A Man of His Word

by The Complete Series 01-04 (epub)

  There were two bends in the road. Somewhere.

  “Rap, you can’t!”

  “Get off, then!” Rap snapped, without slowing the wagon. He was not going to sit for six or seven hours on Big Island and be laughed at for the rest of his days. In truth, he was already too late to stop, for the roadbed was raised and there was no room to turn; this part would be underwater in an hour or so. Backing up would be tricky. Then hooves started splashing and he saw eight ears begin to flicker with alarm. He could calm horses by singing to them—not that he had any sort of a voice, but horses were not music critics. He started singing the first thing that came into his head.

  I traveled land, I traveled sea . .

  “Rap!” Lin howled. “You’ll go off the road! Stop, for the Gods’ sake!”

  “Shut up!” Rap said, and went back to singing. The horses’ ears rose again as they listened to him. They kept splashing their big hooves and the wagon continued to roll steadily forward. A couple of swimming gulls watched intently, bobbing up and down as the waves flowed under them.

  Maiden, maiden, maiden, oh . .

  Far off to his left, two fishing boats were setting sail from the quay, and Rap wondered what they thought of this strange horsedrawn vessel plying their harbor. There were a couple of big rocks coming up on his right, green with weed and purple with mussels, being lapped by the small waves, and he knew about how far those were from the road. A fraction more to the left …

  There was just enough wind to make the water ruffled and impossible to see through, but he could tell where the edges were by the way the waves surged over them. It was safer than it looked, he told himself.

  Lin was starting to whimper.

  I gave her love, I gave her smiles,

  I wooed with all my manly wiles.

  The rocks floated past on the silvery water, and the swell was beginning to trouble the horses, coming well up their legs now, over the wagon axles. They were finding the wagon hard to pull. They were towing it.

  The water was deeper. The waves no longer showed the edge very clearly.

  “Turn, Rap!” Lin sobbed. “We’re at the bend, Rap! We must be! We’ll go off!” He rose to his feet, awkwardly holding the seatback with his one good arm. They were going to get wet boots in a minute. “Rap! Turn!”

  Rap was not sure. Distances were deceptive when they were all covered with water and there were no landmarks at hand. He was thinking of the road itself, beneath the water, two stone walls filled in level with shingle and rocks, greeny blue, probably, with the strands of weed waving in the current. There would be shadows of ripples moving over, like cloud shadows moved over the summer hills. Fish? He had not expected so many fish, little ones …

  “Maiden, maiden …”

  “Shut up, Lin!”

  “. . . maiden, oh.”

  Now he could imagine that watery blue roadway making its turn. He pulled on the reins and the wagon curved slowly round and apparently he had guessed right, because they continued their slow progress.

  Lin had started to pray to some God Rap had never heard of. A new one, maybe.

  One of the fishing boats was heading in their direction.

  The wagon had almost stopped bumping. The tide was stronger here, in the middle, leaving a wake as it flowed by the horses, and they were getting very nervous now, no matter how hard he sang.

  “Maiden, maiden”

  “SNOWBALL!”

  “… maiden …”

  Too far to the right!

  He eased the lead pair to the left and they carried on. But if the wagon began to float, then it would surely drag the horses off the road.

  The second bend, a big, wide curve … the wagon seemed to lift, skew left, then settle, then lift. He blinked sweat from his eyes, squinting against the sun’s glare, visualizing that underwater causeway, easing the horses around the bend.

  Staying away from the edges.

  Then Tallow Rocks were straight ahead and the current was behind them and the road was starting to rise. He flicked the reins for more speed and licked salty lips. He’d done it!

  His hands were shaking slightly and his neck felt sore. He arched his back to ease it and then sat down.

  “Sorry, Lin,” he remarked, “what were you saying?”

  Lin’s eyes were big as oysters. “How did you do that?”

  Come to think of it, how had he done that? Rap began to feel very shaky. It was almost as if he’d been able to see the road under the water. He’d known where it was, what it looked like, almost. He had not seen it, but he’d felt as if he knew what it would look like if he could … or as if he could remember having seen it like that. Which he never had; no man ever had.

  Just as, earlier, he’d known there was another wagon around the seventh bend?

  He did not say anything, just shrugged.

  “Another thing we youngsters have to learn, I suppose?”

  Rap grinned at him. “Practice by yourself, though.”

  Lin used some very special obscenities. Where had he learned those?

  “Lin?” Rap said. “Lin, please don’t go and make a big story out of this?”

  Lin just stared at him.

  “Lin! You’ll get me in trouble.”

  “I suppose you weren’t getting me in trouble?” Lin yelled. He must have been more scared than Rap had realized.

  “It was nothing much, Lin. I was standing up. I could see where the water was flowing over the edges.”

  “Oh … sure!”

  But Lin reluctantly promised not to make a big story out of it.

  They left the water and followed the lumpy track across Tallow Rocks, wheels spraying silver drops in the air. The last dip was deep, but very short. The wagon might float there, but it would not matter for there was no current and the road was not raised above the shingle. He had done it!

  The king had ordered him off Krasnegar before the tide.

  Gods save the king.

  “You shave now?” Lin asked suddenly.

  “Of course.” Rap had shaved the previous night for the fourth time and included his chin for the first time. He would have to get a razor of his own soon. Lin had a faint dark haze on his upper lip. And he still had a very odd look in his eye. “Why?”

  Lin shrugged and turned away, but after a moment, he said, “Funny thing, growing up. Isn’t it?”

  Yes it was, Rap agreed, and concentrated on the next water barrier. But once they were safely through that, he relaxed and began to enjoy himself, enjoy the feeling that now he was one of the drivers—if the old man would ever trust him again after that mad stunt he had just pulled .

  “Yes,” he said. “One moment you’re feeling all manly and the next you find you’re behaving like a kid again. It’s like being two people.” A fellow’s body started making all these odd change without as much as asking permission … What right did his face have to start growing hair without asking him?

  Like being two people … And you knew only one of those people. Growing up was becoming a stranger to yourself again, just when you thought you’d got to know yourself. And part of growing up was wondering what sort of person you were going to be. How tall? How broad? Trustworthy? A strong man or a weakling? And what were you going to do with that man? Master-of-horse? Man-at-arms?

  “Girls!” Lin muttered to himself.

  Girls.

  Inos.

  Now they were rolling along the edge of the shingle, passing the lonely cluster of shore cottages with their racks of fish and nets and a ramshackle corral and a couple of haystacks starting to sprout. There were stacks of driftwood that the old women gathered and heaps of peat moss. Bonfires of kelp were sending up blue smoke. There were girls there and they waved. The men waved back. The long bent grass waved, also.

  “We could eat here,” Lin said thoughtfully.

  “Later.”

  Beyond the shiny blue harbor lay Krasnegar, a towering triangle with a castle as a topknot. Yes, it did look like a piece of
cheese. Perhaps Rap was hungry after all, but he’d said later, so later it would have to be. A yellow triangle. Where had the sorcerer found black stone for his castle?

  Inos was in that castle.

  He thought of horse rides and clam digging and surf fishing; of Inos running over the dunes, long legs, gold hair streaming in the wind, and her shrieks and giggles when he caught her; of Inos scrambling up the cliffs in the sunshine, daring him to come after her; of hawking and archery. He thought of her face, not bony like a jotunn’s or round like an imp’s. Just right. He thought of singsongs and winter firesides with singing and joking and his arm around her as they sought pictures in the embers.

  It hurt, but it was for the best. There could never be anything between a princess and a stableboy, nor even a wagon driver. He supposed that it had crept up on them. He really had not noticed it until the previous day. They had been a bunch of kids together, a dozen or more of them. It had only been near the end of the last winter that he and Inos had started to drift together, and together start drifting to the edge of the bunch. And then he had gone off to the mainland when spring came.

  She had kissed him good-bye, but even then he had not thought very much about it—not until they were apart. Then he had realized how he missed her smile and the comfortableness of having her near—and realized that she didn’t kiss other men good-bye.

  And lately he had started to dream about her. But she would go off to Kinvale and find some handsome noble to come back and be king after Holindarn died.

  And he would have to find some other girl to kiss.

  Trouble was, there weren’t other girls like Inos.

  “Can you remember much of your mother, Rap?”

  Rap looked in surprise at Lin, who was still a little paler than usual. “Why?”

  “Some of the women say she was a seer.”

  Rap frowned, trying to remember if his mother had ever admitted anything like that or done anything like that.

  “So?” he said.

  “Growing up,” Lin said. “I just wondered … You’ve been doing some strange things today, Rap. You’ve never been able to do things like that before, have you?”

  “Like what? I didn’t do anything!”

  Lin was unconvinced. “Could it be something that comes with growing up, like shaving?”

  Rap would not talk about such things with chatterbox Lin. “Does that cast bother you?”

  Lin looked down at his arm. “Yes, some. Why?”

  “Because,” Rap said, “if you start hinting that my mother needed to shave, then you’re going to have two of them.”

  2

  Summer, said the hardworking folk of Krasnegar, was the two weeks they were given to prepare for the other fifty. There was no small truth in that.

  True, summer usually lasted longer than two weeks, but it came late and left soon, and it was marred by endless toil. Without the profit of their summer labors, the people would not survive the merciless winter that was sure to follow. A few hardy crops were sown and most years those could be harvested before the first snows, to augment the grain that must be imported by ship. The other years were destined to bring famine and sickness before summer came again. Peat must be cut and dried and carried to the town in load after load, to blunt the deadly teeth of frost during the long nights. Hay, also, standing high upon the wagons, crossed the causeway at every tide so that the king’s horses could eat until spring came again and the cattle might give milk for the children the next year. Fish must be caught and smoked, livestock slaughtered and their beef salted; seal meat or whale meat laid by, also, if the boats were blessed with fortune. Vegetables and berries, rushes and driftwood and furs … the scanty fruits of the hard land were carefully gathered and jealously hoarded away.

  Here and there in the bare hills stood forlorn hamlets and clumps of cottages, where life was even harder than it was in the town. But for most of the year there was nothing for men to do on the land except survive, and survival was easier in the city—or death less lonely—and so the cottagers also huddled in with the townsfolk during the long winters, like badgers in their earth. When the snows streamed off the hills in spring, they emerged once more to their toil, and voices were heard again under the sky.

  Without careful management their efforts would never have sufficed, and the leadership came from the king, or more directly from his factor, a tall and rawboned jotunn named Foronod, who was everywhere at all times and reputedly wore out three horses a day. His water-blue eyes saw everything, and he commanded everyone in sharp, laconic phrases like small knives, never wasting a word or a moment, never sparing a soul, least of all himself. In high summer he seemed to sleep even less than the sun. His gangling figure could appear at any time anywhere in the kingdom, long legs hanging limp at the sides of his pony, silver hair flashing a warning before him as he came into view. His memory was as capacious as the palace storerooms. He knew to the inch how much hay had been gathered, how much peat; he knew the state of the herds and the times of the tides and he could call down the wrath of the Gods or the Powers on anyone caught slacking or sleeping except for reasons of total exhaustion. He knew the strengths and abilities and weaknesses of every man and woman, girl and boy in his whole great workforce.

  Foronod noted that a wagon had been repaired and returned. He doubtless noted as well that a certain stableboy had been promoted to driver, and that fact, also, would have been stored away until it might be needed. But the factor had many drivers and that boy had talents that others did not.

  By nightfall, Rap was back with the herds.

  3

  “Turn around, my dear,” Aunt Kade said. “Charming! Yes, very nice! Definitely charming.”

  Inos did not feel charming, she felt wretched. There was a nasty hard feeling at the back of her throat and a dull coldness all over her. Her arms and legs were made of stone. Last night she had slept in her own bed for the last time. An hour ago she had eaten her last meal in the palace—not that she had been able to eat anything. Every time she did anything at all now it was for the last time.

  And her slimy mood was not helped by the charmingness of her dress, either. She was wearing her precious golden dragon silk and she hated it. Somehow she blamed it for starting all this. Now it had been made up into a gown, and she thought it looked ludicrous, not charming. She could not believe that ladies in the Impire wore anything so outlandish. The minstrel must have been fantasizing when he sketched such absurdities as lace dangling over her hands and shoulders like small pillows. Trumpets indeed!

  And if the dress was bad, the hat was unthinkable—a smaller trumpet, a high golden cone all frilly with more lace. She felt like a freak in it, a clown. Every small boy in Krasnegar was going to laugh himself hysterical at the sight of her as she rode down to the dock. The sailors would fall off the ship laughing. Probably the ladies in the Impire would kill themselves. Inos was sure they would all be wearing bonnets like any sane woman wore.

  The only consolation was that Aunt Kade looked worse. Her conical hat stuck up like a chimney pot and her dumpy form could never be made to resemble a trumpet. A drum, maybe, or even a lute, but no trumpet. She had appropriated the apple-blossom silk, which was all wrong for her shape, although Inos had to admit that the colors matched her white hair and pink cheeks. Aunt Kade, moreover, was excited, bubbling with happiness, chattering like a flock of birds in joyful anticipation.

  “Charming!” Aunt Kade repeated. “Of course we shall have to acquire many more gowns when we are established at Kinvale, but at least we shall not seem too rustic when we arrive. And the good citizens of Krasnegar shall see how ladies should dress these days. I do hope the coachman remembers to go slowly. Hold your head up, dear. You look like a unicorn when you bend forward. Oh, Inos, you will love Kinvale!” She clasped her pudgy hands. “I so look forward to showing it all to you—the dancing and the balls, the banquets and the elegant conversation! I was not much older than you when I first arrived, and I danced every nig
ht for months. The music! Fine cooking! Gentle countryside … you have no idea how green and prosperous the landscape is, compared to these harsh hills. And the handsome young men!” She simpered and then sighed.

  Inos had heard all that about a million times in the last week.

  Now was the time of spring tides, she thought bitterly. There would have been good clam digging this morning.

  “And Duke Angilki!” Aunt Kade was in full gush now. “He was a very striking young man in his … well, I mean, he is a most civilized person. His artistic taste is quite impeccable.”

  He is also thirty-six years old and has two daughters. He has buried two wives already. Although Inos had never met her distant cousin, she was quite certain that he was utterly detestable. She was determined to hate him.

  “He will be so happy to see us!” Kade peered into the mirror and patted her blue-tinted hair where it emerged under the silver trumpet on her head.

  “I always thought that one should not go visiting without an invitation,” Inos said bleakly; but she had tried that argument before and it had not worked. It would hardly work now, not with a ship waiting.

  “Don’t be absurd!” Kade said, but without heat. “We shall be very welcome. We have a standing invitation, and there simply has not been time to write and wait for a reply. Winter is coming. You will love the sea voyage in summer, my dear, but it would not be possible later. Ah! The sea! I do so enjoy sailing!”

  “Is Master Jalon ready?” Jalon was an infuriatingly vague person, but he would at least make the voyage bearable.

  Kade turned to her niece in surprise. “Oh, did he not tell you? He has decided to go overland.”

  “Jalon has?”

  “Yes, dear.”

  “He’s crazy!” Inos tried to imagine Jalon wandering through all those weeks of dangerous forest, and her mind went limp. There were goblins in the forest. Jalon?

  “Oh, quite possibly.” Kade shrugged. “But your father seems to think he can manage; he gave him a horse. He left this morning. I know he went looking for you to say good-bye.”