But Dewar slouched and propped his feet on a chest at the foot of Otto’s bed, and Otto sat on another chest.
“I hope you meant it about the food,” Dewar said after a moment, opening his eyes and looking sharply at Otto.
“Sure I did. I’ll send someone. There’s usually stew at least.” Ottaviano went out again and found one of his squires, who was a few tents away giggling and dicing with two other boys and a predatory off-duty lieutenant from Herne’s troops. Otto sent the boy off to find them a late bite of supper and considered, as he squelched back to his tent, that perhaps he should find more work for his squires, if only to keep them from losing their shirts and the Sun might see what else.
Dewar was rubbing his forehead and yawning.
“Tired?”
“The Marshal’s wine in an empty gut brews instant hangover,” Dewar said. He smiled thinly. “He would have been happier to see Prospero himself, I do think.”
“I’m sure that if he does, he’ll offer him a drink,” Otto said. “Gaston doesn’t seem to take this whole thing personally.”
“But of course not. Is it not the Emperor whom Prince Prospero opposes? The Marshal is, hm, standing in the way. Not a good place to be, between a sorcerer like Prince Prospero and something he wants.”
Otto sat on the bed again. “Not a good place at all. Even less good in a few days, if what you said is true.”
“It’s true.”
“Did you drop by just to tell us that?” Otto asked.
“No,” Dewar said, after thinking for a moment.
The wind flapped the tent’s sides. Dewar got up, thumping the chair, and went to the tiny wood-stove in the center of the tent. “Coal would be better,” he said, stuffing two days’ ration of wood into the cast-iron belly.
“In Ascolet we use coal,” Otto said; “we’ve got a lot of it. Out here there’s nothing to burn but dung, which stinks, so we’re leaving that for the foot troops and as a special concession to the officers the Marshal let Herne haul in some wood.”
“Most of the heat goes right up and out,” Dewar observed, standing and closing the stove, looking up the pipe.
“Why are you here?”
The sorcerer dusted bark from his hands. “Have you ever seen Prospero?”
“Yes. Well, at a distance. A great distance. I thought it was him.”
“I dreamt of him,” Dewar said, turning and sitting on the stove. He and Otto eyed one another by the dull light from the lamp, whose chimney needed to be cleaned.
“Did he tell you to come here?” Otto asked, trying to keep his voice level. He didn’t believe in supernatural dreams, dreams of foreseeing and dreams of far-sight.
“He laid a geas on me,” Dewar said, “to seek him until we met.”
“Hell of a geas,” Otto said. “What did you do to deserve that?”
Dewar lifted his eyebrows. The stove was becoming warm enough to penetrate his trousers. He shifted his seat. “Well,” he said, “when I first had it I was in his tomb.”
Ottaviano opened and closed his mouth. Trespassing in the Royal Tombs? How? Why? But Dewar wouldn’t answer questions, certainly. “You get around,” he said.
Dewar inclined his head, smiling. “Lately,” he said, “the geas has, in a manner of speaking, been roused. I could ignore it before. Have you ever had a geas?”
“Uh, no, not that sort.”
“They’re a pain in the neck,” Dewar said thoughtfully. “Dreadful nuisance. Particularly that sort, the very vague and wide-ranging sort that, if one isn’t aware, hangs over one’s every deed and either shapes or shadows it. One forever has a feeling that there’s something else one ought to be doing. Not pleasant at all, particularly when one is doing something that one is quite sure is what one wants to be doing.” Dewar nodded slowly, his eyes looking past the tent to something outside, beyond, with detached, remote interest.
“So,” Otto asked, when the sorcerer had said nothing more for several minutes, staring into nothing, “Prospero put a geas on you, in a dream you had in his tomb. And you’ve been looking for him since. How long ago was this?”
“Oh, years. Years,” Dewar said, blinking and shaking the geas’s veil from him. “As I said, one can ignore a geas, for a while anyway. But all that talk in Ascolet about Prospero woke mine.”
“What are you going to do, then? Walk over there and introduce yourself?”
“I hardly think so. He’s patently in a fire-first, worry-later temper; he snapped a bolt at me when I prodded one of his Bounds today. If I’d known he was nearby I wouldn’t have done, I assure you.”
The tent-flap flipped back, and all the feeble warmth whooshed out and a cold slab of winter fell in. Otto’s squire entered, carrying a covered tray. Dewar watched as the boy laid the rough table with a cloth, dishes and green glass goblets, napkins and utensils.
“We’ll not need you to serve,” Ottaviano said. “Stay out of Tick’s tent and his games,” he added. “Did you finish oiling those boots?”
“No, sir,” said the boy.
“Do it,” Ottaviano commanded, and the squire, with a sullen look, left with another gust of cold air. “Shall we eat?”
The food was ham, a bony stewed rabbit, and mutton; there was bread also, and Dewar concentrated his first attention on the loaf, eating with the quiet ruthlessness of sharp hunger. When they had supped as well as they might, both sat back and regarded one another.
“You could call him to a duel,” Ottaviano suggested.
“No, thank you. I have no quarrel with him, nor do I desire one.” Dewar wiped the loaf-end meticulously around and around the rabbit-dish, removing every trace of gravy, and ate it.
“But here you are,” Otto said. “Right in the path of his possible firebath.”
“Ye-e-s.… Do you know how the calendar really works?”
“What?”
“The calendar. Events such as Days of Flame happen regularly and for a reason.”
“Well, yeah, everybody knows that. Holidays.”
“Landuc observes only Days of Flame,” Dewar said, “but there are others. Tomorrow will be a Day of Stone.”
Otto slapped the table, exasperated. “I don’t understand. We should get religion? Could you say something straightforward, Dewar? It’s late, I have to go tell Gaston why you’re here, and I can’t figure you.”
Dewar chuckled. “All right,” he said. “I can’t imagine what passes for education here. Tomorrow is a Day of Stone. It’s the most auspicious and efficacious day for working with that Element. The most sensible thing for you, for Gaston, to do, is to use that day to put up Bounds of your own and get inside them. Stonebounds can repel a Salamander, properly made.”
“Thank you for the suggestion. It is inconvenient that none of us is able to do that.”
“I can,” Dewar said.
“Obviously you can, but why would you?”
“Because,” Dewar said condescendingly, “I have a geas gnawing at me, and I don’t like it, and I intend to putter about in the area and get a better idea of Prospero, what he is and so on, before I let the geas rule me altogether. It’s much stronger with proximity.”
“I see,” murmured Otto. “So you’re—volunteering. Again.”
“I suppose one could look at it thus. Or one might say that I am using Gaston and his army as a piece of distracting business while I observe a potential opponent. Whether or not Gaston wants me, I will be here. Whether or not he likes it, I shall certainly forge Bounds to protect myself. He can allow me to make myself, from his point of view, useful.”
“You’re insane.”
“Unconventional,” Dewar said, smiling. “Now it is nearly midnight. Run along and tell Gaston he has a sorcerer, for the nonce, if he wished to retain me, though I know he can’t, and I don’t sell my sorcery; and that if he does not want me, I shall be here anyway.”
“Truth to tell,” Dewar said, “I rather like this rain. It’s thoroughly wet.” He was soaked to the skin, his cr
eam-white linen shirt molded to him in dark folds, water running down his face.
“Part sheep, are you?” Otto gibed.
Dewar bared his teeth at Otto in a humorless grin—from his point of view, the jest lacked taste and humor—and tossed wet hair from his face. The torch in Prince Gaston’s hand sputtered and hissed at the spray of drops. “Is the horse ready, Prince Herne?”
“He doesn’t like it,” Herne said, “he’s a warhorse, not a—”
“Yes, yes. He’ll manage. If he bites me I’ll geld him,” Dewar added, “on the spot.”
“What do we do?” Golias asked.
“You, if you’re smart, will all go about three hundred feet from here—that low hill should be all right—and watch,” Dewar said. “Since none of you is a virgin, or so I believe I may safely assume, none of you can possibly be of assistance. Give me that end of the rope. Marshal, your men have marked the gaps I surveyed?”
“Yes. There are two greater, east and west, and two lesser. The stakes were further apart, east and west; I assumed you meant them so.”
“Very good,” Dewar said. “Hm, one of you can carry this plough while I lead the horse. Thanks, Prince Herne. This way; we’ll start at the west side, as that’s the most important. No, put it facing—yes.” The sorcerer and the Prince walked to a tall upright wand and Herne set the plough down. “Go, join the others,” Dewar said, suddenly urgent. “Take my lantern. Hurry. Dawn comes.”
Prince Herne bit back a retort and left, not running but not lingering. The lights he carried bobbed away among the bushes.
Dewar stood in the predawn rain with a crude plough, to which Herne’s horse had been harnessed, and a long rope, which led off through the foul weather and darkness to the center of Gaston’s newly-chosen campsite. Closing his eyes, he laid his hands loosely on the plough-handles and concentrated.
There it was: the first trickle of daybreak, and the Well’s muted roar beneath it. Dewar’s hands closed; he lifted the plough, set it down, and shouted “Gee!” to the horse, adding a kick of the Well to the word, so that the huge horse started and sprang forth, dragging the plough.
The ploughshare dug into the ground, making a shallow furrow, and Dewar strode forward, chanting in a low monotone. The earth rumbled and shivered and began to flow behind him; the wind switched around to hammer rain in his face and parted screaming in his wake. He did not look back; once he had put hand to plough and begun the Bounds, he must not look back until the circle was completed. A Well-fostered nimbus crackled on the ploughshare and gradually spread up over the handles, over Dewar, over the horse.
“Holy Well,” muttered Herne, reaching the hilltop and looking back.
An ethereal, glowing figure of a ploughman as high as a mountain was striding around the perimeter of the camp, following a ghostly horse, and the furrow he made was a deep, steep ditch, and the earth he turned was a high dike inside the ditch. A thin line of fire led from the plough to a tall pole of sparks, snapping discharges of power, in the center of the plough’s circular path.
Gaston and the others said nothing, watching. If one squinted, one could see in the distance the tiny Fire-limned figures of Dewar, the straining horse, and the plough.
A whirlwind, black and conical, whipped toward Dewar from the west. Prospero had taken note.
Dewar, head down, felt the Well pumping through him, and he felt the rippling approach of Prospero’s whirlwind. He was nearly to the first break; he would be vulnerable as he carried the plough over it, not digging, and so he tried to hurry the horse, so as to be past when the wind struck. The whirlwind stitched and kinked, delaying; was Prospero controlling it from wherever he was? Dewar came to the pole; the whirlwind’s roar was behind him, approaching swiftly, and the sorcerer jerked the ploughshare out of the ground and walked slowly forward.
The storm hit with a pummelling wind. Dewar screwed his eyes shut. The horse stumbled and caught his footing. The plough was pushed toward the ground; Dewar held it higher and pressed on, feeling the line of the Well’s Fire burning from the center of his Bounds outward (the spell now suspended between his plough and the point where it had left the ground), drawing more power from the Well than before, and chanting still as the power built up and then shot into the whirlwind.
A rushing implosion shook the plough in Dewar’s hands. The whirlwind was gone; moreover, the rain had stopped. Panting, feeling hollow and light-headed, he arrived on the other side of the gap and dropped the plough to the ground again.
There came no further overt opposition. He had been tested and had passed. Prospero had learned that he was facing a sorcerer, not a fool trying to plough a Bound without knowing what he did. They would meet again, later. Dewar wrestled the plough through the half-frozen earth, feeling the ground part before the bite of the blade, and pressed on, his mouth automatically continuing the Summoning chant, his hands beginning to bleed from the chafing.
He had never forged such a large Boundary before. Protecting the city Lys from Sarsemar had been far less difficult, because of Luneté; of Lys blood, a virgin, and the mistress of the city, she had gone around the ancient, weakened Bounds with him, dragging a half-peeled green staff on the grass, and that had been all: a festive occasion, a procession with flowers and drums and afterward a picnic and dancing. Dewar had had to do nothing strenuous, and neither had blushing Luneté, for the fortuitous combination of innocence and power in her person had made for a textbook-perfect Bounding. In this weather-blasted waste, fighting Prospero’s wind, battered by bushes and stones, he seemed to be taking forever to reach the third gap, and then he must go even further to reach the end, the last pole.
The sorcerer was stumbling and the horse was barely lifting his hooves by the time he lifted the plough and set it back in the center of the first gap he had made, which now let on a causeway through the ditch-and-dike thrown up by the plough.
Dewar leaned on the plough’s handles with his forearms, his knees locked, his back aching wretchedly, and hoped that someone would have the decency to bring him wine. The temperature was falling. He could feel the air drying, a different kind of weather blowing in.
“I am knackered,” he told Herne’s horse. The horse had halted when Dewar did, his head hanging wearily downward, his back probably aching as much as the sorcerer’s. Dewar began picking splinters out of his hands.
“Dewar!” someone yelled, and he nodded, not wanting to turn and look. Ottaviano shouted again; hoofbeats pounded nearer.
“Lord Dewar,” said the Prince Marshal, dismounting.
“How do you like it?” Dewar asked, pushing himself up, his spine creaking.
“Well done,” Gaston said. “It is nightfall, nearly.”
“Of course,” Dewar said. “You must bury the plough here. Here. Tonight. Midnight. Don’t forget.”
He and Gaston stood eye-to-eye for a minute. “The rope?” Gaston asked.
Dewar half-laughed, a sharp sound, and jerked the rope sharply. Ashes blew away on the breeze.
Ottaviano galloped up now, and Herne on Dewar’s horse, and Golias. Dewar gazed at Gaston, noticing with his Well-sharpened vision that Gaston was illuminated from within, that flame streamed in his every gesture. “Forgive my lack of conversation,” Dewar said. “I am imminently asleep. Good sorcery is pleasantly tiring.”
“Like screwing, eh?” Herne said. Otto guffawed, throwing Dewar’s cloak around his shoulders as Dewar’s eyes closed.
“Sorcery’s better,” Dewar mumbled, and sighed, and slept, still standing balanced.
“Well,” said Gaston. He had not expected such exhaustion; Panurgus had never seemed wearied by sorcery—rather, invigorated, rejuvenated—on the few occasions when Gaston had seen his father ply the Art.
“Leave him there,” muttered Golias. Herne was grumbling about his heaving horse.
“Baron, do thou bide here with him,” Gaston said, “and I’ll send a litter. Let us move him aside until there is a tent for him. Hath done as honest a day’s wor
k as any man in the Empire today.” And he took off his cloak, and they tipped Dewar into it gently to carry him slung in it, and he stirred as much as a log might.
All night, unearthly lights played up and down, earth to stars and higher, at the edge of the Bounds Dewar had made. Gaston stood and watched a long time, and he saw that the lights were made by shapeless dark things from Prospero’s direction striking the Bounds and immolating themselves on Dewar’s defenses.
“For the nonce are we more evenly matched,” the Fireduke whispered to the faraway sparks of Prospero’s campfires. “Let us see what cometh now.”
16
PRINCE PROSPERO STOOD TO RECEIVE HIS guest.
Ariel’s arrival made the flames in all the candles flatten and gutter; the door swung open and the cloak-tangled man stumbled in.
“Here he is, Master,” said Ariel triumphantly.
“Well done, Ariel. ’Tis all for now.”
“Shall I go and—”
“Aye, do that. I’ll Summon thee later.”
Ariel left with a gust and a bang of the door.
“A Sylph,” said the windblown man, shaking himself out of the blue-green wool, turning to watch Ariel go.
“Aye,” Prospero said.
“And powerful.”
“Aye.”
He ran his hands through his hair, and looked at Prospero. “I find myself fairly ba …” His voice trailed away, and he stared at Prospero.
Prospero regarded him steadily. Now that he saw this fellow face-to-face, in the same room by the still-trembling light of the candles, now that he traced the line of brow and nose and jaw with his own eye directly, there was something to him Prospero knew he knew.
The young man closed his eyes and shook his head as if dizzy.
A Sorcerer and a Gentleman Page 19
