2
There are seven windows in the Queen’s bedroom in the Citadel that is the center of the City that is on the lake island called the Hub in the middle of the world.
Two of the seven windows face the tower stones and are dark; two overlook inner courtyards; two face the complex lanes that wind between the high, blank-faced mansions of the Protectorate; and the seventh, facing the steep Street of Birdsellers and, beyond, a crack in the ring of mountains across the lake, is always filled at night with stars. When wind speaks in the mountains, it whispers in this window, and makes the fine brown bed hangings dance.
Because the Queen likes light to make love by, there is a tiny lamp lit within the bed hangings. Black Harrah, the Queen’s lover of old, dislikes the light; it makes him think as much of discovery as of love. But then, one is not the Queen’s lover solely at one’s own pleasure.
If there were now a discoverer near, say on the balcony over the double door, or in the curtained corridor that leads to the servants’ stairs, he would see the great bed, lit darkly from within. He would see the great, thick body of the Queen struggling impatiently against Black Harrah’s old lean one, and hear their cries rise and subside. He might, well-hidden, stay to watch them cease, separate, lie somnolent; might hear shameful things spoken; and later, if he has waited, hear them consider their realm’s affairs, these two, the Queen and her man, the Great Protector Black Harrah.
“No, no,” Black Harrah answers to some question.
“I fear,” says the Queen.
“There are ascendancies,” says Black Harrah sleepily. “Binding rules, oaths sworn. Fixed as stars.”
“New stars are born. The Grays have found one.”
“Please. One thing at a time.”
“I fear Red Senlin.”
“He is no new star. If ever a man were bound by oaths…”
“He hates me.”
“Yes,” Harrah says.
“He would be King.”
“No.”
“If he…”
“I will kill him.”
“If he kills you…?”
“My son will kill him. If his sons kill my son, my son’s sons will kill his. Enough?”
Silence. The watcher (for indeed he is there, on the balcony over the half-open double door, huddled into a black, watching pile, motionless) nods his head in tiny approving nods, well pleased.
The Queen starts up, clutching the bedclothes around her.
“What is it?” Black Harrah asks.
“A noise.”
“Where?”
“There. On the stair. Footsteps.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
Feet grow loud without. Shouts of the Queen’s guards, commands, clash of arms. Feet run. Suddenly, swinging like a monkey from the balcony, grasping handholds and dropping to the floor, the watcher, a tiny man all in black. Crying shrilly, he forces the great door shut and casts the bolt just as armed red-coated men approach without. The clash of the bolt is still echoing when armed fists pound from the other side:
“Open! In the name of the Great Protector Red Senlin!”
The watcher now clings to the bolt as though his little arms could aid it and screams: “Leave! Go away! I order you!”
“We seek the traitor Black Harrah, for imprisonment in the King’s name…”
“Fool! Go! It is I who command you, I, your King, and as you truly owe me, leave!”
The noise without ceases for a moment. The King Little Black turns to the bed. Black Harrah is gone. The King’s wife stands upright on the bed, huge and naked.
“Fly!” the King shouts. She stands unmoving, staring; then with a boom the door is hammered on with breaking tools. The Queen turns, takes up a cloak, and runs away down the servants’ corridor, her screaming maidservants after her. The door behind the King begins to crack.
Because the island City lies within a great deep cup, whose sides are mountains, dawn comes late there and evening early. And even when the high spires of the Citadel, which is at the top of the high-piled City, are touched with light filtering through the blue-green forests, and then the High City around it and then the old-fashioned mansions mostly shuttered are touched, and then the old inns and markets, and the narrow streets of the craftsmen, and then the winding water-stairs, piles, piers, ramparts, esplanades and wharfs—even then the still lake, which has no name, is black. Mist rises from its depths like chill breath, obscuring the flat surface so that it seems no lake but a hole pierced through the fabric of the world, and the shadowy, broad-nosed craft that ride its margins—and the City itself—seem suspended above the Deep.
But when the first light does strike the Citadel, the whole world knows it’s high morning; and though the watermen can still see only stars, they are about their business. The Protectorate has ever feared a great bridge over the lake that couldn’t be cut down at need, and so the four bridges that hang like swaying ribbons from the High City gates are useless for anything but walkers or single riders. The watermen’s business is therefore large, and necessary; they are a close clan, paid like servants yet not servants, owing none, singing their endless, tuneless songs, exchanging their jokes that no one else laughs at.
It was the watermen in their oiled goatskins who first saw that Red Senlin had returned from the Outlands, because it was they who carried him and his armed riders and his fierce Outland captains into the City. The watermen didn’t care if Red Senlin wanted to be King; it’s well-known that the watermen, “neither Folk nor not,” care only for the fee.
Fauconred had put the Visitor on early watch, to make some use of him; but when the first chill beams silvered the Drum fog he woke, shivered with premonition, and went to find the Visitor.
He was still watching. Impervious apparently to loneliness, weariness, cold, he still looked out over the quadrant assigned to him.
“Quit now,” Fauconred said to him hoarsely, taking his elbow. “Your watch is long over.” The man (if man he was) turned from his watch and went with Fauconred, without question or complaint.
“But—what,” he asked when they sat by Fauconred’s fire, “was I to watch for?”
“Well, the Just,” Fauconred said. “They can be anywhere.” He leaned toward the Visitor, as though he might even here be overheard, and the Visitor bent close to hear. “They draw lots by some means, among themselves. So I hear. And each of them then has a Protector, or Defender, that he is pledged to murder. Secretly, if possible. And so you see, since it’s by lots, and nothing personal, you’ll never know the man. You can come face to face with him; he seems a cottager or… or anyone. You talk. The place is lonely. Suddenly, there is the Gun.”
The Visitor considered this, touching the place on his head where he had been hurt. “Then how could I watch for one?” he asked.
Fauconred, confused, tossed sticks angrily into the fire, but made no other answer. Day brightened. Ahead lay the Downs at last…
It was a waterside inn.
“Secretly,” the cloaked man said. “And quickly.”
“You are…”
“A… merchant. Yes. What does it matter?” His old, lean hand drew a bag from within a shapeless, hooded traveler’s cloak. It made a solid sound on the inn table.
The girl he spoke to was a waterman’s daughter. Her long neck was bare; her blond, almost white hair cut off short like a boy’s. She turned, looked out a tiny window that pierced the gray slatting of the inn wall. Above the mountains the sky had grown pale; below, far below, the lake was dark.
“The bridges?” she asked.
“Closed. Red Senlin has returned.”
“Yes.”
“His mob has closed the bridges.”
“Then it must be illegal to ferry.”
The other, after a moment, added a second bag to the table. The girl regarded neither. “Get me,” the traveler said, “three days’ food. A sword. And get your father to take me to the mountain road before daybreak. I’ll double that.”
The girl sat staring a moment, and then rose quickly, picking up the two bags. “I’ll take you,” she said, and turned away into the darkness of the inn. The traveler watched her go; then sat turning this way and that, looking ever out the tiny window at the pre-dawn sky. Around him a dark crowd of watermen sat; he heard bits of muttered conversation.
“There were oaths sworn.”
Someone spat disgustedly.
“He’s rightful King.”
“Yes. Much as any.”
“Black Harrah will hang him.”
“Or maybe just hang.”
Laughter. Then: “Where is Redhand?”
“Redhand. Redhand knows.”
“Yes. Much as any.”
Suddenly the girl was before him. Her long neck rose columnlike out of a thick cloak she had wrapped over her oiled goatskins—and over a bundle which she held before her.
“The sword?” he whispered.
“Come,” she said.
There was a dank, endless stairway within the warren of the inn that gave out finally onto an esplanade still hooded in dark and fog. He followed her close, starting at noises and shapes.
“The sword,” he whispered at her ghostly back. “Now.”
“Here, the water-stairs. Down.”
She turned sharply around the vast foot of pillar that supported waterfront lodges above, and started down the ringing stone stairway faster than he could follow. In a moment she was gone; he stumbled quickly after her, alone now, as though there were no other thing in the world than this descent, no other guide but the sound of her footsteps ahead.
Then her footsteps ceased. He stopped. There was a lapping of water somewhere.
“Stop,” he said.
“I have,” she answered.
“Where?”
“Here.”
The last step gave out on a gravelly bit of shingle, barely walking space. He could see nothing ahead at first; took three timid steps and saw her, a tall blank ghost, indistinct, just ahead.
“Oh. There.”
“Yes.”
He crept forward. Her figure grew clearer: the paleness of her white head, the dark cloak, in her hand the…
In her hand the Gun.
“Black Harrah,” she said.
“No,” he said.
“Justice,” she said.
The Gun she held in both hands was half as long as an arm, and its great bore was like a mouth; it clicked when she fired it, hissed white smoke, and exploded like all rage and hatred. The stone ball shattered Black Harrah; without a cry he fell, thrown against the stairs, wrapped in a shower of his own blood.
High above, on the opposite side of the City, by the gate called Goforth from which a long tongue of bridge came out, a young man commanded other men for the first time; a dark, small man destined by birth so to command; who felt sure now, as dawn began to silhouette the mountains against the sky, that he was in fact fitted for the work, and whose hand began to ease at last his nervous grip on his sword handle. He sighed deeply. There would be no Black reprisals. His men began to slouch against the ancient bridge pilings. One laughed. Day had come, and they were all alive.
The young man’s name was Sennred; he was the younger of the two sons of Red Senlin, he who had come out of exile in the Outlands to reclaim his rightful place at the King’s side by whatever means necessary.
That the Great Protector Red Senlin had been unjustly kept away from King Little Black’s side by Black Harrah; that he came now to help the King throw off Black Harrah’s tyranny; that his whole desire was to cleanse odiousness and scandal from the Citadel (and if that meant Black Harrah’s arrest, so be it)—all this the young Sennred had by heart and would have argued fiercely to any who suspected his father’s motives; but at the same time, as many can who are young and quick and loyal, Sennred could hold a very different view of things…
A century almost to the day before this pregnant dawn, a crime had torn the ancient and closely woven fabric of this world: a Great Protector, half-brother of King Ban, had seized from King Ban’s heir the iron crown. King Ban’s heir was the son of King Red. The Great Protector’s name was Black. To the family Red and all its branches, allies, dependents, it mattered nothing that King Red’s son was a foul cripple; a tyrannous boy in love with blood; he was Ban’s heir. To the family Black and its equally extensive connections what mattered was that the crown had fitted Black’s head, that the great legal fraternity, the Grays, had confirmed him, and his son, and his son’s son. There had been uprisings, rebellions; lately there had been a brief battle at Senlinsdown, and King Little Black, childless, had accepted Red Senlin as his heir. So there had been no war—not quite; only, the world had divided itself further into factions, the factions had eaten up the unaligned, had grown paid armies each to protect itself from the other; the factions now waited, poised.
Red Senlin was King Red’s true heir. He had learned that as a boy. He had never for a moment forgotten it.
And his younger son Sennred knew in his heart who was truly the King, and why Red Senlin had come back from the Outlands.
Around him, above him, the great City houses of the Protectorate had begun to awaken, such as were used; many were empty. There was, he knew, one sleeping army in the City large enough to decide, before noon, whether or not the world would change today; it was housed in and around that dark pile where now lamplight glimmered in tiny windows—die Harbor, the house of the family Redhand.
The Redhands would be waking to a new world, Sennred thought; and his hand tightened again on his sword handle.
At the head table in the great hall smoky with torches and loud with the noise of half a hundred Redhand dependents breaking their fast, Old Redhand sat with his three sons.
There was Redhand, the eldest, his big warrior’s hands tearing bread he didn’t eat, a black beard around his mouth.
There was the Gray brother, Learned, beside him. The gray that Learned Redhand wore was dark, darker than the robes of Grays far older than himself, dark and convoluted as a thundercloud, and not lightened by a bit of red ribbon pinned within its folds.
There was, lastly, Younger. Younger was huddled down in his chair, turning an empty cup, looking as though someone had struck him and he didn’t know how to repay it.
When the red-jacketed messenger approached them they all looked up, expectantly; but it was only letters from the Drum, from Fauconred; Redhand tucked them away unread… “The Queen,” he said to Learned, “has fled, Outward. No one knows how she escaped, or where Black Harrah is.”
“Red Senlin let them slip.”
“He would. Graceless as a dog among birds.” Redhand’s voice was a deep, gritty growl, a flaw left by the same sword that had drawn a purple line up his throat to his ear; he wore the beard to hide it.
“Where is Young Harrah?” Learned asked. The friendship between Black Harrah’s son and Red Senlin’s was well-known; they did little to hide it, though their fathers raged at it.
“Not imprisoned. At Red Senlin’s Son’s request—or demand. He will fly too; he must live. Join his father…”
“Will Red Senlin be King now?” Younger asked. “Does he wish it?”
“He could bring war with his wishing,” Learned said. “He would.”
“Perhaps,” Redhand said, “he can be dissuaded.”
“We can try,” Learned said. “The reasons…”
Trembling with suppressed rage, his father cut across him. “You talk as though he were a naughty child. He is your uncle, and twice your age.”
“He must listen, anyway,” said Younger. “Because he can’t do it without us. He knows that.”
“Must listen,” Old Redhand said bitterly. “He will abide by your wishes.” His hands were tight fists on the table.
“He will,” Redhand said.
“And if he won’t,” Old Redhand shouted, rising out of his seat, “what then? Will you cut off his head?”
“Stop,” Learned said. “The guests…”
“He is here because of you,” Old Redhand shouted at his eldest son. “You, the Great Protector Redhand. Because of you and your army he thinks he can do this thing.”
“He is rightful King,” said Younger softly, drawing in spilled drink on the table.
“Little Black is King,” said his brother Redhand.
“My King,” said his father, “shortly to be murdered, no doubt, whom I fought for in the Outlands, and against the Just, and whom Red Senlin fought for and in the old days…”
“The old days,” came his eldest’s gritty voice, cold with disgust. “If time turned around, you could all be young again. But against the advice of the old, it keeps its course.” He rose, took up his gloves. “And maybe it means to see Red Senlin King. If by my strength, then by my strength. You are gone foolish if you stand in our way.”
His father rose too, and was about to speak, shout, curse; Redhand stood hard, ready to receive: and then there was a noise at the back of the hall; messengers, belted and armed, were making their way to the head table. Their news, rippling through the assembly as though from a cast stone, reached the head table before its bearers:
The Great Protector Black Harrah is dead. The richest man in the world, the Queen’s lover, the King’s King, has been shot with a Gun on the margin of the unplumbed lake.
The way from Redhand’s house to the Citadel lay along the Street of Birdsellers, up the steep way through the Gem Market, along Bellmaker’s Street; throngs of City people, lashed by rumor, called out to Redhand, and he waved but made no replies; his brother Younger and a crowd of his redjackets made a way for them through the frightened populace. “Redhand!” they called to him. “Redhand… !”
They said of the family Redhand that they had not walked far from the cottage door, which in an age-long scheme of things was true. Old Redhand’s great-grandfather was the first Defender; he had been born merely a tenant of a Red lord whose line was extinguished by war and the assassinations of the Just. But it had always been so; there was no Protector, however great, who somewhere within the creases of history had not a farmer or a soldier or even a thief tucked.
Why one would wish to plot and strive to rise from the quiet pool of the Folk to be skimmed from the top by war, feud, and assassination was a question all the poets asked and none answered. The Protectorate was a selfish martyrdom, it had never a place empty. The laws and records of inheritance filled musty floors of the Citadel. Inheritance was the chief business of all courts of the Grays. Inheritance was the slow turning of this still world, and the charting of its ascendancies and declinations took up far more of the world’s paper and ink than the erratic motions of its seven moons.
At Kingsgate, men Redhand recognized as old soldiers of Red Senlin’s, wearing ill-fitting King’s-men’s coats, barred their passage. Redhand summoned an unshaven one with a pot in his hand. When the man came close, frankly comradely, but shaking his head, Redhand leaned over and took his collar in a strangling grip.
“Goat,” he growled, “get your mummers out of my way or I’ll ride them down.”
He would almost have preferred them not to move.
Their hooves clattered down Kingsgate Alley between the walls of blank-faced, doorless mansions, pierced only far above by round windows. Somewhere above them a shutter clashed shut, echoing off the cool, shadowed stone walls.
Down at the puddly end of the alley was a tiny doorway called Defensible, a jackhole merely in the great curving wall of a rotunda: one of only three ways into the vastness of the Citadel.
The rotunda that Defensible let them into one by one was unimaginably old, crudely but grandly balconied, balustraded, arched and pierced. They said that this rotunda must be all that the Citadel was, once; that it was built up on older, smaller places that had left traces in its walls and doors. They said that the center of its figured stone floor was the exact center of the world; they said that the thousand interlaced pictures that covered the floor, once they were themselves uncovered of centuries of dirt, and explained, would explain all explanations… Two bone-white Gray scholars looked up from the space of floor they were methodically cleaning to watch the spurred men go through.
“Where will he be?” Younger asked.
“The King’s chambers.”
“The King. Has he…”
“What will you tell him?”
Redhand tore off his bonnet and shook his thick hair. He pulled off his gloves and slapped them into the bonnet, gave them to Younger.
The doors of the Painted Chamber were surrounded by loafing guards who stood to some kind of attention when Redhand approached. Ignoring them, he hunched his shoulders as though disposing burdens on his back, left Younger and the redjackets at the door and went in, unannounced.
Red Senlin was there, and his two sons. The eldest was called simply Red Senlin’s Son; it was he who was intimate with Young Harrah. The other Redhand had not been seen at court; his name was Sennred. At Redhand’s entrance the three moved around the small room as though they were counters in some game.
The Painted Chamber had been an attempt of the ancients at gentility, no doubt once very fine; but its pictured battles had long since paled to ghostly wars in a mist, where they had not been swallowed up in gray clouds of mildew. And the odd convention of having everyone, even the stricken bleeding pink guts, smile with teeth made it even more weird, remote, ungentle.
With a short nod to the sons, Redhand extended his hand to his uncle. “Welcome home.”
The Great Protector Red Senlin was in this year forty-eight years old. A battle in the Outlands, where he had been King’s Lieutenant, had left him one-eyed. A scarf in the Outland fashion covered the dead one; the living was cold gray. His dress was the simplest, stout country leathers long out of fashion and ridiculous on any but the very high.
Redhand’s father dressed so. Before him, Redhand wore his City finery self-consciously.
Red Senlin took his hand. “Black Harrah is dead.”
“Yes.”
“Shot by the Just.”
“Yes?”
Red Senlin withdrew his hand. Redhand knew his tone was provoking, and surely no Protector, even against his greatest enemy, would have a hated Gun used—and no one of Red Senlin’s generation would have a man slain secretly. “By a Gun, nephew,” he said shortly.
“These are unlovely times.” Behind him, Senlin’s younger son, Sennred, stirred angrily. Redhand paid a smile to the dark, close-faced boy. So different from his tall, handsome older brother, whom nothing seemed to offend—not even the attentions of Black Harrah’s son.
Red Senlin mounted the single step to the painted chair and sat. “Black Harrah’s estates are vast. Half the Black Downs owes him. His treason forfeits… much of them.”
“His son…”
One gray eye turned to the blond boy leaning with seeming disinterest at the mantel. And back to Redhand.
“Has fled, presumably to join his father’s whore and other traitors. Understand me. The King will be at liberty to dispose of much.”
It was an old practice, much hated by the lesser landowners and long considered dishonorable: seize the property of one’s fallen enemies to pay the friends who struck them. Redhand, after the battle at Senlinsdown, had come into valuable lands that had been Farin the Black’s. He chose not to visit them; had made a present of them to Farin’s wife and children. But he had kept the title “Great” that the holdings carried. And certain incomes… It angered Redhand now more than anything, more than not being consulted at first, more than his father’s maundering about the old days, more than the compromise to his oaths to the Blacks, to be so offered a price to make his uncle King.
“The Harrahs and their Black kin will not take it well, your parceling out of their property.”
“Let them take it as they must.”
“You make a war between Red and Black. And whoever dies in that war, on either side, will be kin to you.”
“Life,” said Sennred coolly, “is not so dear as our right.”
“Your—right.” Somehow Sennred reminded him of his brother Younger: that same quick anger, that look as of some secret hurt.
“Must I rehearse all of that again, nephew?” Red Senlin snapped. “Black took the crown by force from King Red’s son…”
“As you mean to do?”
“My father’s father was nearest brother to King Red’s son…”
“And Black was half-brother to King Ban himself.”
“But it was my father’s father who in the course of things should have been King!”
“But instead swore oaths to Black.”
“Forced oaths, that…”
“That he swore. That my grandfather’s father swore too. That you and I in turn have sworn to Black’s son’s son.”
“Can be set aside. Your brother Learned could sway the Grays to affirm me in this.”
“And forfeit all credence with the world by such deceit?”
“Deceit? I am even now Little Black’s heir, in default of heirs of his flesh!”
“You know the Queen is with child.”
“By Black Harrah!”
“That matters nothing to the Blacks. They will swear oaths to Little Black’s child with one hand on her great belly.”
“Cousin.” Red Senlin’s Son spoke quietly from where he lounged at the mantel. “I think I have heard all this argued before, between my father and yours. The part you take your father took often.”
Redhand felt his face grow hot suddenly.
“I don’t know,” the Son went on lazily. “It all seems of another day to me.”
“It means nothing to me either, Defender,” Redhand said fiercely. “But there are others…”
“It seems to me there are prizes to be won,” said the Son, cutting across Redhand more sharply now. “It seems to me that Little Black is a cold pie left over from our ancestors’ feasts. My oath to him makes him taste no better to me.”
“He is weak-minded,” Redhand growled, not sure whether he was accusing or excusing.
“Yes,” said Red Senlin’s Son. “We are fallen on evil days. The King goes mad, and old oaths no longer bind.” He smiled a sweet smile of complicity at Redhand, who looked away. “We are protected only by our strength.” He took Redhand’s arm in a sudden strong grip. “We will be King. Tell us now whether you support us in this or not.”
Redhand regarded the blue, uncaring eyes. Red Senlin might be grown evil, dishonorable, gone sour in repetition of old longings; might, in a passion of vanity, betray old alliances. He might, in his passion, be slain. Might well. But this blue boy was a new thing in the world; he would never lose, because he cared for nothing. And suddenly a dark wave rose under Redhand’s heart: he didn’t want to be an old man yet, sitting by the fire with his father, shaking his head over the coming of evil days without honor: he wanted suddenly very much to win while he could.
“Since oaths are thrown away,” he said, releasing himself from the Son’s grip and stepping back to face the three of them, “why, then I won’t swear, and I ask no swearing from you. Until I see no further hope in you, I am yours.” Red Senlin struck the throne arm triumphantly. “But this I do swear,” he went on, raising his arm against them, his voice gravelly with menace. “I am no dog of yours. And if you kick me, I will bite you to the bone.”
Later, when Sennred went unasked with the Redhands to the door Defensible, Redhand could almost feel his dark mistrustful eyes.
“If we must do this thing,” he said at last when they stood in the ancient rotunda, “we must at least pretend to be friends.”
“I don’t pretend well.”
“Then you must learn.” He gestured to the beetling arcades above them. “If you would live here long.”
When they had gone, Sennred watched the two Gray scholars working in the long, long shafts of dusty afternoon sun at their patch of floor, dusting with delicate brushes, scraping with fine tools, copying with colored inks what they uncovered.
“A pattern.”
“Part of a pattern.”
Crowned men with red tears running from their eyes held hands as children’s cutouts do, but each twisted in a different attitude, of joy or pain he couldn’t tell, for of course they all smiled with teeth. Behind and around them, gripping them like lovers, were black figures, obscure, demons or ghosts. Each crown had burning within it a fire, and the grinning black things tore tongue and organs from this king and with them fed the fire burning in the crown of that one, tore that one’s body to feed the fire burning in this one’s crown, and so on around, demon and king, like a tortured circle dance.