by Dave Duncan
I chivvied Eadig all through dinner in the hall. As he wanted to hear everything that had happened with Sir Vernon, I got less eaten than he did before I took him off with me to the sanctum. I did not quite drag him by an ear, although that was the general effect.
“You’ve thought of something!” he said.
“Something I should have thought of a long time ago—the Hwat Segst.”
I had been trying to find a spell that would tell me where I could meet up with the king, and there was no such chant, not here in Lincoln and not in Helmdon, so far as I could recall. But the Hwæt Segst, if it worked, would predict a person’s destiny. It had done so twice before for me, and once for Eadig, in Northampton, when it had warned us of High Treason.
So we reached the sanctum, where we had already changed the password on the outer door to Nicholaa, and taken all curses off the inner one. We settled across the table from each other. Eadig quickly read over the scroll to remind himself of the text, and then tied on a blindfold. I spread out the tiles. Eadig chanted, and smiled as he felt acceptance. I waited with chalk poised over a slate.
His hand moved, and pointed: feoh . . . æsc . . . gyfu . . . eh . . . rad . . . In the Latin alphabet that would be fæger, meaning “beautiful”. Then came another word, followed by the blank tile, signing off.
Eadig hauled off the blindfold. “What’d they say?” His smile faded as he saw my disappointment.
“Fæger munt,” I said. Beautiful mountain.
“Sounds possible, doesn’t it? They might have told us if that’s in Brittany or Normandy or . . . No?”
“It’s not a place,” I said. “It’s a name. Robert de Beaumont is the justiciar, the earl of Leicester.”
Eadig was young enough to ignore the clouds and concentrate on the silver linings. “Well, then the Wyrds are predicting that we’ll meet him, aren’t they? If you have to guess between London and Winchester, it sounds like you’ll guess right.”
I nodded as I began putting the tiles back in their bag. “We can probably pass close by Leicester town on our way. I don’t know if he has a seat there or not. If he does, then the garrison will be able to direct us to him.”
But it meant more delay. Neil would have three full days’ start on me. Of course the weather might prevent him from reaching France for weeks, but it might also favor him and then delay me. For several minutes we sat in silence. Then I glanced up and saw Eadig’s glum expression. I knew I was somewhat of a hero to him and the other Saxon varlets at Helmdon. He had known me as the boy who shoveled out the stable. He had seen my dramatic rise to royal familiaris and astrologer to the queen. And now, in his eyes, his champion was quitting the field.
I banged my fist on the table. “All right! I’ll try. I’ve got nothing better to do with what’s left of the day. But I’ll need ten thousand slates and twenty thousand wood tablets. And ten gallons of ink!”
Grinning widely, Eadig jumped off his stool. “Yes, master!”
“Just don’t expect it to work,” I growled.
An enchantment is a lot more complicated than a psalm or a drinking song. It must be rhythmic, yes, and its form is set— within limits, for some seem to break all the rules and yet work well. It can appeal to many of the ancient spirits or to very few, but their order is important, for even very minor deities can be touchy about precedence and their respective prerogatives. Above all it must be beautiful, in a way that is hard to define. Ugly enchantments never work. That is why tiny flaws like the trip wires can render them ineffective, and also why even those texts have been preserved for centuries.
Eadig had suggested earlier that I could base a new chant on one of the traditional ones, and there was some sense in that. One that I had brought with me was the Ubi malum, “Where Is The Evil?” which I had used with dramatic effect at Barton, almost causing a murder. It invoked a whole cosmos of entities. On the other hand, some of those it called upon were malevolent themselves, and would have to be omitted.
After more head scratching, I realized that my greatest successes in curing damaged chants had been the Hwæt segst and the Hwá becuman, both of which had been addressed to the Wyrds. Perhaps they liked me. Perhaps they were lonely now, when almost no one spoke to them anymore. I decided to appeal to them.
Besides, while I could read many dialects of Latin or French, writing a correct text in one’s mother tongue is much easier, and the Wyrds might not respond to any other language. I would begin my pretend spell with, “Loc hwær he sie”, meaning “Wherever he may be,” so Loc hwær would be its name.
Eadig laid out at least a beginning of the supplies I would need in the inner sanctum and promised to keep me undisturbed for the next year or so.
Once or twice I heard voices, but the connecting door remained closed. Once I heard Eadig chanting something, but he had the resident healing spell grimoire out there and was quite competent to deal with a bellyache or a bad tooth. How long this situation continued I do not know, but it was close to sunset when he tapped on the door and peered in—very cautiously, as if he feared I might throw the inkwell at him.
I laid down my quill, yawned, and stretched my arms. “Almost done.”
“They’re singing evensong, master, and Lady Nicholaa has called for you to join her and her father at sup in the tower.”
I growled. Certainly I needed a break, but I had been planning to make a quick call on Lovise. Yet I could not refuse the constable’s daughter, and the gates would be closing soon. I sent Eadig off to the servants’ mess to make up for what I had dragged him away from at dinner time, and told him that when he returned he could look over what I had written.
Five of us supped in the Lucy Tower solar that evening: Nicholaa, Constable Richard, mistress of the robes Elvire, me—and Iden Attewell, the courier. Iden was about my age, but no taller than Eadig, and built like the racing dog they call a grighund. He would be little more of a burden for a horse than the letters he carried. Everything about him was quick, from his eyes to his feet.
We did not talk of my business during the meal, mostly we listened to Iden’s merry chatter. Despite his youth, he really did seem to have been everywhere between the Scottish border in the north and Aquitaine in the south. Talking did not stop him eating as much as I did. I marveled that he stayed so thin.
When we finished, I was itching to return to my attempt to invent a new enchantment. I asked Iden how long we should need to reach London.
“Three days easy,” he said. “Lord Richard has picked out Peregrine for your lad. A bay gelding. He’s fast and always willing. Can’t see that Ruffian brute of yours letting himself be outclassed, and I’ll be riding Whirlwind, as usual.” He obviously foresaw no chance of being out-ridden by a couple of glorified clerks.
Nicholaa picked up my hint. “You’ll be wanting to make an early start, Sage?”
“I’ll try not to waken the roosters, my lady.”
Iden nodded. “First light? Meet you at the stable, sir?”
“I’d rather you stopped by at the sanctum. We could use an extra hand with our baggage.”
That was agreed and then I must make my farewells. I thanked Lord Richard for the gift of a horse and remembered to tell him the password on the sanctum door. I suggested that he have the pentacle on the cellar floor covered over with tiles, but he said he was going to raze the whole building. Healer Fulk in Nottingham was sending a new healer, who would set up in the old sanctum that Healer Bjarni had used.
And after all that I could rush back to the sanctum. Dark was falling, and I had an enchantment to try. I found Eadig there, frowning over my efforts. He had written out the responses on a separate sheet of parchment, ready for a trial performance.
“Speak up,” I said. “I value your comments.”
He simpered at my flattery. “This verb should be willaþ, not wilt, unless you intend that to be a trip wire, also the third and fifth versicles don’t scan. Apart from that, as fine an assignment as you’ve handed in in years, varlet.�
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I swung a slap at his ear and he ducked.
“Very well, Sage Eadig, let’s try it. It’s late,” I added, glancing at the window, “but there’s nothing too risky in the text. We won’t be summoning any evil spirits.” I hoped I was not mistaken.
I corrected the flaws he had seen and we did a read-through. It seemed to flow well, considering we were working backward. So we began at the beginning and sang it through.
We felt not a trace of acceptance. We talked it over, changed a couple of details, and tried again. Still nothing.
I had wasted half a day attempting the impossible. I should have known better.
“You did warn me,” Eadig said sadly. “But the Hwæt segst promised that you would meet with the earl of Leicester.”
And that would have to do. “Early start in the morning,” I said. “Let’s pack and catch up on sleep. We’ve got two hard days ahead of us.” And I had a letter to write.
chapter 24
“wake up!” I repeated, “or I’ll dribble hot wax on you.”
(Eadig groaned, rolled over on his back, and blinked up at my candle. “It can’t be morning yet. I won’t allow it.”
It wasn’t quite. “The sky’s changing. We have an early start to make, and before that we have to chant again. We forgot something!” That wasn’t fair, because I was the one who had done the forgetting.
“What?”
“The queen.”
“She’s a whom, not a what.” Eadig’s voice was muffled as he pulled on his shirt, so perhaps I was not supposed to hear that impudence.
“The king would recognize me and believe me. Possibly the earl of Leicester was there in Barton and saw me swearing loyalty to the king; if so then he may believe my wild story backed up by Lord Richard’s letter—or he may not. But the queen was certainly there that day, and young Lord Richard with her. She commissioned me to draw up his horoscope. If I can find Queen Eleanor, she will know who I am and will certainly believe our story.”
“She’s in England?”
“Sage Gilbert in Northampton told us that she is.”
I set up candles on the table and found the necessary scrolls in my bag. In a few moments Eadig joined me, half dressed and blinking, barely awake. “What d’you need me t’do?”
“Start by reading over this incantation.” I handed him the cantor’s part of Oculos deceptus. That spell isn’t black magic, but its purpose is to deceive, and therefore at best it could be called gray. I had first met it and used it two years earlier, at Barton, with results close to disastrous, and I had brought it along with me to Lincoln purely by accident, because the parchment had been rolled up inside another.
Eadig’s own oculos grew wider and wider as he read. He was only seeing half the text, of course, but he could tell enough from that to know that its purpose was well on the shady side of enchanters’ ethics. When he finished he gave me a very troubled look.
“What are you planning to do with this, master?”
“Get by Sir Vernon Cheadle.”
Eadig said, “Oh!” in a very small voice.
“Isn’t it obvious? He knows we’re here and Sir Neil gave him orders concerning us. He said he was told to escort us to the king. That may well be true, but I think it will only be true when I give him the password.”
“What password?” Eadig was still not quite awake, and I had been chewing over my problems half the night.
“I don’t know what password. Corneille and Quentin would have given it to me after I was safely enslaved. It would change Vernon’s memory of what he was supposed to do with, or for, me. Since I didn’t get the password, the first instructions remain in effect and he believes I am a murderer.”
“That’s crazy.”
“No, it’s just foxy. We were dealing with very clever men. It took a woman to out-think them. So I think that Vernon truly believes that I murdered Francois. Remember that Neil and his brother have been ‘recruited’ as Satanist agents, so they may have dark powers of their own now, at least enough to deceive Vernon. He will be waiting for us on the road, Friend Eadig, sure as fleas jump! So we have to sneak by him in disguise. Now, who would you like to look like? Someone you know well would be best.”
“Adept Maur?”
Maur son of Marc was his closest friend at Helmdon, and also much taller.
“Excellent idea. And when I’ve sung it for you, you’ll sing it for me and I’ll try to be Sage Marcel. Be warned, this is a ramshackle sort of spell. I mean it doesn’t work very well, especially in sunlight, but in this case we don’t need a perfect likeness. As long as we don’t look like ourselves, we should pass by the ambush quite easily. You need us to read it through together first?”
Eadig shook his head, rubbed the last of the sleep out of his eyes, and moved one of the candles closer. “Pitch, please, master.”
So we chanted the Oculos deceptus and when we reached the end, the gangling Adept Maur was sitting on the other side of the table from me. I was very impressed, because the spell had produced a much more stable illusion than the one it had provided for William Legier and me at Barton two years previously. Perhaps that was because the candlelight was dimmer here, or because we were limning a living person, not a dead one.
The fake Maur had Eadig’s grin, though. He stood up and looked around from his new, higher point of view. “Mm . . . This has possibilities,” he said in Maur’s deeper voice.
“That’s why it isn’t taught to adepts. Dimitto!” That brought him back to his normal appearance. “Now me.”
We exchanged scrolls so that he could take the enchanter’s role and I the cantor’s. The second attempt did not go as smoothly. We had to start over a couple of times, but when we reached the end, Eadig was staring at me in awe. I was fascinated to see my wrists bearing little black hairs that had not been there before.
Eadig said, “Dimitto!” and they disappeared. I was Durwin again.
Time was fleeting. Iden was due very soon and I wasn’t ready to leave yet.
“My Loc hwær,” I said. “I don’t think we gave it a fair trial last night. The king is far away and over the sea. But what about the queen? She knows me. She’ll believe me. If she’s still in England, then this should tell us where she is, and she can send a warning to the king much faster than we could take it.”
In fact I had been wakened by a vivid dream of Queen Eleanor. I don’t much believe in prophetic dreams, being more inclined to agree with Sage Guy’s opinion, which was that not all your brain goes to sleep when you do. It leaves a night watch on duty, and often the night watch can find answers that your waking brain missed. I should have thought of the queen much sooner.
Eadig said, “Mmph,” with a disappointing lack of faith in the incantation that he had persuaded me to invent.
“I think we’d better write in the changes.”
“Mmph.”
He took up a pen reluctantly and we went over the two parchments, changing “king” to “queen” and all the necessary pronouns and adjectives. Then we did a read-through. We found one adjective I had missed. We chanted. Half way through I found another mistake. We started over, and this time I felt a strong acceptance. Eadig’s voice took on the ancient croak I now recognized as the voice of a Wyrd. When we finished I waited anxiously.
“Hwær æðling cirmane oðer sona!” Eadig closed his eyes. For a moment I feared he was going to be smitten with a headache, as had happened when we chanted the Hwá becuman. But then he opened them wide. “What did I just say?”
I thumped both fists on the table in triumph. “You said Beaumont!”
Blink. “No I didn’t.”
“But you meant it. You said, ‘Where a prince cried, another soon will.’ There are two Beaumonts, Eadig! One is a name— Earl Richard de Beaumont, the justiciar, and the other is a palace, just outside Oxford. When the queen commissioned a horoscope for Prince Richard, she told me when and where he was born, and the ‘where’ was Beaumont Palace. That’s what the Hwæ
t segst was telling us, too. The Wyrds just had you inform me that the queen is with child again and has gone back to Beaumont Palace for her confinement. We’ll go there and warn her, and she can send the message on—far faster than we could take it.”
Eadig beamed. “Then you did it, master! You wrote a new spell.”
Great Heavens! So I had.
chapter 25
very soon after that, in the clammy colorless light before dawn, while the castle roosters were screaming for their harems, Iden tapped on the outer door to lead us to the stable. We loaded him up, collected everything else we needed, and then followed, shivering and laden.
Despite the early hour, Iden was as chattery as ever. He nattered to the ostlers as they saddled up Ruffian and two others. Ruffian was difficult on principle, so I went over and lectured him. Knowing that I was good for a fine ride, he calmed down and stopped trying to eat the stable hands. Iden introduced Eadig to Peregrine, and I paid my compliments to Whirlwind, who was lean and built for stamina, like his rider.
Iden gave me the constable’s letter to the justiciar. I gave him mine to Lovise, with a penny to bribe the stable hand he trusted most to deliver it for me. I had written very little except that I would come back for her if I had to crawl all the way, because I loved her more than life itself. My words were far from original, but heartfelt all the same. I don’t suppose I expected her to believe them, but I hoped that she would hope.
When the day watch arrived to open the gates, the three of us were mounted and ready to go.
The bells had not yet rung for Sunday mass, and the market square was deserted. I cried, “Whoa!” and reined in. The other two looked at me in surprise.
“Iden, yesterday a man named Sir Vernon came calling with a troop of knights. He wanted to escort us to the king, or so he said. Not trusting his intentions, I declined his invitation, and Lady Nicholaa sent him away. It is possible that he will lie in wait for us and try to seize us on the road. Now, where would you expect him to make such an attempt? At the town gate perhaps?”
