Otherwise (10 page)

Impossible to judge if Younger heard or understood. He only looked into the fire, flames gesturing within his eyes.

“Now I need you, Younger.”

Always it had been that the faction that commanded a garrison of the Edge could forge it into a weapon for its use. After the battle at Senlins-down in the old days, Black Harrah returned from Forgetful without orders to do so, with an unruly army and a new big wife for the King, and the Reds who had thought the King to be in their pockets backed away.

“The King Red Senlin’s Son,” Redhand said, “was Young Harrah’s lover. He will send an army to invest Forgetful, once he deduces I am here. I would prevent that.”

Yes, and Red Senlin too, Redhand thought. He had gone away to the Edge to be vice-regent then, and in his time
he
had returned with bought Outland chiefs and an army of Edge-outcast soldiers. And Black Harrah had turned and fled… Suddenly Redhand felt caught up in the turnings of an old tale, a tale for children, endlessly repetitious. Well, what other chance had he but to repeat what his fathers and their fathers had done? He would not wait here to be ferreted like a rabbit.

“I want to march first, Younger. I want you with me. Help me now, as ever I have done for you.”

Younger said nothing, did not turn from the fire.

There was this flaw in it then. The old tale stopped here, the teller faltered at this turning.

That mob in the courtyard was no army. Fauconred had had to cut off some bandit’s ear in order to find lodging for Redhand’s household. He could flog them into order, a kind of order, with like means if he had weeks in which to do it. He did not have weeks.

“If flesh were stone,” said Younger. “If all flesh were stone…”

No. He couldn’t anyway face the King and the Folk with such a band. Outlanders, and men like these, had no strictures such as the Protectorate had concerning the Folk; they would take what they could. He must draw the country Defenders to his banners, keep the City open to him. It could not be done with marauders.

And they would not flock with any will to himself. He had no true friends; his strength lay in pacts, alliances, sealed with largesse. Red Senlin’s Son had seen that, and vitiated it with his City courtiers and his own largesse.

There must be another banner to ride Inward with than his own.

“Her spies,” Younger said, smiling. “The messages they take her. Songs, lies, jokes. What harm is there in that?”

With an instant, horrid clarity Redhand remembered the last time he had seen her: at the Little Lake, in the bloody snow, shuffling away on her big horse, riding Outward, looking back for fear.

No!

She must have had the child. Black Harrah’s, doubtless. As he had said to Red Senlin (so long ago it seemed) that didn’t matter. All the Outlands and half the world would kneel to kiss Little Black’s heir.

No!

A joining of Red and Black. An end to the world’s anguish. Despite his promises, the King had seized lands, divided them among his friends, who played in the City while farms rotted. The Downs would be his. And the City—well. He had been master of the City. He had friends. It would do.

No! No!

“What harm is there in it?” Younger said again, his voice beginning to quaver.

Redhand took hold of his revulsion and with an effort wrung its neck, stilling its protest. “No harm, brother,” he said. “Can you find one of these spies? Do you know them?”

“I know them. Oh, I know them all.”

“Send for one. Have him brought here. I… have a little joke myself to tell the Queen.”

Younger returned to staring into the fire. “Only…”

“Only?”

“We will go Inward. But.” He turned to Redhand. “Father
must not come!”
He beat his palm against the chair arm with each word. “They said he suffered from a soldier’s melancholy. They said, the Endwives said, that spring would bring him round, and they would nurse him back to health. But those were lies.”

As in one of the new pageants the King had caused to be shown in the City, the madman in the courtyard of Forgetful had an audience, an audience though of only one; and unlike those pageants’ actors, he was unaware of being watched, for the drama unfolding within him took all his attention.

On the belvedere above, his brother, his audience, was attentive, though feeling he had lost the thread, the point, the plot; he shivered in the warm wind, dislocated, lost, feeling that at any moment some unexpected shock might happen. He leaned against the belvedere, tense with expectation, bored with awful expectation.

Now unlike those City pageants, this audience had an audience himself.

Again, an audience of one.

Only she knew the plot. This scene had been laid out in cards the troubled man she watched had never seen; it was a scene in a story begun she knew not how many millennia before she lived, whose end might come as long after her death; she only knew her part, and prayed now to many gods that she might play it right.

From a pouch beneath her cloak of no color she drew the Gun named Suddenly. She was behind a thick pillar of duncolored stone. There were stairs at her back. Beyond, Outward, yellow clouds encircled the setting sun like courtiers around a dying Red king, and as the sun set, the war-viols of Forgetful would start, calling the garrison to meat and meeting. She hoped the noise would cover Suddenly’s voice. Afterwards, she would go quickly down those stairs, down to the stables, to Farin’s black horse she had come to love, without, she hoped, arousing more suspicion than she had already. And after that—well: she didn’t know. Nightfall. A curtain on this scene. She scarcely cared, if this was all played right.

She didn’t know either that she, who watched the madman’s audience, had herself an audience. Pageants upon pageants: she was observed.

He had come up the narrow stair to find his master. Had seen her at the top of the stair, dim, a blue shadow in the evening light. When she drew the thing from within her clothes, he at first did not recognize it; stood unmoving while a chain of associations took place within him.

So for a moment they all stood motionless; he on the stair, she with the Gun, he on the belvedere, he below biting his nails, and also he headless within the inconstant earth.

Then the one on the stair ran up.

She didn’t know who or what had seized her, only that its strength was terrible. A hand was clamped over her face, she could not cry out or breathe; an arm encircled her, tight as iron bands, pressing the Gun, against her so that if she fired she shot herself. She was picked up like a bundle of no weight, and before she was trundled away fast down the stair she saw that the man on the belvedere still looked down: he had not seen or heard.

They went quickly down. At a dim turning they paused; her captor seemed unsure. They turned down a tunnel-like hall, but stopped when the sound of men came from far off; turned back, slipped within a niche formed by the meeting of vast pillars, and waited.

She was beginning to faint; she could not breathe, and where the arm held her the pain had faded to a tingling numbness. Sheets of blank blackness came and went before her eyes. She tasted blood; the pressure of his hand had cut her mouth on her teeth.

When those coming up the hall had passed without seeing them, she was rushed out and down again. She saw evening light spilling from a door at the tunnel’s end, and then it was extinguished, and she knew nothing for a time.

The thud of a door closing woke her. She woke gulping air, looking into a bald, blank face hooded in red, oddly calm. Its thin lips moved, and the words came as from a distance. “You won’t cry out, struggle.”

“No.”

“If they found you. If I gave you to them, they would hang you.”

“Yes. I won’t.” He was not “they,” then?

His face withdrew. Her thudding heart slowed its gallop, and involuntarily she sighed a long, shuddering sigh.

The room was tiny, higher almost than wide; above her head a small window showed a square of summer evening; there was no other light. A wooden door, small and thick. A plain wooden pallet she lay on. A wooden chair he sat in; in one hand he held Suddenly by its barrel, loosely, as though it were a spoon.

“You are Just,” he said.

“If you drop that,” she said, her voice still hoarse, “they will know soon enough you have me.”

He lifted the Gun, examined it without curiosity. “Does it have a name?”

“Why do you keep me?” she said. “I know you, I know you are a thing of his.” She hoped to probe him, see if there was some disloyalty, some grudge she could play on… His face, though, remained expressionless. The same mask she had seen always beside Redhand in the City that spring. Who was he, then?

“I was told they have names.”

“They do.”

“I have an interest in names.” - As though they had gathered here for some scholarly chat. She almost smiled. “And so what is yours?”

“I am called Secretary now.”

“That’s no name.”

“No. I have no other.”

She could not read him. There was nothing to grasp. His voice, cool and liquid, the strange nakedness of his face. His hideous strength. For the first time since he had seized her, she felt fear; yet could not imagine how to plead with him, beg him, felt that he knew nothing of mercy. A cold sweat sprang out on her forehead.

“I will say a name,” he said, “if I can, and you will tell me if you know it.”

What name? Some other she had slain? Some brother or sister? She would tell him nothing…

“Here is the name.” It seemed to take all his strength to say it. “Leviathan.”

She only looked at him in disbelief.

“Leviathan,” he said again. “Do you know that name?”

Evening had deepened. The red cloak he wore was dark now as dried blood; his pale head shone like wax. And as it grew darker in the room, his eyes seemed to glow brighter, as precious stones do.

“Yes.” In a whisper.

“Where he lives,” the dark form said. “Where he lives, who he is, how to come to him.”

He could not mean this; he must be mad.

And yet. “Yes.” Again a whisper; he leaned forward to hear. “Yes, I know.”

Slowly, as though not meaning to, he leveled Suddenly at her. “Do you pull this? The lever here? And it will kill you?”

She pressed herself against the stone wall behind her, but could not press through it.

“Listen to me,” he said, the voice calm, liquid. “I will give you this choice. Take me to this one you know of, wherever, however far Outward. I will give you back this. If you refuse, tell me now, and I will kill you with it.”

There was an old story she knew: a brother was surrounded by King’s men, who closed in upon him with torches and dogs; he was utterly lost, yet had to escape. He did this, they say: he took a step Outward, a step Inward, and a step away, out and gone. The King’s men when they closed the circle found only themselves; they never found him, nor did the Just ever see him again.

She took the step. “Yes. I’ll take you. If we leave tonight. I’ll take you to see him, I swear it, face to face.”

THREE

RECORDER

1

H
ow many skills he had learned since that distant morning on the Drum when with the young Endwife he had learned to say Cup and Drink! If there were wonder in him he would have wondered at it.

With Redhand he had learned secrecy, the gaining of ends unknown to others by means devised to seem other than they were. It was not a mode that suited him; he had this failing, a curiosity about others that made it hard for him to keep himself secret. Yet he had this virtue: it all meant little to him but the learning, and he never betrayed himself by eagerness or need.

Never till now.

For this mission was his only. No one had assigned it to him, as Caredd had the watching of her husband, or Redhand the keeping close of his alliances. This he had found within himself, this was the engine of his being, and he had used force and cunning and even the betrayal of his trust to Redhand to accomplish it.

And he feared for its success.

There were winds blowing in him then, awful winds he could hardly bear: this, he thought, is what they all feel, this singularity, this burden of unknown quest, that drives all else out, obscures other loyalties, causes their eyes and thoughts to drift away in conversation, their attention to wander: a mission, whose shape they cannot perceive, whose end they fear for, an end that may be a means, they don’t know, or a lie, and yet they have no other.

He thought that in this he had become as fully a man as any of them. It gave him joy, and fear; a fierce resolution, and a strange vacillation he had known nothing of before.

He had stolen. Food from the kitchens, money from the purse he carried for Redhand, good boots and a lamp and a shelter from the quartermaster, a long knife and a short one. He would have stolen horses, but she said they would be useless till far beyond.

He had left the ravished purse and its papers for Redhand, without explanation—had thought to leave a note saying he was returning to the stars, but did not—and had crept away then with the girl, at midnight. Away from his master and the trusts given him. Away from the intrigues he had had some part in directing. Away from Younger’s very instructive madness. Away from Forgetful’s Outward wall, carrying the girl Nod on his back and her Gun in his belt, down the blind nighttime cliffs of the Edge, ever down, till dawn came and the girl slept and predatory birds circled the ledge they lay on, startled perhaps to see wingless ones there.

From there on the ledge at morning he looked over the Outlands, smoky with mist and obscured by coils of cloud. The paths of meandering rivers were a denser white than the greenshadowed land, which stretched flat and foggy to a great distance; far off the mists seemed to thicken into sky and gray rains could be seen moving like curtains in a wind. Except where low hills humped their backs above the mist, it was all shrouded. He woke her, they ate, and continued down.

He imagined this to be like his progress was from sky to earth, though he could remember nothing of that. As they went downward the air seemed to thicken, the sun’s clarity was dimmed, the smooth-faced rocks became slippery with moss and the stone ground began to crumble into earth, sandy at first and cut with flood beds, and then darker and bound by vegetation.

By evening on the second day they were within the Outlands, up to their knees in its boggy grasp.

Late in the night Nod awoke, forgetting where she was, how she had come to be there. She sat upright in the utter darkness, hearing animal noises she did not recognize. Something very close to her grunted, and she inhaled sharply, still half asleep. Then the lamp came bright with a buzzing sound, and his familiar naked face, calm and inquisitive, was looking at her.

“Do we go on now?” he asked.

She blinked at him. “Do you never sleep?”

There was a halo of moisture around the lamp’s glow, and clumsy insects knocked against it.

“How far is it?”

“Many days. Weeks.” How would she know? How far is it to heaven, how long is death? There were a thousand spirits Nod believed in, prayed to, feared. Yet if someone had said to her, Let’s go find the bogey who lives in the lake or the dryad of the high woods, she would have laughed. All that lay in some other direction, on a path you could put no foot on, somewhere at right angles to all else. If they wanted
you,
they would find you.

And perhaps then Leviathan wanted this one. Perhaps he walked that path, perhaps he was at right angles to all else.

“It will be dawn soon,” he said.

Yes. That was it; and in spite of what they had agreed,
he
led
her:
to the edge of the world, to look over the edge, and call into the Deep.

Through the morning, mist in wan rags like unhappy ghosts rose up from the Outlands, drawn into the sun, but still lay thick along the river they followed. Gray trees with pendulous branches waded up to their knobby knees in the slow water.

“We must go up,” she said. “We have to have dry ground, though we lose the way Outward.” That she knew, that the rivers flowed Outward here as they flowed Inward on the other side of the Edge. But they would have to find another marker, or spend a lifetime in mud here.

They had begun to decide which way was up when the Secretary stopped still, listening. She stopped too, could hear nothing, and then sorted from the forest’s murmur the knock of wood on wood, the soft slosh of water around a prow. A sound she knew well.

The Outlanders she had known were dour merchants she had ferried to the City, resplendent for the occasion but awed too: she had felt superior to them in her City knowledge. Here it was otherwise, and she sank behind the knees of a great tree. The Secretary followed; she was, after all, the guide.

The boat sounds grew closer, though they could see nothing through the shroud of mist; and then there came, walking on the water it seemed, a tall, tall figure, hideously purple of face with staring eyes… It took them a moment to see it was the boat’s carved prow.

Dark men with long, delicate poles sounded the river channel, and called softly back to those who rowed. Deep-bellied, slow, with tiny banners limp in the windless air, it passed so close they could hear the oarsmen grunt, and its wake lapped their feet. Yards of it went by, each oarhole painted as a face with the oar its tongue, and each face looked at them unseeing.

In the stern, stranger than all the painted faces, there was a woman under a pavilion, a vast woman, a woman deep-bellied like the ship. She lay cushioned in her fat, head resting on an arm like a thigh, fast asleep. At her feet, in diverse attitudes, Outlanders, chiefs with brass spangles braided in their beards, slept too; one held to his softly heaving chest a grotesque battle-ax.

The boat passed with a soft sound, rolled slightly with the channel, which made the Queen list too, and was lost in the mist.

Other boats came after, not so grand but stuffed full of armed men, spiky and clanking with weapons. One by one they appeared and glided by. Deep within one boat, someone chuckled.

“Is the child strong?” Redhand asked. “Healthy? Is it male or female?”

The Queen said nothing, only continued with her refreshment. Before her was a plate like a tray, tumbled up in Outland fashion with cakes, fruits, cheese, and fat sausages.

“I would see the child,” Redhand said.

“There are other things,” the Queen said, “that must come first.” She was waited on by a lean, fish-eyed man, her companion and general, a man named Kyr: Redhand and he had exchanged names, looked long in each other’s faces, both trying to remember something, but neither knew that it was Kyr who had nearly killed Redhand at the Little Lake. Kyr passed to his mistress a napkin; she took it, her eyes on her food.

So they waited—Redhand; Fauconred, who looked red-faced and furious as though he had been slapped; and Younger Redhand.

It had been an awful week. Redhand, with Fauconred’s help, had locked his screaming brother in a tower room, at dead of night so no one saw. Then he had ordered the cairn in the courtyard dismantled.

He dug out of the garrison an unshaven, wispy man who said he was Gray, made him presentable, and then, with him presiding, had Old Redhand exhumed from the courtyard. He forced himself to look on, his jaw aching with nights of sleepless resolve; he made the garrison look on too, and they did, silent and cowed before his ferocity and his father’s mortality.

He had found a quiet chamber within Forgetful, that once may have been a chapel, with dim painting on one wall he could not read, of a smiling, winged child perhaps; it would do. He had the great stones of the floor torn up, and a place made. From the dark wood of old chests a carpenter of his household had made a box.

“Wine,” the Queen said. “No water.”

When the last of the floor stones had been mortared back into place, and the same carpenter had tried an inscription on them, two or three ancient letters only that would stand for the rest, Redhand went to the tower and released Younger. Hesitant, his cheeks dirty with dried tears, Younger allowed himself to be taken and shown the empty place in the courtyard, and the quiet room and its secure stones.
Now,
Redhand had said, gripping his brother’s shoulders,
now you have no more excuse to be mad. Please. Please…
They had embraced, and stood for a while together, and Redhand from exhaustion and confused love had wept too.

Whatever it was, the true burial, or Redhand’s strength in doing this, or only that the vine flowers fell in that week: the horrid surgery worked. Younger slept for a day, worn out by his adventure, and woke calm: well enough to sit with his brother and Fauconred now, somewhat stunned, with the look of one returned from a long and frightening journey.

Kyr poured water from a ewer over the Queen’s fingers, and only when she had dried them did she look up, with her marvelous eyes, at her new allies. “Have this cleared,” she said, gesturing with a ringed hand at her pillaged feast, “and we will talk.”

There had been little time for Redhand to worry over his Secretary and his weird disappearance, though now he felt in need of him. The man, if man he had been, was so fey that in a sense Redhand felt he had not ever been truly there: this though he had saved Redhand’s life, twice. Well, there was no help for it. Redhand felt less that he had lost a friend or even an aide than that he had misplaced a charm, lucky but possibly dangerous too.

“Now, lady,” Redhand said.

“We have conditions,” she said. “We have drawn them up, you and whoever else will sign them.”

“Conditions.”

“Certain incomes I demand. Honors restored. There is a house near Farinsdown I wish for my summers.” She took a paper from Kyr. “There are names here of those I want punished.”

“Punished?”

“Much wrong was done me.” As though it were a morsel, her fat hands unrolled the paper lovingly. “Red Senlin’s Son, I have him here, and he must die.”

“So must we all.” Something like a smile had begun to cross Red-hand’s features. “Who else have you?”

She let the paper curl itself again, her dark eyes suspicious. “There are others.”

“Half the Red Protectorate?”

“I will have revenge.”

Redhand began to laugh, a hoarse; queer laugh that he owed to his old wound, and over his laughter the Queen’s voice rose: “I will have revenge! They murdered Black Harrah, they imprisoned my husband, they took my crown, they killed my child!”

Redhand stopped laughing. “Your child.”

The Queen stared at him defiantly.

“Where is the child?” he asked.

She rose slowly, raised her head, proud. “There is no child,” she said quietly. “Red Senlin murdered him.”

“Murdered a
child?”

“His relentlessness. His constant harassment. I miscarried on the Drum.”

Redhand too rose, and came toward the Queen, so malevolent that Kyr stepped close. “You have no child,” Redhand said. “Then tell me, Lady, what you do here with your conditions, and your demands, and your revenges. Do you think we owe you now, any of us, anyone in the world? For your beauty only, did you think?”

She did not shrink, only batted her black lashes.

“These,” he said, flicking her papers, hoarse with rage, “these will be our reason then to cross the Drum? Answer me, Lady. To kill the King, and any else who might have mocked you once or done you wrong?”

“No, Redhand.”

“What reason, then?”

“To free my husband from the house they have prisoned him in. Free Little Black, and make him King, again.”

Redhand turned away, flung himself in his chair. But he said nothing.

“Send to the Black Protectorate,” the Queen said. “Send word that you mean to do this. He has always been their King. They will rise.”

Redhand glared at nothing, his jaw tight.

“It is your only hope, Redhand.”

“The old man may be dead, or mad,” Fauconred said.

“He is not dead. I have spies near him. And he is no more mad than he ever was.”

“When the King learns of it,” Redhand growled, “he will kill Little Black. It surprises me he has not yet.”

The Queen sat heavily. “He will not learn of it. Send word to Blacks only, I will say whom, they will not reveal it. To your Red friends say only you want their help. Put it about that the child lives.”