Rendulic Baster-kin stepped back as if struck hard. “But—” He had begun to grasp at any other conclusion that his mind could formulate. “Our first son—Adelwf—he is the very model of health and virtue!”
“And conceived when the disease had scarcely taken root in the Lady Chen-lun,” Caliphestros answered earnestly, “as well as born during a period when it had, for a time, retreated. There are many of us who have studied this illness, my lord, who have come to call the pox by another title: the ‘Great Imitator,’ for its ability to mimic other ailments, until the terrible truth becomes undeniable. And such may be the case here—it may be that what we have called ‘the pox,’ in the case of your father, your wife, and your son, may be some other disease. But to be safe, my lord—you must not attempt to conceive a child with your wife, until she is healthy once more, and for an extended period of time. You yourself appear to have escaped, as has your eldest son—that at least argues for, not the pox, but a pox-like disease. And it ensures you at least one healthy heir. But you must not risk your safety again, or the safety of a future child. You are simply too important to this kingdom.”
But it had already become clear that Rendulic Baster-kin saw only the worst in his predicament: Radelfer watched his young friend and master turn back to the window, as the Merchant Lord said, in a soft, bitter voice, “Even from beyond the pyre, he strikes at me …”
Radelfer rushed quickly to the young lord’s side. “Did you not hear the minister, my lord? It may be some other illness, there may have been no such attempt to curse your life at the last—”
“I knew him, Radelfer,” Rendulic quietly continued, shaking his head to deny his seneschal’s protest. “It would be precisely his perverse idea of—of immortality: to poison his descendants for generation after generation … And so, whether he knew it or not, I would stake my life that he believed he was planting the seed of the plague in us all …” Without fully turning back about, the Merchant Lord tried to speak with as much composure as he could muster: “My … thanks, Lord Caliphestros. We have, at least, solved one mystery, I believe: the condition of that”—he tossed his head in the direction of the crib—“that thing that was to be my son. And now, I must ask you to give me a measure of time alone. Radelfer will see you out, and arrange all payments.”
Caliphestros nodded. “No payment is necessary, my lord—and let us pray that I am wrong, as all healers are, on occasion. I shall take my leave, then, offering only my deepest sympathy—and my most emphatic advice that you heed my words, which are not mine alone, but the sum of knowledge gained by most learn men far outside the frontiers of this kingdom …”
Not waiting for an answer, Caliphestros moved quickly to the nursery door, where Radelfer intercepted him even more speedily. “Can you find your way back out, Minister?” the seneschal whispered. “I—I confess that I am afraid to leave my lord alone with either this child or his wife, after what you have said.”
Caliphestros nodded. “You are right, Radelfer, to take such precautions. Of course, I can look after my own departure. But you must continue to try to make him see that, even if his child and his wife have been so abominably cursed by his own vicious father, he must care for them, and not turn to the punishments which I know are first in the minds of all Broken nobles, when they are presented with such imperfection and perfidy.”
Radelfer nodded, urging the minister further along the hallway. “You speak of the mang-bana?” Radelfer asked. “I confess, it is my own fear—for my master is, as you have witnessed, a young man of enormous passions, capable of reason one instant, and of …” The aging soldier did not seem able to complete this thought, bringing Lord Caliphestros’s hand to his shoulder.
“You are wise, Seneschal,” he whispered, “and your master is fortunate to have had your steadying influence. Remain here, if only as a kindness to my own conscience.” Caliphestros looked into the nursery a last time. “For the mang-bana may be the least of what will occur to him, once he has brooded on the subject at length. And with that—I fear I must bid you farewell …”
As Caliphestros moved more rapidly than Radelfer would have thought his silver and black robes would have permitted down the grand staircase and toward the front entrance of the Kastelgerd—for it mattered not if any servant heard those doors open and close, now—he heard the child within the nursery begin to wail once more, his torment rising again, and looked in to see his master moving toward the crib.
“My lord?” the seneschal asked carefully. “Are you well?”
The young lord shook his head. “Evil has been done, and there must be blame. There must be—punishment …” As Rendulic continued to stare at the wailing child, he held out a desperate hand. “Do you know—I would comfort him, had I any idea of how to do it. Simply to be touched, said the great scholar of the Inner City, to be taken up and swayed, gently rocked to expel the air and vomit in his stomach, all that a child requires, this the child finds agonizing. And so—I cannot … I cannot bring myself to offer him such ordinary comforts, if it is at the cost of such severe pain. We must have a drunken bitch of a wet nurse to do it, for his cries will mean naught to her ears and heart, or whatever machine passes for her heart, until the inevitable day …” And then another thought, altogether different, occurred to Rendulic Baster-kin, and he looked to Radelfer:
“And yet, what if the great scholar who has just left us is wrong? What if this disease will resolve itself before the child must be left to the Wood? Or, worse yet, after he is thus outcast? Weigh the matter carefully, Radelfer—why should we pay that man Caliphestros greater heed than we do our own healers? He said himself that these are all issues of debate, of opinion—and has he arrested the deterioration of the God-King Izairn? No. Why, then, Radelfer? Why heed him …?”
The seneschal wished to utter the simplest reason why: that Rendulic Baster-kin knew himself, from personal and bitter experience, that Broken’s Kafran healers were fools, and that Caliphestros, while he could not stop the inevitable progression of the God-King Izairn’s decline, had at least softened that march of mortality. But, ultimately, the seneschal found that calming his lord was far more important than proving this point: and so, as soon as the drunken wet-nurse appeared, wiping grease from her mouth with the same filthy sleeve that she would shortly use to wipe the face of the unfortunate infant in the crib, Radelfer guided the somewhat stunned Merchant Lord from the room.
And as they went, Rendulic Baster-kin made only one sensible statement: “I can prove it, Radelfer—you think me near-mad, at this moment, but I can prove my assertion …”
“My lord?” Radelfer replied, wishing simply to get the master of the house abed.
“Another child,” Rendulic Baster-kin replied; and at that, Radelfer was forced to pause in the hallway.
“But my lord, we have just heard—”
“An opinion,” the young master replied, with the fire of inspiration in his eyes. “The great Lord Caliphestros said as much, himself. Well—I have formed my own opinion: if my wife and I can conceive another child, one that resembles Adelwf rather than that horror we have just left, then, then I shall know the truth. And then there shall be punishments enough to slake even my wrath …” Walking unsteadily, Lord Baster-kin moved toward the bedchamber where Lady Chen-lun now lay alone, attended constantly by the marauder woman Ju. “Fetch Raban back here,” Rendulic Baster-kin said, pausing by the chamber’s door. “Send for him. I would have my wife well enough, at least, to conceive, and he shall accomplish it, if he wishes to live. Tell him that I have determined his tale of the alp from Davon Wood having invaded this house and violated my wife to be correct. We shall have a priest to purge this Kastelgerd, and protect it from such beings in the future. And then …”
{vi:}
THE LADY CHEN-LUN’S HEALTH did improve sufficiently for childbearing, for the most part because of Healer Raban, or so the lord and lady of the house believed; in reality, it was because of liberal reliance on various instructions which Lord Caliph
estros had, Radelfer later learned, left behind with the marauder woman Ju, the only person in the great house who knew what had actually transpired between her mistress and Rendulic Baster-kin’s father, and therefore the only person, as well, who knew the truth of Caliphestros’s statements concerning Chen-lun’s illness.
The birth of a baby girl brought immediate joy into the home of the greatest of Broken’s ruling secular families, joy that lasted half a dozen years unabated. The beast-child Klauqvest remained exiled to the mazelike cellars of the Kastelgerd, along with a new and kindly nursemaid. By Kafran rites, Klauqvest should have been exiled to Davon Wood, a fate he escaped only because of the increasingly vexing nature of his brother, Adelwf. While still a young boy, that publicly acknowledged scion of the clan Baster-kin had become so much the delight of the women of the household, and had learned how to use their adoration to achieve his every young desire, that he had grown spoilt and intellectually lazy, facts that often irritated his father; yet Klauqvest paid undivided attention to learning and development of the mind, achievements that were ever made clear to Rendulic Baster-kin by Radelfer. A taste and talent for knowledge could not, however, overcome the utter disgust his lordship felt upon simply looking at the boy; and so it was that the youngest child of the group (who believed Adelwf to be her only sibling) became the joy of the family, embodying enough of both qualities—loveliness and true quality of intellect—to make her father constantly proud.
Early in her life this happy creature exhibited a joyous, almost ethereal talent and taste for dancing about the halls and rooms of the Kastelgerd; and yet this inclination did not cause her to ignore the studies that she was tasked to undertake early, and that she would need, should she ever in fact find herself leader of the clan Baster-kin. In addition, she was undeniably lovely, with beautiful, thick hair and the wide, dark eyes that made visitors—especially male visitors—innocently indulge her with gifts; although her father was delighted when she sometimes informed these acquaintances, quite earnestly, that she had not achieved enough that day to merit reward, and put off acceptance of such tokens. Thus did Baster-kin become ever more certain that, even if his eldest son became a useless wastrel, his daughter would never do so, and the clan would be secure. Keeping all this in mind, and still feeling most fortunate that the legacy of illness and despair that his father had intended to inflict upon Rendulic’s children had not, in two of three cases, materialized, the lord of the Kastelgerd had determined that he would name his young daughter Loreleh. When he explained to his wife the well-known myth of the beautiful spirit who was to be the child’s namesake, a siren said to stand on a large, rocky protrusion in the storied river Rhein, drawing river sailors to their crashing doom with her irresistible beauty and peerlessly beautiful voice, the yet superstitious Chen-lun believed the tale to be true. She found it a recklessly impertinent name to give a child who had, only by divine grace, escaped the terrible fate that had befallen the now-unmentionable creature that had emerged from her womb, and whom, Chen-lun believed, her husband and Radelfer had long ago left in the wilds of Davon Wood. Whatever god or gods one worshipped, she pleaded with Rendulic, why tempt them by flouting such a myth?
Rendulic Baster-kin was only mildly irritated by his wife’s continued clinging to marauder ignorance; for had not all his prayers to Kafra been rewarded by the lovely girl’s birth? The golden god had forgiven and rewarded the Baster-kin family, after punishing it for sins that Rendulic did not wish to mention, he told Chen-lun. And, in the end, Chen-lun’s guilt over the “sin” of which her husband had spoken forced her to submit to his reasoning. In addition, their daughter’s beauty, as well as her affinity for singing and her almost spirit-like ability to dance—both not only displayed from an early age but quickly developed by tutors of such arts—even convinced her mother, after a time, that her husband might have been right: his golden god Kafra just might have been more powerful than all other deities. And so, Loreleh became the child’s name; and if Adelwf represented the clan Baster-kin’s public hopes, so Loreleh represented its private pride, joy—and security.
In all this, Rendulic was encouraged and comforted by an exceptional Kafran priest (whose name has been lost to history, with his eventual elevation to Grand Layzin); and among the many subjects upon which the two maturing men found they agreed completely was a fundamental disdain for the Second Minister of the realm, whose advice to Lord Baster-kin had been so foully wrong. In addition, the priest, although he could speak only in pieces of the matter, indicated that the God-Prince Saylal had been given good reason not only to rebel against, but to find moral fault with Caliphestros—particularly so far as his royal sister, the Divine Princess Alandra, was concerned.
This maiden had evidently fallen under the Second Minister’s influence and become his disciple, not only in matters of healing, but in the study of all of Nature’s wonders: and the perfection of and delight in the human form that Kafran tenets idealized seemed to hold no place in such learning. Rendulic Baster-kin urged the priest to tell the young God-Prince that, should the day ever come that he or his sister might need “practical” assistance (for it remained clear that their father, the God-King Izairn, was wholly in the thrall of Caliphestros’s undeniable intellectual refinement and power), he could depend upon the full weight of the clan Baster-kin being brought to bear in support of his cause …
Here, then, was a portrait of a family that seemed to have righted the ship of its fate long ago; and yet on this night, the Merchant Lord kneels at the bedside of his wife to find that her ailments of mind and body are only worsening—and becoming, to him, ever more repellent.
Yet how can we have reached such a pass? Lord Baster-kin wonders, for an instant uncertain if he has murmured the words aloud. What was our sin? We lived pious lives; and when the God-King finally died, we followed the will of his son, Saylal, not only in ensuring the investiture of a new Grand Layzin, but by working for and bringing about the downfall, exile, and mutilation of that blasphemous minister, Caliphestros, and his acolytes, as well. Where, then, was the grievous error? Why should we have been so reduced?
But Baster-kin knows full well the individual steps that have led his family to this crisis, and he feels, in some private portion of his heart, enough pity to want to sit—for a time, at any rate—by Chen-lun’s side, to comfort and above all quiet her. At the same time, however, he inwardly knows his true practical reason for visiting his wife: in his heart, he has grown—until only the last day or two—to despair of any hope for the future of the clan of which he remains chief; indeed, of which he may well be the last unchallenged leader. And there might be justice, if I were to suffer that ignoble fate, he muses. But the recent news from the provinces has brought something like hope, if a dark sort of hope, to the Kastelgerd’s master; and so, as Baster-kin watches the pompous but well-bribed Healer Raban gather his calming and palliative drugs, he makes sure the greedy, ambitious Kafran man of “medicine” also conceals the additional ingredients that Baster-kin has contracted with Raban to slowly mix into her ladyship’s medicines. The healer then silently leaves the room, leaving his lordship to glance again at his wife, still writhing upon the bed, and then at Chen-lun’s sole remaining personal servant, the marauder woman Ju, who, as always, stands as if made of stone in the shadows of one corner of the room, comprehending few of the words, but much of the behavior, of the people of Broken. And, as he goes to his lady’s bedside and waits for her to acknowledge him before taking her hand, Baster-kin silently determines:
Nay, I can no longer lie to myself about these things; for if condemning my second son to the near-perpetual darkness usually suffered only by prisoners in dungeons, as I did when Klauqvest became a youth wise enough to be of use as an advisor, was an act made more bearable by Kafran tenets, I cannot help but wonder if the order concerning my third child has not placed me beyond the pale of any true forgiveness or peace. And even if it has, what of my “merciful” intentions toward my wife: am I so certain t
hat they are the righteous course?
And who is there who could argue with the man’s doubts on these subjects? For Baster-kin broods, in the first instance, upon his long-ago yet constantly remembered order that Radelfer take his daughter Loreleh—that same Loreleh who was once the greatest joy of her father’s life, but who had begun, late in her childhood, to show tragic signs of the onset of physical deformities all too close to Klauqvest’s—into the deadly wilds of Davon Wood, and abandon her there. The mang-bana had been forced upon the girl that Baster-kin saw as his greatest hope simply because the city and kingdom were aware of her, and could see the deformity growing. As for his second cause of self-torment, Baster-kin struggles over the deadly course he has lately embarked upon regarding his wife: a woman who, he has been told, no longer has any hope. Yet even if he counts his deadly plans for her a mercy, will his god judge them thus, as well?
“Rendulic,” Lady Chen-lun says, seeing him at her side, and then feeling his touch on her own hand. “I heard Raban,” she almost whispers. “Speaking in the hallway. Someone said that you might not come, but Raban said that you must; and I knew you would. But—here is the strangeness of it, Rendulic—” Her eyes suddenly grow wide with emotion and she arches her back in torment as she says more urgently: “I knew who he was speaking to; I knew the second voice! It seemed I did, at any rate—and it was him—our child, Rendulic. But it cannot have been; I know this, husband, for I know that you saw to his exile; I know that he is no more, that he was taken by the Wood. And so, it must have been … someone else …”
“Calm yourself, my lady,” Rendulic Baster-kin says softly, holding her right hand tighter. “It was but Radelfer, whom I earlier ordered, as I ordered all of the household staff, to speak in whispers, so that you will not be disturbed.”
Nodding her head nervously, wishing to preserve this moment of peace and affection, Chen-lun responds, “Yes, husband. No doubt it was just as you say. Would that you could always command my mind to be so still …”