4

There was a single window in the room where they had prisoned Caredd the Protector Redhand’s wife and Sennred the King’s brother. It was a blue hole pierced in the sheer curtain wall. The bricks of the wall were roughly masoned and a skillful man might crawl down, with a rope, a rope made of bedclothes… Sennred leaned far out and looked down, felt a weird fear grip his knees and pull him back. He hated high places, and hated his fear of them.

Below, in the dawn light of the courtyard of Redsdown, a knot of frightened servants was herded from the house by soldiers. Faintly he could hear pleas, orders. He turned from the window.

Caredd had ceased weeping.

She sat on the bed, eyes on the floor, hands resting in her lap.

“Lady,” he said.

“Have they brought him back?” she asked, tonelessly.

“No,” he said. “No, they have not.”

He did not like to impose by sitting with her on the bed; he felt too implicated in her grief. So he had stood much of the night, trying in a helpless way to help, attempting lame answers to her unanswerable questions. Almost, at times, for her sake, he wished he had prevented what had happened in the banquet hall.

“Will they burn the house?” she asked.

“Never,” he said, with almost too great conviction. “Never while the Arbiter is in it.”

“And if he leaves?”

“He will not. Not till your safety is promised him.”

They were silent awhile. The blue window brightened imperceptibly.

“What will they do to you?” she asked.

“I am the King’s brother. Will you sleep, lady? No harm will come to you.”

She had hardly looked at him, hadn’t spoken except to question him; he could not tell if she hated him. For Young Harrah he had spared no thoughts. For himself he cared little. The thought that Redhand’s lady suffered, because of him… her quiet weeping, nightlong, had been as knives to him.

“I think,” she said quietly, “you must have done as you did… partly, at least… for his sake.”

“I did,” he said earnestly. “I did as I thought he wished me to, then.” Was it so? “Perhaps I did wrong.”

She looked up at him where he stood by the window. “I hope they will not harm you.”

Perhaps the night’s exhaustion, he didn’t know, but suddenly he felt a rush of hot tears to his own eyes. He turned again to the window.

A troop of King’s men were riding slowly up the road from the Downs. One man held the reins of a horse who plodded on, head down; over its back was flung a burden… “No!” he cried out, and then bit his lip in regret. But she had heard, and ran to the window beside him.

“They have brought him home,” she whispered.

“Brought someone home.”

“He was unarmed. There was no way he could have…”

“Lady, he was resourceful. And brave.”

“Was. Oh, gods…”

“Is that his horse?”

“His? No, not any I know…”

“Where is his Secretary? Fled?”

“He would not have.”

“He is not there.”

She had taken Sennred’s hand, perhaps not knowing it; gripped it tight. “They must let me see him!”

“They…”

“No! I will not! I couldn’t…”

The troop entered the courtyard. What was now clearly a body swayed will-less on the nag’s back. Caredd stared wide-eyed, mouth down-drawn. A boot dropped from one lifeless foot, a green and cuffed boot, a fashionable tasseled boot. Caredd cried out: “That isn’t his!”

“Not his boot?”

She laughed, or sobbed. “Never. Never would he wear such a thing.”

Sennred leaned far out the window, calling and gesticulating. “Who is it? Who is the dead man?”

A soldier looked up. “It is Farin’s bastard son.”

“Who?” Caredd asked.

“Farin’s bastard,” Sennred exulted.

“Shot with a Gun,” the soldier called.

“A Gun! Where is Redhand?”

“Fled. Fled Outward with his people.”

“Fauconred!” Caredd said. She began to slump forward. Sennred caught her around the waist and helped her to the bed.

“A Gun,” he marveled. “The lout! Strikes out to find a murderer, and finds one. Of all nights in the year, flushes out such game! The idiot! I should have realized it from the first! He had a habit of drooling; he is well out of his miserable life… and tripping on his boots…”

“His green boots,” Caredd said. “With the ridiculous cuffs.”

“And tassels.”

She laughed. She laughed with relief, with amazement, with grief, a long and rich and lovely laugh, without any edge of hysteria or exhaustion; her whole body laughed, and her laughter poured over Sennred like cool water.

The bar on their door slid back with a grating sound.

There was the Arbiter, and ten or twelve guards, and two of the King’s young favorites.

“Sennred,” the Arbiter said. “They will take you to the City.”

“I will speak to the King.”

“The King will not see you,” said one of the young Defenders.

“I will go nowhere without a word with the King.”

“Sennred,” Learned said, “I have taken a liberty. I have promised them your good conduct in exchange for the Lady Caredd’s safety.”

“And the house’s safety,” Sennred said. It had been mostly what she talked of through the night.

“He will guarantee nothing beyond…”

“Listen to me,” Sennred said to the King’s men. “Listen to me and tell the King. I am his heir. He will have no other. If ever I am King and I find that any part of this house, or any hair of this lady’s head has been harmed, I will spend my life and my crown and all its powers to avenge it. Avenge it most terribly.”

He looked once at Caredd, sitting shyly on the bed; he heard an echo of her laughter.

“And now. We will go to the City.”

It was Rennsweek of the vine flowers, strange brief instant when all the world was summer, even the dun country far Outward.

The broken rock walls of the Edge were bearded with yellow-green; the ravines and crevasses, just for this one moment, ran with water; tiny sun-colored flowers nodded in the dry winds that would soon desiccate them. The few who lived this far Outward, solitary people, gem hunters, ore smelters, people dun-colored as the earth, smiled their one smile of the year this week, it seemed.

The watch-castle Forgetful seemed to grow out of the dull earth, made as it was of the same stone, undressed, undecorated, rectangular indeed, but hardly more so than the split and shattered cliffs of the Edge it guarded. It had few windows, fewer doors; blind and mute. Only now, in this week, the endless scrollwork of vines which lashed Forgetful to the earth flowered bright orange briefly, so orange that anciently the flower’s and the color’s name were one word; and bees were drawn up from the Outland valleys to feed on the nectar that dripped from the fat blossoms as from mouths. And Forgetful in this one week seemed rightly named: Forgetful old tyrant with vine leaves in his hair, drunk on honey wine and Forgetful of a life of sin.

A tent and cave village squatted at the fortress’s feet, serving the soldiers with all that soldiers have always been served with; a few of its low buildings, in parody of their master, were covered too with vine flowers. Two soldiers, on this day in Rennsweek, climbed up the stone way that led back to Forgetful from the village.

“Is he as bad, then?” the ostler asked.

“Worse than he was,” the quartermaster said.

“Didn’t the Endwife say spring would bring him round, and…”

“She said it was a melancholy.”

“A soldier’s malady.”

“And if it weren’t that, would she know?”

They paused for breath. The perfume of the vine flowers was thick. Forgetful motioned to them, almost gaily, with its fingers of vine leaves.

“He has ordered,” the quartermaster said, “more stone on the… in the courtyard. And belts and spikes.”

“To hold down the stones,” the ostler said.

“Hasn’t slept these three days.”

“Dreams while he’s awake, then.”

The quartermaster shuddered. “I wouldn’t have his dreams,” he said. “Not for the wealth of Tintinnar.”

Far above their heads, the war viols called alarm from the battlements. The two scrambled up the rock walls to where they could see. Inward, Inward, the song called, and they looked Inward.

It could be no army; it had no wagons, no advance guard, no banners. It trailed out over the boulder-strewn plain in twos and threes; yet the ones in front wore red, and now as they looked a small detachment broke off and rode hard for Forgetful, unfurling as they rode a banner with a red open palm on it.

“Redhand.”

“Come to pay his brother a visit.”

“What are those weapons? A hoe?”

“A rake. Perhaps…”

“What?” the quartermaster said.

The ostler slid down from the rock. “Perhaps he’s gone mad too. It should be a merry meeting.”

In Forgetful’s courtyard goats bleated, cookfires showed pale in the sun, curious soldiers lounged at doorways and looked down from parapets at the Army and Household of the Great Protector Redhand.

In Forgetful’s courtyard, in the midst of this, there was a pile of stones half as high as a man. Over and through some of the stones ran leather straps and straw ropes, which were tied tight to stakes. The dung seemed weirdly purposeful, devised by a logic alien to the rest of the courtyard, the cooks, the goats, the soldiers, yet the center of all, like the altar of an ignorant, powerful cult.

Redhand’s horse turned and turned in the wide sunstruck yard. They had opened the gates for him, but none had greeted him. His little crowd looked around themselves, silent, waiting for an order.

“You.” Redhand called a grizzled man who stared openly at him. “Call your captain.”

“Indisposed.”

“How, indisposed?”

The soldier only stared at Redhand, grinning with sunlight, or at a private joke; chewing on a sliver of bone. Then he turned and went to climb worn stairs toward the slit of a doorway. Even as he approached it a man came from the darkness within, armed, helmeted.

“Younger!” Redhand dismounted, went to meet his brother. Younger came toward him down the stairs, unsmiling; his eyes had the blank, inward look of a child just wakened from a nightmare. Without a word he embraced his brother, clung to him tightly. In the grip of his embrace, Redhand felt fear.

He pulled himself away, experimented with a friendly smile, a slap on the shoulder, a laugh of greeting. Younger reacted to the slap as though stung, and the laugh died in Redhand’s throat.

He turned to Fauconred. “Can you…” He waited for Fauconred to pull his gaze from Younger’s face. “Can you find lodging, stabling? You’ll get no help, I think.” Fauconred nodded, glanced once at Younger, and began to shout orders to the men behind him.

Redhand put an arm tentatively, gently around Younger’s shoulders. “Brother,” he said. “Brother.” Younger made no response, only sheltered himself, as he ever had in his great griefs, within the circle of Redhand’s arm. “Come inside.”

He walked with Younger toward the door he had come out of. All around them the garrison and its hangers-on looked on, some grinning, some fearful. His brother had been baited, Redhand knew. It had been so before; and always Redhand had hit out at them, beaten at their grinning, stupid faces, so much more mad-seeming than his brother’s. And he would again, he vowed, memorizing the mockers, unappeased by his knowledge that they knew no better.

At the cairn, Younger stopped, staring, all his senses focused there as a rabbit’s on a fox in hiding. “In winter,” he began, in a thin, dreaming voice.

“Yes.”

“In winter the ground was frozen.”

“And.”

“He lay still. Now…”

“He?”

“Father. Where they buried him. The ground was frozen hard, and he couldn’t get out. Now he would push through. He must not, though; no, though he pleads with me.” He started suddenly, staring at the pile, and it was as though Redhand could feel a surge of fear through the arm he held his brother with.

“It was Harrah’s son,” Younger said.

“Harrah?”

“Harrah’s son who saw him slain. Harrah’s son who threw him in a shallow hole, far too shallow, so shallow the birds would come and peck and scratch the ground. Harrah’s son, that Father would get out to go find, but must not, must not…”

“Harrah’s son,” Redhand said slowly, “is dead. I have killed him.”

Younger turned to him slowly. He took Redhand’s arm in a mad, steel grip. “Dead.” Tears of exhausted anguish rose in his eyes. “Then why do the stones move always? Why does he squirm? Why will he not lie still?”

In Rennsweek when he was ten years old it had begun, this way: when the vine flowers bloomed on the walls of Old Redhand’s house, Younger had poured a child’s pailful of dirt on his father’s sleeping face, because, he said, tears in his eyes, anyone could see the man was dead…

Night along the Edge was cold even in Rennsweek. A fire had been lit; it was the huge room’s only light. It lit Younger, who stared into it, lit lights within his eyes, though to Redhand it seemed he looked through his brother’s eyes, and the lights he saw were flames within.

“There was a duel,” Redhand said. “A kind of duel, with carving knives, in the banquet hall at Redsdown. I killed him. Then I fled.”

Impossible to judge if Younger heard or understood. He only looked into the fire, flames gesturing within his eyes.

“Now I need you, Younger.”

Always it had been that the faction that commanded a garrison of the Edge could forge it into a weapon for its use. After the battle at Senlins-down in the old days, Black Harrah returned from Forgetful without orders to do so, with an unruly army and a new big wife for the King, and the Reds who had thought the King to be in their pockets backed away.

“The King Red Senlin’s Son,” Redhand said, “was Young Harrah’s lover. He will send an army to invest Forgetful, once he deduces I am here. I would prevent that.”

Yes, and Red Senlin too, Redhand thought. He had gone away to the Edge to be vice-regent then, and in his time he had returned with bought Outland chiefs and an army of Edge-outcast soldiers. And Black Harrah had turned and fled… Suddenly Redhand felt caught up in the turnings of an old tale, a tale for children, endlessly repetitious. Well, what other chance had he but to repeat what his fathers and their fathers had done? He would not wait here to be ferreted like a rabbit.

“I want to march first, Younger. I want you with me. Help me now, as ever I have done for you.”

Younger said nothing, did not turn from the fire.

There was this flaw in it then. The old tale stopped here, the teller faltered at this turning.

That mob in the courtyard was no army. Fauconred had had to cut off some bandit’s ear in order to find lodging for Redhand’s household. He could flog them into order, a kind of order, with like means if he had weeks in which to do it. He did not have weeks.

“If flesh were stone,” said Younger. “If all flesh were stone…”

No. He couldn’t anyway face the King and the Folk with such a band. Outlanders, and men like these, had no strictures such as the Protectorate had concerning the Folk; they would take what they could. He must draw the country Defenders to his banners, keep the City open to him. It could not be done with marauders.

And they would not flock with any will to himself. He had no true friends; his strength lay in pacts, alliances, sealed with largesse. Red Senlin’s Son had seen that, and vitiated it with his City courtiers and his own largesse.

There must be another banner to ride Inward with than his own.

“Her spies,” Younger said, smiling. “The messages they take her. Songs, lies, jokes. What harm is there in that?”

With an instant, horrid clarity Redhand remembered the last time he had seen her: at the Little Lake, in the bloody snow, shuffling away on her big horse, riding Outward, looking back for fear.

No!

She must have had the child. Black Harrah’s, doubtless. As he had said to Red Senlin (so long ago it seemed) that didn’t matter. All the Outlands and half the world would kneel to kiss Little Black’s heir.

No!

A joining of Red and Black. An end to the world’s anguish. Despite his promises, the King had seized lands, divided them among his friends, who played in the City while farms rotted. The Downs would be his. And the City—well. He had been master of the City. He had friends. It would do.

No! No!

“What harm is there in it?” Younger said again, his voice beginning to quaver.

Redhand took hold of his revulsion and with an effort wrung its neck, stilling its protest. “No harm, brother,” he said. “Can you find one of these spies? Do you know them?”

“I know them. Oh, I know them all.”

“Send for one. Have him brought here. I… have a little joke myself to tell the Queen.”

Younger returned to staring into the fire. “Only…”

“Only?”

“We will go Inward. But.” He turned to Redhand. “Father must not come!” He beat his palm against the chair arm with each word. “They said he suffered from a soldier’s melancholy. They said, the Endwives said, that spring would bring him round, and they would nurse him back to health. But those were lies.”

As in one of the new pageants the King had caused to be shown in the City, the madman in the courtyard of Forgetful had an audience, an audience though of only one; and unlike those pageants’ actors, he was unaware of being watched, for the drama unfolding within him took all his attention.

On the belvedere above, his brother, his audience, was attentive, though feeling he had lost the thread, the point, the plot; he shivered in the warm wind, dislocated, lost, feeling that at any moment some unexpected shock might happen. He leaned against the belvedere, tense with expectation, bored with awful expectation.

Now unlike those City pageants, this audience had an audience himself.

Again, an audience of one.

Only she knew the plot. This scene had been laid out in cards the troubled man she watched had never seen; it was a scene in a story begun she knew not how many millennia before she lived, whose end might come as long after her death; she only knew her part, and prayed now to many gods that she might play it right.

From a pouch beneath her cloak of no color she drew the Gun named Suddenly. She was behind a thick pillar of duncolored stone. There were stairs at her back. Beyond, Outward, yellow clouds encircled the setting sun like courtiers around a dying Red king, and as the sun set, the war-viols of Forgetful would start, calling the garrison to meat and meeting. She hoped the noise would cover Suddenly’s voice. Afterwards, she would go quickly down those stairs, down to the stables, to Farin’s black horse she had come to love, without, she hoped, arousing more suspicion than she had already. And after that—well: she didn’t know. Nightfall. A curtain on this scene. She scarcely cared, if this was all played right.

She didn’t know either that she, who watched the madman’s audience, had herself an audience. Pageants upon pageants: she was observed.

He had come up the narrow stair to find his master. Had seen her at the top of the stair, dim, a blue shadow in the evening light. When she drew the thing from within her clothes, he at first did not recognize it; stood unmoving while a chain of associations took place within him.

So for a moment they all stood motionless; he on the stair, she with the Gun, he on the belvedere, he below biting his nails, and also he headless within the inconstant earth.

Then the one on the stair ran up.

She didn’t know who or what had seized her, only that its strength was terrible. A hand was clamped over her face, she could not cry out or breathe; an arm encircled her, tight as iron bands, pressing the Gun, against her so that if she fired she shot herself. She was picked up like a bundle of no weight, and before she was trundled away fast down the stair she saw that the man on the belvedere still looked down: he had not seen or heard.

They went quickly down. At a dim turning they paused; her captor seemed unsure. They turned down a tunnel-like hall, but stopped when the sound of men came from far off; turned back, slipped within a niche formed by the meeting of vast pillars, and waited.

She was beginning to faint; she could not breathe, and where the arm held her the pain had faded to a tingling numbness. Sheets of blank blackness came and went before her eyes. She tasted blood; the pressure of his hand had cut her mouth on her teeth.

When those coming up the hall had passed without seeing them, she was rushed out and down again. She saw evening light spilling from a door at the tunnel’s end, and then it was extinguished, and she knew nothing for a time.

The thud of a door closing woke her. She woke gulping air, looking into a bald, blank face hooded in red, oddly calm. Its thin lips moved, and the words came as from a distance. “You won’t cry out, struggle.”

“No.”

“If they found you. If I gave you to them, they would hang you.”

“Yes. I won’t.” He was not “they,” then?

His face withdrew. Her thudding heart slowed its gallop, and involuntarily she sighed a long, shuddering sigh.

The room was tiny, higher almost than wide; above her head a small window showed a square of summer evening; there was no other light. A wooden door, small and thick. A plain wooden pallet she lay on. A wooden chair he sat in; in one hand he held Suddenly by its barrel, loosely, as though it were a spoon.

“You are Just,” he said.

“If you drop that,” she said, her voice still hoarse, “they will know soon enough you have me.”

He lifted the Gun, examined it without curiosity. “Does it have a name?”

“Why do you keep me?” she said. “I know you, I know you are a thing of his.” She hoped to probe him, see if there was some disloyalty, some grudge she could play on… His face, though, remained expressionless. The same mask she had seen always beside Redhand in the City that spring. Who was he, then?

“I was told they have names.”

“They do.”

“I have an interest in names.” - As though they had gathered here for some scholarly chat. She almost smiled. “And so what is yours?”

“I am called Secretary now.”

“That’s no name.”

“No. I have no other.”

She could not read him. There was nothing to grasp. His voice, cool and liquid, the strange nakedness of his face. His hideous strength. For the first time since he had seized her, she felt fear; yet could not imagine how to plead with him, beg him, felt that he knew nothing of mercy. A cold sweat sprang out on her forehead.

“I will say a name,” he said, “if I can, and you will tell me if you know it.”

What name? Some other she had slain? Some brother or sister? She would tell him nothing…

“Here is the name.” It seemed to take all his strength to say it. “Leviathan.”

She only looked at him in disbelief.

“Leviathan,” he said again. “Do you know that name?”

Evening had deepened. The red cloak he wore was dark now as dried blood; his pale head shone like wax. And as it grew darker in the room, his eyes seemed to glow brighter, as precious stones do.

“Yes.” In a whisper.

“Where he lives,” the dark form said. “Where he lives, who he is, how to come to him.”

He could not mean this; he must be mad.

And yet. “Yes.” Again a whisper; he leaned forward to hear. “Yes, I know.”

Slowly, as though not meaning to, he leveled Suddenly at her. “Do you pull this? The lever here? And it will kill you?”

She pressed herself against the stone wall behind her, but could not press through it.

“Listen to me,” he said, the voice calm, liquid. “I will give you this choice. Take me to this one you know of, wherever, however far Outward. I will give you back this. If you refuse, tell me now, and I will kill you with it.”

There was an old story she knew: a brother was surrounded by King’s men, who closed in upon him with torches and dogs; he was utterly lost, yet had to escape. He did this, they say: he took a step Outward, a step Inward, and a step away, out and gone. The King’s men when they closed the circle found only themselves; they never found him, nor did the Just ever see him again.

She took the step. “Yes. I’ll take you. If we leave tonight. I’ll take you to see him, I swear it, face to face.”