The Tale of Oriel

by Cynthia Voigt

  Lord Haldern ignored the King. “You must go to the Tourney as if you went to the chance of your own death. For that is what you do.”

  Oriel, who had lived months as captive to the Wolfers, knew enough about facing death to measure Haldern’s courage. But by the same token, he knew too much about facing death to wish to be the death-dealer.

  “Griff?” he asked. If Griff thought as he was thinking, then Oriel knew the right of it. For he knew the truth of Griff.

  “For myself,” Griff said, after thought, “I would choose the risk of making a friend out of an enemy. If he were my enemy in a fair contest. A fair contest,” he amended, “fairly fought. For I don’t think I would become an enemy to a man for the reason of him proving more able or more worthy than I am. I don’t think you would do that either, Oriel. Although, we have known some who would hate a man for just that reason.”

  It was decided, then. And if Oriel was going to lose this chance, then he would lose it now, and absolutely. If he was going to give it up, he didn’t wish to prolong the giving. “I cannot enter such a contest,” he said. “Sire,” he added, wishing to show no disrespect.

  “You fear dying?” Lord Tseler asked, to make the accusation.

  “No,” Oriel answered. “I fear killing.”

  All four men stiffened at his words. The King turned around, and then stood up from his chair, awkwardly, with his hands outflung like a woman when the Wolfers attack. It was Lord Haldern, however, who laughed out loud and said, “So might every man. So ought every man. And I think, if memory serves me truly, the law says the same. Does it not, Karossy?”

  Lord Karossy answered cautiously. “The law will hang a man, if it must. But it does not”—his long pointing finger silenced Lord Haldern’s protests—“require that a man be killed.”

  “I thank you for the honor you have done me,” Oriel said to the King. He bowed, and felt Griff and Beryl behind him doing similar courtesy. He needed to leave the hall quickly, for if he did not his courage might fail him, and he might agree to fight to the bloody death anyone who stood between him and the object he desired—aye, and slay their whole families, too, so that he might be Earl. But this was not the way he wished to take the prize—as if he were a gryfalcon, bloody with the hunt. For Griff had spoken truly, as Oriel had known he would, and Oriel would be wise to follow Griffin this. “I thank you for the honor, sire, but—on these terms—I can’t accept it. I leave the falconstone in your possession,” Oriel said to the King.

  The King turned irresolutely to face his advisors. “Surely—”

  “You are the King and your will rules,” Lord Haldern said now. “But I stand with Oriel. I would have you know this, sire: If this young man comes into the lists, I will withdraw my own candidacy and support his. If Oriel will stand for the title, I will stand with him, and say he is worthy. Also, I can teach him the skills he may lack, for not having been raised a lord’s son. I would be glad to be Oriel’s teacher and his advocate, and not his enemy. If he were in the lists. That is, sire, if the terms of the contest were altered and if Oriel agreed to enter.”

  The King didn’t hesitate. “Done,” he said. “I so rule,” he said. The other two spoke brief syllables but the King cut them off. “There will be no more talk on the subject.”

  Oriel thought he saw now how the King’s will was governed.

  “Let the notice be written and read aloud to all, let the contenders each be informed by messenger. The Tourney is a fight to surrender, not to death. It is done,” the King said, and he raised his right fist up into the air.

  This must have been a ceremonial gesture, like the bringing out of the whipping box, for all three advisors bent their heads and responded as if in one voice, “As you command, so it shall be.”

  The King, his crown a gold circlet resting lightly on his forehead, said again to Oriel, “You’ll let me sponsor you in the Tourney, I hope.”

  “Yes, gladly,” Oriel said. “If I win through, I will serve you to the best of my strength, and honor, all of my life.”

  “I believe so,” the King said. Oriel had pleased the King, and won for him something the King had been unable to get for himself. The King was for Oriel. “I believe that of you. And now what would you have me do with the falconstone?”

  “I would ask you to present it to the Earl Sutherland, when he is named,” Oriel said. “And hope I will be the man.”

  He wished to be excused, now, from the company; he wished to be allowed to go with his companions and consider his plans; he wished he were free to clap his hands in the air and dance his feet on the ground, aye, and shout out his joy. But he judged it not the time to ask for anything. He would let the older men govern the day.

  But he hoped they would let him glimpse the lady of the lands.

  Chapter 24

  ORIEL HAD NEVER BEFORE LIVED such days. He had so much to learn and he was so eager to progress that he had almost to forget himself, Oriel, or else he could not concentrate on winning all that he, Oriel, had the promise of winning. It seemed as if time was chasing him from behind, to trip him up and hold him down with a foot on his neck, for all must be accomplished by the autumn fair. But it seemed also as if his heart raced ahead of time, and time was a weight his desires dragged behind them. He cared little for sleep, and less for food. Nothing tired him, nothing discouraged him.

  At first, Lord Haldern taught him the skills of the sword in the privacy of his own courtyard. For those lessons, Griff also was a student, so the two could duel while Lord Haldern called corrections, and corrected positions, and positioned their hands and shoulders. He taught them how to move their feet, in attack and defense, in concert with the use of the long blade for attack and for defense. Also during those days Lord Haldern had both Griff and Oriel mounted on horses, until they could both ride the great beasts with confidence, and dignity, too. During those days, Oriel’s arms ached from sword fighting, his legs and groin ached from riding, and his heart ached from the continual desire to improve more quickly.

  When both Oriel and Griff could present themselves well in these two most important areas, Lord Haldern asked them how things stood between them. Oriel was slow to understand, but Griff was not. “I serve Oriel,” Griff said, “as I have from the first.”

  “For what reason?” Lord Haldern asked, his eyes narrowed. They were all three refreshing themselves with goblets of cool red wine after a training period; sweat ran down their faces and dampened the fine cotton shirts they wore.

  Lord Haldern’s question puzzled Griff. “How could I not?” he asked, so Oriel answered for him. “I think he chose me when I was a boy, and because he is so true a man he has never wavered.”

  The answer satisfied Lord Haldern. He suggested to Oriel, then, that while Oriel prepared himself for the Tourney, Griff might be better used as a student of the laws and history of the Kingdom, and especially the southern Earldom. Oriel didn’t have time to undertake both those studies and his own contender’s skills; and since Oriel trusted Griff as much as he seemed to—“Aye, with my life,” Oriel interrupted—then Griff could store the knowledge that Oriel had no time to acquire but would find immediately needful, should he win through to the Earldom. “When you win, that is,” Lord Haldern said. “For you are already almost as able as any of them, except Verilan, and we have weeks yet left to practice.”

  This was the first Oriel had heard of his skills relative to the other contenders. He didn’t think he was satisfied to be equal, but he didn’t trouble Lord Haldern with this thought.

  So Griff went daily to the libraries Lord Karossy kept, and sat reading among the priests. He would sometimes bring back two or three new acquaintances to dine with Oriel, and they would discuss the kind of authority the King held over his Earls, its history, its rights, its points of overlap and conflict and how such points had traditionally been settled. There was one day when Lord Karossy accompanied his priests to Haldern’s table, and the First Priest found occasion to remark privately to Ori
el, “The King is easily influenced, and there is no need for any of his chief men to lack of anything. This is a time an Earl’s power might increase greatly, and his wealth, too, and his honor among men.”

  Oriel worked at his skills of horsemanship and sword fighting, and at his understanding of the thorny points of law—those were his activities across the mornings and into the afternoons. In the late afternoons he went to the palace, where the Queen taught him the dances, taught him the courtesies of palace life, taught him the songs and stories that had for generations been known to the Earls Sutherland and their people.

  It was Lady Gwilliane Oriel asked about Merlis. Gwilliane answered that Merlis had fled to her own castle, two days after Oriel arrived. “Why should she flee?” Oriel asked.

  The Queen brushed her long-fingered hand across her forehead, and brushed away her distraction. “The King makes you his man in the Tourney, even though Lilos, who is his own son, also aspires to the title,” she said.

  “And to the lady,” Oriel said.

  “Yes, the lady. I concur with my husband’s judgment,” the Queen said, “although I know that the woman Lilos weds will be glad of him. So when I say what I am about to say I hope you will understand, Oriel, that—I hope you understand. But I think the girl might be permitted to select her husband herself. She’s not even a girl, she’s nearly twenty-one summers, so it is the more insulting to her to be given away in marriage to the man who can win the court to his cause with pretty speeches, who can knock others off their horses most efficiently, who can use his sword better than the others. Is this how a husband is chosen?”

  Oriel didn’t know. It was how Merlis’s husband was to be chosen.

  “Why not let the girl rule as regent, and let her first son be Earl in his proper time. For if she chooses the man herself, there must be many children, and sooner or later there will be a son, and he will be of the blood. So all will come right.”

  “I had been told that the troubles in the Earldom began with a woman’s regency,” Oriel said. They were walking in the garden at the lady’s pace, walking and talking as lords and ladies often did in the warmth of a late spring afternoon.

  “I can’t deny that,” Gwilliane sighed. She turned to place a hand on Oriel’s arm, where the green cloth was woven across with silver threads. “Her husband, they say, could govern her—while he lived. But our Kings have lacked Gladaegal’s strengths.”

  They walked on. Her skirts brushed over the grassy path.

  “You should think of this, if you think of becoming Earl Sutherland,” she advised him. Her long dark hair, streaked with grey, hung down her back. “For my husband will be your King.”

  “He will be my King, lady, whether I am Earl or not,” Oriel said, and caused her to smile.

  Sometimes Lord Tseler walked with Oriel from the palace back to Lord Haldern’s home, the two striding off together into a setting sun, or a star-crowded night. Tseler liked to talk about the anthill nature of life in the King’s service, the many toiling bodies who did the work that enabled the Kingdom to exist. “When the King is weak,” Tseler confided, “then all those around him become greedy, and must be watched. A minister knows his King’s weaknesses and he guards those very points, much as soldiers guard the palace gates.”

  “But there are no soldiers at the palace gates,” Oriel said.

  “Just so,” Tseler said, nodding wisely. “If men don’t fear their King, then they will dare to betray him.”

  Oriel was not so sure of this, but he held his tongue. “Why do you tell me this?” Oriel asked.

  Lord Tseler raised his nose, as if he were sniffing the direction of the wind.

  By that time, Lord Haldern had taken Oriel to join in the practice of swordplay among the others who sought Merlis’s hand. Their numbers had increased to fifteen or more when the terms of the contest were altered. It seemed that more wished to wed the lady of the lands than were willing to die for the chance to attempt her.

  At first, Oriel was among the least skillful of the contenders, but he improved rapidly. The men, young and older, said of him at first that he would never give up, and then complained of him that he would never give in. Oriel enjoyed the contests, enjoyed an equal opponent, enjoyed a superior opponent, and—as they gradually appeared, then grew in number—enjoyed playing an unequal opponent with his ringing steel.

  Lord Haldern also took Oriel riding about the countryside, to practice horsemanship and to develop endurance for long journeys on horseback. It wasn’t many days, Lord Haldern told him, before they would go off with a troop to collect taxes for Sutherland’s house. The King’s troops had for many years now made those collections. There were those, Haldern guessed—although he didn’t know it for a certainty—who would be sorry to give up the task, for they would have found ways to take private profit from the public duty.

  “I will be glad to be the one to ride the southern lands beside you,” Lord Haldern told Oriel, speaking privately. “And I’ll be glad to introduce you to Lord Yaegar’s sister, who has lived in her brother’s city at the southern boundary of the Kingdom for all of her life, under her father’s hand before and now under her brother’s hand, for neither man would part with the dowry that would have brought her a worthy husband. I tell myself, perhaps she has waited unwed so that I may propose for her again.”

  “Again?” Oriel asked, too surprised to hold his tongue.

  “I courted her, but the lady’s father refused her anything in dowry. Even so, I almost took her then, as she was.”

  Half teasing and half curious, Oriel asked, “Without any dowry?”

  “What’s a dowry when a woman’s heart makes her willing in bed, and glad to welcome you into the home? Now my fortunes are such that I don’t require anything from a wife—only her heart, only her presence in my days and nights.”

  “Yet you would have wed the lady Merlis?” Oriel asked. “You would once again have given up—has she a name?”

  “Rafella,” Haldern said, and Oriel knew that if Beryl had spoken that way through a puppet, it would have been intended to tell an audience that the man’s heart was in the woman’s keeping. He thought of Beryl with a quick pang, wishing for an hour of her company, a night in her bed. He hadn’t thought of her for days, hadn’t even remembered her, for weeks now. The pang stung him, and was gone.

  “You would have given up the lady a second time to marry Merlis?” Oriel repeated the question.

  “When the King is weak,” Lord Haldern said, “his Earls must be strong, and true.”

  LORD HALDERN AND ORIEL RODE out into the lands of the Earls Sutherland, as the days moved into summer. Oriel came to know the slow rising slopes, and the sweet taste of the waters in the lazy streams. His heart rose to that land, as they rode over a hill and he saw the plain spread out before him, farmsteads and villages and sometimes in the distance the lazy curl of river. His heart rose when his horse stepped into an ancient forest, and the thick-trunked trees whispered overhead. His heart rose every time he dismounted and felt the land under his feet.

  And when he thought of the lady of these lands, he almost couldn’t breathe, so high did his heart rise, like wings to carry him terrifyingly high into the air. He was impatient to be introduced to her but impatience did him no service, so he mastered it. The present gladnesses were enough.

  As he played against other contenders for the lady’s lands and hand, winning and losing in rehearsals of strength and quickness and words and courtesies, he found some good companions. Lilos, the King’s younger son, was one of these, and also Wardel from Hildebrand’s house, Lilos for his willingness to see the good in others and Wardel for his refusal to let any other take advantage of him. Both of these men were young. Garder, who was Lord Tseler’s second son, was a cautious man, too cautious for wiving so that although he had almost thirty summers on his back he was still unwed. Tintage, the fourth of Lord Yaegar’s sons, refused to take anything seriously, not winning or losing, not another man’s pride or d
ignity or privacy. Tintage was a mocker of things; yet he had eyes as dark and secretive and soft as the skin of a mole, seeking blindly for the safety of his den under the earth. Verilan, as quick as a springing birch, was Oriel’s favored opponent at swords, for his quick feet and clever hands, for the inventiveness of his fighting. A man who could keep Verilan at bay could hold his own against any swordsman.

  These six, with Griff and Lord Haldern, often gathered of an evening in Lord Haldern’s wide gardens, or they went together to an Inn. When they were together they spoke of sword skills, they spoke of points of law, they spoke of the history of the Kingdom and the breeding of horses. They spoke of the hunt, and bed pleasures, gaming, and the truth of men and the truth of women. They spoke of all subjects but two. They did not give voice to their common ambition. And they did not speak of the lady Merlis except—sometimes, late in the evening, when the sky was black overhead, someone would propose that they all drink together, to the lady.

  All would draw a breath solemn with hope, raise goblets to the stars, and drink.

  Then Tintage would break the mood, turning it once again away from serious thoughts—for the prize was great and they all desired it with full seriousness. Each intended with full seriousness to win it away from the others. Thus, Tintage’s mockeries were welcome to them. “I know how my father would speak to this occasion,” Tintage might say.

  They had all heard much about Yaegar, a thickheaded heavy-fisted man, who communicated with his sons in clouts and curses. “What’s that?” someone would ask.

  “He’d tell me to use poisons,” Tintage would laugh. “Poison their cups,” Tintage would roar, mocking his father. “Nobody’ll be the wiser, and dead men can’t complain, so you’ll have the place.” Or Tintage might slide down into his seat as if he were afloat on a sea of wine, his eyelids falling down over his eyes, to remark in a roaring voice, “I’ll drink to any woman as long as she’s female.”