Hugo scrambled out of the tent to tell the others. I broke the wad of herbs open, because while it was still damp in the center the outside had dried, and reapplied it. “Thank God,” I managed to say, although my voice no longer seemed to be working correctly.
“I’m afraid my mind may have wandered again for a while,” said Joachim, “but I have a vague recollection that, somewhere through the evil dreams, I heard talk of chicken soup. Do you think there might still be some?”
PART FOUR — THE EASTERN KINGDOMS
I
We stayed at our mountain campsite among the rocks and evergreens a week, by which time the cut on Joachim’s throat was little more than a scab, and the horses were getting restive. I used the time to read Melecherius on Eastern Magic thoroughly. Ascelin hunted and made two more trips down into the village to buy bread and other supplies.
The fact that no one came by in all that time, not the bandits, not the king’s chancellor to check on stories of travelers ambushed less than a day’s ride from the royal castle, not any other traveler, made me even more convinced than I had been that King Warin was behind the attack on us. King Haimeric still refused to distrust his old friend, but he had discovered during the week that he was outnumbered, four to one, with the chaplain abstaining.
I thought grimly that if they were the same bandits who had tried to attack Arnulf last fall, then this was why Arnulf had sent whatever was in the package with Joachim rather than going anywhere himself, but I did not mention this to the chaplain.
Ascelin and King Haimeric looked again at the maps. “With spring another week along, we should have even less trouble with the passes,” said Ascelin.
“Dominic’s not the only one who wants to go to the eastern kingdoms to visit his father’s grave,” the king said. “I’ve never been there either.”
When we started eastward again, Ascelin went first, his bow strung and ready, looking around with hunter’s eyes at anything that could be an ambush. I rode at the rear, probing with magic. No one would be able to attack us by surprise this time.
In spite of the tension, all of us found our spirits rising just to be on the road again. We passed a number of narrow tracks branching off from the main road, which could have gone to the royal mines and could have gone to the bandits’ hideout. The road quickly grew so steep that in several places we had to dismount and lead the horses.
As we climbed upward, I kept glancing surreptitiously at the chaplain out of the corner of my eye, fearing that he would find the ride too exhausting. If he did, he gave no sign, and in fact several times he appeared to be singing, half under his breath. This was the man, I reminded myself, who had thought that peril gave additional merit to the journey.
When the road finally leveled out, it clung halfway up the side of a gorge, with peaks high above us blocking out the sky and a rushing river far below. The stonework looked ancient, as though dating from the Empire, but the road appeared sound. A cold wind blew steadily through the gorge. In several places, waterfalls shot from the cliffs above us toward the river below, and the road went under them. As we passed beneath a solid, roaring mass of water, damp dripped onto our hair and gave life to vividly green ferns clinging to the rock wall, though on either side the cliffs were barren.
“Aren’t we up to the pass yet?” Hugo asked as the road emerged at last from the gorge but immediately started again to zigzag upward across a dry mountain slope.
“We won’t be up to the pass for two more days,” said Ascelin. “And it certainly won’t be a smooth road from then on, either.”
When we stopped for the night in a hollow sheltered by evergreens, Joachim asked me, “Why have you been watching me all day? Afraid your wizardry might not have healed me fully?” There was an amused glint in the back of his dark eyes.
“I didn’t heal you with wizardry,” I said patiently. “Let me explain it again. The words of the Hidden Language by themselves have little power either to sicken or to heal. Certainly there are herbs, potions, compounds, and the like, products of the earth, that will do both, and some wizards in the old days used to do as much with such compounds as with the real forces of magic. But nowadays most wizards avoid such messiness. All I did was what my predecessor in Yurt used to do: use the spells of wizardry to discover, and at most augment, the powers of growing things. Herbs’ attributes can provide a shortcut, or even go where spells do not go, but they are inherently unpredictable. I can’t be nearly as confident about a healing herb as I could be about a modern spell.”
I stopped in the middle of this academic discourse and smiled at him. “And I think you know me well enough to realize that even my modern spells don’t always work quite the way they’re supposed to.”
“I’ll take my chances on the quality of your spells,” he replied, with the same almost amused look. But then he became more sober. “I’m sorry, Daimbert, that I waited so long to open Claudia’s present. Now you’ll never know what was in it.”
“It’s not worth worrying about,” I said. I didn’t want to think any more about a woman who had hypocritically tried to remind her brother-in-law of her former love for him, just so she could give him an object so accursed it would nearly kill him.
But Joachim had more to say. “I hope you don’t think me foolish, Daimbert, but in a way I was testing myself during our visit. I realized that, at some level, I had stayed away from my old home for so long because I was afraid that I might regret my decision to become a priest.”
“And did you?” I asked in trepidation.
“Of course not, and that was one of the best parts of the visit. I deliberately spent time talking to Claudia, and was pleased to find that I felt brotherly affection for her as my brother’s wife and my niece’s and nephews’ mother, but nothing more.”
“Is that why you let her sing love-songs to you?”
The chaplain stretched out his long legs in front of him. I was relieved that he took my question with new amusement, rather than as an insult. “The songs she was singing had nothing to do with me. She’s very happily married to my brother. I’m sure any particular affection she may have had for me vanished many years ago.”
I looked at the chaplain thoughtfully. Joachim always assumed that everyone was a sinner, without letting it bother him, but it occurred to me that he also resisted thinking real evil of someone whom he liked and trusted. I had always hoped that the fact that he was willing to be friends with me was an indication that I was really virtuous the whole time. But that he would not even consider the possibility that Claudia had been trying to seduce him-or at least persuade him with seductive hints to take a “gift” from her unquestioningly-now made me wonder how deep my own virtue might actually go.
“The next time we reach a place with a telephone or a pigeon loft,” said Joachim, “I will send her a message and apologize for losing her present. I just hope it wasn’t anything very valuable.”
It grew slowly colder as we climbed during the next two days, and several times there were patches of snow in the ditches at the side of the road as well as on the towering peaks above us. But late in the afternoon of the second day we finally reached the pass and looked out eastward, a stinging wind in our faces.
Before us stretched broad green meadows, scattered with low wooden buildings and clumps of stunted trees. Cows grazed in the meadows, and smoke rose from several chimneys. But we were not looking at the meadows. Instead our eyes were drawn to the mountain to our left, which rose at least a mile higher than the high saddle on which we stood. We had caught glimpses of it as we climbed, but the mountain we were on had hidden its true size from us.
“The Snow Giant,” said Ascelin, “and to our right is Diamond Mountain.” This more southerly peak was scarcely lower. Storms swirled around their upper reaches, covering them with white mist, but suddenly a gust of wind a mile above us cleared the clouds away, and the peaks seemed to glare down at us with the same unbearable cold which I had felt, on a much reduced level, in the eyes of King Warin.