Summer King, Winter Fool

by Lisa Goldstein

Anthiel shook his head. “The poet-mages are jealous people. He may stop his work altogether if he senses someone else speaking verses.”

  “But he’ll die. We’ll all die if he backs down.”

  The other man shrugged. “I know only what I tell you. I’ve met a few wizards in my life, though none as knowledgeable as Penriel. But I have never heard that any of them was able to work with another mage.”

  “He may have to. We can’t continue on like this.”

  But that morning no illusions came from the Shai camp across the plain. The duke returned from wherever he had been, but Val could not find a time to get him alone. And then, as the camp was taking the noon meal, the sentry blew the trumpet that meant an attack of men, not magic.

  Val put down his bottle of ale and stood quickly. He could barely make out the Shai, specks small as birds riding toward them across the plain. The sun sparked off their golden armor, and as they came nearer he could see the helmets shaped like half-masks that covered their eyes and nose. They had more horses than the men of Etrara, and they rode them in tight formation.

  Val mounted his horse and called to his men. Before they had gone halfway across the plain they met with the enemy. A mounted soldier armed with a sword attacked, and he raised his own sword to strike.

  The sendings of the wizards began while Val and the other man fought together. Bells and thunder pealed across the plain, and after a while he heard a strange music of trumpets and drums. The music seemed to put heart into his opponent and he fought with desperate strength, urging his horse to advance. Suddenly, before Val could raise his sword to counter the attack, the other man fell, his breast pierced by an arrow. Val turned to see his rescuer but there was no time; another man was upon him.

  The lessons of his fencing master came back to him and forced out all other thought. He became like the mechanical figure he had once seen at the palace, capable of a bare half-dozen actions, moving only in response to his opponent. Somewhere on the field men screamed and horses neighed and an unearthly music played, but he managed to hear none of it. His world had narrowed down to the flashing blade of the man before him.

  Finally the other man allowed him an opening. He moved forward and drove his sword to the man’s heart.

  There was no time for a respite, though; more of the Shai were heading toward him. It seemed a long time before he could stop and take stock of his troops, but by the sun it could barely have been an hour. The sendings had ceased for the moment; the field was a little quieter now.

  Something shone to his right and he turned. The hero Andosto, said to be the grandson of the god Callabrion, fought his way through a knot of men. The light seemed to radiate outward from the man, and Val wondered if it could be the immanence of the gods he had heard about. The light gladdened him, and he wheeled his horse toward the fighting.

  He slew two of the Shai fighting his way toward Andosto. By the time he reached him Andosto had killed the others. The hero grinned at Val, the only one on the battlefield who did not look weary. The light around him was stronger now.

  Andosto called out something, but it was drowned out by another loud peal of bells. “What?” Val said.

  “Where’s Arion?”

  “Arion? I don’t know.”

  Val saw Andosto frown. Had the Shai taken Arion prisoner? Could they be trusted to ask for a ransom, like civilized men, or would they put the duke to death?

  A half dozen of the Shai rode against them, and Val put the duke out of his mind. He and Andosto faced the enemy at the same moment, and side by side they stood against their attackers, forming a wall the Shai could not pierce. The light that came from Andosto warmed him, moving him to a courage he had never known, making him dare much against the enemy.

  They killed four of the Shai between them, and the others fled. Val looked around him. In the distance he could see Arion and his men, near the Shai camp: the duke’s standard waved in the chill wind from the mountains. Dozens of soldiers had gathered around the duke, and Val realized with amazement and joy that most of Arion’s company had survived the battle. He rode toward them.

  As he drew nearer he saw one of Arion’s archers fit an arrow to his bow and aim it toward him. “Stop!” Val called across the plain, raising his hand. His voice sounded weak among the confused noises of battle. He saw the arrow leave the bow and managed to turn his horse aside at the last minute. The arrow grazed his thigh.

  Had the archer taken him for one of the Shai? Val hurried on toward Arion, intending to berate the man for his stupidity. The archer took another arrow from his quiver.

  Val wheeled his horse away from Arion’s company. The man was mad. Did he, Val, wear golden armor and a helmet? Was this the sort of discipline Arion kept among his men?

  He turned in time to see the archer’s second arrow fall several yards short of his horse. But he saw something else as well, something far more chilling than the sight of a lunatic shooting his own men. Arion had lowered his lance and was shaking the hand of one of the helmeted men.

  Betrayal, Val thought, feeling cold. We’re all betrayed. This is the plan Arion made against Callia.

  Arion’s company and the Shai turned as one, and they headed toward the soldiers of Etrara.

  The men of Etrara began to give ground. Some, probably, did not want to fight against their duke, and others did not yet understand that Arion had changed sides.

  The Shai came on. They were close enough that Val could see a man riding near the leader and chanting, the poet-mage who had done them so much damage. A sending formed in the air, a huge wave coming on across the plain, unstoppable.

  Where is Penriel? Val thought. His leg throbbed, and he looked down at his wound. Blood had drenched his breeches. He felt the despair of the sending reach him before the actual apparition did. He would die of his wound. They would all die, all the men of Etrara, lost here on a plain far from home. Where is Penriel?

  The wave roared over him. His horse reared in fright and he fell to the ground, dazed; he managed to get clear of the animal just in time. Then it seemed as if the wave lessened, began to calm. Callabrion be thanked, Penriel had come at last. Val lifted his head.

  But it was not Penriel that Val saw calling out verses against the noise of the water. Anthiel stood on the grassy ridge, his voice barely audible over the rush of the waves. The water of the wave subsided and finally disappeared.

  Val looked around him. Did they have enough men to stand against Arion and the Shai? And would the soldiers fight on, against the duke, against such terrible odds?

  Anthiel was still speaking. A sending formed in the air above him, a vast forest of moving trees. Val saw the Shai wizard say something, a spell of banishment, probably, but the forest continued on, implacable.

  Val laughed, his heart lifting at the sight. Truly the man was an artist, a poet. But as he watched he saw this sending dissolve as the first one had. And the Shai, joined with Arion’s forces, had not succumbed to despair but had continued on across the plain.

  He got to his feet quickly and looked around for his horse. The animal lay nearby but would not be coaxed up; it had been stunned by the sending or by its own fall.

  The Shai were nearly upon him. He raised his sword. Andosto rode up next to him and engaged one of the armored men. Val thought he could hear Andosto reciting poetry and he felt hope grow briefly within him; had the man been trained as a mage?

  But as he listened he realized that Andosto was speaking an invocation to his grandfather, the god Callabrion. If Callabrion heard he did not choose to help his grandson; the light around Andosto grew stronger but his enemies did not retreat.

  One of the Shai in front of him drew his sword, and Val parried the attack wearily. He heard Andosto call out triumphantly but could not spare the time to look at the other man. At the edge of his vision he saw a man fall from his horse. Arion.

  Val doubled his efforts against his opponent, hoping to fight his way toward the duke. But others had seen Arion as well,
and a handful of soldiers on both sides pressed toward him. In the confusion Val lost sight of the Shai he had been fighting. Something hit him hard, and he fell.

  When he woke it was night. He could not hear the sounds of the battle, and he wondered if it might be over, wondered who had won. Where was he?

  He tried to sit up, but a sharp pain in his chest made him lie back. He had probably broken a rib in addition to receiving the wound in his thigh; he was no soldier, that much was certain.

  Someone near him spoke in the barbaric accent of the Shai, and the shock was enough to make him sit up despite the pain. He had been taken prisoner, then. He remembered wondering if the Shai ransomed their prisoners or killed them. Suddenly the question did not seem at all theoretical.

  There was no moon, and the stars did not provide enough light for him to see anything but the distant bulk of the mountain. He put his hands out and felt grass, and then another body only a foot from where he sat. The other prisoner groaned. Val drew his hand away quickly.

  The prisoner groaned again. “Water,” he said. “Water, please, before I die.”

  Val felt thirsty too, and very cold. He listened for the Shai who had spoken before but could not hear him anywhere. In the dark Val felt rather than saw the other prisoner move.

  “Who are you?” the man said.

  “Arion?” Val said, astonished. “It can’t be—Arion?”

  “Yes,” Arion said hoarsely. “Who are you?”

  “Val.”

  Arion laughed shortly. “Val. Sometimes I think you worry Callia more than the Shai, you and Tobol An. By all the gods, I wish I knew what she’s planning. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me now, now that I’m dying.”

  “Come—you won’t die here.”

  “I will, though. I can feel my death coming for me—I’ll be feasting with Sbona before the night is over. She told me, the old woman. She said I will love a foe and hate a friend, and that one will betray me and the other save me. The Shai betrayed me, that much is certain. They accepted my help, but they never intended to let me live.”

  “It was Andosto who attacked you.”

  “Was it?” Val heard the bitterness in the other man’s voice. “Then why am I wounded in the back? They killed me, the Shai did, after I had given them the forces of Etrara. And you’ll save me, Val, won’t you? You’ll tell them in Etrara I fought bravely in the defense of my country.”

  How many people had seen Arion riding at the head of the Shai’s forces? It didn’t matter; if Val repeated his story often enough no one would question it. And he would do that one favor for Arion, for his brother, would grant the man the heroic death he so desperately wanted. “I will,” he said. “Who told you this? Who was the old woman?”

  “She said I would have my heart’s desire. What is my heart’s desire, though?”

  “A hero’s death,” Val said.

  “Yes.” Arion coughed. “A hero’s death. They’ll make songs about me in Etrara after I’m dead, won’t they?”

  “Of course they will. I’ll make a few myself.”

  Arion said nothing for a long moment. Then, “Betrayed,” he said finally. “Betrayed by everyone. Penriel left the field after that last sending, did you notice?”

  Penriel hadn’t fought because Anthiel had made his own verses. The poet-mages are a jealous people, Anthiel had said. “Who won the battle?” Val asked. “Do you know?”

  “Oh, the Shai, of course.” Arion sounded weary. He coughed again. “Their forces are far better than ours, and their commander, Rakera, is a brilliant man. Callia was overconfident—she knows nothing about the realities of war.”

  He laughed harshly. “Callia. Valor is nothing without honor, I learned that much. There was no honor in fighting for my sister, and none in fighting against her.”

  Arion was silent a moment. Then he said, “No, Val, tell them how I died. Tell them that there are better things than a hero’s death. Tell them I said that heroes should live, not die uselessly in battle.”

  “I will, Arion. Come, you shouldn’t spend your strength talking. Sleep. I’ll tell them.”

  Arion said nothing. Val slept a little, fitfully, waking when the pain in his side grew worse. It was only when dawn came that he saw Arion stretched out cold on the grass; the duke had died sometime in the night. He feasts with Sbona now, Val thought, and closed his half-brother’s eyes.

  Taja sat in the central room of the library and worked on the catalogue. The room’s great walls curved inward and met in an arch far overhead. Rows of scarred wooden cabinets were bunched together in the center, looking somehow out of place in the vast hollow of the room.

  She leafed through a book called A History of the Battle of Arbono and, as she had feared, found another book sewn into the binding. She sighed; she would have to catalogue it twice. The second book proved to be a hymn to the goddess Sbona. And there was a third book after that, a treatise on medicine.

  When she had finished she put the triple book back on the pile of those already catalogued and opened the next one. A book by the poet Cosro, according to the title a hymn to the Ascending God. She read a few lines and nearly laughed out loud. The book was in fact about a man’s first night with a woman, and used the images of rising and falling to mean something very different.

  Two soldiers came into the room. “We need to get back to the records room,” one of them said. He spoke carefully, as if he expected his voice to echo in the enormous spaces of the room. Instead he sounded plain and clear, like the actors who had once visited Tobol An. Taja tried not to smile. She had seen people respond this way to the catalogue room before.

  “Take that staircase over there,” Taja said. “Turn left when you come out and—”

  “No,” the man said. “You show us.” He had a large mustache, which he smoothed after he spoke.

  She sighed and put down her pen. As the weeks passed the soldiers had grown more uncomfortable with the small traces of wizardry left in Tobol An. They did not go into the library alone, and they began to avoid the ruined stones left by the wizards’ war. They did not travel into the forest at all.

  As she led the two men to the records room she passed five more soldiers, who demanded to know the way out of the library. “By the Wandering God, I think the place changes shape whenever we come here,” one of them said. No one laughed.

  They were actually within two doors of the exit. She directed them to the outer door and then climbed a staircase to the next level. Since the soldiers had come she seemed to spend half her time showing them through the library.

  She usually didn’t mind being helpful; it was part of her task as a librarian. But like the rest of the villagers she resented the soldiers for other things, for the men and women—five of them now—who had been arrested and put in cages, for the huge amount the soldiers consumed in food every day, for the fact that they insisted on paying for their meals and lodging with the debased coins of King Gobro III.

  They came to the records room and she turned to go. “No, you’ll stay with us,” the man with the mustache said. “The records have to be somewhere in this room. And I think you know where they are. I think you’ve lied to us.”

  She sat and watched as the two soldiers went through the drawers. They worked methodically; unlike the first men she had brought here they studied every name, not just the file headings. It took them more than an hour to finish.

  “By the Burning Ladder, the records have to be here somewhere!” one of the men said, slamming the drawer shut. “You know where they are, don’t you?”

  “No,” Taja said. She looked directly at him; she had noticed that the soldiers always turned away whenever her eyes met theirs. Val had done the same thing.

  “She’s lying, as I said,” the other man, the one with the mustache, said. “She’s the librarian, after all.”

  “The queen’s getting impatient. The commander said she wants us to try torture on the ladder.”

  “Aye, sometimes torture’s the on
ly way to get to the truth.” The second man moved closer to Taja, looked down at her. “Would you give up your secrets then? Your hands stretched over your head, your legs tied, your body hurting in every joint? You’d beg to tell us the truth, wouldn’t you?”

  The first man seemed uneasy; he had probably mentioned the ladder only to frighten Taja. “We—we should ask the commander first.”

  “We’ll take her with us to the commander, then.”

  They moved toward her. She was ready for them and managed to hit one in the midriff and knock the wind out of him, but then the second came for her. She tried to fight him off but the first one had recovered and seized her from behind. She struggled and the second hit her across the face.

  “How do you suppose you’ll get out of here without my help?” she asked.

  The second man drew a knife and laid it across her throat. “We’ll kill you if you don’t help us,” he said. “Your body could lie here for days before anyone found it.”

  The first man stirred behind her. “Tell us where the records are,” he said.

  She thought he sounded a little desperate; things had moved too quickly for him, had gotten out of his control. She tried to turn and face him, but the other man pressed the edge of his knife into her throat. “I don’t know,” she said. “I told you—I don’t know.”

  “Good,” the second man said. “Let’s take her.”

  She directed the soldiers out of the library. It was raining hard when they left, but a few people had business out-of-doors and they stared after her in horror. No one said anything; they had already learned their lessons in the months the soldiers had been in Tobol An. She was only glad that Pebr wasn’t there to see her.

  The commander had taken over the cottage of the first woman he had caged, and the soldiers led her toward it and knocked on the door. A guard let them into the front room. The commander sat behind a desk, studying a few pieces of paper before him.

  The second soldier and the commander talked together in low voices, stopping every so often to glance over at Taja. The first soldier had remained to keep watch over her. Finally the commander looked up. “Good,” he said. “I was about to suggest something like that myself.”