done.”
“Sieur, I have disgraced my guild once. I only ask that I may not be made to disgrace it again.”
“Nothing you do will be known,” Vodalus said. And that satisfied me.
X
Thea
With a dozen or so others we left the glade on foot, and half a league away found a table set among the trees. I was placed at Vodalus’s left hand, and while the others ate, I feigned to and feasted my eyes on him and his lady, whom I had so often recalled as I lay on my cot among the apprentices in our tower.
When I had saved him, mentally at least I had still been a boy, and to a boy all grown men appear lofty unless they are of very low stature indeed. I saw now that Vodalus was as tall as Thecla or taller, and that Thecla’s half-sister Thea was as tall as she. Then I knew them to be truly of the exalted blood, and not armigers merely, such as Sieur Racho had been.
It was with Thea that I had first fallen in love, worshipping her because she belonged to the man I had saved. Thecla I had loved, in the beginning, because she recalled Thea. Now (as autumn dies, and winter and spring, and summer comes again, the end of the year as it is its beginning) I loved Thea once more—because she recalled Thecla.
Vodalus said, “You are an admirer of women,” and I lowered my eyes.
“I have been little in polite company, sieur. Please forgive me.”
“I share your admiration, so there is nothing to forgive. But you were not, I hope, studying that slender throat with the thought of parting it?”
“Never, sieur.”
“I am delighted to hear it.” He picked up a platter of thrushes, selected one, and put it upon my plate. It was a sign of special favor. “Still, I own I am a trifle surprised. I would have thought that a man in your profession would look on us poor human beings much as a butcher does on cattle.”
“Of that I cannot inform you, sieur. I have not been bred a butcher.”
Vodalus laughed. “A touch! I am almost sorry now that you have consented to serve me. If you had only elected to remain my prisoner, we would have had many delightful conversations while I used you—as I had intended to—to cheap for the unfortunate Barnoch’s life. As it is, you will be away by morning. Yet I think I have an errand for you that will consort well with your own inclinations.”
“If it is your errand, sieur, it must.”
“You are wasted on the scaffold.” He smiled. “We will find better work for you before long. But if you are to serve me well, you must understand something of the position of the pieces on the board, and the goal of the game we play. Call the sides white and black, and in honor of your garments’so that you shall know where your interests lie—we shall be black. No doubt you have been told that we blacks are mere bandits and traitors, but have you any notion of what it is we strive to do?”
“To checkmate the Autarch, sieur?”
“That would be well enough, but it is only a step and not our final goal. You have come from the Citadel—I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history—that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?”
“Everyone knows,” I said, “that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.”
“As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”
The Chatelaine Thea, who must have been listening to Vodalus though she had showed no sign of it, looked across him to me and said in a sweet, cooing voice, “Do you know how our world was renamed, torturer? The dawn-men went to red Verthandi, who was then named War. And because they thought that had an ungracious sound that would keep others from following them, they renamed it, calling it Present. That was a jest in their tongue, for the same word meant Now and The Gift. Or so one of our tutors once explained the matter to my sister and me, though I do not see how any language could endure such confusion.”
Vodalus