I am back.
This story is a work of fiction. It contains descriptions of, and expressions of, physical affection without regard for affectional orientation. If you find this type of story offensive, or if you are underage and it is illegal for you to read it, please exit now. All characters are fictional and in no way related to any persons living or deceased. Any such similarity is purely coincidental and uncanny.
This work is copyrighted by the author and may not be reproduced in any form without the specific written consent of the author. It is assigned to the Nifty Archives under the provisions of their submission guidelines but it may not be copied or archived on any other site without the direct consent of the author.
My thanks to Dr. Grant for his prodding and encouragement.
I can be contacted at Bookwyrm6@yahoo.com
Copyright 2009 Kristopher R. Gibbons All rights reserved by the author.
Chapter 47
Menenius: Do not cry havoc, where you should but hunt with modest warrant.
Coriolanus Act III, Sc. 1
The King sat and waited, choosing not to leave the room until he saw Ddronhelim more comfortably ensconced.
As some of the royal companions watched, Karondeo strode down the steps of the dais, walked to a tubular extrusion along one of the walls and studied it. Up close, the 'accent' resembled a mound such as those made by a mole the width of two fingers burrowing in dirt. The seaman pressed his hand to a runnel of unyielding stone, then quickly jerked back cold-stung fingers. "M'Alismogh?"
"Come away,...beloved," the King bade. "Whatever is afoot is now the purview of Kul, or Anlota Oseidh."
Counter to the King's expressed desires, Karondeo stood and waited, choosing not to leave this curiosity unexamined.
"Is there ought I can do to assuage your concern?" Evendal ald'Menam's expression moulted not a feather, gave no sign of amusement or displeasure.
The mariner was beginning to dislike his King's gambler's grin.(302) "I wonder at the purpose of these...cocoons. And so ask what it is you know that makes you evoke two disparate powers in your ascription?"
M'Alismogh replied, after a fashion. "Though We did not note their every emergence, We have no doubt Our song provoked these...alterations, along with a consequence to them that We cannot yet see. Until We are informed to the contrary, We do not name these ephemera hazard."
Evendal's aberrant tone of indifference irritated Drussilikh. "And you have no concern what might harbour within these additions? Or what they might bode for a much trafficked room?"
The King leaned forward as if to reply, but then relaxed back, perversely resistant. He had said all he would to the Matron for the moment as regards the chamber.
Exuding her usual sober intensity, Drussilikh approached the dais. "Your Majesty?"
Evendal barely declined his head -- wary permission for his ally to approach -- but said naught.
Drussilikh chose to treat her liege's silence as opportunity. "Your Majesty assesses with a certainty not shared. Might Your Majesty resolve a confusion I struggle with? One well within Your Majesty's purview?"
The glowing skin about his lids tensed, but the King nodded.
The Matron paused in reflection, working her perturbation into honeyed words; being most cautious where it mattered least. "Your Majesty's authority is singular, broaching areas of congress I never thought accessible. You have adapted lyric with consequence that no one could have prepared for: Fearsome figures out of cautionary tales have erupted from the aether responding to you. You have forced truth from those whom it would ill serve. To my everlasting joy you compelled memories into phantasms and beleaguered the senses of a stonehearted dastard, rescuing my brother from a slow and ignoble death."
Feeling a strong urge to back away though seated against solid stone, Evendal spoke in a tone higher than usual, querulous even to his ears. "I mistrust effusions of gratitude, Mistress."
Karondeo rolled his eyes at the understatement, even as he made note of m'Alismogh's forbearance. He knew of no one who suffered a listing of their own accomplishments less charitably.
"They shall not season my petition, Your Majesty." Drussilikh smirked, amused at the idea of her gushing out thanks. "Prior to each spelling that I did attend, Your Majesty's semblance was that of someone innocent of his capacities but willing for whatever might result in their exercise. Yet in the rowen,(303) Your Majesty was the very mould for the phlegmatic. Your countenance bore no tincture of curiosity or surprise; you offered no uncertainty or awe or wonderment. What passion I witnessed from you, the Singer, was in this hall, when your Song subdued Kernost. Wherefore?"
Though to all appearances still engaged by his curiosity, Karondeo's re- examining of the wall nearest him was pure and poor pretence. He knew where this woman's peregrination could wander to, having been there before with m'Alismogh. He had told Evendal, when they were aboard Swan Song, that deciding whether or not to return to the Thronelands had been their only divisive argument; that had been a grand simplification on Karondeo's part.
Prior to his self-exile, whenever he felt frustrated by his father or a crewmember, Karondeo addressed them directly and forthrightly. Likewise when he felt any degree or combination of the five emotions,(304) he voiced it promptly. That any honourable life might legitimately call for the hiding of feelings or ignorance had seemed a perilous path to the brash seaman; a seaman's fellows had to know him well or someone died overestimating him.
Evendal and Alta had required he adapt.
A man of the sea, Karondeo faced mysteries daily, learning early from Alekrond's example how to let them be. The sea was a repository with the might and right to keep her wonders unmolested. But when m'Alismogh became more than an acquaintance, Karondeo had difficulty granting him the same dignity as he did the ocean. Karondeo eventually realised it was a simple habit of thought of no inherent virtue for him to ignore the mysteries he met daily, and quite a different matter to live every day as one.
In the wake of this odd epiphany, Karondeo yet allowed for change grudgingly. One old plaint of Karondeo's, old in his overuse of it the first year of their greater acquaintance, was his insistence that m'Alismogh should leave off pretending to human innocence and simply Sing the obedience and love he desired of his subject humans.
After an explosive series of short 'discussions,' and some unpleasant, dwoemer-laced confrontations between m'Alismogh and crew, Karondeo came to recognise that what he took as the prince's policy -- a pretence of possessing the same limitations and perceptions as those around him -- though indeed pretence, was not policy.
Evendal's thoughts and feelings (those that eventuated into the royal disposition Drussilikh so baulked against) were, too often, labyrinthine for Karondeo.
M'Alismogh did not know how to knot rope, and despite obvious and repeated effort on his part, never learned. He could cook but could not start a fire. He treated with everyone as with an equal or as with someone of higher station, but his anger, his hurt, and his unadmitted times of self- doubt, came out in arrogant speech and hauteur. In the face of other people's hurt or sorrow, he kept silent. When someone got angry with him, he kept silent. If asked his opinion, he gave it as if giving the definitive truth. But when someone challenged him, he kept silent. He preferred to work alone, whether it was scraping barnacles or tarring sections of the hull, and worked without comment or complaint once he knew what was expected. But he worked well, if silently and single-mindedly, with others. He would wake crew up in the darker bells of the night or morning to talk about frivolities, and not grasp the cause for their ire. He would sit for bells fascinated by the infants and toddlers aboard ship, but vehemently refused to tend them. He would eat what was given him, with comment but without protest, whether his body could suffer it or not. Unless given direct permission, m'Alismogh could not bear sitting in comfort were anyone in the same space standing.
Except in matters that Karondeo later learned touched on some intimate fear or worry, m'Alismogh's habit was to defer to others, more particularly to Karondeo. After three separate melees against aggressive Altan families, a wounded m'Alismogh tended crew and ship until he collapsed. The reason he gave for not desisting was that they claimed Karondeo's love and were, therefore, m'Alismogh's primary responsibility. This was how m'Alismogh behaved at first: give every gust of his life's breath for those he saw as in his care, but not hobnob with them or admit his care for them.
With his crew alternating between complaining and divulging, Karondeo began to perceive some of what m'Alismogh was afraid to admit and some of what the prince did not even know he was ignorant of. In turn, Karondeo struggled quietly to permit Evendal his private uncertainties and public eccentricities. The mariner also struggled with a great impotent fury toward the late Menam of Osedys.
Karondeo used to joke that he was amazed m'Alismogh knew how to greet someone properly, so ignorant was he of social protocol beneath his royal estate; and even the crew knew the mariner was both jesting and in earnest.
Evendal heard the Matron's talk as so much babble. Had the guild- mistress not been in this very room during the first Council of his reign? Had she not been a passenger on the same ship he had sailed on today? She had witnessed his rage and grief and fear. Amply. "Perhaps I,...We, do not ken the question."
The Matron prepared to cast again. "Your Majesty. Do your songs throw you into an ecstasy? Do they impose this...dispassion upon you?"
Evendal's wits turned dull with the reiteration; his mind, commonly steady and quick, for the moment ran short.(305) "An ecstasy?" he asked. The phrase stood out. "I don't know that any genius but Grief has ever unmanned me, Mistress."
Drussilikh briefly frowned at what she saw as a poor attempt to foil her. "Such dissembling does not guide me to what I seek, Your Majesty. Except to suggest that you ever bear a free heart. And that in turn tells me your silence and stolid mien are deliberate. But are they genuine nonetheless?"
Sygkorrin turned from testing Ddronhelim to stare in surprise at the Kohermarthen. Gwl-lethry likewise bent Drussilikh's way, his head bowed to hide his sudden concern for her. The Majesty of Osedys, however green, was not someone a guild-mistress took to task.
Urhlysha gave every appearance of dozing outright in Innocents' Row, but his utter stillness betrayed him.
Aldul, from the more oligarchic South, did not recognise what could qualify as effrontery toward a monarch absolute. He alone sat in genuine ease, eyes slitted, seemingly content to muse by the restored fire.
The humming of blood in Evendal's ears spoke of a passion such as the guildmistress might want evidence for, but he did not delineate it. Fear? Fury? Sorrow? Whatever the emotion or admixture, it commanded more of Evendal than his public goodwill did and roused his obduracy. The Matron's repeated querying was drawing a blank.(306) What did she truly need of him? "We have no other answer We can give. We would advise you to confer with Her Eminence, Matron, or Master Aldul."
Oblivious to her lord's perturbation, Drussilikh gave no thought to relenting. "Even an assay at clarity from you would help to reassure me, Your Majesty."
Reassure her? He had just executed the royal who had tried to raise and overshadow him, adjudicated between self-involved landowners, and barely managed to not kill one of his own who had come to him in need. Surely this pedestrian concern could wait. "Why are the seasons of Our countenance so vital to your own, good Matron? Can we not defer this complexity?"
But the Matron had suffered five years under a prevaricator extraordinaire; the urge to pursue, engendered in her by Polgern's plots, lingered. "What complexity? I do not know how to make the mountain rivulet of my humble importunity any clearer. Will you not speak to the point, and allay my worry?"
Urhlysha lost the struggle to keep his lips from pursing in a smirk of admiration -- and gloating -- over the brass his office's traditional gadfly was displaying. The aged magistrate remained immobile, with eyes shut; prepared to maintain his somnolent fiction against any chance that the King might involve him in this converse. The magistrate could ill afford even rumour implicating him in a guild-mistress's shaming. The notorious ill will between the guilds and the mediators of the King's Law needed no excuses, flaring into conflict sempiternally.
The King looked to Kri-estaul, but his son was talking sotto voce with Ierwbae.
Danlienn, with Lialityne, intently counted sheaves and examined nubs.
Karondeo alone, ravenous of mien, had taken to staring at the Throne but Evendal felt diffident about engaging him.
For all his occasional egalitarian behaviours, Evendal did not notice the shock or loyal dismay on the faces of Lin-kaelug, Par-shetope or Ierwbae.
With no other entreaties or supplicants to interrupt them, or intercede for him, the King yet hoped to check the Matron's spurious enquiry. He enlarged on an implication from the woman's diatribe so that she would believe him mindfully attentive, rather than dull-witted from weariness and hurt. "When have I ever been silent or...indifferent?"
Herself alert, the Matron of the Scriveners had noted her King's meandering eye. To watch her liege scrounge so blatantly for a distraction offended. Sorely. His Majesty's inexplicable evasions served only to frustrate her, so Drussilikh abandoned any further attempts at delicacy. His Majesty's last bit of pabulum did not warrant acknowledgement. "Each time after you sing, your face and speech admit no affect, as if you have already anticipated all ensuing consequences. Have you? Do you?"
Foundering in the thickets of honesty, Evendal stubbornly refused the Matron's drag hunt.(307)
"I, We, do not follow."
It was a denial, the setting of a boundary, not a request for clarity. The words spoke themselves, and Evendal knew they could be misapprehended but let them stand.
For Drussilikh the King's sentence had no freight. She kept a calm and steady gaze assuming, blithely, that she possessed the King's ear and with it the royal forbearance.(308) "Is your manner before each glamour your true face? Or do you ken well beforehand not only the lyric to sing but how each song will provide? Was your labour with Lialityne this past bell nothing but a dumb show?"
It seemed Gwl-lethry was not half as ready as the Matron in the use of hyperbole.
Evendal did not know what to say, whether to be gracious. A 'friend of the King' was now asking, indirectly, if he knew what would come to pass. His own future. Her's. Did she think him a liar after some fashion? Did she truly think he would have allowed Kri-estaul on the dais during that first Court had he any hint of Kernost's treason?
No. Most likely, Drussilikh had no thought of what the answer to her question might suggest.
No. They had been of one mind in the immediate aftermath of Kernost's knifing. She had grieved with him at his most vulnerable. Surely she remembered that. How his 'Songmastery' -- lacking rhyme, rhythm or scan in the midst of his fury and pain -- had worked against Kernost. He thought the latest effort over Darhelmir had demonstrated clearly enough for any witness that his heart must be engaged, that he must know some passion, or his song- spells would provide nothing but expelled wind. Had no one else gleaned that?
To Evendal's gratification, Aldul, Sygkorrin, Ierwbae and Karondeo were now eyeing the noverint.(309) What had drawn their attentions, Evendal did not know, but they had, for the moment, quit pretending at other occupation. Ierwbae indeed looked the most troubled.
The King sensed an undertone of anxiety from his companions that actually eased his own. Looking on Drussilikh stirred a bundle of impulses and, over them all, an anger that came to buoy him.
"I, We, do not follow. We have offered you Our honest recommendation, Matron. We advised you to speak with Her Eminence, or Master Aldul, if your own memory is failing you so. And We shall say no more to you on the subject."
Evendal maintained sense enough to know embarrassment for both Drussilikh's treatment of him and his of her. The Mistress of Scriveners would see his refusal to confide or enlighten as a poor return for the gift of a son and heir wrenched from her newly-softened heart. But the prospect of engaging this oak-skulled woman to no good purpose niggled, added to the spark of anger she had ignited in him.
The darkly amusing aspect -- in this contest that the Matron pressed on him -- was that his advice to her was pertinent. Were Drussilikh to counsel with Sygkorrin, or with Aldul who knew him best, she might nose out the clarity she claimed to want. But he himself refused to help her gain those ends toward which her insecurities sent her hopping.
That 'scribe within' that Anlota had once alluded to struck Evendal with foreboding and dread, warned him against cosseting Drussilikh on this. He would find himself striving to justify a personal ritual, one that had fashioned itself out of his need to face down that faceless enormity -- his Song-mastery. Such behaviours justified themselves in a person's life or dissolved, forgotten. What Drussilikh wanted flushed from its covert was m'Alismogh's halidom for coping in times when his fear of his Songmastery was equal to his need for it. It wanted no interpreter to fathom the Matron's motives, but Evendal refused to think on those.
The multiplicity of tasks that this day had hoisted on him was staggering. And he had wards and nobles still to settle.(310) Evendal m'Alismogh felt excessively tired; too slug-like to really worry over his stranger privileges as Drussilikh demanded he do.
Instead, Evendal considered the company he surrounded himself with.
Ierwbae and Kri-estaul aside, expectations had been met. Dan-lienn, his royal brother willing, would continue to quietly prosper here; likewise Sygkorrin, with the Temple now free from praetorial threat. Urhlysha could contentedly adjudicate within his domain, once Evendal winnowed the magisterium. Bruddbana would soon be an absurdly happy and demonstrative father, Haemon was engrossed in labour that completed him, and the twins would rediscover life's joy soon enough. The Dowager need fear no man now and Aldul...Evendal could not think what satisfaction the Kwo-edan gathered from living in a realm that became a wintery torture-chamber, but Aldul seemed to find some nonetheless.
One worry stilled Evendal's brief impulse to burrow into an illusion of bonhomie and complicity with the few around him: Would these recipients of his trust and magnanimity follow Drussilikh's example and 'suddenly' cry havoc over some aspect of their fey King's constitution? Did they already question his fitness?
For Menam's heir the concern was cogent and history-freighted.
His father had ruled, regularly beset by merchants and guildmasters tearing at his sovereignty. Or so Evendal remembered matters. The compagnies and guilds of the city plagued Menam over tariffs and market-tolls; taxes and fees agreed upon six reigns past that the merchants yet brought before each ruler since, in vain hope of a different decision. As kings before him had done, Menam oversaw the dissemination of the liberties particular to the portus and vicus(311) with a miser's eye and hand.
The mercatus countered -- as they always had -- with hoary broadsides and block-book pamphlets printed anonymously and distributed generously. Efforts meant to incite, not convince. Pressed on cheap rag were almost perennial phrases full of injured merit against the despotism of an un-named regnant king: Attacks on the royal's suitability. That he wasted the thesaurus on unspecified frivolities. That he had refused his assent to laws, ones 'wholesome and necessary for the public good.' That he had forbidden the Council to pass laws of evident importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, had utterly neglected them. The plaints did not fit any situation then current. The language in most of the works was genuinely archaic.
A few sturdier pamphlets, however, deviated from the traditional republican plaints with more contemporary fare, boldly naming the objects of their despite: mock-poetic attacks on King Menam's virility, specifically the paternity of his heir. And complaints that, by his marriage, he colluded to annex Osedys to Arkedda.
Unlike the verbal arrows more accurately released by his despising bride, the anonymous barbs against Menam's manhood tore at the King's sang- froid. Evendal never learned the wherefore. And when Menam got mood-wracked, unmanned by a melancholy, he would sit comfortless in the unlit Council Chamber, brooding and drinking. These solitary considerations occurred once or twice a year and lasted three to six days. The Prince either heeded their warning signs and found occupation outside the Palace or found himself volunteered to act as his father's shadow; as silent as his father, seeming empathetic, and never more than arm's length away.
Menam stayed morose during the ascendancy of these humours, pitiless with intruders and uncaring toward his own person. Even so, a few courtiers would choose those times to all but trespass the Circle of Presence in order to accost the King over foolishness. It was as if they wanted to make sure the King saw them and marked them his friends -- which he never did(312) -- or they enjoyed the spectacle of the King in his wretchedness. Their obsequium grated, their battening condescension soured Evendal's stomach, especially as he suspected that the same courtiers were in some way responsible for those catalytic leaflets.
Only in the last two years of his father's life did Evendal's awareness maintain anything like an adult's maturity; feel something beyond self- absorption. Evendal did not understand the source of his father's turmoil at all, but during the forced sittings with Menam in the last seasons before Mausna, he came to respect his father's pain. Seeing misery so whelm this violent, self-serving aenigma frustrated Evendal, kept him from the easy luxury of hating his sire. Sitting in dimness, with no book at hand or person to converse with, Evendal had many bells to study the father he yet judged as backward and limited. In the enforced silence, with no one to chastise him for a contrary thought of his own, he had privately acknowledged an old, child's misjudgement: His father was not, solely, a windbag of fury and dissatisfaction.
Menam sat overtaken but fully aware of what motivated those courtiers who visited him like parvenus ogling the vagaries of the Palace. To Evendal's adolescent heart, the Court his father guided and presided over seemed nothing but a skulk of foxes. While he recalled the flush of shame he felt -- that these shade-traders(313) would play his father so -- what Evendal did not recognise was how those evenings playing Menam's barnacle sowed a fierce if inconsistent sensitivity in him towards the royal dignity.
Regardless of its origin, Evendal's anxiety abided, ever ready to beget others and pile them one atop another:
How quickly would the uncertainties of his companions speed to the predatory?
If he professed the extent of his mystification and ignorance, how could they not think him a dangerous fool?
How soon before fear of him and rage at him replaced trust and honour?
Four times Drussilikh had prettily asked a question of him and he had not granted her an answer. The motive for his silence would not matter; word of it would outrun the wind to every ear in her manour and craft. The urge to dissemble was strong, though his heart baulked at lying openly merely for the Matron's comfort.
Evendal had worked to keep himself honest when dealing with people. He chose to offer intrinsic rewards to others rather than titles and honours -- because the intangibles mattered more to him. He refused to lie outright to those he spoke with, and left no one uncertain of their standing with him.
But 'memory grows short with food in the belly,' or once needs are met.
Different worries chased each other's tails with escalating fervour, each one more sad. When the confusion became all that his mind reverberated with, like the spoor of too many animals crossing his line, Evendal closed his eyes and pretended to deafness. The gesture helped him -- however briefly -- to subsume the pricking demands and uncertainties he felt surrounding him. One sharp surprise of perception and he swallowed the petty worries of rule in the trust he knew others had in him.
Savouring the bronze dimness behind his eyelids, he forced three slow breaths. And nearly escaped into a doze.
With one exception, the King's companions had returned to their poses of interrupted pre-occupation. Blatantly watchful since Drussilikh first accused Evendal of dissembling, Karondeo had waited to see what his beloved might do or refuse to do; what -- if anything -- the young ruler had retained of their purportedly forgotten past, apropos of Drussilikh's demands and escalation. He did not doubt m'Alismogh. And he had been a seaman long enough to witness wound-caused amnesia in others, and long enough to see memory re-emerge in unanticipated ways. The sanguine Nikraan happily acknowledged that m'Alismogh's annoying patience toward people had survived to the present.
For the Matron, her King's arbitrary decision goaded her into contumacy. The King would answer her, and straightly! "Then what can we expect from Your Majesty? Shall each of us find ourselves encompassed in stone or ice before this day is passed?" Her assayal rang out, the Chamber was still good acoustically, but it also rang out defensive, shrewish.
The urge to submit, to obey, to respond to her want was insidious. It spoke to him as a radical impulse, 'second nature,' the thing that was most right, for him, to do. Almost, Evendal spoke to assuage her alarm. Almost. But the lie stung in the royal mouth and died aborning. He kept his lips clamped and his teeth clenched; the second easiest path for him to take. As well, it was becoming more difficult to ignore his own distress and the insult in Drussilikh's voice and in her repeated challenges. He had worried at the Matron and her contentment too exclusively, only peripherally aware of another teeth-clenched personage in his boon companion.
Softly, ever so softly, a wry bit of jocundity employing Karondeo's voice touched the royal ears.
"M'Alismogh. Do not suffer this feral rabbit further."
Startled, Evendal glanced around again. His company had paused from their varied occupations, but not to look Karondeo's way. All eyes had fixed on the Scrivener Matron. Even Urhlysha had stirred, sitting up and shaking his head at the woman. It seemed that no one else had heard what Evendal m'Alismogh had.
After a moment equivocating he dared a question of his own, "What was your last speech, Kar...K-Karondeo?" No titles, endearments, or genteel descriptives.
Drussilikh, thinking herself ignored or dismissed, blushed with anger.
Eyes cast down, Evendal idly noted how, while his left hand posed steady just above the throne armrest, his right hand shook and swayed as in an ague. He lowered the betraying hand onto the armrest and gripped the stone hard. It helped. The solid feel of chill Kul-stone provided comfort.
Alekrond's son answered in a gentle timbre. "What I said...loud enough so that any might hear who would...was 'what is it you know that you blithely consign this stonework to Kul and your midwife?' Or something very like. Other goads followed, not even murmured, meant for private solace." He pointedly did not remark whose comfort his private words were for. The look Karondeo gave bespoke a complicity; he knew the reasons for the King's apparent non sequitur and was willing to keep their counsel inviolate.
Karondeo's response momentarily melted the wax of Evendal's façade. The fountains of his eyes threatened to flood and he strove to keep his once- loved in sight despite their blur and ache. Against his will he blinked, only to find Karondeo on the dais and kneeling before him. The young Counsellor gently enveloped the frozen royal hands with his own, cupped, as one offering aid and solace. The touch of palm to palm brought a measure of calm to the King.
Par-shetope moved to intervene, but Ierwbae waved at him to forebear.
"I do not ken...what I am about...at all!" m'Alismogh huffed. "I am not as anyone I know. Such a confusion, 'Deo! So much of me says I am here to aid, to heal myself and my people! As well I know an errant compulsion...to act the harem-bitch.(314) I want her happy, but I will not act the minor child pacifying the mother! I will not! What am I about?"
"Shhh," Karondeo sounded. "Do not fash about it so. Few enough deign to ask such questions, or to interrogate their whims. You have five limbs and a skull, like nearly every man I have heard of." The jest passed unremarked. "As for the moles and blights that trouble you, track them to the earth of those years you cannot remember. Whether handily or desperately, you yet command yourself. Quite a feat for anyone."
"I do not know you," Evendal began baldly, wretched. "Your face disturbs me as one I might have seen and remarked out of a sea of faces. Vaguely, annoyingly familiar. But no more than that." He hoped, by this confession, to discourage false expectations in the man. At the same time he wondered, and thought he knew, what a fierce, hungry embrace would feel like from those sun-seared arms.
The air around Evendal's face grew warmer as the image tarried.
The bloom to Evendal's cheeks elicited a sweet grin and defiance from the dark seaman. "You know me," he refuted. "And I hope I continue to perturb you for as long as you hold thought or heart."
"You can speak to me? Without employing breath?" Evendal had netted people's foremost thoughts or intentions before, so 'hearing' Karondeo's was no surprise. This was, however, the first time he felt safe mentioning the occasions to another.
Karondeo's grin revived, but as he spoke, his slow and earnest speech declined into the lower register. "Rather, I learned how well you hear me -- no matter how softly I speak. M'Alismogh. And I learned to rely on you doing so. Sister to your son or no, this woman is testing you to no purpose. Be rid of her for the day."
Tired and tempted, Evendal yet chuckled at the idea. "She cannot know me as you do. And so I suffer her, indulge her maybe."
Turned away from the King, Karondeo's grin lost all mirth; a lupine stretching of the lips that greatly troubled Drussilikh. "Give over her shell and crown, Your Majesty, this lapwing hatched long ago. Or if you must, lend me an attent ear and I will ease a few of...her...recurrent fears with the succour of my vast experience and many years."
The mariner dragged his gaze briefly toward the Matron, and then waited on Evendal's nod. Throughout the interview, Karondeo's unwavering attitude in relation to the Throne preserved the fiction that he addressed only the King. But for the Master Scrivener the night-black pools of Karondeo's scorn flowed over her so ferociously that Drussilikh felt she countered a current just by standing in place.
The derision Drussilikh sensed was her own construct. The dozen people currently mortised about the Throne hummed as gnats in Karondeo's reckoning. Like an infant in the presence of his mother, Karondeo found he could not fix his attention for long on any figure other than m'Alismogh. Gazing upon Evendal brought a pain to his chest. His beloved filled his awareness so that looking away, very much aware of his truant lover's proximity, also made his chest hurt. The only difference in the two conditions seemed to be the sweetness of the ache. The pathetically typical tenor to his feelings did not weaken their veridicality.
The force of Karondeo's regard translated into an earnest, unvarnished manner that made it impossible for Evendal to ignore or deny the certainty in the man's speech. "My honoured lord is not moonstruck. Your Majesty is not some daemon or genius miming Hramal."
Kri-estaul started on hearing, from this huge and suddenly intent man, a terrible fear he harboured about himself.
"I never knew for how long you were cleped 'm'Alismogh,' but there was no day -- since we first shared drink in Alta -- that you imposed on us any pretence as to your accidents or essence."
The Matron tried to rebuff. "His Majesty does not admit to such outright, but his manner..."
Unheeding, Karondeo continued over the interruption, summoning the assent of Urhlysha, Ierwbae, Parshetope and Aldul with a glance. "The Matron is mistaken. We who love Your Majesty find no cause for doubt, before or after any coda. What your heart distils fuels the lamps of your face, whether you are singing or mute. Whoever rests their eyes on you or peers beyond their own need, may readily see this. That stillness you try to assume fools only the single-minded, such as the Matron."
The Scrivener bristled.
"Such a trait does not diminish your authority, or the respect due Your Majesty," Karondeo both assured and warned. His lip twisted upward on one side in a deprecating grin. "It but distinguishes the portraiture of a true king."
Drussilikh took umbrage. "Does Karondeo lin'Alekrond impugn my loyalty?" The courtier's use of the patronymic was meant to put the mongrel Nikraan in her sense of his place.
Karondeo shook his head, the smirk again discernible at the corner of his lip. "I'll not impugn what I have not seen. I defy the Matron to demonstrate wisdom and perception. She has evinced her lack of trust in Your Majesty four times this bell. As for her honour..." He released his grip on the King and motioned as if shoving some irrelevancy aside. "I wonder what did she hope for from this graceless interrogation?"
It took Drussilikh an extended moment of her own hard breaths to find sufficient equanimity to give answer. "I would know which face is my liege's. An innocent as to Your dwoemer's limits? Or invulnerable and fey. A stranger."
Spoken thus, without even the most commonplace floriation, the words indicted. But Drussilikh, autocratic in temper and confirmed in it by her premature ascension to Scrivener governance, did not recognise any presumption in her words. She stood in the hectic poise of the honest, all impatience to be quit of the buzzing fly that was Karondeo so she might return to her query.
Having forged herself into the Scriveners' shield against blatant attacks from the duumvirate, the Matron dared admit no errors or retreats, and disdained any subtleties pointed out to her as feints or fruitless diversions -- evils best ignored, not countered. Drussilikh, by dint of her natural disposition as well as six years' rough survival in an usurper's court, could not long see a person of puissance and authority as aught but an adversary; even were they presented to her on a platter with 'friend' on the nameplate atop.
Drussilikh's wounds became suddenly plain to the Maritime Counsellor's heir, along with the reason for his beloved's care.
M'Alismogh, Karondeo thought ruefully, was wrong to be patient with this noblewoman. The Matron knew sigils, runes, fonts and inks, and probably loved the epic cycles for their clearly defined good and evil. No doubt she learned to rule her guild by miming the ruthless nobles of those songs. But Drussilikh would need to be weaned from her habitude, not simply indulged hence. It might be that she loved Evendal but, without correction, 'the King' would repeatedly evoke twinges of distrust in a woman who constantly needed to demonstrate her primacy over guild-members.
With no justice to be found in provoking Drussilikh, Karondeo calmed, and spoke to her pursuit. "Does Drussilikh inflict the face of the Matron, that ilip-huloee(315) of iron and oak, on her brother? No, for him her façade is all oatmeal, hugs and whispers; an ilip-huloee of a different hue. Neither bloom is like the other, yet they both stem from her. So it is with every man, including kings. You must be weary, Mistress, hewing at what is best not divided."
"I do not understand." Drussilikh protested, her voice finally honest with frustration.
Karondeo turned blunt, eschewing protocol in his own frustration. "Speak with Sygkorrin, as our ruler suggested. The King is not a simple man, yet you demand of him a simple resolve. And you have no privilege to the answer you seek." His lips no longer displayed any hint of mirth.
"But I would have it, and quiet my doubts."
"My apologies, Your Majesty," Sygkorrin had had her fill of this hunt. "Matron, did you interrogate your peers and fellow witnesses before assaulting Osedys?"
"Voice fears about the Saviour of the Os-te? To people eager for my office? And what would I ask them?"
The Priestess shook her head in dismay. Karondeo, Ierwbae and now Sygkorrin made it clear to Evendal that Drussilikh's provocation was not only personally objectionable, but unacceptable to others.
Her Eminence did not feel particularly genteel. "Berating and brow- beating your puissant sovereign is a signal of stupidity, not strength. Asking Master Aldul did the King seem distract is a safe enough path. But what you might have learnt would have humbled you."
"Why would I question one who saw the same sights as I?"
Sygkorrin scowled. "You are acting obtuse deliberately." The Priestess raised a hand suddenly aflame and shook a blazing finger at the Matron. "You try my patience, child."
Drussilikh swallowed hard.
Sygkorrin stood with a groan and strode to the edge of the dais. "What do you see, Kohermarthen's-daughter, that has you so wan?"
The King's brow creased in puzzlement.
"Your hand. It burns."
"I feel no fire. My hands look as they always have. To me. They feel hale and as strong as my age allows them to. To me." Sygkorrin glanced at the silent assemblage. "What does the Majesty of the Thronelands see? Or His Royal Highness? Or Shipmaster Karondeo?"
Evendal cleared his throat before attempting to speak again. "I see your hands, Priestess. One hand adorned as always with the signet of your offices, the other bare but for an armlet."
When, after a pause Kri-estaul had not responded, Sygkorrin prodded. "Your Highness? How do my hands appear to you?"
Kri-estaul glanced at his father. When Evendal nodded his encouragement, the child struggled a bit to give a clear answer. "As...cuffed in shadows. Your Eminence. Is that how to say it, Papa? I see their outlines only. Is everyone upset with Drussie again? Why?"
The King lifted his index finger to his lip, and Kri-estaul subsided.
Karondeo stared the Priestess in the eye while he spoke. "How Her Eminence wishes me to see her hands is how I see them." The mariner's eyes strayed back to the King.
Sygkorrin blinked at the simple humour and smiled. The hieratic's smile was not in evidence when her gaze returned to Drussilikh.
"Do you understand yet, fool of a child? No one. No one sees, hears, remembers, the same as you. Each person here can tell you somewhat of our King that you do not know. And assuage any genuine worries. For His Royal Highness, my hand is shrouded in mystery, and the ignorance he feels keenly. For you, my hand is aflame with your fury and worries."
Softly, Drussilikh protested, "I but sought out Your Majesty in order that I might quiet those fears..."
"In this instance," Karondeo reproved gruffly, "your doubts are for you to wrestle with. And among your peers, not before your King. His Majesty is not subject to you, except in the manner His Majesty is accountable to us all."
Having satisfied Kri-estaul as to Metthendoenn's condition, only to be alarmed by the Matron's burgeoning audacity, Ierwbae had bent his ear to the argument. Hearing comforts and truths pour out from a man made citizen by deceit(316) surprised the Guard. When Sygkorrin asked her riddle, Ierwbae looked and saw movement on her arm. To the Guard's distraction, a snake lifted its head from the Priestess's wrist and gazed toward Ierwbae. The Guard thought nothing of this as the High Priestess was known for her eccentricities, and a serpent was an image of wisdom.
The impassive regard of the serpent, which Ierwbae continued to see, emboldened him to speak up. "The Majesty of m'Os-te rests like a set of scales, assuring equity and justice. Is my speech fair?" The Guard gazed upon no one in particular and so caught Karondeo's brief grin, approval for his defying of protocol.
Drussilikh, further annoyed, nodded sharply. "You know it is, as does all Kelotta."
Unabashed, Karondeo continued with the simile. "But what happens to a set of scales resting atop a set of scales? Shall we anticipate balance then?"
Feeling tutored, the guild-mistress growled, "No."
"Anything of reliability or clarity?"
"No."
Again, Ierwbae spoke up; part of the hedge surrounding His Roseate Majesty so newly returned. "Yet you ask He who is the incarnate ambition of our kingdom to pronounce judgement upon himself. You ask that he scan his reflection and tell you what he sees." As the King's main, whom His Majesty may either lean on or deputise, Ierwbae had only so much license in argument with non-belligerent members of the guilds.
As a quasi-citizen, and with more liberties than most, Karondeo did not ken or share Ierwbae's limitations, and so was free to finish what the Guard dared not.
"No. You demand it. To satisfy a whim of your distrust. Her Eminence spoke true. Had you but asked directly of us your fellows, we could have told you. But approach His Majesty -- whose genius fathoms motives -- to parse his numen's motives and you foment confusion. He will see...a slough of uncertainty; multitudinous empty 'I could haves' for every decision he makes. And you will subject him to a new inquisition with every worry that swims through your head and out of your mouth."
Evendal interrupted. "It is clear nothing more will get done until we end this mad hunt properly. Something more is engaged in Matron Drussilikh's persistence," he began.
The seaman bit back an expletive. "No doubt. Yet just as I, though your beloved, do not need notification of every lustful pang that might sail through your day, so Your Majesty's subjects do not need an itinerarium for your heart and mind."
Evendal m'Alismogh essayed a laugh; a cluster of forced hiccoughs by which he tried to sluice away the whelming hurt of betrayal. He had first heard the Matron's discontent in her questioning his decision to let the Chamber manifest as it chose. The senses and wit that had dulled in order to deny Drussilikh's unadmitted purposes, and to delay Drussilikh's end, now dulled in anger and pain with that end so near.
Everyone in the room looked to the Throne in surprise. Urhlysha sat up, and Kri-estaul rolled closer to his Papa. The Priestess turned completely about, and watched for a clearer hint as to her King's disposition. Karondeo again knelt and gripped his King's hands, awaiting clarification or command.
The King took a deep breath to steady his nerves; he had heard enough, endured enough.
"I agree." The eyes of the King pinned their glow on the orphaned daughter of a heroic woman. "But you dance around what's foremost in 'Drussie's' purposes. The Matron wishes to find cause so that she might separate herself from Us."
Stunned, Ierwbae asked, "Wherefore?" To his added amazement, the Guard saw Sygkorrin nod in comprehension.
Evendal shrugged, his gaze fixed on the owl-eyed courtier. "Her brother is found, her guild cleansed and its building restored. By Our grant is her livelihood assured. What more does she need Us for? We trouble her. From our first meeting We troubled her. She does not want Us a friend to her, only a friend to her guild."
(302) ~Oxymoronic descriptor. A gambler doesn't dare grin while gambling. The Hramal equivalent of the phrase 'a poker face'. (303) the aftermath; see http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aftermath #1 (304) Happiness, Sadness, Fear, Anger, Awe. (305) A hunted hare, tired from the chase, is said to 'run short' when it increasingly twists and turns in an effort to escape. http://nwhsa.redblackandgreen.net/hunting_terms.htm (306) To search a hedge or thicket without finding your prey. (307) A hunt where an artificial scent is laid and followed. ~In Arkedda & the Thronelands, a pastime of foppish, bored courtiers. With no live quarry, and so no element of surprise, most hunters consider drag hunts an insult to the sport. (308) Likely because of the conversation from Ch. 14. Beginning with Evendal's query, "Would it help if We documented your status as sole embassy for the Scriveners to the Throne?" (309) The term "Noverint "was applied to lawyers & clerks because in Elizabeth's time most legal documents were in Latin, and began "Noverint universi per presentes." "know all men by these presents that..." (310) Shontrekh, Kieralametth & Eletthrha of Siara'keb, Ierowen. (311) The Necessity For Ruins; J. B. Jackson; Univ. Mass. Press, 1980; pg.56-59. ~In Osedys the two words meant different elements of the mercantile 'realm'. In the vicus, the king upheld the regula appropriate to citizens and bughers, the localized market occasions, The portus signified the chaos of the harbour, the regula for visitors, the law for both the visiting merchant ships & the native; itinerant merchant-citizens with storage and headquarters near the water. And there were the rules for fairs and market-time, when both elements involved themselves. (312) ~His father had laboured to create his own gentry, the Sixty-six, to stand between himself and the guilds & some of the manourlords, to be a multitude that could drown out any voices raising obscene requests(like demands for a governing device by which the merchants could parley with King & nobles). That no one else existed of the royal family to displace Menam did not deter his entrenched detractors. (313) From old folklore. A courtier of the ___ kingdom sought promotion so avidly, he bartered his shadow to the king for a ring. Without his shade, the courtier could not wear the ring, he did not have sufficient substance. So the shade executed the courtier and - with the king's permission - replaced him. (314) ~A tasteless term from the time of the Nikraan Advent. An utterly submissive man or woman. (315) ~Lantana or Queen's Lace Hydrangea. The Hramal have a flower language of sorts, though a plant protocol might be more accurate. For instance; gifts of seedlings are almost always welcome(except in the first few days of mourning). Type & genus matter more than cost, quantity or difficulty of acquisition. Never send a friend -- or an ascendant enemy -- Anagallis arvensis. The behaviour of the primrose is that of a coward or a sycophant, and so the gifting would be an insult. (316) Ierwbae told the story to Evendal in ch.6