Elder Isles - Madouc Part 89

The ferry conveying Casmir and his company was just now leaving the sh.o.r.e. His party had dismounted and were tying their horses to a rail. A slender still form wrapped in a brown cloak indicated the presence of Madouc. There seemed to be a bandage or a gag across her mouth.

Dhrun stared hopelessly at the ferry. Casmir looked back once, his face an impa.s.sive white mask. "They have evaded us," said Dhrun. "By the time we can cross the river they will be to the other side of Pomperoi."

"Come!" said Aillas in sudden exultation. "They have not evaded us yet."

He rode pell-mell along the scarp to the b.u.t.tress which anch.o.r.ed the hawser. He jumped to the ground and, drawing his sword, hacked at the taut cable. Strand by strand, twist by twist, the hawser was severed. The ferry tender, looking up from his hut, shouted a frantic protest, to which Aillas paid no heed. He hacked, sawed and cut; the cable sang, spun, as tension over taxed the fibers. The hawser parted, the loose end snaking down the face of the scarp and into the water. The ferry, no longer impelled by the sidewise thrust of the current, drifted down the estuary toward the open sea. The hawser sang loosely through the sheave and at last pulled free altogether.

The ferry drifted quietly on the tide. Casmir and his party stood with sagging shoulders looking helplessly toward the sh.o.r.es.

"Come," said Aillas. "We will board the Flor Velas; it awaits our arrival."

The company rode down the scarp to the harbour where the Flor Velas, a gallea.s.s eighty feet long with a square sail, a pair of lateen sails and fifty oars, rested at its mooring. Aillas' party dismounted, put the horses into charge of the harbourmaster, and boarded the ship, Aillas giving the instant order to cast off. Mooring lines were loosed from the bitts; the sails unfurled to catch a favorable north wind, and the vessel eased out into the estuary.

Half an hour later the Flor Velas drew close beside the ferry and made fast with grappling hooks. Aillas stood on the after deck with Dhrun; the two looked down with expressionless faces at Casmir's sour countenance. Ca.s.sander attempted a flippant salute to Dhrun and Aillas, which neither acknowledged, and Ca.s.sander haughtily turned his back.

From the midship deck of the gallea.s.s a ladder was dropped to the deck of the ferry; four men-at-arms descended. Ignoring all others, they went to Madouc, pulled the bandage from her mouth and led her to the ladder. Dhrun came down from the afterdeck and helped her aboard.

The men-at-arms climbed back aboard the Flor Velas. Casmir, standing to the side, heavy legs spread apart, watched with out expression.

No words had been spoken, either from gallea.s.s or from ferry. For a moment Aillas stood looking down at Casmir's party. He told Dhrun: "If I were a truly wise king, here and now I would kill Casmir, and perhaps Ca.s.sander as well, and put an end to their line. Look at Casmir; he half expects it! He would have not a qualm in the world; indeed he would kill us both and rejoice in the act!" Aillas gave his head a jerk. "I cannot do it. I may live to regret my weakness, but I cannot kill in cold blood."

He gave a signal. The grappling hooks were jerked loose and brought aboard the gallea.s.s, which eased away from the ferry. Wind bellied the sails; wake bubbled astern and the gallea.s.s drove down the Cambermouth and toward the open sea. From the Daut sh.o.r.e a pair of longboats, each manned by a dozen oarsmen, put out after the ferry. They took it in tow and with help from the turning tide brought it back to the dock.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Upon returning to Castle Haidion, King Casmir went into virtual seclusion. He attended no court functions, received no visitors, granted no audiences. For the most part he kept to his private chambers, where he paced up and down the length of his parlour, pausing occasionally by the window to look out over the town and the gray-blue Lir beyond. Queen Sollace dined with him each night, but Casmir had little to say, so that more often than not Sollace lapsed into plaintive silence. After four days of brooding, Casmir summoned Sir Baltasar, a trusted counsellor and envoy. Casmir gave Sir Baltasar careful instructions and sent him off on a secret mission to G.o.delia.

Upon the departure of Sir Baltasar, Casmir resumed many of his former routines, though his mood had changed. He had become terse, sharp in his commands, bitter in his judgments, and those who ran afoul either of Casmir or his justice now, more than ever, had cause for regret.

In due course Sir Baltasar returned, dusty and haggard from hard riding. He reported at once to King Casmir: "I arrived at Dun Cruighre without incident. The town lacks all grace; you might well hesitate to stable your horses in the royal palace."

"King Dartweg would not receive me immediately. At first I thought his motives to be sheer Celtic perversity, but later I learned that he was entertaining certain grandees from Ireland, and all were drunk. Finally he agreed to receive me, but even then he kept me standing to the side of his hall while he settled a dispute dealing with the breeding of a cow. The wrangling went on for an hour and was interrupted twice by dog fights. I tried to follow the litigation but found it beyond my understanding. The cow had been freshened by a prize bull without authorization and free of charge, by reason of a break in the fence; the cow owner not only refused to pay the stud fee, but beseeched a penalty for the illicit advantage taken of his cow by the amorous bull. King Dartweg was now gnawing a bone and drinking mead from a horn. He adjudicated the case in a manner I still find perplexing, but which must have been equitable, since it pleased no one.

"I was at last brought forward and presented to the king, who was quite drunk. He asked me my business; I said that I wished a private audience, that I might deliver the confidential messages entrusted to me by Your Highness. He waved high the bone upon which he was gnawing and declared that he saw no reason for 'fiddle-faddle'; that I must speak out brave and bold like a good Celt. Stealth and furtive timidity were useless, he claimed; and secrecy was pointless, since everyone knew my business as well as I knew it myself; indeed, he could give me his answer without my so much as hinting of my mission; would that be suitable? He thought so, since it would expedite affairs and enlarge the time for tilting of the horn.

"I maintained as much dignity as was possible under the circ.u.mstances, and stated that protocol compelled me to request a private audience. He handed me a homful of mead and told me to swallow all at a single draught, and this I managed to do, thereby gaining King Dartweg's favor, and allowing me to mutter my message into his ear.

"In the end I spoke with King Dartweg on three occasions. Each time he sought to fill me full of strong mead, apparently hoping that I should become foolish and dance a jig, or babble my secrets. Needless to say, the attempt was fruitless, and in the end he began to find me a dull fellow, drunk or sober, and became surly. At our last meeting he blurted out his fixed and settled policies. In essence, he wants the fruits of victory with none of the risks. He will join our cause gladly, once we demonstrate that we have gained the upper hand over our enemies."

"That is certainly a policy of caution," said Casmir. "He has everything to gain and nothing to lose."

"He acknowledged as much, and said that it was in the best interests of his health, since only a program of this sort allowed him to sleep well of nights.

"I spoke of the need for a specific undertaking; he only waved his hand and said that you were not to worry on his account. He claimed that he would know the precise instant when the time was ripe and then he would be on hand in full force."

King Casmir grunted. "We are listening to the voice of an opportunistic braggart! What next?"

"From Dun Cruighre I journeyed by ship to Skaghane, where I met a dozen frustrations but gained no profit. The Ska are not only inscrutable and opaque in their conversation, but large in their manner. They neither want nor need alliances, and have a positive aversion for all folk but themselves. I broached the matter at hand, but they brushed it aside, giving neither 'yes' nor 'no', as if the matter were arrant nonsense. From Skaghane I bring back no news whatever."

Casmir rose to his feet and began to pace back and forth. He spoke, more to himself than to Sir Baltasar: "We are a.s.sured only of ourselves. Dartweg and his Celts in the end will serve us, out of greed. Pomperol and Blaloc will stand rigid, paralyzed by fear. I had hoped for distraction, or even rebellion, among the Ulfs, but they merely crouch like sullen animals in their high glens. Torqual, despite my great expense, has done nothing. He and his witchwoman are fugitives; they maraud along the moors by night, and take cover by day. The peasants consider them ghouls. Sooner or later they will be brought to bay and slaughtered like wild beasts. No one will mourn them."

II.

Shimrod sat in his garden, somnolent in the shade of a bay tree. His garden was at its best. Pink hollyhocks stood like shy maidens in a row along the front of his manse; elsewhere blue delphinium, daisies, marigolds, alyssum, verbena, wallflowers, and much else grew in casual clumps and cl.u.s.ters.

Shimrod sat with eyes half closed, letting his mind wander without restraint: through follies and fancies, along unfamiliar landscapes. He came to an engaging notion: if odors could be represented by color, then the scent of gra.s.s could be nothing else but fresh green. In the same way, the perfume of a rose must inevitably be rendered by velvet red, and the scent of he liotrope would be a ravishing lavender purple.

Shimrod conceived a dozen other such equivalences, and was surprised how often and how closely his colors, derived by induction, matched the natural and irrefutable color of the object from which the odor originated. It was a remarkable correspondence! Could it be ascribed to simple coincidence? Even the acrid tang of the daisy seemed perfectly consonant with the white, so prim and stark, of the flower itself!

Shimrod smiled, wondering whether similar transferences, involving the other senses, might exist. The mind was a marvellous instrument, thought Shimrod; when left to wander untended, it often arrived at curious destinations. Shimrod watched a lark flying across the meadow. The scene was tranquil. Perhaps too tranquil, too serene, too quiet. It was easy to become melancholy thinking how quickly the days slipped past. What was lacking at Trilda was the sound of conviviality and happy voices.

Shimrod sat up in his chair. The work must be done, and sooner was better than later. He rose to his feet and after a last look around Lally Meadow went to his workroom. The tables, once stacked high with a miscellany of articles, were now greatly reduced of their burden. Much of what remained was stubborn stuff, obscure, arcane, or intrinsically complex, or perhaps it had been rendered incomprehensible by Tamurello's eery tricks.

To one of the articles still under investigation Shimrod had given the name 'Lucanor', after the Druidic G.o.d of Primals.*

Lucanor-the magical artifice, or toy-consisted of seven transparent disks, a hand's-breadth in diameter. They rolled around the edge of a circular tablet of black onyx, at varying speeds. The disks swam with soft colors, and occasionally showed pulsing black spots of emptiness, coming and going apparently at random.

*Lucanor's duties were three: he plotted the shape of the constellations and, when needful, altered the placement of the stars; he a.s.signed to each thing of the world the secret name by which its existence was confirmed or denied; he regulated the cycle by which the end of the future merged into the begin ning of the past. In Druidic depictions, Lucanor wore double-pointed shoes, with toes extending both forward and back. An iron circlet displaying seven golden disks clasped his head. Lucanor was a solitary G.o.d, who held himself aloof from the lesser G.o.ds of the Druidic pantheon, among whom he inspired awe and fear.

A Druidic myth relates how Lucanor, coming upon the other G.o.ds as they sat at the banquet table, found them drinking mead in grand style, to the effect that several were drunk, while others remained inexplicably sober; could some be slyly swilling down more than their share?

The disparity led to bickering, and it seemed that a serious quarrel was brewing. Lucanor bade the group to serenity, stating that the controversy no doubt could be settled without recourse either to blows or to bitterness. Then and there Lucanor formulated the concept of numbers and enumeration, which heretofore had not existed. The G.o.ds henceforth could tally with precision the number of horns each had consumed and, by this novel method, a.s.sure general equity and, further, explain why some were drunk and others not. "The answer, once the new method is mastered, becomes simple!" explained Lucanor. "It is that the drunken G.o.ds have taken a greater number of horns than the sober G.o.ds, and the mystery is resolved." For this, the invention of mathematics, Lucanor was given great honour.

Shimrod found the disks a source of perplexity. They moved independently of each other, or so it seemed, so that in their circuit of the tablet, one might pa.s.s another, and in turn be overtaken by still a third. At times two disks rolled in tandem, so that one was superimposed upon the other, as if an attraction held them together for a few instants. Then they would break apart and each would once more roll its own course. At rare intervals, even a third disk might arrive while two disks rolled together, and for a s.p.a.ce the third disk also would linger, for a period perceptibly longer than if just two disks were together. Shimrod once or twice had observed what would seem to be a very rare chance, when four disks chanced to roll together around the tablet, and then they clung together for perhaps twenty seconds before parting company.

Shimrod had placed Lucanor on a bench where it could catch the afternoon sunlight, and also where it most efficiently distracted him from his other work. Was Lucanor a toy, or a complex curio, or an a.n.a.log representing some larger process? He wondered if ever five of the seven disks might roll in unison, or six, or even all seven. He tried to calculate the probability of such concurrences, without success. The chances, while real, must be exceedingly remote, so he reflected.

At times, when a pair of disks rolled together, their black spots, or holes, might develop simultaneously and sometimes overlapped. On one occasion, when three disks rolled in unison, black spots grew on each of the three, and by some freak, they were superimposed. Shimrod squinted through the aligned holes as the disks rolled past; to his surprise he saw flickering lines of fire, like far lightning. The black holes disappeared; the disks parted company, to roll their separate courses as before.

Shimrod stood back in contemplation of Lucanor. The device undoubtedly served a serious purpose-but what? He could arrive at no sensible theory. Perhaps he should bring Lucanor to the attention of Murgen. Shimrod temporized, since he would far prefer to resolve the puzzle himself. Three of Tamurello's ledgers remained to be deciphered; there might be a reference to Lucanor in one or another of the tomes.

Shimrod returned to his work, but continued to watch the seven disks, causing him such distraction that at last he put a low-order sandestin on watch for unusual coincidences, and then took Lucanor to a far corner of the workroom.

The days pa.s.sed; Shimrod found no reference to Lucanor in the ledgers, and gradually lost interest in the disks. One morning, Shimrod took himself to his workroom as usual. Almost as soon as he pa.s.sed through the door, the sandestin monitor called out an alarm: "Shimrod! Attend your disks! Five roll together in congruence!"

Shimrod crossed the room on swift strides. He looked down in something like awe. For a fact, five of the disks had joined to roll as one around the periphery of the tablet. Further, the disks showed no disposition to separate. And what was this? A sixth disk came rolling to overtake the five, and as Shimrod watched, it edged close, shuddered, merged into place with the others.

Shimrod watched in fascination, certain that he was witnessing an important event or, more likely, the representation of such an event. And now the seventh and last disk came to join the others, and the seven rolled as one. The single disk changed in color, to become marbled maroon and purple-black; it rolled lethargically, and showed no disposition to break apart. At the center a black spot grew dense and large. Shimrod bent to look through the hole; he saw what appeared to be a landscape of black objects outlined in golden fire.

Shimrod jerked away from Lucanor and ran to his workbench. He struck a small silver gong and waited, looking into a round mirror. Murgen failed to acknowledge the signal. Shimrod struck the gong again, more sharply. Again: no effect.

Shimrod stood back, face drawn into lines of concern. Murgen occasionally went to walk on the parapets. Infrequently, he left Swer Smod, sometimes by reasons of urgency, sometimes for sheer frivolity. Usually he notified Shimrod of his movements.

Shimrod struck the gong a third time. The result was as be fore: silence.

Troubled and uneasy, Shimrod turned away, and went back to stare at Lucanor.

III.