Very soon his head started to spin. Then the blond boy in the portrait, that delightful boy with the clean cheeks, unstained by a sword, nodded his head and smiled meaningfully.
Evening was drawing close; the hour had arrived when the day was not yet dead but the night was not yet born. Beyond the window the sky faded. Shadows crept out of the corners, and the room transformed. Studying the muzzles of the boars on the tapestries, still visible in the twilight, Egert felt a faint, vague uneasiness.
He cautiously paid heed to this awkward, uncomfortable, tenacious feeling. It was as if there was an expectation, an expectation of something that had neither form nor name, something shadowy but inescapable. The boars bared their teeth at him; the fair-haired boy, snuggled in the lap of his mother, smiled; the edge of the valance over the bed quivered sluggishly; and Egert suddenly felt cold in his warm couch.
He stood up, trying to free himself from the unpleasant, uncertain anxiety. He wanted to call for someone, but then he thought better of the idea. He sat down again, agonizingly trying to identify the cause of his anxiety and to determine where the threat was coming from. He sprang up again to go into his drawing room and there, to his joy, was a servant bringing in lighted candles. An ancient, many-armed candelabrum was standing on the table, the room was brightly lit, the twilight had already given way to night, and Egert immediately forgot about the strange sensation that had swept over him at the juncture between day and night.
That night he slept without dreams.
* * *
Far from Kavarren, in a room filled with harsh incense, two people talked, their hands resting on a tabletop of polished wood. One set of hands was senile, with long nervous fingers, and the other young, white and strong, with a tattoo on the wrist:
“The mage refused, Your Lordship.”
“I am disappointed, my brother. You failed to persuade him.”
“This mage is a proud man. Money is not important to him—perhaps he is well-to-do. He does not need power, and he did not want to be introduced to our Secret. He did not believe us.”
“You failed me, my brother.”
“We tried … we did everything we could … but … but we failed, Your Lordship,” the younger man replied, and his voice audibly cracked. “But we will find another way. We will manage without the mage.”
The old man kept silent for a long while. The gray mane of his hair hid his face; clever, sharp eyes looked from under the white eyebrows.
“I rely on you, my brother,” he said finally, and his thin fingers were bound into the locks of his hair. “We cannot be delayed any longer. The world gets older; people become impudent. Our brotherhood is losing influence.”
“Fragile peace will be changed by a new one,” the young man said confidently.
“Fragile peace will be changed by a new one,” echoed the old man. “You have to hurry, Fagirra. The End of Time is on the threshold.”
After leaving the room, the man with the tattoo walked along the rock terrace and stood for some time, inhaling the smoky air the city. Then he pulled the gray hood onto his head, nodded to the guards at the gate, and found his way to a bustling street via a dark lane. Two women with baskets, returning from the market, bowed stiffly to him and hurried to the other side of the street.
He walked, wrapped in his hooded robe with his face covered. When he stared at someone’s back the person would shudder, look back, bow, or dive into the crowd. But people seemed to bow with less respect than before, and some people did not bow at all—they looked at him sullenly, and the young ones—some of them even glared at him with naked challenge. The lesson will have to be severe, he thought with a sigh. Cruelty will be necessary. He walked on.
He came to a small river shining in the sun under the humpbacked bridge in a deserted section of the city. A poor man, still as a statue, sat close by. His dry hand projected like a dead branch, vainly expecting alms.
The man in the hooded robe slowed his steps, almost completely hidden in the shade.
A passerby emerged at the opposite end of the lane. How could this village fellow have strayed there—perhaps he was lost, perhaps someone gave him bad directions? He looked every inch a young merchant from the suburbs who had sold off his goods and was so happy with life that he glanced kindly at the poor man.
“Take a coin, drink to my luck.…”
“Thank you,” answered the poor man slowly.
Suddenly the beggar’s hand gripped the wrist of the merchant with surprising force. A broad-shouldered, red-faced confederate emerged from an alleyway and caught the purse, which was snatched from the passerby’s waist seconds earlier by the poor man. The merchant tried to shout, but the bulky fellow threw a rope around his neck.
Everything ended very rapidly. The body of the unlucky merchant, “relieved” of purse, tobacco pouch, and thin neckkerchief, was packed into a bag—not to be distinguished from hundreds of other bags, which were in abundance in the commercial streets. The bulky fellow and beggar, breathing heavily, finished their job when a shadow appeared on the road.
Both raised their eyes and started back in horror.
The gray-robed man smiled from under the hood. In his hand—with the tattoo on the wrist—coins tinkled.
“Tail, Nutty, be moderately greedy,” said the man in a soft voice that made the killers tremble. “I require your assistance.”
* * *
A week went by, and the city thankfully forgot about the tragic incident associated with the name of Egert Soll. Grass began to grow on the student’s grave, it was announced that a new arena for the boar fights would be erected on the shore of the Kava river, and the captain of the guards, the husband of the beautiful Dilia, proclaimed that there would be a parade before the guards set out into the countryside for their upcoming drills, which were pompously termed military field maneuvers.
The maneuvers took place every year. They were implemented to remind the gentlemen of the guards that they were not simply a riotous assembly of carousers and duelists, but a military unit. Egert loved these drills because they naturally afforded him the chance to boast of his prowess, and he always looked forward to their approach.
This time he was not looking forward to them.
His wound had scabbed over; it almost did not hurt anymore. His manservant had caught the trick of shaving Egert with special care: hair on one’s cheeks and chin was considered incompatible with aristocratic birth, so Egert did not consider, even for a moment, hiding his wound with a beard. Little by little, those around him became accustomed to his new appearance, and he himself often forgot to think about his wound, but with every passing day the strange anxiety, which had taken up residence in his soul, grew steadily, until it began to turn into a flurry of alarm.
During the day he felt tolerably well, but as soon as darkness settled in, the alarm unaccountably crept out of shadowy corners and chased him home, where at the command of the young master, his servant brought almost all the candles in the house into his rooms. However, even though Egert’s rooms blazed with light like a ballroom, at times it still seemed to him that the boars, their eyes full of blood, might trot right out of the tapestries.
One evening he found a means of combating this strange affliction: He ordered his servant to turn down the bed before sunset. He lay down, and although he did not succeed in falling asleep right away, Egert stubbornly refused to open his clenched eyes. Finally, he slid into slumber and then into a dream.
Glorious Heaven, it would have been better to stand on guard the whole night.
In the desolate predawn hour a dream came to him. He had already had many dreams that night, simple, ordinary, more or less pleasant dreams: women, horses, acquaintances, cockroaches. Waking up, he forgot his dreams sooner than he realized he had dreamed; this time he awoke in the middle of the night, his sweaty nightshirt molded to his body, shaking like a puppy left out in the rain.
It was likely influenced by some long-forgotten tale about the incursion of th
e black plague that arose from the furthest reaches of his memory, one of those horrible tales of the elders, about which he had laughed when he was still an adolescent. In his dream he saw a strange creature in a blackened, shapeless garment mounting the terraced steps of his house, its face muffled with rags blackened with pitch. In the hands of this visitant there was a tool that resembled a pitchfork, with extremely long, inverted tines; it was like an enormous bird claw, clutched tight with spasms. The manor was empty. The visitant climbed to the drawing room, where the lid of the harpsichord was thrown up, the candles were burnt down to their stubs, and Egert’s mother sat with her hands resting on the keys: yellow, desiccated, dead hands. The visitant lifted up his pitchfork, and Mother toppled to the side like a wooden figurine. The pitch-covered creature raked the dead body with his tool like a gardener rakes up last year’s leaves.
Egert could not remain in the dark for a second longer: Don’t remember that dream, forget, forget! He lit a candle; then, burning himself, he lit another. The portrait gathered shape out of the darkness: a blond boy in the lap of a woman. Egert froze for a second, peering into the face of his young mother, as if begging for protection like a child. A cricket sang somewhere nearby; the dead hours of night stood beyond the window. Egert clutched the candelabrum to his chest and stepped closer to the portrait, and in the twinkling of an eye, the face of the woman in the portrait twitched with a dreadful malice, turned blue, broke into a grin.…
With a scream he awoke for a second time, this time in truth. Beyond the windows was the same old night, deep, sultry, and clammy.
He lit the candles with trembling hands. Shuffling his bare feet, he drifted around the room from corner to corner, clutching his shivering shoulders with his hands. What if this were yet another dream? What if he was doomed until the end of his years to live in ghastly dreams and to awake only to exchange one nightmare for another? What would happen tomorrow? What dreams would tomorrow bring?
Dawn found him lying in his couch, doubled up, haggard, and trembling.
* * *
A few days later, it was his turn to do his duty on night patrol. He rejoiced; since that unforgettable dream, the very sight of his bed was disagreeable to him. It was far better to spend the night in the saddle with his weapons at hand than to struggle against the treacherous desire to leave the candles burning until morning!
There were five of them on guard: Egert who, as a lieutenant, was the leader of the patrol; Karver; Lagan; and two very young guards, about sixteen years old.
The patrol was a traditional part of the nighttime existence of Kavarren. Any shopkeeper would declare without pride that he slept more peacefully when he could hear the clip-clop of hooves and the voices of the sentries beneath his windows. There was rarely anything serious to attend to; there were just not enough nocturnal thieves, and those who did decide to thieve went about their work quietly and apprehensively: the gentlemen of the guards were very serious about their task.
Having received, as was usual, parting words from their captain, the guards set out. Egert and Karver rode in front, and behind them rode Lagan and the two younglings, Ol and Bonifor. Having taken a turn through the streets that surrounded the Town Hall, they made their way toward the city gates. One after another, the lights in the windows went out. The rasps of latching dead bolts and the clatters of shutters swinging shut could be heard from all around. The tavern by the gate was wide awake; the cavalcade hovered in front of the wide oak doors, trying to decide whether or not to stop in for a minute and visit the landlady who ruled over the lovely Ita and Feta. In the end, duty triumphed over temptation and the patrol was about to continue on its way when a drunk, lurching, stumbled out of the doors of the tavern.
In the darkness and in his intoxication, the reveler had neither family nor name: it was impossible to determine whether he was an aristocrat or a commoner. Jauntily whooping, Karver rode his horse toward the drunk. Cantering at nearly full tilt, he raised his steed onto its hind legs right in front of the stupefied drunkard, not touching the poor man, but letting the hot breath of his horse pour over him and thus terrifying him half to death. The guards laughed. Emitting a strange, distressed cry, the drunk sank down onto the pavement, but Karver was satisfied, and he returned to his companions, all the while peering over at Egert. Egert had once taught his friend that particular jest.
They moved on. The town lay in darkness. Only the torches in the hands of the patrol and the rare stars that shone weakly through the openings in the clouds illuminated the black façades of the sleeping houses. They rode silently. The pavement rang out under the hooves of their horses, and Egert, who found it unpleasant to watch the shadows that danced along the street, focused on the worn stones passing by under his horse.
The pavement below him suddenly seemed like a river undergoing the first thaw of the year: the cobblestones thronged without order; they cracked and jutted over one another, raising their jagged edges as if waiting for victims. Egert felt a chill, and he suddenly understood something he had never realized before; he understood and was astounded by his former blindness: the stones of the pavement were hostile, deadly, and dangerous, and a man who fell on them from a height, even if from the back of a horse, would most certainly be doomed.
The cavalcade continued on its way, and Egert’s stallion clip-clopped his hooves along with all the others, but his rider could no longer see anything around him. Squeezing the reins with sweaty palms, Egert Soll, a natural-born horseman, nearly died from the fear of falling off his horse.
The crunch of a broken neck kept repeating in his ears. The stones of the pavement thrust upward lasciviously, as if anticipating the moment when the head of the brave lieutenant would burst like a ripe melon on their burnished edges. An avalanche of sweat rolled down Egert’s back even though the night was brisk, almost cold. In the space of two blocks, he managed to die a thousand times until, finally, his horse began to sense that something was wrong, as if the perturbation of his rider had been transferred to him as well.
The cavalcade whirled around suddenly. The agitated stallion jerked, and this unexpected movement was enough to unseat the celebrated equestrian Egert.
Egert did not understand how it happened. He had long ago forgotten how to fall from a horse; the last time it had happened to him, he was only ten years old. He felt only a momentary horror; then the black sky with its smattering of stars flashed before his eyes and was followed by a painful but, to Egert’s astonishment, nonfatal blow.
He was lying on his side. All he could see in front of him were his horse’s hooves and the torch that had flown from his hand as he fell. It now sputtered in a puddle to his left. He heard astounded questions somewhere in the distance, which caused him to comprehend suddenly what had happened. Egert was thankful for the blessing of being able to pretend he had lost consciousness.
What could possibly cause a lieutenant of the guards, especially Egert Soll, to fall from a horse that was going no faster than a walk? Only death, thought Egert as he lay there, and he wished to die.
“Egert! Hey, help me, Lagan! It’s like he’s dead! What happened?”
He felt someone’s hands grasp him by the shoulders and turn him over so he was facing upward, but he did not give any signs of life.
“The canteen, Bonifor, the canteen, quickly!”
A small stream of water spilled over his face. After waiting a bit longer, he groaned and opened his eyes.
In the light of the torches, he could see Karver, Lagan, Ol, and Bonifor bending over him; their faces were all surprised, and those of the younger guards were still frightened.
“He’s alive,” Ol noted with relief.
“How did this happen to him?” Lagan asked stolidly. “Egert, are you drunk, or what?”
“When we set off for the night, he was sober,” Karver retorted. “Unless, while we were riding, he somehow managed to…”
“While on duty?” asked Lagan good-naturedly.
“Well, he doesn?
??t smell of drink,” growled Bonifor.
Egert was quite embarrassed to be lying on his back and serving as an object of general interest; besides, the pavement stones, which had waited for their chance, were sticking into his back. Fidgeting, he raised himself up onto his elbow, and at the same time a few hands immediately helped him stand up.
“What’s wrong with you?” Karver asked finally.
Egert did not know what was wrong with him, but he had no plans to give the other guards a detailed account of what had happened.
“I don’t remember,” he lied, trying to make his voice sound as hoarse as possible. “I remember we were riding. Then everything went dark, obscure, and then I was lying on the ground.”
The other guards exchanged looks.
“That’s not good,” said Lagan. “You should go see a doctor.”
Egert did not answer. Suppressing a shiver, he reluctantly climbed back on his horse. The night patrol continued, but until the early morning hours, Egert kept catching inquisitive glances thrown at him by his comrades, as if they were waiting for him to fall from his horse again.
* * *
A few days later, the regiment went out on maneuvers.
Their send-off was accompanied by all sorts of pomp: as was customary, the maneuvers were preceded by a parade. Almost the entire population of Kavarren gathered on the embankments; moreover, the heads of the esteemed families appeared with miniature banners of their Houses, and their drawn swords, held up like the batons of bandleaders, served as banner poles. The mayor was robed in a mantle embroidered with heraldic animals. Boys whose names had been entered into the roster of the regiment but who had not yet reached manhood were formed into a column and marched back and forth several times. A fifteen-year-old youth marched at the head of the column while a three-year-old lad in a little uniform with a wooden knife stuck in his belt brought up the hind end. The difference in the length of the strides of these future guards was obvious; the tiny lad was panting heavily, and he foundered a number of times, getting tangled in his baldric. However, he never cried; he was well aware of the honor he had been favored with today.