Beyond the Burning Lands

TWO

TOASTS AT A BANQUET

EZZARD ACCOMPANIED ME ON MY return to Winchester. It was accepted by Peter that my life had been in danger in the days following our father’s murder and his own accession, and that the Seer had been right to take me away. That was the official story, but I imagined there was more to it. Though he had married a Christian Peter himself was a Spiritist, as far as he was anything, and so also were his Captains. It was not easy even for a strong Prince to defy the Seers for long.

We went on horseback, openly, Ezzard in Seer’s robes and I in clothes befitting my rank. I wore also a sword, a parting gift from the High Seers: the Sword of the Spirits which had been promised to me when they came to Winchester after the taking of Petersfield. Handing it to me, Murphy said:

“Steel, case-hardened in an induction furnace. You will find no metal to come near it, and no blade that will match it in strength and cutting edge. Look after it and it will serve you well.”

We called at various towns on our way. Everywhere Ezzard let it be known that I was returning on my brother’s invitation, thus binding his honor more firmly to my safety. The precaution, as he said, was probably unnecessary, but it was best to take no chances. So despite my impatience we did not hurry on the journey.

But at last, having spent the night as guests of its Prince, we left Andover in the morning and I had high hopes of reaching Winchester by night. The weather dashed these: a light fall of snow before midday turned, in the afternoon, into a driving blizzard. We had passed Headbourne Worthy, the nearest village north of the city, and had not much more than a mile to go. The distance was tantalizingly short but as the wind howled and the blinding snow drove into our faces, even I was forced to agree that we must seek shelter. We found it in a farm, where we were respectfully received and well looked after. They gave us tidings of the city, to which I listened greedily. The farmer and his wife had a son, a boy of twelve. He told me he had seen me win the Sword of Honor in the Contest, and recited a full account of it. His dream was to be a warrior, and I told him to come to me when he was of age and I would enlist him in my troop. He was deeply grateful for the promise, which I thought was likely to profit me also. He was a strong, capable lad, with the makings of a soldier. His mother was less pleased, since he was her only son, but she would reconcile herself to losing him: she must have known he was not the sort of boy to stay on a farm once he was grown.

I had feared, when we retired to bed with the blizzard still howling, that we might be immured in the farmhouse for days. The morning dawned clear, however, the sky gray but no longer threatening, and when the servants had cut a path through drifted snow to the stable we were able to leave. Our horses floundered at times where the snow was loosely packed but we made fair progress. I saw, even in this landscape blanketed in white, landmarks I knew: Wherry’s mill, a clump of fir trees that leaned in toward each other like conspirators, a rusty crumbling shaft that came from the ancient times and was shunned by children, being thought to harbor ghosts. And beyond these, so familiar and so dear, the walls of my native city. I was home again. Turning my head so that Ezzard would not see, I put up my sleeve and brushed the dampness from my eyes.

• • •

If I had any doubts of my welcome they were dispelled by the shout of joy from the guard on the North Gate. Its Sergeant, who had been in my father’s troop when he was still a Captain and whom I could remember, when I was five or six, fencing with me with wooden sticks for swords, gave me the ceremonial salute, and his men yelled their heads off in acclamation. The ordinary people took up the cry and followed us through the streets as we rode to the palace. And the news must have gone ahead because when we reached the palace yard many of the Captains were assembled. I saw Greene and Meredith and Nicoll, small watchful Harding who had hoped to he Prince after my father’s death, and blustering Blaine who had cuffed me into a corner when I urged them to ride against our own walls to avenge him. I saw Edmund’s brother, Charles, whose father had been Prince until my father, with Ezzard’s help, unseated him. And last I saw my brother, who held that title which the Spirits, through Ezzard’s trickery, had promised to me: Prince of Winchester.

I dismounted and let a soldier take my horse. I walked toward Peter, my feet sinking into snow which the polymufs had not yet had time to clear away. I bowed my head and said:

“Greetings, sire.”

He put a hand on my shoulder. He said, smiling:

“No ceremony between brothers! Come in, Luke, and we will drink your health.”

• • •

The day of my return had been proclaimed a feast, and in the evening there was to be a banquet in celebration. Meanwhile there was the confusion of people greeting me. Some were sincere; others, I very well knew, were not. Blaine, who fulsomely gave thanks to the Spirits for protecting me, would have liked to slip a dagger between my ribs. Harding, a more wily man, would have preferred to watch him, or any other, do it. But there were those like Sergeant Burke, who looked after me on my first campaign, and Wilson, my father’s most trusted comrade, whose gladness was real and unmistakable. There was also Ann, the Prince’s Lady.

I had seen little of her in the old days. The estrangement between Peter and me had kept me from visiting the house in the River Road where they lived; and of course she was a Christian and so of no importance in the city.

I had known her as a quiet, perhaps simple woman, without beauty or indeed much else to explain my brother’s choosing her. When I paid my respects I found she had only one woman in attendance—my mother had never had less than half a dozen. This one she dismissed, if dismissal is the right term to use of what was no more than a request, modestly put, that we might be left alone together. She said:

“Let me look at you. Have they been taking proper care of you, your High Seers? You are paler than you were. And taller. And they have shaved your head, but that will soon grow. We shall see that mop of fierce black hair again before spring.”

I was surprised that she paid me such attention, or remembered me so well. And her smile surprised me with its warmth, and the way it changed a face which I had thought plain and insignificant. I made some sort of reply and she said:

“I cannot express how glad I am to see you, Luke. Not only for your sake but for Peter’s. He could not be happy, knowing you were in exile and from fear of him. He would never have harmed you, and this reconciliation gladdens his heart. He has been so much happier since he asked the Seers to send you back and they agreed.”

And also, I guessed, since he had done that which was pleasing to his wife’s strange Christian conscience. Nor had I any doubt that the main urging for my recall had come from her. Her influence over him was plainly great and this was something to be remembered. I could not see why it should be so—why a man should let any woman dominate his mind—but the fact that one did not understand a thing was no reason for not weighing its effects. There would not be many things in which Peter would run counter to her wishes.

I said: “I am glad to be back, my Lady.”

She shook her head. “Call me Ann, as your sister. My Lady is not a title I like, in any case. There is only one who merits it—the mother of our Lord.”

The Lord being, as Murphy had explained, the Christian god. It was puzzling to think of a god with a mother but I thought it best to ask no questions. I was not, in any case, interested in the oddities of their religion. We talked together for a time and kissed as brother and sister when we parted.

• • •

I had sent messages to Edmund and Martin, saying I would be at our usual meeting place at four of the afternoon. I got to the Ruins a little before that. I went down the stairs and, lighting my way with a candle, through the secret way to the hidden door and our den behind it. Inside I found an oil lamp which I lit. It was still strange not to command the bright steady light of electricity at the flick of a switch; the illumination from the lamp was dim and patchy, leaving shadows in the corners. But even by its feeble glow I could see that the place had fallen into disuse. Dust was thick on every surface. The chessboard was set out with pieces and a spider had stretched its web across them. That probably meant that Martin had been here last. It was he who was keen on chess problems and Edmund, in any case, would have tidied up before leaving: he could not bear disorder.

I heard footsteps. The door was pushed open and Edmund came in. He said:

“You are here before me, Luke.”

We looked at each other for a moment before I put out my hand and he took it in a firm grip. I remembered that he had offered to go with me into exile, and that when I escaped instead with Ezzard I had sent him no word. But the constraint between us came from my side, not his. I had looked forward so much to seeing him but did not know what to say. I said awkwardly:

“You do not come here now?”

“Not since you left.” He looked round the room. “Nor Martin, either, it would seem.”

“You have not been seeing Martin?”

He shrugged. “Now and then, by chance. He is busy with his studies and I have had my own concerns.”

We talked, but the awkwardness remained. I think we were both glad to hear Martin approaching. He came to me and shook hands also. Edmund began to shake with laughter. I asked him:

“What is it? A good joke?”

It took him a moment to control himself sufficiently to speak. He said, gasping:

“It was the sight of the pair of you—those two shaved heads . . .”

Martin stared at him owlishly: he had taken to wearing spectacles since I last saw him and the effect, together with the long black robe of an Acolyte, was slightly comic. I realized I must look nearly as odd, if not odder, in warrior’s leather but with a naked skull, and laughed as well. Martin joined in. We stood there, the small chamber echoing with our laughter, and the feeling of strangeness and uncertainty dissolved in it.

“Thank the Great yours is only temporary,” Edmund said to me, still laughing. “I would have felt truly forsaken had you both turned Acolyte. And one could not rule out the possibility, Luke, since you were living in the Sanctuary with the High Seers. They might well have talked you into it!”

“It would need a great deal of talking,” I said. “And there is such a thing as aptitude. I do not think the High Seers ever fancied me as a recruit to the Order.”

“They cropped your head.”

“There was a reason for that.”

I was on the point of saying that they had cropped their own as well before I remembered to guard my tongue. Edmund, flinging himself onto one of the chairs and sitting backward astride it, said:

“But what is it like there? Is it true that you get to the Sanctuary by climbing up a rainbow? And that you eat clouds and drink butterfly milk? What have you been doing all the time you have been away?”

Martin said quickly: “He cannot tell us about it. It is forbidden for him to tell or for us to listen.”

In this same place Edmund had asked Martin, newly made an Acolyte, about the secrets he had learned and I, on his behalf, had said much the same as he was saying now. I had not guessed what secrets there might be, nor how soon I would be made privy to them. I wondered how much Martin himself knew; even with him I dared not speak freely of what I had seen.

I said: “It is all dull stuff, anyway. Tell me what has been happening here in Winchester since I’ve been gone.”

They told me the news: how such a one had broken a leg in a fall out hunting, how another had perpetrated an elaborate jest against Blaine’s son Henry and got into trouble when Blaine himself was tricked by it, how one of the Dwarf Coiners of the Prince’s Mint had been found to have debased the gold but had fled before he could be punished. Who had been promoted, who fallen from favor. Who won the toboggan race which was held yearly in the High Street after the first snow. I listened with an interest whetted by the months of confinement to the duller conversation of the High Seers. Martin said:

“But the really interesting thing happened only two days ago, when the peddler came.”

“The peddler?” I asked.

Edmund said: “He has goods to sell, but you could as well call him liar as peddler. He says he has come across the Burning Lands, from some city far to the north.”

I nodded. “I have heard tell of him. You think he lies?”

“What else? No man can cross the Burning Lands. Peddlers always have tall tales. They are for the women, to catch their interest so that afterward they can sell them trinkets at fancy prices. It is just that this one has a taller tale than most.”

“He wears strange clothes,” Martin said.

“Which he claims is the garb of his native land. I could devise something of the sort myself. With a pouch just above the waist, perhaps, for keeping rain off my head when I was carrying it under my arm!”

The men with their heads beneath their arms who would come from beyond the Burning Lands was one of the fantasies with which polymuf maids sometimes frightened naughty children. Edmund and I laughed, but Martin said:

“It is not only his clothes that are different. The things he sells are, also. I looked at a necklace which my cousin bought. The workmanship was not like any I have seen.”

“There are always new fashions in necklaces,” Edmund said. “It means nothing.”

“But if the fires of the Burning Lands are dying down, and one could cross them . . .”

“One would find savages and polybeasts. What else?”

“Perhaps another city, as he says.”

“In any case, who cares?” Edmund said. “There is enough to concern us in this city.” He turned to me, dismissing the other topic. “Luke, I am glad to see you again. But are you safe?”

“I think so. And the High Seers would not have sent me here unless they thought the same.”

“The Spirits named you, not Peter, Prince in Waiting. And promised you glory. This is something that will be remembered, and for some the memory of it will be a stink in their nostrils.”

“I trust my brother. And his honor is pledged.”

And his will, I thought, under the bidding of his Lady’s conscience; but I did not say that. Edmund said:

“Do you know the story of Donald the Red?”

“No.”

“I had it from a polymuf maid, an old woman who had been in the palace in my grandfather’s day.” At a time, I did not need reminding, when my grandfather was a humble carpenter with a strong son eager to exchange the adz for the sword. “He was a Captain who fought well in the campaigns and was popular with the other Captains. For two years, while our army did badly he himself scored great successes. There was talk of a plot to make him Prince, and other talk of accusing him of treason before the plot could succeed. My grandfather would have none of that, despite the urgings of his friends. But in the next campaign Red Donald was killed and it was said his wound was in the back. It was not my grandfather’s doing, but the man died. Your brother might have friends of a similar mind.”

This was true, and true that Ann’s Christian conscience could not hold her husband guilty of a murder planned by others, a deed of which he knew nothing. I was, of course, under the special protection of the Seers; but so had my father been and it had not saved him. I said, smiling:

“Thank you for the warning! But I do not think I am in any danger.”

“All the same,” Edmund said, “if I were you I should keep my back well guarded.”

• • •

The banquet was held in the Great Hall. I sat at the right hand of the Prince and as guest of honor drank with him from the great gold pot which had been our father’s, and Prince Stephen’s and Prince Egbert’s before that. No women were present, of course. The Captains sat above the first salt, other dignitaries between the first and second, and lesser guests below. I saw my old friend, Rudi the Armorer Dwarf, and catching my eye from that distance he raised his pot to me in greeting.

After the last of the meats were cleared and before the sweets were brought it fell to me to give the Prince’s toast. I stood and the company with me. I lifted the golden pot and gave the health of the Prince of Winchester. The cry echoed down the table, and we drank.

My brother rose as I took my seat. He said:

“I would have you drink again. This time to Luke, my brother.”

Afterward he remained standing. He said:

“And I have news for you and him. Tonight I make him Captain.” His raised hand quelled the murmur of surprise and applause. “He is young for the rank but already capable, and promises better. And there is something else that I would say.”

I looked at him standing by me. Although I was still growing I knew I would never match his height, which was two inches over six feet. He had my father’s fair hair and breadth of face and chest. The brooding expression which once had marred his features had gone, replaced by an easy smiling confidence. He was a true Prince. I wished I could feel more glad of that.

“You do not need reminding,” he went on, “of certain things that have been between us, and I do not wish to dwell on them. But one is better spoken of than left hidden. There was a Seance, after my father’s acclamation as Prince, in which this brother of mine was named Prince in Waiting and promised a great and glorious future. Yet I am Prince of Winchester, though named by no Spirit, and he is not.”

He paused and they were silent, waiting on his words. My brother looked down at Ezzard, who sat next to him on the other side.

“As the Seer himself will tell you, the prophecies of the Spirits are not always what they seem. Luke may still have a destiny of triumph, in another city, perhaps even another land. In this city I rule, and will do so. But I say this to you: after my Lady, my brother is the most precious to me of all. I pledge myself, by my honor as Prince, by the Great Spirit, and by any other god that may be, to protect and care for him. I say this also: if harm should come to him I will hunt down the man who does it and kill him with my own hands.”

There was a moment’s silence before they started cheering and banging their pots. He stood there smiling. When at last the noise died down, he said:

“There will be no dissension between us brothers. By his return Luke declares this also, and renounces the claims that others made for him. So I ask him now to seal the contract as I have done. I ask him, by the Great Spirit, to pledge allegiance to me and to my heirs.”

I fought to control my face against the feelings that pressed in on me. Apart from anything else I was astounded: I would not have thought he had such guile. Had the Christian priest, perhaps, counseled him? Or Ann? I could not believe it of her. I wondered what Ezzard was thinking; whatever it was he would show nothing. I forced a smile to my lips and kept it there as I rose to face the two long lines of faces. In the strongest voice I could muster, I said:

“In the name of the Great Spirit, I pledge my allegiance to Peter, Prince of Winchester, and to his heirs.”

They cheered at that, though I thought the face of Blaine, who sat a little way down the table, showed puzzlement: his eyes in their folds of fat were narrowed. Harding, sitting opposite, was impassive as always.

My brother put his hand on my shoulder. I felt its weight as strong, oppressive, and would have liked to shake it off. He said:

“There will be no more talk of dispute between us. Luke stands at my right hand and will always do so. The city is well guarded. If I should die in next summer’s battles, or any summer after that, Luke will see to things until a son of mine is old enough to wear a sword.”

There was something strange; not in his words but in the manner of speaking them. It was proper for a warrior to face death with a light heart, but the exultation in his voice meant more than that. Others, too, had sensed it. I saw Blaine lean forward, watching, hand tugging at his beard.

My brother said: “So one more thing: one more toast to drink! And for this we will all stand because we toast one who is not here—not in this room and not yet in this world.”

He lifted the golden pot that stood between us.

“My Lady is with child. Drink to my son to be—your future Prince!”