

Sharn begins to relax, to smile as he dons his Lienish hunting breeches and is helped into his most comfortable boots. When the tray of hot meat, bread and greens together with a few sorbets and sweetmeats arrives, he eats sparingly. Prickett covers the dishes. He and Yuri will clear the tray when the king is gone.

There is a moment's disturbance when a party of nobles including the Countess Caddah present themselves at the outer door of the royal apartments. All the screens are up however, and Prickett could hold the doors against an army. No, there will be no audience, and no, the king will not dine, and no . . . no one may ask to accompany the king if he rides out.

Sharn sprawls in the chair, eats a lamb chop and picks his teeth dreamily. Then with a new burst of energy he springs up, dons cloak and hat, takes his gauntlets. With only two guards, he returns to the maze of corridors and comes to his own stable yard by the lower eastern hall. He must play hide-and-seek once or twice with parties of nobles struggling to reach the banquet table in the great hall. The stable yard has been kept very quiet; Redwing is waiting and the two hawkmasters, the brothers Réo, and their servants. A page hands the king his stirrup cup of apple wine once he is in the saddle.

“Go ahead, Hawkmasters!” cries the king. “Carry their cradles down to the gate. We'll try the Chernak road, what d-ye say? That valley I've been saving . . .”

“My King . . .”

The swarthy elder Réo grins and bows. Four men bear out the long wooden cages, hitch them to their shoulders; two others handle the dogs, cheerful black pointers, waving their tails. They all set off through the palace grounds to a private gate out of the city.

The king smiles down at the head groom. “Master Chiel,” he says, “we must have some decent mounts, some tall horses, I think. My sister Merilla is coming and Prince Carel.”

“My pleasure, Dan Sharn,” says Esher Am Chiel. “Does the princess ride in the manner of Lien?”

“Not if she can help it,” says the king. “She hates the sidesaddle.”

He laughs in fond irritation thinking of Merilla, riding so coolly out of Lien.

“She rides a great deal better than I do,” he says, “and young Carel has been known to ride at the ring. Goddess, they may even join the hunt . . .”

He rides out of the stableyard and follows the hawkmasters down a broad path. The palace stands in a gentle landscape: grassy slopes, ponds, flowering groves. Apart from an orangery and a display of roses in stone urns, there are no formal gardens. The attempt to plant a garden in the manner of Lien was made at the palace of the Firn, and it was not a success. The king does not know it, but the lovely Chameln park that lies about him is a memorial to his mother, Aravel of Lien. The queen complained long over her exile in the barbarous Chameln lands, but before her mind clouded, she showed an instinctive appreciation of their beauty. The rare conifers, dwarf maples, ash trees and every sort of birch were brought at her command from the far corners of the realm to enhance this park of the Zor and its ancient oak trees.

Now the king sees below him, by the old elm, a little knot of ladies and gentlemen . . . the “good company” hunted up by Denzil of Denwick. Indeed, Zilly, who knows his master's habits well, might be accused of advance strategy. How else did Count Zerrah and the Countess Sabeth happen to be prepared to ride out in Athron hunting dress, following an invitation to dine at the Zor palace? There is of course a great deal of invitation and counterinvitation between the two palaces. On this day General Zabrandor sits at the left hand of Aidris in her banquet hall. Sharn notes the Zerrahs with approval and sees that dark Veldis of Wirth, Iliane's waiting woman, is there, and the handsome widow, Lady Hargren, and Engist, the king's master at arms. Zilly has done well. As Sharn rides down to join the company, which is well prepared with two packhorses, bearing food and drink, all that is necessary for a picnic, he sees that they are staring into the park.

“Sire!” exclaims Engist. “Your tree of doom . . . look there . . .”

In an open space there stands a stockade and a shallow ditch; in the midst of the enclosed plot, on a hillock, there grows a solitary dark tree. It is gnarled and spiny, but not unshapely, and about fifteen feet in height. Its trunk is black and grey; the smooth black patches of bark seem to absorb the light. The leaves are of a papery texture, resembling just a little the leaves of a plum tree, and in color they vary from deep purple to midgreen. Queen Aravel's call for rare trees had an unexpected success; the seedling that the gardeners thought was a wild flowering plum was instead the rarest of trees. Harts Bane is one name for it or Wanderers Bane or Blackthorn, Killing Thorn; in some tales it is the Morrichar, the tree under which unwanted children were exposed. Its best-known name is Skelow. Leaves, bark, flowers and the very exhaltations of the tree are held to be deadly poison; and if this were not enough, the tree is credited with magic powers. Danu Araval would have uprooted the thing as soon as it was identified, but this was held to be a dangerous provocation of the tree and the Dark Huntress to whom it was sacred. It was, after all, an honor to have such a tree. The stockade and the ditch were set in place to keep children away from the Skelow, the black tree.

Sharn sees that now, after years of slow growth, a change has come to the tree. The leaves are turning to their autumn color, a coppery purple-brown, and as they fall it is clear that for the first time the Skelow has brought forth fruit. Two gardeners with long-handled rakes and a basket on the end of a long pole are scraping away fallen leaves and taking up a few of the long black fruit.

Sharn Am Zor has a special relationship to this tree; it haunts his dreams and is woven into the painful memories of his childhood. He bids the gardeners take care of the Skelow and burn its fruit and leaves upon the stone altar by the long pond.

He is still in high good humor and leads his party of good companions out of the park into the countryside. They follow the hawkmasters, the cagers and the dogs sedately along a road through the cornfields. They can look to the northeast and glimpse the Hain, the royal hunting grove, and the blue waters of Lake Musna, but their way lies to the south. They leave the road and climb a low hill; before them lie broad slopes of grassland and a long valley, a deep grassy ravine, dotted with trees. A brook pushes through reeds and sedges in the valley floor. It is a place that must teem with birds and other small game.

The king rides to a chosen spot, a natural platform on the side of the valley. The party dismounts and the ladies and gentlemen turn to and set out their own comforts; blankets to cover the grass and baskets of good things. The king is already engrossed in his hawking: the blue-black wanderers have been set free to fly high, the dogs are off with their handlers into the thick grass. The two great hillfalcons have been uncaged. The dogs point at once and their handlers begin to flush out the hurtling grouse and woodcocks. Sharn, whispering to the bird perched on his gauntlet, removes its hood, meets its dark eyes, raises his hand. The hillfalcon soars away.

All eyes are on the young king. Engist, the burly master at arms and Gerr of Zerrah join the hunt, running to retrieve game. As a wanderer hurtles down upon a grouse and the male hillfalcon takes a woodcock, very high, the ladies cry out in admiration. Sharn Am Zor is in his element, striding about on the hillside. And in the minds of those ladies watching—Sabeth of Zerrah or Veldis of Wirth or the Widow Hargren—perhaps this autumn day, the wide sky, the rich, sheltered valley, the king, with his bright head uplifted, smiling at last, remains as an image of a golden time.