A. Hartley - Will Power

“Patience, Will,” said Garnet, a remark so out of character that I was still gaping at him when the liveried lackey who had just arrived started whispering to him.

“They’re ready,” said Garnet, eyes wide with delight. “The king will see us now.”

“Already?” I said. “I mean, I could listen to this I-love-you-more-than-he-does stuff all day.”

“Be quiet, Will,” said Garnet. And suddenly his eyes flashed with that dangerous impatience that I knew so well. It was, strangely enough, sort of a relief to see it. At least some things don’t change.

The lackey, a small, obsequious man in a carefully tailored suit with brass buttons and little epaulettes, led us through a series of corridors and double doors, several of which opened onto smaller versions of the room we had just left. In each, diamond-encrusted courtiers sat around swapping witty banter, reciting lousy sonnets, and singing to each other about their disdainful mistresses. Fortunately, we were moving quickly, so I only caught the odd word, but I’d already heard enough of this verbal poncing about to last me a lifetime, and each half-heard quip, each shrewdly worded jest, each ripple of polite amusement stuck me like the blade of a stiletto.

“Don’t these people have anything better to do?” I murmured after one particularly sophisticated remark about how kissing a beautiful lady was a rung on the ladder to the divine.

“The question,” said the lackey who led us, tossing the remark over his shoulder in a manner one of his masters would have been proud of, “is whether anyone could do it better than them.”

This was obviously supposed to close the matter. I thought otherwise.

“But if what they’re doing is worthless, who cares whether they are any good at it or not? It’s like being the national champion of balancing a spoon on the end of your nose. I mean, so what?”

Our little procession stuttered to a halt and the lackey turned on me with an offended look that flushed his cheeks.

“These are the elite,” he said stiffly, “and their accomplishments do not merely accompany their station, they demonstrate it and show why they are courtiers and others aren’t. A tradesman can buy clothes and friends, but these people are different, superior. No tradesman could enter here without being shamed. These people just know how to behave, how to dress, and how to converse in civilized society. It is in their blood, and that is why they have the ear of the king and the tradesman does not.”

With a curl of the lip which neatly coincided with the word “tradesman,” the lackey turned on his heel and marched off. Garnet and Renthrette shot me the obligatory looks of hostility, amazed I could have missed something this obvious, and stalked after him. Someone in the corner began to sing about how beauty and virtue were really the same thing. I, the tradesman who didn’t belong, hurried after the others.

We had to be announced before being admitted to the king’s chambers. This, for reasons unknown, took a good ten minutes. During that time we stood at the door and tried to look reverential, something which seemed to be an effort only for me. The somber siblings, despite having spent their adult lives fighting the hand of authority, were clearly very impressed with all this ritual and glamorized hierarchy. I suspect that if the Diamond Emperor himself condescended to invite them and their rebel brethren to tea, all organized resistance would collapse overnight while they basked in the glow of his magnificence and that paradoxical “human” quality which apparently justified any semblance of tyranny. “Such and such a lord butchered my father to get his land, but he personally sent a basket of fruit to the funeral. What a decent chap-you know, always has a smile for the locals. Sure, he lives in a castle and eats gold, but if you meet him he’s so genuine, so ordinary. What’s it to us if he wants to turn our village into one big sheep farm and send us into whoredom and beggary? I mean, I’m sure he knows best. After all, he is a lord.”

Anyway, the announcements started echoing down the halls and through the palace’s sumptuous chambers. “Garnet and the Thrusian wanderers,” they called us.

“We sound like a pub act,” I remarked, with bitter amusement. And all at once I could see the three of us playing for a crowd in Cresdon’s Eagle Tavern: Renthrette with a lute, Garnet with a bloody big drum, and me with a pair of bent spoons, dodging insults and rotten fruit. But before I could share this little vignette with my companions, we were hustled down yet another corridor, through three more antechambers and, with a silvery fanfare, into the presence of King Halmir, son of Velmir, lord of Phasdreille.

He was seated in an alabaster throne padded with purple velvet at the end of a long chamber with high windows along the walls. A narrow carpet of the same rich purple led up to it, and on each side stood guards and courtiers, their eyes turned toward us. The king himself was pale and blond, perhaps forty, his hair breaking around his shoulders in luxuriant ringlets, but these were details I noticed later. My first impression of him was one of spectacle. He was dressed from head to foot in cloth-of-gold, and the early afternoon sun splashing down in great diagonal shafts through the windowpanes picked him out and made him shimmer astonishingly, like a man seated amidst flames. We faltered, our eyes on him, and Garnet gasped audibly.

“Approach his majesty the king,” said the lackey, a smug smile sprawling across his plump face as he took in our response.

There was a fluttering of fans from the female courtiers as the king inclined his head fractionally: a tiny nod which sent the light in the room dancing, as if a thousand burnished mirrors had been flashed toward the sun.

We began to edge forward, onto the carpet and down it, Garnet leading, then Renthrette, then me, all half-blinded by his brilliance. He did not move, but a ripple passed through the crowd as we approached and a number of men gathered at the foot of the throne: councilors and private secretaries, no doubt. Some were clad as the rest in bright, expensive fabrics and jewels, others wore the somber black of the archetypal civil servant. I noted that Gaspar, the middle-aged courtier I had seen earlier trading metaphors as proof of his love, was in the latter group. He was changed out of his finery now and looked positively funereal. Sorrail was among the courtiers. His eyes fell on Renthrette in her borrowed finery, and he smiled, pleased.

I had tried to wash my clothing for the event, but still looked like something dragged in by the proverbial cat: dragged, I might add, through hedges and waterlogged ditches, and then partly eaten. This had not gone unnoticed. While Renthrette got glances of quiet, polite admiration from the men and equally quiet, polite malice from the women, and Garnet got an inverted version of the same thing, the whole assembly found common ground once they’d looked me over: I was a scumbag. My shirt was yellowed with age and sweat, my breeches were stained disturbingly, worn at the seat, torn at the knee, and shredded altogether at the hem. It had been a tough journey, all right? If my comrades hadn’t been so lovingly supplied with fresh and dazzling attire, they would look no better. Well, not much. The point is that I was an adventurer (I had just decided), not a fop. And anyway, I wasn’t the least bit interested in people who would evaluate me according to what I looked like. Who did they think they were?

The problem was that all this elegance and spectacle was getting to me, and the truth was that, yes, I did feel a bit awkward and out of my element. I once witnessed a frog race in Cresdon years ago. (Bear with me, and the relevance of this will become clear). Some idiot had marked out a little course and people were expected to place bets on which of the five uninterested frogs would finish first. People did, too. When the “race” started, the frogs either sat where they were, went in the wrong direction, hopped out of the course altogether, or tried to make friends with the other frogs. The idiot organizer was press-ganged into paying the gamblers as if everyone had won, and finished the afternoon badly out of pocket and looking like a complete prat. Anyway, being before the king reminded me of that, though I couldn’t decide if I, surrounded by courtly leers and polite smiles, felt more like him or one of his stupid frogs. (See? I told you it was relevant. Sort of.)