Hall of the Mountain King

by Tarr, Judith

  Vadin sat back. “What are you telling me, my lord? What am I supposed to do?”

  “Keep them from killing one another.”

  “Keep—” Vadin laughed. His voice came within a hair of cracking. “My lord, I don’t know what Adjan told you about me, but I’m only human. I can’t come between the thunder and the lightning.”

  The king seized him as if he had been a weanling pup, dragging him to his feet, shaking him until his eyes blurred. “You will do it. You will stand between them. You will not let them die at one another’s hands.”

  “This time.”

  The king wound his fingers in Vadin’s braids, wrenching his head back. “Never while I live. Swear it, Vadin alVadin.”

  “I can’t,” Vadin gasped. “Moranden—maybe—but Mirain—”

  The king’s grip tightened to agony. He was mad. Stark mad.

  “My lord, I—”

  The old man let him go. He fell to all fours. His head throbbed; he choked on bile. Trembling, hating himself for it, he peered up.

  The king knelt beside him. Not madness, he saw with bitter clarity. Love. The king gave tears to them; both of them. His voice was thick, but it yielded nothing. Even his pleading was proud. “You must try. You are all I have. The only one whom both are fond of. The only one whom I can trust.”

  It was too much. Mirain, and the king too. Vadin crouched and shook.

  The king touched him. He started like a deer.

  “It is the price you pay,” the king said, “for your quality.”

  Little by little Vadin stilled. He drew himself up. Half his braids were down, the rest working loose. He shook them out of his eyes and looked at the king. “My lord, I will do all I can, even if it kills me.”

  “It may kill us all.” The king raised him, holding him with only a shadow of strength. “Go. Defend your lord. From himself, if need be.”

  oOo

  The cold light of dawn found Mirain’s temper calmed but his will unshaken. Vadin looked at him and did not know whether to rage or to despair. “By the gods,” he muttered under his breath, “if the king breaks his heart for that lunatic’s sake, I’ll—I’ll—”

  Rami shifted under him, troubled. He bit back the hot swift tears and glared at the madman. Mirain bore no mark of his royalty, went armed like all the rest with sword and spear and shield, light plain armor and plain tunic beneath it and plain helmet on his head. And yet he was impossible to mistake, riding his wild black demon without bit or bridle, laughing as the beast lashed out at a soldier’s gelding.

  A tall figure approached him on foot. The Mad One stood suddenly still, ears pricked, eyes gleaming ember-bright in the torchlight.

  Mirain bowed in the saddle. “Good morning, Grandfather.”

  “You will go,” the king said. It was not a question. A little of the old, cold madness had returned to his face. “Fight well for me, young Mirain. But not so well that you die of it.”

  “I do not intend to die,” said Mirain. He leaned out of his saddle and kissed the king’s brow. “Look for me when Brightmoon waxes again.”

  “And every day until then.”

  Abruptly the king turned away from him to confront Moranden. The elder prince, intent on the mustering of his troops, had not yet mounted; a groom held the bridle of his charger. He met his father’s stare with one as level, and as cold, and as unreadable.

  “Come back to me,” the king said. “Both of you. Alive and whole.”

  Moranden said no word, but bowed and sprang astride.

  The gates swung back; a horn sounded, fierce and high. With a shout the company leaped forth.

  oOo

  They passed the Towers of the Dawn in the full morning, riding steadily from the Vale to the height of the pass, winding down the steep ways into the outer fiefdoms of Ianon. The long riding lulled Vadin into a sort of peace. The king had been fiercely alive when they left him, and Mirain was far from dead, and Vadin knew certainly that at least a tithe of the men about him were the king’s own.

  This might even prove to be no more than it seemed: a quelling of rebellion, a first testing of Ianon’s heir in battle. Moranden was an honorable man; he would not do a murder that was certain to kill his father.

  Vadin would let grief come when it came. Meanwhile he tried to be wise; he opened himself to the clean bright air and the company of men around him and the strong beast-body beneath him. Green Arkhan unfurled beneath Rami’s feet; Avaryan wheeled to his zenith and sank westward behind the mountain walls.

  Mirain was an exemplary soldier. He kept his place in the line beside Vadin, just ahead of the squires with the remounts; he held his Mad One to a quiet pace with no outbursts of stallion temper; when the company was silent he was silent, and when they sang he always seemed to know the songs.

  His accent, Vadin began to notice, had changed. His Ianyn was as good as Vadin’s own, if not better: he had no Imeheni burr but the lilt of a lord of Han-Ianon, clear and melodious yet pitched to carry through field or hall. And he was working the magic of his presence. The men near him had fallen under his spell; Vadin watched it spread.

  They were not falling at his feet. Not yet. But they were warming to him. They were forgetting to hate him; as for shunning him, that battle was long lost.

  Moranden knew it. He did not show it, but Vadin could sense a growing darkness in him. A set to his shoulders; a sharpening of the dun stallion’s temper.

  oOo

  “It can’t work, you know.”

  They were camped on the borders of Medras, sacrificing comfort in a lord’s hall for the sake of speed and sobriety. Fine clear night that it was, Mirain had elected to bivouac with his mount, with a small fire and a warm blanket and the Mad One for wall and guard.

  The stallion admitted Vadin on sufferance, as much for Rami’s sake as for Mirain’s; he had taken an interest in the mare, chaste enough for it was not her season, and she was not inclined to discourage him. But no one else ventured near, or appeared to wish to.

  “It can’t work,” Vadin repeated. “You can bedazzle people when they’re near you, but when their eyes clear they turn straight back to your uncle.”

  Mirain fed the fire with deadwood from the thicket in which they camped. The flames, leaping, made his face strange: sharpened the curve of his nose, carved deep hollows beneath his cheekbones, glittered in his eyes. “Bedazzle people, Vadin? How am I doing that?”

  Impatience flung Vadin’s hand up and out, made him snap, “Don’t play the innocent with me. You’re subverting my lord’s men under his very nose. And he can see it as well as I can.”

  “I am not—” Mirain rose abruptly. The Mad One snorted and threw up his head; the prince gentled him, centering himself on it, shutting Vadin out.

  Vadin hammered at his gates. “Sure you aren’t. You talk to them like a northerner born. Me you lisp at as sweetly and southernly as you ever did. Who’s being played for a fool?”

  Mirain’s back was obdurately silent. One ruby eye glowed beyond and just above it, beneath a fire-honed blade of horn. Rami grazed peacefully on the edge of the firelight, oblivious to two-legged troubles.

  Not for the first time, Vadin cursed all mages and their intransigence. How could a mere man beat sense into the likes of them?

  Mirain spun. “Sense? What sense? You accuse me of machinations I never meant. You fault me for trying my tongue in good Ianyn, and again to easing it with you who know and occasionally forget to despise me. What should I do, refuse to have anything to do with these men I have to fight beside?”

  “Pack up and ride straight back to Han-Ianon where you belong.”

  “Ah no,” said Mirain. “You won’t turn me back now. It was too late for that when I faced Moranden in the market.”

  “You two should be brothers. You hate each other too absolutely to be anything less.”

  “I don’t hate him.” Mirain said it as if he believed it. Perhaps he did. Perhaps even Vadin did. “He lusts after what is mine. He�
�ll never have it. Maybe one day I can teach him, if not to love me, at least to accept the truth.”

  “Are you really as arrogant as that, or are you simple? Men like him don’t back down.”

  “They can be persuaded to step sidewise.”

  Vadin spat into the fire. “And the moons will dance the sword-dance, and the sun will shine all night.”

  To his great surprise, except that he was learning to be amazed by nothing Mirain said or did, the prince dropped down beside him and grinned. “Another wager, O doubter?”

  “I won’t rob you this time, O madman.”

  Mirain laughed. His teeth were very white. He lay with his head pillowed on his saddle, wrapping his blanket about him, eyes bright upon Vadin. “I won’t kill him. That’s too easy. I’ll win him instead. Of his own free will, without magery.”

  “What am I, then? Your practice stroke?”

  “My friend.” Mirain was a shadow on shadow, even his eyes briefly hooded. They flashed open, silencing the snap of protest. “I’ll do it, Vadin.”

  Vadin could understand how Mirain looked on Moranden. One could not hate a man afflicted with insanity. One pitied him; one had a hopeless compulsion to cure him.

  They were both mad, these princes. They were going to die for it. Then what would Ianon do for a king?

  Mirain was asleep. He could do that: will himself into oblivion between breath and breath, and leave the fretting to lesser mortals.

  Vadin inched toward him. He did not move. Nor did the Mad One, which was more to the point.

  The squire peered down at him. The fire, dying, only deepened the shadow of him, but his face was clear enough to memory.

  A face one could not forget. Someone had said that—Ymin, the king. It was in a song.

  Mirain had laughed when he heard it. Aye, he said, he was ugly enough to be remarkable.

  He was stone blind and stark mad. With a sound between a growl and a groan, Vadin rolled himself into his own blanket. The gods looked after the afflicted, said all the priests. Let them do it, then, and give this poor mortal peace.

  oOo

  Perhaps, after all, the gods did their duty. No one tried to slip poison into Mirain’s field rations or a dagger into his back. Moranden paid him no more heed than he paid any other trooper, and no less; and Vadin heard no such words as he had heard in Han-Ianon’s market. The elder prince was ruling himself and he was ruling his men.

  On the third day the bright weather faded. The dawn was dim, the sunrise scarlet and grey; by noon the rain fell in torrents. The company wrapped their weapons in oiled leather and themselves in heavy hooded cloaks and pressed on without pausing.

  Early summer though it was, the rain was northern rain, mountain bred; it chilled to the bone. Men grumbled under their breaths, laying wagers on whether the prince would command them to harden themselves yet further by camping in the storm.

  Mirain took up one such. “He won’t,” he said. “We’ll lodge warm and dry tonight.”

  He won a silver-hafted dagger. For as the grey light dimmed to dark, Moranden led his company up a long twisting track to a castle.

  It was smaller even than Asan-Geitan, and poorer, but it had a roof to keep out the rain. The men cheered as its gate creaked open to admit them.

  oOo

  Mirain would have been content to lodge in the guardroom with the rest. But as he moved toward the comer Vadin had claimed for him, Moranden’s voice brought them both about. “Lord prince!”

  Moranden was easy, affable, even smiling. The lord of the castle, a thin elderly man, looked ready to faint.

  As Vadin made his way behind Mirain through the crowding of men, he strangled laughter. The poor man was terrified enough to be playing host to the greatest lord in Ianon; now that lord presented him with the throne prince himself.

  Who looked like a child, drenched and shivering; who raised his head and stood suddenly towering, full of the god; who spoke to the baron in his own rough patois and won his soul.

  Vadin trailed the three of them in a sort of stupor. Much of it was wet and misery; some was fascination. He had never seen Mirain’s magic worked so near, or to such devastating effect.

  Except that it was not magic, not exactly; not a thing of spells and cantrips. It was his whole self. His face, his bearing, his presence. His infallible knowledge of what to say, and when, and how. And his incomparable eyes.

  They had the best the lord could offer, Moranden the room given over to guests, Mirain the lord’s own chamber. The lord’s own slaves built up the fire in the hearth, which smoked, but which was warm; even the squire had a warm robe, almost clean, and a cup of wine heated to scalding, and the slaves would not let him wait on his lord.

  He was a lord himself here. They were pitiably inept, but less so with him than with Mirain, who awed them into immobility. Until the prince loosed a smile and a word; then they fell over one another to please him.

  Warm and dry and with the wine rising from his stomach to his brain, Vadin woke somewhat from his bemusement. After Han-Ianon this castle was shabby and unkempt and not remarkably clean, but it had an air of comfort; it felt like home. The slaves were ill-washed but well enough fed; the wine was good; the coverlet of the bed was beautiful.

  He remarked on the last, and Mirain smiled. “Your lady’s weaving?” he asked the man who tended the fire, persuading it by degrees to smoke upward and not outward.

  The slave bowed too low and too often, but he answered clearly enough. “Oh, yes, my lord, the Lady Gitani did it. It’s poor stuff, I fear, as you great ones reckon it, but it’s warm; the wool came from our own flocks.”

  “It’s not poor at all; it’s splendid. Look, Vadin, how pure a blue, like the sky in winter. Where ever did the lady find the dyes?”

  “You must speak to her, great lord,” the slave said, bowing. “She can tell you. It’s a woman’s art, my lord, but you a prince—she can tell you.” He bowed yet again and took flight.

  Mirain stood stroking the coverlet, smiling a little still, with the familiar wry twist. “How differently they look on a prince. When I was only a priest, I lodged in the stable or, if the family were pious, with the servants; no one ever stammered when I spoke to him. But I was Mirain then as I am now. Why should it matter?”

  “You didn’t have power then. You couldn’t order one of them put to death and be obeyed.”

  Mirain turned his eyes on Vadin. “Is that what makes a prince? The power to kill without penalty?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “No,” Mirain said. “It has to be more than that.”

  “Not if you’re a scullion in a hill fort.”

  The prince folded himself onto the splendid weaving, brows knit, chin on fist. Without the slaves to interfere, Vadin busied himself with their belongings, spreading wet garments to dry, inspecting the arms and armor in their wrappings.

  When he looked up again Mirain said, “I will be more than an exalted executioner. I will teach folk to see what a king can be. A guide, a guard. A protector of the weak against the strong.”

  Vadin rolled his eyes heavenward and squinted at Mirain’s sword. The blade was beginning to dull. He reached for the whetstone.

  “You scoff,” Mirain said more in sorrow than in anger. “Is that all you know? Fear and force, and all power to the strongest?”

  “What else is there?”

  “Peace. Fearlessness. Law that rules every man, from the lowest to the highest.”

  “What odd dreams you have, my lord. Are they a southern sickness?”

  “Now you’re laughing at me.” Mirain sighed deeply. “I know. If a king hopes to rule, he has to rule by force or he’ll be struck from his throne. But if the force could be tempered with mercy—if he could teach another way, a gentler way, to those who were able to learn; if he could keep to his resolve and not surrender to the seductions of power—imagine it, Vadin. Imagine what he could do.”

  “He wouldn’t last long in Ianon, my
lord. We’re howling barbarians here.”

  Mirain snorted. “You’re no more a barbarian than the Prince of Han- Gilen.”

  “Not likely,” said Vadin. “You won’t catch me dead in trousers.”

  “Prince Orsan would shudder at the thought of a kilt. How ghastly to ride in. How utterly immodest.”

  “He must be as soft as a woman.”

  “No more than I.”

  Vadin eyed Mirain askance. “Have you been walking a shade gingerly for the past day or two?” He dodged the headrest from the bed, flung with alarming force. “What were you saying about mercy, my lord?”

  “I had mercy. I took care to miss.”

  “See?” said Vadin. “Superior force. That’s what makes you the prince and me the squire.”

  “Dear heaven, a philosopher. One of the new logicians, yet. I’ll teach you to read, and you’ll be a great master in the Nine Cities.”

  “Gods forbid,” said Vadin with feeling.

  oOo

  Vadin dined in hall, seated perforce with the princes while the lesser folk took their ease below. At least he was allowed to set himself beside Mirain; no one had the wits or the courage to forbid him.

  He kept a wary eye on Moranden and a warier one on his own wild charge, who was enrapturing the lord’s family as utterly as he had their kinsman. The women in particular were falling in love with him, although one doe-eyed youth—the youngest son, Vadin supposed—was long lost already. He waited on Mirain with something approaching grace, melting at a word or a glance, trembling if chance or duty brought him close enough to touch.

  “Pretty,” Vadin observed when the boy had retreated to fill the wine jar.

  Mirain lifted a brow. “He’s going to beg me to take him when I go. Shall I?”

  “Why not? He looks as if he might be trainable.”

  The brow lifted another degree, but Mirain turned to answer a question, and did not turn back again.

  Left to himself, Vadin watched the boy out of the corner of his eye. His amusement was going sour. Mirain did not mean it, of course. He already had more servants than he could bear.

  But the lad was extraordinarily pretty. Beautiful, in truth. Slender, graceful, with those great liquid eyes; his beard was only a sheen of down on his soft skin, and although his hair had grown long from the shaven head of childhood, he had not yet confined it in the braids of a man. Wrapped in soft wool and hung with jewels, he would make an exquisite girl. He was acting like one, swooning over Mirain.