Daughter of Magic - Wizard of Yurt - 5 (11 page)

Although I didn’t trust him, at the moment he appeared to be interested in my friendship, and it realy did seem unlikely that he would harm Antonia while I was gone. When I went out a few minutes later, he was again absorbed in my predecessor’s spidery hand, and Antonia, with a quick glance at me and a self-righteous lift of her chin, had puled down Elements of Transmogrification.

The Lady Justinia’s luggage had included a sort of double saddle with a roof, almost a little house, that could be strapped onto her elephant’s shoulders. The stable boys, grim and determined, managed to get it on, shaking their heads behind Justinia’s back. The elephant appeared almost as nervous as they were.

The automaton watched without moving, then sprang up onto the elephant’s neck when it was ready at last to go. I lifted the lady and Gwennie with magic into the little house and perched myself behind them on the elephant’s back. The leathery skin was scattered with long, coarse hairs that pricked through my trousers. I gave the stable boys a companionable shake of my head. This was supposed to be a smal elephant, but I felt disturbingly high above the ground.

It reached its trunk, as supple as a snake, up to Justinia, and she handed it an apple. The trunk’s end, I saw with fascination, was provided almost with fingers, or at least flexible protuberances. It thrust the apple in its mouth and ate it with evident enjoyment, made several rumbling noises that I hoped indicated a happy elephant, and then, at the light touch of a goad on its neck from the automaton, trotted briskly across the drawbridge and out into a lovely June day.

“The sun here is very faint and low in the sky,” commented the Lady Justinia.

Staying on an elephant’s back was even harder than I had expected. Remaining fairly stable and probing magicaly for potential enemies kept me fuly occupied while the beast’s roling gait took us down the hil and along the brick road that led eventualy to Caelrhon. I left it to Gwennie to try to explain that this was a warm day of midsummer and that the sun here was never as high or as hot as the lady was accustomed to.

We entered the forest, and dappled shadows flitted across us. After a few minutes, I was able to work out a spel to keep myself more or less balanced on the elephant’s back, while alowing me the attention to keep a watch for bandits or anyone else who might try to attack. When the Lady Justinia, who had falen silent after exhausting the possibilities of solar intensity, suddenly spoke again, I was so startled I almost fel off.

“Art thou,” she asked Gwennie, “the king’s concubine?”

Gwennie blushed a dark red from her hairline to the neck of her dress. “Excuse me, my lady,” she said faintly, “but I do not find that an appropriate question.” Now she had me curious.

“Come,” said Justinia breezily, “a vizier may oft keep secrets, but not from a governor’s granddaughter—especialy not one who wishes to aid her.” Gwennie kept her eyes down. “No, my lady,” she said as though the words were dragged from her, “we are not lovers. And—” She took a deep breath. “—and I think it shows how immoral the East must be for you even to think so.”

“Nay, O Vizier,” said Justinia. It was hard for me simultaneously to stay on the elephant, to pretend to be looking around as though not hearing their conversation, and to folow it avidly. “Does not passion for him burn great within you?”

Gwennie’s mouth shaped the word No, but for a moment no sound came out. Then she took another breath and answered fairly firmly, “Such a feeling would not be appropriate. A king can love only a princess or highborn lady, his social equal, someone fit to become his queen.”

There was not even a hint in her voice that she thought Justinia would make a terrible queen of Yurt. It occurred to me that Gwennie, not in any position of real power, was much more concerned with maintaining social conventions than was someone like Paul whom those conventions were supposed to support.

“This attitude speaks wel for thy training and awareness of thy position,” said Justinia thoughtfuly. “But I have observed how thou watchest the king, how aware thou constantly art of his presence. I speak now as a woman, not a highborn lady. Many a king has found more solace with a slave girl than his own wife. Would not thy heart’s sorrow be eased by entering his bed?”

“I don’t have to listen to this,” Gwennie replied, in what was doubtless supposed to be a hot defense of morality but came out half-choked. “Turn the elephant back to the castle.”

“That may indeed be a difficulty,” said Justinia, as though Gwennie had said something quite different. ‘Thou hast always lived, I ween, here in the royal court— wert thou perhaps even once his playmate?

But I have also verily observed him, how eager his youthful strength and restlessness is to turn to something deeper and stronger. If he awoke in the night to find thee beside him, it would be but a moment ere his friendship for thee turned to passion—especialy when he realized how much thy love could guide him to find what he truly wishes to find.” I wondered myself what she thought Paul was seeking.

“Thou earnest the castle’s keys at thy belt, I have noted,” Justinia continued. “It wil be a simple act for thee to slip into his chamber when al are sleeping, so that none else need ever know. Thy delicacy and inexperience itself should prove an added attraction.”

‘Turn the elephant back,” said Gwennie again, staring straight ahead.

Justinia laughed and said a word to the automaton, which touched the elephant’s neck with the goad. It turned obediently, pausing only to strip a trunkful of leaves from an overhanging branch before starting homeward. I remembered somewhat guiltily to probe for bandits.

And realized there was a group of riders approaching, less than a quarter mile behind us. I stiffened, summoning spels of protection. But there was something familiar about them. . . .

“Wait a minute, my lady,” I caled to Justinia, in a loud voice to indicate that I could not possibly have overheard a low-pitched conversation. “It’s the queen mother of Yurt, coming home.” In a moment the riders came out of the trees and puled up hard: a smal group of knights with the queen and her ladies in the center. Several of the horses, eyes roling white, reared as the elephant turned to look back at them.

Gwennie worked herself out of the housing on the elephant’s neck and would have jumped straight to the ground if I had not caught her magicaly to slow her fal. She sketched a curtsey, and although her cheeks were stil blotched red she addressed the queen clearly and calmly. “Welcome home, my lady! This is the princess of which I told you.” There were greetings and introductions al around. Gwennie must have telephoned the royal court of Caelrhon or sent a pigeon-message as soon as Justinia arrived, I realized. The queen and Prince Vincent, her husband, would have left for Yurt the very next day, cutting short what had been supposed to be a several-weeks visit at his family’s court. Although at first I drought that Gwennie had told them about the attack on the castle, and the queen had hurried home to assess the damage and the danger, no one in the party from Caelrhon seemed to have heard about it.

When the queen introduced a wide-eyed and rather gawky girl to Justinia, a girl who seemed to have shot up two inches since I saw her last, I understood why Gwennie had been so quick to contact the queen. It was not just the acting constable teling the queen of Yurt that her castle had company, although that was how she would have phrased it. Gwennie must have made an alusion—that the queen had understood very wel—to the beauty and charm of the foreign lady. The thirteen-year-old princess of Caelrhon who some, at least, had designated as Paul’s future bride was being brought in fast before it was too late.

“And wilt thou be a queen someday, Princess Margareta?” Justinia asked the girl politely.

Margareta, in awe of the elephant, stared open-mouthed for a moment, then remembered herself and said in a slightly squeaky voice, “No! That is, my father is king of Caelrhon. But, you know, if I marry another king, that is—”

The girl stopped in confusion. Justinia, considering with a twitch at the corner of her crimson lips, seemed to have guessed almost as quickly as I had why Margareta was being rushed to the royal court of Yurt. “In the meantime,” she said with a smile, “would it bring thee delight to ride upon an elephant, O Princess?”

“Oh,” with a nervous look toward her Uncle Vincent, the prince consort, and toward the queen, “could I?”

Gwennie seemed happy to give up her seat on the elephant’s back. In a minute Margareta was seated next to the Lady Justinia, gaping anew at the automaton, and we al started homeward. I yawned and thought I might finaly get some sleep once we were back at the castle.

Margareta squealed with real or assumed nervousness when the elephant began trotting, until Justinia told her rather sharply to stop scaring it. Gwennie, riding on the young princess’s horse, gave a calm and professional account of the castle’s doings in the few days the queen had been gone—except for the most crucial, the attack of the unliving warriors.

“In addition,” she finished, “there was one very sad event, and the night watchman is dead. Perhaps the king can tel you about it better than I. No, no, my lady, there is nothing to concern you now.” Glancing surreptitiously at Gwennie, I wondered what, if any, of the Lady Justinia’s advice had gone home. That, I knew, would concern the queen if she ever learned about it even more than an attack which was now safely over.

When I awoke, aching and ravenous, in late afternoon, it was to find Antonia and her dol curled up beside me. I had been having strange, rather uneasy dreams, involving Theodora and some bones, and was glad to wake. I tried to sit up without disturbing the girl, but she roled over and looked at me inquiringly through tousled hair. “I want to ask you something, Wizard,” she said. “Are you my father?” I jerked upright, fuly awake, and looked around quickly for Elerius. But if he was stil reading old spels it was in my outer study. “What has your mother told you, Antonia?” I asked cautiously.

“She said that my father couldn’t live with us,” she said slowly, as though trying to remember al the details correctly, “but that he loved us very much, and that I would understand it al when I grew up. I want,” she added, fixing me with sapphire eyes, “to understand it al now.”

I ran a hand over my face and pushed back my hair. “So why do you thunk I’m your father?”

“I know you love me and Mother,” she said with great seriousness, explaining a complicated logical exercise, “and you told me you don’t love other ladies. And Mother seems to love you, and she hardly ever talks about any other men—except of course the bishop.”

If our daughter thought Theodora loved me, then she indeed must. Most of the time I knew this anyway— it was just her reserve and self-reliance, I told myself, that made me sometimes doubt it. “The bishop loves you, too,” I said. “He baptized you.”

“He’s my friend,” said Antonia, nodding. “But he just told me to talk to Mother when I asked him about you. Some of my other friends on the street said they al knew you were my father.” In spite of Theodora’s quiet determination to keep her private life private, her neighbors must long have speculated about Antonia’s parentage, and I visited Theodora too often not to have attracted notice.

Even the Romneys knew she had a wizard friend.

“So are you my father?” Antonia asked, looking at me expectantly.

There didn’t seem any way to get out of answering.

Theodora may have preferred not teling our daughter for fear she would tel the other children, but it seemed too late to worry about that. “Yes, I am,” I said gravely, taking her hands in mine. They were bigger than when she had been born but stil tiny in my grip. “And I am very glad you’re my daughter.”

She threw herself against my chest, and I gave her a close hug. “I’m glad too,” she said indistinctly against my shirt.

“Your mother wants this to be a secret,” I said after a minute, stroking her hair, “so let’s not tel anyone here, not even Celia and Hildegarde.”

“I guessed the secret al by myself,” Antonia said proudly, looking up at me. “But my friend Jen said she thought my father was the bishop.” The bishop? I tried to make a sudden jerk seem like squeezing her tighter.

But Antonia observed my surprise. “I think,” she said in explanation, “that’s because he visits us sometimes, and everyone knows that Mother can go visit him in his palace whenever she wants.” If such a rumor had started, I had to tel Theodora to be a little less secretive about me with her neighbors: far better to have them know for certain what most of them had guessed anyway than to have people start believing wild things about her and Joachim.

A sudden rap on the bedchamber door interrupted us, and Elerius put his head in. “Good, I see you’re awake, Daimbert. Your young woman constable just came by with a pigeon-message she said she thought was important.”

He handed me a little cylinder of paper, al the pigeons could carry, and ducked back out. “If you’re my father,” asked Antonia thoughtfuly, “does that mean you’re Doly’s grandfather?” I didn’t answer. The message was from Celia in the cathedral city. I rubbed grit from the corner of an eye. I had again almost forgotten she was there. If people and events would just stay where I put them, and new ones would stop showing up in Yurt, and if I ever got enough sleep again, I might be able to keep track of what was happening in the twin kingdoms.

The message was, of necessity, brief. “Have met the Dog-Man. Religious vocation seems genuine. But strange. This afternoon down by the docks he kiled a pigeon and brought it back to life.”

“But strange” was right. Presumably the pigeon in question was not the same one who had brought this message? I stared unseeing at the little piece of paper until I realized Antonia was trying to read it too, then wadded it up in my fist.

“We’d better get ready for dinner,” I said, but my best effort at cheerfulness sounded forced in my own ears. I felt cold from the nape of my neck al the way down my back. Somehow this man had persuaded Celia as wel as the bishop that he genuinely wanted to be a priest. What could they be teaching in seminary these days? Even a wizard knew that a humble, holy man would not try to show off his miraculous powers. And someone who had already kiled a frog and a pigeon, just to bring them back to life, might have something much worse in mind.