Galen Beknighted h2-3

by Michael Williams

  The truth was, I had become tired of their expectations. "I keep the stones," I explained coolly, leaning against the back of a tall mahogany chair, "only for the Night of Reflections. They remind me of my suspicious past, and yet they also serve to remind me of the first time I stood my ground and did not give in to graft. I shall donate them to the Order following my knighthood ceremony.

  "If the two of you, in your experience and wisdom, have decided that I am withholding yet more treasure from the Solamnic coffers, you are free to inspect my person for it, from the inside of my mouth down to my nether parts."

  Of all the vows of knighthood, that of respecting one's elders has always been the hardest for me to swallow. And after my short-tempered words there in the di Caela treasury, Sir Elazar and Sir Fernando were finding the swallowing hard themselves. They both rose to their feet with the clank of metal and the rub of leather, beneath which, if you listened attentively, you could hear old knees popping. Glowering like raptors, they stared down on the squire in front of them.

  I glowered back, and I wish I could say my honesty and spunk won over the two old fellows that summer morning. But that is a tale from the old romances, where the virtue of a lad shines through his humble surroundings. This, on the other hand, was Castle di Caela.

  Fernando braced himself against the counting table and hissed at me, his eyes narrowed.

  "We didn't want you in the Order to begin with."

  I nodded, but my critics were by no means through.

  "No, we didn't want you," Elazar agreed. "You'd be astounded to know how many favors Sir Bayard has called in to win you your spurs."

  Actually, I was far from astounded.

  That evening, left alone for the Night of Reflections, my sword and armor and knightly belongings arrayed in front of me, I mused that indeed Bayard must have called in every favor owed him, not to mention every loan or bet.

  I picked up the heavy broadsword. The blade glittered as I turned it in my hand.

  Bayard had certainly risked enough on my account. Risked it from the outset, when he took it upon himself to prove that the third son of a threadbare Coastlund family, more accustomed to mischief than to the Measure, could be molded into a presentable Knight. I must admit, the long-ago adventures that followed that decision seemed to prove Bayard right-the adventure in the Vingaard Mountains and up into the pass at Chaktamir, where we hunted down the Scorpion and lifted the curse from Castle di Caela.

  The problem was that once adventuring was over and daily instruction begun, Bayard was dismayed to discover that most of my resources came out under sudden stress. It seemed that I had no talent for all those things a squire was supposed to do.

  How often I remember that nightmare year of training…

  "Don't hold your sword like a feather duster, Galen…"

  "That is a shield at your arm, not a tent, Galen…"

  "Here is what happened in the rest of the tournament, Galen, after you fell from your horse and were knocked unconscious…"

  So it had progressed, through a series of mishaps and head injuries, until, scarcely a month ago, Bayard had taken me aside, grasped me firmly by the shoulders, and expressed his confidence that at last I would attain the knighthood 1 had so devoutly come to pursue.

  "I don't know what to do with you, Galen," he said. "The Order of the Sword is beyond you, as you prove every time you take up arms or sit a horse. And the Order of the Rose, with its dedication to wisdom and justice, well…"

  I nodded, wise enough at least to understand what Bayard was too polite to say.

  "But there is the Order of the Crown," he pronounced, "whose primary duties are those of loyalty and obedience. Obedience is… the hardest thing for you. But by the gods, you are loyal to me and to the Lady Enid, to your own family, and to the idea of becoming a Knight, which has put you through embarrassments and humiliations the likes of which no lad should undergo."

  I tried to smile bravely and cheerily. Bayard stared at me for a long, reflective moment, then shook me vigorously until my dented, oversized helmet dropped smartly on the bridge of my nose.

  "Loyal you are, Weasel, and three years ago I'd not have thought you capable of it. And if someday you achieve half of what I think you're incapable of, you'll be an excellent Knight."

  I blinked at the compliment.

  "So keep quiet and do nothing" Bayard concluded, "even if you think it will improve your chances for knighthood, for the odds are that whatever you do will misfire. Leave the rest to me, and afterward to your own loyalty."

  So I had done, and now it was the Night of Reflections. Setting the sword aside, I had picked up my helmet. Dented and pockmarked it was, but the best I had under the circumstances. It was not the appearance that bothered me now; it was how I might marshal the tactics to adorn it.

  Setting a helmet is a tricky thing, you see, especially among the Solamnic Orders, caught up as they are with chivalry and pomp and show and kindness to women. On ceremonious occasions, a Knight is expected to wear a favor on his helmet-an item of his lady's clothing, whether it be glove or scarf or, in some absurd cases, a slipper. This is meant to signify a special attachment between said Knight and said lady-a sentiment in keeping with courtliness and romance and general goodwill.

  I practically had to pry a glove from Dannelle di Caela's clenched fist-I had developed an uncomfortable and delightful interest in her of late. On my knees yesterday at the foot of the great marble staircase, the hall around me loud with arriving Knights and the rustle of nosy servants and the occasional shrill of a mechanical cuckoo, brashly I dared her to embarrass me before all present, to refuse me the token in public because I knew she would in private.

  Flushed, a little angry, she had stopped at the top of the stairs. I had shouted my request full voice in the corridor, and Father and Alfric, awaiting me by the entrance to the Great Hall, gaped up at the lovely red-haired girl who stared daggers down at me. Everyone was breathless at my breach of etiquette.

  "I… I have heard tales about you, Master Galen," Dannelle replied in a rigid, formal voice that let me know I had already won.

  "It would please me were you not to repeat ill-founded rumors in front of my esteemed father," I shouted merrily, gesturing at the old fart by the entrance, "so as not to spoil his enjoyment of seeing a dear son knighted in the twilight of his life."

  Dannelle glared angrily at me, caught in the strictures of decorum. She spun about, the hem of her gray dress rising like a cyclone, and stomped away toward her quarters upstairs, stopping only for the briefest of moments to hurl a glove suitorward.

  A knot of silk and sequins, it struck the step above me with a commanding thwack. I took it as a sign of her increasing interest.

  Dannelle's, however, was not the only token available. On the table in front of me also lay an item of more intimate apparel, supplied by one Marigold Celeste, one of the Lady Enid's distant cousins and a formidable sort to reckon with.

  I vowed, as I had vowed often before, not to think of Marigold. I turned my thoughts from that black lace item, not even speculating as to how or why in the world one would wear such a thing.

  Slowly, pensively, I had picked up my glain opal brooch from where it lay amidst other, less marketable things-a dog whistle and a pair of old sun-hardened leather gloves. In its humble surroundings, the brooch stood out like the opals against the silver circle in which they were set.

  Long ago the stones had fallen into my possession, a bribe from a treacherous enemy. Now, set in a silver circle, they seemed more respectable-almost tamed, as though their shadowy beginning had nothing to do with this time and with the lad who held them.

  Uneasily, I held the piece of jewelry up to candlelight. It had been scarcely a week since I had taken the stones from the old leather pouch, in which they had resided since they were given to me, and sent them to the local jeweler to have them set in a brooch. It had cost a pretty sum, but it seemed worth it: At night of late, when the high wind raced do
wn from the hills unto the castle, whipping about the battlements and through the window, my belongings would shake on their perches and shelves and places of storage. On those nights, I could swear I heard the opals click together in the darkness, as though they were trying to speak.

  As though on cue, again the wind rose suddenly. The candle sputtered and went out.

  "I have heard of drafty castles," I muttered, "but this…"

  I could not complete the feeble sentiment, for a cold mist followed in the wake of the wind, smelling of old water and ice and cavernous gloom. Somehow it carried upon it a terrible loneliness and sadness, so that as the mist passed over me, I wanted to cry out, to moan and blubber for no reason I could name or understand.

  The whole chamber tensed, as though it awaited some monstrous change.

  It was then that the shapes appeared. They took form out of the heart of the opals and the smoke from the extinguished candle. At first it seemed like a trick of reflected light-that a vapor had fallen from the night air, out of the confusion of wind and weather, and rested in the centermost opal. But the darkness hung all about the brooch, a greater dark inside of the dark, turning and boiling and adopting a solid shape.

  Then the stones seemed to open in front of me, and Plainsmen appeared in the jeweled blackness. They moved silently, smoothly, with a motion born in the grasslands, where they ran with the deer and the leopard. Still too surprised to be frightened, I squinted to see them more clearly in the tricky light.

  There were six figures, gaunt and dusty and tall, wrapped in furs and wearing old ornaments of beads and claws and leather thongs. Beneath the folds of mist-or was it fur? — draped over them, I could see their skin, weathered and tough, as though a century of winds and rain had descended upon them.

  Their leader was the oldest, the tallest. On his head he wore the skull of an antelope, his graying forelocks streaming through its vacant eyes, its tall, thin rack of antlers lending him height and a fearsome otherworldliness, as though he were no Plainsman at all, but a thing out of nature or beyond it.

  He scanned the landscape in front of him slowly, intently, as though he had forgotten something, had left something behind here. Then his gaze pierced the surface of the stone and rested upon me, and for a moment, his eyes flickered like a distant display of fireworks, green and beyond sound and at the faintest edge of sight.

  I swallowed hard and gripped the arms of my chair. If I was expected to say something, I was confounded if I knew what it was. I started to hail the spectral figures in front of me, to offer them greetings or salute but most of all to find out who they were and what they wanted. I opened my mouth, but the leader cut me short, raising a lean hand and staring at me without malice or venom, or even all that much attention. He seemed to be looking somewhere beyond me, though he looked straight at me at the same time.

  Slowly and dramatically, he beckoned. He motioned me. to follow him into the center of the stone.

  "Not on your life," I muttered, my right hand moving quickly from the chair to the sword on the table in front of me. Suddenly, in the black center of the topmost stone, the Great Hall of di Caela appeared. I blinked and looked again.

  As if focusing my gaze, the scene in the opal shifted from wall to wall, resting finally on the high, curtained balcony from which in a nightmare time several years behind me, I had watched the Scorpion announce his evil presence in a hall dark with solemnity and night.

  There, amidst the story of Huma carved in the marble frieze that covered the balcony ledge, my brother Brithelm's shape had joined the Knights and the dragons and the obscure tendrils of marble greenery.

  As I watched, the stone shape turned and looked at me.

  Brithelm's eyes were empty and obscure, his hair and skin dull, as though I watched him through a veil of webbing and mist. Slowly, emerging from the frieze like a cobra rising to strike, a pale hand, a knife in its grip, took shape from the stone and the smoke. Turning toward my brother, it set blade to his throat.

  The white of the marble split in a dark red line. And surely enough, all light and sound seemed to retreat, and I seemed to see my brother at the end of a gray and swirling tunnel.

  I cried out. Brithelm's eyes rested on me.

  Then, as though he had heard me, he shrank back into the dark of the jewel, passing soundlessly into mist and rock, the sides of the opal converging above him like water converges to cover a sinking stone. The Plainsmen vanished along with him, as though they followed him into the dark. One of them carried a torch that glowed with a green, muted flame that cast its light only on the receding figures themselves, as though they drew in its radiance and absorbed it, leaving the rest of the room in shadows. I stumbled to my feet, reeling, as the Plainsmen drifted into the darkness of the thing in my hand.

  From where I stood, they looked like pillars of light as they faded away. That light was the last thing I remembered until Bayard stood above me, shaking and waking me.

  Chapter III

  First of all, visions were never my strength.

  They smack of magic, which for the most part, I do not credit.

  For I have seen the illusionists early and late, dressed in the glittering robes embroidered with moons and stars and pentagons and strange planetary designs, sitting on horseback at the edge of the mist-covered drawbridge outside my boyhood home in Coastlund, camped in their eerie, geometrical tents on the plains outside Castle di Caela.

  Everywhere that I have seen the magicians, they are trying to get indoors.

  Once inside, once they are warm and fed and paid and provided for, I grant you that their tricks can be something to behold. I saw one elderly man set his apprentice on fire.

  The boy moved through my father's hall, stepping gracefully around broken crockery, snoring dogs, and capsized tables. All the while his hair and fingers were aflame, and yet no heat touched him.

  Once I saw a great glittering stone brought forth from the folds of a dramatic red robe. The bearer of that stone spoke some brief, inaudible words above it, and the crystal clouded. Out of the light and mist at its heart, I saw a room of eggs and bizarre, grotesque creatures hatching from them-half man, but also half lizard or eft or dragon or something. And then, before the vision faded, I saw the stone, or one like it, glowing green and amber, embedded in the chest of a young man.

  That was a wondrous night's entertainment, for it was a vision beyond my most fanciful imaginings.

  Yet there is always hypnosis. There are mirrors that a clever man can set at just the right angle to reflect the firelight. There are strings and pulleys, secret pockets and panels.

  I have always been prone to explain anything by its tricks and its hidden machinery. Indeed, though my own adventures had taught me that there was genuine magic in the world, sometimes at my very doorstep, I was inclined to forget that in my search for reasonable explanations.

  So it was as I lay safely on my own bed, puzzling over the cryptic vision of the Plainsman. All the candles were lit in the room, the logs in the fireplace burning as brightly as poor Bayard could manage at a moment's notice. He had discovered and wakened me, and now he was fuming about the room, gathering my belongings, his impatience rising as, caught up in my thoughts, I let him and the page he had brought with him do all the preparations.

  "I want things light around me," I said. "I want things visible."

  Almost by reflex, the boy lit yet another candle.

  "This is no time for dramatics, Galen," Bayard observed quietly. "If for no other reason, you will become a Knight out of simple good manners."

  He was downright intimidating in full Solamnic armor. He stood above me like a king from the old stories instead of the man I had seen bedraggled by rain, thrown from his horse in the mountains, or dozing by countless campfires in our long and difficult travels together.

  It was as if the armor enlarged him, made him more than what he was, or at least more than he was while he snored or endured bedragglement. Right now he was formidable
, banishing the memory of my six spectral visitors almost entirely.

  I sat up.

  Bayard folded his arms.

  "Put on the armor, Galen," he declared flatly. "You realize, don't you, how dishonorable it is to doze on the Night of Reflections?"

  "I beg your pardon? 'Doze,' did you say?"

  With a rough shove, Bayard pushed me back down onto the bed. Sensing a confrontation, the page scurried to the opposite end of the room.

  "Dozed. Drifted away. Nodded off. How long have you been asleep?" Bayard asked curtly.

  I sat up, this time more hesitantly. "But I wasn't asleep, Bayard!" I shouted. "I was-"

  He shoved me back onto the bed again.

  "I thought I had seen it all from you," he declared, his gray eyes glittering, his teeth clenched. For a moment, I understood what it meant to be at the receiving end of his sword, and I blamed neither goblin nor ogre nor enemy Knight for turning and running away.

  Unfortunately, I had no such options. I stood-or rather sat-my ground, and the chambers grew dreadfully silent except for the crackle of the fire and the sound of the page's rag squeaking diligently across embossed metal. By the time the boy was done with being unnoticed in my corner, the shield would shine like Solinari.

  Bayard stood completely still, in that unforgiving silence of those who are, when all is said and done, better than you. The light from the candles seemed to sink and gutter.

  "All of it!" he continued quietly, though his voice began to rise in irritation. "Mishap in the lists and chaos in the saddle, the unwelcome opinion of every veteran Solamnic who maintained you should be passed over and sent back to Coastlund. Put up with it all, I did, because something in me believed that you had the stomach for Knighthood-that out in the swamp and the mountains and up in the pass at Chaktamir, something had taught you a lesson, that you had come away from adventure more honest and wise and eager.