Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  “I don’t understand,” Agion interrupted. “Was Benedict dead?” The centaur scratched his head in puzzlement.

  “Upon that night, Benedict’s father pronounced him dead over strong protest of Knights and clergy, naming Gabriel the Younger sole surviving heir to Castle di Caela. All of this without ever a shred of proof as to the guilt of Benedict di Caela.

  “Who, it must be admitted, did not conduct himself in the days that followed as though he were innocent. Benedict fled the castle to raise an army in the lands north of Solanthas—an army of thieves, of goblins, and of the very bounty hunters sent out for goblin heads by the Kingpriest of Istar. It was a disreputable crew, to be sure, and one that set about to tax, extort, and do Benedict’s bidding in the southwest provinces of Solamnia.”

  “Did anyone support Benedict when he raised the army?” Agion asked, his face just a little obscured by the waning light and the onset of evening. “I mean, any of the Knights and priests?”

  “Most of the priests—not every priest, mind you, but certainly most—saw through Benedict’s illusions to the rats and spiders that peopled them, and what was more, saw that it was Benedict who was shaping those illusions. But there were many Knights who, seeing the legions he could muster, saw power for themselves as well, or what was even worse, feared dangers they dared not brave.

  “His ranks, I am ashamed to say, were not free of our own. Solamnic Knights rode at the head of his columns in defiance of their most profound oaths.”

  Bayard paused in the telling, stood up in the stirrups and looked about him, then flicked the reins lightly on Valorous’s neck as we began to ascend into a region where the once-thick grass grew patchy and thin.

  “So this family you seek to join is descended …” Agion began to say, after a brief silence.

  “From Gabriel di Caela the Younger, of course. He deposed the brother who had deposed him. He destroyed the usurper, though not utterly. For north and west went Benedict, toward the Throtyl Gap and toward Estwilde beyond it—that very Estwilde from which your foolish dice game comes, squire.”

  I nodded in agreement, passing by our old argument to hear the end of Bayard’s story.

  “It was there that the Gabriels caught up with him—Gabriel di Caela the Younger at the head of thirty Knights and two hundred foot soldiers, and his father at the head of a force almost twice that size. When the two joined, there was no hope for Benedict.

  “Outnumbered, misguided, Benedict tossed illusion after illusion, some of which worked at great cost: thirty foot soldiers died crossing a bridge through the Throtyl Gap when it turned out that the bridge was not there, had never been there. Thirty more were stung to death by scorpions in their sleep.”

  I sat back on Agion, breathed deeply and rapidly until the big centaur reached back and steadied me.

  “What ails you, young master?” Agion asked, his big, stupid face narrowing with concern.

  “Altitude, Agion. I’m not good with heights. But we’re interrupting Bayard. Go on, sir.”

  Bayard frowned at me and continued.

  “But all of these illusions were as naught when the battle was joined—when Gabriel di Caela the Younger waded through a barrier of renegade Knights, of goblins and goblin hunters and thieves and mercenaries until he stood facing his brother. In that moment, both of them no doubt knew that hundreds of years were hinging upon what happened next.

  “Still, there was no choice, as there seldom is in the heat of battle. Gabriel the Younger raised his sword and slashed at his brother with a quickness and an accuracy born in the training of the Order. Those who were present said that the world seemed silent as Benedict di Caela’s head tottered a moment, severed above his shoulders, as the face went entirely pale and the eyelids closed. And who knows what the head was thinking when it fell from the shoulders, seeking the ground and oblivion.”

  “But I gather that wasn’t the end of Benedict di Caela,” I said finally, when the silence between us had grown uncomfortable, almost oppressive.

  “Something it was in pronouncing him dead,” Bayard mused, “that indeed unraveled the fabric of things. When Gabriel the Younger struck Benedict down, it seemed as though that was the end of it, that the di Caelas could sit easily upon their wealth and holdings from that time forth. But in the old age of Gabriel the Younger it came—the first visitation of the curse on the family di Caela and the castle in which they lived—a plague of rats and the diseases the rats carry. Two of Gabriel the Younger’s sons were lost—the eldest to disease and the middle son to madness.

  “It was the youngest this time who survived, who was forced to the most radical of methods to lift the curse. Quickly young Rowland ordered Castle di Caela evacuated, carrying the old man Gabriel the Younger out through the iron gates on his shoulders, the old man screaming and cursing in protest with every step. It was then he fired the castle, and as flames licked through the stony parapets, over the crenelations and in the upper rooms of the towers, it was said that you could hear the rats screaming and a scream above those tiny fevered screams which was lost in smoke and in the sound of old dry beams collapsing. All that was left was the stony shell of the walls, and Rowland di Caela rebuilt the castle from the inside, ruling wisely and peacefully for thirty years, until again the curse returned.

  “It is here that the story clouds, for Castle di Caela has been visited by the curse for nigh onto twenty generations, and each time it takes a different form. For the flood failed when Simeon di Caela introduced sluices in the moatwork, and Antonio di Caela stopped the plains fires by opening the right sluices at the right time. The ogre invasions were turned away by Cyprian di Caela, and Theodore di Caela turned back the bandit armies headed by a mysterious, black-robed captain.

  “Even the Cataclysm had a hand in Benedict’s foiling, for at the end of the fourth generation since the curse it was goblins and goblin miners and sappers who tunneled to within a hundred yards of Castle di Caela, filling the inhabitants with panic for the enemy was unseen, beneath them somewhere. When the Cataclysm came, shaking the very foundations of Krynn, the tunnels collapsed upon their makers, upon Benedict himself.

  “So with each generation he has come, unwearying, relentless. In each generation he is turned back, by the eldest di Caela son, sometimes, and sometimes by the youngest or the middle son. Often by the sole surviving heir, for Benedict’s assaults, though ill-fated, take their recurrent toll.

  “Upon this generation a silence has fallen, as Robert di Caela repelled the last attempt some forty years back, when he was a lad of sixteen. Since that time, the House of di Caela has dwelt in peace, and those in the surrounding country have for the most part concluded that, since the sole surviving heir to the holdings is the Lady Enid di Caela, and whomever she marries, her heirs will take their father’s name and the land will pass from the di Caela family forever.

  “For the most part, they have concluded that. But the di Caela family is not so sure.”

  “And thou, Sir Bayard?” Agion asked as Bayard paused once more in the telling. “I have heard this four-hundred-year-old story of wrongs and vengeances and violence heaped on injustices, and I must confess I have many questions. The largest of these is thy part in an ancient story of woe.”

  “That, too, is a long story,” Bayard began, waving as though he’d had enough of stories for the afternoon.

  “Oh, but tell us please, Sir Bayard!” Agion insisted. “Galen and I love stories!”

  “Agion, perhaps Sir Bayard is a little tired, and …”

  “Never mind, Galen,” Bayard said wearily. “For both of you deserve to know, since all of this concerns you.”

  And he began again, with another lurid tale, as his audience rode beside him.

  “My childhood promised to be not unlike yours, Galen. I was the heir to a large castle in central Solamnia.”

  “Which is very like my childhood, sir,” I agreed sarcastically. “For after all, I am about third down the line to inherit a rattrap of
a moat house in northwest Coastlund.”

  Bayard ignored me, bent on continuing his story, determined to teach me something or kill us both in the process. Is there any story of any successful man’s childhood that is not a hard luck tale?

  “It was no soldiers of Neraka, no bandits from Estwilde, who were to rob me of my birthright, my castle and lands which took years to recover. No, none of our old enemies conspired to take my inheritance from me. Instead, it was our own people who rose against my father one summer night—around this time of year, it was, when I was fourteen. They killed my father and mother. Killed the house servants and retainers, too, for ‘harboring sympathy for the oppressors,’ it was. And when I was fourteen, they would have killed me, had not my good luck and their excitement conspired to save me.”

  “The villains!” I exclaimed, thinking that exclaiming something was what was expected of me.

  I was wrong, evidently. Bayard turned to me, frowned, and shook his head.

  “Not villains. Though I, too, thought so at fourteen, and swore to avenge myself upon them and all of their kind. I was too young to understand either their anger or my oath. Not villains, for the most vicious result of the Cataclysm—when the world collapsed and the landscape changed—was that the poor suffered first and most, Galen. I knew nothing of that at the time I swore my oath, knew nothing of the rage that arises when one sees someone not starving simply because he or she was born not to starve. I learned of that rage firsthand in Palanthas.”

  “Palanthas?” I interrupted. “Let me get this straight. You were orphaned down near the Vingaard Keep, left alone at fourteen, and you still found the courage and the wherewithal for a week’s journey alone, through the Vingaard Mountains, to the city of Palanthas?”

  Agion, too, had become attentive, the name “Palanthas” having roused his thoughts from nowhere. He turned and addressed my protector.

  “Palanthas, Sir Bayard? Thou hast visited Palanthas?”

  “Yes, Agion. And dwelt there.”

  “Then perhaps thou canst tell me. Do they eat horses in Palanthas?”

  I thought it was centaur superstition and prepared to laugh, but saw Bayard nodding in response.

  “The poor do, Agion, when they can get them. But they get them rarely, and are forced to survive on other things. Indeed, I know this firsthand, as I was saying.”

  He continued, his eyes on the road ahead of him, while I looked at Valorous, at the pack mare, and tried to imagine them gracing a table.

  “… so the keep safely behind me, I rode half a mile away, to where I could no longer see the flames from the watch-tower, only the smoke. Then I picked up the westbound road and was out of my father’s lands, into what we once called ‘hostile country.’ Now it seemed to me that the hostile country was what I was leaving behind, what I would have inherited had the times stayed the same.”

  He paused, drew Valorous to a halt.

  “We’ll stop here and eat. A flank of goat can spoil even in brisk autumn weather, if you aren’t careful.”

  Whatever had come to pass in Palanthas, and whatever it had to do with di Caelas, Sir Bayard Brightblade had learned the lessons of survival.

  The story paused at the fireside, the goat flank turning on a makeshift spit, Agion standing, watching around us for anything drawn to the smell of roasting meat.

  “Enough story for now,” Bayard insisted. “You should rest.”

  I nodded, then cast a sideward glance at Agion, now idly nuzzling an apple and staring off behind us toward the west and the swamp he could probably barely remember.

  I dozed awhile at that stopping place, as did Agion. Bayard picked up telling his tale to us where he had left off, when we were once again on the road southeast, passing through countryside flat and dreary—the landscape for which Coastlund is justly famous. As I watched a hawk wheeling in the deepest part of the eastern sky, he resumed.

  “The journey to Palanthas was a perilous one, for the Vingaard Mountains are wretchedly cold at any season. Had it not been summer, the outcome of my story might well have been different.

  “Palanthas, of course, is justly famous for its riches, for the library and the colleges and the splendid tower to which mages from all over Ansalon come to be tested and instructed. If that were all that pertained to the city, its love of learning and of wisdom,” he stated, smiling ironically, “I would surely have found better welcome there.”

  I imagined the city of gold, a paradise seated on a hill overlooking drab countryside in all directions. I did not know then that, despite its riches and glimmer, Palanthas was a rough port town sloping into a deep water harbor, and that from that harbor came mariners who spoke in languages none of us had heard or would ever hear again, men who carried daggers with intricate handles and with poison lacing the toothed edges of the blades.

  Bayard’s story was the first I had heard that hinted at the poverty, the dice and the knives upon which the city’s foundation lay. I listened, unbelieving at first, but the parts of Bayard’s story “went from one to the other,” as Alfric had said before he sank beneath a sea of swampy mud. Agion, however, needed less convincing. He nodded agreement throughout—not that he had been to Palanthas, of course, but that he was sure that the seamy side was the only side of human cities, where small, violent, two-legged creatures gathered in their places of stone and baked mud and dead wood.

  “When I arrived in Palanthas,” Bayard explained, leaning forward and picking a burr from Valorous’s mane as the horse slowed to a walk, “there was nothing for me in the southern part of the city. Shops there were, and merchants everywhere you looked, and most cared nothing for buyers, intent as they were on buying the wares of other merchants in their attempts to be, say, the only tea merchant, or the only furrier in the city. Those who indeed were looking for someone who might buy their goods looked only to the rich—to the mages in coaches, to the spice traders in their gowns, who rode through the streets on their thoroughbred horses. Can you imagine keeping high-strung horses such as those pent in a city?

  “No, there was no employment for me there. I could not even buy food with what little money I had saved from my room at the keep—these merchants were not interested in paltry sums.

  “So to the west of town I went, through the ruins of the old temples devoted to gods these people had set aside because such gods were ‘inconvenient.’ It was here I saw the fabled Tower of High Sorcery, from a distance only and for a short time only. I had no energy to admire architecture.… ”

  Well, it gives you an idea. As Bayard spoke, went on with his tale, a layer of bitterness began to cover every event he touched upon. And I began to understand, when I heard how he slept on the docks, dodging the rats and the cutthroats and the press gangs, why he had turned to burglary when the hunger and the cold began to weigh upon him. Sir Bayard told us of how, finally, the hunger and cold had overwhelmed him in the midst of rifling the chests in a wealthy East End house, how he had found nothing but blankets, had wrapped himself in one and fallen asleep, only to wake in the custody of a Solamnic Knight who was staying in the house on a visit to Palanthas and had, consequently, carried few riches with him for a burglar’s taking. He told of how the Knight had known another Knight who had known another who had known Bayard’s father, and how only then—through this knowing of someone who knew—could he escape the cold and the hunger and the poverty. How only then, many years hence, a Solamnic army at his back, could he set about to recover his lands and the castle at Vingaard Keep.

  “Given the circumstances, sir, I would have called upon any family connections I had myself,” I consoled, Agion nodding in agreement with me. “Your castle was yours, handed down through generations, and you simply used those friendships to drive out the rabble who had robbed you.”

  “But there was no driving out to do against that so-called rabble,” Bayard explained. “For they had never taken up residence in the keep. They felt that if they lived in the luxury of those who had ‘oppressed’ th
em, as they called it, they might grow to be as ill-willed, as evil, as their oppressors.”

  “Do you mean they preferred their straw-covered huts to the halls of Vingaard Keep?”

  Bayard nodded.

  It seemed impossible to believe.

  “Then they deserved the driving out and whatever else befell them later, on grounds of sheer stupidity alone,” I pronounced.

  This time Agion was not as quick to agree, the prospect of thatched housing no doubt appealing more to his appetite than the prospect of stone walls. Nor did Bayard agree, shaking his head slowly, frowning, and squinting as he looked off to the eastern distances.

  “Galen, I cannot answer that. What passes sometimes for sheer stupidity is principles in disguise.” He kept looking east, then nodded as though he had discovered something at the horizon’s edge, which indeed he had. He turned to me, spoke seriously and directly.

  “I have just enough trouble with my own principles that I can’t pass judgement on someone else’s.” I sat back in the saddle, prepared for another pompous lecture, but instead Bayard nodded to the east and changed the subject.

  “The Vingaard Mountains.”

  “Sir?”

  “The Vingaard Mountains. You’ll see them soon. You’d see them now if you knew how to look over distances.” He smiled, tugged on the pack mare’s reins and brought her abreast of Valorous. “We bear due east from here, and we should reach the mountains close to where the pass lies.”

  They were black, those mountains, as the evening sky darkened to a deep blue. That night we camped under their shadows, the foliage around us just beginning to grow more sparse as the ground slanted upward and the soil became more rocky.

  We slept heavily, or at least I did, and the morning found me no more fresh than when I bedded down the night before. Bayard shook me to wake me, and when shaking did little good, he nudged me with his foot. The side of the boot atop fresh saddle sores did not sit well, in a manner of speaking.