G
arric or-Reise leaned on the rail of a balcony that existed only in his fancy, watching his physical body practice swordsmanship in the garden below. He wasn't asleep, but his conscious mind had become detached from the body's motions. In this reverie he met and spoke with the ghost of his ancestor who had died a thousand years before.
Garric gestured toward where his physical self hacked at a post with his lead-weighted sword. “It's as boring as plowing a field,” he said. “And there at least you have a furrow to show for it.”
“You've got the build to be a swordsman, lad,” said King Carus from the railing beside Garric. He grinned engagingly. “At least they always told me I did, and my worst enemies never denied my skill with a sword. But to be really good, you have to go through the exercises till every movement is a reflex.”
He pretended to study the clouds, picture perfect in a blue sky. “Of course,” he went on, “you can always save yourself the effort and let me take over running your body when there's need for that sort of work.”
Roses climbed a supporting pillar and flooded their red blooms across the balcony's solid-seeming stone. When Garric was in this state he had the feeling that nothing existed beyond the corners of his vision: if he turned his head very quickly, he might see formless mist instead of the walls of the building from which the balcony jutted.
Garric grinned at the king, pretending that he hadn't heard beneath the banter a wistful note in the voice of the man who hadn't had a physical form for a thousand years. “My father didn't raise me to shirk duties in order to save myself effort,” Garric said. “And I don't care to be beholden to another man for work that I ought to be able to do myself.”
Carus laughed with the full-throated enthusiasm of a man to whom the strong emotions came easily, joy and love and a fiercely hot anger that slashed through any obstruction. “You could have had a worse father than Reise,” he said. “And I'm not sure that you could have had a better one.”
He turned his attention to the figure below, Garric's body swinging the blunt practice sword. The men who guarded the compound of Master Latias, the rich merchant who was sheltering Garric and his friends here in Erdin, watched the exercises with approval and professional interest.
“You lead with your right leg,” Carus said, gesturing. “One day a smart opponent will notice that your foot moves an eyeblink before your sword arm does. Then
you'll find his point waiting for your chest just that much before your own blade gets home.”
“I'm tired,” Garric said. “My body's tired, I mean.”
Carus smiled with a glint of steel in his gray eyes. “You think you're tired, lad,” he said softly. “When you've been through the real thing, you'll know what tired is.”
“Sorry,” Garric muttered. Even as the words came out of his mouth he'd been embarrassed. He'd reacted defensively instead of listening to what he was being told. He grinned. “A scythe uses a lot of the same muscles, but I never had the wheat swing back at me. I'll practice till I've got it right.”
The king's expression softened into bright laughter again. “Aye, you will,” he said. “Already the strength you put into your strokes makes you good enough for most work.”
The two men on the dream balcony were so similar that were they visible no one could have doubted their relationship. Carus had been a man of forty when wizardry swallowed down his ship. He was broad-shouldered, long-limbed, and moved with a grace that gulls might envy as they slid across the winds.
Garric would be eighteen in a month's time. He had his height and strength, but compared to the full adult growth of the king beside him he looked lanky. Both were tanned and as fit as an active life could make a man. Garric was barefoot with the wool tunic and trousers of a Haft peasant. Carus wore a blue velvet doublet and suede breeches, with high boots of leather dyed a bright red.
On the king's head was a circlet of gold, the diadem of the Kings of the Isles. It had sunk with him a thousand years before.
“There's more to being King of the Isles than just being able to use a sword,” Carus said. His elbows were on the railing; he rested his chin for a moment on his tented fingers, an oddly contemplative pose for a man who was usually in motion.
He turned and looked at Garric. “Part of the reason I failed and let the kingdom go smash,” he said, “was that my sword was always the first answer I picked to solve a problem. But you'll need a sword too, lad, when you're king.”
“I'm not a king!” Garric said, grimacing in embarrassment. “I'm just a ⦔
What was he really? A youth from Haft, a backwater since the Old Kingdom fell. A peasant who'd been taught to read and appreciate the ancient poets by his father, Reise, an educated man who had once served in the royal palace in Valles and later had been secretary to the Countess of Haft in Carcosa.
A peasant who'd faced and killed a wizard who'd come close to assembling all the power of evil. A youth who had in his head the ghost of his ancestor, the last and greatest king the Isles had ever known.
“Well, I'm not a king,” Garric finished lamely.
“But you will be,” Carus said, his tone genial but as certain as the strokes of his mighty sword arm. “Not because you're of my blood; that just lets me speak with you, lad. You'll be King of the Isles because you can do the job. If you don't, the crash that brought down civilization when
I
failed will look like a party. All that'll be left this time will be blood and plague and slaughter till there's no one left to kill.”
Carus smiled. “But we won't let that happen,” he said. “On our
souls
we won't, King Garric! Will we?”
Two of Garric's companions had joined the spectators in the garden below. Cashel or-Kenset was nearly Garric's height and built like the trunk of an old oak. He and his sister Ilna came from the same village as Garric, Barca's Hamlet on the east coast of Haft. They and Garric's blond sister Sharina had been friends for as long as any of the four of them could remember.
Tenoctris, the old woman with Cashel now, was as complete a contrast with Cashel as Garric could imagine. A force that she refused to call fate had plucked her from
her own time and carried her a thousand years forward to deposit her on the coast of Barca's Hamlet. Tenoctris was. a wizard. She was a wizard with very little power, she said; but she understood where others merely actedâand by their actions brought destruction on themselves and those about them.
“No,” Garric said. “We won't let that happen.”
He'd have given anything to return to the life for which he'd been raised, the son of the innkeeper in a tiny village where nothing was expected to change except the seasons of the year. He couldn't go back, though.
The forces that ruled the cosmos were reaching another thousand-year peak. In the days of King Carus, a wizard with unbridled power had broken the kingdom into individual islands warring with one another and within themselves. Civilization had partly risen from that ruin; but if the cycle were repeated, Barca's Hamlet would be ground into the mud as surely as great cities like Carcosa on Haft, capital of the Old Kingdom of the Isles, had been shattered when Carus died.
“Join your friends,” Carus said with a cheerful gesture. “Besides, you shouldn't overdo or you'll take more from the muscles than you get back from the exercise. Though you're young and you won't believe that any more than I did when I was your age.”
The king, the balcony, and the sky above dissolved. Garric's mind slipped from reverie back into his sweaty, gasping body on the exercise ground. The shield on his left arm was a fiery weight, and all the muscles of his right side quivered with the strain of swinging the practice sword.
Garric reeled back, wheezing. Every time he'd struck the unyielding target, his hand had absorbed the shock. Garric's palm now felt as though a wagon had rolled over it. He stuck the sword down in ground he'd stamped hard.
“Ho!” Garric said, clearing his lungs. He fumbled with the strap that transferred some of the shield's weight to his shoulders. Cashel's big hands were there before him,
lifting the buckler of cross-laminated wood away as easily as if it had been a lace doily.
The captain of the guards stepped forward. Serians like Master Latias were pacifists, unwilling to use force on another human being. That didn't prevent them from hiring men who had different philosophies, though. The men guarding this compound in Erdin were hard-bitten by any standards, and their chief looked to be the equal of any two of his subordinates.
“You said you hadn't any experience with a sword, sir,” he said to Garric. “But that's not what I'd have thought to see you using one just now.”
Garric had gotten back enough of his breath to speak. “An ancestor of mine was a great swordsman,” he said, half-smiling. “Perhaps some of his skill passed to me.”
He touched his chest. A coronation medal of King Carus hung from a silk ribbon beneath his tunic. Garric's father had given him the medal the day Tenoctris washed up in Barca's Hamlet. From that day everything started to change ⦠.
“Tenoctris and I thought we'd go for a walk around the harbor,” Cashel said. His voice was slow, steady, and powerful, a mirror of the youth himself. He shrugged. “My sister's got Sharina and Liane weaving with her. It's some special idea, she says.”
Cashel and his sister Ilna had been orphaned when they were seven, making their way since then by skill and dogged determination. Garric was stronger than most of the men he'd met, but he knew his friend Cashel was stronger than anyone he was likely ever to meet.
“It's been a great many years since anyone called me a girl, and nobody ever mistook me for a weaver,” Tenoctris said. She spoke with a bright, birdlike enthusiasm that made her seem only a fraction of the age Garric's eyes judged her to be. “We thought you might like to come with us, though if you want to practice more ⦠?”
She nodded to the post. Despite the blunt edge of the
practice sword, Garric had hammered fresh chips away all around the wood.
“No, I'm done for the day,” Garric said. “Let me sponge off and I'll come with you.”
He chuckled. “If you overdo with exercise,” he added, “your muscles lose more than they gain.”
Neither his friends nor the guards understood Garric's amusement, but the king lurking somewhere in the back of Garric's mind laughed his approval.
Â
Â
Cashel or-Kenset was satisfied with life as he sauntered along Erdin's busy waterfront with his friends. He was usually satisfied. Cashel didn't require much to be happy, and he'd found hard work would bring all but one of the things he needed.
The only thing missing had been Garric's sister, Sharina, the girl Cashel had secretly loved for as long as he could remember. Now he had Sharina too.
Cashel and Garric strolled at a pace Tenoctris found comfortable. Though she was a frail old woman, she nonetheless moved faster than the sheep who were Cashel's most frequent companions.
He'd watched flocks on the pastures south of Barca's Hamlet since he was seven years old. As he got his growth he'd been hired more and more often for tasks that required strength: ditching, tree-felling, moving boulders in locations too cramped and awkward to admit a yoke of oxen to do the work. Folk in the borough had quickly learned that you could depend on Cashel to do a careful job of any task you set him.
“Is that a shrine to the Lady?” Garric asked. He nodded toward an altar at the head of a brick quay stretching out into the channel of the River Erd. It would be discourteous to gesture too openly toward a deity, and in a strange placeâas Erdin certainly was to a pair of Haft peasantsâthere was the chance someone would get angry with the boorish strangers.
Not that men the size of Cashel or Garric were likely to be attacked. Even so, they'd been well brought up and didn't want to give offense.
The altar was a carved female figure holding a shallow bowl. Three sailors were burning incense in it. The statue wore loose pantaloons and a sleeveless jacket that left her limestone breasts bare. Cashel had never seen garments like those, and certainly not on an image of the Lady, the Queen of Heaven. The incense surprised him into a sneeze.
“That's the Lady as she's worshipped on Shengy,” Tenoctris said. She grinned ruefully. “I should say, in my day that was the costume the Lady wore on Shengy. But you have to remember that in my day, Erdin was an uninhabited marsh and the Earls of Sandrakkan were a coarse lot who lived like a gang of bandits in a castle on the eastern tip of the island.”
“But the sailors aren't from Shengy, are they?” Garric said. “I thought folk from there are short and dark.”
“Sailors tend to take spiritual help from whoever offers it,” Tenoctris said. “They're more aware than most people of how much their safety depends on things they can't control.”