Enchanters' End Game

  ‘Let’s visit your Asturian countrymen,’ she decided. ‘I don’t think I’d care to take you two into the Mimbrate camp – unless your swords had been taken away from you and your mouths had been bricked up.’

  ‘Don’t you trust us?’ Lelldorin asked.

  ‘I know you,’ she replied with a little toss of her head. ‘Where are the Asturians encamped?’

  ‘That way,’ Torasin answered, pointing toward the south end of the supply dump.

  Smells of cooking were carried by the breeze from the Sendarian field kitchens, and those smells reminded the princess of something. Instead of randomly circulating among the Asturian tents, she found herself quite deliberately searching for some specific people.

  She found Lammer and Detton, the two serfs who had joined her army on the outskirts of Vo Wacune, finishing their afternoon meal in front of a patched tent. They both looked better fed than they had when she had first seen them, and they were no longer dressed in rags. When they saw her approaching, they scrambled awkwardly to their feet.

  ‘Well, my friends,’ she asked, trying to put them at ease, ‘how do you find army life?’

  ‘We don’t have anything to complain about, your Ladyship,’ Detton replied respectfully.

  ‘Except for all the walking,’ Lammer added. ‘I hadn’t realized that the world was this big.’

  ‘They gave us boots,’ Detton told her, holding up one foot so that she could see his boot. ‘They were a bit stiff at first, but the blisters have all healed now.’

  ‘Are you getting enough to eat?’ Ce’Nedra asked them.

  ‘Plenty,’ Lammer said. ‘The Sendars even cook it for us. Did you know that there aren’t any serfs in the kingdom of the Sendars, my Lady? Isn’t that astonishing? It gives a man something to think about.’

  ‘It does indeed,’ Detton agreed. ‘They grow all that food, and everybody always has plenty to eat and clothes to wear and a house to sleep in, and there’s not a single serf in the whole kingdom.’

  ‘I see that they’ve given you equipment, too,’ the princess said, noting that the two now wore conical leather helmets and stiff leather vests.

  Lammer nodded and pulled off his helmet. ‘It’s got steel plates in it to keep a man from getting his brains knocked out,’ he told her. ‘They lined us all up as soon as we got here and gave every man a helmet and these hard leather tunics.’

  ‘They gave each of us a spear and a dagger, too,’ Detton said.

  ‘Have they shown you how to use them?’ Ce’Nedra asked.

  ‘Not yet, your Ladyship,’ Detton replied. ‘We’ve been concentrating on learning how to shoot arrows.’

  Ce’Nedra turned to her two companions. ‘Could you see that somebody takes care of that?’ she said. ‘I want to be sure that everybody knows how to defend himself, at least.’

  ‘We’ll see to it, your Majesty,’ Lelldorin answered.

  Not far away, a young serf was seated cross-legged in front of another tent. He lifted a handmade flute to his lips and began to play. Ce’Nedra had heard some of the finest musicians in the world performing at the palace in Tol Honeth, but the serf boy’s flute caught at her heart and brought tears to her eyes. His melody soared toward the azure sky like an unfettered lark.

  ‘How exquisite,’ she exclaimed.

  Lammer nodded. ‘I don’t know much about music,’ he said, ‘but the boy seems to play well. It’s a shame he’s not right in the head.’

  Ce’Nedra looked at him sharply. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He comes from a village in the southern part of the forest of Arendia. I’m told it’s a very poor village and that the lord of the region is very harsh with his serfs. The boy’s an orphan, and he was put to watching the cows when he was young. One time one of the cows strayed, and the boy was beaten half to death. He can’t talk any more.’

  ‘Do you know his name?’

  ‘Nobody seems to know it,’ Detton replied. ‘We take turns looking out for him – making sure he’s fed and has a place to sleep. There’s not much else you can do for him.’

  A small sound came from Lelldorin, and Ce’Nedra was startled to see tears streaming openly down the earnest young man’s face.

  The boy continued his playing, his melody heartbreakingly true, and his eyes sought out Ce’Nedra’s and met them with a kind of grave recognition.

  They did not stay much longer. The princess knew that her rank and position made the two serfs uncomfortable. She had made sure that they were all right and that her promise to them was being kept, and that was all that really mattered.

  As Ce’Nedra, Lelldorin, and Torasin walked toward the camp of the Sendars, they suddenly heard the sound of squabbling on the other side of a large tent.

  ‘I’ll pile it any place I want to,’ one man was saying belligerently.

  ‘You’re blocking the street,’ another man replied.

  ‘Street?’ the first snorted. ‘What are you talking about? This isn’t a town. There aren’t any streets.’

  ‘Friend,’ the second man explained with exaggerated patience, ‘we have to bring the wagons through here to get to the main supply dump. Now please move your equipment so I can get through. I still have a lot to do today.’

  ‘I’m not going to take orders from a Sendarian teamster who’s found an easy way to avoid fighting. I’m a soldier.’

  ‘Really?’ the Sendar replied dryly. ‘How much fighting have you seen?’

  ‘I’ll fight when the time comes.’

  ‘It may come quicker than you’d expected if you don’t get your gear out of my way. If I have to get down off this wagon to move it myself, it’s likely to make me irritable.’

  ‘I’m all weak with fright,’ the soldier retorted sarcastically.

  ‘Are you going to move it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I tried to warn you, friend,’ the teamster said in a resigned tone.

  ‘If you touch my gear, I’ll break your head.’

  ‘No. You’ll try to break my head.’

  There was a sudden sound of scuffling and several heavy blows.

  ‘Now get up and move your gear like I told you to,’ the teamster said. ‘I don’t have all day to stand around and argue with you.’

  ‘You hit me when I wasn’t looking,’ the soldier complained.

  ‘Do you want to watch the next one coming?’

  ‘All right, don’t get excited. I’m moving it.’

  ‘I’m glad we understand each other.’

  ‘Does that sort of thing happen very often?’ Ce’Nedra asked quietly.

  Torasin, grinning broadly, nodded. ‘Some of your troops feel the need to bluster, your Majesty,’ he replied, ‘and the Sendarian wagonneers usually don’t have the time to listen. Fistfights and street-brawling are second nature to those fellows, so their squabbles with the soldiers almost always end up the same way. It’s very educational, really.’

  ‘Men!’ Ce’Nedra said.

  In the camp of the Sendars they met Durnik. With him there was an oddly matched pair of young men.

  ‘A couple of old friends,’ Durnik said as he introduced them. ‘Just arrived on the supply barges. I think you’ve met Rundorig, Princess. He was at Faldor’s farm when we visited there last winter.’

  Ce’Nedra did in fact remember Rundorig. The tall, hulking young man, she recalled, was the one who was going to marry Garion’s childhood sweetheart, Zubrette. She greeted him warmly and gently reminded him that they had met before. Rundorig’s Arendish background made his mind move rather slowly. His companion, however, was anything but slow. Durnik introduced him as Doroon, another of Garion’s boyhood friends. Doroon was a small, wiry young man with a protruding Adam’s apple and slightly bulging eyes. After a few moments of shyness, his tongue began to run away with him. It was a bit hard to follow Doroon. His mind flitted from idea to idea, and his mouth raced along breathlessly, trying to keep up.

  ‘It was sort of rough going up in the mountains, your Ladyship
,’ he replied in answer to her question about their trip from Sendaria, ‘what with how steep the road was and all. You’d think that as long as the Tolnedrans were building a highway, they’d have picked leveler ground – but they seem to be fascinated by straight lines – only that’s not always the easiest way. I wonder why they’re like that.’ The fact that Ce’Nedra herself was Tolnedran seemed not to have registered on Doroon.

  ‘You came along the Great North Road?’ she asked him.

  ‘Yes – until we got to a place called Aldurford. That’s a funny kind of name, isn’t it? Although it makes sense if you stop and think about it. But that was after we got out of the mountains where the Murgos attacked us. You’ve never seen such a fight.’

  ‘Murgos?’ Ce’Nedra asked him sharply, trying to pin down his skittering thoughts.

  He nodded eagerly. ‘The man who was in charge of the wagons – he’s a great big fellow from Muros, I think he said – wasn’t it Muros he said he came from, Rundorig? Or maybe it was Camaar – for some reason I always get the two mixed up. What was I talking about?’

  ‘The Murgos,’ Durnik supplied helpfully.

  ‘Oh, yes. Anyway, the man in charge of the wagons said that there had been a lot of Murgos in Sendaria before the war. They pretended that they were merchants, but they weren’t – they were spies. When the war started, they all went up into the mountains, and now they come out of the woods and try to ambush our supply wagons – but we were ready for them, weren’t we Rundorig? Rundorig hit one of the Murgos with a big stick when the Murgo rode past our wagon – knocked him clear off his horse. Whack! Just like that! Knocked him clear off his horse. I’ll bet he was surprised.’ Doroon laughed a short little laugh, and then his tongue raced off again, describing in jerky, helter-skelter detail the trip from Sendaria.

  Princess Ce’Nedra was strangely touched by her meeting with Garion’s two old friends. She felt, moreover, a tremendous burden of responsibility as she realized that she had reached into almost every life in the west with her campaign. She had separated husbands from their wives and fathers from their children; and she had carried simple men, who had never been further than the next village, a thousand leagues and more to fight in a war they probably did not even begin to understand.

  The next morning the leaders of the army rode the few remaining leagues to the installations at the base of the escarpment. As they topped a rise, Ce’Nedra reined Noble in sharply and gaped in openmouthed astonishment as she saw the eastern escarpment for the first time. It was impossible! Nothing could be so vast! The great black cliff reared itself above them like an enormous wave of rock, frozen and for ever marking the boundary between east and west, and seemingly blocking any possibility of ever passing in either direction. It immediately stood as a kind of stark symbol of the division between the two parts of the world – a division that could no more be resolved than that enormous cliff could be leveled.

  As they rode closer, Ce’Nedra noted a great deal of bustling activity both at the foot of the escarpment and along its upper rim. Great hawsers stretched down from overhead, and Ce’Nedra saw elaborately intertwined pulleys along the foot of the huge cliffs.

  ‘Why are the pulleys at the bottom?’ King Anheg demanded suspiciously.

  King Rhodar shrugged. ‘How should I know? I’m not an engineer.’

  ‘All right, if you’re going to be that way about it, I’m not going to let your people touch a single one of my ships until somebody tells me why the pulleys are down here instead of up there.’

  King Rhodar sighed and beckoned to an engineer who was meticulously greasing a huge pulley block. ‘Have you got a sketch of the rigging handy?’ the portly monarch asked the grease-spattered workman.

  The engineer nodded, pulled a rolled sheet of grimy parchment out from under his tunic, and handed it to his king. Rhodar glanced at it and handed it to Anheg.

  Anheg stared at the complex drawing, struggling to trace out which line went where, and more importantly why it went there. ‘I can’t read this,’ he complained.

  ‘Neither can I,’ Rhodar told him pleasantly, ‘but you wanted to know why the pulleys are down here instead of up there. The drawing tells you why.’

  ‘But I can’t read it.’

  ‘That’s not my fault.’

  Not far away a cheer went up as a boulder half the size of a house and entwined in a nest of ropes rose majestically up the face of the cliff to the accompaniment of a vast creaking of hawsers.

  ‘You’ll have to admit that that’s impressive, Anheg,’ Rhodar said. ‘Particularly when you note that the entire rock is being lifted by those eight horses over there – with the help of that counterweight, of course.’ He pointed at another block of stone which was just as majestically coming down from the top of the escarpment.

  Anheg squinted at the two rocks. ‘Durnik,’ he said over his shoulder, ‘do you understand how all those work?’

  ‘Yes, King Anheg,’ the smith replied. ‘You see, the counterweight off-balances the—’

  ‘Don’t explain it to me, please,’ Anheg said. ‘As long as somebody I know and trust understands, that’s all that’s really important.’

  Later that same day, the first Cherek ship was lifted to the top of the escarpment. King Anheg watched the procedure for a moment or two, then winced and turned his back. ‘It’s unnatural,’ he muttered to Barak.

  ‘You’ve taken to using that expression a great deal lately,’ Barak noted.

  Anheg scowled at his cousin.

  ‘I just mentioned it, that’s all,’ Barak said innocently.

  ‘I don’t like changes, Barak. They make me nervous.’

  ‘The world moves on, Anheg. Things change every day.’

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean that I have to like it,’ the King of Cherek growled. ‘I think I’ll go to my tent for a drink or two.’

  ‘Want some company?’ Barak offered.

  ‘I thought you wanted to stand around and watch the world change.’

  ‘It can do that without my supervision.’

  ‘And probably will,’ Anheg added moodily. ‘All right, let’s go. I don’t want to watch this anymore.’ And the two of them went off in search of something to drink.

  Chapter Eleven

  Mayaserana, Queen of Arendia, was in a pensive mood. She sat at her embroidery in the large, sunny nursery high in the palace at Vo Mimbre. Her infant son, the crown prince of Arendia, cooed and gurgled in his cradle as he played with the string of brightly colored beads that had been the ostensible gift of the crown prince of Drasnia. Mayaserana had never met Queen Porenn, but the shared experience of motherhood made her feel very close to the reputedly exquisite little blonde on her far northern throne.

  Seated in a chair not far from the queen sat Nerina, Baroness of Vo Ebor. Each lady wore velvet, the queen in deep purple, and the Baroness in pale blue, and each wore the high, conical white headdress so admired by the Mimbrate nobility. At the far end of the nursery, an elderly lutanist softly played a mournful air in a minor key.

  The Baroness Nerina appeared to be even more melancholy than her queen. The circles beneath her eyes had grown deeper and deeper in the weeks since the departure of the Mimbrate knights, and she seldom smiled. Finally she sighed and laid aside her embroidery.

  ‘The sadness of thy heart doth resound in thy sighing, Nerina,’ the queen said gently. ‘Think not so of dangers and separation, lest thy spirits fail thee utterly.’

  ‘Instruct me in the art of banishing care, Highness,’ Nerina replied, ‘for I am in sore need of such teaching. My heart is bowed beneath a burden of concern, and try though I might to control them, my thoughts, like unruly children, return ever to the dreadful peril of my absent lord and our dearest friend.’

  ‘Be comforted in the knowledge that thy burden is shared by every lady in all of Mimbre, Nerina.’

  Nerina sighed again. ‘My care, however, lies in more mournful certainty. Other ladies, their affections firm-fixed on on
e beloved, can dare to hope that he might return from dreadful war unscathed; but I, who love two, can find no reason for such optimism. I must needs lose one at the least, and the prospect doth crush my soul.’

  There was a quiet dignity in Nerina’s open acceptance of the implications of the two loves that had become so entwined in her heart that they could no longer be separated. Mayaserana, in one of those brief flashes of insight which so sharply illuminated understanding, perceived that Nerina’s divided heart lay at the very core of the tragedy that had lifted her, her husband, and Sir Mandorallen into the realms of sad legend. If Nerina could but love one more than the other, the tragedy would end, but so perfectly balanced was her love for her husband with her love for Sir Mandorallen that she had reached a point of absolute stasis, for ever frozen between the two of them.

  The queen sighed. Nerina’s divided heart seemed somehow a symbol of divided Arendia, but, though the gentle heart of the suffering baroness might never be made one, Mayaserana was resolved to make a last effort to heal the breach between Mimbre and Asturia. To that end, she had summoned to the palace a deputation of the more stable leaders of the rebellious north, and her summons had appeared over a title she rarely used, Duchess of Asturia. At her instruction, the Asturians were even now drawing up a list of their grievances for her consideration.

  Later on that same sunny afternoon, Mayaserana sat alone on the double throne of Arendia, painfully aware of the vacancy beside her.

  The leader and spokesman of the group of Asturian noblemen was a Count Reldegen, a tall, thin man with iron gray hair and beard, who walked with the aid of a stout cane. Reldegen wore a rich green doublet and black hose, and, like the rest of the deputation, his sword was belted at his side. The fact that the Asturians came armed into the queen’s presence had stirred some angry muttering, but Mayaserana had refused to listen to urgings that their weapons be taken from them.

  ‘My Lord Reldegen,’ the queen greeted the Asturian as he limped toward the throne.

  ‘Your Grace,’ he replied with a bow.

  ‘Your Majesty,’ a Mimbrate courtier corrected him in a shocked voice.