Anna von Wessen (7 page)

“And you, young Lumarian,” said the steward, “must be none other than Anna von Wessen.”

“That’s very astute of you,” Anna said politely.

“Astute!” exclaimed Byron Evigan. “Not very. Ephram told me all about his Anna – one of the very strongest, and
the
very most beautiful Lumarian alive today. Of course I cannot tell from looking at you how strong you might be –” (though here he flashed a grin which demonstrated, that he doubted the assertion not at all) “– but certainly your own face is the most beautiful before me now.”

It really needn’t be said, how very livid Ari was made to look in this moment.

For the briefest second the steward paused, and a definite shadow came into his face, which had naught at all to do with the tardy lamps. “The most beautiful, indeed,” he said softly, in a voice meant more for himself than for the others, “that I have seen in nearly three centuries.”

Growing suddenly very uncomfortable, Anna attempted to quiet the steward, by pressing his hand and smiling, just as charmingly as she could manage. The gesture did its work, and Byron Evigan was hushed, with his grin changed now to one which was rather dazed – as of course Anna had meant him to be, and as she had very little trouble making him. She turned away from him, then, and hid herself behind Greyson, so that no more attention might be paid to her.

Filipovic was standing by very moodily, for the steward had not yet addressed him, and it seemed that he could not stir until such a favour had been granted him. But when Anna took herself off, and the steward was no longer distracted by the apparently much-anticipated sight of her, he looked to Filipovic and said, “Thank you, my lad. You may go now.”

Filipovic nodded with all due reverence; but the moment the steward had turned his head, his face fell again into an unpleasant frown, and he marched away rather huffily.

“I don’t expect Ephram,” Byron Evigan said to his guests, “till tomorrow evening at the earliest. Therefore make yourselves comfortable until his arrival. My servants will show you to your rooms.”

A host of servants entered, then, from a side door – all wearing those familiar silver chokers. They looked even more sickly, if it was possible, than did those in Ephram’s house. Their hair was more rudely shaven, with coarse mismatched patches springing up over their skulls, so that their heads resembled a sheaf of world maps. Even the women, here, had been shorn of their locks. An image flitted quickly through Anna’s mind, of the wounded young wolf in the ship’s hold, whose long hair had fallen down round her face as she peered through the bars of her cage. Somehow that hair had made her seem more than a human, and more than a wolf; it had given her an identity which was the source of Anna’s discomfort, and which made her flee the hold so rapidly.

All woman-servants of Castle Drelho, it seemed, whether old or young, were not granted such an indulgent luxury as the hair atop their own heads. They stumbled along beside their male comrades, looking hardly different from them. They were all so thin, with their wan skin hanging nearly off of their bones, that the male figure could scarcely be told from the female. They merely drifted, one and all, like spectres into the hall, clad in little more than dirty rags, and their faces as expressionless as the death which seemed swiftly coming for them.

~

That evening, there was a welcome feast held in the dining hall. Not a great deal of conversation took place, though Byron Evigan did try as best he could to initiate some. The meal, then, wrapped up rather quickly; and the servants cleaned up their masters’ mess, only to be met shortly thereafter with an assortment of other chores. Filipovic’s comrades arrived finally with all the baggage which had been left aboard the ship – including, of course, the twelve Narkul cages. The castle servants took most of the things up to what chambers they belonged in, but the Lumaria themselves moved the cages into an empty room. Byron Evigan had ordered it done in this manner, so that his servants would not be tempted to feed the wolves, before he had had a chance to look in on them himself, and determine that they were in fact deserving of such a treat.

For some time there was a great commotion in the entrance hall, and upon the staircase, as the servants rushed about delivering the luggage. After this had been done, they had the magnitudinous task of shifting the great cases of valuables into a locked chamber. Filipovic and several others acted as overseers of this work, in the unlikely case of sticky fingers on the hands of any of the hopeless servants.

Of all this chaos and movement, quite everything had not been said and done till past two. Anna kept to her chamber, all the while she heard the sound of thundering feet down below. But finally it subsided into a gentle thumping, and then into the faintest pitter-pat; after the latter of which, there was a spell of long-awaited silence. It was then that Anna went out into the long corridor, to attempt to find her way back to Greyson’s chamber, where she had left him some hours ago.

When he parted with them in the early evening, Byron Evigan gave the newcomers his leave to wander whither they would in the castle. Anna and Greyson, therefore – who were incurable committers of the act of roaming, even when said act had not been officially sanctioned – took to the halls like birds to the air, soaring this way and that through the immense fortress, which due to its size was nearly as open and free as the sky itself would have been, were a Lumarian capable of flight.

It was Anna’s wish to explore the forestland all around, but Greyson was too nervous to do so, on account of Byron Evigan’s warning. He told them that whole hosts of Narken were prone to stealing through it at night, in hopes of catching a Lumarian unawares. It was a generally understood rule – even if not executively mandated by the steward himself – that no inhabitants of the castle were to wander the grounds after dusk, no matter how large their party. Therefore, although Anna was far from afraid, they remained indoors.

They rambled for a long while through the place, sometimes getting lost, and then in one or two instances taking nearly half an hour to find their way back to the place where they had begun. The castle was a twisting maze, a great network of veins and arteries that stemmed from no central heart, but rather from what seemed very many of them. They decided between themselves, when they thought that they had traversed it once over; but they rather suspected that they had somehow failed to tread in some areas, while they had trodden multiple times in others.

Their attention was finally drawn from the thick darkness of the corridors, by a lamp which burnt at the other side of an open door on their right-hand. They stepped through the doorway, and found themselves standing in a grand drawing-room, lit up brightly against the blackness of the windows.

“Why is this place alight, do you think?” asked Greyson, as he began to meander round the room.

Anna looked about, and caught sight of a mop, broom and bucket which had been left in a corner of the room. “I’d wager a servant forgot to douse the lamp,” she replied.

“Ah,” said Greyson, in rather a significant voice, as if he had just come to understand something infinitely important and complex.

“There is nothing here worth seeing,” Anna said to him. “Come – let’s go on.”

“There seems nothing
anywhere
worth seeing,” returned Greyson, who was settling himself already in a winged armchair beside the dark hearth. “Let’s sit a while.”

Anna sighed in resignation. She admitted to herself that she was weary of wandering; and so took a chair across from Greyson, to face the black eyes of the windows, which stared blankly at her from across the room. She was just closing her own eyes to doze, when she heard Greyson cry out.

“What?” she demanded, looking all around in alarm.

But Greyson only sat with his mouth fallen open, and his hand pointing upwards, over the mantel. On that spot of wall, there hung a very familiar portrait.

“Well, well,” said Anna, in a somewhat sour tone of voice; “if it is not Vaya Eleria. Again.”

“Gracious me!” exclaimed Greyson, rising slowly from his seat. “I have lost one, only to gain another – and this one much larger and better!”

“It is very large,” Anna said flatly.

But Greyson seemed not to notice her perturbation. He was standing stock-still before the mantel, with his hands hanging stupidly by his sides, and his head cocked slightly to the left. “How very wonderful!” he said. “Do you know, Anna – I think this is the very room where the thing was painted!”

This time Anna made no reply. She merely looked crossly over Greyson’s shoulder, at the remarkably vast portrait of Ephram’s daughter. Everything about it was the same as Greyson’s own hidden trinket back home – but this time magnified to the power of three, with every detail accentuated, and every mark of beauty intensified.

Anna hated it.

After looking on the portrait for a few minutes, Greyson resumed his seat. But still his eyes had found no other object of admiration; and he seemed hardly even to notice that Anna was still in the room with him.

“Perhaps I should go to bed,” she suggested. “I doubt my absence would pain you overmuch.”

“Eh?” said Greyson, swivelling his head towards her. “Did you say something?”

“Why ever would you think so?”

But still he did not register her bitter sarcasm. “You know, Anna,” he said simply, “it really makes one think.”

“It surely does,” she muttered.

“This war with the wolves,” Greyson went on, with his eyes fastened once more upon the striking visage of Vaya Eleria, “is beginning to get out of hand. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t.”

“You don’t?”

“Why would I? They haven’t a chance, you know, in the end.”

“But we’ve lost so many of our own,” Greyson argued.

“I’ve not died,” rejoined Anna. “And neither have you. What more do you care about?”

Greyson sighed. “It’s very difficult to have a serious conversation with you, Anna.”

“A serious conversation? I would classify it as no more than mildly philosophical.”

“Philosophical?”

“Yes. The philosophy being: that I am stronger than any Narkul. I fear not a single one of them.”

“Not even Wolach?”

“Wolach!” scoffed Anna, tossing her head at the trifling thought of the great-grandson of King Worgach, who now ruled a single state of wolves which ranged from Denmark to Austria. It was the very largest collection of such beasts in all the world. They even flew their own flag – something of a dreadful concoction of red and orange stripes. Wolach’s own seat lay in Belgium. He had not crossed the English Channel in nearly thirty years; but it should be noted, that neither had Byron Evigan or Josev of Wisthane proposed to do the very same thing, in an equal length of time. Wolach’s father, Wilem, had traversed that same channel some seventy times, to conduct individual raids on the English Lumaria. He had died during the last of them, his seventy-first.

But Wolach was wiser. He knew much better than to invade English soil, where the very strongest and largest houses of both Lumaria and Endai resided, till he was quite sure his own forces were built up to a surplus. He knew, too, the number of Lumarian sovereigns which were allied so closely with England (in other words, the remaining members of the Night Council) as to make them definite constituents of the army against him, should a conflict arise. It seemed that Wolach considered his own pentagon of countries (which included, too, both Germany and the Netherlands) insufficient for the task. Current intelligence proclaimed that he was in the midst of negotiations to adopt the Swiss wolves into his republic, and that he was just on the brink of swaying the Czechs into the fold. The French Narkul King (who was extremely old-fashioned in his methods, and who refused to allow a single member of the Voranu past his boundaries, tainted as he considered them with Endalin blood) had warred with Wolach for a whole decade, a never-ending sparring battle, each member with the fond hope of annihilating his opponent. Wolach desired France terribly for himself; and only Trydon stood in his way.

France, a major holding for both the Narken and the Lumaria, was a fierce battleground, with Trydon and Abrast at the head of either army. Queen Ria’s Spain, and Queen Ursula’s Poland, were both relatively free of wolves; and Trydon and Wolach tried with all their might to penetrate their respective bounds, and overtake them by force. Presently, however, the situation was at a stalemate, with neither the wolves nor the Lumaria gaining headway. Most parts of Africa, Asia, Australia, South America, Canada and the Arctic – and all of Europe, West of Poland – were full of wild, independent states, with Lumarian and wolfen houses scattered to the winds, and falling any place that wind happened to take them. The worldwide collation of the Night Council was no more. The United States, as has been said, was become the central breeding ground for the Narken, with little racial prejudice to be found. The Narken, there, embraced their Voranan brothers, and took them firmly by the hand in their project of propagation.

There reigned no sovereign in the States. Instead, the infrastructure of the American wolves’ government more closely resembled that of their human neighbours – minus the President. Each state had its own legislative body of decision-makers. It was their belief that Wolach and Trydon went about the business of domination in rather the wrong fashion. If we can commend them on anything, it is that the citizens of their country can call themselves more free than any of
us.
Which of us humans, truly, is free? We call ourselves equal – but are we really? Of course we’re not.