Lois Bujold - The Curse of Chalion

Her brows rose, and she sat back. "Oh, aye. Were you ever to the Zangre, in Cardegoss?"

"Yes, when I was a younger man. Not lately. It was a vast warren. I spent half my time lost in it."

"Strange. I was lost in it, too... it is haunted, you know."

Cazaril considered this matter-of-fact comment. "I shouldn't be surprised. It is the nature of a great fortress that as many die in it as build it, win it, lose it... men of Chalion, the renowned Roknari masons before us, the first kings, and men before them I'm sure who crept into its caves, on back into the mists of time. It is that sort of prominence." High home of royas and nobles for generations—rank on rank of men and women had ended their lives in the Zangre, some quite spectacularly... some quite secretly. "The Zangre is older than Chalion itself. It surely... accumulates."

Ista began gently pressing the thorns from her rose stem, and lining them up in a row like the teeth of a saw. "Yes. It accumulates . That's the word, precisely. It collects calamity like a cistern, as its slates and gutters collect rainwater. You will do well to avoid the Zangre, Cazaril."

"I've no desire to attend court, my lady."

"I desired to, once. With all my heart. The gods' most savage curses come upon us as answers to our own prayers, you know. Prayer is a dangerous business. I think it should be outlawed." She began to peel her rose stem, thin green strips pulling away to reveal fine white lines of pith.

Cazaril had no idea what to say to this, so merely smiled hesitantly.

Ista began to pull the whip of pith apart lengthwise. "A prophecy was told of the Lord dy Lutez, that he should not drown except upon a mountaintop. And that he never feared to swim thereafter, no matter how violent the waves, for everyone knows there is no water upon a mountaintop; it all runs away to the valleys."

Cazaril swallowed panic, and looked around surreptitiously for the returning attendant. She was not yet in sight. Lord dy Lutez, it was said, had died under the water torture in the dungeons of the Zangre. Beneath the castle stones, but still high enough above the town of Cardegoss. He licked slightly numb lips, and tried, "You know, I never heard that while the man was alive. It is my opinion that some tale-spinner made it up later, to sound shivery. Justifications... tend to accrue posthumously to so spectacular a fall as his was."

Her lips parted in the strangest smile yet. She drew the last threads of the stem pith apart, aligned them upon her knee, and stroked them flat. "Poor Cazaril! How did you grow so wise?"

Cazaril was saved from trying to think of an answer for this by Ista's attendant, who emerged again from the door of the keep with a hank of colored silk in her hands. Cazaril leapt to his feet and nodded to the royina. "Your good lady returns..."

He gave a little bow in passing to the attendant, who whispered urgently to him, "Was she sensible, my lord?"

"Yes, perfectly." In her way...

"Nothing of dy Lutez?"

"Nothing... remarkable." Nothing he cared to remark upon, certainly.

The attendant breathed relief and passed on, fixing a smile on her face. Ista regarded her with bored tolerance as she began chattering about all the items that she'd had to overturn and hunt through to find her strayed thread. It crossed Cazaril's mind that no daughter of the Provincara's, nor mother of Iselle's, could possibly be short of wit.

If Ista spoke to very many of her duller company with the cryptic leaps of thought she'd sprung on him, it was little wonder rumors circulated of madness, and yet... her occasional opacity of discourse felt more like cipher than babble to him. Of an elusive internal consistency, if only one held the key to it. Which, granted, he did not. Not that that wasn't also true of some sorts of madness he had seen...

Cazaril clutched his book and went off to seek some less disturbing shade.

SUMMER ADVANCED AT A LAZY PACE THAT EASED Cazaril's mind and body both. Only poor Teidez chafed at the inactivity, hunting being curtailed by the heat, the season, and his tutor. He did pot rabbits with a crossbow in the dawn mists around the castle, to the earnest applause and approval of all the castle's gardeners. The boy was so out-of-season—hot and restless and plump—if ever there was a born dedicat to the Son of Autumn, god of the hunt, war, and cooler weather, Cazaril judged it was surely Teidez.

Cazaril was a little surprised to be accosted on the way to nuncheon one warm noon by Teidez and his tutor. Judging by both their reddened faces, they were in the middle of another of their tearing arguments.

"Lord Caz!" Teidez hailed him breathlessly. "Didn't the old provincar's swordmaster too take the pages to the abattoir, to slay the young bulls—to teach them courage, in a real fight, not this, this, dancing about in the dueling ring!"

"Well, yes..."

"See, what did I tell you!" Teidez cried to dy Sanda.

"We practiced in the ring, too," Cazaril added immediately, for the sake of solidarity, should dy Sanda need it.

The tutor grimaced. "Bull-baiting is an old country practice, Royse. Not befitting training for the highborn. You are destined to be a gentleman—at the least!—not a butcher's apprentice."

The Provincara kept no swordmaster in her household these days, so she'd made sure the royse's tutor was a trained man. Cazaril, who had occasionally watched his practice sessions with Teidez, respected dy Sanda's precision. Dy Sanda's swordsmanship was pretty enough, if not quite brilliant. Sporting. Honorable. But if dy Sanda also knew the desperate brutal tricks that kept men alive on the field, he had not shown them to Teidez.

Cazaril grinned wryly. "The swordmaster wasn't training us to be gentlemen. He was training us to be soldiers. I'll give his old method this credit—any battlefield I was ever on was a lot more like a butcher's yard than it was like a dueling ring. It was ugly, but it taught us our business. And there was no waste to it. I can't think it mattered at the end of the day to the bulls whether they died after being chased around for an hour by a fool with a sword, or were simply stalled and thwacked on the head with a mallet." Though Cazaril had not cared to stretch the business out, as some of the young men had, making macabre and dangerous play with the maddened animals. With a little practice he had learned to dispatch his beast with a sword thrust nearly as quickly as the butcher might. "Grant you, on the battlefield we didn't eat what we killed, except sometimes the horses."

Dy Sanda sniffed disapproval at his wit. He offered placatingly to Teidez, "We might take the hawks out tomorrow morning, my lord, if the weather holds fine. And if you finish your cartography problems."

"A ladies' sport—with hawks and pigeons—pigeons! What do I care for pigeons!" In a voice of longing Teidez added, "At the roya's court at Cardegoss, they hunt wild boar in the oak forests in the fall. That's a real sport, a man's sport. They say those pigs are dangerous!"

"Very true," said Cazaril. "The big tuskers can disembowel a dog—or a horse. Or a man. They're much faster than you expect."

"Did you ever hunt at Cardegoss?" Teidez asked him eagerly.

"I followed my lord dy Guarida a few times there."

"Valenda has no boars." Teidez sighed. "But we do have bulls! At least it's something. Better than pigeons—or rabbits!"

"Oh, potting rabbits is a useful soldier's training, too," Cazaril offered consolingly. "In case you ever have to hunt rats for table. It's much the same skill."

Dy Sanda glared at him. Cazaril smiled and bowed out of the argument, leaving Teidez to his badgering.

Over nuncheon, Iselle took up a descant version of a similar song, though the authority she assailed was her grandmother and not her tutor.