The three youths were very different. Bard was tall and heavily built, already a man’s height, with thick blond hair twisted into the warrior’s braid at the back of his head, and the strong arms and heavy thews of a swordsman and rider; he towered like a young giant over the others. Prince Beltran was tall, too, although not quite as tall as Bard; but he was still thin and coltish, bony with a boy’s roundness, and his cheeks still fuzzed with a boy’s first traces of beard. His hair was cropped short and tightly curled, but as blond as Bard’s own.
Geremy Hastur was smaller than either, red-haired and thin-faced, with sharp gray eyes and the quickness of a hawk or ferret. He wore dark, plain clothing, the dress of a scholar rather than a warrior, and his manner was quiet and unassuming.
Now he looked up at Bard, laughing, and said, “You will have to sit down, foster brother; neither Beltran nor I can reach your head to tie the red cord about your braid! And you cannot go to a ceremonial occasion without it!”
“No indeed,” Beltran said, hauling Bard down into a seat. “Here, Geremy, you tie it, your hands are defter than mine, or Bard’s. I remember last autumn when you stitched that guardsman’s wound—”
Bard chuckled as he bent his head for his young friends to tie on the red cord which signified a warrior tried in battle and commended for bravery. He said, “I always thought you were cowardly, Geremy, that you did not fight in the field, and your hands as soft as Carlina’s; yet when I saw that, I decided you had more courage than I, for I wouldn’t have done it. I think it a pity there is no red cord for you!”
Geremy said, in his muted voice, “Why, then, we should have to give a red cord to every woman in childbirth, or every messenger who slips unseen through the enemy’s lines. Courage takes many forms. I can do without warrior’s braid or red cord, I think.”
“Perhaps, one day,” Beltran said, “when the day comes when I rule over this land—may my father’s reign be long!—perhaps we may reward courage in some other form than that we see on the battlefield. What about it, Bard? You will be my champion then, if we all live so long.” He frowned suddenly at Geremy and said, “What ails you, man?”
Geremy Hastur shook his red head. He said, “I do not know—a sudden chill; perhaps, as they say in the hills, some wild animal pissed on the ground which will be my grave.” He finished twisting the red cord around Bard’s warrior braid, handed him sword and dagger and helped him to bind them on.
Bard said, “I am a soldier; I know very little of other kinds of courage.” He shrugged his ceremonially embroidered cape into place, bright red to match the red cord twisted into the braid all along its length. “I tell you, it demands more courage to face this nonsense tonight; I prefer to face my enemies sword in hand!”
“What’s this talk of enemies, foster brother?” Beltran asked, surveying his friend. “You surely have no enemies in my father’s hall! Why, how many young men your age have been given a warrior’s cord, and made the king’s banner bearer on the field of war, before they were full sixteen years old? And when you killed Dom Ruyven of Serrais and his paxman, twice saving the king’s life at Snow Glen—”
Bard shook his head. “The Lady Ariel does not love me. She would stop this marriage to Carlina if she could. And she is angry because it was I, and not you, who won renown on the battlefield, Beltran.”
Beltran shook his head. “Perhaps it is simply the way of a mother,” he hazarded. “It is not enough for her that I am prince, and heir to my father’s throne, I must have renown as a warrior too. Or perhaps—” he tried to make a joke of it, but Bard could tell that there was bitterness, too—“she fears that your courage and renown will cause my father to think better of you than he does of his son.”
Bard said, “Well, Beltran, you had the same teaching as I; you too could have won a warrior’s decorations. It is the fortune of war, I suppose, or the luck of the battlefield.”
“No,” Beltran said. “I am not a warrior born, and I have not your gift for it. It is all I can do to acquit myself honorably and keep my skin in one piece by killing anyone who wants to have a swing at it.”
Bard laughed and said, “Well, believe me, Beltran, that is all I do.”
But Beltran shook his bead gloomily. “Some men are warriors born, and others are warriors made; I am neither.”
Geremy broke in, trying to lighten the tone, “But you need not be a great warrior, Beltran; you must prepare yourself to rule Asturias one day, and then you can have as many warriors as you like, and if they serve you well, it will not matter whether or not you know which end of a sword to take hold by! You will be the one who rules all your warriors, and all your sorcerers, too. . . . Will you have me, on that day, to serve you as laranzu?” He used the old word for sorcerer, wizard, and Beltran grinned and clapped him on the shoulder.
“So I will have a wizard and a warrior for foster brothers, and we three will rule Asturias together against all its enemies, battle and sorcery both! But may that day, be the gods merciful to us, be long in coming. Geremy, send your page to the courtyard again to see if Bard’s father has come to see the handfasting of his son.”
Geremy started to signal to the youngster who waited to run their errands, but Bard shook his head.
“Save the child trouble.” His jaw tightened. “He will not come, and there is no need to pretend that he will, Geremy.”
“Not even to see you married to his king’s own daughter?”
“Perhaps he will come for the wedding, if the king makes it clear that he will be offended if he does not,” Bard said, “but not for a mere handfasting.”
“But the handfasting is the true binding,” Be!tran said. “From the moment of the handfasting, you are Carlina’s lawful husband and she cannot take another while you live! It is only that my mother thinks her too young for bedding, so that part of the ceremony is delayed for another year. But Carlina is your wife; and you, Bard, are my brother.”
He said it with a shy smile, and Bard, for all his calm façade, was touched. He said, “That’s probably the best part of it.”
Geremy said, “But I am astonished that Dom Rafael should not come to see your handfasting! Surely he has been sent word that you were decorated on the field for bravery, made the king’s banner bearer, killed Dom Ruyven and his paxman at a single blow—if my father heard such things of me, he would be beside himself with pride and pleasure!”
“Oh, I have no doubt Father is proud of me,” Bard said, and his face twisted into a bitterness strange in one so young. “But he listens in all things to the Lady Jerana, his lawful wife; and she has never forgotten that he forsook her bed when she was childless for twelve years of their marriage; nor did she ever forgive my mother for giving him a son. And she was angry because my father brought me up in his own house, and had me schooled in arms and the ways of a court instead of having me nursed and fostered to follow the plow or scratch the fields farming mushrooms!”
Beltran said, “She should have been glad that someone had given her husband a son when she could not.”
Bard shrugged. “That is not the Lady Jerana’s way! Instead she surrounded herself with leroni and sorceresses—half her ladies-in-waiting have red hair and are trained witches—until sooner or later one of them could give her a spell to cure her barrenness. Then she bore my baby brother, Alaric. And then, when my father could deny her nothing because she had given him a legitimate son and heir, she set herself to get rid of me. Oh, Jerana could not show enough kindness to me, until she had her own son; she pretended she was a true mother to me, but I could see the blow held back behind every false kiss she gave me! I think, she feared I would stand in her own son’s light, because Alaric was little and sickly and I was strong and well, and she hated me worse than ever because Alaric loved me.”
“I would have thought,” Beltran said again, “that she would welcome a strong brother and guardian for her son, one who could care for him. . . .”
“I love my brother,” Bard said. “There are t
imes when I think there is no one else in the world to whom it would matter whether I lived or died; but since Alaric was old enough to know one face from another, he smiled at me, and held up his little arms for me to carry him piggyback and begged for rides on my horse. But for Lady Jerana it was not seemly that a bastard half-brother should be her little princelet’s chosen paxman and playmate; she would have princes’ and noblemen’s sons for her child’s companions! And so a time came when I saw him only by guile; and once I angered her when he was sick, because I sneaked without permission into his precious nursery. A child of four, and she was angry because his brother could sing him to sleep and he would not sleep for her coaxing.” His face was hard, bitter, closed away into memory.
“And after that, she gave my father no peace until he sent me away. And instead of bidding her be silent, and ruling his own house, as a man should do, he chose to have peace in his bed and at his fireside by sending me away from home and brother!”
Beltran and Geremy were, momentarily, silenced by his bitterness. Then Geremy patted his arm and said, with a half-embarrassed tenderness, “Well, you have two brothers to stand at your side tonight, Bard, and soon you will have kin here.”
Bard’s smile was bleak, unforgiving. “Queen Ariel loves me no more than my stepmother. I am sure she will find some way to turn Carlina against me, and perhaps both of you. I do not blame my father, except for listening to a woman’s words; Zandru twist my feet if I ever listen to what a woman says!”
Beltran laughed and said, “One would not think you a woman-hater, Bard. From what the maids say, quite the reverse—on the day you are bedded with Carlina, there will be weeping all over the kingdom of Asturias!”
“Oh, as for that,” Bard said, making a deliberate effort to match the mood of merriment, “I listen to women only in one place, and you may guess what that place is. . . .”
“And yet,” said Beltran, “when we were young lads and girls all together, I remember that you always listened to Carlina; you would climb a tree no one else would hazard to fetch down her kitten, and when she and I quarreled, I soon learned I must give way or you would pummel me, taking her part!”
“Oh—Carlina,” Bard said, and his bitter face relaxed into a smile. “Carlina is not like other women; I would not speak of her in the same breath as most of the bitches and sluts in this place! When I am wedded to her, believe me, I shall have no leisure for the rest! I assure you, she will have no need to surround herself with spells as Lady Jerana did, to keep me faithful to her. Since first I came here, she has been kind to me—”
“We would all have been kind to you,” Beltran protested, “but you would not speak to anyone and threatened to fight us—”
“Still, Carlina made me feel that perhaps, for once, someone cared whether I lived or died,” Bard said, “and I would not fight her. Now your father has chosen to give her to me—which I never thought I could win, being bastard born. Lady Jerana may have driven me from my home, and from my father, and from my brother, but now, perhaps, I have a home here.”
“Even if you must take Carlina with it?” Beltran mocked. “She is not what I would choose for a wife; skinny, dark, plain—I’d as soon bed the stick-poppet they mount in the fields to scare away the crows!”
Bard said genially, “I wouldn’t expect her brother to be aware of her beauty, and it’s not for her beauty I want her.”
Geremy Hastur, who had the red hair and the laran gift of the Hastur kin of Carcosa, the gift to read thoughts even without the starstones which the leroni or sorceresses used, could sense Bard’s thoughts as they went up toward the great hall for the handfasting ceremony.
There are plenty of women in this world for the bedding, Bard thought. But Carlina is different. She is the king’s daughter; wedding her, I am no longer bastard and nobody, but the king’s banner bearer and champion; I shall have home, family, brothers, children someday. . . for a woman who can bring me all this, I shall be grateful to her all my life; I swear she shall never have cause to reproach her father that he gave her to his brother’s bastard. . . .
Surely, Geremy thought, this was enough reason for a marriage. Perhaps he does not want Carlina for herself, but as a symbol of all that she can bring him. Yet marriages are made in the kingdoms every day, with less reason than this. And if he is good to Carlina, surely she will be content.
But he felt disquiet, for he knew that Carlina was afraid of Bard. He had been present when King Ardrin mentioned the marriage to his daughter, and had heard Carlina’s shocked cry and seen her weeping.
Well, there was no help for it, the king would have his way, and surely it was right that he should reward his banner bearer, who was also his nephew, though a bastard, with honors and a rich marriage into his household; this would cement Bard to King Ardrin’s throne as champion. Perhaps it was a pity for Carlina, but all girls were given in marriage, soon or late, and she might have been married to some elderly lecher, or some grizzled old warrior, or even to some bandit barbarian from one of the little kingdoms across the Kadarin, if her father found it expedient to seal an alliance with another kingdom. Instead he was giving her to a close relative, one who had been her own playmate and foster brother and had championed her in childhood. Carlina would resign herself to it soon enough.
But his sharp eyes spotted the reddened eyelids, even behind the careful touch of powder and paint. He raised his eyes and looked compassionately at Carlina, wishing she knew Bard as well as he did. Perhaps, if she understood her handfasted husband, she could lessen his bitterness, make him feel less withdrawn, less outcaste among others. Geremy sighed, thinking of his own exile.
For Geremy Hastur had not come willingly to King Ardrin’s court, either. He was the youngest son of King Istvan of Carcosa; and he had been sent, half hostage, half diplomat, to be fostered in King Ardrin’s household as a token of friendly relations between the royal house of Asturias and the house of the Hasturs of Carcosa. He would have wished to be his father’s counselor, a sorcerer, a laranzu—he had known all his life that he had not the makings of a soldier—but his father had found him one son too many and had sent him away as a hostage, as he might have sent a daughter away to marry. At least, Geremy thought, Carlina would not be sent away from her home for this marriage!
The court rose for King Ardrin’s entrance. Bard, standing beside Beltran, listening to the crying of the heralds, still found that he was glancing about the crowd to see if, perhaps, his father had come at the last moment, wishing to surprise him; desisted and angrily faced forward. Why should he care? King Ardrin thought more of him than his own father did, the king had decorated him in battle, given him lands and a rich estate, and a warrior’s red cord, and the hand of his youngest daughter in marriage. With all this, why should he worry about his father, sitting home and listening to the poison that filthy hag Jerana poured into his ears?
But I wish my brother were here. I wish Alaric could know I am the king’s champion and his son-in-law. . . he would be seven, now. . . .
At the appointed time he stepped forward, prompted by Beltran and Geremy. Carlina was standing at the right hand of her father’s seat. Bard’s ears were ringing, and he hardly heard the king’s words.
“Bard mac Fianna, called di Asturien, whom I have made my banner bearer,” Ardrin of Asturias said, “we have called you here tonight to handfast you to my youngest daughter, the lady Carlina. Say, Bard, is it your will to enter my household?”
Bard’s voice sounded perfectly steady; he wondered at that, because inside he was shaking. He supposed it was like riding into battle, there was something that steadied you when you had to be steady. “My king and my lord, it is my will.”
“Then,” said Ardrin, taking Bard’s hand in one of his, and Carlina’s in the other, “I bid you join hands before all this company and exchange your pledge.”
Bard felt Carlina’s hand in his; very soft, the fingers so slender that they felt boneless. She was icy cold, and did not look at him.
“Carlina,” said Ardrin, “do you consent to have this man for your husband?”
She whispered something Bard could not hear. He supposed it was a formal phrase of consent. At least she had not refused.
He bent forward, as ritual demanded, and kissed her trembling lips. She was shaking. Hellfire! Was the girl afraid of him? He smelled the flowery scent of her hair, of some cosmetic that had been dabbed on her face. As he drew back, a corner of her stiff embroidered collar scratched his cheek a little. Well, he thought, he had had enough women; soon enough she would lose her fear in his arms, they always did; even if now she was a dressed-up doll. The thought of Carlina in his bed made him feel dizzy, almost faint. Carlina. His, forever, his princess, his wife. And then no one could ever again call him bastard or outcast. Carlina, his home, his beloved. . . his own. He felt his throat thicken as he whispered the ritual words.
“Before our kin assembled I pledge to wed you, Carlina, and to cherish you forever.”
He heard her voice, only a whisper.
“Before. . . kin assembled. . . pledge to wed. . .” but try as he might he could not hear her speak his name.
Damn Queen Ariel and her idiotic plans to rid herself of him! They should have had the wedding and the bedding tonight, so that Carlina could quickly lose her fear of him! He was trembling, thinking of that. He had never wanted any woman this much. He tightened his hand on her fingers trying to reassure her, but felt only her involuntary flinching of pain.
King Ardrin said, “May you be forever one,” and he loosed Carlina’s hand, reluctantly. Together, they drank from a wine cup held to their lips. It was done; Carlina was his bride. Now it was too late for King Ardrin to change his mind. Bard realized that until this moment he had felt that something would come between him and his good fortune even as they stood together for the handfasting, that his stepmother’s malice, or Queen Ariel’s, would come between him and Carlina, who meant to him a home, a place, honor. . . damn all women! All women except Carlina, that is!
Darkover: First Contact Page 21
