The Curse Of Chalion Part 30

Half a dozen men were present, but Cazaril's eye had no trouble picking out the Fox and his son. At seventy-odd, the roya of Ibra was stringy, balding, the russet hair of his younger days reduced to a wispy fringe of white around his pate. But he remained vigorous, not fragile with his years, alert and relaxed in his cushioned chair. The tall youth standing at his side had the straight brown Darthacan hair of his late mother, though tinged with reddish highlights, worn just long enough to cushion a helmet, cut bluntly. He looks healthy, at least. Good... He looks healthy, at least. Good... His sea-green vest-cloak was set with hundreds of pearls in patterns of curling surf, which made it swing in elegant, weighty ripples when he turned toward these new visitors. His sea-green vest-cloak was set with hundreds of pearls in patterns of curling surf, which made it swing in elegant, weighty ripples when he turned toward these new visitors.

The man standing on the Fox's other side was proclaimed by his chain of office to be the chancellor of Ibra. A wary and intimidated-looking fellow, he was the-from all reports, overworked-servant of the Fox, not a rival for his power. Another man's badges marked him as a sea lord, an admiral of Ibra's fleet.

Cazaril went to one knee before the Fox, not too ungracefully despite his saddle-stiffness and aches, and bowed his head. "My lord, I bring sad news from Ibra of the death of Royse Teidez, and urgent letters from his sister the Royesse Iselle." He proffered Iselle's letter of his authority.

The Fox cracked the seal, and scanned rapidly down the simple penned lines. His brows climbed, and he glanced back keenly at Cazaril. "Most interesting. Rise, my lord Amba.s.sador," he murmured.

Cazaril took a breath, and managed to surge back to his feet without having either to push off the floor with his hand or, worse, catch himself on the roya's chair. He looked up to find Royse Bergon staring hard at him, his lips parted in a frown. Cazaril blinked, and favored him with a tentative nod and smile. He was quite a well-made young man, withal, even-featured, perhaps handsome when he wasn't scowling so. No squint, no hanging lip-a little stocky, but fit, not fat. And not forty. Young, clean-shaven, but with a vigor in the shadow on his chin that promised he was grown to virility. Cazaril thought Iselle should be pleased.

Bergon's stare intensified. "Speak again!" he said.

"Excuse me, my lord?" Cazaril stepped back, startled, as the royse stepped forward and circled him, his eyes searching him up and down, his breath coming faster.

"Take off your shirt!" Bergon demanded suddenly.

"What?"

"Take off your shirt, take off your shirt!"

"My lord-Royse Bergon-" Cazaril was thrown back in memory to the ghastly scene engineered by dy Jironal to slander him to Orico. But there were no sacred crows here in Zagosur to rescue him. He lowered his voice. "I beg you, my lord, do not shame me in this company."

"Please, sir, a year and more ago, in the fall, were you not rescued from a Roknari galley off the coast of Ibra?"

"Oh. Yes...?"

"Take off your shirt!" The royse was practically dancing, circling around him again; Cazaril felt dizzy. He glanced at the Fox, who looked as baffled as everyone else, but waved his hand curiously, endorsing the royse's peculiar demand. Confused and frightened, Cazaril complied, popping the frogs of his tunic and slipping it off together with his vest-cloak, and folding the garments over his arm. He set his jaw, trying to stand with dignity, to bear whatever humiliation came next.

"You're Caz Caz! You're Caz Caz!" Bergon cried. His frown had changed to a demented grin. Ye G.o.ds, the royse was mad, and after all this pelting gallop over plain and mountain, unfit for Iselle after all- "Why, yes, so my friends call me-" Cazaril's words were choked off as the royse abruptly flung his arms around him, and nearly lifted him off his feet.

"Father," Bergon cried joyously, "this is the man! This is the man!"

"What," Cazaril began, and then, by some trick of angle and shift of voice, he knew. Cazaril's own gape turned to grin. The boy has grown! The boy has grown! Roll him back a year in time and four inches in height, erase the beard-shadow, shave the head, add a peck of puppy fat and a blistering sunburn..."Five G.o.ds," he breathed. "Danni? Danni!" Roll him back a year in time and four inches in height, erase the beard-shadow, shave the head, add a peck of puppy fat and a blistering sunburn..."Five G.o.ds," he breathed. "Danni? Danni!"

The royse grabbed his hands and kissed them. "Where did you go go? I fell sick for a week after I was brought home, and when I finally set men to look for you, you'd disappeared. I found other men from the ship, but not you, and none knew where you'd gone."

"I was ill also, in the Mother's hospital here in Zagosur. Then I, um, walked home to Chalion."

"Here! Right here all the time! I shall burst. Ah! But I sent men to the hospitals-oh, how did they miss you there? I thought you must have died of your injuries, they were so fearsome."

"I was sure he must have died," said the Fox slowly, watching this play with unreadable eyes. "Not to have come to collect the very great debt my House owed to him."

"I did not know...who you were, Royse Bergon."

The Fox's gray eyebrows shot up. "Truly?"

"No, Father," Bergon confirmed eagerly. "I told no one who I was. I used the nickname Mama used to call me by when I was little. It seemed to me more unsafe to claim my rank than to pa.s.s anonymously." He added to Cazaril, "When my late brother's bravos kidnapped me, they did not tell the Roknari captain who I was. They meant me to die on the galley, I think."

"The secrecy was foolish, Royse," chided Cazaril. "The Roknari would surely have set you aside for ransom."

"Yes, a great ransom, and political concessions wrung from my father, too, no doubt, if I'd allowed myself to be made hostage in my own name." Bergon's jaw tightened. "No. I would not hand myself to them to play that game."

"So," said the Fox in an odd voice, staring up at Cazaril, "you did not interpose your body to save the royse of Ibra from defilement, but merely to save some random boy."

"Random slave boy. My lord." Cazaril's lips twisted, as he watched the Fox trying to work out just what this made Cazaril, hero or fool.

"I wonder at your wits."

"I'm sure I was half-witted by then," Cazaril conceded amiably. "I'd been on the galleys since I was sold as a prisoner of war after the fall of Gotorget."

The Fox's eyes narrowed. "Oh. So you're that that Cazaril, eh?" Cazaril, eh?"

Cazaril essayed him a small bow, wondering what he had heard of that fruitless campaign, and shook out his tunic. Bergon hastened to help him don it again. Cazaril found himself the object of stunned stares from every man in the room, including Ferda and Foix. His tilted grin barely kept back bubbling laughter, though underneath the laughter seethed a new terror that he could scarcely name. How long have I been walking down this road? How long have I been walking down this road?

He pulled out the last letter in his packet, and swept a deeper bow to Royse Bergon. "As the doc.u.ment your respected father holds attests, I come as spokesman for a proud and beautiful lady, and I come not just to him, but to you. The Heiress of Chalion begs your hand in marriage." He handed the sealed missive to the startled Bergon. "In this, I will let the Royesse Iselle speak for herself, which she is most fit to do by virtue of her singular intellect, her natural right, and her holy purpose. After that, I will have much else to tell you, Royse."

"I'm eager to hear you, Lord Cazaril." Bergon, after a taut glance around the chamber, took himself off to a window-door, where he popped the letter's seal and read it at once, his lips softening with wonder.

Amazement, too, touched the Fox's lips, though it rendered them anything but soft. Cazaril had no doubt he'd put the man's wits to the gallop. For his own wits he now prayed for wings.

CAZARIL AND HIS COMPANIONS WERE, OF COURSE, invited to dine that night in the roya's hall. Near sunset, Cazaril and Bergon went walking together along the sea strand below the fortress. It was as close to private speech as he was likely to obtain, Cazaril thought, waving the dy Guras back to trail along through the sand out of earshot. The growl of the surf cloaked the sound of their voices. A few white gulls swooped and cried, as piercing as any crow, or pecked at the smelly sea wrack on the wet sand, and Cazaril was reminded that these scavengers with their cold golden eyes were sacred to the b.a.s.t.a.r.d in Ibra.

Bergon bade his own heavily armed guard walk at a distance, too, though he did not seek to dispense with them. The silent routine of his precautions reminded Cazaril once more that civil war in this country was but lately ended, and Bergon had been both piece and player in that vicious game already. A piece that had played himself, it seemed.

"I'll never forget the first time I met you," said Bergon, "when they dropped me down beside you on the galley bench. For a moment you frightened me more than the Roknari did."

Cazaril grinned. "What, just because I was a scaly, scabbed, burnt scarecrow, hairy and stinking?"

Bergon grinned back. "Something like that," he admitted sheepishly. "But then you smiled, and said Good evening, young sir Good evening, young sir, for all the world as if you were inviting me to share a tavern bench and not a rowing bench."

"Well, you were a novelty, of which we didn't get many."

"I thought about it a lot, later. I'm sure I wasn't thinking too clearly at the time-"

"Naturally not. You arrived well roughed-up."

"Truly. Kidnapped, frightened-I'd just collected my first real beating-but you helped me. Told me how to go on, what to expect, taught me how to survive. You gave me extra water twice from your own portion-"

"Eh, only when you really needed it. I was already used to the heat, as desiccated as I was like to get. After a time one can tell the difference between mere discomfort and the feverish look of a man skirting collapse. It was very important that you not faint at your oar, you see."

"You were kind."

Cazaril shrugged. "Why not? What could it cost me, after all?"

Bergon shook his head. "Any man can be kind when he is comfortable. I'd always thought kindness a trivial virtue, therefore. But when we were hungry, thirsty, sick, frightened, with our deaths shouting at us, in the heart of horror, you were still as unfailingly courteous as a gentleman at his ease before his own hearth."

"Events may be horrible or inescapable. may be horrible or inescapable. Men Men have always a choice-if not whether, then how, they may endure." have always a choice-if not whether, then how, they may endure."

"Yes, but...I hadn't known that before I saw it. That was when I began to believe it was possible to survive. And I don't mean just my body."

Cazaril smiled wryly. "I was taken for half-cracked by then, you know."

Bergon shook his head again, and kicked up a little silver sand with his boot as they paced along. The westering sun picked out the foxy copper highlights in his dark Darthacan hair.

Bergon's late mother had been perceived in Chalion as a virago, a Darthacan interloper suspected of fomenting her husband's strife with his Heir on her son's behalf. But Bergon seemed to remember her fondly; as a child he'd been through two sieges with her, cut off from his father's forces in the intermittent war with his half brother. He was clearly accustomed to strong-minded women with a voice in men's councils. When he and Cazaril had shared the oar bench he had spoken of his dead mother, although in disguised terms, when he'd been trying to encourage himself. Not of his live father. Bergon's precocious wit and self-control as demonstrated in the dire days on the galley weren't, Cazaril reflected, entirely the legacy of the Fox.

Cazaril's smile broadened. "So let me tell you," he began, "all about the Royesse Iselle dy Chalion..."

Bergon hung on Cazaril's words as he described Iselle's winding amber hair and her bright gray eyes, her wide and laughing mouth, her horsemanship and her scholarship. Her undaunted, steady nerve, her rapid a.s.sessment of emergencies. Selling Iselle to Bergon seemed approximately as difficult as selling food to starving men, water to the parched, or cloaks to the naked in a blizzard, and he hadn't even touched yet on the part about her being due to inherit a royacy. The boy seemed half in love already. The Fox would be a greater challenge; the Fox would suspect a catch. Cazaril had no intention of confiding the catch to the Fox. Bergon was another matter. For you, the truth. For you, the truth.

"There is a darker urgency to Royesse Iselle's plea," Cazaril continued, as they reached the end of the crescent of beach and turned about again. "This is in the deepest confidence, as she prays to have safe confidence in you as her husband. For your ear alone." He drew in sea air, and all his courage. "It all goes back to the war of Fonsa the Fairly-Wise and the Golden General..."

They made two more turns along the stretch of sand, crossing back over their own tracks, before Cazaril's tale was told. The sun, going down in a red ball, was nearly touching the flat sea horizon, and the breaking waves shimmered in dark and wondrous colors, gnawing their way up the beach as the tide turned. Cazaril was as frank and full with Bergon as he'd been with Ista, keeping nothing back save Ista's confession, not even his own personal haunting by Dondo. Bergon's face, made ruddy by the light, was set in profound thought when he finished.

"Lord Cazaril, if this came from any man's lips but yours, I doubt I would believe it. I'd think him mad."

"Although madness may be an effect of these events, Royse, it is not the cause. It's all real. I've seen it. I half think I am drowning in it." An unfortunate turn of phrase, but the sea growling so close at hand was making Cazaril nervous. He wondered if Bergon had noticed Cazaril always turned so as to put the royse between him and the surf.

"You would make me like the hero of some nursemaid's tale, rescuing the fair lady from enchantment with a kiss."

Cazaril cleared his throat. "Well, rather more than a kiss, I think. A marriage must be consummated to be legally binding. Theologically binding, likewise, I would a.s.sume."

The royse gave him an indecipherable glance. He didn't speak for a few more paces. Then he said, "I've seen your integrity in action. It...widened my world. I'd been raised by my father, who is a prudent, cautious man, always looking for men's hidden, selfish motivations. No one can cheat him. But I've seen him cheat himself. If you understand what I mean."

"Yes."

"It was very foolish of you, to attack that vile Roknari galley-man."

"Yes."

"And yet, I think, given the same circ.u.mstances, you would do it again."

"Knowing what I know now...it would be harder. But I would hope...I would pray, Royse, that the G.o.ds would still lend me such foolishness in my need."

"What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father's gold? Can you teach me to be such a fool too, Caz?"

"Oh," breathed Cazaril, "I'm sure of it."

CAZARIL MET WITH THE F FOX IN THE COOL OF THE following morning. He was escorted again to the high, bright chamber overlooking the sea, but this time for a more private conference, just himself, the roya, and the roya's secretary. The secretary sat at the end of the table, along with a pile of paper, new quills, and a ready supply of ink. The Fox sat on the long side, fiddling with a game of castles and riders, its pieces exquisitely carved of coral and jade, the board fashioned of polished malachite, onyx, and white marble. Cazaril bowed, and, at the roya's wave of invitation, seated himself across from him. following morning. He was escorted again to the high, bright chamber overlooking the sea, but this time for a more private conference, just himself, the roya, and the roya's secretary. The secretary sat at the end of the table, along with a pile of paper, new quills, and a ready supply of ink. The Fox sat on the long side, fiddling with a game of castles and riders, its pieces exquisitely carved of coral and jade, the board fashioned of polished malachite, onyx, and white marble. Cazaril bowed, and, at the roya's wave of invitation, seated himself across from him.

"Do you play?" the Fox inquired.

"No, my lord," said Cazaril regretfully. "Or only very indifferently."

"Ah. Pity." The Fox pushed the board a little to one side. "Bergon is very warmed with your description of this paragon of Chalion. You do your job well, Amba.s.sador."

"That is all my hope."

The roya touched Iselle's letter of credential, lying on the glossy wood. "Extraordinary doc.u.ment. You know it binds the royesse to whatever you sign in her name."

"Yes, sir."

"Her authority to charge you so is questionable, you know. There is the matter of her age, for one thing."

"Well, sir, if you do not recognize her right to make her own marriage treaty, I suppose there's nothing for me to do but mount my horse and ride back to Chalion."

"No, no, I didn't say I I questioned it!" A slight panic tinged the old roya's voice. questioned it!" A slight panic tinged the old roya's voice.

Cazaril suppressed a smile. "Indeed, sir, to treat with us is public acknowledgment of her authority."

"Hm. Indeed, indeed. Young people, so trusting. It's why we old people must guard their interests." He picked up the other list Cazaril had given him last night. "I've studied your suggested clauses for the marriage contract. We have much to discuss."

"Excuse me, sir. Those are not suggested. Those are required. If you wish to propose additional items, I will hear you."

The roya arched his brows at him. "Surely not. Just taking one-this matter of inheritance during the minority of their heir, if they are so blessed. One accident with a horse, and the royina of Chalion becomes regent of Ibra! It won't do. Bergon bears the risks of the battlefield, which his wife will not."

"Well, which we hope she will not. Or else I am curiously poorly informed of the history of Ibra, my lord. I thought the royse's mother won two sieges?"

The Fox cleared his throat.

"In any case," Cazaril continued, "we maintain that the risk is reciprocal, and so must be the clause. Iselle bears the risks of childbirth, which Bergon never will. One breech birth, and he could become regent of Chalion. How many of your wives have outlived you, sir?"

The Fox took a breath, paused, and went on, "And then there's this naming clause!"

A few minutes of gentle argument determined that Bergon dy Ibra-Chalion was no more euphonious than Bergon dy Chalion-Ibra, and that clause, too, was allowed to stand.

The Fox pursed his lips and frowned thoughtfully. "I understand you are a landless man, Lord Cazaril. How is it that the royesse does not reward you as befits your rank?"

"She rewards me as befits hers. Iselle is not royina of Chalion-yet."

"Huh. I, on the other hand, am the present roya of Ibra, and have the power to dispense...much."

Cazaril merely smiled.

Encouraged, the Fox spoke of an elegant villa overlooking the sea, and placed a coral castle piece upon the table between them. Fascinated to see where this was going, Cazaril refrained from observing how little he cared for the sight of the sea. The Fox spoke of fine horses, and an estate to graze them upon, and how inappropriate he found Clause Three. Some riders were added. Cazaril made neutral noises. The Fox breathed delicately of the money whereby a man might dress himself as befit an Ibran rank rather higher than castillar, and how Clause Six might profitably be rewritten. A jade castle piece joined the growing set. The secretary made notes. With each wordless murmur from Cazaril, both respect and contempt grew in the Fox's eyes, though as the pile grew he remarked in a tone of some pain, "You play better than I expected, Castillar."

At last the Fox sat back and waved at his little pile of offering symbols. "How does it suit you, Cazaril? What do you think this girl can give you that I cannot better, eh?"

Cazaril's smile broadened to a cheerful grin. "Why, sir. I believe she will give me an estate in Chalion that will suit me perfectly. One pace wide and two paces long, to be mine in perpetuity." Gently, so as not to imply an insult either given or taken, he stretched out his hand and pushed the pieces back toward the Fox. "I should probably explain, I bear a tumor in my gut, that I expect to kill me shortly. These prizes are for living men, I think. Not dying ones."

The Fox's lips moved; astonishment and dismay flickered in his face, and the faintest flash of unaccustomed shame, quickly suppressed. A brief bark of laughter escaped him. "Five G.o.ds! The girl has wit and ruthlessness enough to teach me my trade! No wonder she gave you such powers. By the b.a.s.t.a.r.d's b.a.l.l.s, she's sent me an unbribeable amba.s.sador!"

Three thoughts marched across Cazaril's mind: first, that Iselle had no such crafty plan, second, that were it to be pointed out to her, she would say Hm! Hm! and file the notion away against some future need, and third, that the Fox did not need to know about the first. and file the notion away against some future need, and third, that the Fox did not need to know about the first.

The Fox sobered, staring more closely at Cazaril. "I am sorry for your affliction, Castillar. It is no laughing matter. Bergon's mother died of a tumor in her breast, taken untimely young-just thirty-six, she was. All the grief she married in me could not daunt her, but at the end...ah, well."

"I'm thirty-six," Cazaril couldn't help observing rather sadly.

The Fox blinked. "You don't don't look well, then." look well, then."