Mordant's Need

by Stephen R. Donaldson

  Nevertheless he entered the tent like a much younger man. He strode forward with strength in his legs, authority in his arms; and his eyes flashed a blue so deep that it was almost purple.

  When he saw Terisa and Geraden, he grinned like a boy.

  ‘Well met. Better to come late than not to come at all, I always say.’

  ‘My lord King,’ Geraden breathed, gaping. He was too surprised to bow, almost too surprised to speak. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘A few scratches.’ The King’s grin broadened into the smile Terisa remembered, the smile of innocence and pleasure, the sunrise which lit all his features and made him the kind of man for whom people were willing to die. ‘Nothing my enemies can pride themselves for.’

  He might have gone on, but the Tor stopped him.

  Hearing King Joyse’s voice, the old lord jerked up his head, snatched open his eyes. Urgently, almost frantically, he hauled his legs off the stool and blundered to his feet like a surfacing grampus. Around the vivid bulge of his hemorrhage, his bare skin looked as pale as disease, tarnished with frailty and need.

  Tottering, he caught a hand on Ribuld’s shoulder. ‘Prince Kragen,’ he gasped. ‘Summon the Prince.’

  Then he plunged to his knees as if the ground had been cut out from under him.

  Ribuld started to help the lord, but King Joyse’s presence daunted him.

  Bowing his face to the canvas, retching for breath, the Tor panted, ‘My lord King, I beg you.’

  King Joyse’s smile turned to ashes on his face.

  ‘I beg you. I have brought your guard and your Congery and all your friends to destruction. Tell me I have not betrayed you.’

  ‘Betrayed me?’ The passion in the King’s face was wonderful and dire. As if he had no arthritis and no years, no weakness of any kind to hamper him, he caught hold of the Tor’s arms and raised him to his feet by main strength. ‘My old friend! If you have put all I love and all my force in the path of ruin, you have not betrayed me. If you have sold my kingdom to the Alend Contender, so that I have nothing left to rule, you have not betrayed me. You are here – here, where the fate of the world hinges.’ Tears trailed through the grime on his cheeks. ‘My lord Tor, I have used you abominably. I considered you an obstacle, your loyalty a stumbling block. And you have served me better than my best hope.’

  Hardly able to bear what he heard, the Tor clamped his hands over his face and shuddered as if he were sobbing.

  King Joyse glanced up and down the Tor’s frame; at once, his expression darkened. To the astonished physician, he snapped, ‘How was he injured? How severe is his hurt?’

  ‘A kick, my lord King,’ the physician fumbled out quickly. ‘The High King’s Monomach. He bleeds inwardly.’ The man faltered, then forced himself to say, ‘If he does not rest, he will die. And even if he does rest, I cannot vouch for his life. He has used himself’ – the physician seemed unaware that he was aping the King’s words – ‘abominably.’

  ‘Then he will rest,’ King Joyse replied in a tone which no one could have ignored. ‘You will give him your best care. If he dies, you will justify yourself to me.’

  Without waiting for an answer, he eased the Tor back into his camp chair. The Tor collapsed against the chair back weakly.

  Geraden put a hand on Ribuld’s arm. ‘Prince Kragen.’ He spoke in a whisper; but his tone was like the King’s, irrefusable. ‘And Master Barsonage.’

  Ribuld went out of the tent in a daze.

  ‘Now.’ King Joyse faced Terisa and Geraden. He stood slightly poised, as if he were ready to spring, and his eyes blazed blue. ‘You have a great deal to tell me. Before Prince Kragen comes. Begin from Gart’s attack in the hall of audiences.

  ‘Where is Castellan Lebbick?’

  His intensity was so compelling that Terisa almost started to answer. Geraden, however, had other ideas. He shifted a bit away from her, a bit ahead of her, placing himself between her and danger. Folding his arms on his chest, he said firmly – so firmly that Terisa was simultaneously amazed and proud and frightened – ‘You’ve been fighting your enemies, my lord King. I can decide better what to tell you if you’ll tell me who gave you your “scratches.”’

  The King’s eyes narrowed. ‘Geraden,’ he said harshly, ‘do you remember who I am?’

  Geraden didn’t flinch. ‘Yes, my lord King. You’re the man who abandoned the throne of Mordant when we needed you most. You’re the man who brought us all to the edge of ruin without once’ – his anger stung the air – ‘having the decency to tell us the truth.’

  Instead of retorting, King Joyse studied Geraden as if the younger man had become someone he didn’t know, a completely different person. A moment later, he shrugged, and the peril in his gaze eased.

  ‘Your father, the Domne,’ he said evenly, ‘has given me many gifts, both of friendship and of service. His greatest gift to me, however, is the loyalty of his sons. I trust you, Geraden. I have trusted you for a long time. And I have given you little reason to trust me. You will answer me when you are ready.

  ‘I have been fighting, as you see’ – he indicated his battle gear – ‘to rescue Queen Madin.’

  Rescue Queen Madin. Rescue the Queen. Terisa didn’t understand how that was possible – the distances were too great, the time too short – but his mere statement filled her with so much relief that she could hardly keep her legs under her.

  ‘Doubtless,’ King Joyse explained, ‘you have been told of the strange shapeless cloud of Imagery with which Havelock broke Prince Kragen’s catapults. That shape is a creature, a being – a being with which Havelock has contrived an improbable friendship.

  ‘I must confess that when you told me of the Queen’s abduction I became’ – he pursed his lips wryly – ‘a trifle unreasonable. It was always my intention to lead whatever forces Orison could muster myself. I meant to beg or intimidate an alliance out of Margonal. I could coerce the Congery somehow. For that reason, my old friend’ – he nodded toward the sprawling Tor – ‘had no place in my plans. I did not know that I would need him.’

  ‘That’s my fault,’ Terisa said abruptly, unexpectedly. Geraden had placed himself between her and the King for a reason, a reason she ought to respect. Nevertheless she couldn’t keep still. ‘You were doing what you had to do. You hurt the Tor and Castellan Lebbick and Elega and everyone else so they wouldn’t realize your weakness was only a ploy. So they wouldn’t betray you. But I already betrayed you. I told Eremis’ – the thought of her own folly choked her – ‘told Eremis you knew what you were doing. That’s why he took the Queen.’

  King Joyse looked at her hard, so hard that she blushed in chagrin. Yet his gaze held no recrimination. After a brief pause, he said, ‘My lady, you were provoked,’ and returned his attention to Geraden.

  ‘As I say,’ he continued, ‘I became unreasonable. I abandoned you. Though he pleaded with me to reconsider, I forced Havelock to translate his strange friend for me, and that shape bore me to the Care of Fayle as swift as wings. At the debris of Vale House, I found the trail of a motley collection of the Fayle’s old servants and soldiers attempting to pursue Torrent and the Queen. That trail led me eventually to Torrent’s – eventually, I say, or I would have returned to you a day or more sooner – and so to Torrent herself and the Queen.

  ‘At the cost of much hardship and privation and danger’ – his eyes hinted at pride – ‘my demure and retiring daughter saved her mother. She enabled me to find the Queen and set her free.

  ‘Her abductors defended themselves as well as they could – well enough to prevent the Fayle’s men and me from capturing or questioning them – but at last they fell.’ The state of his gear testified that the battle hadn’t been easy. ‘When I had taken Queen Madin and Torrent to safety in Romish, Havelock’s friend brought me here as quickly as possible.’

  Geraden absorbed this account without obvious surprise or appreciation. When King Joyse had finished, Geraden asked noncommittally, ‘And you didn’t stop in
Orison? You don’t have any news from there?’

  The King was losing patience. ‘Do I look like a man who has spent time on social amenities and conversation? I knew that if I did not find you here I could return to Orison at my leisure. But if I had stopped there first and failed to find you, the delay might have made me too late to join you. I have learned nothing, heard nothing, since the moment I left the hall of audiences.

  ‘Geraden,’ he concluded warningly, ‘I must know what has happened in my absence. I must hear the tale you brought to Orison with Prince Kragen. I cannot go into battle without that knowledge.’

  ‘My lord King,’ Geraden responded as if he were immune to Joyse’s impatience, ‘Eremis is holding my brother Nyle hostage somewhere near here – a stronghold of some kind, probably. Eremis is going to use him against us. Against me. And it’s my doing. If I hadn’t been so determined to stop him from betraying you for Elega and Prince Kragen, he never would have been vulnerable to Eremis. He wouldn’t have been locked up where Eremis could get at him.

  ‘But it’s your doing, too. You’ve always been such a friend of the Domne. You welcomed Artagel. You went out of your way to draw me to you. And yet you always ignored Nyle.

  ‘His yearning was as great as mine. He has plenty of ability. And he was raised from the beginning on Artagel’s stories about you, the Domne’s stories. He would have been willing to kill for you by the time he was six.’

  ‘Geraden,’ King Joyse growled.

  Nevertheless Geraden went on, ‘Why didn’t you value him at all? Why didn’t you give him something to save him while he was still young enough to save?’

  ‘You exceed yourself,’ snapped the King. ‘I have not come all this way to answer such questions.’

  ‘But you’re going to answer this one,’ Geraden replied as if he were sure – as if he had the capacity to make King Joyse do what he wanted. The hint of authority in his voice was so subtle that Terisa scarcely heard it. He meant to wrest some kind of truth from his King.

  And the King did answer. To her astonishment, he retreated visibly, with a crestfallen air, a look of embarrassment; Geraden had touched an odd shame. ‘Yes,’ he muttered, ‘all right. You are right. I always did ignore him. There was always a quality in his dumb need which I disliked. He pitied himself before I could pity him – and so I had no desire to pity him.

  ‘But that is not the reason.

  ‘Artagel was another matter altogether. His talent with the sword was obvious. Anyone would have welcomed him. But you, Geraden—’ The King’s gaze was angry and hurt at once, as if his own sense of culpability baffled him. ‘I did not choose you out of a desire to give you precedence over Nyle. I would not have done that to the son of a friend. No, I drew you to me because I had already seen your importance in Havelock’s augury.’

  Geraden hissed a breath; but King Joyse didn’t stop.

  ‘The glass which he broke when I was an infant showed you exactly as you appear in the Congery’s augury’ – for a moment, the King’s voice sounded as raw as splintered wood – ‘surrounded entirely by mirrors in which Images of violence reflected against you. How could I let you be? I had to save you, if that were possible. And if it were not, I had to give you the chance to save me.

  ‘Geraden,’ King Joyse admitted in frank pain, ‘on your father’s love, I swear to you that I slighted Nyle’s yearning only because I was not wise enough to see where it would lead him. The Domne has given me nothing but love and loyalty. In the matter of his son Nyle I failed him.’

  For a long moment, Geraden didn’t speak. When he did, his throat was tight with emotion. ‘We all failed, my lord King. For my part – I swear to you on my father’s love that I’ll save you if I can. No matter how many people you’ve hurt. You haven’t been honest with us for a long time, and I hate that. But you’re still my King. Nobody can fill that place but you.’

  Terisa couldn’t keep quiet any longer. ‘Castellan Lebbick is dead,’ she put in cruelly to get the King’s attention. She needed answers of her own. ‘Gart killed him. All he managed to do before he died was save the Tor.’

  That made Geraden turn toward her, made King Joyse face her again.

  The two men looked unexpectedly like a match for each other, suited to meet each other’s demands.

  ‘I defended you,’ she said with Lebbick’s body vivid in her mind, and the Perdon’s; with the Tor’s hurt displayed under the light of the lanterns. ‘I stood up in front of everybody and told them what Master Quillon told me. You made yourself the only reasonable target. So the enemies you hadn’t been able to identify would attack you instead of someone else, somewhere else. I told them. That’s why we’re all here. We decided to trust you even after you abandoned us.

  ‘But Master Quillon is dead. Castellan Lebbick is dead. The Perdon is dead. The Tor is dying.’ Her distress accumulated as she spoke. She thought that she would never be reconciled to all the different kinds of pain King Joyse had exacted from his friends. ‘Nyle is a hostage, and Houseldon has been burned to the ground, and Sternwall is sinking in lava, and the Fayle doesn’t even have enough men left to rescue his own daughter, and now we’re probably going to be slaughtered because we don’t know where Eremis’ stronghold is,’ oh, curse you, curse you, you crazy old man, ‘and I want to know how you stand it. How do you live with yourself? How do you expect us to trust you?

  ‘You can’t help us now!’ Overwhelmed by unpremeditated bitterness, Terisa cried, ‘You can’t even beat Havelock at hop-board!’

  Despite her outburst, however, King Joyse faced her gently. Her accusation hurt him less than Geraden’s had: maybe he was readier for it. His face softened while she protested against him; his gaze was blurred by compassion. He waited until she was finished. Then, incongruously, he pulled an old handkerchief out of the seam of his breastplate and handed it to her so that she could wipe her eyes.

  Geraden stood now at the King’s shoulder as if he had been won over. ‘Terisa—’ he began; but King Joyse touched his arm, stopped him.

  ‘No, Geraden. I must answer her.

  ‘My lady, I have already proved myself to you, after a fashion. You have seen atrocities in Mordant. Yet it was not I who perpetrated them. If I had not, as you say, made myself a target, if I had not risked those I love most in the name of my weakness, those atrocities would be everywhere. Without the lure of my weakness, Eremis might have had great difficulty forging an alliance with High King Festten – and so he would have had no choice except to afflict Cadwal and Mordant and Alend with vile Imagery until all things were destroyed. At the cost of Quillon’s life, and Lebbick’s, and the Perdon’s – at the cost, yes, of my own wife’s in dignation, my own daughter’s betrayal, I have procured my enemy’s name as well as his attention, so that for Cadwal and Mordant and Alend there is still hope. I have given us the opportunity to fight for our world.

  ‘But that is not what you wish to know, is it?’

  His voice searched her, and his eyes seemed to probe her bitterness. When he looked at her like that, she felt an unaccountable desire to tell him about being locked in the closet, as if it were his fault in some way, as if there were something he could have done about it. Until this moment, he had cut himself off from her – as her father had cut himself off. What made King Joyse a better man than her father?

  ‘You dislike what I have done,’ the King said, ‘but you are able to grasp the necessity of it. Otherwise you would not have supported me. No, my lady, what you want from me is a more immediate hope. You wish me to be greater than you can imagine. You wish me to justify myself with power. You wish me to tell you that I have the means to save you.’

  Involuntarily, she ducked her head, unable to meet his steady blue scrutiny.

  ‘Terisa,’ he said softly, ‘my lady, I cannot save you. I do not have the means.

  ‘You know that already,’ he continued at once. ‘As you have observed, I cannot so much as defeat the Adept at hop-board. It is only a game, of course, a
mere exercise – but I cannot forget that the pieces live and breathe, with names and spouses, children and bravery and fear. I am an unreasonable man. When Quillon told me that Myste went to you before her disappearance, I risked myself and all my plans in order to challenge you, even though Havelock’s augury had given me reason to think I knew where she had gone. When my wife is threatened, I do not ask whether any larger need should outweigh her peril in my mind. I lack Havelock’s particular sanity.

  ‘And the same unreason weakens me everywhere. Shall I tell you a thing which shames me? When I learned that you had fled to Havelock after Quillon’s death, that you had gone to him for rescue with Master Gilbur hot behind you, and that he had refused you— My lady, Havelock is my oldest friend. It was he who put me on the path to become what I am. But when I learned that he had refused you, I struck him—’

  Geraden’s eyes widened at that revelation; but he said nothing.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ the King went on as if mere shame couldn’t hold him back, ‘I am here. When Quillon was killed – Quillon, who had served me so long with such courage and cunning – I knew that this battle was mine to wage, rather than only to command. The blood must be on my hands. I will not have my pieces so contemptuously used. I will not allow Master Eremis to tilt the board, to remake the world in his own image.’ Terisa could have sworn that he was growing taller, rising to power in front of her. ‘Do you believe I care nothing for Lebbick’s suffering, or the Tor’s? Do you believe I have not felt your distress – or Geraden’s – or Elega’s?

  ‘My lady, you have not seen me fight.’

  Curse you. Oh, curse you completely. I’ll do anything you want. Just tell me what it is.

  ‘I have seen you fight, however,’ put in Prince Kragen as he came between the tentflaps. ‘Though it galls me to say so, my lord King, I am glad that you have come.’

  The Prince had Ribuld with him, and Castellan Norge. Master Barsonage entered the tent on the Castellan’s heels. And with them came a slim figure cloaked from head to foot in dark satin, face and shape and even hands hidden. As Prince Kragen strode forward to confront the King, as both Master Barsonage and Norge stopped and stared as if they couldn’t believe their eyes, the cloaked figure slipped back along the tent wall, trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible.