Barbara Hambly - 01 THE TIME OF THE DARK

"Always is a long time," Rudy said, and Minalde looked away.

They talked a while longer of the Keep, of the Palace at Gae, of the small doings that had made up the life of the Queen of the Realm of Darwath. The fire sank in the open brazier that warmed the room, the flames playing in a small, steady amber glow over writhing scarlet coals; the soft smells of camphorwood and lemon sachet drifted from the folded clothes. "A lot of this will have to be left, I'm afraid," Alde sighed. "We have only three carts, and one of those has to be for the records, the archives of the Realm." She was sitting on the floor now, turning over in her hands book after book from the small pile beside her. The firelight sparkled off their jeweled bindings and spread gold, like a warm suntan, on the soft flesh of her chin and throat. "I'd wanted to take all of these, but some of them are terribly frivolous. Books are so heavy, and the ones we take really ought to be serious, philosophy and theology. These may very well be the only books they'll have in the Keep for years."

Behind the gentle run of her voice Rudy heard the echo of another voice, Gil's voice, saying, Do you realize how many of the great works of ancient literature didn't survive? All because some Christian monk didn't think they were important enough to preserve? He'd forgotten the context and the conversation, but the words came back to him, and he ventured, "Probably a lot of people are going to hang onto the philosophy and theology." And, God knows, I wouldn't want to be shut up for years with nothing to read but the Bible.

"That's true," she mused, weighing the two books in her hands, as if measuring pleasure and emotional truths against fine-spun scholastic hairsplitting. Then she turned her head, the dark sheet of her hair brushing his knee where he sat on the edge of the bed behind her. "Medda?"

The stout servant, who all this time had worked in silent disapproval in the darker corners of the room, came forward now, and her manner softened imperceptibly. "Yes, my lady?"

"Could you go up to the box room and see if you can locate another trunk? A small one?"

The woman bobbed a curtsy. "Yes, my lady." Her heavy tread with its clicking heels diminished down the dark hall. Rudy thought to himself, Score one for Gil and ancient lit.

Alde smiled at him across the gemmed fire-glint of the gilded bindings. "She doesn't approve of you. Or of anybody, really, who isn't sufficiently impressed by my being Queen. She was my nurse when I was small and she puts a lot of store in being the Queen's Nurse. She isn't like that when we're alone. Don't let her worry you."

Rudy grinned back at her. "I know. The first time I saw the two of you together, I thought you were some kind of junior servant, the way she bossed you around."

The fine, dark eyebrows raised, and there was a teasing light in her eyes. "If you'd known I was the Queen of Darwath, would you have spoken to me?"

"Sure. Well, I mean-" Rudy hesitated, wondering. "Uh-I don't know. If somebody had said, 'Look, that's the Queen,' maybe I wouldn't even have seen you, wouldn't really have looked at you." He shrugged. "We don't have kings and queens where I come from."

"Truly?" She frowned, puzzled at the incomprehensible thought. "Who rules you, then? Whom can your people love and honor? And who will love and guard the honor of your people?"

To Rudy, this question was equally incomprehensible, and since his major area of success in school had been evasion of classes, he had only a sketchy notion of how the United States Government worked. But he gave her his perceptions of it, perhaps more informative than political theory, and Alde listened gravely, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up knees. Finally she said, "I don't think I could stand it. Not because I'm Queen-but it all sounds so impersonal. And I'm not really a Queen anymore."

She leaned her back against the carved post of the bed frame, her head close by his knee. Profiled against the amber glow of the fire, her face seemed very young, though worn and fragile and tired. "Oh-they honor me, they bow to me. It's all in my name. And Tir's. But-it's all gone. There's nothing of it left." Her voice was small and tight suddenly, as if struggling to be calm against some suppressed emotion. He saw the quick shine of tears in her violet eyes.

"And it all happened so suddenly. It's not the honor, Rudy, not having servants who wait on me. It's the people. I don't care about having to pack my own things, when all my life servants have done it for me. But those servants, the household at the Palace-they'd been around me for years. Some of them were from our House, from when I was a girl; they'd been with me since I was born. People like the Guards who stood outside my bedroom door-I didn't know them well, but they were like part of my life, a part I never really thought about. And they're all dead now."

Her voice flinched from it, then steadied. "You know, there was one old dooic slave who scrubbed the floors in the hall at the Palace. Probably he'd done so for his whole life, and he must have been twenty years old, which is very old for them. He knew me. He'd grunt and sort of smile at me when I went past. In the last battle in the Throne Hall at Gae, he grabbed up a torch and went with it against the Dark Ones, swinging it like the men swinging their swords. I saw him die. I saw so many people I knew die." One tear slid down the curve of her cheek, those lobelia-dark eyes turning to meet his, seeking in them some comfort, some bulwark against the fear and grief she'd locked in.

"It wasn't being Queen or not being Queen," she went on, wiping at her cheek with fingers that shook. "It's the whole life, everything. Tir is all I have left. And in the last fight, I left him, too. We locked him in a little room behind the throne, my maid and I. They needed every sword in the hall, though neither of us had ever handled one before. It was like a nightmare, some-some insane dream, all fire and darkness, I think I must have been half-crazy. I thought I was going to die, and that didn't matter, really, but I was terrified they'd get Tir. And I left him alone." She repeated the words in a kind of despairing wonder. "I left him alone. I-I told Ingold I'd kill him if he didn't take Tir and go. He was going to stay and fight to the last. I had a sword. I told him I'd kill him... " For a moment her eyes seemed to see nothing of the shadowy golden warmth of the curtained chamber, reflecting only relived horror.

Rudy said gently, "Well, he probably didn't believe you," and was rewarded to his joy with a tiny smile of self-mockery and the return to the present of those haunted eyes. "And anyhow, I don't think you could have hurt him."

"No." She laughed softly, shakily, as people do when they remember any desperate passion which has lost its importance. "But how embarrassing to meet him afterward." And whether, as Ingold had said, it was the sentiments or the social gaffe that made her smile, it was enough to break the grip of the horror and let its raw memory fade.

The rain had almost ceased, its persistent drumming dimmed to a soft pattering rustle on the heavy glass of the window. Coals settled in the brazier, the glow of them like the last heart of a dying sunset. Minalde stood and moved through the dimness of the room to kindle a taper from the embers and transfer the flame to the trio of candles in the silver holder on the table. She blew out the touchlight, and smoke folded around her face as she laid it aside.

"That was what I couldn't endure," she went on, her voice quiet, as if she spoke now of someone other than herself. "That I'd left my child to die. Until Ingold came to me, the night before last-until he brought Tir back to me-I never even knew if they'd survived or not. All the rest of it, the Dark Ones surging down on us over the torches, the-the touch of it, the grip of it, like an iron rope-the Icefalcon's face when he picked me up off the floor of the vaults-it doesn't even seem real. Only that I'd left my child, the one person, the one thing that remained out of everything else in my life... "