Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  Bayard showed no signs of mercy or of exhaustion. In fact, he no longer seemed affected by any of the hardships of the journey. That morning and that afternoon he urged on a flagging Valorous, moving through ragged countryside as though we were cavalry—or worse, scouts for a band of nomadic raiders. The occasional farmer or traveler we saw shied away from us, no doubt thinking, True, there are only two of them, but judging from their faces, they’re the advance party for a terrible bunch of freebooters.

  We went on like this into the night, when our relentless passage ceased, and Bayard, alighting from Valorous as though he were rushing also to rest, said simply, “Here.”

  Then he tied the reins to the low fork of an apple tree and, leaning against the trunk, fell into a sudden and deep sleep.

  I sat up on my blanket. For a moment I thought I was back at the moat house, subject to some punishment, but my thoughts cleared and the surroundings tumbled back into place—the rolling Solamnic countryside, the stars of Gilean the Book glittering directly overhead, a huge armed man standing beside my blanket, saying something unclear at first, but then …

  “… until we get to Castle di Caela. From there you may find a dozen paths home, Galen. If not Knights returning from the tournament, then certainly merchants or bards or pilgrims will pass by on their way to the West—to Coastlund or to Ergoth through the Westgate Pass—and they’ll not mind an extra hand with the horses until you’re back to your father’s house.

  “But as for me, I owe your father the courtesy of seeing to it that you’re not lost or waylaid in Solamnia. Nonetheless, be ready and mounted at once, or I leave without you.”

  Bayard was always threatening, but after the events in the mountains, I had no confidence that he was bluffing any more. Gasping in the chill night air—the air that feels all the colder when you first awaken—I wrapped my blanket about myself, then grabbed onto the mare’s mane for dear and desperate life as we galloped off after the galloping Sir Bayard, who was just underway in the dark ahead of us.

  It was three days more to Castle di Caela.

  In the early hours of the morning, we galloped like apparitions through the small town we had seen from the overlook in the Vingaard mountains—the town in which Bayard had promised we would rest. Side by side, we rushed between dark thatched houses, only a banked lamp or two in the windows to guide us through the sleeping streets, those lights the only signs at this hour that the town was not abandoned entirely.

  Aside from the brusque awakenings, a shouted command or two, Bayard refused to speak to me, ignoring every question or statement I made, looking beyond me or even through me as though I were invisible. I felt like the puppeteers of Goodlund, designers and performers of the kender puppet shows, who stand on the stage with their wooden creations, move them, and supply their voices. By tradition, the audience has ignored these artists for so long, paying attention only to their puppets, that many outsiders wonder if the kender see the puppeteers at all.

  Yes, things had changed between us. As the sky clouded and the rains began once more, Bayard mired himself in silence. He looked at the road ahead of him only. And no doubt he brooded over the comments the ogre let drop.

  The sameness of things those days on the road—the rolling hills, the silence, the gloominess of weather and of spirits—was so maddening that I was relieved and grateful, finally, to see a change in the landscape when we reached a rise in the road. Looking down into a valley sloping gently eastward, we saw Castle di Caela in front of us, the bright tents and pavilions of two dozen Knights pitched around it.

  “Castle di Caela,” Bayard said offhandedly, and pointed down to the stronghold below us. “We are late, without a doubt.”

  He should have been more impressed. Castle di Caela was no huge, imposing structure like, say, the High Clerist’s Tower scarcely a week to our north; yet it made the moat house of my boyhood look like a cottage.

  I pulled on the mare’s mane, urging her to stop for a moment, even though Bayard was well on his way into the valley.

  Castle di Caela faced west. We could see the main entrance and the drawbridge from where we stood. Four small towers rose perfectly from the corners of a huge square bailey, and these towers varied in height. The farthest one from us was the tallest by far, a square structure looming high above the two conical towers in front of it.

  The upkeep was remarkable. Merlons and crenels altered on the curtain walls like gapped but otherwise perfect teeth. The westward faces of the towers, lit as they were by the sun setting behind us, glistened with a reddening light that made the castle seem brown or rusty, but flawless nevertheless.

  I had never seen its like. I know I was a poor boy from the provinces, unaccustomed to solid architecture, but even though this place had stood for over a thousand years, it shone with the glint of newness as though, like the swamp we had left far behind us, it was constantly growing, constantly recovering from the damage of time and of weather.

  “Something, isn’t it?” I whispered to nobody in particular. The pack mare twitched anxiously, shaking me in the saddle.

  I thought of Agion and of how he would have recoiled at the architectural foolishness of the castle below us, then remembered the few cottages and farmhouses we had passed between the swamp and the western foothills of the mountains, and how our centaur friend would recoil at the little buildings, as though they were somehow a mistake the earth had made.

  The castle seemed to blur in front of me. There was no time to think of Agion. Sir Bayard was getting too far ahead of me. With a sharp clicking of my tongue and a slap on her haunch, I prodded the mare into movement. She galloped down the rise with her rider clinging on desperately, and sooner than I could have imagined, we reached the plain in front of Castle di Caela and started to pass by some of the pavilions.

  Where Knights were striking camp.

  The tournament was over, evidently.

  Bayard was past the tents and the noisy encampments, almost to the gates of the castle before I caught up with him. He had stopped at the edge of the moat, shouted his name up to the sentinel on the battlements, and was waiting for the message to travel to the keep—no doubt to Sir Robert di Caela—and the huge gate to open and the drawbridge to descend. Rigid in the saddle, eyes fixed on the entrance to the castle, Bayard paid me no mind, even when I spoke to him.

  “There is no chance, of course, that we will be offered a warm bath and a feather bed for the night, is there, Sir Bayard?”

  From the moat’s edge, the castle was even more impressive, the walls rising thirty feet or more to the merlons overlooking the gate. Half a dozen archers, perhaps more, stood up there on the battlements and gazed idly down at us. They were not curious at all—Just another outlander Knight, they probably thought.

  Only this one is late.

  Behind the archers, if you leaned back in the saddle and craned your neck almost to the point of snapping, you could see over the gate wall to the top of the tallest tower, there in the southeastern corner of the castle. Atop that tower fluttered a wide blue banner, clearly visible because it was held aloft by the north wind—the flag of the House of di Caela, red flower of light on a white cloud on a blue field. It was all very rich, very blue-blooded and forbidding.

  Nervously I looked to Bayard, who paid me no attention. Instead, he dismounted and rummaged through the blankets on Valorous’s back until he drew out a thing wrapped in linen, large enough that it surprised me I had not noticed it before.

  Indeed, had I been half a squire, I not only would have noticed it but have taken pretty good care of it.

  It was a shield, naturally, that Bayard unwrapped there at the entrance to Castle di Caela. Not the one he had been using to absorb the battery of vanishing satyrs or mysterious ogres, but a shiny one, unscratched and unscathed, bearing the imprint of a red sword against the background of a burning yellow sun.

  The Shield of the Brightblades.

  As blue bloods met blue bloods.

  The gat
es were thrown open for us, and Robert di Caela himself came down from the keep to greet us, all polite smiles and elegance. He was one of those men whose hair turns gray or even white in his twenties, who retains those youthful features under plumage that should belong to a man twice his age, and as a result looks even younger in the bargain than he actually is. And within the young face hung a white moustache neatly trimmed over a highbred nose, as handsome and as curved as a hawk’s bill.

  His eyes were green as the ocean offshore. This was no man to wrestle hunting dogs in his great hall.

  It was good blood, good breeding, a bone structure to be envied. I began to hold out hopes for Enid. Indeed, I began to hold out hopes for Bayard—that something had happened in the lists or in the musings of this important, elegant man that had left Bayard the swain of the moment, Enid di Caela’s suitor of choice. That Bayard, according to his prophecy, would tie his family name to that of the di Caelas.

  Or so I was hoping.

  Until Robert di Caela spoke.

  “Brightblade, you say? Ah, there was a time I feared that name had died out—in your youth it would have been, when the peasantry seized Vingaard Keep. Yes, the name figures mightily in our past history. Perhaps it might have figured mightily in our present … had you come in time.”

  “The tournament …” Bayard began, questioningly.

  “Is over,” Sir Robert stated flatly. “And my daughter is betrothed.”

  Bayard’s face reddened.

  “Betrothed …” Sir Robert continued, with a hint of coldness and of trepidation in his voice, “to Gabriel Androctus, Solamnic Knight of the Sword.”

  I could not tell if that coldness and trepidation had been saved for Sir Bayard, or whether they now belonged exclusively to this Androctus fellow. But I could tell that Sir Robert di Caela, despite his courtesy, was not reveling in the choice of son-in-law.

  “No, Sir Bayard Brightblade of Vingaard,” Sir Robert continued, this time even more coldly, “there were stories afoot that you would be here—indeed, that you might even have been favored to win in the lists. My old companion Sir Ramiro of the Maw was prepared to wager a substantial amount of money on your lance.”

  “I know Ramiro well,” Bayard replied modestly. “He has a penchant for the long odds.”

  “Made even longer when the party in question fails to show!” Sir Robert snapped. Then he governed himself, smiled, gestured toward one of the doors to the keep. “The young man chosen by lance, though a bit rough around the edges, seems of impeccable breeding and singularly gifted with the lance.”

  Sir Robert looked pointedly at Bayard, who dwindled on each step across the courtyard. When we reached the door to the keep, Bayard seized the chance to leave Sir Robert and Castle di Caela gracefully.

  “It is far from me to belittle hospitality, especially that of such a noble and gracious house,” he began, gaining his confidence and balance as he spoke, “but my horses are tired. So also must be my squire.”

  That he added almost as an afterthought.

  “With these duties in mind, I must beg leave of you until tomorrow. With your permission, I shall travel outside the walls and set up my pavilion among the other Knights.”

  The first problem with all this courteous withdrawal was that we had no pavilion to set up—not even a tent to pitch. But Bayard wasn’t thinking of lodging; instead, he was all fired up to get beyond these walls, where, I could tell, we would shiver about a campfire until the early hours of the morning, when we would leave quietly, in the company of some of the other departing Knights. In only a moment’s conversation with Robert di Caela, it had become evident that the great doubt in Bayard’s thoughts had come to blossom: that the handwritten prophecy in the margin of the Book of Vinas Solamnus was at best a fanciful scrawling, at worst a cruel joke.

  Bayard was beaten. Instead of embarrassing himself and the name of Brightblade any further, he intended to beat a quick retreat to the swamp in Coastlund, bearing the news of our comrade’s death and fulfilling his promise to Agion by undergoing centaur trial.

  “I respect the decision of my liege lord and protector, Sir Robert, but if it please Your Grace, I should like to stay in the Castle di Caela this evening.”

  Bayard and Sir Robert gaped at me.

  We stood at the big mahogany doorway to the keep—as tall as two men and five times as heavy—and it was as though that door had fallen suddenly onto the four of us.

  “Certainly, young man, you are welcome to the hospitality of this castle …” Sir Robert began. I could sense the big “however” approaching in that sentence, so I leaped in quickly.

  “Then I shall accept your kind offer, sire.” I turned to walk to the horses and retrieve my belongings from atop the pack mare, knowing that both Knights were far too much the gentlemen to make a decision in my absence as to where I would stay.

  That’s the best thing about good old-fashioned Solamnic courtesy: you can rely on the people you’re taking advantage of to be basically more decent than you. Walking back toward the horses at the main gate in the curtain wall, I could relax, could take my first chance to look around me, knowing that no plots were hatching while Galen was away.

  Castle di Caela was less a castle than a city within walls, or at least it seemed so to my eyes at the time. Thatched huts and lean-tos lined the inside of the gate wall. They seemed to be either homes or places of business for peasants and farmers who were there to peddle wares, to argue among themselves, to offer me chickens.

  Once inside the castle gates, our horses had seemed more at ease, their only anxiousness that of hunger. While one of the farmers had turned to curse another, I dipped several radishes out of the basket at the front of his stall and offered them to the pack mare. She ate serenely, snorting briefly at the first spicy taste of the plant but then chewing loudly and delightedly, her big brown eyes half-closed in bliss.

  I watched the pack mare chew, carefully drawing my bag of belongings out of the clutter piled atop her saddle. It was times like this that you wanted to be a horse or mule, free of memories of the past and worries about the future and most of all the politics of the present. Let my only concern be where the next radish was coming from, and I’d carry a hundred pounds of armor gladly.

  I looked over my shoulder, careful to put my hands behind my back in case the pack mare were to confuse my fingers with further radishes.

  At the keep door Sir Robert and Bayard continued to talk—calmly for all I could tell, although I could see, even from this distance, that Bayard was still red from his squire’s disobedience. Be that as it might, I figured I was his squire no longer.

  Which did not mean I had left his service.

  For there is nothing that turns a boy’s thoughts inward more completely than a long ride in silent company. Especially when he knows the thoughts of his companion, and knows that they are not friendly ones. Had all the rolling lands of Solamnia lay between the foot of the Vingaard Mountains and the gates of Castle di Caela, it would not have been enough traveling, enough time, to outrun the thoughts of that narrow pass, of the gloating head of the ogre.

  Of our fallen friend and his humble cairn of stones.

  What I had cost Agion I didn’t see how I could return.

  But I owed Bayard some serious penance. I intended to get to work on that, and far better to work from somewhere in this castle, where his hopes for power and matrimony lay shaken, than out of some solemn campsite. Far better to tunnel than to sulk.

  After all, they did call me Weasel.

  If all else failed, I could burrow into Robert di Caela’s affections. In the days to come I would flatter the old man, cast admiration on his every word and action. I would even marvel at his gestures. Enid I would treat as my dear older sister, regardless of how stern and blocky she might be, and I would learn at Sir Robert’s hand the management of the estate while this newfound sister was off in the barrens of wherever becoming disenchanted with Gabriel Androctus. I would fill Sir Robert’s
empty nest, and by the time a question of inheritance arose (which would be years, judging from the strength and apparent health of the di Caelas), I might well have flattered and groveled enough before him that I might be heard in the halls where wills are drawn up. I liked the size and shape and luxury of Castle di Caela. I hoped devoutly to stay awhile.

  But first things first. In all this many-windowed splendor there had to be a prospect for Bayard.

  As Bayard went to the gate and out into the countryside surrounding the castle, where he would spend the night on the ground surrounded by horses while I pitched camp in fresh bedding surrounded by silk, by a fireplace I prayed, he glared at me with such a look of disbelief and defeat and betrayal that for a moment I was angry, outraged that despite the Scorpion and his thefts and lies and misdeeds. Bayard thought I was the real weasel in the henhouse.

  Then the smell of roast beef reached me from somewhere in the warm recesses of the castle keep. I followed Sir Robert through the huge mahogany door, into a well lit room of polished marble, filled with buffed armor and dark paintings.

  It was the kind of lodging I was born for, I decided.

  “I heard the name ‘Galen’ in my exchange with Sir Bayard,” Sir Robert began, draping his magnificent blue cloak over a nearby chair. “Is the family name one I would recognize, or are you …” and he smiled without any irony I could see, “… from a faraway place where I might not know the names?”

  “I’m a Path warden myself, sir,” I said.

  “I see,” Sir Robert replied, and said nothing else, as he lit a candle resting on a mahogany table in the hall and beckoned to me to follow him.

  We passed through the anteroom of the family di Caela. I knew the Brightblades had some sort of historical importance—and I was hoping devoutly that Sir Robert wasn’t going to ask me to refresh his memory on my family history—but somehow both names paled in the glamor and traditions housed by this building. I was walking in a shrine of sorts—I knew Father and Gileandos would both be impressed.