Will Power (21 page)

The royal palace came alive before dawn. Unfortunately, since we were due to meet the king today, that meant that the banging on the door at half past five in the bloody morning was supposed to be taken seriously. The journey had taken its toll and I had slept like a particularly exhausted log right until Garnet started bludgeoning my door down.

I crawled over, threw the bolt, and admitted him with a sour grunt. He was dressed in burnished armor that, even in this miserably low light, sparkled like a box of mirrors. He wore a tunic of immaculate white linen and a matching cloak. He was cradling his great horned helm in his arm and beaming like he’d just found a bag of gold in an alley. Or at least, that’s what would make me beam like an idiot. I couldn’t imagine, especially with my brain still fogged with sleep, what could make him so happy short of meeting the goblin king (if there was one) in single combat.

“Ready?” he chirped.

“Hardly,” I muttered, rubbing the sleep from my eyes and clambering irritably into a pair of trousers. “Do we have to meet him so bloody early? Couldn’t we, like, have lunch together or something?”

“No.”

“Dinner, then?”

“No,” said Garnet, still cheery and indulgent with that schoolboy exuberance that occasionally takes the place of his homicidal nobility. “That’s not the way of things here. But you’ll see. This is going to be one of the most fantastic days in your life, Will. Just wait till you see the court: the clothes, the sophistication. I could listen to them talk for hours.”

“Who?”

“The courtiers,” he laughed, like he was assuring a four-year-old about how good a piece of chocolate was going to taste. “You’ll be in your element.”

“Right,” I agreed hollowly, suspecting the chocolate was really spinach.

“Come on, Will. Are you going to put a shirt on?”

“Oh!” I exclaimed, parodying his childlike excitement. “That would be a wheeze.”

I dressed, irritably.

“You’re wearing
that?
” said Garnet, with a sour look.

“Evidently,” I said, checking to be sure. “Why?”

“Don’t you have anything . . . you know,
classier?”

“I thought we were adventurers,” I said. “These are adventurers’ clothes. Shirt and britches. Leather belt. Some bits of ring mail here and there to denote manly purpose. I thought you’d approve.”

“Weren’t you wearing them yesterday?”

“I was indeed,” I agreed. “We adventurers are hardy folk. But the britches are fairly clean and the shirt is not actually unpleasant. Yet. Maybe when the day heats up a little . . .”

“Can’t you wash them?” said Garnet, like someone’s grandmother.

“Not now, and I didn’t have time last night. If I’d known you cared so much I wouldn’t have bothered sleeping at all, then I could have spent the night running something up in pink satin and lace.”

“Well, at least wash yourself. Here.”

He tossed me a piece of soap shaped like a seashell. I sniffed at it suspiciously. It smelled of rose petals, only stronger and powerfully sweet.

“It’s wonderful,” Garnet said. “All produced locally, I hear. There’s quite a lot of soap around. They are a very clean people. They bathe daily. It’s a sign of spiritual purity. But it’s not just about being clean; it’s also about elegance. Look how intricately that has been molded,” he said, nodding at the shell-shaped soap, “and smell the fragrance!”

“Yes,” I scowled. “Very nice. And the next time I want to go round stinking like an expensive whore I’ll put it straight to use.”

“Just get a move on,” he snapped. “And brush your hair.”

And so we left, him in front, striding off and making pleasant little bows every time someone passed, me straggling after him, doing up buttons and cursing quietly to myself.

We entered a large room, flagged with black and white marble like a chessboard and arranged with padded chairs and benches. There were torches and lanterns everywhere and it was like daylight inside, except for the wreath of smoke that hung about the ceiling. It was packed with men and women in silks and satins and jewels, many seated or reclining elegantly on pieces of furniture that looked like chairs with pretensions
to couch-hood. Others were poised artistically against columns or leaning with studied nonchalance on mantelpieces. And all were engaged in hushed conversation. Occasionally there would be a ripple of laughter or a soft pattering of polite applause from restrained, gloved hands. Somewhere a wistfully plucked harp was accompanying a woman singing in a high, lilting tone about a lovelorn shepherdess.

“What the hell is this?” I breathed to Garnet.

“It’s a waiting room.”

“What are all these people doing?”

“Waiting,” he said, as if this was self-evident.

“For?”

“A summons from his lordship the king.”

“And us?” I pressed, losing patience.

“We wait, too.”

“Hold it,” I whispered, venomously. “Are you telling me that you dragged me out of bed before cockcrow so that I could stand around with this bunch of overdressed cretins for an hour?”

“More,” he said.

“What?”

“More than an hour. Probably several. But being here is half the fun.”

I gave him an oblique look. Was this a perverse brand of humor I had never glimpsed in my generally surly companion?

“I mean it,” he said, guilelessly. “Just watch and listen.”

Too exasperated to do anything else, I did.

Seated on one of the extended chairs close by were two ladies lounging elegantly in cream-colored lace and taffeta. They dripped with pearls and other forms of conspicuous opulence. One wore a necklace of the largest diamonds I had ever seen. Another pair of ladies sat beside them on velvet cushioned chairs. All four were turned to a pair of gentlemen who held court in their midst. Both were tall, lithe, and blond, one in a doublet of sea-green velvet trimmed with golden cord and matching hose, the other, an older gentleman, in royal-blue-and-silver silk. Both were immaculately groomed and wore trim beards that tapered to waxed points.

“My lord Gaspar,” said the one in green with a wry smile, “affects, I fear, a disposition toward my lady Johanna that he feels not. For as flames give off smoke, so love breathes forth the sighs of passion for all to see. It seems that though my worthy friend bewails his love for
fashion’s sake, there is no passion like to mine for my lady Beatrice. I fear his mistress’s disdain has finally quenched his fire and smothered his smoke.”

The ladies smiled among themselves and waited for the elder to reply. He did, with the smallest step forward and the most casual positioning of one hand upon his hip. “My Lord Castileo,” Gaspar intoned, smiling, “embers and smoldering leaves produce a smoke most bitter and unwholesome to the senses, yet the heat from whence it rises is but a poor and mean thing at which one might not even warm one’s hands. The heart of a furnace burns pure and hot, consuming all and leaving little there to smoke withal. So my love for Johanna, like the core of the forge, blazes with white, undying passion, while yours for Beatrice, I fear, so cool and, doused with overlong laments, smokes merely.”

“And yet,” retorted Castileo, “are my words from the heart, not crafted in forges or furnaces where men beat out their labors with the sweat of their brows. My words, like my love, are natural and proceed thoughtless from my consumed heart.”

This met with another burst of applause. I turned, befuddled, to Garnet only to have my confusion increase. He was spellbound, hanging on every word with an awestruck expression on his face.

“What the bloody hell was all that about?” I breathed. Garnet didn’t respond, so I tried another tack. “This is what they do all day?”

“Yes. Isn’t it wonderful? Hush now,” he whispered, his eyes not straying from the peacocks in front of us. “Gaspar is going to respond.”

“The anticipation is crushing me,” I muttered, walking away in search of something more closely resembling entertainment.

There wasn’t any. I circled the room twice and, save for a little dice rolling here and there, that witty little study in who loves who more seemed the rule rather than the exception. A shepherdess in silk and rubies worth about a thousand acres of grazing land bewailed her lost love (“Alack the day, my Corin’s gone away”), and a curious species of high jump contest flared up for a while. But spoken words were the order of the day: elegant, polished, and memorized. They pretended they were making them up as they went, but I know a rehearsed performance when I see one, and I was looking at about twenty. But, there being bugger-all else to do, we sat there for about four hours and listened to what the fair folk did when they weren’t slaying goblins.

Renthrette had arrived midway through this study in futility, and her appearance took my breath away. This was not simply because she
was beautiful, in a flame-colored satin gown and an extravagant diamond necklace, gold in her hair and crystal studs set into her bodice—though I suppose she was—but because I barely recognized her. She looked like one of them, blending in so well that it depressed me a little.

“Sorrail sent it,” she said simply, glancing with a kind of delighted uncertainty at her dress. “To help me fit in.”

“Quite,” I said, fitting in less and less by the minute. “Look,” I said, opting for something direct and virile to offset all this court culture, “shouldn’t we be doing something useful, like organizing a rescue of Orgos and Mithos or something?”

“Patience, Will,” said Garnet, a remark so out of character that I was still gaping at him when the liveried lackey who had just arrived started whispering to him.

“They’re ready,” said Garnet, eyes wide with delight. “The king will see us now.”

“Already?” I said. “I mean, I could listen to this I-love-you-more-than-he-does stuff all day.”

“Be quiet, Will,” said Garnet. And suddenly his eyes flashed with that dangerous impatience that I knew so well. It was, strangely enough, sort of a relief to see it. At least some things don’t change.

The lackey, a small, obsequious man in a carefully tailored suit with brass buttons and little epaulettes, led us through a series of corridors and double doors, several of which opened onto smaller versions of the room we had just left. In each, diamond-encrusted courtiers sat around swapping witty banter, reciting lousy sonnets, and singing to each other about their disdainful mistresses. Fortunately, we were moving quickly, so I only caught the odd word, but I’d already heard enough of this verbal poncing about to last me a lifetime, and each half-heard quip, each shrewdly worded jest, each ripple of polite amusement stuck me like the blade of a stiletto.

“Don’t these people have anything better to do?” I murmured after one particularly sophisticated remark about how kissing a beautiful lady was a rung on the ladder to the divine.

“The question,” said the lackey who led us, tossing the remark over his shoulder in a manner one of his masters would have been proud of, “is whether anyone could do it better than them.”

This was obviously supposed to close the matter. I thought otherwise.

“But if what they’re doing is worthless, who cares whether they are any good at it or not? It’s like being the national champion of balancing a spoon on the end of your nose. I mean, so what?”

Our little procession stuttered to a halt and the lackey turned on me with an offended look that flushed his cheeks.

“These are the elite,” he said stiffly, “and their accomplishments do not merely accompany their station, they demonstrate it and show why
they
are courtiers and others aren’t. A tradesman can buy clothes and friends, but these people are different, superior. No tradesman could enter here without being shamed. These people just know how to behave, how to dress, and how to converse in
civilized
society. It is in their
blood, and that is why they have the ear of the king and the tradesman does not.”

With a curl of the lip which neatly coincided with the word “tradesman,” the lackey turned on his heel and marched off. Garnet and Renthrette shot me the obligatory looks of hostility, amazed I could have missed something this obvious, and stalked after him. Someone in the corner began to sing about how beauty and virtue were really the same thing. I, the tradesman who didn’t belong, hurried after the others.

We had to be announced before being admitted to the king’s chambers. This, for reasons unknown, took a good ten minutes. During that time we stood at the door and tried to look reverential, something which seemed to be an effort only for me. The somber siblings, despite having spent their adult lives fighting the hand of authority, were clearly very impressed with all this ritual and glamorized hierarchy. I suspect that if the Diamond Emperor himself condescended to invite them and their rebel brethren to tea, all organized resistance would collapse overnight while they basked in the glow of his magnificence and that paradoxical “human” quality which apparently justified any semblance of tyranny.
“Such and such a lord butchered my father to get his land, but he personally sent a basket of fruit to the funeral. What a decent chap—you know, always has a smile for the locals. Sure, he lives in a castle and eats gold, but if you meet him he’s so genuine, so ordinary. What’s it to us if he wants to turn our village into one big sheep farm and send us into whoredom and beggary? I mean, I’m sure he knows best. After all, he is a lord.”