Cyrion, page 20
It was not until the winter when he was nineteen that he learned for himself an array of rumors both about the young lady who was to have been his bride, and the life now lived at Flor.
The man who gave him access to these rumors was a person of rank and high esteem at the King’s court, and they were contained in a letter, brought by a messenger in this person’s employ. The letter itself was unsigned. It would seem Eliset was neither charming nor chaste, since she was the doxy of her brown-haired cousin, and of others besides. But this was nothing to her other practices. Roilant’s informant was unclear on these, and self-excusive, now and then dismissing items as the “superstitions of the ignorant”—without even naming them. Fumbling between the lines, Roilant came to understand Flor was haunted, and Eliset herself belonged to a clandestine sisterhood of witches of whom her old nurse had also been an enthusiastic member. It was said (O oft’ repeated and irritating phrase) that the death of Valia had been induced by witchcraft when Eliset was only nine. And that the deaths of Valia’s mother and Eliset’s own father and uncle had next been engineered at suitable junctures. Even the death of Roilant’s father came in question. He, a peerless rider, had been thrown—immediately after he had denied the girl the wealth of Roilant’s branch of Beucelair. The letter logically ended with the remark that any rich man who wed Eliset might expect to die himself, rather swiftly and without issue, leaving his fortune to his wife.
At this time, Roilant had not really believed in sorcery. And yet, a nagging, inexplicable doubt grew in him, a doubt he then accepted had been planted at his father’s death. He did not ponder the matter unduly, but he resolved upon three things. Firstly, that he would not yet tell Eliset he no longer meant to honor the betrothal, secondly, that he would not honor it, and thirdly that he would make her, thereafter, a legal allowance to assuage his guilt.
So much was done, or not done, as the case was. Eliset for her part wrote thanking him for the allowance with total gracefulness. Only one tiny sentence jarred, that in which she looked forward to their future meeting.
But years, again, passed. Roilant settled to the knowledge that he preferred women who were not overly beautiful, and certainly not overly demanding, while finding a genuine happiness in female company. Eventually, he became aware of an ideal match, well-born, of ordinary appearance and meager dowry, but with a gleaming sound common sense, a calm vivacity, and a lovely disposition to mirth that uplifted Roilant, for it was never directed at himself. Not moved to write her a single poem, Roilant yet discovered himself saying to this lady one day, in her father’s prettily dilapidated garden—when they had been speaking of some hypothetical traveler lost in the desert—“if I were lost there I should somehow have to get back. I should miss you—” By which, and the lady’s quite unlooked-for but gratifying blush, he knew the time had come for certain arrangements. He therefore made the acquaintance of a lawyer or two, and was in the process of undoing the tenuous betrothal of nine and a half years before when—
There was a lengthy pause.
The fawn cat sat bolt upright on Cyrion’s shoulder and stared at Roilant. Cyrion did not stare, but neither did he look elsewhere.
“—When,” Roilant finally said, “a number of things took place that I should be hesitant to relate, if it were not that you, I gather, are familiar with the occult.”
Firstly the letter which the lawyers had drawn up and sent to the estate at Flor was returned, during the night, by a messenger no one could describe, to Roilant’s house on the Beucelair estate near Heruzala. Opening the letter, Roilant found the legal parchment, somewhat altered. It had been torn in many small pieces, and as these fluttered to the floor, they spontaneously caught fire. In a moment, cinders were all that remained.
“I thought I must have imagined it,” said Roilant. “As one would.”
“Would one?”
Roilant said, “Then, I would. And did.”
The next thing to occur was that the shoddy talisman of the jets somehow unearthed itself from one of Roilant’s chests, and came whirling in at him through an unshuttered window, badly contusing his forehead. When he picked the thing up from the floor, it burned his hand. Thoroughly alarmed, he had hurried from the room, only to return an hour later with the theory someone had stolen it and thrown it at him, having first heated it in a fire. He found the talisman in fragments, had them swept up, and tried to put the business from his mind. Which was quite easy as, that very night, something much worse had happened. Roused about midnight, he had initially thought himself awakened by a violent rain storm clamoring outside. But then he had become aware of a vile sensation, as if a host of insects were lightly crawling over his face, brushing him with their wings. Flinging up and clawing at his skin, he had escaped them—only to perceive, by the flame of a hastily kindled candle, that they were nothing more—or less—than the pressed flowers that Eliset had sent him after their adolescent meeting, brown and mothlike with age. Even as Roilant stood gasping and gazing at them, they flew in the air and scattered into dust. As the dust floated down, a figure came visible through it.
It was hard to see. The flicker of the candle, the riot of the storm outside, his own shock, made the amorphous visitation all the more difficult of observation. Yet it had been there, transparently printed on the air, like mist on a mirror. Slender and pale, the face a blur, but held within an aureole of daffodil hair. Then it spoke to him. Not audibly, but in words written slowly and brilliantly across the dark beyond the candleflame. They said:
The bond is made and may not be broken. You are mine and must come to me before the month is over.
“In the morning,” said Roilant, “I thought it a nightmare.”
“Of course,” said Cyrion, kindly.
And for the first time in his life, Roilant felt a fool for not believing in the supernatural.
Sheepishly he said, “This same thing then happened every night, for seven nights. Then I did believe it. I was—I was terrified, I admit. And the freakish weather, the endless rain, depressed me in a way I have never known before. I called in a man noted in the nearby village for his grasp of magical lore. He examined my bedchamber, and said he smelled sorcery everywhere in it. I could smell only the rain. But I asked what I should do, and he offered to study the matter. He went off and I did not see him again, even when I went to the village. It seemed to me he was as frightened as I was. What came next? After seven days, the apparitions had ceased, and nothing else replaced them. Though I was constantly alert by then, for something. However, if I journeyed to Flor, this same sorcery that had called me, would presumably be used to kill me. It seemed safer to stay put. Then, there was news from the city.”
The lady in Heruzala who had taken Roilant’s fancy had been sitting quietly on her father’s terrace, when part of the roof above her had come away and fallen with a crash. She was unhurt, but only the breadth of a finger had differentiated between herself and death. It was very odd. The masonry had always been considered sound. Her father, who had sent this information ostensibly to reassure Roilant, should he hear the event otherwise mentioned, in truth to stir the suitor’s ardor, was rather mortified to receive Roilant’s reply. Roilant expressed great joy in the young woman’s safety, and chagrin that he would not be calling on them for some while; on the next occasion he hoped to bring his new wife.
“For me, there was never much choice. Eliset might sorcerously murder me, if I wed her, or if I did not. But when my dear—when the lady I alluded to was also threatened, I dared not delay any further. I sent a letter to Eliset that very evening, and bribed the messenger to ride in record time to Flor.”
“And the message said?”
“Why, that I would be at her side on the last day of the month.”
“Which leaves you scarcely any margin at all to get there.”
“I have spent all this while looking for you.”
“And here I am,” said Cyrion.
Roilant frowned. “I am not a martyr. I do not want to die. Or to be cheated. But I would not risk—a lady’s life. And since I promised to go to my cousin, everything has been placid.”
“Am I to take it,” Cyrion said, rubbing cheeks with the fawn cat, “that you also alluded to your lady in the betrothal-breaking letter sent your cousin?”
“Yes. An imbecilic act. I thought she would tolerate rejection better on such grounds. I added, of course, that not seeing Eliset for more than nine years had dimmed my recollection of her beauty.”
“Most tactful,” said Cyrion. Roilant looked at him narrowly, guessing this might mean the reverse, as he himself had latterly suspected. “At least,” Cyrion elaborated, “Eliset did not learn of your new interest by sorcery. If she had done that, she could also have learned in the same way that you sought for me.”
“God defend us.”
“Quite so. I think, however, these powers are of another sort. The mind is used to protect the energy of the will. The spell works only through what is already, mundanely, known.”
The plump gentleman spread his arms in relief, and knocked over his wine cup. He looked at the result in distaste. The fawn cat, however, sprang approvingly to the table, and began to imbibe. “You see how I am,” said Roilant candidly. “No well-coordinated man of action, no sharp and racing wit. But, till they thieve it, I am rich. Will you assist me?”
“In what way,” said Cyrion, “do you suppose that I can?”
Remembering such queries from the tales, Roilant refused to be thrown.
“You are the legend. Therefore, you decide,” said Roilant firmly.
The cat finished the wine. Unsteadily it puttered back to Cyrion across the table, and fell into his arms.
“Three libations should be lucky,” said Cyrion. “But I still predict you will have to start for Flor tomorrow. And travel quickly.”
CYRION IN STONE
ONE
Where the road turned toward Cassireia, it casually threw off a subsidiary track which, curling uphill, overtook rocks and woods, and passed incidentally across two rambling villages. In the second village, overwhelmed by adventure, the track stopped.
A mile farther on a break between a pair of hills showed the orchards of Flor, and, rising from them, the grassy ascension which ended in the house and the tower, against the demarcation of the sea.
The villages had strayed closer in by-gone eras. When the Remusan fort had dominated the countryside, there had been a village at its foot. But now, the small settlements seemed sensibly to have crept away, taking their goats and their red oxen downhill, and riding to market in the city, where once the palace of a Cassian emperor had been built above the ripe blue waters of the bay.
To one not an emperor, the journey to Cassireia might well be irksome. To turn off at the track, to go by the villages and be stared at, to reach the cleft hills and look down, then up, to Flor—perhaps more irksome yet, and a cause also, maybe of apprehension, should that traveler be Roilant of Beucelair, riding hither to claim his bride. Theoretically, with the bride came Flor itself, her only dower. The beautiful wreckage of the place might repay renovation with interest. If such a thought had even been in the mind of the arrival it could well have departed on sight of the cluster of dead fig trees that introduced the orchards. A blight, a blasting irreparable. Next came a depressing cypress tree, long since slain by lightning. And then a torrent of healthy trees, burgeoning too soon and out of rhythm with each other, boughs bent to the ground, boughs flung around each other for support, the rogue fruit inviting swarms of insects so the whole area throbbed and thrummed madly in the thick green light. To fight a way through this jungle sound-box was neither easy nor entertaining on mule-back. To emerge at last among the ultimate trees and gain the slope, brought one to the Remusan wall, insultingly almost as intact as it had been nine years before. While the mansion, drawing closer over the brown grass, was little less than alarming.
The gates, missing many of their studded metals, were open and looked as though they might nevermore be shut. Within, the entrance court with its cistern, pillars and palm trees—a faded rose, whose petals rapidly fell. Smashed tiling, descended from above, lay in the barren trough that once had been a cloudy mirror of water. Lions of stone, blue with lichen, stood desolately at its corners. The lions, the walls, the pillars, the trees were universally scabrous.
Under a dead palm couched a ragged servant boy—asleep, and vagrant wasps and flies from the orchard buzzed fastidiously to and fro. No other live thing was apparent.
The arrival sat his horse in the gate, looking about him, the westering sun fiery on his fiery hair. His awkwardness in the saddle had been momentarily minimized by a stance of bewildered affront. To know was one thing, to see, another.
Behind him, the two Heruzin servants and the baggage hovered on their mules. Finally, one of the men inquired:
“This is Flor, my lord?”
“I grieve that it is.”
The other snorted, just audibly.
“Should I wake the urchin?”
“It seems to be necessary.”
The first man, bulkier than Roilant, yet with an undercurrent of pure muscle, swung from his mule and walked over to the sleeping boy. Taking him by one shoulder, the man shook. The boy came to his wits and began instantly to pummel his attacker, presently sinking his teeth in the man’s sleeve and refusing to let go. The second Heruzin dismounted and ran to help. Something of a skirmish ensued as two further unkempt adolescents sprang from the raddled trees and landed with whooping cries amid the fray.
The plump young man continued to sit his mule, seeming dumbfounded and might have done so indefinitely as the fight indefinitely went on. However, one of the leaves of the central door beyond the pillars presently gave signs of having moved, very grudgingly, ajar, and next a figure appeared, stepping from shade to light.
Two white hands flashed as they were brought smartly together.
“Stop this! Harmul—Dassin—At once, Zimir.”
Two of the boys hurtled aside and fell to their faces on the broken stone beyond the cistern. The third boy seemed undecided, before bolting away and into a narrow archway at the end of the court. The Heruzin servants were left in wild attitudes, scowling.
It was apparent the mistress of the house was here in the person of the girl with white hands. And it seemed she possessed authority, for one unruly youth had fled, the other two lay motionless, as if in abject fear, before her. When she spoke again, her young voice was like a thin knife.
“For shame. You should be beaten. If my father lived, you would be lashed. Get up. Go to the gentleman and his attendants. Beg their pardon.”
The youth who had begun the brawl raised his head, and plucked at her gown. It was of a high-sheeny topaz silk, the exact color of her hair.
“One struck me,” the boy avowed.
The girl with the topaz hair said nothing, she merely regarded him. Slowly, the boy rose, his companion with him. They slunk around the empty cistern and now cast themselves down before the redheaded man on the mule.
“Pardon, lord!”
“Pardon us!”
The redhead was clearly flustered.
“Granted,” he muttered. “Now get up and go away.”
“They cannot, alas,” the girl called to him. “Zimir has run off, but these must see to your mules. They are the only grooms we have.”
The plump young man maneuvered himself, stiff and ungainly, from his mount, and surrendered it with blatant misgiving. “But leave the baggage here—my own servants will see to it.”
As the muscular Heruzin servant followed the boys and three mules in the direction of the narrow archway, the other Heruzin proceeded to unload the baggage from the fourth beast. Their master turned then, and let his eyes rest on the lady, a slim daffodil against the back-drop of sun-burned decay. He seemed unable to speak, and it was she who came forward, her movements fluid and connected as a dancer’s.
“Roilant,” she said softly. “Is it really you?”
“Oh, yes,” he assured her foolishly.
She smiled up into his round face.
“How fine you have grown. I saw you last a boy, and now you are a man. And I, have I changed so very much?”
He was flushed and flustered again, and his wavering eyes seemed to note for the first time the worn places in her gown that had dazzled from a distance. Her allowance from Heruzala then, had been spent on other needs.
“You are,” he said with an effort, “as pretty as ever.”
Her eyes widened, possibly at his ineptitude, but she smiled still. “Then, if I am,” she said, “it is from my joy at seeing you. I thought you had forgotten me. I am so glad that you did not.”
His own eyes were tired and puffy and perplexed. It was not, perhaps, good policy to say: But you know you sent for me, a summons I could not refuse. Coercion by black magic. He only said, “It has been hell, the journey.”
“Forgive me. I will send someone to prepare the bathhouse—in the Remusan style—do you recall? And do you remember, too, the story? That a Remusan legion buried a treasure of gold there. . . . You and I searched for it. We did not find the gold, did we?” She put out one of her white hands, as if to rest it on his arm, then drew her fingers back timidly. She had no jewels, except her eyes, her hair, the pearl teeth, the white jade skin. “Your hostess fears she chatters. But she is so glad—oh, Roilant, it is so wonderful that you have come back. Please. Enter the house. And—” she lowered her lashes in long strips of bullion—“Overlook what cannot be helped. It is not as it was in Lord Gems’ day. Or even as in my uncle’s.”
