Will Power wh-2

by A. J. Hartley

  “Yes,” I scowled. “Very nice. And the next time I want to go round stinking like an expensive whore I’ll put it straight to use.”

  “Just get a move on,” he snapped. “And brush your hair.”

  And so we left, him in front, striding off and making pleasant little bows every time someone passed, me straggling after him, doing up buttons and cursing quietly to myself.

  We entered a large room, flagged with black and white marble like a chessboard and arranged with padded chairs and benches. There were torches and lanterns everywhere and it was like daylight inside, except for the wreath of smoke that hung about the ceiling. It was packed with men and women in silks and satins and jewels, many seated or reclining elegantly on pieces of furniture that looked like chairs with pretensions to couch-hood. Others were poised artistically against columns or leaning with studied nonchalance on mantelpieces. And all were engaged in hushed conversation. Occasionally there would be a ripple of laughter or a soft pattering of polite applause from restrained, gloved hands. Somewhere a wistfully plucked harp was accompanying a woman singing in a high, lilting tone about a lovelorn shepherdess.

  “What the hell is this?” I breathed to Garnet.

  “It’s a waiting room.”

  “What are all these people doing?”

  “Waiting,” he said, as if this was self-evident.

  “For?”

  “A summons from his lordship the king.”

  “And us?” I pressed, losing patience.

  “We wait, too.”

  “Hold it,” I whispered, venomously. “Are you telling me that you dragged me out of bed before cockcrow so that I could stand around with this bunch of overdressed cretins for an hour?”

  “More,” he said.

  “What?”

  “More than an hour. Probably several. But being here is half the fun.”

  I gave him an oblique look. Was this a perverse brand of humor I had never glimpsed in my generally surly companion?

  “I mean it,” he said, guilelessly. “Just watch and listen.”

  Too exasperated to do anything else, I did.

  Seated on one of the extended chairs close by were two ladies lounging elegantly in cream-colored lace and taffeta. They dripped with pearls and other forms of conspicuous opulence. One wore a necklace of the largest diamonds I had ever seen. Another pair of ladies sat beside them on velvet cushioned chairs. All four were turned to a pair of gentlemen who held court in their midst. Both were tall, lithe, and blond, one in a doublet of sea-green velvet trimmed with golden cord and matching hose, the other, an older gentleman, in royal-blue-and-silver silk. Both were immaculately groomed and wore trim beards that tapered to waxed points.

  “My lord Gaspar,” said the one in green with a wry smile, “affects, I fear, a disposition toward my lady Johanna that he feels not. For as flames give off smoke, so love breathes forth the sighs of passion for all to see. It seems that though my worthy friend bewails his love for fashion’s sake, there is no passion like to mine for my lady Beatrice. I fear his mistress’s disdain has finally quenched his fire and smothered his smoke.”

  The ladies smiled among themselves and waited for the elder to reply. He did, with the smallest step forward and the most casual positioning of one hand upon his hip. “My Lord Castileo,” Gaspar intoned, smiling, “embers and smoldering leaves produce a smoke most bitter and unwholesome to the senses, yet the heat from whence it rises is but a poor and mean thing at which one might not even warm one’s hands. The heart of a furnace burns pure and hot, consuming all and leaving little there to smoke withal. So my love for Johanna, like the core of the forge, blazes with white, undying passion, while yours for Beatrice, I fear, so cool and, doused with overlong laments, smokes merely.”

  “And yet,” retorted Castileo, “are my words from the heart, not crafted in forges or furnaces where men beat out their labors with the sweat of their brows. My words, like my love, are natural and proceed thoughtless from my consumed heart.”

  This met with another burst of applause. I turned, befuddled, to Garnet only to have my confusion increase. He was spellbound, hanging on every word with an awestruck expression on his face.

  “What the bloody hell was all that about?” I breathed. Garnet didn’t respond, so I tried another tack. “This is what they do all day?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it wonderful? Hush now,” he whispered, his eyes not straying from the peacocks in front of us. “Gaspar is going to respond.”

  “The anticipation is crushing me,” I muttered, walking away in search of something more closely resembling entertainment.

  There wasn’t any. I circled the room twice and, save for a little dice rolling here and there, that witty little study in who loves who more seemed the rule rather than the exception. A shepherdess in silk and rubies worth about a thousand acres of grazing land bewailed her lost love (“Alack the day, my Corin’s gone away”), and a curious species of high jump contest flared up for a while. But spoken words were the order of the day: elegant, polished, and memorized. They pretended they were making them up as they went, but I know a rehearsed performance when I see one, and I was looking at about twenty. But, there being bugger-all else to do, we sat there for about four hours and listened to what the fair folk did when they weren’t slaying goblins.

  Renthrette had arrived midway through this study in futility, and her appearance took my breath away. This was not simply because she was beautiful, in a flame-colored satin gown and an extravagant diamond necklace, gold in her hair and crystal studs set into her bodice-though I suppose she was-but because I barely recognized her. She looked like one of them, blending in so well that it depressed me a little.

  “Sorrail sent it,” she said simply, glancing with a kind of delighted uncertainty at her dress. “To help me fit in.”

  “Quite,” I said, fitting in less and less by the minute. “Look,” I said, opting for something direct and virile to offset all this court culture, “shouldn’t we be doing something useful, like organizing a rescue of Orgos and Mithos or something?”

  “Patience, Will,” said Garnet, a remark so out of character that I was still gaping at him when the liveried lackey who had just arrived started whispering to him.

  “They’re ready,” said Garnet, eyes wide with delight. “The king will see us now.”

  “Already?” I said. “I mean, I could listen to this I-love-you-more-than-he-does stuff all day.”

  “Be quiet, Will,” said Garnet. And suddenly his eyes flashed with that dangerous impatience that I knew so well. It was, strangely enough, sort of a relief to see it. At least some things don’t change.

  SCENE X The King

  The lackey, a small, obsequious man in a carefully tailored suit with brass buttons and little epaulettes, led us through a series of corridors and double doors, several of which opened onto smaller versions of the room we had just left. In each, diamond-encrusted courtiers sat around swapping witty banter, reciting lousy sonnets, and singing to each other about their disdainful mistresses. Fortunately, we were moving quickly, so I only caught the odd word, but I’d already heard enough of this verbal poncing about to last me a lifetime, and each half-heard quip, each shrewdly worded jest, each ripple of polite amusement stuck me like the blade of a stiletto.

  “Don’t these people have anything better to do?” I murmured after one particularly sophisticated remark about how kissing a beautiful lady was a rung on the ladder to the divine.

  “The question,” said the lackey who led us, tossing the remark over his shoulder in a manner one of his masters would have been proud of, “is whether anyone could do it better than them.”

  This was obviously supposed to close the matter. I thought otherwise.

  “But if what they’re doing is worthless, who cares whether they are any good at it or not? It’s like being the national champion of balancing a spoon on the end of your nose. I mean, so what?”

  Our little procession stuttered to a halt and
the lackey turned on me with an offended look that flushed his cheeks.

  “These are the elite,” he said stiffly, “and their accomplishments do not merely accompany their station, they demonstrate it and show why they are courtiers and others aren’t. A tradesman can buy clothes and friends, but these people are different, superior. No tradesman could enter here without being shamed. These people just know how to behave, how to dress, and how to converse in civilized society. It is in their blood, and that is why they have the ear of the king and the tradesman does not.”

  With a curl of the lip which neatly coincided with the word “tradesman,” the lackey turned on his heel and marched off. Garnet and Renthrette shot me the obligatory looks of hostility, amazed I could have missed something this obvious, and stalked after him. Someone in the corner began to sing about how beauty and virtue were really the same thing. I, the tradesman who didn’t belong, hurried after the others.

  We had to be announced before being admitted to the king’s chambers. This, for reasons unknown, took a good ten minutes. During that time we stood at the door and tried to look reverential, something which seemed to be an effort only for me. The somber siblings, despite having spent their adult lives fighting the hand of authority, were clearly very impressed with all this ritual and glamorized hierarchy. I suspect that if the Diamond Emperor himself condescended to invite them and their rebel brethren to tea, all organized resistance would collapse overnight while they basked in the glow of his magnificence and that paradoxical “human” quality which apparently justified any semblance of tyranny. “Such and such a lord butchered my father to get his land, but he personally sent a basket of fruit to the funeral. What a decent chap-you know, always has a smile for the locals. Sure, he lives in a castle and eats gold, but if you meet him he’s so genuine, so ordinary. What’s it to us if he wants to turn our village into one big sheep farm and send us into whoredom and beggary? I mean, I’m sure he knows best. After all, he is a lord.”

  Anyway, the announcements started echoing down the halls and through the palace’s sumptuous chambers. “Garnet and the Thrusian wanderers,” they called us.

  “We sound like a pub act,” I remarked, with bitter amusement. And all at once I could see the three of us playing for a crowd in Cresdon’s Eagle Tavern: Renthrette with a lute, Garnet with a bloody big drum, and me with a pair of bent spoons, dodging insults and rotten fruit. But before I could share this little vignette with my companions, we were hustled down yet another corridor, through three more antechambers and, with a silvery fanfare, into the presence of King Halmir, son of Velmir, lord of Phasdreille.

  He was seated in an alabaster throne padded with purple velvet at the end of a long chamber with high windows along the walls. A narrow carpet of the same rich purple led up to it, and on each side stood guards and courtiers, their eyes turned toward us. The king himself was pale and blond, perhaps forty, his hair breaking around his shoulders in luxuriant ringlets, but these were details I noticed later. My first impression of him was one of spectacle. He was dressed from head to foot in cloth-of-gold, and the early afternoon sun splashing down in great diagonal shafts through the windowpanes picked him out and made him shimmer astonishingly, like a man seated amidst flames. We faltered, our eyes on him, and Garnet gasped audibly.

  “Approach his majesty the king,” said the lackey, a smug smile sprawling across his plump face as he took in our response.

  There was a fluttering of fans from the female courtiers as the king inclined his head fractionally: a tiny nod which sent the light in the room dancing, as if a thousand burnished mirrors had been flashed toward the sun.

  We began to edge forward, onto the carpet and down it, Garnet leading, then Renthrette, then me, all half-blinded by his brilliance. He did not move, but a ripple passed through the crowd as we approached and a number of men gathered at the foot of the throne: councilors and private secretaries, no doubt. Some were clad as the rest in bright, expensive fabrics and jewels, others wore the somber black of the archetypal civil servant. I noted that Gaspar, the middle-aged courtier I had seen earlier trading metaphors as proof of his love, was in the latter group. He was changed out of his finery now and looked positively funereal. Sorrail was among the courtiers. His eyes fell on Renthrette in her borrowed finery, and he smiled, pleased.

  I had tried to wash my clothing for the event, but still looked like something dragged in by the proverbial cat: dragged, I might add, through hedges and waterlogged ditches, and then partly eaten. This had not gone unnoticed. While Renthrette got glances of quiet, polite admiration from the men and equally quiet, polite malice from the women, and Garnet got an inverted version of the same thing, the whole assembly found common ground once they’d looked me over: I was a scumbag. My shirt was yellowed with age and sweat, my breeches were stained disturbingly, worn at the seat, torn at the knee, and shredded altogether at the hem. It had been a tough journey, all right? If my comrades hadn’t been so lovingly supplied with fresh and dazzling attire, they would look no better. Well, not much. The point is that I was an adventurer (I had just decided), not a fop. And anyway, I wasn’t the least bit interested in people who would evaluate me according to what I looked like. Who did they think they were?

  The problem was that all this elegance and spectacle was getting to me, and the truth was that, yes, I did feel a bit awkward and out of my element. I once witnessed a frog race in Cresdon years ago. (Bear with me, and the relevance of this will become clear). Some idiot had marked out a little course and people were expected to place bets on which of the five uninterested frogs would finish first. People did, too. When the “race” started, the frogs either sat where they were, went in the wrong direction, hopped out of the course altogether, or tried to make friends with the other frogs. The idiot organizer was press-ganged into paying the gamblers as if everyone had won, and finished the afternoon badly out of pocket and looking like a complete prat. Anyway, being before the king reminded me of that, though I couldn’t decide if I, surrounded by courtly leers and polite smiles, felt more like him or one of his stupid frogs. (See? I told you it was relevant. Sort of.)

  While I was musing on my frog-like status, we had reached the dais where King Halmir, son of Velmir, sat like a human sunbeam. He looked us over, opened his mouth pensively, and said nothing. Not a sausage. So we stood there looking deferential, and lowered our eyes as his gaze strayed over our clothes, lingering significantly on mine. I felt my beard growing. Nothing happened and there was, for a moment, total silence. I felt. . something, like I was being held under a lens like a bug, an odd sensation that was more than being simply looked at. I was being studied, evaluated, but since no one said anything I had no idea whether or not I had passed whatever test I seemed to be taking. Then Gaspar, who was standing beside the king’s throne, no expression on his austere privy-councilor face, coughed politely. We looked up and he bowed fractionally.

  “Thank you,” he breathed. “That will be all.”

  My jaw dropped. I looked from him back to the king, whose attention had turned to his finger ends in a manner which said that our presence in his was no longer required. Garnet and Renthrette bowed and turned. With a rushed and halting movement, I followed suit, glancing back at the king, too bewildered to speak. He was conversing in hushed tones, his mouth barely moving, to Lord Gaspar, who was nodding thoughtfully. We got about a third of the way down the carpet before the crowd began to buzz with chatter as their ordered ranks collapsed. Suddenly there was a throng of people about us, milling here and there and taking no notice of us whatsoever. The king, I discovered, had left the room through a door at the far end. We were propelled out by the lackey, whose manner was now casual to the point of brusqueness, and dismissed. The frog race had been abandoned.

  “Excuse me?” I gasped, as we were virtually ejected from the inner chambers and directed toward the street entrance. “Could someone tell me please what the bloody hell just happened?”

  “What confuses me,”
said Garnet, pushing ornate little pastries around his bowl sullenly, “is why we were presented to His Lordship in the first place.”

  “Especially since he was just going to look us up and down like we were maggots in the dregs of his salad,” I added, taking one of the elegant little pies and sampling it.

  “What do you mean we?” asked Renthrette, spitefully.

  “Oh, it was my fault,” I exclaimed, incredulous, spitting crumbs. “I should have known.”

  “Couldn’t you at least have changed your clothes?” she spat like an alley cat disputing ownership of a fish head.

  “Into what?” I shouted back. “This is it, my entire wardrobe, right here on my back. I’m sorry, but all my golden suits are being polished and I haven’t found some horny courtier to buy me another, all right?”

  At this last she wilted a little and turned irritably away.

  “Have you any idea how much that little get up must have cost?” I went on, pushing the point home and flicking my finger accusingly up and down her dress and jewelry. “More money than I’ve seen in a long time, that’s for sure. Don’t start with me because I don’t look like what happens when you tie a tailor to a goldsmith and ply them with cash. And what the hell is in these pies?” I said, studying Garnet’s ornamental lunch. “They taste of nothing at all. Why can’t we go somewhere where people know how to cook?. .”

  “Shut up, Will,” said Garnet, flaring. “I should have known you’d humiliate us just by being here.”

  “Listen. .” I began.

  “I said, shut up!” he roared, his hand straying for his axe with that just-try-me gleam in his eye. It was a familiar gesture, but it was one of those that never got stale, somehow. It was sort of like watching a favorite play: I always got a little something new out of it, something I’d not seen before. This time it was a hot flush that rushed through me like a bison with its tail on fire and almost made me stain my britches. All right, stain them some more. Happy?