Nobody's Son (20 page)

Val offered to stay with him, but Mark shook his head. “I need a quick pair of eyes out there,” he said. “And I’d like a voice there besides Gail’s too.”

Val didn’t take much coaxing: not to ride a whole day with the Divine Lissa. Mark had to grin, watching them trot out through the big iron gate:
You may not have eyes quick for Court, Mark, but they’re plenty keen for courting! Val’s heart is about as hard to track as hoof-prints in snow
.

As they rode away he turned back to the Pension and felt a loosening in his chest, as if the wire around his heart had slipped out another notch, and he could breathe a little easier.

The Duke’s father, Jervis, met him at the door. “She sits astraddle well enough.”

“Eh?”

“Your wife. She rides well. Not a usual accomplishment in a lady of her rank.”

Mark smiled. “I hear she’s a dead eye shot too.”

“She will find no lack of hunting by the Border, should she wish it: fowl as well as game. Are you a hunter?”

Mark shook his head. “Where I come from it’s only work, not pleasure.”

The old man nodded. “I have no time for hunting; a useless occupation unless stranded far from markets with an empty stomach. I warn you that for youth there is but little to amuse, here. Nor for age,” he added, laughing drily as he turned to go inside. “To what there is, feel welcome. Our library perhaps will please; it is of all my failing years the sole accomplishment. You should find something in it to amuse yourself.”

Mark stopped awkwardly in the passageway. “I don’t think so,” he said shortly.

“Oh.” The old man looked back at him, steel eyes narrowing. “Oh, I see. That was thoughtless of me.” He sighed, and his grim, seamed face seemed suddenly weary. “One danger of imprisonment is this: when you are your only company, it’s easy to forget that not all men are like yourself.”

“You’re not by yourself,” Mark said. “I’ve seen a village-worth of servants.”

The old man paused. “Well—servants. Servants now are something different.” He glanced sharply up at Mark. “You will learn that soon enough. For now, perhaps a walk among the trees? I have things I want to ask you, Shielder’s Mark, if you can throw a grizzled dog a scrap of time…”

“You are the man who brought our Sweetness back,” Jervis said. “For this I thank you.”

“Thank the King,” Mark grunted. “I didn’t give it up by choice. He threatened to set Sir William on me, and I figured better to be a live rat than a dead lion, as they say.”

The old man laughed, dry as cork, bitter as wormwood. “Then will I feel a bandit’s gratitude.” They paced a winding path between crabbed apple trees with rough grey bark, all in blossom. “Knotty, gnarled, cranky things,” Jervis said, laying a hand on an overhanging branch. “Like white-haired men with twisted backs. But in their autumn they bring forth a fruit, which old men seldom do, these days.” The thought seemed to mean something profound to him; he paused and glanced sharply at Mark.

“I should dearly love to see the sword,” he continued. “If Richard will not send it down, then must I crawl into the hills, and beg entrance at what was once my own damn door for the privilege of seeing it. Hah! That will make the young cock crow.”

“It’s worth seeing. And hearing,” Mark added.

The old man’s eyes sparkled. “So the legends then are true?” he asked hungrily. “The blade sings?”

Mark nodded, remembering the haunting song; a melody of loneliness, of empty places in the world, hollows in the heart. “It has a tune for every hand, I think: it sang a different song for Stargad than for me.”

“Stargad, say you! You spoke with him?”

“Well, he broke my sword and I ran,” Mark admitted. He didn’t want to tell Jervis about seeing Stargad die.

The old man nodded. “Well you chose. He was a mighty man, by all accounts. Perhaps the greatest of my long-fathers.”

“Your family has a better crop of fathers than mine,” Mark said drily.

“Our line is old. And remember this: as he who broke the ancient curse, your name will stay forever in your line. But I have done no greatness: my name will die with my last breath. God knows you will not hear it on my Richard’s tongue.” Jervis stopped to rest, leaning against the trunk of an ancient apple tree. “You know it used to bother that fool Astin that he had no sons? Hunh! But this is not a country for fathers, Duke Mark. Not any more.” He started forward again, walking more quickly. “Upon a knoll there is a bench I like to sit sometimes, when the sun comes out, and let my old bones drink the light.”

Mark followed Richard’s father to the knoll at the orchard’s edge and climbed up into the mid-morning sunshine.

“Here’s a little riddle for you, Mark, locked within a name. Our family, you know, is ancient in this land. Since before Duke Aron’s time the High Holt has been ours; our name is long. Now in my study is a book, perhaps the oldest in the kingdom, full of rules of etiquette. One chapter of this tome is given to Long Names: the rules by which the Sable must decide if Such-and-So, upon his death, shall have his name committed to the family patronymic. Imagine my surprise to see our line used as an example! But there, the name is different:
Nobody’s Gregor’s Henry’s Coll
is how they styled our patronym.” The old man looked up slyly, touching his tongue to his old grey lips. “We are
Nobody’s
sons, my Richard and I; I wonder why.”

Nobody’s son.

The words ran down Mark’s spine. How many times had he thought that about himself? Nobody’s Son.

“Oh I should love to know just who that No One was,” Jervis said, gasping as he climbed. “I wonder why our shield is plainer by far than that of any other family half so ancient as our own. There was more to it once than a single silver sword; I’d bet my life on it.

“Once sentenced to my dotage, history became my study, Shielder’s Mark. An old man does not like to think about the future. Instead I gaze into the past, and wonder how this ever came to be.” Reaching the top of the little knoll Jervis grasped the back of a wrought-iron bench and wheezed, showing grey teeth in a tight smile. “Would you like a seat?”

“God no!” Mark said. “After two days on horseback I doubt I’ll ever sit again.”

Jervis settled himself on the bench, and wrapped himself in his heavy cloak as if it were a blanket. “Old men had a job to do, back in grandfather days. Did you know that? Books tell us that in Aron’s time both sexes had a mystery. The women’s was of birth, of course: of life and the pain of life, and the joy of it. That mystery is still preserved, by our midwives and our mothers.

“But men had a mystery too, a mystery of death. It was the old man’s job to teach the young men about death… Everybody loves the spring: but fall and winter are seasons too, and they have been forgotten. They have been forgotten because we want to forget! Do you want to think about dying?” Jervis seized Mark’s wrist, his old fingers dry and hard as bones. His steel eyes were cold, cold. Mark squirmed and looked away. “Of course you don’t,” Jervis said; and he let Mark’s hand fall.

“We want to be young! We are all like my Richard. We want youth and beauty always, and the apple trees should always be in bloom; never should we have to see their branches bare… But this is not life, Shielder’s Mark. Every fall these apple trees let drop their crop of sin. The first frost kills their leaves, and then the snow flies: for a time they die and are dead.”

Mark shivered. Trapped, he stood with his right hand on the cold iron back of the bench, trying not to meet the old man’s bitter eyes. To his right he could see the track they had travelled the day before, climbing back into the hills, winding its way around outcrops of stone blotched with moss. Before Mark spread the great horse-runs that fell down to the Border River. Tiny gusts of wind ran through the tall grass like hidden animals, making it weave and shiver.

Close by, sheep grazed the hill’s flank, and cows lazily cropped, bells tanking as they swung their heads. Farther off, a herd of horses, half-wild with so much freedom, galloped swiftly north.

“And maybe there is something more,” Jervis said quietly. “A reason we old men have lost our way. After all, what should it matter if the young men do not wish to see? It should be our job to make them, to take our gift and stab them with it. But we have lost our wisdom: lost it back in Aron’s time, and can’t remember where we put it.

“The old books say—no, they demand! The ancient books demand that when a man has reached a certain time in life he put aside the playthings of this world, and this we still do. But the ancients do not say old men retreat to idleness, but to something else. We are to start upon our ‘greater work’…”

Jervis’ grey eyes slid through Mark like steel pins through an insect. “Do you have the healer’s touch, young man?”

Mark didn’t know how to answer.

Jervis sighed. “I do not. All that I touch withers; for I am barren of life, and of death too. But History requires a healer’s touch!” He grimaced in frustration. “So much past is jammed in this old head, and yet… I can make its dead bones dance, but I cannot bring it back to life!” Jervis laughed his dry, unhappy laugh. “You have been to the Ghostwood, boy: tell me if these old bones can speak to you:

“If the Ghost King was real, then Aron must have laid his armies with a spell.
So where did the magic go
? Why has there been no magic in the land since then? Could Aron be the only man in history to wield it? Absurd. Of course he was not the only one: but it seems he was the last. Fifty generations since are buried in our graveyards; in all that weary time no other man has been a proven warlock. Why even the tales our granddams tell, of ghost and spook and Devil: even magic stories all run back before the Ghost King brought the Time of Troubles down on us.

“What did Aron know that no one knows today? I am compelled to wonder: were the old men pensioned off as I have been, back in grandfather days? Or did they have a gift to give back then, a ‘greater work’: an old man’s magic brewed from contemplation, and steeped in years…”

“But even if the magic died with Aron, surely that’s no bad thing,” Mark said slowly. “Who wants to live in a world of ghosts?”

“Who wants to get wet and catch a cold? Who wants the river to rise and sweep away their family in the flood?” Jervis replied. “And yet, I think we should miss the rain, if it ceased to fall. I wonder if magic isn’t bigger than ‘Good’ or ‘Bad’, as the rain is.”

A silence ran between them, chill as the north wind that whispered through the apple blossoms and swept over the fields. “Here’s another question for you,” Jervis said some time later. “What spectre walks the High Holt walls at midnight? You are startled I have heard the tale? Well well, I was lord of that place once. Even my Richard fears me still, when he thinks of it…”

Jervis laughed again. A gust of wind rushed over the knoll, fluttering his steel grey hair, making him shiver within his cloak. “I had better get out of this damn wind. I do not know the old man’s truth; I do not wish to die.” And rising stiffly from the iron bench, he stared out across the plain, as if looking for his son. Then he turned and left that high place, heading for home.

“He was a fool, and a damn fool too, the king that first demanded every man must swear an oath to him alone.” Jervis gestured with a crust of bread, then dipped it in his gravy.

Jervis seemed to be expecting some reply, so Mark mumbled an agreement, though he hadn’t been paying much attention to the old man’s words.
Summat bitter about this manor-house
, Mark thought.
There’s emptiness in every corner. T’awd man’s half a ghost himself, haunting the place
. Half a dozen times that day Mark had looked up suddenly to find Jervis watching him from a doorway, or a window.

A servant announced that Richard’s party had been seen heading for the Pension. Mark leapt quickly to his feet, babbling something about meeting his wife. Jervis left orders for a second meal to be laid.

Together they walked out into the twilight, waiting in the courtyard before the gates. “It was better in grandfather days,” the old man continued. “All of us to swear allegiance to the King! Who can be loyal to a man he does not know?”

“Mm,” Mark said. He did not care about kings tonight: he just wanted to see Val’s friendly baffled face, and hear Gail’s laughter as she climbed into the big double bed with him.

But something was wrong.

Richard seemed in excellent spirits, jumping easily down from his bay, and Lissa was inscrutable, of course. But seeing Mark, Gail scowled and looked away. Even Valerian’s round face was troubled by a frown.

“But kings are greedy men, with little wit or foresight. In ancient days, when each swore fealty to the man above him, five men only had the king to watch for treason: five men kept close at hand. Now are we a commonwealth of traitors; and doubt must gnaw the king’s suspicious heart because he cannot keep us all in view.”

“Droning on, I see, in your usual delightful vein,” Richard said cheerfully.

“You look like a wet cat,” Mark said, smiling at Gail. “Summat wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Gail snapped, swinging herself off her horse. She tossed the reins to a stable boy and stood looking angrily at Mark.
Oh shite, here it comes
—
she’s got some words stuck in her throat she’ll spit out in a moment
.

But she only growled, “For God’s sake—take off that stupid hat,” and stalked past him into the house.

• • •

That evening was unpleasant; everyone was crabby and out of joint.
Like the wheels on a cart with bent axles
, Mark thought,
no one running true to anybody else
. Apparently Richard had put a foot wrong, making a few chance comments that had nettled Gail considerably, but when Mark asked her, she didn’t want to talk about it.

Even the next morning Gail seemed strained, Val awkward, Lissa subdued. Duke Richard alone was in excellent spirits. His witty jests and pleasing conversation carried the day as they beat the northern bounds.

And yet, when Richard swept off his hat in a final bow, turned his horse for home and left them standing on the plain, Mark’s heart felt suddenly lighter, as if an unnoticed cloud had finally drifted away, and he could feel the sun again at last.