The Three Lands Omnibus (2011 Edition) (79 page)

This time it was Peter who waited. I said, my voice flat and dry, "Lord Carle."
Peter spread his hands in front of him in acknowledgment of my words. "You are under Lord Carle's care, and it is he who may judge you and pass sentence. I can give him my recommendation, but he has already told me in private that he believes you require once more the discipline of slavery. He has also told me who your new master would be."
My chest tightened, and I felt my fists begin to clench. Peter continued swiftly, "And so my clerk and I spent all of last night trying to find some way out of this problem. And I believe that, in the end, we found something a solution that will serve."
I did not unclench my fists, but my breathing eased somewhat. The breeze from the window made the light shudder once more, and the shifting shadows revealed to me what I had not noticed before: the dark circles below the Chara's eyes.
He said, "You are a palace free-servant; that is why you are under Lord Carle's care. But if you were under my care, I would be able to dispense the mercy I believe you deserve." He turned and pulled toward him the paper he had been reading upon my entrance.
My fists were still clenched. I forced myself to wait two heartbeats more before I said, in a carefully neutral voice, "You wish me to be your slave once more?"
Peter had been reaching for a pen. His head jerked up, and there was a moment's silence before he laughed and said, "I must admit that such a solution did not occur to me during my sleepless night. No, my idea is more devious. Prisoners who are palace free-servants are under Lord Carle's care, but prisoners who are palace guests are under my care. The Chara is reserved judgment in crimes involving men and women who visit the palace briefly, or men like that horrid bard Esmond, who stopped here one night during a rainstorm twenty years ago and whom we have not been able to get rid of since then. This document was prepared by my clerk – it is all clerks' language, but if you sign it, you will be resigning from the palace service and may remain here as my guest." He held out the paper and pen expectantly.
Still I could not find a way to unclench my fists. I stayed motionless and asked, in the same flat tone as before, "And what would my duties be as a guest?"
Peter put the paper carefully down on the table, placed the pen beside it, picked up the pen again, and stared at the quill for a second before his eyes met mine. He said simply, "To be my friend, I hope."
During the silence that followed, his gaze dropped again, this time toward the floor. After a moment he raised his head and said in a low voice, "Andrew, my father often told me when I was a boy that it was impossible for the Chara to be friends with a free-servant or a slave. I have come to see that he is right. Neither a free-servant nor a slave-servant is someone with whom one can converse candidly, as one can with a friend. But eleven years ago, I walked out of Lord Carle's room sick with anger and filled with loneliness from the fact that I could tell no one what I was thinking. And then I met you, and you listened to my troubles and told me honestly what you thought I was like and even smiled at my joke. And since that time I have considered you my friend, though I have never told you so."
He looked at me, and as I gazed at him I saw suddenly in him the boy-heir I had met long ago, courteous and quiet, afraid to speak openly, lest his words be used as weapons against him. He waited for me to reply. When I did not, he said in a voice even lower than before, "I do not speak my thoughts to many people – it is not wise for me to do so. Aside from you, I am candid with few men. As for you . . . Well, as far as I know, you volunteer your thoughts to no one. This too is probably wise. But if you would care to be candid with me tonight, I would very much like to know how you think of me."
I opened my mouth finally, spoke a word that did not reach past my lips, tried again, and said, "Chara . . ." My voice trailed off, as though the formal title had dropped somewhere in the stretch of space between us, too heavy to reach the young man before me.
When he spoke again, it was in little more than a whisper. "If you wish, you may call me Peter."
I whirled around suddenly and walked almost blindly to a small window overlooking the southern part of the city. In the dim moonlight I could see the black mountains bordering Koretia; down below, hidden in the blackness, was the marketplace where I had revealed my blood vow against the Chara.
When I looked to my side, I saw that Peter was standing next to me at the window, his eyes on me, and his fingers tenderly cradling the pen. My gaze fell, and I said in a quiet voice that matched his, "Peter, before I struck Lord Carle, he told me that I was a traitor to my people. He said I had broken my vow of loyalty to Koretia, for I had sworn when I first met him that I would never become Emorian and that my blood was dedicated to the slaying of the Chara. He pointed out that I now wore Emorian clothes, that I was free-servant to the Chara himself, and that I had no plans to return to my homeland. He said that the luxuries of my life here had led me to forswear my duty to my Koretian brothers."
My eyes were still cast down; I could see Peter's hand clenched about the pen, as though he were holding a weapon. I looked up and gazed into the Chara's eyes. "It is true, what Lord Carle said, that I have broken my vow and that I am a traitor to my people. But I did not do this for love of the riches here. I did it for love of the Chara, whom I never considered my friend, because I dared not aspire that high."
Peter's eyes remained solemn, but the corners of his mouth crooked upwards into a slight smile. He took a step forward and held out the pen toward me. "Dare."
Slowly I reached toward the pen. As I took it from him, I felt for a moment his wrist beating against mine, blood next to blood. Then his hand dropped for a moment, and when it rose again, it made a gesture I had not seen him make since his enthronement, a gesture that no Chara had ever made, because the Chara has no equals: he touched his heart and his forehead.
I returned to him the greeting, and then walked over to the table to sign the paper.
 
 
Blood Vow
4
LAND OF THE JACKAL
 
CHAPTER NINE
Late-afternoon light landed on the trees above us and then stole its way slyly through the translucent skin of the leaves to dapple our path, gold on brown. I raised my head to look at the cloudless sky peering at us through the leaves, and to feel upon my face the moist stroke of the sun-heated air. It was warmer than any fire I could remember sitting next to during my fifteen years in Emor.
As I lowered my head again, I saw that Lord Carle was watching me with narrowed eyes. We were riding along the Koretian forest path three abreast, with Peter in the middle; the Chara had shown his usual formal courtesy in acting as though he welcomed equally the company of both of us. By the rules of rank, I should have been riding behind with the servants, leaving the noblemen to talk together, but Peter had insisted on having me by his side during most of our fortnight-long journey, and Lord Dean, I could guess, was willing to take advantage of the time in order to glean bits of gossip from the servants that he could later use to his advantage.
Lord Carle paused from his persistent watch of me only in order to answer a question I had not heard Peter ask. The council lord said, "If I needed one word to describe the nature of this land, it would be blood. All of the oaths in this land are sworn on blood, the gods of this land can only be placated through the blood of animals – and frequently that of humans as well – and the traditional form of Koretian justice, if I may call it that, is the blood feud. It says something about Koretia that its most famous institution is ritualized murder."
I opened my mouth and closed it again, but Peter caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, and he pulled back on his horse's reins so that we were moving at a less rapid pace than before. He had driven the six of us to travel at a rate which Lord Carle had complained was faster than that of the Chara's vanguard, but now we were approaching the capital city, and Peter's anxious look was beginning to ease.
"What would you say, Andrew?" he asked. "Is Koretia founded on blood, as Lord Carle says?"
"I think that Lord Carle has noticed Koretia's outward rituals without understanding their inward significance," I said, carefully phrasing my words so that the council lord could not accuse me of insulting him. "Blood is a sign of sacrifice in Koretia. The Koretian people believe that loyalty to the gods must be shown through offerings of sacrifice. It is true, as Lord Carle says, that the blood feud was used as a form of justice in the old days, but it was not considered a form of private justice, a way to achieve vengeance on one's own behalf. Rather, it was a way to avenge deeds that broke the commands of the gods."
"That hardly reassures me," said Lord Carle, and then paused momentarily to swat a small butterfly that had taken his green and gold tunic to be a flower. Probably, I thought, struggling to remain just toward Lord Carle, he had mistaken the butterfly for one of the Koretian blood-flies that had been feasting upon us since we crossed the black border mountains.
"The bloodthirstiness of this land's gods is a model that I imagine the Koretians strive to imitate," continued Lord Carle. "Take this man, the Jackal. He first appeared during that blood feud to end all blood feuds, the Koretian civil war. I don't suppose that he could have chosen a more fitting moment to make his entrance, considering all the times since then that he has slaked his thirst on the blood of men. He has certainly fashioned himself after your god."
I pulled my horse's reins tight – I think that it was only a reflex action, but once I had done so, I discovered that my horse was standing still, and both Lord Carle and Peter were watching me. The Chara was unconsciously stroking his horse's mane, reassuring it as to our sudden delay, and at sight of Peter's characteristically gentle and affectionate action, I felt my resentment flame within me at Lord Carle's typical harshness. "They are not my gods, Lord Carle," I said. "I wish that you would remember that."
"Yes," said Peter, looking toward the council lord in a pointed manner. "I too wish that you would remember that, Lord Carle. Whatever point you have been trying to make during this trip, I think you can assume that you have long since made it. I am growing weary of hearing you sing the same stale tune."
Lord Carle kept his gaze fixed on me rather than Peter, but he said with that overcourteous formality which I knew drove Peter mad, "I will endeavor to serve you better in the future, Cha— Lord Peter. Is it the Cha— Is it your wish that we stay in the governor's palace tonight?"
I could see Peter biting away a smile at Lord Carle's fumbled speech. If there was one form of loyalty that Lord Carle had never managed to achieve toward his master, it was in following Peter's frequently expressed desire that his council lords not treat him with strict formality during his leisure hours. I suspected that Lord Carle's unusually bad temper during this trip came, not only from his hatred of Koretia and of me, but also from his frustration at Peter's command that Lord Carle address him at all times by his childhood title.
"Why do you ask, Lord Carle?" replied Peter.
"Because we may have to return to our old speed if we are to reach the city by nightfall," said Lord Carle. "This road meanders quite a bit before it reaches the western gates."
This was, I thought, one of Lord Carle's milder statements during the trip. Koretia being the smallest of the Three Lands, it took travellers merely two weeks to journey between the Emorian capital and the Koretian capital at the southern tip of this land. Or rather, it would have taken two weeks if the Koretians had built straight, paved roads the way the Emorians did. As it was, only the Chara's lightning-swift messenger journeyed between the capitals in that amount of time. Ordinary travellers took a month or more, held back by mud and muck, deep cart-ruts that threatened to trip their horses and mules, bridges that were inevitably broken, roads that zig-zagged back and forth for obscure religious reasons or simply because it suited the fancy of the road-builder, and, of course, the Koretians' unique method of collecting tolls.
To prevent Lord Carle on offering further comment on this, I said, "You appear to know a great deal about Koretia."
Lord Carle's gaze drifted over my way once more and remained fixed on me as he said blandly, "It is always wise to know one's enemy."
I was saved from making a reply by the appearance of Lord Dean, who, seeing us halted in the road, had ridden ahead of Curtis and Francis. Peter, glancing his way, started his horse forward again, but the imperturbable High Lord took this as a sign of encouragement and continued toward us. I quickly pulled back behind the others in order to allow Lord Dean his place beside the Chara.
"I hate to admit it, Lord Carle," Peter was saying, "but I have reached the conclusion that you are right about this land, at least as far as the weather is concerned. After two weeks' worth of hot and dusty travel, I am ready to hand my office over to any man who can give me a few days' worth of Emorian coolness."
"Well, it has allowed for a quick journey," said Lord Dean cheerfully. "At least we haven't had to endure any rain."
Lord Carle glanced over his shoulder to where I was riding, a few paces behind Lord Dean. Our eyes met, and I knew that, for once, our thoughts were in sympathy.
Peter, who always caught small gestures in a conversation, asked, "Is the lack of rain a problem?"
"Only because this is a land whose weapon of war is fire," replied Lord Carle.
"Why, we all know that," said Lord Dean. "That's what allowed us to win the Border Wars; the Chara Nicholas was able to turn the Koretians' weapon against them."
Lord Carle said, "Even the Koretians, High Lord, would hesitate to use their favorite weapon during a summer like this."
"Why is that?" asked Peter quietly. I could tell from his tone that he had already guessed Lord Carle's warning, but as always, he preferred to hear other men explain matters in which they had expertise rather than offer comment himself.
Lord Carle looked back at me again. "Perhaps Andrew could give you part of the answer by explaining why all of the towns we have visited have moats surrounding them."
"I had assumed that they were there to protect against invaders," said Peter, looking at me inquiringly.