Christopher Stasheff

His jaw tightened, sullen anger rising in him. This bitch was nothing to him - just a pawn in the Great Game, a tool that might be used to establish a democracy. And what the hell was he getting angry about? He had no right to that, either.

Hell! He needed a little objective analysis! ‘Fess!’ He meant it as a mutter, but it came out as a shout. Brom O’Berin scowled up at him. ‘What is a fess?’

‘An unreliable gear train with a slipped cam,’ Rod improvised.

Where the hell was that damn robot, anyway~?

Then he remembered. Fess had had a seizure.

But Brom bad stopped, and was studying Rod’s face with his ultra-suspicious look. ‘What are these words, Rod Gallowglass? What is a gear train? And what is a cam?’

Rod pressed his lips together and mentally recited the books of the Bible. Careful, boy, care full You’re at the brink! You’ll blow the whole bit!

He met Brom’s eyes. ‘A gear train is the pack mule a knight uses to carry his armor and weapons,’ he growled, ‘and a cam is a half-witted squire.’

Brom scowled, puzzled. ‘Half-witted?’

‘Well, some kind of an eccentric. In my case, it all adds up to a horse.’

‘A horse?’ Brom stared, completely at sea.

‘Yea. My horse, Fess. The sum and total of my worldly goods and supporting personnel. Also the only soul - well, consciousness, anyway - that I can tell my troubles to.’

Brom caught at the last phrase and held to it with all the vigor of a drowning man. His eyes softened; he smiled gently. ‘You are of us now, Rod Gallowglass, of we few who stand by the Queen.’

Rod saw the sympathy in Brom’s eyes and wondered what bound the deformed little man to Catharine’s service - and suddenly hated Catharine again for being the kind of bitch that enjoyed using men.

He set off down the hall, striding long. Brom marched double-time to keep up with him.

‘Unless I miss in my judgment of a man,’ Rod growled through his teeth, ‘the Queen has another friend in the House of Clovis; yet she calls him her enemy. Why is that, Brom? Is it just because he’s the son of her enemy the Duke of Loguire?’

Brom stopped him with a hand on his hip and looked up into Rod’s Christopher Stasheff

eyes with a half-smile. ‘Not enemy, Rod Gallowglass, but one that she loves well: her uncle, blood-kin, who gave her sanctuary and cared for her five years while her father tamed the rebel Northern lordlings.’

Rod raised his head slowly, keeping his eyes on Brom O’Berin’s.

‘She chooses strange ways to show her love.’

Brom nodded. ‘Aye, most truly strange, yet doubt not she loves them, both the Duke and his son Tuan.’

He held Rod’s eyes a moment, not speaking.

He turned away, pacing slowly down the hail. Rod watched him a moment, then followed.

‘It is a long tale, and a snarled one,’ Brom murmured as Rod caught up with him. ‘And the end and beginning and core of it is Tuan Loguire.’

‘The beggar king?’

‘Aye.’ Brom nodded heavily ‘The lord of the louse of Clovis.’

‘And one who loves the Queen.’

‘Oh, aye!’ Brom threw his head back, rolling his eyes upward. ‘One who loves her right well, be certain; he will tell you as much!’

‘But you don’t believe him?’

Brom locked his hands behind his back and stamped as he walked, head bowed. ‘He is either truthful, Rod Gallowglass, or a most excellent liar; and if he lies, he has learned the way of it right quick. He was trained only in truth, in the house of his father.

Yet he is lord of the House of Clovis, of they who claim the ruler should be chosen as the ancient King Clovis was, or as they say he was - by the acclamation of those whom he rules.’

‘Well, they’ve warped history a little bit there,’ Rod muttered.

‘But 1 take it their plan calls for pulling Catharine off her throne?’

‘Aye; and how can I then believe him when he says that he loves her?’ Brom shook his head sadly. ‘He is a most worthy young man, high-minded and honest; and a troubador who will sing you the beauties of milady’s eyetooth as quick as he will twist the sword from your hands with his rapier. He was always a gentleman withal, and in him was nothing of deception.’

‘Sounds like you knew him pretty well.’

‘Oh, aye! I did, most surely I did! But do I know him now?’ Brom heaved a sigh, shaking his head. ‘They met when she was but seven years of age, and he but eight, at the keep of Milord Loguire in Christopher Stasheff the South, where her father had sent her for safety. There two children met and frolicked and played - under my eye, for I was ever a-watch over them. They were the only two of their age in the whole of the castle, and’ - he smiled, and gave a bitter laugh ‘I was a miracle, a grown man who was smaller than they.’

Brom smiled, throwing his head back, looking past the stones of the hail into the years that were dead. ‘They were so innocent then, Rod* Gallowglass! So innocent, aye, and so happy! And he worshipped her; he would pluck the flowers for her crown, though the gardener scolded him. Did the sun chasten her? He would put up a canopy of leaves! Had she broken milady’s crystal goblet? He would claim the fault for his own!’

‘Spoiled her rotten,’ Rod muttered.

‘Aye; but he was not the first to play Tom Fool for her; for even then, she was a most beautiful princess, Rod Gallowglass.

‘Yet over their happiness stood a dark, brooding shadow, a lad of fourteen, heir to the keep and estates, Anselm Loguire. He would look down from the tower, watch them at play in their garden, his face twisted and knotted all sour; and he alone in the land bated Catharine Plantagenet - why, no man can say.’

‘And he still hates her?’

‘Aye; and let us therefore wish my lord of Loguire long life. ‘For near to five years Anselm’s hatred did fester; but then at long last he did stand triumphant. For the lords of the North were subdued, and her father called for her to be brought again to his side, here in his castle. And then did they vow, Tuan and Catharine, she at eleven and he twelve, that they would never forget, that she would wait till he came for her.’

Brom shook his great shaggy head sadly. ‘He came for her. He came for her, a lad of nineteen, a golden prince riding out of the South on a great white charger - broad-shouldered, golden-haired and handsome, with muscles that would thicken any woman’s tongue and make it cleave to her palate. A troubador, with a harp on his back and a sword by his side, and a thousand extravagant praises for her beauty. And his laugh was as clear, his heart as open, and his temper as frolicsome as when he was twelve.’

He smiled up at Rod. ‘She was eighteen, Rod Gallowglass, and her life had been as still and smooth as a summer stream. Eighteen, and ripe for a husband, and her head filled with the giddy Christopher Stasheff gossamer dreams that a girl learns from ballads and books.’

He peered sharply, but his voice was gentle, echoing strangely in the emptiness of his years. ‘Was there never a dream of a princess for you, Rod Gallowglass?’

Rod glared at him and swallowed, hard. ‘Go on,’ he said.

Brom turned away, shrugging. ‘What need to say it? She loved him, of course; what woman would not? He knew not what a woman was for, and I’ll swear it, and neither did she; but it may be that together, they learned, you may be sure that they had golden chances.’

He shook his head, scowling. ‘If ‘twas so, ‘twas the crown of the last days of her youth; for it was that spring that her father died, and the scepter was set in her hands.’

He fell still, measuring the hall with his stride, and was silent so long that Rod felt the need to say something.

‘Here is no matter for hating, Brom O’Berin.’

‘Oh, aye! But bear the end of the tale, for only when the crown was on her head did Catharine come to see that Tuan was a second son; that he thus inherited his family’s honor, but no more. She swore then that he loved her not, that he coveted only her throne.

She would not have him; but in wrath and scorn she sent him away without due cause, it seemed, though only they two could know the truth of that. She banished him to the Wild Lands with a price on his head, to dwell midst the beast-men and elves, or to die.’

He fell silent again.

Rod prodded him. ‘And Milord Loguire rose up in wrath?’

‘Aye,’ grated Brom, ‘and all his liegemen with him, and half the nobles of the kingdom besides. If Tuan failed in his courting, wrath and scorn were his due, quoth Loguire; but banishment comes only for treason.

‘“And was it not treason,” Catharine answered hotly. “to conspire for the crown?”

‘Then Loguire stood tall in cold pride and declared that Tuan had sought only the love of Catharine; but his words rang hollow, for he whom the Queen marries must reign; and this Catharine told him.

‘Then did Loguire speak in sorrow, that his son was no traitor but only a fool, a fool to be courting a silly, spoiled child; and then would Catharine have cried “Treason!” again, had I not prevented her.’