Orson Card - Maps in a Mirror - The Short Fiction of Orson Scott Card

“Out of the way, you damned fool!” cried the Count. But Bork stood his ground. The Count was determined not to be thwarted. He prepared to ride Bork down.

“You can’t charge!” Bork yelled. “They surrendered!”

The Count gritted his teeth and urged the horse forward, his lance prepared to cast Bork out of the way.

A moment later the Count found himself in midair, hanging to the lance for his life. Bork held it over his head, and the knights laboriously halted their charge and wheeled to see what was going on with Bork and the Count.

“My Lord Count,” Bork said respectfully. “I guess you didn’t hear me. They surrendered. I promised them they could go in peace if they stopped collecting tribute.”

From his precarious hold on the lance, fifteen feet off the ground, the Count said, “I didn’t hear you.”

“I didn’t think so. But you will let them go, won’t you?”

“Of course. Could you give a thought to letting me down, old boy?”

And so Bork let the Count down, and there was a peace treaty between the Duke and the Count, and the Duke’s men rode away in peace, talking about the generosity of the giant knight.

“But he isn’t a knight,” said a servant to the Duke.

“What? Not a knight?”

“No. Just a villager. One of the peasants told me, when I was stealing his chickens.”

“Not a knight,” said the Duke, and for a moment his face began to turn the shade of red that made his knights want to ride a few feet further from him—they knew his rage too well already.

“We were tricked, then,” said a knight, trying to fend off his lord’s anger by anticipating it.

The Duke said nothing for a moment. Then he smiled. “Well, if he’s not a knight, he should be. He has the strength. He has the courtesy. Hasn’t he?”

The knights agreed that he had.

“He’s the moral equivalent of a knight,” said the Duke. Pride assuaged, for the moment, he led his men back to his castle. Underneath, however, even deeper than the pain in his ribs, was the image of the Count perched on the end of a lance held high in the air by the giant, Bork, and he pondered what it might have meant, and what, more to the point, it might mean in the future.

Things were getting out of hand, the Count decided. First of all, the victory celebration had not been his idea, and yet here they were, riotously drunken in the great hall, and even villagers were making free with the ale, laughing and cheering among the knights. That was bad enough, but worse was the fact that the knights were making no pretense about it—the party was in honor of Bork.

The Count drummed his fingers on the table. No one paid any attention. They were too busy—Sir Alwishard trying to keep two village wenches occupied near the fire, Sir Silwiss pissing in the wine and laughing so loud that the Count could hardly hear Sir Braig and Sir Umlaut as they sang and danced along the table, kicking plates off with their toes in time with the music. It was the best party the Count had ever seen. And it wasn’t for him, it was for that damnable giant who had made an ass of him in front of all his men and all the Duke’s men and, worst of all, the Duke. He heard a strange growling sound, like a savage wolf getting ready to spring. In a lull in the bedlam he suddenly realized that the sound was coming from his own throat.

Get control of yourself, he thought. The real gains, the solid gains were not Bork’s—they were mine. The Duke is gone, and instead of paying him tribute from now on, he’ll be paying me. Word would get around, too, that the Count had won a battle with the Duke. After all, that was the basis of power—who could beat whom in battle. A duke was just a man who could beat a count, a count someone who could beat a baron, a baron someone who could beat a knight.

But what was a person who could beat a duke?

“You should be king,” said a tall, slender young man standing near the throne.

The Count looked at him, making a vague motion with his hidden hand. How had the boy read his thoughts?

“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“You heard it,” said the young man.

“It’s treason.”

“Only if the king beats you in battle. If you win, it’s treason not to say so.”

The Count looked the boy over. Dark hair that looked a bit too carefully combed for a villager. A straight nose, a pleasant smile, a winning grace when he walked. But something about his eyes gave the lie to the smile. The boy was vicious somehow. The boy was dangerous.

“I like you,” said the Count.

“I’m glad.” He did not sound glad. He sounded bored.

“If I’m smart, I’ll have you strangled immediately.”

The boy only smiled more.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Winkle. And I’m Bork’s best friend.”

Bork. There he was again, that giant sticking his immense shadow into everything tonight. “Didn’t know Bork the Bully had any friends.”

“He has one. Me. Ask him.”

“I wonder if a friend of Bork’s is really a friend of mine,” the Count said.

“I said I was his best friend. I didn’t say I was a good friend.” And Winkle smiled.

A thoroughgoing bastard, the Count decided, but he waved to Bork and beckoned for him to come. In a moment the giant knelt before the Count, who was irritated to discover that when Bork knelt and the Count sat, Bork still looked down on him.

“This man,” said the Count, “claims to be your friend.”

Bork looked up and recognized Winkle, who was beaming down at him, his eyes filled with love, mostly. A hungry kind of love, but Bork wasn’t discriminating. He had the admiration and grudging respect of the knights, but he hardly knew them. This was his childhood friend, and at the thought that Winkle claimed to be his friend Bork immediately forgave all the past slights and smiled back. “Winkle,” he said. “Of course we’re friends. He’s my best friend.”

The Count made the mistake of looking in Bork’s eyes and seeing the complete sincerity of his love for Winkle. It embarrassed him, for he knew Winkle all too well already, from just the moments of conversation they had had. Winkle was nobody’s friend. But Bork was obviously blind to that. For a moment the Count almost pitied the giant, had a glimpse of what his life must be like, if the predatory young villager was his best friend.

“Your majesty,” said Winkle.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I only anticipate what the world will know in a matter of months.”

Winkle sounded so confident, so sure of it. A chill went up the Count’s spine. He shook it off. “I won one battle, Winkle. I still have a huge budget deficit and a pretty small army of fairly lousy knights.”

“Think of your daughter, even if you aren’t ambitious. Despite her beauty she’ll be lucky to marry a duke. But if she were the daughter of a king, she could marry anyone in all the world. And her own lovely self would be a dowry—no prince would think to ask for more.”

The Count thought of his daughter, the beautiful Brunhilda, and smiled.

Bork also smiled, for he was also thinking of the same thing.

“Your majesty,” Winkle urged, “with Bork as your right-hand man and me as your counselor, there’s nothing to stop you from being king within a year or two. Who would be willing to stand against an army with the three of us marching at the head?”

“Why three?” asked the Count.

“You mean, why me. I thought you would already understand that—but then, that’s what you need me for. You see, your majesty, you’re a good man, a godly man, a paragon of virtue. You would never think of seeking power and conniving against your enemies and spying and doing repulsive things to people you don’t like. But kings have to do those things or they quickly cease to be kings.”