Chance (4 page)

Strip, before all those present in the great hall. But it was not so uncommon an occurrence, and Chance stolidly did as he was told. To do otherwise was unthinkable. Powers of hell only knew what his punishment would have been if he, himself, had ever scanted a bow. But looking back, with a flare of fury and anguish he wondered if little Halimeda had been there to see his humiliation. Belike not. Belike she was yet too young to eat in the great hall, or a nurse had taken her away so that she would not be frightened. Though he seemed to remember a child's crying.…

Riol had lifted the whip, a sort of rod covered with knotted leather, meant for the disciplining of hounds. With it he had commenced to scourge Chance's legs and buttocks.

This, also, was an occurrence all too common. Riol was easily angered, no matter how Roddarc tried to please him. Eyes narrowed with pain, Chance stole a glance at his foster brother's face, expecting the more inward, bittersweet pain that sustained him through these times. Roddarc would be starting to weep. In a moment, he would begin to plead with his father for Chance's sake. It would take much pleading to satisfy Riol, much begging before the flogging would be ended. But for days thereafter Roddarc would do whatever his father wished.…

The young lord's face was hard and dry.

“Bow,” Riol commanded his son.

Roddarc stood without moving, jaw set, chin raised at a stubborn angle.

“Bow!” Riol roared, and he beat Chance with such fury that blood burst from the boy's mouth and nose; he would have fallen if it were not that the lord's hard hand held him up. His eyes, blinded by pain and tears, could no longer seek Roddarc's.

“Lash all you like,” he heard the young lord coldly say. “Chance is a commoner and a bastard. He deserves whipping.”

“Aaaa!” Chance panted suddenly aloud in a new experience of pain. He could not have said which hurt him more, Riol's rage with the whip or Roddarc's betrayal. Though of course Rod could not mean it—

“Is that so?” the lord queried in a soft voice, far too soft for comfort. “Chance deserves punishment?”

“Certainly. He is a commoner, and we of the blood do with commoners what we like. Do we not?”

“Truly? You flog him, then.” Riol stilled his whip long enough to offer it to Rod. Not an offer, but a command.… Knuckling his eyes so that he could see, Chance looked at his friend. With an angry, arrogant smile, Rod was shaking his head.

“But I choose not to. And what will you do to me, my father? Turn the lash on me?”

With a wordless roar of fury Riol struck Chance across the face. Only the boy's raised hands saved his eyes from the rod.

“Go ahead. Kill him,” said Roddarc. “And who will you beat then?”

Riol spun the whipping boy around and struck him with the rod featly across his cock, bending him double with agony. His head swaying above the floor, Chance felt that his world had spun upside down. Rod, condemning him?

“Cut it off,” Roddarc said. “I don't care.”

Riol straightened Chance with a blow of his heavy fist, then struck again with the rod.

“You are a filthy tyrant,” said Roddarc with something of heat, more of disgust, and nothing, nothing at all, of heart.

Even in his agony Chance felt the lord's shock, the sudden silence, the rod hovering, stilled. “What did you say?” Riol inquired through clenched teeth.

“You heard me,” said Roddarc with a weird calm. “A filthy, bloody tyrant. All goodly folk hate you.”

Riol flung Chance to the floor and started to laugh, yell after yell of comfortless laughter. “Very truth, very truth!” he shouted amidst his laughter. “And someday you will be another.”

It was over. No thanks to Roddarc, and not because the lord was merciful, either. Merely because he was amused. Lying half drowning in his own blood, slipping away into a swoon, Chance heard the yells of laughter, the lord's tipsy shouts. “Tyrant, is it? And someday you will be one, just like me.”

Servants carried him away after the lord's back was turned, tended to him hastily and heaved him into his bed. He knew nothing until he awoke groaning in the dark of night.

“Stop your whimpering.” Roddarc's voice sounded irritably across the chamber they shared. “Let me sleep.”

“You swine,” Chance breathed. “Every part of me is on fire. Do you not care—”

“Hold your tongue,” Roddarc commanded more coldly, “or I will thrash you myself.”

From mere pride Chance kept silence. He would not have Roddarc hear him weeping.

Later he understood, in a dim way, how Roddarc had needed to free himself from the trap formed by his own noble birth and the happenstance of his loving Chance. But at the time, the pain of the flogging had seemed as nothing compared to his heartache.

He lay in his bed for days, past the time when he could have been up and about, for all parts of him were healing cleanly. No one troubled him. Let the lad sulk; there were events afoot. Lord Riol was going off to war.

The war from which he never returned, all good powers be praised. And after he was gone, Chance and Roddarc had drifted gradually back into their former, brotherly ways. No lasting harm had come to Chance from the flogging except a quietly continuing pain of spirit. For there had been no apology from Roddarc, nothing said between them of trust betrayed. No need for words, Chance had told himself. Forgive and forget. Better truth was that he was too needful to risk a quarrel with Roddarc. The young lord's regard was all he had. The young tyrant …

“I still bear the scars,” he said angrily. The old, buried dagger-blade of anger, all but forgotten, edging up in him, after all the years; why? Roddarc's ice-pale face before his eyes.

“You think it is the easier lot,” the lord said, “to stand by and let a—a brother be beaten? You will scoff, Chance, but it may have been almost—harder for me.”

Long habit is not easily broken. Chance did not quarrel.

“Yes,” he said, “there are punishments worse than blows.” How well he knew it. “And my lady knows it as well as you and I. If she fears, it is not for her body.”

“She knows full well I will never lay a finger on her to hurt her,” Roddarc said stiffly. “I did not touch her even today to wrest the story from her.” He stood up, his face stony. “But by all the powers, it will be many a long day before she sees my smile.”

Chance stood up as well, trying to pierce that locked gaze with his own. “You're no gentle lord, then,” he said. “Blows would be kinder.”

But Roddarc only gave him a black look and strode out.

He will be over it in a few days
, Chance thought, or hoped, for he had no basis for thinking so. And at the back of his mind he seemed to hear still the yelling of dead Riol's laughter.

As summer warmed into high summer he learned what Halimeda had somehow feared but he, Chance, had never admitted: that Roddarc was capable of an icy and relentless wrath day in, day out, sustaining it and feeding it as he had never been able to nurture tenderness. And even though his demands were the same as they had ever been and his rulings in the court of law not unjust, all his people felt his mood and began to mutter under it.

Every few days Chance went to see Halimeda.

At first he found it hard to find excuses. Business had never brought him much within the fortress. Later, he simply went, not caring for sly looks or whispered comments, taking blackberries, a delicate flower found beneath the Wirral shade, a drinking noggin carved and polished out of oaken whorl.

Halimeda needed none of these things, for she was a lady and had all she needed of baubles and good food, clothing and the gardens for roaming. But as her belly swelled with child, Chance sensed she needed his visits for nurture food could not give her. Though, truly, she was strong, all through the summer and early autumn, strong in body and steady in spirit, “bearing up well,” as the gossips would have it. With awesome strength, for one so slender, so young, so defenseless, Chance thought.

“Does my brother come to see you still?” she asked him when summer was hot and golden before autumn.

“From time to time, yes.”
Fleeing his own wrath
, Chance thought.

“Maybe there is still hope, then, if there is that much heart in him. I—sometimes I think he will never be a brother to me again.”

“He provides for you,” Chance said awkwardly, meaning,
love underlies the silence
. But Halimeda only pulled a face.

“Yes, he checks on me as he might on a well-bred birth in whelp, cursing me with his concern. He speaks to the servants, not to me.” She shrugged, dismissing the matter as out of her control.

“He speaks of you from time to time,” Chance added after a moment.

“None too kindly, I am sure,” said Halimeda with bitter amusement, and Chance could only keep silence.

He sometimes took issue with Roddarc for Halimeda's sake, but not too strongly, hoping to do more good if Roddarc continued to think of him as a friend. Moreover, he was afraid to speak ardently of Halimeda. Afraid of what Roddarc might see in his eyes.

By harvest time, the lady had grown as round as the fruits of the vines, a very emblem of the full lofts. Those golden days were darkened for Chance. A fear was growing in him as the babe grew in the lady, and one evening when the smell of frost hung in the air he spoke plainly to Roddarc.

“It is time for you to give over this wrath,” he said.

“Give over?” The lord glanced up, his look chill even in the warm light of the hearthfire.

“Yes. I know well enough that you love your sister, Rod. You cannot keep on this flinty shell forever. Suppose she dies in the birthing of the child?”

Chance felt his voice falter, speaking of that fear. But Roddarc's hard stare did not change. Chance plunged on.

“She is very young, very slender, it is not unlikely. How will you feel if she dies and you have not made your peace with her?”

“As I feel now,” Roddarc stated. “That it would be her own foolish fault, for dallying.”

“You cannot mean that!” Chance whispered, shocked and vehement. No use, any longer, trying to hide his vehemence.

“I do mean it,” the lord said, all too evenly. “No one made her conceive a child. It is not as if she were wed.”

“Roddarc of Wirralmark,” Chance shouted at him, “for whatever goes wrong, the blame will be on your head if you send her to childbed grieving!”

“Is it not fitting,” the lord said with icy calm, “that a sorrow child should be born amid tears?”

“Does it mean nothing to you that she is your beloved sister?” Chance was on his feet now, raging. “Lord Roddarc, you are blind, locked like a felon in a dungeon of your own digging, as bad as your father Riol at his very worst, for all that you give yourself airs of kindness!”

That stung. “Speak not to me of Riol,” Roddarc snapped, and the lash of the words brought him to his feet in his turn.

“I will speak what you need to hear! My lady Halimeda was wise not to confide in you. She knew that you can be as cruel as any tyrant who ever wielded—”

“Speak no more to me of that wench!” Roddarc thundered. “What, are you besotted with her?”

“You pledged me once to protect her!” Chance shouted back just as fiercely. “With my life I was to shield her! What, am I to desert her now for the sake of your ill humor? Is she worth less than she was before?”

“She is worth nothing!”

“She is worthy of all love,” Chance whispered. But the lord did not hear him, ranting on.

“What man of rank would have her? There is no noble in the land who will take such a sullied bride, be her dower far richer than I can afford. Once I had thought there would be perhaps a prince for her, but now—”

“I would take her in an instant,” Chance said softly, and this time Roddarc heard him.

For the space of three breaths there was utter silence. Eyes met in a complicated communication; memory was part of it, memory of a time ten years and more before, of a battlefield. Pain for Roddarc in that memory, and pain angered him.

Lord Roddarc spoke.

“How very fitting, how suitable for her. You: a commoner, a bastard, and a castrate.”

Chance stood as if frozen, unable even to breathe. When he drew breath and moved, it was to stride across his small home and fling open the door.

“Get out,” he said.

“I will go when I please.”

“It is not fitting that a lord should come so familiarly to the home of a commoner. Out!”

Roddarc shrugged and ambled out with apparent indifference.

The next time he went to see Halimeda, Chance found that he was no longer to be admitted to her presence. Nor did Roddarc come any more to his warden's lodge.

Autumn waned toward winter. Chill winds and rains tore the leaves from the trees until only a few remained, hanging in dark tatters, like rags.

The Denizens seemed not to mind the cold any more than the bare trees of Wirral did. They wore no more clothing than they had in the heat of summer, nothing more than their barklike skins.

Making his rounds of the forest one day, Chance went back to the same lightning-hollowed oak where he had first spoken with a small brown man. There he paused, feeling diffident, for he had been mocked and snubbed by the small folk often enough. He stood gathering courage until he heard a birdlike giggle within the blackened hollow.

“Little one there in the tree,” he whispered, “come out, please, and speak with me.”

A face popped into view. But as the body followed it, Chance saw that it was a female he had summoned this time. Her jutting breasts and pudenda were no less daunting than the cock of her male counterpart had been. More so, to Chance.

She saw as much, and grinned at him. Her narrow, bony face yet had a broad and sensual mouth. Chance forced himself to look not at that mouth, nor at the handspan height of the rest of her, but at her eyes, both merry and haunted, as he spoke.