P. Hodgell - The Sea of Time

“You are going back to the keep, aren’t you?” Hull asked anxiously, looking up at him.

Cold and shock made Torisen’s teeth clatter, and his sodden clothes dripped with mud. No clean hands this time, after all.

“I’d better, hadn’t I?” he said, trying to smile.

Lord Caineron and the Director of Mount Alban sat in the college’s library on either side of its massive oak table. The southward-facing window was curtained with oiled cloth to keep out the fog, leaving a gloomy interior lit with candles as if it were twilight. In fact, it was morning on the last day of winter. The Director leaned back in his chair, his blind, opaque eyes overhung by shaggy, scar-broken brows. Caldane sat opposite in hunting leathers that strained against his girth. He had just finished a late breakfast, more by fretfully scattering its remains about the table and the floor than by consuming them. He seemed simultaneously eager and on edge, although he did his best to hide it. The former randon who served as the college’s current director might not have noticed, but Kirien suspected that he did: Taur was no one’s fool.

Kirien herself stood behind a screen by the door.

The inhabitants of the college had kept their visitor under covert observation since his arrival the previous evening with a large hunting party that claimed to be lost in the dense fog. The Director had pointed out that Valantir across the river had better accommodations, but Caldane had insisted that he couldn’t find the Jaran keep, which might have been true. On the other hand, the Caineron and the Jaran hadn’t been on good terms since the previous summer. Certainly, the current if temporary lord of Valantir, Kirien’s uncle, would have objected to Caldane’s hunters on his land. So did Kirien, as the Jaran Lordan.

Caldane wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his gilded leathers, leaving a greasy smear.

“For this hospitality, again, much thanks,” he said. “Such a fog I’ve never before seen, although we do get some monsters in the early spring. They can last for days.”

“I trust you wouldn’t be exiled from your home for that long, my lord,” said Ran Taur dryly.

Caldane shot the big Kendar a suspicious look. Was he being hinted away?

Yes , thought Kirien. Go .

Caldane leaned back. His chair groaned as he overlapped it on all sides.

“We won’t be leaving just yet,” he said. “I’ve wanted to have a word with you for some time, Ran Taur.” He gestured around him at the library’s scrolls on their towering shelves under the vaulted roof. “It’s about these. How many would you say came with us to Rathillien?”

“Several dozen, at least. We didn’t have time to gather more.”

“And the rest?”

“Scrollsmen and singers dictated them from memory.”

“Ah. Singers. Now, this has always puzzled me: given their use of the Lawful Lie, how can we trust anything that they say?”

“Singers swear not to distort the basic truth in their songs.”

“But they do take liberties with it.”

“They may. Such songs as abuse the privilege, however, don’t endure, nor do we record them.”

Caldane leaned forward. “But how do you know what to write down and what to let fade? This summer, my hunters were put off the trail of a particularly valuable golden willow with some song only two generations old. I gather, after questioning my own scrollsmen, that that song endures only in memory.”

“Then it isn’t law. Your hunters were misled.”

“Ah. I thought as much. And what about these songs of Ashe’s about the battle at the Cataracts? I was there , man. The dead didn’t speak to me. They were just that: dead.”

“If you don’t hear something yourself, my lord, does that make it a lie?”

“If some blasted singer says it, does that make it the truth?”

“That depends on the judgment of the scrollsmen, when it comes to recording a particular song. The two branches of the college keep each other in check. Have you discussed this matter with my lord Corrudin?”

Caldane looked huffy. “I’ve talked to my uncle, yes, although he tends to back into a corner whenever addressed. What that little Knorth bitch did to him at Tentir, I’ve yet to discover, except that it involved falling out a window. He helped me to make sense of things, although we didn’t reach the same conclusions on some matters.”

He made himself sit back with a creak of wood and leather. His beringed, pudgy fingers tapped nervously on the arms of his chair. “Now see here: I don’t quarrel with the oldest songs, the ones composed before the Fall that come to us only through memory. After all, those can be dismissed as legends rather than laws. It’s the more recent lot that worry me. For instance, those that demand individual responsibility rather than loyalty to one’s lord.”

“Honor’s Paradox,” murmured Ran Taur, “born of Gerridon’s fall.”

“Yes. That. A lot of romantic claptrap, if you ask me. Why, my own war-leader, Sheth Sharp-tongue, was misled by it, and the result? He released that brother of his . . .”

“Bear.”

“. . . a dangerous madman, mind you, to roam the Riverland at will. Then the Highlord’s hoyden sister graduated from Tentir, against my express orders.”

“The randon have their own code, as you may have noticed. They are not political.”

“Tell that to the Randir.”

The Director sighed. “M’lady Rawneth pushes to have her own will, not unlike you, m’lord.”

Caldane scowled, uncertain if he had just been handed a compliment, an insult, or simply a fact.

“You think I am wrong to want the Knorth so-called lordan returned to her proper place? What kind of a success has she been at Kothifir, pray tell? I’m told that she is often absent from her post in the camp. Will Harn punish her for that? Probably not. He has also been corrupted by such songs as Ashe sings. Huh. That woman is an abomination. She should have long since been consigned to the pyre where she belongs.”

Kirien became aware of a coldness beside her, and Ashe’s yellow, knobby hand touched her arm.

“Caldane’s men . . . have sealed off the college,” the haunt singer muttered in her hoarse, halting voice. “Not that the fog . . . hadn’t already.”

“But why would Caldane do such a thing?”

“I don’t know . . . but from what I’ve heard . . . I suspect.”

“Have we no way to signal Valantir for help?”

“Not . . . that I can see.”

“Well, we still have this.” Kirien extracted a tablet from her jacket and began to write on it in her rapid, spiky script.

“There are no far-writers closer than Gothregor,” said Ashe. “It and the Matriarch Trishien . . . are a hundred miles away.”

“I know Tori and Aunt Trish. They’ll find some way to answer, although it may take time.”

“Then there’s another song of special interest to me,” Caldane was saying, leaning forward again, more eagerly than before although he sought to hide it. “‘Gerridon Highlord, Master of Knorth, a proud man was he. The Three People held he in his hand—Arrin-ken, Highborn, and Kendar—by right of birth and might.’ D’you remember it?”

“Everyone does,” said the Director. “So?”

“My own scrollsmen tell me that it was composed on this world after the Fall and subsequently written down. Only one copy exists. Now, that I would like to see.”

“Why?”

Caldane airily waved a fat, dismissive hand. “What would your scholars say? Intellectual curiosity.” He looked around the library. “Is it here?”

“Possibly. Most Kencyr know that song by heart, though, passed on as it has been from mouth to mouth. No one has had to refer to the original manuscript in years. Who even knows where it is?”