12
Courting Disaster
WE WERE OUT to steal what time we could; I met NaRee in her father’s garden.
The storm was moving in, the setting sun obscured by dark, oily clouds. From our usual place by the south wall, we probably could have seen the far-off lightnings, instead of merely being disturbed by the distant roars of their thunder cousins as the cold wind breathed against our faces.
For a long time, we sat on a bench quietly, and I just held her. That was enough, for a while.
“Tell me,” she said, finally, “tell me about the mountains of Helgramyth.”
She was always wanting to talk about distant counties and distant lands. Sometimes it was irritating, sometimes it was arousing, but now it was comforting, NaRee’s way of consoling me, distracting me.
So I told her about climbing through the mountains of Helgramyth; about how when you’re negotiating the high passes, you camp on the narrow roads themselves, because night falls quickly that high, and you’re never more than a few steps away from a long fall.
And I told her about the nights high in the mountains, about how it feels to be camped out on the side of the world, on the edge of the world where the stars shine more brightly, more steadily, more bravely than they can on the plains; and I told her about how sweet the wind blowing up the mountain passes is, filled as it is with mint and the remnants of the warm tang of sun-baked grasses, and the far distant foresty smell that never goes away, and about how distances in the mountains stretch and shrink, about how you can sometimes see a light in a window that feels so close that you think you could reach out and touch it, only to find that it’s four days away.
And I told her about the mornings in the mountains, about the dim, chilly mornings when the clouds have blown off from the mountain-locked lakes in the night, and how when you wake and can barely see your feet on the road next to you—and you never leave the road, you never leave the road—you’re not sure sometimes whether it is fog or cloud that parts every now and then; and I told her about how you can see vague, hulking shapes off in the mist, sometimes, and then how the fog or cloud thins even more with the oncoming day, and how you can see sometimes dark things, you’re never quite sure what, moving across the surface of the lake, and how all is mist and shadow until the sun, not caring whether it is fog or cloud, simply burns it away and leaves behind the bluest water, the greenest grass, the clearest air that there ever has been in the world, and you feel you can see from one end of D’Shai to the other, and how sometimes maybe you really can see from Wyness Tongue in the north to Everai in the south, from Bitter Bay in the east of the Ven, to Wisterly, where the Tetnit stands watching the Sleeve.
I didn’t tell her everything, of course.
I didn’t talk about how the pack’s straps cut into your shoulders with a pain that doesn’t become one whit less intense with great familiarity, or about how, late in the day, when you finally take too long a rest—only a few moments, it’s supposed to be; you must rest, but you mustn’t let your muscles cool, or your feet will realize how very much they hurt—you let yourself remember how each step is agony when you resume.
And I didn’t talk about the days of eating cold food, the beef and chicken salted too heavily, the onions too pungent, the waybread always stale and sometimes wormy, and how you have little enough of that, or about sleeping on cold ground that will suck the life and heat from your core, or about how, if you’ve found a soft patch of grass on which to stretch your blankets, more insects than you’ve ever believed existed will choose to share them with you, or about how you can never quite get the damp and dank out of the blankets, because it will take at least an hour of sun and wind to fully air them, and you can’t wait in the morning, and you can’t stop until the sun is down. And I didn’t tell her about how, sometimes, when the road slows you down too much, and two villages that were three days apart become four days apart, you arrive in the next one too beaten down with hunger to even be able to sleep properly, because you never carry more on the road than you have to, and you already have to carry a lot.
And then she leaned her head against me, and sighed, and said, “Today, my father has given Refle permission to marry me.”
I thought about how I felt up near the top of Aragimlyth, the mountains of Helgramyth, where I could see it all, and how clear it all was, and how good that felt, how it made me feel a part of everything.
And I thought of the supposed spell Narantir was preparing, and about how quickly gossip travels, and then I thought about Refle sitting up in his workshop looking across the courtyard at the donjon, and at the room where, for all he knew, the spell that would reveal him for what he was was being prepared.
And then I thought about that vague crease of irritation that had crossed Toshtai’s face at the thought of the murder of Enki Duzun interrupting his entertainment, and I smiled into her hair, and I said, “We shall see about that.”
Because of the storm, we were performing indoors for the two lords and their entourages; for the same reason, Crosta Natthan had arranged for us to be quartered in the donjon, even better rooms than I had expected—we were to use the room we had been using as equipment room, and the three next to it.
The room with the doorframe.
The doorframe that had held the clamp.
The clamp that had held the cable.
The cable that Refle had cut through, plunging my sister, Enki Duzun, to her death.
The top of the doorframe was covered with a plaster, from which several small wires projected, draped down over the clamp. Some of the wires were of gold, some of silver, three of some green metal I couldn’t have named. Several runes had been scribbled over the frame, and the wall beyond it, no doubt thrilling Varta Kedin and the rest of the maids.
One swordsman stood guard over it. Actually, he sat guard across from it, lolling in an armchair that had been moved there, drumming his fingers against the arm of the chair, alternately singing and humming a complex minor-key scale. But he wasn’t just for show, perhaps; his naked sword was flat on the arms of the chair, and any sound, any movement from either end of the hall got his immediate attention, his whole body tensing into sudden motionlessness until he identified the source of it.
He eyed me levelly as I walked out the door, closing it behind me. I was late; the others were already downstairs, outside the ballroom.
“Dinner performances are always difficult,” Gray Khuzud said, as we waited outside the double doors. Inside, the silverhorns had picked up a three-note theme and were tossing it back and forth, occasionally letting the zivver take part of the melody.
“It’s a simple matter to overpower the food and talk, but it’s higher art to complement it, as we do the music. We do not—” He stopped, swallowed, and started again. “We do not attempt to create the fear in the audience that if they don’t watch at any moment they will miss something forever, but rather we want to create the comfort of knowing that should they look in our direction, they will find something interesting to see.
“Or, more accurately, we only insist upon all of their attention occasionally, as with the entrance.
“Similarly, all of the acts are built so that almost all of the interesting moves are repeated, at least once. When Egda tosses Fhilt into the air for a double roll, it comes after a fairly quiet moment, and the attention of many may be on their plates—so, Sala will do the same move next.
“Is all that understood?”
“I’m never sure whether a road is Kami Khuzud’s river, or his wall,” Sala said, eyeing me.
“Some day, Sala,” Fhilt said, “you’ll come up with an aphorism that suits the occasion, and we’ll all faint in astonishment.”
She raised an eyebrow. “We take what victories we can, Fhilt.” She reached out and laid a hand on Gray Khuzud’s shoulder, and then on his cheek, cupping it. “We understand, Gray Khuzud,” she said. “We understand all of it.”
He smiled, and just for a moment was the Gray Khuzud that I had always known; and before the dull gray mask slipped back over his face again, he mouthed his thanks to her.
I never really understood the two of them. I knew that there had been no woman for my father since my mother died, and that he wanted it that way, but that Sala loved him, in a way both complicated and requited, but in a curious fashion, one that permitted but didn’t require they touch each other as lovers.
Enki Duzun had always said that she understood it, and that the trouble with me was that I thought too much not with my heart and head, but with my phallus, but that that’s not where all love is, not even where all passionate love is, even if you’ll never understand that, Kami Khuzud, not until you grow up, and never mind that I’m younger than you, I understand these things, I—
Fhilt gripped my arm. “Kami Khuzud, pay attention,” he said, not ungently. “We are on in a moment.”
“Sorry.”
Beyond the doors, the two silverhorns were playfully, lightly dueling at the top of their registers, supported below by easy rhythms on the zivver, smooth, heavy notes from the bassskin, an even flurry of drumming and a delicate tinkling from the chimer.
The doors swung open, and I entered the hall with a simple tumbling run: a quick dash, followed by a pair of handsprings, and then a solid landing. I quickly moved off to the side to pick up my juggling sticks while Fhilt made his entrance, his run the same as mine, except that he finished with a punch-back, to a spattering of applause.
He took up his sticks, and we each began to juggle three, occasionally banging two together in time to the music, but not loudly enough to distract from Evrem’s entrance—he was using a single watersnake tonight, keeping it spinning straight—and Sala’s.
It was a banquet in the traditional style of our beloved ruling class: a forty-person, staple-shaped table that cupped the far end of the room, with all the diners on the outside of the staple, their backs to the wall; members of our beloved ruling class were always nervous about leaving their backs to the open room. Near the legs of the staple, two serving tables stood, one holding a rosette of golden-roasted capons, another a single roast kid, white-clad servitors slicing to order.
The diners at the table itself were broken into eight or so smaller groups of four and five by interposed islands of serving foods, each similar, but variations on a theme: the soup bowls were all up on legs, heated by candles beneath, but one had bits of bright carrot and dull chard floating on its surface, another was clear; on yet another, three carved turnips, each shaped like a coil of a seadragon, poked out of an oil-slick bowl.
It was a magnificent spread, from the traditional first course, the pyramid of roasted aborted piglets, each the size of a small chicken, to the finale: a spiced potato pie, a wall of cinnamon sticks arranged around its edge like logs in a stockade.
The only foul note in the room was Refle. He and his brother sat with the group at the far end of the table, the farthest from Lord Toshtai, with Dun Lidjun’s group in between him and the lord. I wished that it had been a place of dishonor, but It wasn’t: all seats with the lord are a place of honor; this was only one of lesser honor.
His face studiously blank as he watched me, he toyed with his food and he kept from looking over toward Narantir.
Felkoi didn’t have as much self-control: he kept glancing over to where the wizard was busy staining his beard with the juices of an aborted piglet.
Lord Toshtai and Lord Orazhi, each with the traditional counselor at his side, were the center foursome. They chatted amiably, occasionally gesturing with their eating sticks, Toshtai politely tasting from Orazhi’s plate and vice versa. Arefai, arrayed in black and silver, sat at his father’s side, and in a bit of typical D’Shaian hypocrisy, Orazhi had chosen Lord Edelfaule, the older of Toshtai’s two resident sons, as his counselor, and even dipped his head toward Edelfaule every now and then, nodding as though receiving a confidence.
Where Toshtai was magnificent in his rotundity, Orazhi was quiet in his compactness: a lean, beardless man, thinning yellow hair slicked back neatly across his head and glossed to a high shine, formal black and gold tunic cut tightly across his shoulders.
His movements were both quick and sudden, even as he reached out an eating prong to spear a marinated mussel from the serving tray in front of them; Dun Lidjun, part of the group to Orazhi’s left, eyed the younger lord with unconcealed suspicion.
The food looked marvelous, and smelled wonderful; it filled the air with the scent of roasting meat, and of garlic, and a distant tang of firemint, probably from the hot apple stew. I paid particular attention to a plate of roast turkey legs, each one beautifully crisped on the outside.
While the crowd was watching Sala, Large Egda and the Eresthais quietly entered the hall, picking up their own equipment as Fhilt and I reclaimed the crowd’s attention with a flurry of exchanges, the wands first tumbling once around as they flew through the air between us, and then one and a half times.
Kneeling next to Fhilt, Sala opened the large oaken box containing the juggling knives. The appearance is part of the effect: the box was of deep rubbed oak, lined with crimson silk; the knives were polished to a high gloss.
She picked up one, and all eyes fell on her as she walked to the horseshoe-shaped dining table and took an apple from a fruitbowl, smoothly moving the knife through the air, slicing the apple a dozen times as she walked back to Fhilt’s side, and then cleaned the knife.
It’s a fool-the-mind trick: deep inside, the audience knows that we’re flipping the wands over one and a half times, and knows that if we do that with the knives, we’ll be cut to ribbons. So all eyes were wide and upon us as, one by one, Sala reached up and took one of Fhilt’s juggling wands from his hand, replacing it with a knife.
I wondered about that, too.
Fhilt, effortlessly, as though it didn’t affect his timing at all, quickly worked the knives into the stream, careful to give each knife only a half-turn flip as it flew across the air to me.
We picked up the exchange pattern: throw-throw-exchange instead of throw-throw-exchange-throw. The crowd broke into a polite patter of applause. Perhaps Refle paid more attention, wondering if he would be quick enough should I turn one of my throws to Fhilt into a throw at him.
The door again opened: it was Gray Khuzud, carrying three juggling sticks, and he was weaving as he walked.
He was quite obviously drunk.
Gray Khuzud threw one of the sticks in the air with his right hand, and then hesitated, as though unsure when to throw the next, but he barely got it out of his left hand in time to catch. The flipping pattern was almost random; some sticks flipped half over, some all the way, some one and a half times, and every once in a while one wouldn’t quite rotate out of the way, and he would snag a horizontal stick, and barely throw it in time.
Gray Khuzud kept walking forward, though, approaching Fhilt and me almost blindly. One stick dropped from his shower, but it bounced on its end off the hard marble, and Gray Khuzud snatched it and worked it back into his rough shower as he walked.
He caught himself barely an armslength from our exchanges, and bowed to Lord Toshtai as he continued his staggered juggle.
And then it happened: another stick fell and bounced off the marble, but this time it bounced forward, directly beneath where Fhilt’s and my knives were whipping back and forth, through the air.
Any sane person, any sober person would have let it fall, but Gray Khuzud leaned forward, through the path of our knives, a pair of knives barely missing his head.
And then he rose, the juggling stick firmly in his hands. The knife I had just thrown to Fhilt passed barely in front of his naked chest, and the one from Fhilt to me barely behind his back, but Gray Khuzud juggled through our exchanges, the knives and sticks coming close together, but never quite touching, the applause of the audience almost deafening as he dove through the space where, only half a heartbeat before, a knife had been flickering through the air.
Those of the audience who hadn’t seen my father’s drunk act before sat stunned, while those who had grinned.
The knives still flickering through the air behind him, Gray Khuzud took a step forward.
And his right heel came down firmly on a slippery apple slice, and he fell backwards, toward the exchanging knives—
—and through the turning, flying knives, as his fall became a backwards handspring, and then a forward handspring back yet again through the shower of knives, a handspring that brought him almost to the table and into yet another handspring that turned into a leap to the surface of the dining table.
Dun Lidjun was already on his feet, a sword in his hands, but Gray Khuzud had cartwheeled away in the opposite direction down the surface of the table, his flying hands and feet avoiding plates and bowls and cups and fingers as they had planted knives in our entrance act, and then he was again on the floor, but he had somehow seized six turkey legs, and had them in the air in an intricate shower.
Fhilt and I caught our knives, and bowed in his direction, as the applause thundered.
Gray Khuzud smiled as he tossed the turkey legs off in different directions, one toward Fhilt, another toward Sala, and three others to the Eresthais and me. He flipped the last turkey leg through the air, end over end, then caught it and took a bite.
“The Troupe of Gray Khuzud is with you,” he said, with a bow to where Toshtai and Orazhi sat, and then another, perhaps deeper bow, toward Dun Lidjun.
The old warrior eyed him blankly for a moment, then sheathed his sword with a smooth motion ...
And bowed to Gray Khuzud.
After a performance is a special time, always; nothing can take away from that. I’ve never known much about mahrir, wizard-magic, and I doubt I ever will, but there is some sort of magical energy that passes between the audience and the troupe, draining one kind of energy, leaving us charged with a different sort.
Usually you just know what to do—usually, when you’re both charged and drained, you find the nearest place to sit down, to lie down, not to rest. But sometimes you don’t. The banquet was over, but the servitors had gone to bed, leaving the cleaning for the morning and what leftovers we -wanted to the seven of us.
A quarter of the leavings wouldn’t have fed more than a troop of famished soldiers; the troupe of Gray Khuzud could barely finish half. Outside, past the half-open glass-paneled doors, the rain beat down with a steady patter, punctuated only occasionally by the crash of thunder or a distant flash of its cousin, lightning.
“I’m not sure,” Fhilt finally said, sprawled on a rug runner, “that this is the way things would be done if it was my castle, my banquet.” He toyed with a plate on the rug next to him, dipping a piglet haunch in raspberry sauce, then taking a delicate bite before offering some to Sala.
She smiled. “For some reason old Crosta Natthan didn’t think to ask you.”
“Foolish man.”
“Every problem its own solution; every solution its own problem,” she said.
I looked over at Large Egda. “Good food?”
“Mm.” Large Egda had piled his plate high, and was working from the top down, stoking himself without concern for how the flavors mixed. “Very good food,” he said, when his mouth cleared.
Evrem, despite the fact that he had been the last to start eating, was already on the potato pie—the snake-handler was like one of his snakes, I guess, tucking away immense quantities of food, figuring that he could digest anything he could squeeze down his throat.
The Eresthais, Josei and Eno, just ate.
I wasn’t hungry, although I had a bowl of apple stew in front of me, and had tasted some. The firemint had been laid on with too heavy a hand for my taste, although perhaps it was less intrusive when the dish was hot.
But I tried to talk anyway.
Gray Khuzud sat alone, eating without tasting whatever Sala set in front of him, chewing with an even rhythm, like a machine. We hadn’t exchanged any words at all, not privately. Not since Enki Duzun died.
Fhilt pitted a cherry, so purple it was almost black, and with a quick, “Egda, open wide,” thumb-flicked it into the air and into Egda’s mouth.
The big man smiled as he chewed and swallowed.
“I will see you all in the morning, in the courtyard, at the hour of the hare,” Gray Khuzud said, rising. He walked out of the hall.
Sala made as though to get up and go after him, but she looked to me for confirmation, first, as though I had the slightest idea what was right.
I didn’t understand Sala. I spread my hands.
Enki Duzun was dead, and nothing said or done right or wrong would ever change that. Everyone was silent for a long time.
Fhilt finally broke the silence with a loud sigh.
“I miss her, too, Gray Khuzud,” he said to the air in front of him. “And were there anything that could bring her back, I would do it. Failing that, I’d do anything that would expose her murderer.” He looked steadily at me. “But it appears that you and Narantir have that well in hand, doesn’t it, Kami Khuzud?”
“I hope so. If you put too much strain on a cable, it breaks,” I said, then realized what I’d said.
Sala didn’t like that. “The spell, though, will tell who did ... oh.”
I didn’t answer.
Evrem stroked the rug, his fingers moving sinuously. “I watched Refle. He worries. He tries not to show it, but he worries.”
“I don’t understand all this,” Large Egda said. “Too complicated for me.”
Fhilt started to say something, but I interrupted. “Just leave it to me, Egda. I’ve got it well in hand, I hope.”
Egda grinned, his smile a yellow gash in his porridge face. “Whatever you say, Kami Khuzud.”
Fhilt twisted an eating stick between his fingers. “If you put too much strain on anything,” he said, “it breaks.” He snapped the stick cleanly. “But if not?”
Lightning crashed outside; I picked up my juggling sticks and left.
When you don’t know what else to do, you go back to the beginning, the basics. The root of acrobatics is juggling.
I stood in the courtyard and the rain and the thunder, the rain beating down so hard at times that I couldn’t even see.
One ball; the most basic juggle. Never mind that the rain beats down hard, never mind that your sister is dead, never mind that crash of thunder or this flash of lightning; you can’t control that. What you can do, the only thing you can do, the thing you have to do is throw one ball up into the air and then let it fall into your hand.
You have to get at least one thing right.
Throw and catch, throw and catch. It isn’t the most important thing in the world; it has to be the only thing in the world.
Throw, and catch. Not quite. Oh, it was close enough for catching, and easy enough to make part of a juggle, but the ball hadn’t fallen onto exactly the spot on my left palm that it was supposed to.
It has to be perfect, the form is everything, because you can’t raise kazuh without the proper form, and once you raise kazuh, everything will be correct, in proportion.
Again.
Not quite. But closer. Again.
A flash of lightning and crash of thunder overhead rocked me, but I didn’t drop it, by the Powers I didn’t let the ball fall.
Feel the ball, Kami Khuzud, you must feel the ball, you must find your balance, find your center, and throw and catch it from the center.
Again.
That felt better. No—it felt right, there was even a distant tingling, a far-off spark of something. I added the second ball, and then the third, and kept them going in an even flow of catch-left throw-left catch-right throw-right, each ball falling perfectly into place, despite the rain battering at me, despite the thunder, despite the lightning, and I held that moment of time for as long as I could.
And, once again, it wasn’t enough. There was a distant spark somewhere, perhaps, but it wasn’t the kazuh of the acrobat.
I don’t know what I am. But whatever that is, it isn’t a kazuh acrobat.