After his tale, I said I planned to locate the inn by its foundations and follow Belham’s path straight from it to the fatal ledge.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘that might be difficult, as the whole town has moved over at least two stades to the east, even since my childhood. Also, one must remember, Belham was very drunk.’ My cousin smiled. ‘And a drunken man does not necessarily walk the straightest line.’
I think my laughter surprised him. ‘Of course!’ I declared. ‘And Belham was not only drunk with cider, he was drunk with genius!’ Did he suspect how sure I was that my own cleverness could untangle any and all mysteries about Belham or his life? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘not only has the town itself moved, it’s perhaps half its former size—really, it’s just some houses going by the same name. But did you know,’ he went on, ‘that there’s a peasant woman today, who lives not very far off, on the outskirts of Ellamon itself, with whom Belham lived awhile, here in the High Hold? Why not visit her? She’s in her sixties now—possibly even her seventies—and is supposed to be quite a character in her own right. Certainly she’ll share her memories of the transient architect and inventor.’
But didn’t he stay here, at the Vanara Castle, when he was working on the gardens…?
‘Well—’ my cousin smiled again—‘the story has it that Belham was a rather difficult man. I believe my uncle, for whom the fountains were actually built, then Suzerain of Vanar, put him out at one point!’
I was appalled—at my late uncle!
But my cousin seemed impressed with my commitment to the memory of the Great Man, and wished me luck. The next morning my carriages rolled off for that tiny, mountain hold.
An hour on, again it poured.
Early that evening, drops still hammering the carriage roofs, we rolled in among some hovels of sopping thatch, all brown and hide patched, which were—probably—the village my cousin had told me of. But at least once, when I’d been up with my driver on the bench, I’d inadvertently had him go right when we’d been supposed to go left—and probably, at another point, had gone left instead of right.
In the downpour, no one seemed about; no workhardened hands pushed back a leather hanging to let creased eyes blink out at us through the rain as we rode past. (One hut had fallen half in and was obviously abandoned.) As I looked out the carriage’s dripping window, we clattered and splashed over what may or may not have been a road between them.
Beside me, Cadmir wanted to know: ‘Should we stop to ask if this is—’
‘No!’ I declared. ‘No. We have our directions. Drive on!’
Looking out, I tried to imagine among the ancestors of those impoverished dwellings—two stades to the east—one that might have once served as an inn, or even as a drinking establishment where a man such as Belham could have entered, seated himself, and found enough conviviality to reach the necessary drunkenness to bring about his evening’s wandering—and death.
It was very hard.
Fifteen minutes or so beyond the enclave, we rolled out onto a long ledge from which—along parts of it—a man might have fallen. I leaned out the window in the rain to look down on the uneven ground at what, scattered among the rocks and leaves, my driver called back to assure me was wild dragon spore. But by then, I was sneezing regularly, and so told myself that the two mistakes (if, indeed, we’d made two) surely canceled each other out.
At last I climbed from the carriage, hunching in the downpour, to walk along the precipice in the peppering drops and gaze off at other mountains, wrapped half-round with mists. Going on a little further, staring over into the dripping undergrowth, I realized there would be no climbing down. Indeed, minutes later at a less steep place, clambering over those wet stones, my scandal missed its footing and I slipped and slid some six feet to an outcrop below, landing in leaves and twigs, scraping my thigh and wrenching one arm. Breath knocked out of me, I lay there with my face full of leaf dirt, a speck of something in one eye, gasping and astonished, while a branch jabbed at my leg.
I blinked and grunted in the rain.
My first thought was that, in moments, someone would be running up to help.
But do you know, not one of my servants, soldiers, or drivers saw me go over? They were all inside the carriages to keep dry, no doubt convinced that their young master, off slogging about in the wet, was quite out of his mind.
I climbed back up on my own.
But as I stood once more atop the ledge, sore, scraped, and still sneezing in the torrent, I knew that, in such weather, there was also no possibility of ‘quiet contemplation’ of the last thoughts and hours of the Great Man.
It was raining too hard.
Minutes later, back at the carriage, I did not even mention my fall, though Cadmir asked as I climbed up inside if there were something wrong. No. No, I said. No, I was just wet and leaf-stained. As we jarred and joggled back through the town—if town you could call it—I told myself that, whether or not I’d stood on the ledge from which the drunken genius had fallen, whether or not I’d gazed down at where he’d lain three days until he died, I’d surely been close enough to it, if not in space, then in kind, so that I should be satisfied. Besides, even if I had fallen upon the spot itself (for couldn’t an older man, landing just so, have broken his legs in such a tumble?), in the time since, new trees would have grown up and old ones must have come down, so that the actual site would appear different, anyway, in just those details I’d hoped, till then, to recapture by my presence: I had looked from a ledge on a view near enough to the last Belham must have seen for me to be content. And didn’t fable hold that the night of his fall had been cold and wet? Belham had been drunk with cider and genius? I’d been drunk with Belham! He’d fallen. And I…? Well, as I sat sneezing in the carriage with Cadmir now and again pushing more blankets up around me, I decided my experience of the ledge—the severity of the fall excepted—was probably more like Belham’s than I had bargained for!
My revised plan had been, of course, to return to my cousin’s at Ellamon. But an hour later, Cadmir took his hand away from my forehead with a worried look to state that I felt feverish. The caravan steward was called in from the other wagon (where he rode with the soldiers). And I surprised everyone, including myself, by suddenly ordering that we bypass the High Hold of fabled Ellamon and continue to the next spot on my map.
‘But my young master must know that,’ said the steward, ‘in his condition and this weather, such action isn’t wise…’
Cadmir even brought up that my cousin had promised to take me out on my return to see the flying beasts from the corrals above the High Hold that so many people talk of. Certainly Belham had gone out to watch them up on the hillside, as did all tourists who came through fabled Ellamon.
Cadmir, of course, knew me better than the balding, bushy-browed steward. At another time it might have worked.
But I was persistent.
(I was feverish and, in a word, unreasonable.)
I’d not come to be a tourist, I declared. I’d come with a purpose and a passion. I’d already seen Belham’s fountains in my cousin’s garden. Now I’d seen his place of death. Thus my purpose, in these parts, had been fulfilled. Also, I hadn’t seen them in the order I’d intended. Now I wanted to go on—to repair my injured plan by continuing with it as though nothing had gone amiss. And that did not allow for going back!
So that is more or less what we did.
But, bundled in furs lest my indisposition turn into some serious catarrh, as the wagon jounced through the evening along the soaked mountainside, I knew why I did not want to return to my cousin’s.
I have never actually told anyone this, though it is simple enough to say.
Cadmir no doubt thought that it was because I did not want my cousin to confirm as fact that we had, indeed, found the wrong turning, the wrong town, and the wrong ledge. Had he dared say that in the jostling carriage, sullenly I would have agreed.
My real reason, however, was the same one that had preve
nted me from dismounting to ask directions among those poor, crumbling huts to verify the town, make sure of the ledge, or even to help me find the old inn’s site.
It was that peasant woman.
A city lad, I had not spoken with many peasants before—and certainly none who didn’t at least work for someone related to me. I’d only just managed to quell, through dint of almost forcible companionship on my part, an even then occasionally resurgent, if unmotivated, embarrassment before my own soldiers and drivers. And they, at least, I paid. Certainly I could demand of myself, in those days, no more! The notion of speaking to such a person, an ancient, dense, impoverished, and imperceptive crone, no doubt half-senile in the bargain, seemed by turns preposterous, impossible, and, even more so, terrifying. A peasant woman, I kept repeating. A simple, stupid peasant. A seventy-year-old peasant. And a ‘character’ too, whatever that meant. Certainly I knew Belham was, by birth, a peasant himself. But that he had been ejected from a royal hall to go and live with a stupid, dirty peasant…
That I should be expected—for whether or not my cousin expected it of me, I certainly expected it of myself—to confront this aged wall of belligerent, senile dementia, to sit in some drafty shack, trying to pry out from that unyielding common blankness a few pebbles of truth, fact, and firsthand information, when the earth and air itself already seemed to conspire around me to yield only approximations of what I wanted, was simply too frightening for someone so newly loose in our strange and terrible land.
Later that night we made camp—
But let me skip ten months, or eleven, or possibly even thirteen, for I have calculated the time differently on several occasions by several methods. Suffice it to say it was in the last weeks of my trip.
It was night.
We made camp.
Deep in the southern forests, our fire burned within the makeshift ring of stones we’d pushed together earlier. Supper was done. The three of us sat around the flame—
Who—? you ask. What three—?
Certainly the tired young man scraping charcoal away from the burnt end of his empty roasting stick with his thumbnail was a leaner, browner, and, I would guess, a more levelheaded fellow than I’d been the night we pulled away from the Ellamon road. My hands were harder, too.
It had begun with that brazen and much sweated over decision to eat among my own soldiers at my cousin’s court. But between then and now many distinctions of class—at least, I like to think so—had fallen away.
My fear of peasants?
Well, by now I had slept in my share of chill, smelly peasants’ huts, and, in several more, had eaten my share of oddly spiced meals (as well as some spectacularly tasteless ones). Here and there three or four commoners, come to my rescue out of the simplest kindness and without a suspicion I was a prince (and most I never told), I’d even called friends. In that time I’d managed properly to bed my first woman, a peasant widow, four or five years older than I. She, I confess, I told about my lineage in what I’d call exaggerated detail. But though I don’t know whether, a day later, she believed me, she seemed fascinated during the account—though possibly only by the complexity of what she may have taken to be some imaginative merchant’s son’s preposterous dreaming. She smelled of cows, I remember, and knew all about country remedies for ailments I’d never even heard of before, though I was sure, after a few hours’ talk with her, that the country witch could have cured my poor father, without a doubt. And not quite two weeks later, at a royal relative’s great granite home, I snuck through some lightless stone corridor behind a frizzy-haired princess, three years younger, and far more highly born, than I. She was the orphaned ward of another noble cousin and wore a black gown, bronze jewels, and carried a smoky brand high ahead. Finally, on the dirt floor of the castle storage room I showed her some of what I’d learned not a full fortnight back in a common woman’s arms…
I had no other woman for over a year—though the very range of my encounters was enough to make me think myself at least as much an expert on sex as I was on Belham, if not the final authority on womankind itself.
I’d also managed to learn the lesson easy for rural nobles but hard for the heads of our urban upper classes to absorb: in the right situation, peasant wisdom can outshine all others. In my case, one of our carriages put a wheel over the road edge and, after we’d all gotten out, in our effort to right it the whole wagon suddenly toppled over the side, overturning at the bottom of a five-foot slope with a great crash—just as five dirty, silent, and absolutely unprepossessing bumpkins came wandering along, two women among them, only to gape and giggle at us, I was sure. But I had the good sense to be polite, and after five or six grunts with a minute or two between and many, many, many shakes of their heads, suddenly they went to hauling at limbs and uncoiling ropes, barking brief and incomprehensible instructions, now to one another, now to my wary soldiers, till, with this and that, they managed to lever the carriage up, a bit at a time, propping it now with this rock, now with that log, till it was again on the road with only a snapped trace. And as I stood about in embarrassed gratitude (no, they would take no money, but were happy for the worked-metal jars and plates I gave them as gifts), I found myself thinking that their method must be very near to one Belham himself might have devised to move the incredibly heavy stones from quarry to building site, how many decades ago.
But my material losses in those months must be mentioned along with my intellectual gains, or this is no true account.
Cadmir was the first to go. My fever and sneezing had vanished with a week’s cough and a somewhat raspy throat. But soon it was Cadmir himself who was feverish, with a constant hacking that alternated between painful dryness and bouts when he would bring up phlegms, green and yellow—and sometimes even blood.
When we met another caravan, this one commercial, returning to Kolhari, I paid them to take him back to my uncle’s in the city where he might be better cared for in familiar surroundings.
The soldiers? Well one, for instance, came to me to say we were within stades of his home hamlet. Could he stop off for a day’s visit? He knew our itinerary and promised he would catch up to us within the week. Against my steward’s advice, I let the man go—and have not seen him since. But a week after that, two more soldiers took off, just on their own.
‘Comes of being lenient with the first one,’ some said to me with sympathy, some with censure.
The two closed carriages were eventually lost: The first went one hot morning when the carriage tongue snapped, and two of my drivers simply walked away in disgust. But by then I’d had two more caravan stewards since the first (whom I’d never really gotten along with) had abandoned us to take on, I can only assume, a more profitable and, certainly, more sensible job with yet another commercial venture heading toward the desert; which he’d heard of, so Terek later informed me, at our stopover in Varhesh. Since we were low on soldiers, drivers, and provisions, we decided to consolidate with the remaining carriage.
Then, wouldn’t you know, we were attacked by bandits somewhere in the western woods. I say bandits, but truly I think they were two mounted guards from a noble house where only hours before we’d been—oh, politely enough—refused any hospitality at all and sent on our way:
The master, they said, was not in.
The three soldiers left had been inside the carriage with me when we stopped outside the castle gate, and I think the guards who decided to follow us wrongly assumed my single carriage caravan had no soldiers at all. When they stopped us on the road with a shout and an arrow through my driver’s arm, before I was even sure what was happening, Terek took up his spear beside me and thrust it mightily from the carriage window through the flank of one of the bandit’s horses, felling her on top of her rider—I almost lost a tooth when the spear’s end hit my jaw. Then we were all out of the carriage, fighting the remaining rider. I really only looked on as they ran down the second on his horse, cutting at his legs, at the horse’s legs, until both went over, all
bloody, and they killed them. Then they came back and Terek put his sword through the neck of the bandit who’d fallen first. His leg broken and pinned under his horse, the man screamed horribly when, for the fifteen seconds before it, he realized what the tall dark soldier with the broken nose ambling leisurely toward him with his sword out was about to do.
We now had a wounded driver, and there was speculation among the men as to whether we would have avoided the fray if they had been walking along outside, visible, as was usual, where the sight of them might have discouraged attack. Terek commented, sensibly I thought, that if three soldiers and a steward had been outside, the bandits, before pouncing, would simply have picked them off from the cover of the trees with bows and arrows, just as they’d shot the driver—who listened to it all leaning against the wagon, a pained expression on his face and his arm now bandaged in a piece of old cloth and a leather sling. We left him off at the next city—where there was a particularly fine, circular grain-sellers’ guild building, built by Belham.
While I was out looking at it, two more of my soldiers made up their minds to leave my employ, but they at least had the courtesy to stay long enough to tell me, and even to help me sell off the last carriage and horses to a merchant family there and replace it with a sizable two-mule provisions cart with a canopy over its back half that could be taken down if needed; Terek and I could manage it alone.
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