Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  Some time very early in the morning—the night was at its absolute darkest—I started awake from my watch again.

  Good luck was with me. I had nodded off, and still no dire thing had happened. I sighed and looked overhead, where the Book of Gilean wheeled faintly in the sky above me, covered fitfully by the clouds that passed rapidly by from east to west. It was hard to see beyond the light of the fire, hard to hear beyond the crackle of the blaze, the breathing of the horses, Agion’s snoring, and the dim cry of the wind.

  But somewhere off in the darkness to the south—in the direction of the pass—the wind lifted a sound toward me, making me sit up and listen again, this time to a distant silence, as the sound did not repeat itself.

  For an hour or so I sat there alert and silent, still listening. But from that point onward I heard only the snap of the pine branches in the fire and the rumble of the centaur, who slept untroubled by thought, I was sure, because he was so untroubled by any thought while he was awake.

  What I had heard was the sound of voices passing. And for the life of me, they sounded like my brothers’ voices calling my brothers’ names.

  When Agion replaced me on watch, for a moment I thought about following those voices.

  But where had they gone?

  Who was to say that I had heard brothers on the wind and not some monstrosity?

  Bayard awakened the next morning, babbling to someone about securing the keep, that “Vingaard is once more ours, Launfal.” He was a hundred miles away and a dozen years back, evidently, and it took us a while to explain to him where he was.

  It took him awhile yet to recover. Sullenly he resolved to wait until the next day for us to travel, knowing that his wounds would not bear the journey on horseback.

  When evening came, Bayard had recovered some. He relaxed and became almost pleasant. There was still no sign of the ogre, so he and I climbed an enormous, sloping array of rocks that peaked above the trail, leaving Valorous and the pack mare behind in the care of Agion. Bayard gestured toward the horizon.

  “Perhaps they watched for dragons here back in the Age of Dreams, when there were dragons,” Bayard murmured.

  “Who watched, Sir Bayard?”

  “Dwarves. Maybe men. Maybe a race older than both, or one born from both and since forgotten. We know so little of the time in which these rocks were placed here.”

  He looked at me reflectively.

  “Indeed,” he concluded, “we know just enough of our past to get us in trouble.”

  He was silent for some time. Below us and to the east, the faces of the mountains declined rapidly into foothills, then rolling hills, then plains I could see even from where we were standing—from great distance and in the growing dark.

  This must have been the way this country looked at the time of which Bayard was speaking—back in the Age of Dreams, when men fought elves, when dwarves trusted nobody, when everyone looked out for dragons. Back then, perhaps, the trees grew more thickly in the altitudes, unhewn and unfired. Back then, even in autumn, there might have been more bird song.

  As I reflected, a pinpoint of light flickered at the farthest east my eyesight could reach. It was followed by another, then another, and soon a whole patch of dark downward and eastward lay speckled and spangled with dim light. It looked as though you were looking down a well where someone—some mischievous boy, perhaps—had hidden vials of phosfire.

  “Solamnia,” Bayard said softly behind me.

  I turned to see him looking beyond me, smiling.

  “What you see lighting the eastern horizon is a village in Solamnia. A pleasant little place, halfway between the end of this pass and the south fork of the Vingaard River. We should be there by tomorrow night, the gods willing. And from there the Castle di Caela is but two days away—a day and a night of hard riding if we travel with spirit and the horses are able.

  “As for now,” he said and looked at me more directly, his gray eyes drooping with fatigue, “as for now, a rest well deserved. No matter my hopes of arriving on time to the tournament, I shall not risk the lives of my companions on rocky terrain in the blackness of night.”

  “Master Bayard? Master Galen?” Agion called from below, for the first time a note of fear in his voice.

  He was afraid of the slippery rocks and sliding gravel beneath his large and clumsy hooves.

  Bayard walked to an overlook behind us, to where he was in sight of the centaur.

  “Agion, make a fire. We shall be down shortly, and then all of us will sit and talk, and sleep when the need for sleep comes.”

  The great pile of rocks stretched over the plateau for almost a hundred yards. Bayard knew the pass well, knew the plateau, too. If he had decided not to travel by night, we were crossing deceptive ground indeed.

  On the leeward side of the rock pile the air was calm and dried branches lay bundled and stacked in an orderly fashion, as though the travelers before us had looked out for our comfort, never knowing who we might be or how much time would pass before we followed their footsteps.

  Agion scraped together the fire, using one bundle of the kindling. The horses saw the spark from the flint, smelled the pine smoke, and moved closer to us as the light began to rise from the dried branches. We sat, our backs to the warmth of the horses, our faces and our outstretched hands to the warmth of the fire. It was there that I heard the rest of Bayard’s story.

  And understood that history was something like this notch in the road filled with abandoned bundles of kindling—that things are left within it to be picked up and used later, in ways that those who had left those things might never have dreamed.

  Bayard was right about our past, that often it showed us only enough to get us in trouble.

  “So there were Brightblades at the outset of this story of di Caelas,” I began when the warmth had settled on my skin and the hardtack—almost the last of the traveling food we had brought with us from the moat house—had settled in my stomach. “But what are the Brightblades doing in the story now?”

  Bayard stirred the fire.

  “What is the Brightblade doing. You see, Galen, I am the last of the line, and therein lies the end of the story.

  “For the history of the Brightblades touches that of the di Caelas twice—at the beginning of the family and at its end. Indeed, it is a Brightblade who is supposed to lift the di Caela curse.

  “Don’t tell me I’ve forgotten to mention the prophecy that ties our stories together.”

  He gave me a look of innocent concern.

  “Yes, Bayard, I am afraid you ‘forgot to mention’ it, After dragging me through some swamp that nearly swallowed me whole, then past some behemoth of an ogre that nearly chopped up all of us, then into the coldest weather I’ve ever seen, where even my extremities give up on me, I can understand why you might ‘forget to mention’ that there is a genuine reason for all of this, and that we are supposed to do something about this curse.”

  “Calm yourself, Galen,” Bayard urged, rising from the fire and moving slowly toward me. “Hear the rest of my story.

  “It is the beginning of the end for the line of Benedict di Caela, or for Benedict di Caela himself, if he is, as some legends claim, four hundred years old and forever returning. It is the beginning of the end for him, or he wins and wins finally.

  “For I remembered the prophecy, word for word, the first time I saw it in the Great Library of Palanthas, when there was little to do except read and wait and hope to gain wisdom. I found the book by accident, as such things are often found. I turned to the third chapter at random and read it only idly at first, my interest maintained when the Brightblade name occurred in the text, and I skimmed hundreds of pages to find that name again. It was there at the end of the chapter, in a scrawl in the margin that obviously had bearing on me.

  For generations down, the curse

  Arises in di Caela’s hall

  And things descend from bad to worse,

  Until a girl succeeds to all.

/>   When things have reached their darkest pass

  The Bright Blade joins unto the bride,

  And generations from the grass

  Arise and lay the curse aside.”

  “Lots of verbal hocus pocus if you ask me,” I commented. We had listened in silence to the night wind outside our shelter as it whipped across the plateau. “The first part is pretty clear, and di Caela’s inheritance descends to a woman for the … first time?”

  Bayard nodded. “In four hundred years.”

  “What’s more, I must allow that ‘Bright Blade’ is doubtless no coincidence. But the last part is too gnarled and obscure and badly rhymed. Have you figured out any other way to read it?”

  “Not for the life of me, Galen. Each time I read it, the meaning comes out the same. Which is, I allow, unusual for prophecy.”

  The wind raised its voice, and Bayard moved closer to the fire, regarding me calmly over the wavering flame.

  “It also seems to me that when one finds himself written into the chronicles to come, whether in Sath’s prophetic poems, or the History of Astinus of Palanthas, or a more humble work such as the one I found in the Great Library, when one knows he has a part to play in the unfolding of that history, one plays that part and trusts that his role, because he intends only good, will be for the good.”

  “But, Master Bayard, what if, despite the goodness of heart and goodness of intention, your role is a disastrous one?” Agion asked, draping a cloak about my shoulders.

  The centaur was turning into quite the philosopher.

  “Or what if, sir, your role is a good one, yet you destroy two equally well-intentioned companions in the process of finding your place in history?”

  Bayard rested his head against stacks of granite and limestone. He closed his eyes, and the wind sang its desolate song all around our campsite. Outside this circle of fire and stone, the night was fit for nothing. It was much like I pictured the landscape of the white moon Solinari, claimed by the myths to shed good influence over the planet, but cold and extreme and forbidding on its surface.

  “Don’t you think I have considered these things?” Bayard asked finally, and like the wind over the plateau, a terrible, desolate look passed over his face. He seemed twice his thirty years for a moment, and it alarmed me.

  “But after all,” he continued, and the pained look softened, “it does no good considering these things so long before they happen and,” he gestured about him, “in such a mournful place.

  “Rest assured,” he said softly, urgently, “that I put you at risk for no personal gain, for no ambition of my own.”

  Agion nodded and drew nearer the fire.

  I was less convinced.

  “What does Sir Robert di Caela make of all this business?”

  “Sir Robert di Caela,” Bayard answered hesitantly, “may not know of this business, as you call it.”

  “May not know of some prophecy affecting his family?”

  “Some obscure prophecy, Galen,” Bayard corrected. “Made not even by a historian, but by someone writing in the margin of an old history—in a different hand and a different ink.”

  “Whatever. You mean to tell me that you’re the only one familiar with this … this oracle, sir?”

  “That may be. It was shelved deep in the Great Library. I came upon it by accident—or rather, not by accident, but by curious design, as I like to think. The manuscript was in a wavering, disordered hand that even the young sharp eyes I was blessed with at the time had trouble reading—I suspect it was the original, and that it had never been copied by the scribes. And yet the hand that wrote the prophecy was bold, flowing.”

  “But I could write a book of prophecies, sir, and spin the future out of my most prized imaginings, or use these dice I wrestle with to predict a future you would say was a bogus one. Who’s to say your sage is a genuine seer? That he isn’t some mountebank selling trinkets, peddling at outrageous prices those oils he claims will restore eyesight if you place them on the ailing brow? But in fact the trinkets are glass, the oil is watered patchouli. And what’s in that book may belong on the same shelf of shabby wonders.”

  Bayard nodded gravely.

  “I’ve thought of that, Galen,” he maintained, knitting his eyebrows.

  “All I have to say,” he continued, drawing his hands away from the fire, cupping them, and blowing into them, “is there is a coincidence that is not coincidence, that underlies everything we do that goes into making up history. It was chance that I should find the Book of Vinas Solamnus, but it was not blind chance. It was a chance that took place in a larger order I failed to recognize at the time.”

  “Like the roll of two red dice,” I maintained flatly, and Bayard stared at me a long time, started to speak, then grew silent once again. The pack mare pawed the hard earth behind us and Valorous whickered, as though someone was laughing and dancing beyond the warmth of our fire.

  “As for now,” Bayard concluded, wrapping himself in the blanket, his breath steaming though he stood only ten feet or so from the heart of the fire, “as for now, it’s best not to worry about such things. Best to sleep.”

  The ogre returned as it neared midnight, as Bayard had predicted he would. The brute was no worse for the previous scuffle and, as far as I could see, was spoiling again for contact.

  Bayard, on the other hand, was still in terrible shape. Nevertheless, he raised himself slowly—wearily, I thought—and gave his enormous opponent the time-honored Solamnic salute. Holding his sword in the right hand, his dagger in the left, he stood by the campfire, faced the dark hulk on the horse and folded his arms ceremoniously.

  Well, the dark hulk moved not a whit in response. I doubted that was because the big fool had any reverence for Solamnic ceremony, or any reverence at all, for that matter. Instead, he was probably sitting there looking forward to the little armored fellow’s riding within the operating reach of his trident.

  Agion and I were after Bayard before he rode to meet the ogre, both trying to stop him from tangling with the whirlwind.

  “You’re not obliged to fight this fellow, Sir Bayard,” I urged. “Let’s get him to chase us back up the trail and set a snare for him.”

  It seemed reasonable, or so I thought. Bayard, on the other hand, tightened a cinch on his greaves, his back to me.

  “But if thou contendeste,” Agion added, “that our way must lie through this monster in our path, then remember it is our road—mine and Galen’s—too, not simply thine alone.” He stared at the ogre, sizing up the opposition. “And that the fight ahead is our fight as well as thine.”

  “But I suppose that if we must go through with this,” I swiftly interjected, shooting Agion a look of pure and blistering hatred, “that I must urge you to remember your own words, that ‘this is a conflict between Knight and opponent.’ As much as Agion and I would like to help, we really can’t unless we kind of undo your principles altogether and as a result, make you kind of unworthy of Solamnic Knighthood.”

  “Which is also why I cannot resort to trickery, Galen.”

  “I understand, sir,” I equivocated.

  This time things began differently. Valorous, remembering no doubt the encounter two nights ago, had passed beyond skittish to lathered and twitchy, evidently having his fill of unequal contests. Weary and sore though he seemed, Bayard calmed the big stallion with one pat of his gloved hand, then turned to us.

  The look I saw on his face was not that of a doomed man. Tired, yes, and no doubt a little afraid, but beneath the fatigue and the fear was a confidence I had not seen before, had not imagined.

  “If I can hold him off a while, hold him off only this night, Galen, I shall defeat him,” Bayard whispered. “Of that I am certain.

  “For surely there is a reason that he fights by night alone. I wager that it’s as simple a reason as those that run through the old legends: because he can’t fight by day, because the sunlight weakens him and vexes him. Things of darkness are often like this.
Think of the ogre’s cousins, the goblins and the trolls, how they recoil at healthy sunlight.”

  Bayard turned Valorous toward the battle, glanced back over his shoulder, and smiled as he shut the visor of the helmet.

  “Playing the fox, boy! Playing the fox!” he shouted, as Valorous broke into a canter and, once again under a confident and sure hand, into a gallop, straight toward the dark, imposing figure of the ogre amidst the rocks, off on a dangerous gamble.

  I scrambled to a small plateau by the roadside, where I had a vantage point from which to view the evening’s action.

  As Bayard approached the mounted ogre, I glanced up at the clear and chilly autumn sky. The spiraling, infinite stars in the constellation of Mishakal, goddess of healing and knowledge, wheeled over me, and if I were a stargazer, such a sign would have given me courage.

  Instead I cast the Calantina, there in the light of two moons, in the faintest glow from Agion’s fire a hundred feet away.

  Sign of the Mongoose.

  I knew of the Snake Dances in farthest Estwilde, where the mongoose is brought in to the last movement of the dance, where with nothing but quickness and brains and sharp teeth it goes up against the deadly ophidian to the music of pipe and drums. And I became a little more hopeful that Bayard’s version of events would somehow come to pass, that we were in a story where the sun would rise, the ogre would scream a withering, bloodcurdling scream, and vanish into smoke or melt away before our eyes.

  By the time I had settled in to watch, Bayard had stopped some forty feet from the ogre—twenty feet or so out of the range of the net and the trident, where the rocks drew back from the side of the trail.

  Where there was room to maneuver.

  Bayard stayed where he was on the trail—unmoving, staring down his enemy. The ogre responded in kind, a dark cloud rising as though out of the ground, covering his horse until it seemed that he was borne on the back of a thunder-head. So still were the two combatants that a rabbit hopped silently out of the rocks by the side of the road, stood poised on her haunches between them, and then hopped unhurriedly away, never aware that she had passed through a region that might at any time explode in swordplay and metal and blood. It was that still.