The Fugitive Prince (Bell Mountain) (26 page)

They sang as their spirits moved them, creating a babble that echoed up and down the streets of great Obann, praising God, and with a roar that the people of the city would long remember, the chorus: “His mercy endureth forever!”

Gurun kept her bodyguard of eighteen Blays, all that was left of a contingent of the Thunder King’s host—short, barrel-chested men, expert slingers, who had attached themselves to her before she came to the city and would never leave her. They feared the Thunder King because he took away their gods, and then his army was destroyed and they were hopelessly far from home with nowhere to go. They fell into awe of Gurun because she taught them God would save them and taught them how to pray. Nothing would part them from her.

She stood on the roof of the palace, watching the parade with Fnaa, Uduqu, Hennen, Constan, and other city notables. She wondered where Gallgoid was, and knew he would be watching more closely than anyone.

His last words to her, two days ago, were these: “My agents will be busy, but don’t expect to see them. Don’t mention my name to anyone but Hennen or Uduqu. As far as anyone else knows, I am nobody. It won’t be safe for us to see each other face to face. If you need to communicate with me, wear this necklace and leave the rest up to me.” And he gave her a thin gold chain with a green stone, of a type common enough in the city that any well-to-do lady might be expected to own.

Already, she mused, the servants and the functionaries in the palace had noticed a change in their supposed king. Fnaa was doing things that caught their eyes—and made them gossip, too, Gurun supposed. “It must be all over the city by now,” she thought.

It was a marvel to watch him staring fixedly at a spider in its web, with his mouth open, and sometimes drooling. Or walking with his eyes apparently unfocused and bumping into someone. Or making a rude noise at the supper table and laughing about it. He had more tricks than a traveling puppet show, and you’d swear they weren’t tricks at all and that he truly was going diddly. “No wonder his old master couldn’t sell him!” Gurun thought.

The chieftains had wanted Jandra to go with them, too; they would bring her back to Lintum Forest. But Gurun pleaded with them. “Please don’t take both Obst and Jandra! Or else wait for God to speak again through her and show us His will in this matter.” The chiefs seemed puzzled when Uduqu and Chagadai strongly supported her.

“We’ll do as you ask,” Chief Shaffur said, “but for no one else would we do it.”

“All will be made plain to you before long, my lords,” Obst promised.

Hennen, standing next to Gurun while the parade went by, had to speak twice before he got her attention.

“I said, my lady, that I hope we see these men again,” he said. “There’s never been another army like it, has there? Not since the days of King Ozias himself! They have no general, and yet they’ve never lost a battle. They came to Obann to sack the city and wound up saving it. They’ve never been inside a chamber house in all their lives, and yet they love God and would die for Him. My lads and I will miss them. It’s been an honor to serve with them. And who would have thought it? A leaderless mass of Heathen has become the army of the Lord. I wish I were marching with them!”

“Oh, they’ll be back, all right,” Uduqu said. “This song is a long way from being sung to its finish.” Fnaa climbed onto the rail for a better look at the parade, the kind of thing a very foolish child would do, and Uduqu snatched him back to safety before he could fall. “Here, Your Majesty! You sit up here on my shoulders, and you’ll see everything.” He set the boy on his shoulders and held on to his ankles. Fnaa waved delightedly to a passing bird. Gurun saw people down below looking up at him, and a few of them pointing.

“We’re all going to wish we’d marched out with the army, by and by,” she thought.

In the evening the army camped on the plain beside the great river, and the chieftains pitched their great black tent that had once belonged to a mardar of the Thunder King. Obst said he had to speak to them; they gathered in the tent at sundown. Shaffur made a point of setting King Ryon’s ivory stool in the midst of them, conspicuously empty.

Obst stood to address them. He spoke in Obannese, but each of the chiefs heard his words in his own native tongue.

“My lords,” he said, “the time has come to tell you something that you did not know, because it was kept a secret from you. Please hear me out before you get angry!

“A month ago and more, King Ryons disappeared. You couldn’t find him anywhere inside the palace, nor could he be found outside. His hound, Cavall, was missing, too—as you were told at the time.”

He told them how, when the matter seemed most hopeless, Ellayne and Jack brought to the city a boy who was the image of King Ryons; and how, lest disorder should break out in the city, Gurun installed that boy in Ryons’ place and presented him to everyone as the king himself, recovering from a sudden illness that had blotted out his memory.

“Chieftains, the boy we left behind today is not the king, but a brave boy who has agreed to hold Ryons’ place for him until he returns. Chief Uduqu knew of the substitution, and Chief Chagadai. But we dared not tell the rest of you. If somehow the matter became known in the city, we feared there would be an uprising against us. There is a great deal of treason fermenting in that city.”

Shaffur smote his thighs and roared a profanity.

“I knew it!” he said. “There was a stink in all these dealings, Teacher! And meanwhile, where is our king?” All the chieftains grumbled loudly, and it took some time to settle them.

“My lords, we don’t know where King Ryons is,” Obst said. “Somehow, one night, he got out of the palace and out of the city without anyone seeing him. There is nothing to suggest he’s been abducted. After all, his hound is with him! We don’t know how he got away, or where he went, but we think he may have gone to Lintum Forest—of his own free will, for some unknown reason. But whatever the case, he hasn’t been in Obann for some time. And meanwhile the Thunder King sows treason everywhere. It was judged best for this army not to be penned up in the city.”

“Well, that’s good sense, at least!” said Tughrul Lomak, chief of the Dahai. “Had we stayed there much longer, we might have forgotten what our swords and spears are for.”

“But how are we to find King Ryons?” wondered the new chief of the Abnaks—Buzzard, one of the many sons-in-law of the late Chief Spider. “If only we’d been told as soon as he was gone! We would have tracked him down—we, or our friends the Attakotts.”

“Attakotts would have found him,” said their chieftain, Looth.

“My lords, my lords!” said Obst. “Be sure that all of this has come to pass by the will of God and that He will protect Ryons better than we ever could. Has He not promised him the kingdom?

“Besides which, I must tell you now that God has spoken to the boy Fnaa through Jandra, whom you know as a true prophet. Fnaa has the Lord’s protection now. It remains for us to wait for the Lord and learn what is His will for us.”

It took most of the night for Obst, with help from Chagadai, to reconcile the chiefs to all the deceptions that had been practiced on them. Shaffur questioned Gallgoid’s role in it, but Chagadai convinced him that there was no way King Ryons could have eluded the Ghols’ guardianship, except by God’s providence. But the tall Wallekki couldn’t quite stop fuming.

“It seems to me, sometimes,” he said, “that God asks too much of us. The old Wallekki gods wouldn’t dream of trying us so.”

“My lord!” Obst protested, but Shaffur held up a hand to quiet him.

“Peace, old man!” he said. “I’m as much God’s man as you are. If He knows everything, as you say He does, then He knows that, too.”

Chapter 31

What Sunfish Saw

Ryons and Perkin were thoroughly lost. The forest had swallowed them up. Fleeing from the outlaws, they followed whatever path seemed easiest. Once they had to splash through a bog. Finally they found a place to stop—they really couldn’t go any farther without rest—where there was a little creek nearby, but nothing to eat.

“I wonder if I ought to build a fire,” Perkin said. “But we have nothing to cook, and the smoke might help Hwyddo find us.”

“Oh, let’s have a campfire!” Ryons said. “It’ll be dark soon, and I don’t want to sit around in the dark for hours and hours.”

“I doubt either of us will stay awake for many hours,” Perkin said. Before the night closed in, he made a little campfire. Cavall lay down beside Ryons, and Baby settled down by Perkin. “We’re safe from wild animals, at least,” thought Ryons.

But Cavall never stretched out and shut his eyes. He kept his head up and his eyes open. From time to time his ears twitched, but Ryons couldn’t hear anything but the normal nighttime noise of birds and frogs and insects, and the night breeze creeping through the treetops.

“I’m hungry,” he muttered.

“So am I, Your Majesty,” said Perkin. “Maybe tomorrow we’ll find something we can eat.”

Ryons would have fallen asleep much sooner if he hadn’t been so hungry. They’d been on the run all day with nothing to eat. His stomach rumbled. An owl hooted in reply. Perkin began to snore. Their fire died down to a feeble glow, and Ryons couldn’t see anything but the solid black wall of benighted forest all around him, and high above, directly overhead, a patch of sky strewn with stars. He saw a shooting star streak past, and fell asleep waiting for another one.

In the grey morning Ryons woke. Cavall lay sleeping beside him, and Baby was up, drinking from the creek. Perkin still slept. Ryons sat up, yawned and stretched—

And then froze: because there at his feet, lying on the ground, he saw the carcass of a large, plump hare.

He grabbed Perkin’s sleeve and shook. “Perkin—wake up! Look!”

Something in his tone woke Perkin in a hurry. When he saw the hare, the last vestige of sleep fell from him.

“Now how did that get there?” he said. “Cavall must have caught it during the night.”

“Did you?” Ryons asked the dog. Cavall looked at him and wagged his tail. “But I don’t think he left my side all night.”

“We ought to get this cleaned and cooked right away,” Perkin said. He picked it up, studied it, shook his head. “Sire, Cavall never touched this hare. See—these punctures in its side. No dog’s teeth did that.”

“Then what did?”

Perkin frowned. “I don’t know. It wasn’t Angel. She wouldn’t fly by night. Nor was it any weapon I’m familiar with.”

“Let’s eat it anyway!” Ryons said. “Then we can wonder about how it got here.”

“At least we can be sure it wasn’t put here by an enemy,” Perkin said.

Expertly he cleaned the hare and skinned it, tossed the innards to Angel, while Ryons gathered firewood. Soon the hare was cooking on a spit; not so soon and it was ready to eat.

“Let’s remember to give thanks before we eat,” said Perkin; but Ryons had already bowed his head in prayer.