Lyonesse

by Jack Vance

  In a wooden croak the mouth said: "I hear and speak."

  Carfilhiot touched the eyes. "Tamurello! Look upon me and King Casmir of Lyonesse. We are considering the use of his armies in South Ulfland, to quell disorder and to extend King Casmir's wise rule. We understand your policy of detachment; still we ask your advice."

  The image spoke: "I advise no alien troops in South Ulfland, most especially the armies of Lyonesse. King Casmir, your goals do you credit, but they would unsettle all Hybras, including Dahaut, to bring inconvenience upon me. I advise that you return to Lyonesse and make peace with Troicinet. Carfilhiot, I advise that you decisively use the might of Tintzin Fyral to bar incursions into South Ulfland."

  "Thank you," spoke Carfilhiot. "We will surely take your advice to heart."

  Casmir said no word. Together they descended to the parlor, where, for an hour, they spoke courteously of small subjects. Casmir declared himself ready for his bed, and Carfilhiot wished him a comfortable night's sleep.

  In the morning King Casmir rose early, expressed gratitude to Carfilhiot for his hospitality, and with no further ado made his departure.

  At noon the party approached Kaul Bocach. King Casmir, with half of his knights passed the fort after paying a toll of eight silver florins. A few yards along the road they halted. The rest of the party approached the fortress. The captain of the fortress stepped forward. "Why did you not pass all together? It is now necessary that you pay another eight florins."

  Sir Welty dismounted without haste. He seized the captain and held a knife to his throat. "Which will you be: a dead Ulfish cutthroat, or a live soldier in the service of King Casmir of Lyonesse?"

  The captain's steel hat fell off, his bald brown pate bobbed as he writhed and struggled. He gasped. "This is treachery! Where is honor?"

  Look yonder; there sits King Casmir. -Do you accuse him of dishonor, after mulcting him of his royal money?"

  "Naturally not, still—"

  Sir Welty pricked him with the knife. "Order your men out for inspection. You will cook over a slow fire if a drop of blood, other than your own, is spilled."

  The captain attempted a final defiance. "You expect me to deliver our impregnable Kaul Bocach into your hands without so much as a protest?"

  "Protest all you like. In fact, I'll let you go back within. Then you are under siege. We will climb the cliff and drop boulders on the battlements."

  "Possible perhaps, but very difficult." We will fire logs and thrust them into the passage; they shall blaze and smoulder, you will smoke and bake as the heat spreads. Do you defy the might of Lyonesse?"

  The captain heaved a deep breath. "Of course not! As I declared from the very first, I gladly enter the service of the most gracious King Casmir! Ho, guards! Out for inspection!"

  Glumly the garrison filed out to stand scowling and disheveled in the sunlight, hair tousled under their steel caps.

  Casmir looked them over with contempt. "It might be easier to lop off their heads."

  "Have no fear!" cried the captain. "We are the smartest of troops under ordinary circumstances!"

  King Casmir shrugged, and turned away. The fortress tolls were loaded into one of the wagons; Sir Welty and fourteen knights remained as a temporary garrison and King Casmir joylessly returned to Lyonesse Town.

  In his workroom at Tintzin Fyral Carfilhiot once again engaged the attention of Tamurello.

  "Casmir has departed. Our relationship is at best formally polite."

  "The very optimum! Kings, like children, tend to be opportunistic. Generosity only spoils them. They equate affability with weakness and hasten to exploit it."

  "Casmir's temperament is even less pleasant. He is as sin-gleminded as a fish. I saw him spontaneous only here in my workroom; he is interested in magic, and has ambitions in this direction."

  "For Casmir, forever futile. He lacks the patience and here he is much like yourself."

  "Possibly true. I am anxious to proceed into the first extensions."

  "The situation is as before. The field of analogues must be like a second nature to you. How long can you fix an image in your mind, then change its colors at your will, while holding fixed lineaments?"

  "I am not proficient."

  "These images should be hard as rocks. Upon conceiving a landscape you must be able to count the leaves on a tree, then recount to the same number."

  "That is a difficult exercise. Why can't I merely work the apparatus?"

  "Aha! Where will you obtain this apparatus? Despite my love for you, I can part with none of my hard-won operators."

  "Still, one can always contrive new apparatus."

  "Indeed? I would be glad to learn this hermetic and abstruse secret."

  "Still, you agree, it is possible."

  "But difficult. Sandestins are no longer innocent nor plentiful nor accommodating... Eh! Ha!" This was a sudden exclamation. Tamurello spoke in a changed voice. "A thought occurs to me. It's so beautiful a thought that I hardly dare to think it."

  "Tell me this thought."

  Tamurello's silence was that of a man engaged in a complex calculation. Finally he said: "It is a dangerous thought. I could neither advocate nor even suggest such a thought!"

  "Tell me the thought!"

  "Even so much is to join in its implementation!"

  "It must be a dangerous thought indeed."

  "True. Let us pass on to safer subjects. I might make this mischievous observation: one way to secure magical apparatus is, in blunt language, to rob another magician, who thereupon may become too feeble to avenge the predation—especially if he does not know its perpetrator."

  "So far I follow you closely. What then?"

  "Suppose one were to rob a magician: who would he choose to victimize? Murgen? Me? Baibalides? Never. The consequences would be certain, swift and awful. One would seek a novice still fresh to his lore, and preferably one with an amplitude of equipment, so that the theft yields a good return. Also, the victim should be one whom he perceives as an enemy of the future. The time to weaken, or even destroy, that person is now! I speak of course in the purest of hypothetical terms."

  "For the purposes of illustration and still hypothetically, who might such a person be?"

  Tamurello could not bring himself to utter a name. "Even hypothetical contingencies must be explored down several levels, and whole areas of duplicity must be arranged; we will talk more of this later, meanwhile, not a word to anyone else!"

  Chapter 13

  SHIMROD, SCION OF MERGEN THE MAGICIAN, early demonstrated an inner impulse of extraordinary strength, and in due course wandered beyond Murgen's control into autonomy.

  The two were not obviously similar, save for competence, resource and a certain immoderacy of imagination, which in Shimrod evinced itself as an antic humor and a sometimes painful capacity for sentiment.

  In appearance the two were even less alike. Murgen revealed himself as a strong white-haired man of indefinable age. Shimrod appeared as a young man with an almost ingenuous expression. He was spare, long of leg, with sandy-buff hair and hazel-gray eyes. His jaw was long, his cheeks somewhat concave, his mouth wide and twisted as if at some wry reflection.

  After a time of loose-footed wandering Shimrod took up residence at Trilda, a manse on Lally Meadow, formerly occupied by Murgen, in the Forest of Tantrevalles, and there settled himself to the serious study of magic, using the books, patterns, apparatus and operators which Murgen had given into his custody.

  Trilda was a congenial seat for intensive study. The air smelled fresh of foliage. The sun shone by day, the moon and stars by night. Solitude was near-absolute; ordinary folk seldom ventured so deep into the forest. Trilda had been built by Hilario, a minor magician of many quaint fancies. The rooms were seldom square and overlooked Lally Meadow through bay windows of many sizes and shapes. The steep roof, in addition to six chimneys, disposed itself in innumerable dormers, gables, ridges; and the highest verge supported a black iron weathercock, which ser
ved in double stead as a ghost-chaser.

  Murgen had dammed the brook to create a pond; the overflow turned a wheel beside the workroom, where it powered a dozen different machines, including a lathe and a bellows for his hot-fire.

  Halflings occasionally came to the edge of the forest to watch Shimrod when he went out on the meadow, but otherwise ignored him for fear of his magic.

  The seasons passed; autumn turned to winter. Flakes of snow drifted down from the sky to shroud the meadow in silence. Shimrod kept his fires crackling and began an intensive study of Balberry's Abstracts and Excerpts, a vast compendium of exercises, methods, forms and patterns inscribed in antique or even imaginary languages. Using a lens fashioned from a sandestin's eye, Shimrod read these inscriptions as if they were plain tongue.

  Shimrod took his meals from a cloth of bounty, which, when spread on a table, produced a toothsome feast. For entertainment he schooled himself in the use of the lute, a skill appreciated by fairies of Tuddifot Shee, at the opposite end of Lally Meadow, who loved music, though no doubt for the wrong reasons. Fairies constructed viols, guitars and grass-pipes of fine quality, but their music at best was a plaintive undisciplined sweetness, like the sound of distant windchimes. At worst they made a clangor of unrelated stridencies, which they could not distinguish from their best. Withal, they were the vainest of the vain. Fairy musicians, discovering that a human passerby had chanced to hear them, invariably inquired how he had enjoyed the music, and woe betide the graceless churl who spoke his mind, for then he was set to dancing for a period comprising a week, a day, an hour, a minute and a second, without pause. However, should the listener declare himself enraptured he might well be rewarded by the vain and gloating halfling. Often, when Shimrod played his lute, he found fairy creatures, large and small,* sitting on the fence, bundled in green coats with red scarves and peaked hats. If he acknowledged their presence, they offered fulsome approbation and asked for more music. On certain occasions fairy horn-players asked to play along with him; each time Shimrod made polite refusal; if he allowed such a duet he might find himself playing forever: by day, by night, across the meadow, in the treetops, higgledy-piggledy through thorn and thicket, across the moors, underground in the shees. The secret, so Shimrod knew, was never to accept the fairies' terms, but always to close the deal on one's own stipulations, otherwise the bargain was sure to turn sour.

  *Fairies maintain no specific size indefinitely. When dealing with men they often appear the size of children, seldom larger. When caught unawares, they seem on occasion only four inches to a foot tall. The fairies themselves take no heed of size. See Glossary II. Fairies share with humans the qualities of malice, spite, treachery, envy and ruthlessness; they lack the equally human traits of clemency kindness, pity. The fairy sense of humor never amuses its victim.

  One of those who listened as Shimrod played was a beautiful fairy maiden with flowing nut-brown hair. Shimrod tried to lure her into his house with the offer of sweetmeats. One day she approached and stood looking at him, mouth curved, eyes glinting with mischief. "And why would you wish me inside that great house of yours?"

  "Shall I be truthful? I would hope to make love to you."

  "Ah! But that is sweetness you should never try to taste, for you might become mad, and follow me forever making vain entreaties."

  "'Vain', always and always? And you would cruelly deny me?"

  "Perhaps."

  "What if you discovered that warm human love was more pleasing than your birdlike fairy couplings? Then who would beseech and who would follow whom forever, making the vain entreaties of a love-sick fairy maid?"

  The fairy screwed up her face in puzzlement. "That concept has never occurred to me."

  "Then come inside and we shall see. First I will pour you wine of pomegranates. Then we will slip from our clothes and warm our skins by firelight."

  "And then?"

  "Then we will make the test to learn whose love is the warmer."

  The fairy maiden pulled her mouth together in a pout of mock-outrage. "I should not flaunt before a stranger."

  "But I am no stranger. Even now, when you look at me, you melt with love."

  "I am frightened." Quickly she retreated and Shimrod saw her no more.

  Spring arrived; the snows melted and flowers bedizened the meadow. One sunny morning Shimrod left his manse and wandered the meadow rejoicing in the flowers, the bright green foliage, the bird calls. He discovered a track leading north into the forest which he never before had noticed.

  Under the oaks, thick-boled with sprawling branches, he followed the trail: back, forth, over a hillock, down into a dark glen, then up and through a clearing, walled with tall silver birches, sprinkled with blue corn-flowers. The way led up over an outcrop of black rocks, and now, through the forest, Shimrod heard laments and outcries, punctuated by a reverberant thudding sound. Shimrod ran light-footed through the woods, to discover among the rocks a tarn of black-green water. To the side a long-bearded troll, with an extravagantly large cudgel, beat a lank furry creature hanging like a rug on a line between a pair of trees. With every blow the creature cried out for mercy: ‘Stop! No more! You are breaking my bones! Have you no pity? You have mistaken me; this is clear! My name is Grofinet! No more! Use logic and reason!"

  Shimrod moved forward. "Stop the blows!"

  The troll, five feet tall and burly, jumped around in surprise. He lacked a neck; his head rested directly on the shoulders. He wore a dirty jerkin and trousers; a leather cod-piece encased a set of very large genitals.

  Shimrod sauntered forward. "Why must you beat poor Grofinet?"

  "Why does one do anything?" growled the troll. "From a sense of purpose! For the sake of a job well done!"

  "That is a good response, but it leaves many questions unanswered," said Shimrod.

  "Possibly so, but no matter. Be off with you. I wish to thrash this bastard hybrid of two bad dreams."

  "It is all a mistake!" bawled Grofinet. "It must be resolved before damage is done! Lower me to the ground, where we can talk calmly, without prejudice."

  The troll struck out with his cudgel. "Silence!"

  In a frantic spasm Grofinet won free of the bonds. He scrambled about the clearing on long big-footed legs, hopping and dodging, while the troll chased after with his cudgel. Shimrod stepped forward and pushed the troll into the tarn. A few oily bubbles rose to the surface and the tarn was once more smooth.

  "Sir, that was a deft act," said Grofinet. "I am in your debt!"

  Shimrod spoke modestly: "Truly, no great matter."

  "I regret that I must differ with you."

  "Quite rightly," said Shimrod. "I spoke without thinking, and now I will bid you good day."

  "One moment, sir. May I ask as to whom I am indebted?"

  "I am Shimrod; I live at Trilda, a mile or so through the forest."

  "Surprising! Few men of the human race visit these parts alone."

  "I am a magician of sorts," said Shimrod. "The halflings avoid me." He looked Grofinet up and down. "I must say that I have never seen another like you. What is your sort?"

  Grofinet replied in a rather lofty manner. "That is a topic which gentle-folk seldom see fit to discuss."

  "My apologies! I intended no vulgarity. Once again, I bid you good day."

  "I will conduct you to Trilda," said Grofinet. "These are dangerous parts. It is the least I can do."

  "As vou wish."

  The two returned to Lally Meadow. Shimrod halted. "You need come no farther. Trilda is only a few steps yonder."

  "As we walked," said Grofinet, "I pondered. It came to me that I am much in your debt."

  "Say nothing more," declared Shimrod. "I am happy to have ‘been of help."

  "That is easy for you to say, but the burden weighs on my pride! I am forced to declare myself in your service, until the score is settled. Do not refuse; I am adamant! You need provide only my food and shelter. I will take responsibility for tasks which otherwise might dis
tract you, and even perform minor magics."

  "Ah! You are also a magician?"

  "An amateur of the art, little more. You may instruct me further, if you like. After all, two trained minds are better than one. And never forget security! When a person intently looks forward, he leaves his backside unguarded!"

  Shimrod could not shake Grofinet's resolution, and Grofinet became a member of the household.

  At first Grofinet and his activities were a distraction; ten times in the first week Shimrod paused on the very verge of sending Grofinet away, but always drew back in the face of Grofinet's virtues, which were notable. Grofinet caused no irregularities and disturbed none of Shimrod's properties. He was remarkably tidy, and never out of sorts; indeed, Grofinet's high spirits caused the distractions. His mind was fertile and his enthusiasms came one upon the other. For the first few days Grofinet conducted himself with exaggerated diffidence; even so, while Shimrod strained to memorize the interminable lists in The Order of Mutables, Grofinet loped about the house talking to imaginary, or at least invisible, companions.

  Presently Shimrod's exasperation became amusement, and he found himself looking forward to Grofinet's next outbreak of foolishness. One day Shimrod waved a fly from his work-table; at once Grofinet became the vigilant enemy of flies, moths, bees, and other winged insects, allowing them no trespass. Unable to catch them, he opened wide the front door, then herded the individual insect to the outdoors. Meanwhile a dozen others entered. Shimrod noticed Grofinet's efforts and worked a small bane upon Trilda, which sent every insect fleeing posthaste from the house. Grofinet was greatly pleased by his success.

  At last, bored with boasting of his triumph over the insects, Grofinet developed a new caprice. He spent several days contriving wings of withe and yellow silk, which he strapped to his lank torso. Looking from his window Shimrod watched him running across Lally Meadow, flapping his wings and bounding into the air, hoping to fly like a bird. Shimrod was tempted to lift Grofinet by magic and flit him aloft. He controlled the whimsy lest Grofinet become dangerously elated and bring himself to harm. Later in the afternoon Grofinet attempted a great bound and fell into Lally Water. The fairies of Tuddifot Shee spent themselves in immoderate glee, rolling and tumbling, kicking their legs into the air. Grofinet threw aside the wings in disgust, and limped back to Trilda.