the wind's twelve quarters (14 page)

Standing in the cold midst of the room where the prowlike head of the bedstead hid her from the king, Gerer heard them pacify Argaven and settled her down again. Argaven’s voice sounded reedy, childishly plaintive. So the Old King, Emran, had spoken in her last madness with a child’s voice. Then silence, and the burning of the two great fires.
 

Korgry, the king’s bodyservant, yawned and rubbed her eyes. Hoge measured something from a vial into a hypodermic. Gerer stood in despair. My child, my king, what have they done to you? So great a trust, so fair a promise, lost, lost.... So the one who looked like a lump of half-carved black rock, a heavy, prudent, rude old courtier, grieved and was passion-racked, her love and service of the young king being the world’s one worth to her.
 

Argaven spoke aloud: “My child—”
 

Gerer winced, feeling the words torn out of her own mind; but Hoge, untroubled by love, comprehended and said softly to Argaven, “Prince Emran is well, my liege. She is with her attendants at Warrever Castle. We are in constant communication. All is well there.”
 

Gerer heard the king’s harsh breathing, and came somewhat closer to the bed, though out of sight still behind the high headboard.
 

“Have I been sick?”
 

“You are not well yet,” the physician said, bland.
 

“Where—”
 

“Your own room, in the Palace, in Erhenrang.”
 

But Gerer, coming a step closer, though not in view of the king, said, “We do not know where you have been.”
 

Hoge’s smooth face creased with a frown, though, physician as she was and so in her way ruler of them all, she dared not direct the frown at the Lord Councillor. Gerer’s voice did not seem to trouble the king, who asked another question or two, sane and brief, and then lay quiet. Presently the servant Korgry, who had sat with her ever since she had been brought into the Palace (last night, in secret, by side doors, like a shameful suicide of the last reign, but all in reverse), Korgry committed lese-majeste: huddled forward on her high stool, she let her head droop on the side of the bed, and slept. The guard at the door yielded place to a new guard, in whispers. Officials came and received a fresh bulletin for public release on the state of the king’s health, in whispers. Stricken by symptoms of fever while vacationing in the High Kargav, the king had been rushed to Erhenrang, and was now responding satisfactorily to treatment, etc. Physician Hoge rem ir Hogeremme at the Palace has released the following statement, etc., etc. “May the Wheel turn for our king,” people in village houses said solemnly as they lit the fire on the altarhearth, to which elders sitting near the fire remarked, “It comes of her roving around the city at night and climbing mountains, fool tricks like that,” but they kept the radio on to catch the next bulletin. A very great number of people had come and gone and loitered and chatted this day in the square before the Palace, watching those who went in and out, watching the
vacant balcony; there were still several hundred down there, standing around
patiently in the snow. Argaven XVII was loved in her domain. After the dull brutality of King Emran’s reign that had ended in the shadow of madness and the country’s bankruptcy, she had come: sudden, gallant, young, changing everything; sane and shrewd, yet magnanimous. She had the fire, the splendor that suited her people. She was the force and center of a new age: one born, for once, king of the right kingdom.
 

“Gerer.”
 

It was the king’s voice, and Gerer hastened stiffly through the hot and cold of the great room, the firelight and dark.
 

Argaven was sitting up. Her arms shook and the breath caught in her throat; her eyes burned across the dark air at Gerer. By her left hand, which bore the Sign-Ring of the Harge dynasty, lay the sleeping face of the servant, derelict, serene. “Gerer,” the king said with effort and clarity, “summon the Council. Tell them, I will abdicate.”
 

So crude, so simple? All the drugs, the terrorizing, the hypnosis, parahypnosis, neurone-stimulation, synapse-pairing, spotshock that Hoge had described, for this blunt result? But reasoning must wait. They must temporize. “My liege, when your strength returns—”
 

“Now. Call the Council, Gerer!”
 

Then she broke, like a bowstring breaking, and stammered in a fury of fear that found no sense or strength to flesh itself in; and still her faithful servant slept beside her, deaf.
 

In the next picture things are going better, it appears. Here is King Argaven XVII in good health and good clothes, finishing a large breakfast. She talks with the nearer dozen of the forty or fifty people sharing or serving the meal (singularity is a king’s prerogative, but seldom privacy), and includes the rest in the largesse of her courtesy. She looks, as everyone has said, quite herself again. Perhaps she is not quite herself again, however; something is missing, a youthful serenity, a confidence, replaced by a similar but less reassuring quality, a kind of heedlessness. Out of it she rises in wit and warmth, but always subsides to it again, that darkness which absorbs her and makes her heedless: fear, pain, resolution?
 

Mr Mobile Axt, Ambassador Plenipotentiary to Winter from the Ekumen of the Known Worlds, who had spent the last six days on the road trying to drive an electric car faster than 50 kph from Mishnory in Orgoreyn to Erhenrang in Karhide, overslept breakfast, and so arrived in the Audience Hall prompt, but hungry. The old Chief of the Council, the king’s cousin Gerer rem ir Verhen, met the Alien at the door of the great hall and greeted him with the polysyllabic politeness of Karhide. The Plenipotentiary responded as best he could, discerning beneath the eloquence Gerer’s desire to tell him something.
 

“I am told the king is perfectly recovered,” he said, “and I heartily hope this is true.”
 

“It is not,” the old Councillor said, her voice suddenly blunt and toneless. “Mr Axt, I tell you this trusting your confidence; there are not ten others in Karhide who know the truth. She is not recovered. She was not sick.”
 

Axt nodded. There had of course been rumors.
 

“She will go alone in the city sometimes, at night, in common clothes, walking, talking with strangers. The pressures of kingship... She is very young.” Gerer paused a moment, struggling with some suppressed emotion. “One night six weeks ago, she did not come back. A message was delivered to me and the Second Lord, at dawn. If we announced her disappearance, she would be killed; if we waited a half-month in silence she would be restored unhurt. We kept silent, lied to the Council, sent out false news. On the thirteenth night she was found wandering in the city. She had been drugged and mindformed. By which enemy or faction we do not yet know. We
must work in utter secrecy; we cannot wreck the people’s confidence in her, her own confidence in herself. It is hard: she remembers nothing. But what they did is plain. They broke her will and bent her mind all to one thing. She believes she must abdicate the throne.”
 

The voice remained low and flat; the eyes betrayed anguish. And the Plenipotentiary turning suddenly saw the reflection of that anguish in the eyes of the young king.
 

“Holding my audience, cousin?”
 

Argaven smiled but there was a knife in it. The old Councillor excused herself stolidly, bowed, left, a patient ungainly figure diminishing down a long corridor.
 

Argaven stretched out both hands to the Plenipotentiary in the greeting of equals, for in Karhide the Ekumen was recognized as a sister kingdom, though not a living soul had seen it. But her words were not the polite discourse that Axt expected. All she said, and fiercely, was, “At last!”
 

“I left as soon as I received your message. The roads are still icy in East Orgoreyn and the West Fall, I couldn’t make very good time. But I was very glad to come. Glad to leave, too.” Axt smiled saying this, for he and the young king enjoyed each other’s candor. What Argaven’s welcome implied, he waited to see, watching, with some exhilaration, the mobile, beautiful, androgynous face.
 

“Orgoreyn breeds bigots as a corpse breeds worms, as one of my ancestors remarked. I’m glad you find the air fresher here in Karhide. Come this way. Gerer told you that I was kidnapped, and so forth? Yes. It was all according to the old rules. Kidnapping is a quite formal art. If it had been one of the anti-Alien groups who think your Ekumen intends to enslave the earth, they might have ignored the rules; I think it was one of the old clan-factions hoping to regain power through me, the power they had in the last reign. But we don’t know, yet. It’s strange, to know that one has seen them face to face and yet can’t recognize them; who knows but that I see those faces daily? Well, no profit in such notions. They wiped out all their tracks. I am sure only of one thing. They did not tell me that I must abdicate.”
 

She and the Plenipotentiary were walking side by side up the long, immensely high room toward the dais and chairs at the far end. The windows were little more than slits, as usual on this cold world; fulvous strips of sunlight fell from them diagonally to the red-paved floor, dusk and dazzle in Axt’s eyes. He looked up at the young king’s face in that somber, shifting radiance. “Who then?”
 

“I did.”
 

“When, my lord, and why?”
 

“When they had me, when they were remaking me to fit their mold and play their game. Why? So that I can’t fit their mold and play their game! Listen, Lord Axt, if they wanted me dead they’d have killed me. They want me alive, to govern, to be king. As such I am to follow the orders imprinted in my brain, gain their ends for them. I am their tool, their machine, waiting for the switch to be thrown. The only way to prevent that, is to... discard the machine.”
 

Axt was quick of understanding, that being a minimal qualification of a Mobile of the Ekumen; besides, the manners and affairs of Karhide, the stresses and seditions of that lively kingdom, were well known to him. Remote though Winter was, both in space and in the physiology of its inhabitants, from the rest of the human race, yet its dominant nation, Karhide, had proved a loyal member of the Ekumen. Axt’s reports were discussed in the central councils of the Ekumen eighty lightyears away; the equilibrium of the Whole rests in all its parts. Axt said, as they sat down in the great stiff chairs on the dais before the fire, “But they need not even throw switches, if you abdicate.”
 

“Leaving my child as heir, and a Regent of my own choice?”
 

“Perhaps,” Axt said with caution, “they chose your Regent for you.”
 

The king frowned. “I think not,” she said.
 

“Whom had you thought of naming?”
 

There was a long pause. Axt saw the muscles of Argaven’s throat working as she struggled to get a word, a name, up past a block, a harsh constriction; at last she said, in a forced, strangled whisper, “Gerer.”
 

Axt nodded, startled. Gerer had served as Regent for a year after Emran’s death and before Argaven’s accession; he knew her honesty and her utter devotion to the young king. “Gerer serves no faction!” he said.
 

Argaven shook her head. She looked exhausted. After a while she said, “Could the science of your people undo what was done to me, Lord Axt?”
 

“Possibly. In the Institute on Ollul. But if I sent for a specialist tonight, he’d get here twenty-four years from now.... You’re sure, then, that your decision to abdicate was—” But a servant, coming in a side door behind them, set a small table by the Plenipotentiary’s chair and loaded it with fruit, sliced bread-apple, a silver tankard of ale. Argaven had noticed that her guest has missed his breakfast. Though the fare on Winter, mostly vegetable and that mostly uncooked, was dull stuff to Axt’s taste, he set to gratefully; and as serious talk was unseemly over food, Argaven shifted to generalities. “Once you said, Lord Axt, that different as I am from you, and different as my people are from yours, yet we are blood kin. Was that a moral fact, or a material one?”
 

Axt smiled at the very Karhidish distinction. “Both, my lord. As far as we know, which is a tiny corner of dusty space under the rafters of the Universe, all the people we’ve run into are in fact human. But the kinship goes back a million years and more, to the Fore-Eras of Hain. The ancient Hainish settled a hundred worlds.”
 

“We call the time before my dynasty ruled Karhide ‘ancient.’ Seven hundred years ago!”
 

“So we call the Age of the Enemy ‘ancient,’ and that was less than six hundred years ago. Time stretches and shrinks; changes with the eye, with the age, with the star; does all except reverse itself—or repeat.”
 

“The dream of the Ekumen, then, is to restore that truly ancient commonalty; to regather all the peoples of all the worlds at one hearth?”
 

Axt nodded, chewing bread-apple. “To weave some harmony among them, at least. Life loves to know itself, out to its furthest limits; to embrace complexity is its delight. Our difference is our beauty. All these worlds and the various forms and ways of the minds and lives and bodies on them—together they would make a splendid harmony.”
 

“No harmony endures,” said the young king.
 

“None has ever been achieved,” said the Plenipotentiary. “The pleasure is in trying.” He drained his tankard, wiped his fingers on the woven-grass napkin.
 

“That was my pleasure as king,” said Argaven. “It is over.”
 

“Should—”
 

“It is finished. Believe me. I will keep you here, Lord Axt, until you believe me. I need your help. You are the piece the game-players forgot about! You must help me. I cannot abdicate against the will of the Council. They will refuse my abdication, force me to rule, and if I rule, I serve my enemies! If you will not help me, I will have to kill myself.” She spoke quite evenly and