Fool's Quest - Страница 47

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She’s not here.

She is Bee?

The girl who promised me fish and sausage if I would catch rats and mice for her.

I contained my impatience. Someone stole her. Can you tell me about the people who took her?

They took all the fish. And the sausages, too.

I noticed that. What else?

Some of them stank. Some did not.

I waited for a time. Cats themselves may be very chatty, but they seem to resent it in anyone else. Cats like listeners. But when he had sat regarding me for some time, I dared to ask, Anything else?

They came for her. The ones that did not stink.

What?

A silence fell between us. My question went unanswered. Finally I said aloud, “I wonder if they found all the fish and sausages? I think I shall go down to the pantry to find out.”

I took my shortened candle and left him, eeling my way through the wandering passages. I stepped over the gnawed bread, and took up one of the fallen candles and kindled it from my failing one. It had been nibbled by mice, but not badly. I listened at the door before pushing it open and emerging into the storage room. The sacks of beans and peas and grains had been left. The raiders had taken meat and fish, the two supplies that any traveler depletes first. Could I deduce anything from that?

Gone. Confirmed the cat.

“Do you care for cheese at all? Or butter?”

The cat looked at me speculatively. I pushed the door to the labyrinth closed and went down a short stairway into the cold-room, lined with stone. Here on shelves were crocks of summer butter and wheels of cheese. Either the raiders had not fancied these or they had not discovered the cold-room. I took out my belt-knife and carved a wedge of cheese. As I did so, I became aware that I was hungry. I felt shamed by that. My child and Lady Shun had vanished from Withywoods. Carried off by brutes into the cold and dark. How could I feel such ordinary things as hunger? Or sleepiness?

Yet I did.

I pared off another generous wedge and went back to the kitchen. The cat followed me and when I sat down at the table, he leapt up on it. He was a handsome fellow, very tidy in black and white, the picture of health save for the kink in his tail. I broke off a chunk of the cheese and set it down before him. By the time I returned to the table with a piece of bread and a mug of ale, he had finished it and hooked a second slab toward himself. I ignored that. We ate together and I tried to be patient. What could a cat know, I wondered, that would do me any good?

He finished before I did and sat cleaning his whiskers and dabbing at his face. When I set my mug down on the table, he stopped and looked at me. The ones that didn’t stink had no scent of their own at all.

A shiver ran up my spine. The Scentless One, my wolf had called the Fool. Because he had no scent. And he was invisible to my Wit. Would that be true of all folk with White in their bloodlines?

Once they had her, they stopped killing. They took only her. And one other.

I did not appear too interested. I rose and went back to the cold-room. I emerged with more cheese. I sat down at the table, broke off a respectable piece, and placed it before the cat. He looked down at it, then up at me. They took a woman.

Lady Shun.

I do not bother with the names of humans. But that might have been her name. He bent his head to eat his cheese.

“The girl who promised you fish and sausages. Did they … hurt her?”

He finished part of the cheese, sat up, and then suddenly decided to groom his front claws. I waited. After a time, he looked up at me. I scratched her once. Hard. She took it. He hunched over the remainder of the cheese. Pain is not the thing she fears. I teetered between feeling comforted and horrified. I left him eating and went back to the estate study. The boy did not stir as I put the last of the wood into the fire. With a sigh, I took up Chade’s wet cloak and the lantern I’d earlier taken from the door servant. I lit it again and carried it down the hall.

My errand had been firewood, but when I stepped outside into the clear night, my mind cleared. The bite of the cold seized me and the terrible lassitude that was misting my mind receded a bit in the physical discomfort. I walked instead to the burnt ruin of my stables. As I did so, I crossed the drive in front of Withywoods. Snow had fallen recently. There were no tracks to read. I moved in wide circles around the stable and then between the house and stables, looking for sleigh tracks. But the fresh snow had gentled all tracks to dimples. The tracks the runners had left were indistinguishable from the marks of the carts and wagons we used on the estate. I walked through the darkness down the long drive that led up to Withy. Somewhere Per had bled and somewhere Bee had been captured. But I found no traces of either event. I found my horse’s tracks, and the hoofprints of Sildwell’s horse. No others. No one else had come this way for days. Falling snow and wind had softened all traces of the raiders’ passage as smoothly as whatever magic had misted my people’s memories of them.

I stood for a time staring off into the darkness as the wind chilled and stiffened my body. Where had they taken my child and why? What good was it to be a prince if he was as helpless as a penniless bastard?

I turned and walked slowly up the carriageway to the manor, feeling as if I breasted an icy winter storm. I did not want to go to this place. With every step, I felt more downhearted. I went slowly to one of the firewood stacks and filled a sling of my cloak with enough wood for what remained of the night. My steps dragged as I carried it up the steps of my home.

Chapter Twelve
The Shaysim

...

Corioa, the first Servant, wrote thus of his White Prophet: “He is not the first to come, nor will he be the last. For to every generation is given one who walks among us and, by virtue of his ability to see all the possibilities, guides us to the best future there may be. I have chosen to call myself his Servant, and to record the dreams of my pale master, and to keep count of the ways in which he makes the crooked path straight and safe.”

So Corioa was the first to name himself Servant. Some think he was also Terubat’s Catalyst. As to that, the records from that day are so fragmented that this Servant thinks it an unsafe assumption.

And contrary to many Servants who have gone before me, and been the primary recorders of the deeds of the White Prophet of their days, I will state clearly what some may rebuke me for. Must there be only one? And if this is so, who determines who that single White Prophet is from among those who show us a pale face and colorless eyes? And exactly when, pray tell, does a “generation” begin and end?

I ask these questions not to spread discord or doubt, but only to plead that we Servants open our eyes as wide as those of the White Prophets we serve. Let us admit there are many, many futures. At countless crossroads, the future becomes the past and an infinite number of possibilities die as an infinite number are born.

So let us no longer call the pale child Shaysa, Who Is the One, as we used to name him in our most ancient tongue. Let us call him Shaysim, Who May Be the One.

Let us no longer be blind to our own vision. Let us recognize that when the Servants select, as we must, the Shaysa, then we have determined the fate of the world.

We traveled.

They were a bigger group than I had thought. There were the soldiers, about twenty of them, and Dwalia’s followers, also about twenty. I rode in the big sleigh, and we followed two other smaller ones full of supplies. The soldiers and Dwalia’s followers rode horseback. We traveled by night for the most part. We did not move quickly, for we avoided the king’s highway, instead crossing pastures and following wandering farm roads. We seemed to skirt forest and cross unsettled land, avoiding the farmsteads I sometimes glimpsed. Darkness and cold and the steady thudding beat of the trotting team filled my senses. At other times, the team dragged us through unbroken snow, surging forward with the sleigh sawing and tipping behind them.

I felt cold all the time, even when I was well bundled in furs and robes. When they put up the tents during the day and told me to sleep, I was so cold I could not relax my muscles. Yet the cold I felt had nothing to do with my body. I think it was the same cold that had stilled Shun. She was still as ice on a lake. Even when she moved, she walked like a stiffened corpse. She didn’t speak and scarcely tended to herself. One of Dwalia’s girls took it upon herself to drape Shun in a heavy white fur coat. The same girl, Odessa, would put food into her hands or push a mug of hot soup into her grip. Then sometimes Shun would eat and sometimes she would sit and hold the mug until the hot soup went scummy and cold. Odessa would take the mug and dump the soup back into the shared pot. And Shun, cold and empty, would crawl across the blankets and skins back to the far corner of the tent.

Odessa had long dark hair that was thin, and patchy, pale white skin, and eyes the color of sour milk. One of her eyes wandered in its socket. Her bottom lip sagged open. It was hard for me to look at her. She looked diseased, and yet she moved as if she were healthy and strong. She sang softly as she rode her white horse by our sleigh, and sometimes laughed aloud with her companions at night. Yet there was a wrongness about her, as if she had been born half-finished. I tried not to stare at her. It seemed that whenever I did turn my head to look at her, her wandering eye was already gazing at me.

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