Act of Will wh-1

by Andrew James Hartley

  In the second half of the week in the Hrof, I started secretly doing exercises at night, when it was cool and I was on watch. The others, Renthrette in particular, were asleep, so I could move away from the wagon and wheeze my way through some sit-ups and push-ups. There were no improvements in my physique, but I felt virtuous and that was enough at present. One night Orgos interrupted me. “You don’t exactly tax yourself, do you?” He smiled.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I replied, insulted.

  “You’ve barely broken a sweat. There are a few weights in the wagon. Want to use them?”

  “Er, yes, all right,” I agreed reluctantly. He went into the wagon and reappeared with a pair of small dumbbells, a four-foot bar, and a set of weights, all carried with irritating ease. In order to stave off actually having to use the bloody things, I said the first thing that came into my head.

  “Would you teach me to use a sword, Orgos?”

  He smiled again and said, “I’d be glad to. Though you aren’t going to be a sword master this time next week, and it will take a lot to impress Renthrette.”

  “This is nothing to do with Renthrette,” I lied. “I just need to feel safer and more useful to the party.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but you’re going to have to get yourself in shape first. I’m not sure you could manage much more than a fruit knife at present.”

  I shrugged off his sarcasm and made as if to go to bed.

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry,” he laughed, coming after me. “We’ll start now if you like.”

  “Can I see your sword?” I asked.

  He reached for the left one but I stopped him.

  “The other,” I said, indicating the one with the amber stone in the pommel. He seemed to hesitate for a split second and then handed it to me. It was heavy, too heavy for me to use, though not as heavy as I had expected.

  “What’s this?” I said, touching the stone with my fingertip.

  “Nothing,” said Orgos. “Decoration.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “I’ll get a pair of spears. Better start there.”

  As he got a couple of spears out of the wagon and bound their tips with cleaning rags, I wondered why I didn’t believe him. Decoration? Orgos? That didn’t sound right. And there was something else: a vague and unsettling memory.

  A flash of light.

  I looked at the amber gem, and, as the sun caught it, it seemed to glow with exactly the same inner fire that-crazy though it sounded-I thought had somehow incapacitated those Empire troops back in Cresdon. I considered the stone, then told myself not to be so bloody stupid and put it out of my head.

  I couldn’t help thinking that the spears were less glamorous than the sword I had hoped for, but Orgos assured me it was a good place to start. The spear was light and required more dexterity than strength. In my current physical state that was a good thing, as he had so penetratingly observed. I stood legs apart as he told me, and grasped the shaft with both hands.

  “All right,” he said, “now face me and do as I do. Grip the spear like this. Fists outwards. Your right hand a little further down. Now lunge at me. Good, but make it a smaller movement. The bigger and more obvious the lunge, the easier it is to anticipate and the harder it is for you to recover. Always get back on both feet with your weight evenly distributed like this. Right. Now try that lunge again and recover. Good.”

  So it went on, and I suppose I made progress, and I actually enjoyed it so much that I didn’t realize how late it was getting until the minuscule wound in my thigh began to throb faintly. I also didn’t notice Mithos and Garnet watching from the fireplace, or hear what they had to say. I learnt fast and my reflexes were quick, so they should have been fairly impressed. Orgos was pleasantly surprised and said so. I was flattered, even if he was just encouraging me. Still, it would take more than a bit of training to make me into the stuff of heroes. They couldn’t train me in honor and bravery and the other “qualities” that would one day get them all killed.

  Of Renthrette’s views on the matter I heard nothing, but I strolled around the camp, spear in hand, and occasionally brought up the matter of our sparring when we were all gathered together to dine. Whenever I did so she would give me a long indifferent look as if to say that she knew she was supposed to be impressed and wasn’t; then she would go back to her slow, meticulous brushing of the horses’ tails or whatever the hell she was doing. But I knew her resolve was weakening. She wasn’t the first to have tried to convince herself that I was some kind of repulsive and despicable rodent. I’d read the literature on such things. I’d written some of it.

  Orgos, anxious to improve my other skills, encouraged me to sit on a horse, but I felt so high and ridiculously unbalanced that I could not be persuaded even to have him walk the beast round the camp. I sat on it; that was all. As far as I was concerned, that was progress enough for one day, or indeed for several. I don’t trust things with more feet than me. Come to think of it, I don’t trust things with fewer feet either. If it doesn’t look like me, I find it suspicious, and if I ever met someone exactly like me, I would trust him still less. Trust is a highly overrated commodity, I think.

  By the sixth day, the wound on my leg had vanished. On the eighth day I noted a distinct weaving of grass in the hot earth, and by evening there were trees again. Earlier on in the same day I had been gratified by a glimpse of the famous Hrof ostrich. It had been a good four hundred yards from the road, but you couldn’t mistake that leggy ball of feathers powering up and down the desert on those clawed, pinkish legs of tight muscle and sinew. I think I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen one, since in my former life it was the only image that mention of the Hrof lands might have called to mind. By the late afternoon of the ninth and, somehow, longest day, we could see the distant flashes of light and color from the rooftops of Stavis. And still the Empire hadn’t got me. We, and more particularly, I, had made it.

  SCENE XIII The Party Leader

  On the last day of our journey I got a clearer view of Stavis and it, or rather one aspect of it, came as something of a shock. Stavis sat astride the river Yarseth only a couple of miles from where it emptied its brown, unsightly waters into the sea. I had known this before, but being presented with the reality of the thing was a different matter. The Yarseth was merely a dark and drowsy worm, but at its mouth was the ocean, and there the sparkle was like the billion shards of some immense fractured mirror. I had never seen the sea before.

  It was loathing at first sight. I’m sure there are many well-traveled and broad-minded individuals who are accustomed to the ocean and don’t even recall their first glimpse of it. I, having weaseled my uneventful way into a shabby, provincial adulthood within a twenty-mile radius of the supremely shabby and provincial town of Cresdon, was neither well-traveled nor broad-minded. The sight of that near-infinite expanse of water scared the living daylights out of me, leaving me feeling not so much inadequate as nonexistent, and I found myself glancing at it furtively every few minutes to make sure it was still there. It was.

  At least you could walk on the Hrof. Back in the golden age of Mrs. Pugh and her cockroach-ridden hovel, I had some nagging doubts about the very existence of the sea, as if I was preparing myself for someone to confess that the whole ludicrous “area of salty water” thing was a story to frighten children. The sea had been like magic and dragons or peace and liberty: mythically fictitious. But there it was, huge, vibrant, and glittering smugly to itself. I spent the next two days undergoing what you might call an ordeal by confrontation.

  Stavis itself didn’t help. The road brought us gradually into a sprawl of white-plastered buildings and a population of every racial type imaginable. Here was a Cherrati trade enclosure hanging with silk; there were the people I knew only-and quaintly-as snow folk, from farther north than any map I knew of, selling seal pelts and buying iron spear tips by the sackful. Verone herders with their smelly okanthi rubbed shoulders with Dranetian silver dea
lers and Mesorian glass merchants. The sea drew all races, and in Stavis they met and bartered, calculated their profit and loss in a dozen languages and a hundred dialects. And rather than feeling like one of the ingredients in this great cultural stew, I merely felt left out and longed for the familiar pettiness of Cresdon.

  Our passage through the city was marked by a sudden darkening of the skies until the clouds swirled violet and cracked with electrical flashes. When the rain came I ducked into the wagon and stared out of the back as Stavis’s international cross section ran for cover and the raindrops bounced eight inches high off the Empire’s new-laid pavements.

  The Empire had been here only eight months. In that time, Orgos assured me, little had changed, except that prices had gone up, taxes and soldiers had appeared, and the Diamond Empire was looking fat and pleased with itself. The populace adapted by marking up their cod, herring, and sailfish prices until the only people who were really any worse off were distant trade partners and, of course, the very poor. So Stavis, with the usual economic sidestep, kept everyone happy. Everyone who mattered, anyway.

  We were stopped twice as we entered the city, but even I could see that such challenges were formalities and only some spectacular idiocy on my part would get us into trouble. There was nothing to suggest that even word of us had reached the laconic guards. I couldn’t help being slightly offended that they had lost interest in me, but after a moment’s reflection on Empire execution practices, the feeling passed. By the time Orgos had given a street name, the troops were waving us through with thinly masked apathy. That night I resolved to raise a mug of the best ale I could find and toast Commander Harveth Liefson.

  Once inside the city, the party rode as a unit with its weapons stashed in the wagon. Renthrette tied her horse to the back and climbed up next to me, muttering enthusiastically about the different architectural styles and the magnificent seafood. I tried to give her the look of shriveling distaste she had thrown me every hour or so for the last week, but my heart wasn’t in it. Her eyes shone as she soaked up the rain-drenched scenery or haggled for imported mangoes with basket-laden street children. The transformation was astonishing. She smiled while she talked to me and at one point actually said, “You seem to be making progress with Orgos. You learn fast, Will. If you need any help or advice, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  I stared at her, speechless (not a condition I often find myself in, as you will have gathered), wondering what I had done to deserve such sunny chumminess from Renthrette after our former sojourn in the frozen wastes. But it was soon clear that it wasn’t just this bloody city which delighted her so much.

  “She’s just relaxing now,” said Orgos when I pressed him on the matter. We were waiting to cross the Yarseth, swollen with seasonal rain like an overfed anaconda. Its bridges were either completely submerged or showed themselves as crazy little walkways arching in and out of the river like sea serpents. We had to be ferried across in leaky pontoon boats.

  “But why is she relaxing?”

  “She is comfortable here,” said Orgos, “and perhaps she feels she has to-how shall I put it? — assert herself less now.”

  There had been a slight smile on Orgos’s lips as he concluded that last sentence. He was skirting around some crucial factor.

  “Fine, Orgos,” I interrupted bitterly, knowing he was holding back. “Don’t tell me, see if I care.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “I think you’ll figure it out for yourself when we meet the party leader tonight.”

  So that was it. She was practicing her charm for her big-shot lover. She didn’t need to fend me off anymore, because he would do it for her. For all her posturing, she would rely on her boyfriend’s sword arm after all. But all was not lost. Now, while her guard was down, I would charm my way into her heart. I would show my wit, perception, and sensitivity (the last one I would have to fake, but it had worked before), and she would fall for me. Give me a couple of days and, to Renthrette, the “party leader” would be an embarrassing, bone-crushing thug compared with the sophisticated William Hawthorne.

  Still, that image of the bone-crushing thug rather slowed me down a little. I didn’t particularly want to find myself chivalrously jousting some seven-foot bonehead for her hand. I toyed for a moment with the idea of turning the “leader” in to the Empire guards, but that seemed vaguely below the belt, even for me. See? After only ten days with these clowns I was already letting my judgment get clouded by their laughable principles.

  Perhaps it was Renthrette’s letting her hair down (literally, as it happened), and generally being amiable and gorgeous, but I was rather going off the idea of breaking company with the party here. Partly it was Orgos’s broad grin, partly it was Mithos’s noble tolerance of my existence, partly it was the fact that Garnet didn’t ax me in my bed, and partly it was because I felt out of my depth in Stavis with its urbane, colorful populace, its Empire guards, and its immense ocean. By comparison the party felt like old friends. Well, kind of. Maybe I would travel with them until I found some placid nation of imbeciles who liked theatre and playing cards. I figured I should at least meet their “leader” and hear their plans before I decided. Who knew? Maybe there was money in this adventuring lark.

  The house was in a wealthy suburb with roofs of blue slate and glass in the windows. The grey stone buildings dotted with ancient shells were as different from the lurching ruins of Cresdon as the paved, guttered streets were different from Cresdon’s ratty alleys. On the corner, two men sold spidery crabs and immense lobsters. Orgos enthused about steamed lobster, but I took one look at the massive claws of one antique blue monster and wagered a few silvers on the beast taking the arm of anyone who tried to get it out of the tank.

  As we stabled the horses and unloaded the wagon, Mithos said to me, “The party leader is not expecting us yet since we left Cresdon earlier than intended. I am not sure what the precise nature of the task ahead of us is, but if you wish to come further with us, I could speak on your behalf. Unless you have other ideas, of course?”

  “No,” I muttered uncertainly, “I have no other plans.”

  I wasn’t actually thinking about my plans at all, because something in the reverential way Mithos and the others referred to their nameless leader was beginning to get to me. My mildly resentful disinterest was quickly being replaced by curiosity. whatever I felt about my companions, I could not avoid the fact that they were a rather unusual group of individuals. Once I had admitted this grudging respect for them I was faced with the problem of putting a face to the leader they so clearly looked up to. When I tried to get some information out of Garnet concerning their mission east of the city, he told me that he didn’t care what they were doing as long as “the leader” decided the cause was worthy. For a second he looked reflective, so I jokingly broke the mood by asking him if he would lay down his life for his precious leader.

  “Unquestionably,” he replied instantly.

  Idiot.

  The rain began again in a sudden flurry and we hurried into the house, stamping our feet and shaking our cloaks. Somewhere upstairs I heard footsteps: the party leader? My heart was beating a little faster as we entered the dim hallway, but Mithos just turned to me and said, “Will, we will meet the leader alone first and then invite you in.”

  I nodded dumbly and they left me standing there, listening to the rain drumming on the roof and wondering what I’d got myself into this time.

  One by one they creaked their way up the wooden staircase. I pushed a door open and stepped into a bare room with a couple of chairs and waited, listening to the wordless muttering above me.

  They were gone for five minutes. Maybe a little more. It felt like an hour. Then came footsteps on the stairs and Mithos appeared, beckoning to me. Instantly my heart began to patter again and I followed him up, sucking in my stomach (no mean feat) and squaring my shoulders.

  At the top of the darkened stairs a door was ajar from which light and gentle conversation trickled out on
to the landing. Mithos, now no more than a bulky silhouette above me, pushed the door wide and stepped inside. Before I had even crossed the threshold I heard him speak my name in introduction and, trying to look strong and silent, I glanced around.

  The room was small and windowless, lit by an oil lamp that hung from the rafters and glowed yellowish, the shadows russet and amber. Garnet, Renthrette, and Orgos sat at a table looking at me, and a girl in a long dress of blue cotton stood on the other side. I caught her black eyes and, taking her to be the maid, thought vaguely that she was going to offer me a beer. I looked around for the party leader.

  I turned swiftly to see if he was behind the door. He wasn’t. I looked back and the girl in the blue dress spoke. “Welcome to Stavis, Will, and to our company. I am Lisha, elected leader of the group.”

  I stared at her aghast, and I think my mouth fell open. She looked about fifteen. She was tiny. Smaller than me! Her hair was long, black, and straight and she had the small, elegant features and olive skin of the Far Eastern races.

  But that’s off the subject. What I was actually thinking as the point was pounded home like a tent peg through my skull was No chance, mate. You have to be bloody joking. This might be your party leader’s daughter or even his bit on the side, but. Then I caught Renthrette’s glance of knowing satisfaction and I knew that this was indeed “the leader.”

  She came towards me and shook my hand in a businesslike manner, ignoring absolutely the look of astonishment that gripped my face.

  “Pleased to meet you, Will,” she said. Her voice had no accent. I don’t mean it was untainted by any special dialect; it had no accent at all. I could listen to her for hours and have no clue where she came from.

  “What?” I said.

  “Lisha,” she prompted with a small smile.

  “Right,” I muttered woodenly. My eyes were starting to sting after all that staring at her, so I blinked them deliberately.