Dragonfield (20 page)

They ignored the innkeeper’s flatteries and demanded rooms, which he managed to turn up at once, his inn being neither on Rose Row nor favored by such worthies as yourselves. He served his guests an execrable meal of Ashless stew and an excellent mountain wine, the one cancelling the other, and so they passed the night, their new-forged friendships made agreeable by the inn’s well-stocked cellar. Thus lullabied by strong drink, the three slept until nearly noon.

Now perhaps all that followed would not have, had it not occurred on the seventeenth day of Buds, for it was the very day on which four of the five mentioned in our story had been born, though they recognized it not.

The captain, who had been birthed that day forty years in the past, did not believe in such birth luck, trusting only to his own skill—which is perhaps why he had fetched up so promptly on the shoals of the Eel.

The young farmer was an orphan who had been found on a doorstep some twenty years past, and so had never really known his true birth day. His foster parents counted it five days after the seventeenth, the morning they had tripped over his basket and thus smashed the infant’s nose.

And the priest, who had been born some sixty years in the past, had been given a new birth date by the master of his faith who had tried, in this way, to twist luck to his own ends.

So that was three. But I
did
say four. And it is not of the innkeeper I now speak, for he knew full well his luck day was the twenty-seventh of Wind. But he had forgot that the bull camel, The Demon, humped and with the wandering eye (you
must
remember that eye, Exultancies) had emerged head first and spitting five years ago to that very day.

An animal casts no luck, neither good nor bad, you say, my Supremacies? And where is that bit of wisdom writ? Believe me when I tell you that the seventeenth day of Buds was the source of the problem. I have no reason to lie.

So there they were, three birth days sequestered and snoring under the one inn roof and the fourth feeding on straw in the stable. Together they invented the rest of my small tale and invested it with the worst of ill luck, which led to the haunting of the place from that day on.

It happened in this manner, Preeminencies and, pray, you
must
remember that wandering eye.

The sun glinting on the roof of the Levar’s palace pierced the gloom of the inn and woke our five on that fateful day in Buds. The camel was up first, stretching, spitting, chewing loudly, and complaining. But as he was tucked away in the stable, no one heard him. Next up was the innkeeper, stretching, grimacing, creaking loudly, and complaining to himself. Then in order of descending age, the three guests arose—first the priest, then the captain, and last the farmer. All stretching, sighing, scratching loudly, and complaining to the innkeeper about the fleas.

They gathered for a desultory breakfast and, as it was a lovely day, one of the lambent mornings in Buds when the air is soft and full of bright promise, that meal was served outdoors under a red-striped awning next to the stable.

The camel, ignoring the presence of ox and ass, chose to stick his head into the human conversation, and so the concatenation began.

The three guests were sitting at the table, a round table, with a basket of sweet bread between them, a small crock of butter imprinted with the insignia of the inn to one side, and to the other a steaming urn of kaf, dark and heady, and a small pitcher of milk.

The talk turned to magic.

“I do not believe in it,” spake the captain.

“I am not sure,” said the farmer.

“Believe me, I know,” the mendicant priest put in and at that same moment turned his head toward the right to look at a plate of fresh raw shellfish that had been deposited there.

Now that placed his head—and atop it the turban with the jewel, black and shiny and ripe as a grape—slightly below the camel’s nose, and it, great protuberance that it was, sensitive to every movement and smell carried by the soft air of Buds.

Well the turban tickled the nose; the camel, insulted, spat; the priest slapped the beast who snapped back at the priest’s hand.

But you did not—I hope, Ascendencies—forget that wandering eye?

For the camel’s eye caused him to miss the offending hand and snap up the black jewel instead.

At which the priest fainted. Then rallied. Then fainted again, clutching his chest and emitting a scream rather like that of a Tichenese woman in labor:
“Ee-eah, ee-eah, ee-eee-ehai.”

The captain leaped to his feet, upsetting the table, bread, butter, shellfish, milk, and kaf, and drawing his knife. The farmer simultaneously unsheathed his sword, a farewell gift from his parents. The innkeeper hovered over the priest, fanning him with a dirty apron. And the camel gulped and rolled his wandering eye.

At that, the priest sat up. “The jewel,” he gasped. “It contains the magic of my master.”

To which sentence the captain responded by knifing the camel in the front. This so startled the farmer, he sunk his sword into the camel up to its hilt from behind. The priest fell back, screamlessly, into his faint. The innkeeper began to weep over his bleeding beast. And the camel closed his wandering eye and died. Of course by his death the luck—such as it was—was freed.

And do you think, Extremities, by this the tale is now done? It is only halfway finished for, in the course of the telling, I have told you only what
seemed
to have happened, not that which, in actuality, occurred.

The priest at last revived and offered this explanation. The master of his faith, a magician of great power but little ambition, had invested his luck in a necklace of ten black jewels which he distributed to his nine followers (it was a
very
small sect). He kept but one jewel for himself. Then each year, the nine members of the faith traveled the roads of Liavek letting the master’s magic reach out and touch someone. But now, with a tenth of his master’s luck swallowed and—with the camel’s death—freed, there was no knowing what might happen.

On hearing this, the innkeeper began to scrabble through the remains of his camel like a soothsayer through entrails. But all he could find in the stomach was a compote of nuts, grains, olives, grape seeds, and a damp and bedraggled feather off the hat of a whore who had recently plied her trade at his hostelry.

“No jewel,” he said at last with a sigh.

“Probably crushed to powder when the luck was freed,” said the farmer.

“Then if there is no jewel,” said the captain, “where is this supposed luck? I told you I did not believe in it.”

At which very moment, the severed remains of the camel began to shimmer and reattach themselves, ligament to limb, muscle to bone; and with a final
snap
as loud as a thunderclap, the reanimation stood and opened its eyes. The one eye was sane. But the wandering eye, Benevolencies, was as black and shiny and ripe as a grape and orbited like a malevolent star ’round elliptic and uncharted galaxies.

The four men departed the premises at once in a tangle of arms, legs, and screams. The innkeeper, not an hour later, sold his inn to a developer, sight unseen, who desired to level it for an even larger hostelry. The priest converted within the day to the Red Faith where he rose quickly through the ranks to a minor, minor functionary. The farmer joined the Levar’s Guard where he was given a far better sword with which he wounded himself serving the Levar Modzi of the Flat Dome. And the captain—well, he sold the jewel, black and shiny and ripe as a grape, which he had stolen from the turban the night before and replaced with an olive because he did not believe in magic but he certainly believed in money. He bought himself a new ship which he sailed quite carefully around the shoals of the Eel. There had been no luck in the jewel after all, for the priest’s master had had as little skill as ambition, no luck except that which a sly man could convert to coin.

Then what of the camel? Had his revival been a trick? Oh, there had been luck there, freed by his death which had occurred at the exact day and hour and minute five years after his birth. But the luck had been in the whore’s feather which she had taken from a drunken mage who had bound his magic in it, creating a talisman of great sexual potency. So the demon camel, that walking boneyard, ravaged the inn site and impregnated a hundred and twenty local camels—and one very surprised mare—before the magic dwindled and the ghostly demon fell apart into a collection of rotted parts. But those camels sired by him still haunt this particular place; spitting chomping, reproducing, and getting into one kind of mischief after another.

And each and every one of those little demons, Tremendousies, is marked by a wandering eye.

T
HERE ONCE LIVED
in the forest of old England a fowler named Hugh who supplied all the game birds for the high king’s table.

The larger birds he hunted with a bow, and it was said of him that he never shot but that a bird fell, and sometimes two. But for the smaller birds that flocked like gray clouds over the forest, he used only a silken net he wove himself. This net was soft and fine and did not injure the birds though it held them fast. Then Hugh the fowler could pick and choose the plumpest of the doves for the high king’s table and set the others free.

One day in early summer, Hugh was summoned to court and brought into the throne room.

Hugh bowed low, for it was not often that he was called into the king’s own presence. And indeed he felt uncomfortable in the palace, as though caught in a stone cage.

“Rise, fowler, and listen,” said the king. “In one week’s time I am to be married.” Then, turning with a smile to the woman who sat by him, the king held out her hand to the fowler.

The fowler stared up at her. She was neat as a bird, slim and fair, with black eyes. There was a quiet in her, but a restlessness too. He had never seen anyone so beautiful.

Hugh took the tiny hand offered him and put his lips to it, but he only dared to kiss the gold ring that glittered on her finger.

The king looked carefully at the fowler and saw how he trembled. It made the king smile. “See, my lady, how your beauty turns the head of even my fowler. And he is a man who lives as solitary as a monk in his wooded cell.”

The lady smiled and said nothing, but she drew her hand away from Hugh.

The king then turned again to the fowler. “In honor of my bride, the Lady Columba, whose name means dove and whose beauty is celebrated in all the world, I wish to serve one hundred of the birds at our wedding feast.”

Lady Columba gasped and held up her hand. “Please do not serve them, sire.”

But the king said to the fowler, “I have spoken. Do not fail me, fowler.”

“As you command,” said Hugh, and he bowed again. He touched his hand to his tunic, where his motto,
Servo
(“I serve”), was sewn over the heart.

Then the fowler went immediately back to the cottage deep in the forest where he lived.

There he took out the silken net and spread it upon the floor. Slowly he searched the net for snags and snarls and weakened threads. These he rewove with great care, sitting straightbacked at his wooden loom.

After a night and a day he was done. The net was as strong as his own stout heart. He laid the net down on the hearth and slept a dreamless sleep.

Before dawn Hugh set out into the forest clearing which only he knew. The trails he followed were narrower than deer runs, for the fowler needed no paths to show him the way. He knew every tree, every stone in the forest as a lover knows the form of his beloved. And he served the forest easily as well as he served the high king.

The clearing was full of life, yet so silently did the fowler move, neither bird nor insect remarked his coming. He crouched at the edge, his brown and green clothes a part of the wood. Then he waited.

A long patience was his strength, and he waited the whole of the day, neither moving nor sleeping. At dusk the doves came, settling over the clearing like a gray mist. And when they were down and greedily feeding, Hugh leaped up and swung the net over the nearest ones in a single swift motion.

He counted twenty-one doves in his net, all but one gray-blue and meaty. The last was a dove that was slim, elegant, and white as milk. Yet even as Hugh watched, the white dove slipped through the silken strands that bound it and flew away into the darkening air.

Since Hugh was not the kind of hunter to curse his bad luck, but rather one to praise his good, he gathered up the twenty and went home. He placed the doves in a large wooden cage whose bars he had carved out of white oak.

Then he looked at his net. There was not a single break in it, no way for the white dove to have escaped. Hugh thought long and hard about this, but at last he lay down to the cooing of the captured birds and slept.

In the morning the fowler was up at dawn. Again he crept to the forest clearing and waited, quieter than any stone, for the doves. And again he threw his net at dusk and caught twenty fat gray doves and the single white one.

But as before, the white dove slipped through his net as easily as air.

The fowler carried the gray doves home and caged them with the rest. But his mind was filled with the sight of the white bird, slim and fair. He was determined to capture it.

For five days and nights it was the same except for this one thing: On the fifth night there were only nineteen gray doves in his net. He was short of the hundred by one. Yet he had taken all of the birds in the flock but the white dove.

Hugh looked into the hearth fire but he felt no warmth. He placed his hand upon the motto above his heart. “I swear by the king whom I serve and by the lady who will be his queen that I will capture that bird,” he said. “I will bring the hundred doves to them. I shall not fail.”

So the sixth day, well before dawn, the fowler arose. He checked the net one final time and saw it was tight. Then he was away to the clearing.

All that day Hugh sat at the clearing’s edge, still as a stone. The meadow was full of life. Songbirds sang that had never sung before. Strange flowers grew and blossomed and died at his feet yet he never looked at them. Animals that had once been and were no longer came out of the forest shadows and passed him by: the hippocampus, the gryphon, and the silken swift unicorn. But he never moved. It was for the white dove he waited, and at last she came.