[New Sun 04] The Citadel of the Autarch
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“What I’ve wanted to ask Journeyman Palaemon all these years ...” Winnoc paused, gnawing at his lower lip. “He was a torturer, wasn’t he? He said, so, and so did you.”
“Yes, he was. He still is.”
“Then what I want to know is whether he told me what he did to torment me. Or was he giving me the best advice he could?” He looked away so that I would not see his expression. “Will you ask him that for me? Then maybe sometime I’ll see you again.”
I said, “He advised you as well as he could, I’m certain. If you’d stayed as you were, you might have been executed by him or another torturer long ago. Have you ever seen a man executed? But torturers don’t know everything.”
Winnoc stood up. “Neither do slaves. Thank you, young man.”
I touched his arm to detain him for a moment. “May I ask you something now? I myself have been a torturer. If you’ve feared for so many years that Master Palaemon had said what he did only to give you pain, how do you know that I haven’t done the same just now?”
“Because you would have said the other,” he told me. “Good night, young man.”
I thought for a time about what Winnoc had said, and about what Master Palaemon had said to him so long ago. He too had been a wanderer, then, perhaps ten years before I was bom. And yet he had returned to the Citadel to become a master of the guild. I recalled the way Abdiesus (whom I had betrayed) had wished to have me made a Master. Surely, whatever crime Master Palaemon had committed had been hidden later by all the brothers of the guild. Now he was a master, though as I had seen all my life, being too accustomed to it to wonder at it, it was Master Gurloes who directed the guild’s affairs despite his being so much younger. Outside the warm winds of the northern summer played among the tent ropes; but it seemed to me that I climbed the steep steps of the Matachin Tower again and heard the cold winds sing among the keeps of the Citadel.
At last, hoping to turn my mind to less painful matters, I stood and stretched and strolled to Foila’s cot. She Was awake, and I talked with her for a time, then asked if I might judge the stories now; but she said I would have to wait one more day at least.
XIII. Foila’s Story-The Armiger’s Daughter
“HALLVARD AND MELITO and even the Ascian have had their chances. Don’t you think I’m entitled to one too? Even a man who courts a maid thinking he has no rivals has one, and that one is herself. She may give herself to him, but she may also choose to keep herself for herself. He has to convince her feat she will be happier with him than by herself, and though men convince maids of that often, it isn’t often true. In this competition I will make my own entry, and win myself for myself if I can. If I marry for tales, should I marry someone who’s a worse teller of them than I am myself?”
“Each of the men has told a story of his own country. I will do the same. My land is the land of the far horizons, of the wide sky. It is the land of grass and wind and galloping hoofs. In summer the wind can be as hot as the breath of an oven, and when the pampas take fire, the line of smoke stretches a hundred leagues and the lions ride our cattle to escape it, looking like devils. The men of my country are brave as bulls and the women are fierce as hawks.
“When my grandmother was young, there was a villa in my country so remote that no one ever came there. It belong to an armiger, a feudatory of the Liege of Pascua. The lands were rich, and it was a fine house, though the roof beams had been dragged by oxen all one summer to get them to the site. The walls were of earth, as the walls of all the houses in my country are, and they were three paces thick.
People who live in woodlands scoff at such walls, but they are cool and make a fine appearance whitewashed and will not burn. There was a tower and a wide banqueting hall, and a contrivance of ropes and wheels and buckets by which two merychips, walking in a circle, watered the garden on the roof.
“The armiger was a gallant man and his wife a lovely woman, but of all their children only one lived beyond the first year. She was tall, brown as leather yet smooth as oil, with hair the colour of the palest wine and eyes dark as thunderheads. Still, the villa where they dwelt was so remote that no one knew and no one came to seek her. Often she rode all day alone, hunting with her peregrine or dashing after her spotted hunting cats when they had started an antelope. Often too she sat alone in her bedchamber all the day, hearing the song of her lark in its cage and turning the pages of old books her mother had carried from her own home.
“At last her father determined that she must wed, for she was near the twentieth year, after which few would want her. Then he sent his servants everywhere for three hundred leagues around, crying her beauty and promising that on his death her husband should hold all that was his. Many fine riders came, with silver-mounted saddles and coral on the pommels of their swords. He entertained them all, and his daughter, with her hair in a man’s hat and a long knife in a man’s sash, mingled with them, feigning to be one of them, so that she might hear who boasted of many women and see who stole when he thought himself unobserved. Each night she went to her father and told him their names, and When she had gone he called them to him and told them of the stakes where no one goes, where men bound in rawhide die in the sun; and the next morning they saddled their mounts and rode away.
“Soon there remained but three. Then the armiger’s daughter could go among them no more, for with so few she feared they would surely know her. She went to her bedchamber and let down her hair and brushed it, and took off her hunting clothes and bathed in scented water. She put rings on her fingers and bracelets on her arms and wide hoops of gold in her ears, and on her head that thin circlet of fine gold that an armiger’s daughter is entitled to wear. In short, she did all she knew to make herself beautiful, and because her heart was brave, perhaps there was no maid anywhere more beautiful than she.
“When she was dressed as she wished, she sent her servant to call her father and the three suitors to her. “Now behold me,’ she said. “You see a ring of gold about my brow, and smaller rings suspended from my ears. The arms that will embrace one of you are themselves embraced by rings smaller still, and rings yet smaller are on my fingers. My chest of jewels lies open before you, and there are no more rings to be found in it; but there is another ring still in this room—a ring I do not wear. Cam one of you discover it and bring it to me?’
“The three suitors looked up and down, behind the arras, and beneath the bed. At last the youngest took the lark’s cage from its hook and carried it to the armiger’s daughter; and there, about the lark’s right leg, was a tiny ring of gold. ‘Now hear me,’ she said. ‘My husband shall be the man who shows me this little brown bird again.’
“And with that she opened the cage and thrust in her hand, then carrying the lark upon her finger took it to the window and tossed it in the air. For a moment the three suitors saw the gold ring glint in the sun.
The lark rose until it was no more than a dot against the sky.
“Then the suitors rushed down the stair and out the door, calling for their mounts, the swift-footed friends that had carried them already so many leagues across the empty pampas. Their silver-mounted saddles they threw upon their backs, and in less than a moment all three were gone from the sight of the armiger and the armiger’s daughter, and from each other’s as well, for one rode north toward the jungles, and one east toward the mountains, and the youngest west toward the restless sea.