The Summer's King (20 page)

The fool spoke up from among the tent ropes: “King Sharn, it is the Summoning!”

A small mounted procession came up to the tent, and a white-clad herald blew a brief trumpet call. An old man in a white robe and mounted upon a splendid white horse was the leader. He had something of a martial air about him, but he was not dressed as a knight. The king recognized him partly from his companions: a woman and a younger man riding darker horses.

“Sharn Am Zor,” said Dravyd, the messenger of the Falconers. “We have come to summon you to your vigil in the White Tower.”

“Now? At once?” said the king. “Good Master Dravyd, let me change my clothes at least and see to my people. My champion, Gerr of Kerrick, Count Zerrah, has been wounded.”

“May the Goddess spare this scion of a noble house,” said Dravyd. “You must come at once, King Sharn. You are honor bound to mount up and follow.”

“Master Summoner!” exclaimed Captain-General Britt with some heat, “This is our king you are summoning. He cannot ride off unescorted. We, his guardsmen, are honor bound to protect him!”

“The king may take an esquire,” said Dravyd.

“My King . . .” murmured Tazlo Am Ahrosh.

Sharn saw a flicker of anxiety cross Britt's face; even the young man from the north was not enough protection for his liking. Yet there was nothing else for it.

“Mount up then, Tazlo,” said Sharn Am Zor in exasperation.

He stripped off the garlands from his wrists and from his neck and held them out to the fool.

“Farr the Fool,” he murmured seriously, “stay with my folk in Sennick Fortress and help them. I swear I will give you all that your heart desires.”

Then the fool bowed his head and his smaller companions seized the garlands. One of them kissed the king's hand and said,
“Go well, King Sharn!”

Tazlo Am Ahrosh turned his head sharply; the little man had used the Old Speech.

The king mounted up on his trusty Eildon steed, which was called Blaze, and Tazlo was on his second mount, a bay called Trueheart. They followed the Messengers across the field and saw the King of the Isles summoned with as little ceremony from his tent by the Swordsmen's Yard. Then they came further to the tent of the Falconers, and there Prince Gwalchai was waiting, already mounted, with his esquire who was a kedran officer. So they came past the stand before the lists, and the Eildon nobility waved their hands and cheered the two kings and the prince as they went by to their vigil. The procession moved to the porch of the Hall of the Kings again, and where the priests had stood, there were now the heads of the knightly orders with their banners. Prince Borss Paldo was their speaker:

“Go now, brave knights and warriors,” he said, “go to your vigil and your quest. You are honor bound to return here to this place no sooner than the meeting day, two moons from now, and give account of yourselves. You may ask the Council a boon at that time.”

The king's head whirled with questions. Two moons? A vigil and a quest? A boon from the Council? What if they all asked the same boon, the hand of the Princess Moinagh? Would the business of contests, magic, the formal and friendless life they had been living in Lindress, begin all over again?

Dravyd and Nieva and Gil rode on in silence, taking a path that led round the Hall of the Kings and through smooth parkland. It was late afternoon; they were riding to the north. The setting sun hid behind a low hill, and in twilight they came at last to the White Tower. It was a very old and solid keep built of huge blocks of crudely dressed stone, whitewashed like a farmer's cottage, with the original grey of the stone showing through in places. It rose up on a flat green field without any trace of fortifications; to the right and left were the colleges of the druda and the dagdaren—long low buildings with hedged gardens.

On the green lawn before the arched entrance of the tower grew trees of various heights, planted in no special pattern. It was hard to count these trees; as Sharn Am Zor looked from one to the other, he was amazed by each separate tree, by its beauty or its power or its strangeness. That must be the Carach. Almost involuntarily he sent out a prayer to the Carach, saying, “Care for your countryman, poor Gerr of Kerrick Hall, injured in the lists!” There was an oak, twined with mistletoe, and there a sea-oak, bearded with moss, and there a conifer unknown to him, very narrow and dark, and there a bulbous tree with roots hanging in the air. As they dismounted, still in silence, young druda in their white robes came and led the horses away. The Messengers led the way down a broad pebbled path to the entrance of the tower, and at last Sharn saw the black tree, the Skelow, grown a cloth yard high in the year since it had come into Eildon. It stood to the left of the path, and he wished he might run and kneel down beside it. All he could do was call to it in his mind: “Skelow, I am here, come from the Palace of the Zor at Achamar, from your parent tree, my old dark companion.”

III

He woke with an effort as he had done so many times before and saw that the candles beside the altar stone had hardly burnt down. It was the fourth night, and they were still on the cold stone, still keeping vigil, stripped of their rank, showered with the sacred spring water and wrapped in curious garments. Sharn fingered the stuff of his cloak: it was like nothing at all, like mist, its color a brown-purple-grey, mole color perhaps. It kept him warm, so warm that like all the others he fell asleep in the huge cold hall during the nightlong vigils. He saw that Gwalchai's kedran was wide awake, while her master dozed, kneeling. The woman, Edrith, was the oldest; then Kenzie, the esquire of Diarmut. Both the island men were sitting cross-legged, upright, staring straight ahead, entranced. Tazlo had fallen from a kneeling position a body length away; if he slept too long, one of the druda would come and waken him. Sharn drew up his long legs and hugged his knees; his body ached.

The vast hall was open to the sky. He had watched the stars overhead during these long nights: was that the Hunter winking a red eye at him? There were wooden galleries circling the interior of the white tower, their pillars made of tree trunks, dwarfed by the masonry. The altar of the Goddess was a single block of white stone flanked by thick candles and decorated with stone urns of spring flowers. Sharn knew that visions were often vouchsafed to true worshippers during a vigil, but he had seen none. A trio of priestesses came in every night and swept and garnished the altar and the place before it.

The leaden hours crept by, and he passed them sleeping and waking, gazing at the altar until it swam before his tired eyes. Was it becoming lighter? Was the dawn coming at last? He thought he heard the birds singing and even a fluttering of wings. Yes, woodland birds had come in through the opening overhead; he saw them flying about the altar. A young druda in a long golden cloak stood at the altar. A bird flew down and rested upon his outstretched hand. Tazlo gave some startled exclamation, and Sharn glanced at him, blinking as he turned from the light. The young man from the north looked at the king wildly, then settled himself into a more comfortable position. When Sharn looked back, the young priest and the birds had gone. It was indeed getting light.

The vigil ended. They were led off in silence, each to a lonely cell. Sharn, feeling drained of strength but oddly peaceful, lay down again on his straw-filled mattress and fell asleep. When he woke, there was his daily ration: a jug of water, half a loaf of bread and beef-dripping to spread on it, two hard-boiled hens' eggs, two apples. He began to gobble up the food gratefully.

There was no door to the cell but a thick felt curtain. Now it was drawn back, and a man came in: it was the High Druda, the leader of the college, who had led the opening ceremony for the Tourney of All Trees. He was middle-aged and not as tall as he had appeared at first. Sharn heaved himself up from the low pallet and bowed to the High Priest.

“Sit down, Sharn Am Zor,” said the druda gently. “I am called Gwion Goldenhand. We must prepare for your quest.”

“Master Gwion,” said Sharn, not quite sure how to address the priest, “I will do all that I am bound to do, but I am growing tired of Eildon and its magic.”

“Do not think you know Eildon, my son, because you have spent some time in Lindriss at the princely courts and at the Tourney of Trees,” said Gwion Goldenhand.

“I am a king,” said Sharn. “I came here to court my royal cousin. Yet I have been ill used and tricked and my loyal followers have been struck down . . .”

“Put aside all worldly thoughts,” said the High Druda with firm authority. “What you shall do now in the Sacred Wood and in the countryside of Eildon is no courtly game; it is a quest!”

“What am I to understand by that?” asked the king. “Is it a search for some object, some magic place such as lost Ystamar, the vale of the oak trees?”

“It is a search for truth,” said Gwion Goldenhand. “Everyone who goes into the Sacred Wood, in good heart, purified by a vigil, will learn as much of the truth as he or she is able to bear.”

“But what truth?” asked Sharn impatiently. “The truth about life? The answer to some question?”

“The truth we need most,” said the High Druda. “The truth about ourselves.”

Sharn Am Zor fell silent. In spite of the warmth of the magic cloak, his only garment, he shivered.

“You are a king,” said the priest again, “and you are a brandhul. Do you know what that means?”

“I am proof against certain kinds of magic,” said Sharn. “I have known this for some time, long before the Messengers told me. What else is a brandhul?”

“It is a strange quality,” said Gwion. “I have seen brandhul who were very ugly, twisted and deformed. Others, like yourself, are well-made, handsome. Magic, especially the empty kind of trickery you have experienced in the city, bounces off the brandhul. A spell misaimed returns upon the sender. A spell aimed at a brandhul . . .”

Sharn understood before the words were spoken. He uttered a loud cry.

“Yes, it is true,” said the High Druda. “A spell aimed at a brandhul strikes someone else.”

The king stared open-mouthed at Gwion Goldenhand. He saw Zilly upon the white horse, heard Gerr of Zerrah struck down in the lists. He thought of many common “accidents” in war and in peace that had visited those near him while he went unharmed. Even the arrow fired in the Hain long ago had wounded Aidris while he escaped. He thought of the ride in the early snowstorm with Tazlo; a guard officer had died and others had suffered for
his
foolishness.

“Can I be rid of this?” he demanded. “Master Gwion, can I be healed of being a brandhul?”

“Think carefully,” said the priest. “Some would say that this quality is no bad thing in a king.”

Sharn shook his head but fell silent.

“You will go to the tiring room again,” said Gwion. “Then ride out with Tazlo Am Ahrosh, your esquire, into the Sacred Wood. Take the road that beckons. Open your heart to the power of the Goddess.”

“Is the wood very wide?” asked Sharn.

“About three times the size of the Hain, near Achamar,” said the priest. “If your way leads out of the wood, you must follow it, but the power of the vigil and the quest will be on you, and you will come to no harm.”

“Is the quest peaceful?” asked Sharn. “I have heard of knights who fought with dragons and so on . . .”

“Perhaps it was so in old time.” Garion smiled. “But today the dragons have all flown to the warm lands. They do not trouble us. The quest is peaceful, and no blood can be spilt in the Sacred Wood.”

It all seemed easy enough, Sharn thought, and in the same moment he distrusted the Sacred Wood. He clung to the feelings of peace, of emptiness that he retained from the vigil. In the tiring room, still under ban of silence, he grinned at Tazlo, and they dressed in their clothes from the Tourney, newly pressed and refurbished, but were allowed to keep their cloaks of the magic cloth. So they came out into the noonday sun beside the White Tower and followed two druda to a stableyard where their horses were waiting and were led by their two grooms over a flowery meadow between the colleges of the priests and priestesses.

They beheld the Sacred Wood on the other side of a little river, and Sharn's first thought was that it did not compare with the Hain. The trees were lower, with the gnarly Eildon look he had marked as his ship sailed up the river Laun. The elder of the two druda bowed and blessed them and pointed to a small bridge. They rode over the bridge, first the king, then Tazlo, and Sharn saw a decent path beside a bush of yellow broom, so he took it and they rode into the wood.

The ban of silence was ended; they both burst out laughing. It was delicious to speak aloud, to ride through the low green aisles talking and laughing over every cruel detail of the vigil.

“I saw no visions,” said Sharn. “I wonder how the others fared?”

“On the last night I saw a strange thing,” said Tazlo, “and I could have sworn, my King, that you saw it too.”

“What, that tall blond priest and the birds?”

“A priest?” said Tazlo. “In the gold cloak?”

The young man from the north had reined in his bay horse. They stood on the edge of a clearing. Sharn felt for the first time that the wood spread out all around them, impenetrable. He looked about keenly and saw nothing that he could interpret as a magical sign leading him on.

“The man at the altar in the golden cloak, sire,” said Tazlo uneasily, lowering his voice, “it was yourself. You lifted a hand, and the bird settled on it.”

Sharn shook his head, wondering.

“Perhaps it was a chance likeness,” he said. “I did not see the man as myself.”

They rode on into the clearing and found the ashes of a fire in a ring of stones and hoofprints in the thick soft grass.

“Choose a path,” said Sharn. “We must go further into the wood.”