Act of Will

by A. J. Hartley

  “Did you drive yesterday?” she demanded.

  “No, Garnet did,” I said, thinking that that rather strengthened my position.

  “And the day before?”

  “Mithos drove.”

  “And on either occasion did you offer to drive?” she persisted.

  “Er . . . no, why?” I answered guilelessly.

  “Then how dare you offer today?”

  “What?”

  “You think I’m incapable of steering a wagon along a straight road because I am a woman?”

  “No, of course not,” I stammered hopelessly.

  “Then what?”

  “Well, I was just being civil,” I suggested.

  “Don’t be,” she said, and set us in motion with a crack of the reins.

  She had stoically refused to cover her pale skin as her brother had done, because she said it impeded the movement of her sword arm. I was starting to see a lot of that stoicism and I didn’t much like it.

  “You really should cover up,” I said. “You obviously have delicate skin. Plenty of Cresdon ladies would be jealous of it. Shame to let it burn. . . .”

  “Why don’t you look after your own skin?” she remarked acidly. “You’ve had lots of practice.”

  Great, Will, I told myself. Another triumph. Will the Smooth. Debonair Bill strikes again. All right, a man can only take so much. It’s time to shock her into submission with your forthrightness and straight talking. Put the pressure on. Give it to her hard and direct. Call her bluff. Here we go. “You don’t like me very much, do you?” I said with a disarming smile.

  “No,” she said flatly.

  “Oh,” I said, thrown by her candor. “Well, er . . . why not?”

  “You are an ugly little worm of a man with no scruples or principles other than those that preserve your worthless hide.”

  She turned to me to say that, and her blue-grey eyes blazed into mine. Her voice had a strident edge to it, since she was speaking over the noise of the horses, but her tone was calm. I stared at her and tried turning on the charm.

  “You don’t mean that.” I beamed mischievously.

  “Don’t bet on it.”

  “You can’t mean, for example, that I am physically ugly! Many women—”

  “I mean exactly that,” she said bitterly. “Look at yourself. Skinny and with the belly of an old frog. You’re what, eighteen?”

  “About that.”

  “You have the physique of someone twice your age. Look at that!”

  She poked my stomach with her index finger until it hurt. I wanted to slap her but I was too chivalrous, and didn’t want the further humiliation of her beating me up.

  “That’s nothing a little exercise won’t fix,” I breathed, pushing her hand off my gut testily.

  “You never do any exercise.”

  “I carry wood and stuff,” I said in an injured tone.

  “That’s not exercise, that’s light work,” she snarled. “Call yourself a man?” she sneered. “You’re an actor. A professional liar. You’ve never done a day’s work in your life.”

  “Just because I don’t use my biceps all day doesn’t mean I don’t work. Can’t a man earn his keep with his brain instead of his arms?”

  That ought to get her, I thought.

  “Of course he can, if the work is honorable.” She sat back, pleased with herself as if she had said something unanswerable.

  “Honor!” I spat. “A fine, airy nothing to get yourself killed for. Honor, God help us! If, according to your honor, I am damned for acting on a stage, but you and your brother are praiseworthy for theft and murder, then you can keep it. Better still,” I added, warming to my subject, “you can stick it right—”

  “That’s enough,” said Mithos, who had appeared trotting at my side. “You two had better learn to live with each other for a while. And Renthrette?”

  “Yes,” she said, a faint pout puckering the slim pink line of her mouth.

  “Mr. Hawthorne is our guest.” At that her lip began to curl and he, catching her look, spoke more forcefully. “Conditions will not be good until we reach Stavis. Some degree of harmony is essential. Drink.”

  He indicated the cloth-covered bottle and I passed it to her. She took a long, slow mouthful and I watched her throat as she swallowed. Passing it back to me, she caught the hard glitter of Mithos’s black eyes and forced a smile.

  “There you are, Mr. Hawthorne.”

  “Thank you ever so much, Renthrette,” I said.

  Mithos nodded and rode on. She watched him go and said, “In future, Mr. Hawthorne, have the dignity to fight your own battles.”

  I felt I had cause to protest at this, but the conversation was clearly a circular one. I fell silent and looked at the unchanging road ahead.

  When we stopped to eat, Orgos caught me by the arm and beamed into my face.

  “Had a romantic ride?” he asked.

  “Get lost, Orgos,” I replied. He gave his characteristic whoop of laughter and I grinned at him despite myself.

  In the second half of the week in the Hrof, I started secretly doing exercises at night, when it was cool and I was on watch. The others, Renthrette in particular, were asleep, so I could move away from the wagon and wheeze my way through some sit-ups and push-ups. There were no improvements in my physique, but I felt virtuous and that was enough at present. One night Orgos interrupted me. “You don’t exactly tax yourself, do you?” He smiled.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I replied, insulted.

  “You’ve barely broken a sweat. There are a few weights in the wagon. Want to use them?”

  “Er, yes, all right,” I agreed reluctantly. He went into the wagon and reappeared with a pair of small dumbbells, a four-foot bar, and a set of weights, all carried with irritating ease. In order to stave off actually having to use the bloody things, I said the first thing that came into my head.

  “Would you teach me to use a sword, Orgos?”

  He smiled again and said, “I’d be glad to. Though you aren’t going to be a sword master this time next week, and it will take a lot to impress Renthrette.”

  “This is nothing to do with Renthrette,” I lied. “I just need to feel safer and more useful to the party.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but you’re going to have to get yourself in shape first. I’m not sure you could manage much more than a fruit knife at present.”

  I shrugged off his sarcasm and made as if to go to bed.

  “All right, all right, I’m sorry,” he laughed, coming after me. “We’ll start now if you like.”

  “Can I see your sword?” I asked.

  He reached for the left one but I stopped him.

  “The other,” I said, indicating the one with the amber stone in the pommel. He seemed to hesitate for a split second and then handed it to me. It was heavy, too heavy for me to use, though not as heavy as I had expected.

  “What’s this?” I said, touching the stone with my fingertip.

  “Nothing,” said Orgos. “Decoration.”

  “Yeah?” I said.

  “I’ll get a pair of spears. Better start there.”

  As he got a couple of spears out of the wagon and bound their tips with cleaning rags, I wondered why I didn’t believe him. Decoration? Orgos? That didn’t sound right. And there was something else: a vague and unsettling memory.

  A flash of light . . .

  I looked at the amber gem, and, as the sun caught it, it seemed to glow with exactly the same inner fire that—crazy though it sounded—I thought had somehow incapacitated those Empire troops back in Cresdon. I considered the stone, then told myself not to be so bloody stupid and put it out of my head.

  I couldn’t help thinking that the spears were less glamorous than the sword I had hoped for, but Orgos assured me it was a good place to start. The spear was light and required more dexterity than strength. In my current physical state that was a good thing, as he had so penetratingly observed. I stood legs apart as h
e told me, and grasped the shaft with both hands.

  “All right,” he said, “now face me and do as I do. Grip the spear like this. Fists outwards. Your right hand a little further down. Now lunge at me. Good, but make it a smaller movement. The bigger and more obvious the lunge, the easier it is to anticipate and the harder it is for you to recover. Always get back on both feet with your weight evenly distributed like this. Right. Now try that lunge again and recover. Good.”

  So it went on, and I suppose I made progress, and I actually enjoyed it so much that I didn’t realize how late it was getting until the minuscule wound in my thigh began to throb faintly. I also didn’t notice Mithos and Garnet watching from the fireplace, or hear what they had to say. I learnt fast and my reflexes were quick, so they should have been fairly impressed. Orgos was pleasantly surprised and said so. I was flattered, even if he was just encouraging me. Still, it would take more than a bit of training to make me into the stuff of heroes. They couldn’t train me in honor and bravery and the other “qualities” that would one day get them all killed.

  Of Renthrette’s views on the matter I heard nothing, but I strolled around the camp, spear in hand, and occasionally brought up the matter of our sparring when we were all gathered together to dine. Whenever I did so she would give me a long indifferent look as if to say that she knew she was supposed to be impressed and wasn’t; then she would go back to her slow, meticulous brushing of the horses’ tails or whatever the hell she was doing. But I knew her resolve was weakening. She wasn’t the first to have tried to convince herself that I was some kind of repulsive and despicable rodent. I’d read the literature on such things. I’d written some of it.

  Orgos, anxious to improve my other skills, encouraged me to sit on a horse, but I felt so high and ridiculously unbalanced that I could not be persuaded even to have him walk the beast round the camp. I sat on it; that was all. As far as I was concerned, that was progress enough for one day, or indeed for several. I don’t trust things with more feet than me. Come to think of it, I don’t trust things with fewer feet either. If it doesn’t look like me, I find it suspicious, and if I ever met someone exactly like me, I would trust him still less. Trust is a highly overrated commodity, I think.

  By the sixth day, the wound on my leg had vanished. On the eighth day I noted a distinct weaving of grass in the hot earth, and by evening there were trees again. Earlier on in the same day I had been gratified by a glimpse of the famous Hrof ostrich. It had been a good four hundred yards from the road, but you couldn’t mistake that leggy ball of feathers powering up and down the desert on those clawed, pinkish legs of tight muscle and sinew. I think I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t seen one, since in my former life it was the only image that mention of the Hrof lands might have called to mind. By the late afternoon of the ninth and, somehow, longest day, we could see the distant flashes of light and color from the rooftops of Stavis. And still the Empire hadn’t got me. We, and more particularly, I, had made it.

  SCENE XIII

  The Party Leader

  On the last day of our journey I got a clearer view of Stavis and it, or rather one aspect of it, came as something of a shock. Stavis sat astride the river Yarseth only a couple of miles from where it emptied its brown, unsightly waters into the sea. I had known this before, but being presented with the reality of the thing was a different matter. The Yarseth was merely a dark and drowsy worm, but at its mouth was the ocean, and there the sparkle was like the billion shards of some immense fractured mirror. I had never seen the sea before.

  It was loathing at first sight. I’m sure there are many well-traveled and broad-minded individuals who are accustomed to the ocean and don’t even recall their first glimpse of it. I, having weaseled my uneventful way into a shabby, provincial adulthood within a twenty-mile radius of the supremely shabby and provincial town of Cresdon, was neither well-traveled nor broad-minded. The sight of that near-infinite expanse of water scared the living daylights out of me, leaving me feeling not so much inadequate as nonexistent, and I found myself glancing at it furtively every few minutes to make sure it was still there. It was.

  At least you could walk on the Hrof. Back in the golden age of Mrs. Pugh and her cockroach-ridden hovel, I had some nagging doubts about the very existence of the sea, as if I was preparing myself for someone to confess that the whole ludicrous “area of salty water” thing was a story to frighten children. The sea had been like magic and dragons or peace and liberty: mythically fictitious. But there it was, huge, vibrant, and glittering smugly to itself. I spent the next two days undergoing what you might call an ordeal by confrontation.

  Stavis itself didn’t help. The road brought us gradually into a sprawl of white-plastered buildings and a population of every racial type imaginable. Here was a Cherrati trade enclosure hanging with silk; there were the people I knew only—and quaintly—as snow folk, from farther north than any map I knew of, selling seal pelts and buying iron spear tips by the sackful. Verone herders with their smelly okanthi rubbed shoulders with Dranetian silver dealers and Mesorian glass merchants. The sea drew all races, and in Stavis they met and bartered, calculated their profit and loss in a dozen languages and a hundred dialects. And rather than feeling like one of the ingredients in this great cultural stew, I merely felt left out and longed for the familiar pettiness of Cresdon.

  Our passage through the city was marked by a sudden darkening of the skies until the clouds swirled violet and cracked with electrical flashes. When the rain came I ducked into the wagon and stared out of the back as Stavis’s international cross section ran for cover and the raindrops bounced eight inches high off the Empire’s new-laid pavements.

  The Empire had been here only eight months. In that time, Orgos assured me, little had changed, except that prices had gone up, taxes and soldiers had appeared, and the Diamond Empire was looking fat and pleased with itself. The populace adapted by marking up their cod, herring, and sailfish prices until the only people who were really any worse off were distant trade partners and, of course, the very poor. So Stavis, with the usual economic sidestep, kept everyone happy. Everyone who mattered, anyway.

  We were stopped twice as we entered the city, but even I could see that such challenges were formalities and only some spectacular idiocy on my part would get us into trouble. There was nothing to suggest that even word of us had reached the laconic guards. I couldn’t help being slightly offended that they had lost interest in me, but after a moment’s reflection on Empire execution practices, the feeling passed. By the time Orgos had given a street name, the troops were waving us through with thinly masked apathy. That night I resolved to raise a mug of the best ale I could find and toast Commander Harveth Liefson.

  Once inside the city, the party rode as a unit with its weapons stashed in the wagon. Renthrette tied her horse to the back and climbed up next to me, muttering enthusiastically about the different architectural styles and the magnificent seafood. I tried to give her the look of shriveling distaste she had thrown me every hour or so for the last week, but my heart wasn’t in it. Her eyes shone as she soaked up the rain-drenched scenery or haggled for imported mangoes with basket-laden street children. The transformation was astonishing. She smiled while she talked to me and at one point actually said, “You seem to be making progress with Orgos. You learn fast, Will. If you need any help or advice, please don’t hesitate to ask.”

  I stared at her, speechless (not a condition I often find myself in, as you will have gathered), wondering what I had done to deserve such sunny chumminess from Renthrette after our former sojourn in the frozen wastes. But it was soon clear that it wasn’t just this bloody city which delighted her so much.

  “She’s just relaxing now,” said Orgos when I pressed him on the matter. We were waiting to cross the Yarseth, swollen with seasonal rain like an overfed anaconda. Its bridges were either completely submerged or showed themselves as crazy little walkways arching in and out of the river like sea serpents. We had t
o be ferried across in leaky pontoon boats.

  “But why is she relaxing?”

  “She is comfortable here,” said Orgos, “and perhaps she feels she has to—how shall I put it?—assert herself less now.”

  There had been a slight smile on Orgos’s lips as he concluded that last sentence. He was skirting around some crucial factor.

  “Fine, Orgos,” I interrupted bitterly, knowing he was holding back. “Don’t tell me, see if I care.”

  “Well,” he laughed, “I think you’ll figure it out for yourself when we meet the party leader tonight.”

  So that was it. She was practicing her charm for her big-shot lover. She didn’t need to fend me off anymore, because he would do it for her. For all her posturing, she would rely on her boyfriend’s sword arm after all. But all was not lost. Now, while her guard was down, I would charm my way into her heart. I would show my wit, perception, and sensitivity (the last one I would have to fake, but it had worked before), and she would fall for me. Give me a couple of days and, to Renthrette, the “party leader” would be an embarrassing, bone-crushing thug compared with the sophisticated William Hawthorne.

  Still, that image of the bone-crushing thug rather slowed me down a little. I didn’t particularly want to find myself chivalrously jousting some seven-foot bonehead for her hand. I toyed for a moment with the idea of turning the “leader” in to the Empire guards, but that seemed vaguely below the belt, even for me. See? After only ten days with these clowns I was already letting my judgment get clouded by their laughable principles.

  Perhaps it was Renthrette’s letting her hair down (literally, as it happened), and generally being amiable and gorgeous, but I was rather going off the idea of breaking company with the party here. Partly it was Orgos’s broad grin, partly it was Mithos’s noble tolerance of my existence, partly it was the fact that Garnet didn’t ax me in my bed, and partly it was because I felt out of my depth in Stavis with its urbane, colorful populace, its Empire guards, and its immense ocean. By comparison the party felt like old friends. Well, kind of. Maybe I would travel with them until I found some placid nation of imbeciles who liked theatre and playing cards. I figured I should at least meet their “leader” and hear their plans before I decided. Who knew? Maybe there was money in this adventuring lark.