James White - The First Protector

"I like not his manner," said Sean in a quiet voice. "He moves toward Ma'el, but his eyes twitch about among the other wagons and stalls."

"Nor do I," Declan agreed, reaching back and sliding out his axe. "Your eyes are sharp, boy. That cape he wears is too short to conceal a sword, but there could be knives or cudgels in his belt Slowly and quietly, let us move closer."

"You're not going to use that frightful thing!" Sean protested, looking around him. "Not in the middle of a marketplace. Why is there never a Gardai about when you need one?"

Having already looked all around him and seen that nobody was paying him any attention, the red-haired man now had eyes only for Ma'el. He advanced toward the stall, smiling and loosening his cape. There was a moment's view of the knife and short-handled stone hammer that he carried.

"How may I serve you, good sir?" said Ma'el.

"I heard a boy in the crowd telling everyone that you were a great magician who can foretell the future," he said in a quiet but threatening voice, "and I want to foretell your future. The credulous men and women among us say that great magicians can turn stones into gold, but I have always doubted that. Instead I believe that they have a hoard of gold or silver coins hidden about their persons or possessions. You may serve me by yielding them up now. And your future, old man, if you do not give them to me without delay, will be to die with your scrawny chest and bald egg of a skull stove in."

Declan moved closer, to a position five paces from both the red-haired man and the stall, and changed to a one-handed grip on his long-axe at its center of balance and began to spin it in vertical circles. It was a difficult trick to do with such a heavy, thick-shafted weapon, and he knew that more than a few moments of it would pain his wrist, but it impressed and often discouraged a would-be attacker. In this case it had the effect of making the other's freckles look black in his suddenly pale face.

"Master," said Declan, giving the man a look of disdain, "would you have me open this one's stupid head?"

"No…!" Sean began, before Declan silenced him with his upraised, unencumbered hand.

'The boy is a healer and soft-hearted," he said to the man. "He would feel shamed if I did something to you that he, with his limited experience of the healing arts, could not mend. I myself care little what I do to one who threatens the life of our aged and frail master…"

"No, no, I beg you," the other broke in, beginning to back away. "Have pity. I am impoverished, weak with hunger and needing only a few coins to support my ailing wife and children. I drew no weapon and no bodily harm was done to your master. Please, I meant to threaten his life only with words…"

The last few of his words were lost as he suddenly turned and ran with remarkable speed, Declan thought, for a fat and starving man.

Declan watched as the would-be robber dodged out of sight between the other stalls and wagons, and sighed. "I'm going soft," he said, "talking like that instead of doing physical violence to him. I suppose it comes of spending so much of my time with a healer."

Before Sean could reply, Ma'el raised a finger to point into the crowd behind them and said quietly, "My thanks to you, Declan. But now this frail and aging body of mine is no longer at risk and I would like both of you to withdraw as before and remain watchful. We have another caller."

This time it was an old man, a merchant wide of girth and halting and feeble in his movements, who said that he wanted not so much to know his own future during the few short years remaining to him as whether or not his three sons would agree to his proposed division of his property between them. When Ma'el asked what manner of young men they were, the other spoke without hesitation and at length about their virtues and vices large and small. But soon his talking moved to other subjects, his business concerns and those people who lived and wrought in the town and who envied him his success. He said that he welcomed this chance to talk to and be advised by a traveler who knew nothing about the people he spoke of and whose advice, therefore, would be more balanced than that of self-seeking friends who might seek advantage from the words he spoke. But it was evident to the listening Declan that the old merchant wanted to talk, and even gossip and relate shameful or humorous facts about others to what he considered to be a safe pair of ears. In time he left pleased and with his own ears filled with Ma'el's good advice, which included the suggestion that his future might not be as short as he expected.

There followed two colleens, bright, fair, open of face, and scarcely mature who, like the young men who had called earlier, pushed each other forward in their shyness. They, too, wanted to know the future but as yet had no clear idea of what they wanted their futures to be. Ma'el talked to them kindly and sent them away with good advice and vague promises that satisfied them. They were followed by another caller who apart from being female, Declan could see at once, was in no other respect the same.

She was a young woman, small, strongly built, and with a confident and competent look about her that was at odds with the hesitancy of her approach. Her bare feet and the hem of her well-worn dress were splattered with the mud of the soft ground, but the shawl around her shoulders was new or at least freshly washed, and her long, dark hair was held in a comb that was worn with an air that suggested that it might be her most valued decoration. Her face was broad and plain with eyes that were dark and lively and, Declan thought, in spite of the hands worn rough by toil and her lowly circumstances, she had a mouth that was no stranger to a smile. It was Ma'el who spoke first.

"Come forward, young woman, and speak of yourself," he said quietly. "Doubtless I look old and strange to you, but I am not a demon, and the passage of years and the kind of life I must lead have robbed me of all my hair. Is there a service you would ask of me?"

The other's face deepened in color and she spent more than a little time in thought before she nodded her head with firmness before giving answer.

"If you please, venerable one," she said, "I-I would know the future."

"Of course you would," said Ma'el. He spent a long moment of his own looking at her without movement of feature or even the blink of an eye, then went on gently, "But would you know what the future holds for you yourself, or for another, or for both of you?"

Her color deepened again. She glanced sideways at Declan and Sean who were standing some thirty paces distant, then she said in a firm but quiet voice, 'it is for both of us. I would know if we, in our bodies as well as our futures, will lie together. But how did you know this? Is it because you are a great magician as that boy over there proclaimed?"

Ma'el continued to regard her with steady eyes but gave no answer.

While pretending to be interested in some other person or event in the marketplace, Declan nodded knowingly to himself. Most of the young women like this one who sought the services of a fortuneteller were curious about what the future held for herself and her young man. A magician though the old man might claim to be, he was honest in laying no claims to the possession of wizardly powers while he was simply making a guess that was almost sure to be the correct one. As Ma'el spoke on it pleased Declan greatly for some strange reason that in the simpler trickeries of his craft the other was being honest.

"Child," said Ma'el, "from the look of your eyes and face, it is clear to see that you are deeply in love with a young man. But if I am to look into your future lives, whether they are to be lived together or apart, I must know something of your pasts. First you will tell me of your own past life, and then of his."