The Hallowed Hunt (Curse of Chalion)

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  Full night had fallen before the men began actively to resist their cheerful kitchen comrades’ attempts to reload their platters. Ingrey’s plan to let time and the meal sober him enough to rise and go seek the sealmaster’s palace seemed to need more time. Or less meal…The lamps blazed brightly on flushed and shining faces all around.

  A babble of talk resolved in one man making some petition to their prince, who smiled and shook his head, but then made some compromise involving offering up Ottovin.

  “They want tales,” Jokol whispered to Ingrey, as Ottovin rose and put one booted foot on the bench, and cleared his throat. “We shall have many, this night.”

  Now, a new drink was offered around. Ingrey sipped cautiously. This one tasted like pine needles and lamp oil, and even Jokol’s men took it in small glasses.

  Ottovin launched into the sonorous speech of the islands, which seemed to bounce around the tent in rich rhythms. The dialect lay, maddeningly, just on the other side of Ingrey’s understanding, though recognizable words seemed to spring out of the stream here and there. Whether they were Wealdean cognates or just accidents of similar sound, Ingrey was not sure.

  “He is telling the tale of Yetta and the three cows,” Jokol whispered to Ingrey. “It is a favorite.”

  “Can you translate it?” Ingrey whispered back.

  “Alas, no.”

  “Too difficult?”

  Jokol’s blue eyes danced, and he blushed. “Too filthy.”

  “What, don’t you know all those short words?”

  Jokol sniggered happily, leaned back, and crossed his legs, his hand tapping his knee keeping time to Ottovin’s voice. Ingrey realized that he’d just managed to make a joke. Across a language barrier. And had not even given offense. He smiled muzzily and took another sip of his liquid pine needles. The men crowding the benches and ranged along the walls laughed uproariously, and Ottovin bowed and sat, collecting his due drink; the custom seemed to involve tipping it back in one gulp. The islanders applauded, then began shouting at their prince, who acquiesced and rose in turn to his feet. After a rustling and murmur, the tent fell so silent Ingrey could hear the river waves lapping gently on the hull.

  Jokol drew a deep breath and began. After the first few sentences, Ingrey realized he was listening to verse, rhythmic and alliterative. After the first few minutes, he realized that this was to be no short or simple offering.

  “This is an adventure tale, good,” Ottovin confided to Ingrey in the usual behind-the-hand whisper. “These days, it is hard to get anything but love stories out of him.”

  The sound of Jokol’s voice washed over Ingrey like the rocking of a boat, a cradle, a horse’s stride. The beat never wavered; he never seemed to pause at a loss for a word or phrase. His listeners sometimes giggled, sometimes gasped, but most often sat as though enspelled, lips parted, the lamplight caressing their faces and gleaming from their eyes.

  “He’s memorized all that?” Ingrey whispered in astonishment to Ottovin. And at the man’s slightly blank look, repeated, tapping his forehead, “The words are all in his head?”

  Ottovin smiled proudly. “That and a hundred hundred more. Why do you think we call him Skullsplitter? He makes our heads burst with his tales. My sister Breiga will be the happiest of women, aye.”

  Ingrey eased back on the bench, swallowed some more pine needles, and reflected on the nature of words. And presuppositions.

  At astounding length, Jokol finished, to the enthusiastic applause of his men; they cheered as he knocked back his drink. He grinned sheepishly and waved away an immediate demand for more, with some vociferous debate over the selection. “Soon, soon! It will be ready for you soon,” he promised, tapping his lips, and sat for a time, smiling absently.

  One of the other men took a turn then, though not in verse this time; judging from the raucous laughter, it was another that Prince Jokol might be too shy to translate.

  “Ah,” said Jokol, leaning close to Ingrey to refill his glass. “You grow less glum. Good! Now I shall honor you with Ingorry’s Tale.”

  He rose again, and seemed to settle into himself, his face growing solemn. He launched again into verse, serious and, at moments, even sinister, judging from the riveted looks of his listeners. In very short order, Ingrey realized Jokol was retelling the tale of the corrupted funeral, and of Ingrey’s rescue of the bear and the situation, for Ingrey’s own name, in Jokol’s rolling pronunciation, and that of Fafa, appeared often. The titles of the gods were quite distinct. And, to Ingrey’s dismay, so was the term weirding. Which, judging by the way the men’s eyes shifted to look warily at Ingrey, meant much the same thing in the island dialect as it did in the Weald.

  Ingrey studied Jokol once more, considering the nature of a mind that could take his disaster of sunset and transmute it into heroic poetry by midnight. Extemporaneously. Or perhaps that was, into a campfire tale—the sort designed to send one’s spooked listeners off to bed, but not to sleep…If the sense was represented by the sound, Jokol’s observations had been more acute and detailed than Ingrey would have believed possible, not that his own had been exactly coherent. There seemed not to be any references to wolves, though.

  The response when Jokol finished this time was not raucous applause but something more like a sigh of awe. It became a murmur of commentary and, Ingrey suspected from certain voices rising from the back row, interested critique. Jokol’s smile was more sly, this time, as he tipped back his glass.

  The feast fragmented then, with more food and more drink forcibly circulating. Some men broke out bedrolls and seized corners, and rolled over to snore untrammeled by the noise; Ingrey wondered if they also slept through sea storms. Ottovin, a good lieutenant, averted potential disaster by forbidding the drunken axthrowing contest to have live targets. Jokol stretched his shoulders, eased his strained voice with another drink, and smiled at Ingrey in a curiosity that Ingrey returned full fold.

  “Tomorrow night,” said Jokol, “I will make them listen to a love story, in honor of my beautiful Breiga, or they shall get none. You are a young fellow like me, I think, Lord Ingorry. Do you love a one?”

  Ingrey blinked, a bit owlishly. Hesitated. Claimed. “Yes. Yes, I do.” Sat shocked to hear those words coming from his mouth, in this place. Curse that horse urine.

  “Ah! That is a good thing. Happy man! But you do not smile. Does she not love you back?”

  “I…don’t know. But we have other troubles.”

  Jokol’s brows rose. “Unwilling parents?” he inquired sympathetically.

  “No. It’s not like…It’s…She may be under a death sentence.”

  Jokol sat back, stunned serious. “No! For why?”

  It was the inebriated haze he was seeing everything through, Ingrey decided, that made this southern madman seem such a cheerful confidant, a brotherly repository of the most intimate fears of his heart. Maybe…maybe no one would remember these words in the morning. “Have you heard of the death of Prince Boleso, the hallow king’s son?”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “She beat in his brains with his own war hammer.” This seemed too bald. He added by way of clarification, “He was trying to rape her at the time.” The uncanny complications seemed beyond explanation, at the moment.

  Jokol gave a little whistle, and clucked in sympathy. “That is a hard tale.” He offered after a moment, “Still, she sounds a good, strong girl. My beautiful Breiga and Ottovin once killed two horse thieves that came to their father’s farm. Ottovin was littler, then.”

  Brother indeed! “What came of it?”

  “Well, I asked her to marry me.” Jokol’s grin flashed. “They were my horses. The thieves’ blood-price was made low, because of the dishonor of their crime. I added it to her bride gift, aye, to please her father.” He glanced benignly over at Ottovin—his future brother-in-law?—who had slid off the bench a short while ago and now sat draped half over it with his head pillowed on his arm, snoring gently.

  “Justice is not s
o simple, in the Weald.” Ingrey sighed. “And the blood-price of a prince is far beyond my purse.”

  Jokol cocked an interested eye. “You are not a landed man, Lord Ingorry?”

  “No. I have only my sword arm. Such as it is.” Ingrey flexed his bandaged right hand ruefully. “No other power.”

  “I think you have one more thing than that, Ingorry.” Jokol tapped the side of his head. “I have a good ear. I know what I heard, when my Fafa bowed to you.”

  Ingrey froze. His first panicked impulse, to deny everything, died on his lips under Jokol’s shrewd gaze. Yet he must discourage further dangerous gossip on this topic, however poetic. “This”—he pressed his hand to his lips, then spread it on his heart, to indicate what he dared not name aloud—“must stay bound in silence, or the Temple will make me outlaw.”

  Jokol pursed his lips, sat up a little, and frowned as he digested this.

  Ingrey’s somewhat liquefied thoughts sloshed in his head and tossed up a new fear on the shores of his wits. Jokol’s face bore no look of dismay or revulsion, though his interest was plainly deeply stirred. Yet even a good ear could not recognize something it had never before heard. “This, earlier”—he touched his throat, swept his hand down his torso—“have you ever heard the like?”

  “Oh, aye.” Jokol nodded.

  “How? Where?”

  Jokol shrugged. “When I asked the singing woman at the forest’s edge to bless my voyage, she gave me words in such a weirding voice as that.”

  The phrase seemed to slide through Ingrey’s head as sharply as the scent of pine needles. The singing woman at the forest’s edge. The singing woman at… Yet Jokol seemed untouched by the uncanny; no demon-smell hung about him, certainly, no animal spirit hid within him, no geas clung to him like some acrid parasite. He gazed back at Ingrey with a blank affability that one might easily—fatally—mistake for oxlike stupidity.

  A thump sounded upon the deck from outside the tent, then a silvery rattling, a bass growl, and a strangled cry.

  “Fafa at least does not sleep through his watch,” murmured Jokol in satisfaction, and rose to his feet. He prodded Ottovin with a booted toe, but his kinsman-to-be merely stirred and mumbled. Jokol slipped a big hand under Ingrey’s elbow and heaved up.

  “I don’t,” Ingrey began. “Whups…” The ship’s deck heaved and swayed under his feet, though the tent’s sides hung slack in the windless and waveless night. The lamps were burning low. Jokol’s smile twitched, and he kindly kept Ingrey’s arm, guiding him toward the tent flap. They stepped out into the gilded shadows to find Fafa sniffing and straining at the end of the taut chain toward an immobilized figure with his back pressed to the vessel’s thwart.

  Jokol murmured some soothing words in his own tongue to his pet, and the bear lost interest in its quarry and returned to flop down again by the mast. Ingrey staggered as the boat really rocked, this time, and Jokol’s grip on his arm tightened.

  “Lord Ingrey,” Gesca’s voice choked from the shadows. He cleared his throat, stood upright again, and stepped forward into the lapping orange light of the cresset in its clamp beside the gangplank. His eyes shone a trifle whitely about the rims as he glanced again at Fafa.

  “Oh,” said Ingrey. “Gesca. ’Ware the bear.” Ingrey smiled at his rhyme. The big islander shouldn’t own all the good poetry. “Yes. I was just coming to see m’lord Hewwar. Het-war.”

  “My lord Hetwar,” said Gesca, recovering his dignity and a frosty tone, “has gone to bed. He instructed me to—after I found you—inform you that you may wait upon him first thing tomorrow morning.”

  “Ah,” mumbled Ingrey wisely. Ouch. “Then I’d best get some sleep. Hadn’t I.”

  “While you can,” muttered Gesca.

  “A friend?” Jokol inquired, with a nod at Gesca.

  “More or less,” said Ingrey. He wondered which. But Jokol seemed to take him at his word, and he handed off Ingrey to his lieutenant. “I don’t need…”

  “Lord Ingorry, I thank you for your company. And other things, you bet. Any man who can drink my Ottovin off his bench is welcome on my ship anytime. I hope I see you again, in Easthome.”

  “You…you, too. Give my bes’ to dear Fafa.” He groped with his numb tongue for further suitably princely farewells, but Gesca was steering him toward the gangplank.

  The gangplank proved a challenge, as it was seized with the same wavering motions as the ship, and was much narrower, after all. Ingrey, after a short pause for consideration, solved the problem by tackling it on all fours. After crawling across without falling into the Stork, he rolled over and sat up triumphantly upon the dock. “See?” he told Gesca. “Not so drunk. Jokol is a prince, you know. S’all good diplomacy.”

  With a growl, Gesca hauled Ingrey to his feet and draped his arm across his shoulders. “Grand. Explain all this to the sealmaster, tomorrow. I want my bed. Now, walk.”

  Ingrey, a little sobered in mind, though his body still lagged, made an effort to put his boots one in front of the other for a time, as they made their way up through the gates and began to wind through the dark streets of Kingstown.

  Gesca said in a voice of aggravation, “I’ve been hunting all over the city for you. At the house, they said you’d gone to the temple. At the temple, they said you were carried off by a pirate.”

  “No; worse.” Ingrey cackled. “A poet.”

  Gesca’s face turned; even in the shadows, Ingrey could see the lieutenant was looking at him as though he’d just put his head on backward.

  “Three people up there said they’d seen you enspell a giant ice bear. One said it was a miracle of the Bastard. Two others said it was no such thing.”

  Ingrey remembered the Voice in his head, and shivered. “You know what nonsense frantic folks in crowds come up with.” He was starting to feel steadier on his feet. He withdrew his arm from Gesca’s shoulder. Anyway, in the absence of a menacing bear in the midst of a funeral miracle, it hardly seemed something likely to happen again. No god-voice jarred him now, and animals were a quite different proposition from men. “Don’t be gullible, Gesca. It’s not as though I could say”—he reached down within himself for that hot velvet rumble—“halt, and have you suddenly—”

  Ingrey became aware that he was walking on alone.

  He wheeled around. Gesca was standing frozen in the dim light from a wall lantern.

  Ingrey’s belly twisted up in a cold knot. “Gesca! That’s not amusing!” He strode back, angry. “Stop that.” He gave Gesca a short shove in the chest. The man rocked a little, but did not move. He reached up with his bandaged hand—it trembled—and took Gesca by the jaw. “Are you mocking me?”

  Only Gesca’s eyes, wide with horror, moved, and that only to blink.

  Ingrey licked his lips, stepped back. His throat seemed almost too tight to speak at all. He had to take two breaths before he could reach down again, and that barely. “Move.”

  The paralysis broke. Gesca gasped, scrambled back to the nearest wall, and drew steel. Both wheezing, they stared at each other. Ingrey was suddenly feeling far too sober. He opened his hands at his sides, placating, praying Gesca would not lunge.

  Slowly, Gesca resheathed his sword. After a moment, he said in a thick voice, “The prison house is just around the corner. Tesko is there waiting to put you to bed. Can you make it?”

  Ingrey swallowed. He had to force his voice above a whisper. “I think so.”

  “Good. Good.” Gesca backed along the wall, then turned and walked rapidly away into the shadows, glancing often over his shoulder.

  Jaws clamped shut, hardly daring to breathe, Ingrey paced the other way, turning at the corner. A lantern hanging on a bracket beside the door of the narrow house burned steadily, guiding him in.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  INGREY DIDN’T HAVE TO POUND ON THE DOOR TO WAKE THE house, for the porter, though wearing a nightshirt and with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders, came at his first quiet knock. The firm way the man locked up
again behind Ingrey did convey a strong hint that this should be the last expedition of the night. He readied a candle in a glass holder to assist Ingrey’s way up the stairs.

  Ingrey took it with muttered thanks and scuffed up the steps. Light glimmered above on his landing, which proved to be from both a lamp burning low on a table and another candlestick sitting on the steps up to the next floor. Beside it, Lady Ijada crouched, wrapped in a robe of some dark material. She raised her head from her knees as Ingrey swung out of the constricted staircase with a slight clatter of his sword sheath against the wood.

  “You are safe!” she said huskily, rubbing her eyes.

  Ingrey blinked around into the shadows, startled. The last time any woman had waited up in concern for him was…beyond the reach of his memory. There was no sign of her warden, nor of his servant Tesko. “Should I not be?”

  “Gesca came, three hours ago or more, and said you’d never come to Lord Hetwar’s!”

  “Oh. Yes. I was diverted.”

  “I was imagining the most bizarre things befalling you.”

  “Did they include a six-hundred-pound ice bear and a pirate poet?”

  “No…”

  “Then they weren’t the most bizarre after all.”

  Her brows drew down; she rose and stepped off the stairs, recoiling as his no-doubt vaporous breath reached her flaring nostrils. She waved a hand to disperse the reek and made a face. “Are you drunk?”

  “By my standards, yes. Although I can still walk and talk and dread tomorrow morning. I spent the evening trapped with twenty-five mad southern islanders and the ice bear on their boat. They did feed me. Have you seen Tesko?”

  She nodded toward his closed door. “He came with your things. I think he fell asleep awaiting you.”

  “Unsurprising.”

  “What of my letter? I worried it had gone astray.”

  Oh. It was her letter she’d feared for, why she had waited up in the dark. “Safely delivered.” Ingrey considered this. “Delivered, anyway. How safe a man Learned Lewko is, I would hesitate to guess. He dresses like a Temple clerk, but he’s not one.”