He did get a foot on my thigh step for an instant but he was falling so swiftly, it couldn’t help. I grabbed at him and caught his armpit as he fell into the moat. My center had been low to begin with and I tried to fall back as his weight pulled me forward. I dug my knees and sandals into the dirt and pushed back from the lip with my free hand.
This all took a nanosecond, though it’s taken me ages longer to write it down. One moment he was lowering himself off the ledge, the next he was hanging over a twenty-meter deep gorge strewn with old bones and rocks. Flash frame. No in-between. No thought. One moment safe, next hanging over a moat from my left arm, my weak arm.
He kicked his feet into the cliff side which was mostly dirt pocked with various sized stones. I know he was staring into my eyes so eerily because he was trying to keep from looking down. So I didn’t look down either. His legs stopped his swinging and he managed to get a hold on a jutting rock. Which is when I noticed just how many sharp rocks were jutting out from the side and the perhaps related blood on his face.
Using the rocks and me, he slowly climbed up. I kept my grip on his armpit and he’d gotten his hand around to grasp my shoulder. Thank the gods not the injured one. As he moved his feet up I was able to pull him and sit back between my heels. Then he took a step and the rock didn’t hold. I dove forward and grabbed him.
Then we froze, listening to the echos as the rock bounced off the stones and bones below. Distant hollers told us the four had also heard the noise.
After an agonizing moment wondering whether silence would be the better course, I hurled all of my strength into hauling him up onto solid ground. He got his feet up and we rolled sideways to separate and sit up against the wall.
We lay there, breathing and listening to the commotion outside. The men spoke English, but with such an odd accent I could barely understand them. They examined our tree for a minute, loudly, inexpertly, and stormed off. When they’d gone a good distance we hazarded a look at each other. Guarded relief was creeping across his face and I’m sure it had flooded mine, when an apple flew over the wall, bounced off my knee, and rolled to a stop by Geoffrey’s foot. It was the one I’d been eating when I spotted the four.
My jaw dropped open as my lungs took in air to react. Geoffrey moved a hand to warn me to keep silent, but he needn’t have feared. I felt as though Darth Vader was breathing down my neck. My tongue was frozen, my vocal chords were frozen, and my lungs were burning with unused oxygen.
“Hope you enjoyed your little meal. Actually I hope one of you is lying at the bottom of that old moat, although I doubt you’ve done me that favor.” The man’s voice was rough, his tongue held taut in the back of his mouth as if the cultured tone he now affected were distasteful to him. His slight lisp made me think of Sean Connery beating up little kids. “Enjoy this girl, lord, for you won’t find another. You won’t be leaving this castle.”
A few more ground falls rained on our heads and his parting chuckle enveloped us in gloom. A rainstorm broke over us the instant he strolled off to join his companions, our enemy.
Where the hell am I that I have enemies? And why am I here? Would none of this ever have happened if I hadn’t let Geoffrey stay with me at the workshop? Would I want that?
∞
After Bobby called a halt to the on-the-fly square that Saturday night in Chicago we all went out to Harrigan’s for a drink. All except Faite. Wooley relayed the message that he’d had to go back to Colorado a day early. Something about his daughter Kelly. I was to call him at this number to accept his proposal and arrange the details. The number was attached to a sheath for the sword I’d been unable to return to him after the fight.
“I hear you two fought quite a battle.” Josie Wooley, the Maestro’s pint-sized wife didn't fight. But she always showed up for the drinking. "I see your scar is healing nicely.” Josie held my hand up to better see the white line on my thumb. “So this fight everyone’s talking about? Hi, I’m Josie.” My hand was dropped and Geoffrey’s engaged. I had to step back to avoid being knocked over in the exchange.
“Josephine Wooley, this is Geoffrey Kaveg. Geoffrey, this is the devil.”
Instead of shaking her hand, he held it up reverentially and bowed slightly, bringing his lips nearly to her knuckles. He spoke softly, “Rumor painted you taller, Madam, and a man.”
Josie inclined her head at his observation, then turned her questioning gaze full on me. I politely, if blandly, returned the stare for several moments before lowering my eyes to the black swirl of my Guinness, intimating that any secrets I had were not going to be shared with her.
She recovered her hand, “So you two knew each other before the workshop?”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“No.”
We answered simultaneously. Then Geoffrey corrected his answer. Now he stared into his beer, finding something of great interest beyond the foam.
Josie took a step in and peered up into his face, “You knew Nanda before?”
“I know her now,” he mumbled over the glass. “I was just introduced.” He took a drink and switched his focus to the dartboard, avoiding Josie and me.
She was about to question him further. But Geoffrey’s need to keep his secrets was clear from the crease between his brows, the clenched teeth, and the taut cords running down his neck and into the inappropriately thin fabric of his period tunic.
Before Josie could torment him more, I spoke up in my best Lucky Charms brogue, “D’ye play the game, then?”
Surprised for a mere instant, he responded in an even worse accent, “Nay, but someun tol’ me aboot it once on a time. Would ye like to throw some wi’ me?”
“Aye, but I’ll warn ye, I’m a dangerous player like.”
“That’s certainly true.” Josie added. “She tends to hit people instead of the board.”
I turned a very tight-lipped smile on Mrs. Wooley and stuck out my tongue then, linking my arm in Geoffrey’s, walked away from her mischievous grin.
We played three games of cricket. Well, two and a half. In the middle of the third game, management said we’d have to throw normally or give up the board. I think they were just nervous that we were gonna have Geoffrey throwing from the other end of the bar. We’d only backed him up to the pool table. Okay, the far side of the pool table. He was very good, with an unusual throwing technique. He threw from the feathers over his shoulder, like a circus knife throwing act. But there was little point in playing against him, because he could hit anything he wanted to. At the time I’d thought it a neat trick. Now, I’ve been fed thanks to his accuracy.
∞
He found me an hour ago outside the castle, at the foot of the wall trying to get an apple off that damn tree.
“Was it not you who explained to me the benefits of teamwork?”
The bloody remains of annoying nocturnal insectoids moistened my neck and arms. The bloody remains of my fingernails moistened everything I touched and attracted insects from the holes in the ground left where I dug out my stones. Red dirt from the cliff streaked my face. I was kneeling back from a section of the cliff that had collapsed and tumbled to the moat bottom along with the boulder I had been trying to extract. A small, very small, pile of rocks lay at the foot of the wall under the overhanging branch.
I looked up at him, attempting to scratch an itch under my eye, succeeding only in smearing more dirt into my face, and sneered, “Was it not you who promised to return?”
“And I have.”
“Not to the room where you left me.”
“Much good would it do me when you’re here.”
I looked down at the miserable pile of stones, my best efforts to reach food. Looking at the fruits of my labor and the fruits of the tree, I noted the vast distance between them.
“I would’ve been there,” I dropped my head and sighed, “but I got hungry.”
Geoffrey knelt beside me and gingerly brushed a strand of hair away from my eyes. From nowhere he produced a cl
ean handkerchief and offered it to me. I wasn’t crying, but I reached to accept it and involuntarily tilted my head towards the hand which had lingered there, centimeters from my cheek.
He took the hand away and laughed, “Alas, the larder is empty.”
“I don’t think apples are going to provide a nutritionally balanced diet.”
He spends an inordinate amount of time looking at me like I’m smoking something illegal.
He pulled out the sleekest dagger I’ve ever seen. “This might help us.”
Perhaps he was smoking. “A letter opener?”
He flipped the delicate knife, catching it in a light grip, “You've never seen a minni before?”
"A mini what?"
"It's a throwing knife. Watch." He scooped up a pebble from my pile and threw it up at the ramparts. A flurry of birds erupted noisily and he cocked his arm over his shoulder, taking aim on a low-flying wren.
“No!” I leaped to my feet. “Wait!”
“We must either eat them, or starve,” he said, trying to break free from me.
“I have no, OK, very little, problem with eating them. But if you hit one over the moatless, one of us is gonna have to climb down to get it.”
“I’ll hit one over the ledge.”
“Oh, and have you taken into account the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?”
Another one of those looks from him.
“My aim is true.”
“I have no doubts of your aim. It's the birds I don't trust. Let me see the knife, the minni.”
He stared at me, dumbfounded. No doubt recalling his tender ministrations moments before when I had appeared a helpless dolt. If he can’t handle that, just wait till I hit PMS. And it should be soon, and bad. I went off the pill just before I met him — not yesterday, the first time I met him, back in Chicago — and I’m waiting to go ballistic.
∞
Was it that long ago? How long ago was that? It can’t be five months since I had a period, but I think it has been. Geez, my body is all screwed up. I didn't even get my period until senior year and I didn't get boobs until I was in college. Everything about me is slow.
I should follow Geoffrey’s lead. He’s curled up on the bushy bear rug by the fireplace. So beautiful. I know guys don’t like that but at least I didn’t say, ‘cute.’ His hair is loosed from its queue and one strand flutters each time he exhales. He took his sword belt off for dinner and it's leaning against the wide hearth by the bird bones and water jug. He found a fresh well to the side of the courtyard!
He’s sleeping flat on his back, left knee bent, right arm reaching for his sword. All the little lines of concern and puzzlement that trace gravity on his face in the day are smoothed. His left arm, twitching, releasing knots in the muscle.
Hang on, the hair in front of his mouth isn’t fluttering anymore.
Four
∞ Edling Geoffrey of Kaveg’s journal ∞
Chicago, America
I am Geoffrey, the orphan prince of Kaveg. My journey through the lands of Kaveg has taken me - out of time, it seems - to the uncharted land of America. My search for the prophesied queen must be delayed by this… detour. I have left behind me a good woman whom I would deem my bond if not the “queen with my own heart.”
I left my people in a battle. All around me my people—my friends, my enemies; all of them my people—were dying and killing outside the gates of Voferen Kahago with the wakened dragon soaring overhead. But my mind keeps returning to my vicious aunt Fierell driving her sword down at Nanda. What happened? Did she die? Who is this Nanda? I sit here in this little room, her ‘apartment’ and stare at her, but it isn’t her. I find that I am now able to understand her confusion at Forte. This woman is very different from the Nanda I have become familiar with in the past moons and I begin to wonder if she is indeed not my Nanda, but that she has the same name, the same eyes, the same special dimples that appear only when she is enjoying some private joke.
I have my own private joke. I have found so much to admire in her as to overcome Mobious’ exhortations that I fulfill the prophecy and find the woman with my heart. But now that I know I love this woman, she doesn’t know who I am.
What a beautiful woman she has become in my eyes. That odd brown skin is so much lighter here. And her hair, darker, with less of the golden red glints that shone in the sun. She is sleeping in the corner of this apartment, curled tightly in her sheets on that small mattress — a futon she called it. Her fists clench at a faded and torn pillowcase with a lace crochet border. In Kaveg she had none of these lines that tension and fear engrave in her sleeping face. A ray of light from the single moon has crept its way around the tall buildings that abound here and melted through the iron-barred windows of her little alcove creating shifting shadows as her back rises and falls in ragged breaths.
∞
The first time I watched her sleep, at dTella’s sod-cottage in the forests west of Forte, I wondered if she might possibly be the woman with my heart. She was lying face down, like a newborn, on a myriad of pillows strewn on the rug in the family area, her bare arms glowing pink with clean, freshly blooded scratches and scrapes. dTella’s daughter, little Tira, her own golden hair finally tamed into a single plait by her father, crouched by her head, sleepily reweaving Nanda’s left braid, trying to figure out the unusual pattern and inadvertently tangling the rich brown-red mane.
She slept so soundly. Was she exhausted from the emotional stress of running for her life, hiding in a tree, sneaking through the darkness, and finally finding herself eating in an underground hidey with a rambunctious family of six or was she done in by the physical stress of sustaining wounds in a swordfight, racing through rough terrain for half a day, falling out of that tree, and roughhousing with Rich and dTella's little ones?
Rich and I had been discussing Tgeha, Lord of Stray Tor and briefly my childhood friend. He'd recently requested several wings of Voferen’s civil guarde to augment local forces in defending his people from the dragon whom Rich assured me was not roaming nearly so far as Tgeha’s southern lands.
“The regent Mobious must have had a reason for letting the wings go, but the people begin to doubt him.”
I had not heard this news of Mobious’ waning popularity. “How do you know so much so far from civilization?”
“We get news from travelers lost in the forest and of course we listen to the drums. Certain private messengers know they can always stop here for a hot drink and warm welcome. We stay informed, sir.” The older man shifted the baby, tDavel, in his arms, slipping a forefinger into tDav’s tiny fist. “Furthermore, I’d say we know more about the emotional pulse of Kaveg than those living in the heart of Voferen Kahago.”
“What says that pulse?”
“It will be twenty-nine seasons since the prince disappeared into the countryside. Seven frseason he’s been searching. His quest begins to be mocked. The people miss their true leader, sir. And they want a queen.” His eyes turned towards his daughter, on the rug, “This Nanda is beautiful in her own way. She’s got a kind heart if a troubled soul.”
I didn’t answer. The silence stretched into an ocean as we each with our private thoughts claimed our islands of reverie.
I suppose I was trying her on for size then. Judging, from the eight or so hours of company we had kept and the few words we had exchanged, what kind of partner she could be for me. It was a foolish line of thought. I knew nothing of her. She may have already bonded with a man who was merely missing momentarily. She may not even be interested in men. Besides and above all, I thought at the time, she was not the woman Mobious had sent me to find.
A little over twenty-nine seasons ago now, my tutor, my guardian, my regent, Mobious, sent me away from Voferen Kahago on this quest. I had thirteen. A frightened young orphan being told to leave his home. I had never known any home but Voferen. I thought I would go out, grab a girl, and run home before the bondstar had set.
“Don’t be in a rush. She will
become apparent to you in time.” Mobious had laughed. “Her hair will be the fire of sunset. Her eyes will be spectacular. Her laughter, a joy that will raise in your heart a passionate and overwhelming sorrow that you might ever be denied such a beautiful sound. But your thoughts of her will never raise in you the dreams you have of Aneke.”
I had flushed to the tips of my toes to think that my mentor could imagine the dreams I had been having about my new Survival tutor, an ex roaming guarde turned milkmother for the women of Voferen’s civil wings.
But twenty-six seasons and many women wiser, I didn’t flush as I gazed at Nanda, assessing her merits against those delineated for the ideal I had been sent out to find. I noted that her hair had certain fiery sparks of sunset in it. Her eyes held incredible depth and thoughtfulness. Such laughter as I had heard from her had been light and uncertain, but I enjoyed the sound and the character it betrayed in her.
However, even lying in that ungainly position, limbs strewn haphazardly, Nanda’s body brought to my mind and to my muscles reactions that even the equestrian women of Scentrier hadn’t inspired. And I knew she wasn’t the woman for whom I was searching.
∞
For whom I was searching. Much good that search is doing me now. I don’t even know where I am. Though, obviously I am in the place Nanda meant when she referred to ‘home.’ And it is no longer any wonder that she found my roaming life so enjoyable. The simplest cottage I have ever visited has more cheer than this chicken coop. The poorest village, more. . . heart? This place is cold. I could see a large black space far above as we walked from the El to this square tower. But no stars, so I don’t know if it is sky or just a roof as expansive as the seamless stone paving. Perhaps this is one enormous castle and the place has no sun.
Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel Page 4
