Treason (23 page)

“Will you ride?” the man asked, more humbly this time.

I said nothing, but mounted the horse.

The children gathered silently in front of the house. Vran looked at me expressionlessly. I raised a hand in farewell. And Vran, violating every custom I had seen among the Humpers, burst into tears in front of me and fled into the house. It frightened me to see how much such independent people could come to lean on someone who offers even the slightest power linked with kindness.

The servant followed no road—there were no roads in the Humping Hills but one, which led from the lord’s house-by-the-sea to the city of Hesswatch a hundred or more kilometers to the south. Our journey would end where that road began. The servant instead seemed to find his way by riding east to the sea and then following the shore from a respectful distance until the cliff house was visible on a virtual pinnacle that rose considerably above the hills of Humping.

The sky darkened over with clouds, and the rains came as we approached, the wind driving swiftly, with the sea, usually so placid, suddenly forming huge swells coming in from the north to break their faces on the rocky coast. The wind whipped at us and the horses became unruly, so we dismounted and walked. The servant seemed unsure of himself. He was not a Humper, and he cast his way inland, away from the sea, which would seem daunting to any who saw breakers only when the wind was high. Unfortunately, he did not lead us to the road, but instead managed to end us up at a ravine, and in the darkness it seemed impossible to tell north from south.

He looked at me, his eyes still confident, but the question quite clear: What can we do, now that we’re lost? So I led my horse up away from the ravine and found shelter under a steep cliff, where the wind from the north would, at worst, allow only spray to strike us. Then I tied the horses to each other and the servant helped me as I hobbled them.

“I’ll keep watch at first,” I told him, and he nodded gratefully and curled up to sleep, looking tall and gaunt in the dark red cape that he wrapped around himself.

I was more tired from the day’s exertions than I thought, however, and I decided to catch some sleep in quicktime, so that J would be able to stay awake through most of the realtime night.

I slept easily, and awoke after a long time, feeling refreshed. I lay a moment in quicktime, watching how the drops came crawling down from the sky to hover over the horses’ backs, finally striking and breaking instantly into pools and splashes. As I slipped into realtime, I glanced at the servant and was startled to see him looking much shorter and wearing a shabby blue cape that barely covered his knees.

The illusion passed immediately. I was in realtime, and he looked as he had always looked. I laughed at myself for having let my vision be fooled by the darkness and my sleepiness, and I watched well throughout the rest of the night, taking another short nap as the clouds cleared just before dawn. The horses stirred occasionally, but were usually docile, and we got under way almost as soon as the sun was up.

The cliff house rose in a jumble of stone from the promontory, and up close it was even more dramatic than its height made it seem from a distance. It must have been constructed in bits and pieces over centuries; there was no clear architectural style, though some of the earliest constructions seemed to have been designed for defense. Now the place seemed brooding and forlorn, and the still-high seas cast spray up to the level of the lower stories, seeming to say that it was only a matter of time before the sea claimed the house.

The servant led me to the stable, where a single groom put the horses into stalls and ignored us as we left. Inside the house, the rooms were cold, and we passed no one. It was plain the place was designed for large companies; the emptiness made the cold penetrate even more.

But coldness was not Lord Barton’s manner, and when we appeared unannounced at the door of a large study, I was struck by the contrast. In
this
room, a huge fire burned; in
this
room, the walls weren’t stone, but rather were lined with books rising dizzyingly to the ceiling ten meters from the floor. Ladders were strategically placed and their treads were well worn, implying that the books were read often, though the ladders also gave the room rather the look of a building still under construction.

Barton, an aging man with a smile that overwhelmed his face frequently, welcomed me with a handshake and pulled me into the room. “Thank you, Dul,” he told the servant, and we were alone.

“I’ve heard of you,” said Barton. “Heard of you and wanted to meet you for some time, some time. Sit, please, I’ve moved the softest furniture up here, where I live. It’s shabby and old, but so am I, and it all fits nicely when you consider that I’m the decaying remnant of a decadent line. I only have one son.” That amused him, and he laughed.

I did not laugh. I looked at the titles on the spines of the books. Habits of the Humpers did not disappear overnight, and when I had nothing of importance to say, it was hard to say anything.

Barton stared at me penetratingly. “You are not what you seem.”

That amused me and awoke my old manner of speech. “So many people have said that that I’m beginning to think that’s precisely how I
do
seem. What is it I seem to be that you have now discovered that I’m not?”

“A sharp tongue, even when speaking to a lord, and a man who refuses to come when bidden until the planting’s done. You seem to be a rebel, sullen and silent. But the people say you’re the Man-in-the-Wind, and you save mothers in childbirth and heal lame sheep and help simple children find their minds. Miracles, yes?”

I didn’t answer, regretting my outburst of Muellerish speech. Enough of that. I was done with that.

“But the reason I asked to see you has little to do with that,” said Barton. “Legends come and go among these superstitious folk, and I don’t call every passing healer in to speak with me. What intrigued me was white hair like wool, as the Humpers say, and a man who seeks out hardship. A man who seems young in years but old as I am in experience. Whatever became of Lanik Mueller?”

The last question was so ridiculous, so out of place—so dangerous—that I couldn’t hide my surprise. Barton laughed, obviously feeling very clever. “Tricks and traps. I play them even on the wise. There are rewards, you know, for seeming to be a foolish old man. Lanik Mueller has always fascinated me, you know. It’s been what, four years now since he and dear old Ensel Mueller vanished into the forest of Ku Kuei, never to be seen again. Well, I don’t put much stock in legends. They always seem to have a perfectly natural foundation. And I don’t think people who go into Ku Kuei necessarily die. Do you?”

I shrugged.

“I think they come out again,” said Barton. “I think that Lanik Mueller, the scourge of the Rebel River plain, I think he lives.”

He looked at me intently. “I met you, boy, when you were eleven.”

That forced me to look at him again. Had I ever seen that thin old man before?

“I was a traveler in the old days. And a bit of a historian. I picked up tales and genealogies wherever I went, trying to discover what had happened to the world in the days since the Republic set down our ancestors and their families on this paradise of a world as a punishment for their sins. And when I met you, I thought, ‘Here’s a boy bound to do something important.’ They say you burned and ravaged and raped and killed anything in your path.”

I shook my head, trying to decide whether to admit the truth of what he was saying or pretend not to know any more about Lanik Mueller than any other man might know. Ironic, that no one recognized me on the Rebel River plain, where my double had made my face well known, while here in the most obscure corner of the world I was recognized.

“But what intrigued me most was something that strikes very close to home, Lanik Mueller. I have learned that your younger brother, Dinte, is now ruling where you would have ruled.”

“A figurehead, thank God, since the bastard couldn’t rule an anthill with any efficiency,” I said, admitting what he obviously knew.

“The child of your mother?”

“Incredible as it may seem, yes. I never saw you, Lord Barton.”

“I was younger then.” He got up from his chair and strode to a ladder, climbed it slowly, and reached down a book that must have weighed five kilos. When he was back to the floor, he gave it to me. “I bought this from your father, who was reluctant to part with it. But he had another copy, and when I explained how important genealogy was to me he became convinced I was a doddering idiot. He let me buy the book, though he charged me five times what he thought it was worth.”

That was my father.

I opened the book. A genealogy of Mueller and a history, kept as a kind of chronicle in the handwriting of a herald. I didn’t recognize the hand at the end of the book, but sure enough, the account and the genealogy ended when I was eleven. It was amusing to see what the herald had thought was worth recording. I must have been someone’s delight—every clever thing I said as an infant was there.

The expectancy of Barton’s silence was pressure enough that I skimmed and rushed through to the end.

“Genuine?” he asked.

“Of course,” I said. “Do you doubt it, when you got it the way you did?”

“Not at all. I just wanted your opinion before I point out an omission, a simple but very important thing left out of the book. So obvious it wouldn’t occur to you to notice it was missing.”

I waited.

“Your brother,” he said. “Dinte.”

Of course Dinte was mentioned. So many of my childhood memories were tied to him. But I glanced back to the time when Dinte was born, and there was no mention. Nor was there any mention of him for the entire duration of the journal.

“Well, maybe the herald didn’t like Dinte any better than I did,” I said.

“The herald didn’t meet Dinte.”

“He led a sheltered life in the palace, then.”

“Lanik Mueller, I want you to think back to a memory. An unpleasant one, preferably. I want you to picture it in your mind.”

I smiled. “No one takes psychology seriously anymore.”

“It’s not psychology, Mueller. It’s survival.”

So I thought back to the time I lied about who had lamed Rurik, the horse I was given after I had learned to ride like an adult. I had jumped him stupidly, and he had been injured, and then I walked him home and told my father that the stableboy had lamed him and that I had noticed it as soon as I was away from the stable. The boy lost his job and had a good thrashing in the bargain, particularly since he had “lied” about it and claimed the horse was healthy when I took it out. I remembered the expression on the boy’s face when my father made me accuse him to his face. I remembered clearly how ashamed I felt.

“I see from your face that you’ve thought of something that mattered. How clearly do you remember it?”

“Clearly,” I answered.

“Now, think of your clearest memory concerning Dinte from the time you were, say, seven or eight, and both learning from tutors. Did you have the same tutor?”

“Yenwi.”

“But did he have the same tutor?”

I shrugged.

“Think of a childhood memory of Dinte.”

Easy enough. Until I tried it. But all my memories of Dinte were of the time when I was older. When I was twelve and thirteen and fourteen and fifteen. I simply could not remember Dinte before that, though the unshakable conviction remained that he was
there
.

“Just because I can’t remember details,” I began, and then saw that Barton was laughing.

“My own words,” he said. “Just because I can’t remember details. But you’re so sure. Haven’t the slightest doubt.”

“Of course not. If I could have made the little bastard disappear, I would have done it years ago, believe me.”

“Let me tell you a story, then,” he said. “Settle down in the chair, Lanik Mueller, because it’s a long one, and being old I shall undoubtedly lace it with details that were best left out. Try to stay awake. Snoring puts me off my form.” Then he began to recount the story of his son, Percy. When he mentioned the boy’s name, I immediately recognized it.

“Percy Barton? Lord Percy of Gill?”

“The same. You’re interrupting.”

“But he’s the ruler—or should we say, figurehead—over the so-called East Alliance. And he’s your son?”

“Born and raised in this castle, but I shan’t ever finish if I can’t begin, Mueller.” I let him begin.

“It’s my penchant for traveling, you see. I made a journey, not all that many years ago, one of my last before travel became out of the question because of my health. To Lardner. You may know Lardner—a land of cold that makes Humping look like paradise, but it has the world’s best physicians. If ever I were sick, I’d want a doctor from Lardner. While I was there, I chanced upon a doctor whom I had known when I was a young man, just married and barely into my own as lord—lord of more than I have now, too, I assure you. Not just Humping, but of the whole east peninsula. I suppose that doesn’t matter now. This doctor, Twis Stanly, was a specialist of sorts, women and women’s problems, but he was also a damned fine archer and we’d bend the bow together and have the grandest time on hunts and holidays in the Spine Mountains. Good friends, but I remembered he had treated my wife only a month after we were married for a rather odd infection. This was, of course, some time before Percy was born.”

He paused a moment, as if unsure how to say what came next. “He inquired, of course, after my wife, and I had to inform him, quite sadly, that she had died only two or three years before, at a ripe but not old age. She was over fifty, and it stunned me that it had been near thirty-five years earlier that Twis and I had brought down two harts of the same herd with a single arrow each, practically in unison. I mentioned the fact, and then commented on how my son, Percy, had hardly a notion that his father was once handy with a bow.

“We shared a bit of a laugh at that and the foibles of youth, and then he said, ‘Well, Barton, you remarried then?’”

“The question seemed odd. ‘Of course not,’ I told him. ‘What made you think so?’”