“Leave him alone.” The words came from behind the enormous back of the elder Soll.
Egert’s mother, a pale woman with perpetually hunched shoulders, did not often take the liberty of interrupting the conversations of men.
“Leave him alone. Whatever may have happened to our son, for the first time in years—”
She stopped short. She wanted to say that for the first time in years, she did not sense in her son the harsh and predatory tendency that frightened her and transformed her own child into something foreign and offensive, but she too decided not to say this aloud and only looked at Egert longingly and sympathetically.
Egert grabbed his sword and left the house in haste.
That day, the mock swordfights went on without Lieutenant Soll because, after exiting the gates of his house, he did not make his way to the regiment. Instead, he wandered the empty streets in the direction of the city gates.
He stopped in front of the tavern; there is no telling what compelled him to turn toward the wide, well-known door.
At that early morning hour, the tavern was empty, but a bent back could be glimpsed among the far-off tables. Egert walked closer. Without unbending, the back crawled along the floor, sweeping and humming a tune without words or melody. When Egert pulled out a chair and sat down, the humming broke off, the back straightened, and the maidservant Feta, red and breathless from happiness, let a shaggy mop fall to the floor.
“Lord Egert!”
Forcing a smile, Egert ordered some wine.
Square spots of sunlight lay on the tables, the floor, and the carved backs of the chairs. A fly buzzed weakly, bumping its brow against the glass of a square window. Chewing on the edge of his mug, Egert stared dully at the carved patterns on the tabletop.
The word had been spoken, and now Egert repeated it to himself, wincing from pain. Cowardice. Glorious Heaven, he was a coward! His heart had already failed him innumerable times, and there were witnesses to his fear, the most important of whom was Lieutenant Soll, the former Lieutenant Soll, a hero and the embodiment of fearlessness!
He stopped chewing on his mug and started in on his fingernails. Cowards were disgusting and despicable. More than once, Egert had observed others being cowards; he had seen the outward signs of their fear: pallor, uncertainty, trembling knees. He now knew how his own cowardice looked. Fear was a monstrosity, worthless and insignificant when viewed from the outside, but when seen from within, it was an executioner, a tormentor of irresistible power.
Egert tossed his head. Was it possible that Karver, for example, experienced something similar when he got scared? Perhaps all people did?
For the tenth time, Feta appeared with a rag in hand, scrubbing away Lord Soll’s table until it shone. Finally, he answered her shy, ingratiating glance.
“Don’t fidget so, you little plover. Take a seat next to me.”
She sat with such alacrity that the oak chair creaked. “What is my lord’s pleasure?”
He recalled how the knives and daggers he had thrown at her had rooted themselves in the lintel above her head; he recalled it and was covered in cold horror.
Groaning compassionately, she immediately responded to his sudden pallor. “Lord Soll, you’ve been ill for so long!”
“Feta,” he asked, lowering his eyes, “are you afraid of anything?”
She smiled happily, deciding that Lord Soll was, apparently, flirting with her. “I’m afraid that someday I might displease Lord Soll and then the landlady would fire me.”
“Indeed,” breathed Egert patiently, “but are you afraid of anything else?”
Feta blinked at him, not understanding.
“Well, darkness, for example,” prompted Egert. “Are you afraid of the dark?”
Feta’s face darkened, as though she was remembering something. She muttered grudgingly, “Yes. But why do you ask, Lord Egert?”
“And heights?” It seemed he had not noticed her question.
“I’m afraid of heights too,” she confessed quietly.
There was an oppressive pause that went on for some time; Feta stared at the table. Just when Egert became sure that he would not hear another word out of her, the girl shivered and whispered, “And, you know, especially thunder, when it goes off without warning. Ita told me that in our village there was one little girl who was killed dead by thunder.…” Her breath faltered. She put her palms to her cheeks and added, blushing painfully, “But what I am most afraid of is … getting pregnant.”
Egert was taken aback; frightened by her own candor, Feta began to babble, as if trying to smooth out the awkwardness with a flood of words.
“I’m afraid of bedbugs, cockroaches, tramps, mute beggars, landladies, and mice. But mice aren’t all that terrifying: I can get over that fear.”
“Get over it?” echoed Egert. “But how do you … What do you feel, when you are scared?”
She smiled tentatively. “Afraid, and everything. Inside, it’s as if everything gets weak and all.” She suddenly blushed hotly, and under the veneer of her inability to explain there remained one more important sign of fear.
“Feta,” asked Egert quietly, “were you afraid when I threw knives at you?”
She shivered as if remembering the best day of her life. “Of course not! I know that Lord Egert has a steady hand.”
The landlady snarled from the kitchen, and Feta, making her apologies, flitted away.
The square patches of sunlight slowly crawled from the table to the floor, then from the floor onto a chair. Egert sat, hunched over, and traced the edge of his empty mug with his finger.
Feta could not understand him. No one alive could understand him. The ordinary world in which he, by right, was sovereign and master, that warm, dependable world had been wrenched inside out; it now stared hard at Egert through the tips of swords, the jagged edges of stones, medicinal lancets. Shadows dwelled in this new world, and the nighttime visions that had already caused Egert so many sleepless nights in his blazing rooms. In this new world he was insignificant and piteous, as helpless as a fly with its wings ripped off. What would happen when others found out?
The heavy door crashed open. The gentlemen of the guards poured into the tavern, and Karver was among them.
Egert remained sitting where he was, though he did perk up involuntarily, as though he was about to flee. The guards surrounded him instantly. Egert’s ears began to ring from all the boisterous greetings, and his shoulder ached painfully from all the hearty punches.
“Here we were, talking about you!” trumpeted Dron’s voice over all the others. “As they say, ‘You gossip about a wasp, and behold, the wasp takes wing.’”
“They said that you were on the verge of death,” one of the younger guards reported merrily.
“Don’t hold your breath!” laughed Lagan. “We’ll all die sooner. But if you’re sitting in a tavern, that must mean you’re better.”
“He is sitting in a tavern and avoiding his friends,” mourned Karver bitterly, earning a few reproachful glances.
Egert met his friend’s gaze reluctantly, and he was surprised at what he saw there. Karver was watching his masterful friend with a strange expression on his face; it was as though he had just asked a question and was patiently awaiting the answer.
Feta and Ita were already bustling around the new guests. Someone raised his glass to the renewed health of Lieutenant Soll. They drank, but Egert choked on the wine. From the corner of his eye, he could see that Karver had not stopped examining him with that inquisitive gaze.
“What are you, some kind of hermit crab, hiding away all quiet?” asked Lagan cheerfully. “A guard without good company withers and fades like a rose in a chamber pot.”
The young Ol and Bonifor laughed far too loudly for the quality of the joke.
“I swear by my spurs, he must have been writing a novel in letters,” proposed Dron. “Sometimes, I’d pass by on patrol and see that his rooms were lit until morning.”
“Really?”
marveled Karver, but the others just clicked their tongues.
“I’d like to know if there’s some beauty to whom Egert devotes these vigils,” drawled one of the guards in a faux romantic voice.
Egert sat in the middle of the joyful din, smiling sourly and uncertainly. Karver’s intent gaze was discomforting him.
“Dilia sends her regards,” Karver remarked carelessly. “She stopped by the tilting yard and, among other things, inquired why the fights were taking place without Egert.”
“By the way, what should we tell the captain?” Dron asked suddenly.
Egert gritted his teeth. More than anything else, he wanted to disappear from this place, but to leave now would be an insult to the general merriment and the guards’ benevolent attitude toward him.
“Wine!” he yelled out to the landlady.
In the course of the next two hours, Egert Soll made the most important discovery of his life: Alcohol, if drunk in sufficient quantities, can suppress both spiritual unrest and fear.
Toward dusk, the crowd of guards, fairly thinned out by this time, spilled out onto the streets and stumbled away from the Faithful Shield. Egert hollered and laughed no less than the others. From time to time he caught the alert glances of Karver from the corner of his eye, but the inebriated Egert no longer cared: he was enjoying the long-awaited awareness, however false, of his own strength, freedom, and daring.
All the townsfolk who came across this gloriously drunken company shrank back toward the curbs, not at all desirous of crossing paths with the gentlemen of the guards. On the embankment, a lamplighter was kindling the streetlights: the revelers nearly knocked his ladder out from under him. Egert roared with laughter. The streetlamps danced in front of his eyes; they circled in a waltz, bowing and curtseying. The thick air of late spring was full of smells, and Egert gathered them in with his nose and mouth, experiencing with every swallow the fragrance of the sun-warmed river, the freshness of grass, wet stone, pitch, someone’s perfume, and even warm manure. Embracing Karver with his left arm and, one by one, all the other guards with his right, he unquestioningly accepted that his illness had left him, and that like any cured invalid, he had the right to an especially intense joy for life.
Opposite the entrance to the Faithful Shield, not far from the place where the student and his fiancée, Toria, had first alighted from their carriage, there was a puddle standing in a pothole. The puddle was as deep as regret and as greasy as a feast day broth. Neither the wind nor the sun had dried up this puddle; though it had shrunk slightly, it had preserved itself from the early spring until the very threshold of summer, and it could be expected that such unusual persistence would help it remain there until the fall.
The puddle caught the fading, evening sky on its black, oily surface. A drunken tailor wobbled on its edge.
That this man was indeed a tailor was clear from the very first glance: a well-thumbed measuring tape was draped around his slender neck in a loose knot, and he was wearing a large canvas apron smeared with chalk. His flaxen hair was mussed into two tufts that sprang up behind his ears. Too young to be a master, the apprentice tailor peered at the puddle and hiccuped quietly.
Karver laughed out loud. The others joined in his laughter, but with that the matter should have ended. The apprentice raised his cloudy eyes and said nothing, and the guards, passing to the side of the puddle, walked toward the doors of the tavern.
Of course, just as Egert was walking by the befuddled tailor, the apprentice lost his balance and took a sweeping step forward. His heavy wooden clog crashed down into the very middle of the puddle, raising a violent fountain of fetid muck, a large part of which landed on Lieutenant Egert Soll.
Egert was doused nearly from head to toe; the dirty grime splattered over his coat and his shirt, his neck and his face. Feeling large, cold globs of mud slither down his cheeks, Egert froze on the spot, unable to take his glassy gaze from the soused apprentice.
The guards surrounded the tailor in a dense ring; while they watched Egert warily, they regarded the lad with curiousity and interest. However, the journeyman was far drunker than Lieutenant Soll and thus far more daring: he was not at all afraid of the gentlemen of the guards, though it is possible that he simply did not notice them. With purely scientific interest, he examined his clog, which had disturbed the surface of the puddle and flung mud at Egert.
“Shove him in, the pig,” Dron advised good-naturedly. Young Bonifor darted forward, anticipating the amusement this entertainment would bring.
“May I do it?”
“This is Egert’s man,” Karver commented dispassionately.
Lieutenant Soll grinned fiercely, took a step toward the tailor, and immediately sobered up. Reality descended upon him, grinding down the spring, freedom, and his newborn courage; Egert faltered from the sudden thought that he would once again exhibit his fear. And indeed, as soon as he thought about fear, a dreary weakness burrowed into his belly. All he had to do was simply extend his hand and seize the lad by the collar, but his hand was drenched in sweat and had no intention of complying.
Great Khars, help me!
Shaking all over from the effort, Egert reached out for the scruff of the apprentice. He grasped the collar of the tailor’s jacket with his damp palm, but at that very second the boy roused himself, throwing off Egert’s hand.
The guards were silent. Egert felt rivulets of cold sweat chasing one another down his back.
“What a pity,” he forced out with great difficulty. “He’s just an idiot, a drunk who accidentally…”
The guards exchanged glances. The apprentice, meanwhile, if not wishing to contradict Egert’s words, then simply desiring to continue his scientific inquiry, deliberately raised his wooden clog over the puddle.
The guards sprang back in time; only Egert, who stood as if transfixed, was inundated with the next, even more plentiful helping of greasy mud. The tailor reeled, maintaining his balance with difficulty. Feasting his eyes on the result of his act, gratified, he smiled like a brewer’s horse.
“He’ll kill him,” observed Dron in an undertone. “Damn!”
Egert’s face, ears, and neck burned under the layer of black slurry. Strike! His reason, his experience, and all his common sense insisted on it. Beat him, teach him a lesson, let them pry you off his unresponsive body! What is wrong with you, Egert? This is past endurance, this is the end, the end of everything, kill him!
The guards were silent. The apprentice smiled drunkenly.
Egert fumbled at the hilt of his sword with a wooden hand. Not this! screamed his better judgment. How can you swing your sword at a defenseless man, at a commoner?
… at a defenseless man, at a defenseless man …
The apprentice raised his foot a third time, now looking Egert straight in the eyes. Apparently, he was so drunk that, regardless of the armed guards surrounding him, he was able to recognize only the pleasure he received from this distinct action: the journey of the muck from the puddle to the face and clothes of a certain gentleman.
The apprentice was still raising his foot a third time, but Lieutenant Dron could no longer contain himself. He darted forward with an inarticulate growl and smashed his fist into the tailor’s chin. The astonished apprentice fell backwards without a single sound, and there he remained, stretched out on the ground, sniveling.
Egert took a deep breath. He stood, covered in mud from head to toe, and ten stunned pairs of eyes watched as the mess dripped from the gold braid of his coat.
Dron was the first to break the silence. “You might have killed him, Egert,” Dron said, by way of excuse. “You’re all wound up. He probably should be killed, but not here, not now. He’s beyond drunk, the moron, but you were about to draw on him, a commoner! Egert, can you hear me?”
Egert stood, staring into the puddle just as the apprentice had when they first encountered him. Thank Heaven, Dron had decided that Egert was paralyzed by a fit of rage!
They were pawing at his wet sleeve.
“Egert, are you out of your mind? Dron is right, you shouldn’t kill him. If you kill them all, there would be no craftsmen left, right? Let’s go, Egert, eh?”
Ol and Bonifor were already waiting at the doors to the tavern, impatiently looking back at the others. Someone took Egert by the arm.
“Just a minute,” muttered Karver.
They all looked at him in surprise.
“Just a minute,” he repeated, louder this time. “Dron, and you, gentlemen—in your opinion, did Lieutenant Soll behave correctly?”
One of them snorted, “What is this nonsense, what are you doing, talking like this about your superior, asking if it was correct or incorrect? If he had acted, this dolt wouldn’t be alive.”
“It would have been improper, had he brutalized the lad,” remarked Dron in a conciliatory manner. “That’s enough, Karver, let it go.”
Then something odd happened. Slipping between the guards, Karver suddenly appeared right in that same spot where the now prostrate tailor had stood before. Bending his knees slightly, Karver struck the puddle with his boot.
It became as quiet as a long-forgotten tomb. A convulsion passed through Egert’s body as fresh grime adhered to his coat, slicking his scarred cheek with new drops and cementing his blond hair into icy tufts.
“But!” one of the guards said stupidly. “Uh, but what…”
“Egert,” Karver asked quietly, “are you just going to stand there?”
His voice seemed at once very near and very far away: it was as if Egert’s ears were stuffed with cotton.
“He is just going to stand there, gentlemen,” Karver promised just as quietly, and once again he doused Egert with stinking slime.
Lagan and Dron grabbed Karver from either side. Without resisting, he allowed them to drag him away from the puddle.