Weasel's Luck

by Michael Williams

  “Perhaps you wondered why I didn’t descend on Bayard, on you, and kill you outright?”

  “It occured to me long ago, sir, but I had no objections to your oversight, if oversight it was.”

  “I followed the rules. I murdered no one.”

  “Most people follow that rule, sir. In Coastlund it’s considered a matter of course to pass the day without murdering someone. But what about the Knights at the tournament?”

  “Slain under the fair and mutually accepted rules of Solamnic combat. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy seeing Orban of Kern fall shattered or the blade of my sword find its home in Sir Prosper Inverno.”

  “And Jaffa? What of the peasant?”

  “He came at me with a sword, Weasel. What would you have me do? And yet I loved watching him fall, knowing that Bayard Brightblade would suffer the blame.”

  I paused and took a breath before I asked:

  “What about Agion?”

  “Agion?” The bird stirred on my shoulder. Again I caught the smell of rottenness beneath the cologne.

  “The centaur, damn it! Your marks were all over that ogre business in the Vingaard Mountains, and you can’t tell me that—”

  “That the fight between Bayard and the ogre was not fair? Of course I can tell you that. The battle was Knight against foe, and was not this … Agion warned that to intrude in a conflict of Knight versus foe would somehow be … dishonorable? The death of the centaur is regrettable, but you cannot deny that he received due payment for his little transgression.”

  I said nothing.

  But in silence I made a vow to myself and to Agion that I would do whatever it took to undo this monster at my shoulder.

  “But why? What earthly use do you have for the di Caela inheritance?”

  “None.” The wing of the bird brushed against me, and the smell of old decay passed over me once more.

  “None anymore. On this side of the darkness the lands pale, the gems and gold shine like rotten wood, no longer with their accustomed light. Even the daughters … pale as I cease to remember them.

  “No, I do this because the di Caelas would have these things, would pass them on into the warm, living hands of descendants.

  “I do this for ruin, Weasel. Simple and straightfoward ruin. And for me, ruin has become enough.

  “So I follow the rules and marry the Lady Enid di Caela. Then, beautiful bright thing though she may be, and as much as I may regret the loss of such beauty and brightness, I shall have to kill her. With a ‘bright blade’ of my own devising. For the rules are over then, little Galen. My inheritance is mine once more. I am the di Caela, and my word is law.”

  I tried to move, to throw the loathsome thing from my shoulder, but I felt stunned, paralyzed. It was as though I were one of those creatures that the scorpion stings before dragging it into a remote and dark place where it skitters over the helpless, dying prey and feasts.

  “Do not breathe a word of this, Weasel,” whispered the raven. “Oh, no, not a word. For Sir Bayard is already poisoned against you and Sir Robert is heavy with grievance. Of course, I am … eternally grateful for your assistance. But that would not stop me from gouging out your eyes and feasting upon them, from—what was it I said back at your moat house?—dancing in your skin? Or something worse, oh, so much worse, I assure you, if you ever betray my confidence.

  “Apart from which, young mister Galen, we are bound together in sworn partnership, are we not? And I may yet have further call for your services.”

  There was no telling what the Scorpion had planned for me at that moment, in what dark recess he saw my role in the days that followed. Certainly he had told me more than it was wise to tell, if he intended only to marry the girl and leave me alone.

  Brithelm came into the room then, carrying a tray of food on his head, and the bird took wing, battering itself against the thick glass of the chamber window and dropping to the sill, where it lay motionless and dark in the slanting light of the red moon.

  For once I was glad Brithelm never bothered to knock.

  “Supper, Galen!” my spritual brother sang out merrily, craning his neck to balance the laden tray. “The guardsmen say you’re under the weather, that your feathers are drooping!”

  I felt movement rush through my arms. I felt my legs weaken, knock together with relief and remembered fright.

  “Why, what are you doing standing up? Bed rest for what ails you, Galen, and soup. And wine, though I think you’re under age. Why, once you’re fortified, I’ll bet that—”

  “Brithelm!”

  My brother fell silent and stopped in the middle of the room, tray rocking on the thicket of his red hair.

  “Brithelm, I am not well.”

  As my brother wrapped me in blankets and fed me hot soup and mulled wine, he told his story.

  “Alfric, too, faced the satyrs we faced in the depths of the swamp,” Brithelm explained innocently. “He told me so. Nor did he know at the time that they were illusions only. He killed several of the satyrs, discovered—as we discovered—that they were goats, and filled with a noble rage …”

  “ ‘A noble rage,’ Brithelm? Were those Alfric’s words?”

  “Yes, but I think they are fitting, don’t you? For filled with a noble rage at the fact that innocent animals were being used for the most wicked of designs, he sought the encampment of the illusionist, and finding the villain not far from the site where he found the satyrs, put the entire group to flight.

  “Perhaps that’s why we had so little trouble in driving the villain from the swamp when we confronted him later.”

  “I suppose that is Alfric’s theory, at any rate.”

  “Indeed. He suggested to me that it was his strategy that cleared the way for the heroics of Sir Bayrd Brightblade. Although Alfric quite humbly denies that credit for driving the evil from the swamp should fall to him alone.”

  “Quite humbly,” I agreed.

  I felt even worse. The sickness I had invented for the guards seemed real now, rushing over me in dizzying waves. I coughed, sneezed once. I wrapped the blankets more tightly about me, protruding my hand only so that I could pick up the bowl of mulled wine and drink from it. I looked to the window, where the small dark form lay still.

  Brithelm babbled on about Alfric’s bravery, about how he had rescued Alfric from the quagmire, and about how they had left together the morning after we had parted. How they had passed over the plains of Coastlund eventlessly, riding horses Alfric had received as gifts of gratitude from the centaur chief Archala for having helped drive the satyrs from the swamp.

  It seemed that even the centaurs had bought Alfric’s harebrained story.

  Brithelm went on and on. He spoke of how the time had passed quickly on the road, and pleasantly except for the rising fear in both of them that they would not find Bayard’s pass, would have to turn north and go nearly to Palanthas in order to negotiate the mountains, and that the delay would cause Alfric to miss the tournament. And Brithelm went on, as to how “something” told him to follow a flight of the ravens, that soon in their journey the ravens began to perch in the branches around them, croaking forebodingly, and when Alfric screamed or turned to flee, the birds took wing toward the east and Solamnia.

  I sipped more wine, looked again to the window, and shivered.

  Brithelm said that, by following the ravens, he and Alfric found the pass. They crossed the mountains in the dead of night.

  I remembered the voices that had awakened me.

  Discovering the pass, the quick, unimpeded journey through it: it was all amazing to Brithelm, the ease a sure sign that Fate’s hand was guiding the fortunes of his elder brother. And yet, when they arrived at Castle di Caela, to his great surprise—and apparently Alfric’s, too—the tournament was over. Sir Robert di Caela was polite, but distraught and abstracted, installing them in quarters at the keep and praising both of them mightily for their perseverance over rough and dangerous roads.

  “For som
e reason, though, Sir Robert is less than pleased with Bayard Brightblade,” Brithelm concluded, and stared at me curiously. It was as though his eyes bored through me.

  He rose from his seat on the bed and walked to the window. Tenderly he picked up the lifeless body of the bird, and cupped it in his hands.

  “The poor thing must have flown in here and battered itself to death against the window. It’s odd, Galen,” he said, turning to face me. “Odd that the servants hadn’t disposed of it before they moved you in here. It’s been dead several days now. How sad.” Unceremoniously, he dropped the bird out the window.

  “Nevertheless, it’s not the kind of thing a sick boy should have in his room.”

  Dead several days. Like the prisoner in the moat house.

  Whether from the wine or the fever or from being tired of lying, I felt tears rush into my eyes. I had trouble keeping them down as I spoke.

  “Brithelm, I have done some terribly wrong things.”

  He looked at me evenly and nodded. And I told my story, or, at least as much as I dared tell.

  “So that bird was Benedict di Caela?” Brithelm asked between mouthfuls of boiled egg, balancing the empty tray on his head.

  “No, damn it! That bird was a stopping-off place for Benedict di Caela, for Gabriel Androctus, for the Scorpion, for what have you. Whoever or whatever he is, he’s still about the premises, and plotting villainy.”

  Brithelm was to his feet at once, headed for the door.

  “You and I will simply have to go to Sir Robert di Caela and tell him that this … Gabriel Androctus he fancies his future son-in-law is in fact the family curse come to roost.”

  “I think not, Brithelm. No telling the tricks that old Benedict has up his scaly sleeve.”

  “Then it’s also time to tell Sir Bayard the whole story, Galen. So you won’t be unprotected.”

  “Oh, I think not, Brithelm! The world may be as trusting a place as you seem to imagine, but one thing I can rely on is that Bayard Brightblade will dismantle me if this story is told to him.”

  “Then,” Brithelm concluded, “it is time for dismantlement. Do you want your soup?”

  “No … I’m far from hungry. Far from sober, too, with the mulled wine you’ve plied me with. I’m not drunk enough to confess everything in my dark past, though. I’m afraid that would take dwarf spirits or something stronger.”

  Brithelm nodded, his wide face buried in the soup bowl. When he rose up for air, he had little to say.

  “We’ll go to Bayard as soon as you’ve weathered this fever. But we have to go there. After all, think of Sir Robert. Think of Enid—if half of what that raven boded is true, she’s in dreadful danger.

  “Think of Agion.”

  Something beyond wine and fever impelled me. This time I was sure.

  “Brithelm, I have to go tonight. Bayard will be gone by noon tomorrow—you can count on it. He’s too depressed to stay for the wedding.

  “The wedding!”

  “I had forgotten it, too,” Brithelm declared calmly. “Are these potatoes in the bottom of the bowl? I had been avoiding them, thinking they were turnips.”

  “We must get to Bayard, and get to him tonight!”

  “Very well,” Brithelm agreed, bent curiously over the soup bowl.

  He glanced up at me, once more staring me through.

  “And no lies this time, Galen. Not like Alfric.”

  He must have seen the look of surprise on my face, for he laughed, looked down, and stirred in the soup bowl with his finger.

  “Surely you didn’t think I believed our brother’s tales of heroism.”

  “Then why …”

  He looked up again, smiled at me.

  “Simply because it made him feel better. He was dreadfully embarrassed—passed over for squirehood again and again, and then, when he tried to do something about it, he gets mired by his baby brother waist deep in the ’Warden Swamp, squealing until rescued by his middle brother. He needed a little … ornamental passage in his story, a part where he was the hero.”

  “But then, what about me and having to tell Sir Bayard all about—”

  “Same reason.”

  Again he looked down into the bowl and stirred some more.

  “Potatoes get so confoundedly transparent when you boil them too long. Are these turnips, Galen?”

  He held up the bowl to me, smiling that vacant grin once more.

  As you might imagine, Bayard was not overjoyed to see me. Shivering in the night air, which was burrowing into my cloak and tunic more ferociously than it ever did in the mountains, I approached the pavilion where his standard had been raised that afternoon and saw him sitting alone, away from the other Knights. Wrapped in the blanket from which he had drawn the ceremonial Brightblade shield, he also shivered in the brisk autumn night. He had left the shield face-down in the dirt beside him.

  The night was still overcast and chill. Not far from Bayard, the other Knights drank roca and played music and told stories, enjoying the company before most of them struck camp and returned to Palanthas, to Caergoth, to Solanthus, to those few places in which the Order was still permitted and still welcome. Brithelm walked among them, slack-jawed with amazement at the tales the Knights were telling.

  “Do you suppose these are true, Galen—all these tales about sea monsters and abductions by eagles? Do you suppose Sir Ramiro over there really has a talking sword?”

  “I suppose that it makes him feel good to tell the others about it, Brithelm,” I responded vacantly, looking across the dappling of firelight and darkness into the campsite of my former protector.

  Who sulked at the twilit edge of things, his attention evidently on the stars. It was almost a pitiful sight, and I suspect I felt almost sorry for Bayard.

  I tried to slip by the revelry, and could have done so with ease, what with the citterns and the clatter of cups and the boasts.

  But the smoke of the campfires or the dust in the rising wind—or just plain fatigue, if that is possible—brought on a fit of sneezing as though I had rolled the length of a country in goldenrod. The fit over, I sniffed, walked on as if I belonged at the encampment, or as if I had a message for my protector that would not bear obstructing.

  Sir Ramiro of the Maw, all four hundred pounds of him, stopped me before I could get to Bayard.

  “I would not approach him if I were you, boy. He doesn’t seem all that pleased with any of the business that plagued this tournament, and I understand you had a little hand in delaying him.”

  “So he’s talking about that, is he?” I began. But Ramiro waved his fat hands quickly, so quickly that his forearms quivered.

  “No, no, boy, you’d never hear such talk from Bayard Brightblade. Your brother was quite vocal at the banquet earlier, and seemed altogether pleased that you’d played merry hell with Sir Bayard’s intentions. Seeing as that’s the case, if you’ve come for forgiveness, I’d advise you to wait on it until morning.”

  The big Knight stepped in front of me and folded his arms across his expanse of chest. It was like having a gate closed in your face, and I stepped back, almost into the cheery campfire of two Knights from Caergoth, and adopted my best official voice, lowered at least one strenuous octave.

  “So Bayard isn’t pleased with me, Sir Ramiro? Perhaps he’ll be pleased when the family di Caela, the beautiful Enid included, is finally consumed by the curse it’s been carrying for four hundred years.”

  “The curse again? I thought the di Caelas had put that yarn to rest.”

  “Please let me through, sir. The ill tidings are for Sir Bayard’s ears first.”

  I coughed again, and began the long, circular route around Sir Ramiro. He started to stand in front of me once more, but Brithelm distracted him with some questions about the talking sword, and I was allowed to pass freely through the encampment to where Bayard sat, stargazing, huddled under blankets and gloom.

  I paused and took stock as Bayard pondered the moon.

  “T
hings at Castle di Caela, sir. They’re in bad shape, I fear.”

  “So Robert decided he didn’t want you, either?” Bayard asked icily, still staring above me at whatever pattern he saw in the stars. I followed his gaze to the zenith of the sky, where the two dragons danced around the Book of Gilean. Black clouds scudded rapidly past the stars. There was the promise of rain in the smell of the air.

  Things were strange and forbidding, and I had a reluctant Knight on my hands.

  “It’s more complicated than that, Bayard,” I began.

  “Yes, it’s a complicated situation, Galen,” he snapped, eyes breaking from contemplation of the heavens to fix totally, bleakly on my face. “But I’ve solved the puzzle. The solution is that, despite all their father’s good intention, the sons of Andrew Pathwarden are like crabs in a jar: one scrambles over another until he reaches the lip of the vessel, then the one below him reaches and claws him down. Except for the middle son, who clings to some kind of basic goodness.”

  He nodded at Brithelm as he said this. Then he stood and wrapped the blanket tightly around him against the rising wind and the smell of approaching rain. He stalked away from me, the silence and the long strides daring me to try to catch up, until we stood about a hundred feet apart.

  Huge drops of rain spattered on the ground around us. Thunder rolled out of the south. I had to shout above the natural noise and drama.

  “Benedict di Caela has returned.”

  Lightning turned the sky white over the field. For a moment Bayard was clearly outlined, clearly visible. In the thunder that followed, I could not hear him, but I clearly saw him mouth the word What.

  As the lightning flashed and the thunder followed again, the rain began to sweep over the ground between us. I sprinted to join my protector, splashing through the new and sudden mud on the road as I ran toward him. Water soaked into my blankets. I felt cold and wet and aching all the way into my bones.

  I must have passed out. It was Bayard’s shout that dragged me back onto the rainy road to the Castle di Caela. He was standing beside me. He had me by the shoulders and was shaking me like a schoolmaster shakes a troublesome student.