Adred waved her outside. “Come on. We’re free.”
“What?”
“I’m free,” he amended, as she took his hand and stared at Uthis and the Khamar. “And I’m taking you with me.”
“Adred…what’s happened?”
“All right!” Uthis barked. “Let’s get out of here!”
The Khamar started down the corridor with Adred and Rhia following and Uthis behind them, while the jailer locked the cell.
“Adred!” Rhia whispered to him, holding his hand tightly. “Will you tell me what’s happened?”
“We’re leaving Bessara.” He looked at her: she was as dirty and pale as he was. “On orders from King Elad, I have to leave Bessara and go to Sulos. And I’m taking you with me.”
She stared at him as they followed the Khamar up the stairs.
* * * *
That evening, as the purple-and-gold-sailed royal galley made its way northward under a calm breeze and a full moon, Adred and Rhia, bathed and freshly dressed, stood at the rail and watched the gray waves rock against the dark sky. The Khamar was with them.
Rhia quietly asked Adred, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why bring me along?”
Adred didn’t answer. The Khamar, standing next to him, made a signal that he was leaving to use the bucket and stepped down into the waist. Adred faced Rhia.
“Because…you don’t love me, I suppose.” He smiled. “But I couldn’t leave you there, could I? We could probably use you in Sulos.”
“‘We’? Who’s ‘we,’ Adred?”
He frowned. “I phrased that the wrong way. I shouldn’t have—”
“Will you please tell me what’s happening?”
He stepped away from the rail, put his hands on her shoulders, and looked her in the eyes. She was achingly beautiful in the moonlight, her long red hair touched by the cold silver of the night, her slim face partially in shadows, lips glimmering, eyes shining. Maybe she looked particularly attractive to him tonight because of—circumstances.
“We’re free,” he told Rhia. “But we’re free only because I’ve agreed to do something for Elad.”
“What are you doing for him?”
“Nothing to jeopardize us. I may be jeopardizing a friendship, but that’s all I’m doing.”
“Adred …”
“The Suloskai are acting up again in Sulos,” he told her. “Elad wants me to—intervene for him. Leave it at that, all right?”
Rhia smirked. “Something mysterious going on and I’m supposed to—”
“It’s not mysterious. I just don’t want to talk about it until we reach Sulos.”
The Khamar returned. As he stepped up to the rail, Rhia made a sound in her throat, turned from Adred and went down the steps, heading for her berth.
As the sounds of her footsteps receded, the Khamar snorted and commented, “Women.”
Adred waited until Rhia was out of earshot, then turned and leaned again on the rail. “Oh, she’s all right,” he said quietly. “She’s just headstrong. She gets into trouble because she wants to do the right thing.”
“Everybody,” replied the Khamar, “wants to do the right thing. But the world’s still in trouble.”
Adred looked at him. He had never thought of the palace guards as a particularly reflective or talkative group of men: it seemed to go against their discipline and training. They were elite. But then…they were men.
“Tell me,” he asked this one, “what provoked King Elad to do this?”
“I couldn’t say, Count Adred.”
“But this is totally unlike him. He has no sympathy for the rebellion, for—reformers.”
“I don’t know,” the Khamar answered laconically, staring at the moon. “But the whole palace feels different now. The king seems to have had a change of heart since that bastard tried to kill him.”
Adred contemplated it. “That would certainly change a man,” he agreed, not meaning to sound disrespectful. “Perhaps I should give him more credit. Do they know we’re coming?”
“No, Count Adred.”
“Just as well,” he muttered. “Just as well that they don’t.”
He looked for a flock of birds in the sky, but there was none—only the full moon, the brightly painted clouds, the quick-moving silver waves.
Only those—and the sound of his own beating heart.…
CHAPTER NINE
The two stood alone in the small enclosed courtyard. Lightning hissed in the sky, and a strong drizzle wetted them; only a single, shielded lamp, which Nutatharis held in his left hand, gave them light. Behind Nutatharis sat two of his dogs, great black beasts with coats shiny in the rain, eyes red in the darkness. Before the king stood the wanderer, Eromedeus—a very changed Eromedeus from the man Sir Jors had brought to Lasura a year earlier.
He was now an Eromedeus without pretense, an Eromedeus in whose eyes burned a timeless flame, whose erect posture and plain expression conveyed an attitude perhaps of arrogance, but again of dignity, and certainly of great pathos. A man dressed well in garments lent him by the king—heavy cloak, woolen shirt and trousers, new leather boots. Across one arm was draped a long rough robe.
“If there is anything else you wish for or will need,” Nutatharis told the wanderer, “tell me now, or leave without it. You cannot return here.”
Eromedeus was silent for a moment as he regarded the king. When he spoke, it was in a voice quiet but strong-willed, knowing. “Do you know what fascinates me?” he asked Nutatharis. “It fascinates me that after all I have told you, all I have described, and all that you now know, your reaction is to cast me out. That is your impulse; that is your decision. It fascinates me, Nutatharis, but it does not astonish me. I believe you fear me, or fear the fact that you can make no threat against me which has any strength. Isn’t that true? But in all my years, I have never met a man of authority who treated me otherwise. I am threatening to men of authority, not because I am strange—all things are strange in their essence—but because my secret is Time, Nutatharis: Time always undermines authority.”
Nutatharis’s reply to this was a cold one. “You can think what you like. I do not fear you, and my threats are not empty. Perhaps I can’t slay you, Eromedeus, but I could chain you in a dungeon where you would never know anyone, have no food or water, where you would rot.”
Eromedeus smiled wisely. “I need no food or water, king. And I have never known anyone other than myself, for who is there like me? Your threats are hollow, Nutatharis. I would outlive your dungeon.” He studied the Emarian carefully. “But I suspect that you still do not believe that I am what I say I am. Does even this monumental truth seem false to you?”
“I believe you are a sorcerer and a charlatan, in league with shadows, and that you are a vampire, and foul. I do not believe that you have lived as long as the gods, Eromedeus.”
“The gods are said to live forever, King Nutatharis; I will live only until the tribes of humanity extinguish themselves.” The wanderer’s eyes brightened. “I ask you again—give me the life of one slave girl, give me one soldier—and bid them willingly give their soul to me. Then I will leave your sight freely, and you will have no need to chase me.”
“You will begone now, Eromedeus. You have lived forever? And you have never found a single life to give itself to you? I think you lie.”
“Would you condemn yourself to eternal death, Nutatharis, out of love for one the gods have cursed? You know only yourself; I have known all of humankind. I have approached the frailest of us, those reduced by wasting disease: they have refused me. I have trodden battlefields after days of carnage, and I have whispered to mutilated carcasses that no longer deserved to be called human: they all refused me. There is no love in the hearts of humen beings, only jealousy and acquisitiveness, wants and needs, only posturings of the heart.”
“You speak of love? You are a monster. You have tortured babies, bled young women to make them suffer.”
“I bled
their flesh to free their spirits, to awaken them to greater things than this earthly confusion. Yet all are deluded; the tribes of humankind are young yet, their revolving spirits young and lost.” Eromedeus shook his head. “Love, O king, is a storm; it is not a quiet dawn, it is not placid, it is not merely warm flesh coupling to sate lusts. Were you ever to confront true love, it would demolish you with its purity. I knew it once,” the wanderer admitted, “or felt that I knew it, and thought then that surely the gods would free me.”
“You speak in riddles, and I’ve had enough.”
“I speak in great truths. I speak of purposes, King Nutatharis—and not the challenges men such as you give themselves disguised as purposes. I am one of the tests the gods have given to humankind. You feel no great wind in my presence, do you? You feel no breath of the gods, no heavy sound of time? You were born dead to such things, and life is such a trap that you have ignored doors opened to you. Your life, King Nutatharis…it is a brief thing, more brief than you suspect. You are pretentious, and fill your days and nights and hours with thoughts and troubles, intentions and actions, yet neither you nor others ever touch what you truly are. Where is the god in you, Nutatharis? Comes to you a man who might open the wonders of eternity to you, and you think he speaks only in words, and you think him a liar. Am I a liar? I am all that you fear and that everyone fears, Nutatharis, yet all that you desire. You think your will and your identity are the makings of eternity? Eternity laughs at you!”
Nutatharis stepped ahead and unlatched the courtyard gate; his dogs rose instantly, baring their teeth, slavering. The king nodded outside—outside the city, where the night and the rain were, in a damp mist that hid the green fields and the forests and the distant mountains.
“Go, now,” he commanded the undying wanderer. “If your words are true, still, they are nothing to me.”
“Then perhaps these words will have meaning for you, Nutatharis. Remember what I say. The world is a battlefield, the world is at war; but it is not a war of soldiers, and there is no battlefield of blood. It is a war of hearts that we witness and are joined in, a battlefield of thoughts and great purposes, a striving to gain a balance and hold it. You believe in false things, King Nutatharis; many have, since the start of humanity. I did once; and it is my great curse that, aware, I have lived for millennia but have gained no wisdom, for I have not died for my soul to be reborn. The rebirth of humanity is the cycle of its wisdom, O king; and we die and are reborn as the earth dies and is reborn. And that will bring about the end of this war. You will not win, Nutatharis. Were I to live a thousand times the length of what I have already suffered, still…I might not witness the outcome of this war. But the outcome is known to me already.”
“Begone now!” Nutatharis ordered him.
“The outcome of the earth is to be reborn with the heart of a child, Nutatharis. But you—you will yourself be slain by the heart of a child, and your own fear will encourage the slaying. Fear…and a child’s heart reborn in fear, thinking it truth.”
Before the wrathful Nutatharis could make answer to this, Eromedeus stepped toward the open gate. Then he paused and looked back.
“One may wish for more than he can endure. Recall that, O king, when you face your shadows.”
“Get gone, wanderer!”
Eromedeus nodded and stepped outside, turned his back to the king, and began his walk into the mists of the night, into the darkness.
Nutatharis pushed closed the gate, bolted it securely, turned quickly on his boots, and by the light of his small lamp started across the courtyard for his palace. His dogs began to follow, but he commanded them, “Stay!” The great beasts whined but crouched where they were and stared after their master as he went.
* * * *
Cyrodian awoke before dawn to sounds of commotion outside. Pulling himself from his bed, he loped to a window, yanked open the sash, and looked out over peaked portico rooftops and a garden and trees to see soldiers collecting in one of the wide palace yards. They were dressed in burnished armor and moving into rigid formations.
The prince growled. He had had no word from Nutatharis that the king intended any military demonstration or a review. What was the purpose of this?
Wearing only the kirtle he had slept in, the giant lunged over the flagstones to pull back the door of his chamber, passed through an adjacent room, and heaved open a second door.
In the corridor outside, guards were spaced along the walls.
“Come here!” Cyrodian called to one of them.
The young man across from him stared at him.
“Come here!”
The young guard moved uncertainly across the hall as his companions watched.
“What’s going on out there?” Cyrodian growled. “Where’s Nutatharis?”
“What do you mean, my lord?”
“The soldiers! The troops! They’re taking formation out there! What the hell is Nutatharis doing?”
The guard shook his head. “I don’t know, Prince Cyrodian.”
The giant growled and turned away, slammed closed the door, and returned to his sleeping chamber. He furiously pulled on trousers and boots, a heavy shirt, a leather vest and his sword and knives. Then he went out, down the corridor, and yelled to one of the other guards he passed, “Where’s the king?”
“At his breakfast, your honor.”
Cyrodian went into the main feasting hall, but Nutatharis was not there. Stewards and serving maids, quick-stepping through the corridors, hurried out of his way as the giant continued on to the northern exit. As he did, Sir Jors called to him from an intersecting hallway, and Cyrodian snarled, “Is your king out there?”
Jors, in polished armor and fully weaponed, warned the several young recruits with him to quieten, then asked Cyrodian, “Nutatharis?”
“Is there another king?”
“He is in the yard, Prince Cyrodian. Reviewing his troops.”
Cyrodian moved on, passing through the rear hallways of the palace and down a wide flight of marble stairs. Two young women, just exiting the kitchens with heavy trays, quickly disappeared again into clouds of steam to escape him.
He made his way outside, went down a long patio and through a landscaped arbor, and into the wide, walled yard. From the cramped, closed indoors, he was thrust suddenly into blinding daylight, high blue skies, and a legion of three thousand soldiers and horses stretched before him on the bricks. Atop the high walls to Cyrodian’s right fluttered hundreds of pennants and flags, and officers of the army stood atop the heights to inspect the formations and direct the drills. Before him in the yard, as the Athadian charged ahead, was Nutatharis, on a dressed white horse flanked by ten or more retainers in helmets and with shields, tall spears, and halberds.
Nutatharis caught the gesture of one of his men and urged his horse around. The king watched as Cyrodian stalked toward him.
“Why was I not informed?” Cyrodian bellowed as he approached.
“And for what reason should I have informed you?”
“I’m the leader of these men!” Cyrodian bawled. “What goes on here, Nutatharis?”
Cyrodian was trembling with rage. Nutatharis looked from him to the soldiers standing just beyond the giant: a hundred footmen and their officers, all in a file, awaiting the call of the horns to proceed in formation.
Nutatharis lifted his right hand from the reins; the soft leather of his glove curled and wrinkled like flesh. He held the hand straight and nodded quickly to the soldiers directly behind Cyrodian.
Before the giant understood what was happening, he heard blades whisked from their scabbards. Heavy gloves grabbed his arms, helmets and regalia surrounded him, and two sword points sank lightly into the fleshy cavities behind his knees, where the tendons are. One of the soldiers lifted Cyrodian’s sword from its sheath; someone else removed the knives from his belt.
“Nutatharis! What is the meaning of this?”
“You are under arrest, Athadian,” the king told him, “o
n the charge of matricide—”
“No!”
“—and you will be returned imme—”
“No!”
“—diately, Lord Cyrodian, to the capital of your country—”
“No! Nutatharis, no!”
“—to face the mercy and justice of your brother, King Elad.”
“Damn you, Nutatharis, don’t do this!”
“Manacle him and remove him to the prison.”
“Nutatharis, you cannot!”
Bellowing and howling, fighting with every muscle in him, Cyrodian was dragged away with difficulty, at the last gagged with a dirty cloth retrieved from somewhere, and bound around his chest and legs so that even he could not wrestle free of the leather belts and iron chains.
Nutatharis watched to make sure that the giant was in check, then kneed his horse around and, feigning deafness, continued the review of his troops.
CHAPTER TEN
When the royal galley made dock at Sulos, it was met on the wharves by a coterie of city soldiers. Blockades were set up so that the intrigued public could be kept at a distance. Word spread quickly along the streets, however, that a palace ship had thrown anchor, and very quickly crowds of spectators assembled, shoving against the wooden barricades in attempts to see past the soldiers’ human wall. Raucous chants soon lifted from all directions—protests from working people, the unemployed and the hungry, anonymous rebels and rebel sympathizers.
Adred disembarked with Rhia and the Khamar, and he was surprised to see so volatile a temperament in the streets. As the three of them made their way onto the stone quay, the officer in charge of the troops, a young lieutenant named Revar, saluted the Khamar.
“We had no word of your coming, sir.”
The Khamar handed him a small scroll bearing the royal seal. “King Elad thought it best to keep our arrival secret. Will you escort us to General Vardorian immediately?”
The officer saluted, lifted to his mouth the whistle that hung on a chain around his neck, and blew it; instantly twenty cavalrymen advanced, and behind them, a large carriage. The carriage was dirty and torn, the seal of the governorship on it defaced and discolored.
Sorrowing Vengeance Page 10
