I struggled to rise and my hand fastened on the half-dissolved head. But I was too far gone for nausea or even for relief. I managed to rise and totter a few yards up the hill. As I fell again I saw the horsemen coming down toward me
• • •
I awoke in my bed in the palace of King Cymru. The beds of the Wilsh were absurdly soft and they slept, the nobles anyway, in silken sheets. After the first night of tossing and turning I had got Hans to find a board for mine, to slip between frame and mattress. I realized it had been taken away and called out something about this. Footsteps crossed the room and Hans’s face looked down into mine.
He asked: “How are you, Captain?”
It was only then that I felt the pain in my leg and arms. They burned as they had in the embrace of the Bayemot, though less fiercely. My mind was fogged. I asked for water and Hans brought a pitcher and gave me some, supporting me so that I could drink.
“How long . . . ?”
“Since yesterday, Captain. It is nearly midday, and time to change the dressings on your wounds.”
I watched through a mist as he did this. The burns had been covered with rolled pads of linen, smeared with a yellow ointment. He removed them and cleaned my skin, which was raw and blood-red, oozing a thin ichor in places. He was very gentle, but it hurt. When I could not help wincing he drew back.
I said between my teeth: “Get on with it!”
“There is a drink they have which eases pain. They gave you some before. I will get it.”
“I think it also dulls the mind. I feel as though I have cushions inside my head. Do what has to be done. And then I will have my board back before I smother in softness.”
The drug was powerful. I stayed dazed until evening, swimming in and out of sleep. People came to see me: Greene, Edmund, the King himself with Snake silent and smiling in the background. I remember them being there but little else: nothing of what they said.
Blodwen came also, and her words I remember. She was not wearing white but a dress of soft brown, the color of beech leaves in winter, and her hair curled gold against it. She stood by the bed and took my hand in its clumsy encasement of linen.
She said: “You are a fool, Luke. But very brave.”
I shook my head and it hurt. Although I had tried to keep my head away from the beast my skin must have grazed it. Part of my face and neck were raw, though less so than my limbs.
I said: “A fool, yes. No more.”
She looked down at me, her wide blue eyes grave.
“The city buzzes with talk of you. The poets are vying as to which will be first with his epic of Luke the Bayemot Slayer, while the minstrels have already made up their songs and people gather in the streets to hear them. There is to be a banquet that will be the most magnificent in a hundred years, where my father will give you some great honor.”
I groaned. “What I did was stupid and after that lucky. I want no banquets nor honors.”
She smiled. “You have no choice. There are penalties to being a hero.”
“I can think of one. They have taken the board from my bed and will not give it back.”
“You must do as the apothecaries say. No one is free of obedience. And when you are well you must attend the banquet and accept the honor politely.”
Her hand was very small against my cocooned fist. I said:
“You will be there?”
She nodded. “Of course I will.”
They drank my health, spilling ale on the damask cloth and clinking their gold pots. It was very noisy and through the open windows—the evening was mild and the assembly generated of itself more heat than it needed—came the distant but even heavier din from the courtyard where the whole city, it seemed, was also drinking my health in the King’s ale. Then the others sat down, but the King remained standing.
He said: “There is no need to dwell on the deed which tonight we celebrate. Some of you were there, and the rest have been told of it. No man before this has killed a Bayemot. No warrior has even dared attack one except with arrows from a distance, and arrows do the beast no hurt. Yet this boy, for he is scarcely more than that, from a foreign country beyond the Burning Lands, braved the monster’s grasp and had the strength and cunning to kill it.
“I have pondered how we may do him honor and it has not been easy to find an answer. Gold would be an insult, and in rank he is already son and brother to Princes, proclaimed a Prince to be. It has not been easy, but I think I have found something worthy of him and which he will not refuse. I offer him, as a gift from all the Wilsh, the greatest treasure we possess. He is worthy of it, and I think he will guard it well.”
He smiled and raised his goblet, whose heavily chased gold was crusted round with pearls.
“I offer him my daughter, your Princess. Rise, and drink to the betrothal of Luke and Blodwen!”
EIGHT
THE BUILDING RATS
I DO NOT KNOW WHAT was in the salve that the apothecaries put on my burns, but it was powerful stuff. The marks disappeared rapidly in the days that followed and a week after the hunt my skin showed no more than a slight redness and roughness.
Wherever I went in the city people stared at me. When I could once more sit a horse without discomfort I persuaded Edmund to ride out. We did not take either road but went north where an old track led up into the hills. The city came to an end in a huddle of workmen’s cottages with neither towers nor domes, and we rode alone. The year was ripening. Trees were heavy with leaf and flowers grew out of the grass. From the thickets songbirds hurled defiance at one another in syllables of cool beauty.
There had been rain that morning and from the look of the clouds there might be more, but the air was fresh and the sky had some blue in it. I breathed it deeply and said:
“This is good. And good to be free of eyes and tongues.”
“Is praise so hard to bear?”
“Maybe not when it is merited.”
“You slew the Bayemot,” Edmund said. “A thing unparalleled.”
“And if instead the Bayemot had eaten me, what would the Wilsh have said?”
“At least that you had courage.”
“Not courage—foolhardiness. And they would have been right in it. I did not save the man. I did not even attack the Bayemot to do so. I rode at it, in an ungovernable temper, because I thought the King mocked me, and jumped because my pride would not let me turn back.”
We rode in silence for a while. Edmund said at last:
“They say it was small for a Bayemot. Usually they are twice that size, or bigger.”
“Had it been even three inches higher from the ground I could not have reached its brain or heart or whatever it was I stabbed. As I say, folly.”
“I saw you ride down at it,” Edmund said. “I called but I do not think you heard me. When I saw you pinned to its side, striking at it with a dagger, I thought that I should go to help you.”
“You could have done no good.”
“So I told myself, and very likely it was true. I think before I act—and then think again. I am not entirely a coward, but I do not lose myself in action as you do.”
I shook my head. “It was stupidity. By rights I should be dead, and it would have been my own fault. Dead and derided by these same people who make up songs about me. The southern fool who tried to fight a dagger duel with the Bayemot. Luck made the difference between life and death, triumph and disgrace.”
“And was it luck that won the Contest for you, those years ago?”
I remembered that spring day, like this one warm after early rain, and how in the last round, Edmund having three men against my two, I had ridden away unguarded and had seen him and his lieutenant come after me. And how, as they closed in from either side, I had thrown myself from my saddle and pulled him from his horse.
“When you leaped at me,” Edmund said, “then, too, I paused to think. But there was no time for thinking. And when we remounted and rode at each other, just the two of us with no helpers,
it was knowing I had failed before that made me fail again.”
So many things stemmed from that: within days his father’s death and the plunge from palace into poverty. I said:
“I planned the first part of the Contest. But in the end it was luck.”
“No, I do not think you can call it luck. I know nothing of the Spirits and am not concerned with them, but I think you have a demon who serves you well. I hope he will always do so.”
There was a hill with a crumbling ruin on top. It was too steep for the horses so we tied them to a thorn tree and climbed on foot. Sheep cropped the grass, bells tinkling as they moved. Many were polybeast, either in shape or color—I saw several that were not white but black. I noted this idly, not shocked as I would once have been nor horrified by the thought that they might any day be served as mutton at the King’s table. “They will learn,” the peddler had said, and I was learning.
The ruin was very old, in places no more than a groundwork of stone tracing a plan. There was nothing in it worth seeing. We sat on the remains of a low wall and looked down into the valley. The city was small and peaceful, no faint echo of its tumult reaching us here. Passing sunlight caught it and struck new and sharper colors from its painted spires and domes.
“A fine sight,” Edmund said.
“Yes.”
“When do we leave for home?”
“In a week, Greene says.”
“You still allow him to think he decides such matters?”
“He was named commander by my brother.”
“Tell Cymru that.” He paused and repeated: “A fine sight. Do you think our Winchester would look dull and drab to someone used to this?”
He meant Blodwen, I guessed. We had not talked of the betrothal. I had been waiting for him to say something, and perhaps he had been waiting for me. This was an opportunity but the moment passed.
I got to my feet. “We had better go down again.”
• • •
In all sorts of ways I was becoming accustomed to the Wilsh and this dazzling city of theirs. Their scents faded in my nostrils into a familiarity that was not unpleasant, their bright clothes and ornaments, their ways of talking and laughing and embracing each other in public—all these lost their power to shock. I grew used to the sight of Snake’s misshapen hands and his weird sinuous walk, and to the other polymufs about the court. I counted ten rings on the fingers of one fat noble and the same day learned why the mouth of the Perfumer Royal was so red: he painted his lips like a woman. Both things amused me: no more than that.
The morning of the day before our departure Hans was to take our horses to be shod. I knew that whatever the qualities of the farrier I could rely on Hans himself to see it well done, but I went down there all the same. The farriery was behind the royal stables—a big place with five smiths at work. Hans was holding my horse, which had been finished. We examined her feet together and I said:
“Good enough.”
Hans said: “He makes a fair job of it, for one who is not a dwarf.”
The man was at work on a rear hoof of Hans’s own horse. I heard the hiss of hot iron being pressed home and smelled the familiar stench of burning. It was only as the farrier straightened up that I realized that he too was polymuf, having a twisted back. He was quite young, in his thirties I judged. It had been surprising that a man should shoe horses but this was more extraordinary. As Hans had said, it was dwarfs work in our city, and jealously guarded as such.
I said: “At any rate, they should see us home.”
Hans said, in a low voice that would not carry to the farrier:
“Do we return tomorrow, then, Captain?”
I looked at him. “As you know.”
“There is a story in the city.”
“A hundred, more likely. Which is this?”
He stared at me with heavy, dark eyes. “They say that the embassy might go back without you—that you might stay here among the Wilsh where you have won fame and the King’s daughter.”
I laughed. “They spin fine yarns!”
“Then it is not true, Captain?”
“No, Hans. Not true.”
The last hoof was done and I offered silver to the polymuf but he refused it; all was paid by the King. I went to the stables with Hans and saw the horses put to grooming. Later we walked together up to the palace. He was never one to chatter but I thought his silence had a brooding in it. I said:
“This tale of my staying when the embassy goes back—you believed it true?”
“I did not know, Captain.”
“But if it had been true—if I had chosen to stay and keep you with me, would you have been glad of it?”
He looked at me. “Very glad.”
“But why?”
“Because I am a man here.”
“You are still my servant, as you were in Winchester.”
“And would be anywhere. It is not what I am to you but what I am to others. In this city there is no talk of dwarf and polymuf and true men. All are men.”
“I doubt they would make you a warrior. There is a height mark which Cymru’s soldiers must reach.”
“Perhaps here I would not be plagued by idle dreams. I do not think I would.”
“And your home, family—you would he willing not to see them again?”
Family ties and the love of home were deep and strong in dwarfs. They lived close with one another and were devoted to their kin. Hans did not answer at once and I said:
“Your father would miss you.”
“In a way,” Hans said, “and in a way be glad. My dreams remind him, I think, of dreams he had in his younger days, and put away. Of course I would miss him, too, and my brothers and sisters; above all my mother. There is always something to lose. But maybe more to gain.”
He spoke with passion. I had had no idea that he felt like this. I said:
“Listen, if you would stay that can be arranged. The King will find a place for you.”
“And you, Captain?”
“By the Great, Dwarf, I can do without a servant!”
I stopped, realizing what I had said. It was no insult, or I had not thought it such, and in Winchester neither of us would have noticed the term I had used. But we were not in Winchester. I said:
“I am sorry, Hans.”
He smiled. “There is no need for it, Captain.”
“But it is true that I can manage by myself. I am used to doing so. Stay, if it is your wish.”
“It is not my wish if you are going.”
“I must.”
“Why, Captain?”
We had come to the gardens at the rear of the palace. There were lawns, so smooth and so finely clipped that from a distance they looked like squares and circles and crescents of green cloth. Gardeners trundled cutting devices up and down. They were on wheels, and a bladed cylinder turned with the wheels and sheared the grass. In Winchester they would have been called machines. Between ran walks of finely sifted red gravel, leading to continually splashing fountains. Wooden casks, brightly painted, contained flowering shrubs brought from the glass house across the river. Above us loomed the palace, with all its domes and towers.
I said: “To give news of the embassy to the Prince, my brother.”
“Captain Greene can do that.”
There were swans on the river and one of them flew low across the gardens with a heavy flap of wings. Before I could speak again, Hans went on, more rapidly.
“There would be advantages in staying, Captain. The King favors you.”
“So does the Prince of Winchester.”
“In Winchester there are intrigues.”
I looked at him in surprise. He was dwarf to me still and the remark improper. I said with some sharpness:
“There are intrigues in every city. Here, too.”
“Of a different kind. No plotting for thrones, no daggers in the night. The King is safe, and the King’s friends. They intrigue for amusement. In Winchester the business is in deadly e
arnest.”
I thought of the Blaines and the Hardings. I said:
“If you have heard of anything that threatens my brother . . .”
He shook his head. “No, Captain. But the possibilities are always there. As you know.”
It might be that he referred to that intrigue which had deposed Prince Stephen and raised up my father. I looked at him closely, ready to be angry, and saw nothing in his face but concern for me. I said:
“Enough, Hans. If there is to be trouble at home, the more reason for me to return. But my offer to you stands. Stay if you wish and I will obtain the King’s favor for you.”
“No,” Hans said. “Thank you, Captain, but I will not stay.”
• • •
That which Hans had told as gossip of the city took on hard substance within minutes of my leaving him. A messenger from the King told me Cymru desired my presence. I was taken to one of the smaller state rooms and found him in talk with Snake on a matter of taxes. He did not dismiss his Chancellor but bade me sit with them.
He did not indulge in the long preliminaries which were common among the Wilsh but put the matter to me at once and plainly. There was no need for me to go south with Greene. His people did not wish to lose me. Nor did he. Nor, he added with a smile, did his daughter, the Princess.
I hesitated before replying. He must have taken this for encouragement, because he went on to say that I need not worry as to wealth or position. At the banquet, it was true, he had conferred only one thing on me, though that his most precious possession; but it carried benefits beyond itself. I would be made a Count—house and servants would be put at my disposal, and the means to maintain them as befitted a person of rank and nearness to the throne.
I shook my head and said that I had not been concerned with such things. Cymru said:
“But you hesitate?”
“If it is the King’s wish that I stay, then of course I must.”
“No, Luke. It is for you to decide, freely.”
“Then with permission, sire, I will return with the embassy.”
“You are homesick for your own land? Our ways must be strange to you, but I thought you had grown more used to them.”