C. Brittain: Mage Quest

“It must always be somewhat tense in the East,” the chaplain agreed. “Politically, there are a few independent governors still left over from the fall of the Empire, then the emirs, and the royal Son of David-and that’s only the beginning. It must also be complicated on a religious level, because the Children of Abraham and the People of the Prophet also have holy shrines in the Holy Land, as well of course as the Christian shrines.”

“Don’t they all worship the same God?” I asked. If the organized Church had always lacked interest for me, comparative religion had had even less.

“There is only one true God,” said Joachim dryly.

“I’ve mostly been thinking about the glamour of the East,” I said, deciding that now was not the time to learn more comparative religion. “All the different peoples and cultures. The spices, the flowers, the bazaars-”

“How about the different magic?” the chaplain surprised me by asking.

“Well, there certainly is only one true magic,” I said self-righteously. “But you’ve got a point. The mages there work their spells somewhat differently than we wizards, and there are different magical creatures. The school doesn’t even teach eastern magic now, although they used to have one wizard who taught it, forty or fifty years ago. They sent me an old copy of his textbook to take along, Melecherius on Eastern Magic. ” The thick book made a bulge in my neatly-packed saddle bag.

“I’ve even heard that one can still see Ifriti east of the Central Sea,” I added. “I hope we can see one. It would be enormously exciting, although it would probably be dangerous too … It seems there may be a lot of dangers before us.”

Joachim glanced at me from under his eyebrows. “Otherwise there would be less merit in the voyage.” I gave him up. Tomorrow we would be leaving for places I had never seen, and experiences I could not imagine, and my best friend on the trip was filled with concerns I had no intention of sharing.

We left at dawn. Five of us were mounted, although Ascelin was too tall to ride a horse for more than short periods and would walk beside us. The king, the two princes, and Hugo all wore light armor under their cloaks. Joachim didn’t, because he said it would be inappropriate for a man of God, and I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be bothered by the extra weight. Three pack horses, heavily laden, were ready to follow us. I thought that even though King Haimeric said he was going as a simple pilgrim, not a king, no one who saw us would doubt that our group consisted of four aristocrats, a priest, and a wizard.

The horses’ breath made frosty clouds around their noses, and a paper-thin layer of ice lay on the puddles among the courtyard’s cobblestones. But the sun, rising pale orange in a cloudless sky, promised warming weather. Everyone in the castle turned out to see us off. Paul and Gwennie, hand-in-hand, watched from a doorway. Behind them stood the duchess’s twin daughters, three years younger than the royal heir.

The queen smiled up at the king, her cheeks dry although her eyes seemed unnaturally bright. “I know it will be hard to send messages regularly,” she said, “but if you’re near a telephone, do call, or if you meet someone coming this way, do write!”

I was going to miss the queen too, but I couldn’t tell her. For one thing, I was quite sure she would not miss me in the slightest. All I could do was watch her say good-bye to the king and imagine it was me.

But then my eye was distracted from the royal couple by the sight of the Duchess Diana and Prince Ascelin on the far side of the courtyard. She had climbed onto a mounting block so she could reach him, and they stood with their arms around each other, paying no attention to anyone else.

“Now, are you sure you know everything you’ll need to do in the rose garden this summer?” asked the king, seeming more concerned with his garden than his family. “The entire blossoming season will be over by the time we’re back. Remember what I told you to do if thrips start to infest the blooms again.” But then he suddenly leaned down from the saddle and kissed his wife, something I had never seen him do publicly before.

“And we’re off!” cried Hugo, taking this as a signal to depart. He blew a long blast on his horn and urged his horse forward. Ascelin looked up abruptly from his wife’s embrace, and the other horses all jumped and followed Hugo’s. We dashed across the drawbridge and down the hill, followed by waves and cries of farewell.

We reined in our horses at the bottom and entered the woods more sedately. Ascelin, momentarily left behind, caught up again. “Warn me next time you’re going to burst into a gallop like that,” he said to Hugo with a grin.

“We had to start with a gallop,” said Hugo. “It’s the only appropriate way to start the Quest of King Haimeric and his Giant Henchmen.” He made it sound like one of Paul’s stories.

Dominic was having a little trouble calming his big chestnut stallion. The horse that had tried to buck off Paul and Gwennie seemed reluctant to obey the king’s burly nephew either.

“Come on, Whirlwind, come on,” I heard Dominic say soothingly, holding the reins tight with one gloved hand and patting the stallion’s neck with the other.

“I didn’t know that was your horse’s name,” I said in surprise, once the stallion decided it was easiest to be quiet and walk with the rest of us.

Dominic turned to me with a sudden smile, which was another surprise; he normally smiled even less than Joachim. “It didn’t use to be,” he said. “But Prince Paul renamed him.”

Paul might not be going to the Holy Land with us, I thought, but at least Whirlwind might get a chance to race in search of treasure across the high plains.

After feeling somewhat apprehensive about this trip, once we started I enjoyed it thoroughly. We went at an easy rate, letting the king set the pace. Ascelin, on foot, had no trouble keeping up. After a day and a half, in which all the hills, streams, and woods we saw I knew by name, we passed out of the kingdom of Yurt and into new territory.

New scenes greeted us constantly as we rode: sunlit hills dappled with shadow, villages tucked into sheltering valleys, wheat fields where the new light green shoots burst from the dark earth, wild daffodils bright beneath leafless oaks, and birds tugging at last year’s grass for nesting material. Any difficulty we met, a sudden cold shower of rain, a ford where the horses splashed mud on us, villagers who looked at our equipment and charged us outrageously for fresh bread, was quickly left behind and indeed forgotten. And somewhere ahead of us was the sun-warmed Central Sea, and palms and flowering lemon trees rustling in the sea breezes.

All of us, except perhaps Hugo, were sore and stiff the first few days. But then our muscles became used to the constant exercise and our legs to gripping a horse.

“I’m still not sure my old bones will make the whole journey to the East and back,” said the king to me as we rode along, sounding remarkably cheerful about it. “But it’s good to be off on a quest after decades of worrying about the governance of Yurt. Prince Paul will grow up to be an excellent king whether I return or not, and if by some chance I do I may have the only blue rose in the western kingdoms!”

We spent the first few nights in the castles of lords the king knew; and once we stayed in an inn, all squeezed together in one big bed in the only private room the inn afforded; but most of the time we camped. Hugo put a sign reading “Giant’s Lair” on the tent he shared with Ascelin, until the prince ordered him rather sharply to take it down.

We took turns keeping watch at night. The king said that no one would attack a little group of pilgrims, but Ascelin insisted, and I had to agree with him. Hugo had the final watch on the first night we camped, and he woke the rest of us at dawn. When we crawled reluctantly out of the tents, he already had water boiling for tea and bright pink ribbons braided into Dominic’s stallion’s mane and tail.