Roger Taylor - The call of the sword

Gavor contrived to look injured.

‘Dear boy. You really are too severe on an old friend. Truly I’ve had you in sight all day. Well… most of it anyway. And damp and dull it’s been I can tell you. I presume you’ve not found what you’re looking for, hence this odium stored for poor faithful Gavor.’

‘No. I’m afraid not, Gavor. I fear the tinker simply lied, and I’ve been following a hope not an insight. I’ll look again tomorrow and then we’ll set off for home.’

Gavor cocked his head on one side, but said noth-ing.

They shared a meal with a family that had come up from the far south of Riddin. The husband was a leatherworker whose skin was burnt and bronzed like the material of his trade, while his much younger wife was plump and homely. They had come to the Gret-mearc to celebrate the wife’s acceptance into her husband’s Muster Line, and they had a contentment in one another that made Hawklan think he was already back in Orthlund.

They spent a pleasant evening talking about their respective homes and trades, and regaled one another with the things they had seen around the Gretmearc. Later, when the couple had lain down to sleep, Hawklan sat for a long time looking at the glow of the fire shining on their relaxed faces.

When finally he too lay down, he found it difficult to get to sleep in spite of being tired with the miles he had walked during the day and the quiet, warm and drowsy evening he had spent with the now sleeping couple. He looked out at the bodies lying all around, and at the occasional figures wandering through them, silhouetted against the lights of the Gretmearc. He listened to the mounting chorus of snores and whistles mingling with the dying crackling of the fires, and the occasional fall of a raindrop nudged out of its leafy hollow by a stray breeze.

At last however, as he worked out what part of the Gretmearc he would explore the following day, he fell asleep.

He hardly seemed to have closed his eyes when they were open again and he was wide awake.

Something moved, only inches from his face. He blinked to clear his vision, and found himself looking into two baleful yellow eyes, each bearing an image of his own startled face and the glowing embers behind him.

Eldric wrinkled his nose in distaste as the party rode into the elaborately paved square that fronted his house in Vakloss. Arinndier smiled at Eldric’s involuntary commentary, and spurred his horse alongside. He mimicked Eldric’s voice.

‘Ha. Courtesy of Dan-Tor. Daytime at night no less.’

Eldric looked at him and smiled. ‘You may mock me, young man,’ he said, ‘knowing I won’t box your ears in front of the Guards. But these things are an abomina-tion, and you know it.’ He gesticulated contemptuously with his riding whip towards the globes that floated high above their heads and filled the square with a low humming and a bright blue-tainted white light.

Arinndier’s face became more sober. The globes were one of the many changes that Dan-Tor had wrought in the City under the guise of improvements, but while the arguments in their favour seemed sound enough, there was an intangible quality about both the arguments and the improvements themselves that left him and many others decidedly uncomfortable.

‘They do provide a better light than our old torches,’ he offered tentatively.

‘Better for what?’ retorted Eldric without hesitation. ‘When we were young, we’d no need to assault the night with this.’ He gestured again with his whip. ‘No deeds were done under the old torchlight that couldn’t be done in broad daylight. These things make more and deeper shadows than the ones they dispel-like the man himself,’ he added bitterly.

‘Times change,’ said Arinndier flatly. Both men sensed that the banter was on the point of turning sour. Eldric growled, and jumped down from his horse. Another voice chimed in.

‘Haha! You two warriors bemoaning the passing of the old gloom again, eh?’ It was Darek, who had just trotted up with Hreldar.

Eldric growled again. ‘The old gloom, as you call it, served our fathers well enough. And many before them. And… ’ He stuttered to a halt as his friends began to laugh. Looking for a way to conclude the debate with a modicum of dignity and good humour he joined in the laughter and shouted, ‘And it didn’t make you look purple.’

As the others dismounted, he put his arm around his horse’s neck, patted it affectionately and thanked it for carrying him so well and so faithfully. The horse lifted its head and shook it from side to side, its mane flying in the buzzing air. Eldric looked at the harsh shadow of the horse dancing over the ornate paving and shook his head sadly. Still, there were more urgent matters to hand.

‘Come along, my friends,’ he said soberly. ‘We’ve much still to discuss and our horses must be tended first.’

They had not intended to reach Vakloss at night, but an urgency had pushed them forward and they had gained over half a day almost without realizing it. The early arrival however, did not affect their plans. In fact, it would give them an opportunity for further discussion in more comfortable and, Eldric regrettably had to concede, more secure surroundings.

They had talked on the journey, but although the Lords of Fyorlund did not hold themselves high above the people, the close proximity of their High Guards and servants both when riding and at their staging camps made it advisable to avoid the more delicate aspects of the King’s suspension of the Geadrol. Whatever the outcome of their meeting with the King, it would not be aided by the gossip that could spring from some incautious remark by one of their retainers.

The four Lords were respected and experienced members of the Geadrol, each having served on many occasions as Gatherer, but they were at a loss to know how to act in the light of the King’s unprecedented action. Such brief discussions as they had had on the journey had yielded no greater inspiration than those they had had at Eldric’s castle, and they were still reluctantly obliged to concede that their only choice was to go to the King and ask him directly to justify his action before the Law.

It was not a prospect that any of them relished, least of all Eldric, as the most senior. He knew that Tirke’s outburst at the First Feast not only represented the feelings of many of the ordinary people of Fyorlund, but contained a great deal of truth.

The King had been a sick and tormented man ever since he had returned from the Morlider War with Dan-Tor at his side. Eldric had originally, and for a long time, attributed the King’s condition to a combination of misfortunes. To his coming too soon to the throne following the premature death of his father at a time of great unrest, the Riddinvolk just having sent requests for aid against the Morlider. To his subsequent marriage to Sylvriss, the beautiful daughter of Urthryn, the Ffyrst of Riddin, producing no heir to the throne.

But now? Now he did not know what to think. That Dan-Tor was becoming the real power behind the throne was indisputable. His boundless energy and considerable abilities had taken many of the King’s burdens from his shoulders at times when illness had struck him down, but these were not returned subse-quently. The King had less and less to do other than fret and ponder how it should be that he, in generations of Kings, should be so ill-fated both in his health and his lack of an heir. More and more he turned in on himself, becoming bitter and arbitrary in his whims.

That Dan-Tor was manipulating the King to slowly erode the power of the Geadrol might indeed be the case, but why? Eldric, so used to the patient, intermina-ble listening and sifting of the Geadrol, so used to the counter-balancing weights of authority and responsibil-ity, could not answer this, could not bring himself to believe that one man would want to take all authority to himself without regard to the responsibilities that such an achievement would bring. It was a diseased idea. It could only flit nervously at the edges of his mind, never coming clearly into the centre where he could face and deal with it.