"Dom Andre, when I first met you yesterday, I thought, 'I have met a friend at last.' Was I right?"
Did she plead, or challenge? He was moved. He said, "You were right."
"Then may I ask you, my friend, not to try to marry me? I don't intend to marry." There was a long silence. "I shall do as you wish, princess." "And without arguing!" cried the girl, all at once alight, aflame. "Oh, I knew you were a friend! Please, Dom Andre, don't feel sad or foolish. I refused the others without even thinking about it. With you, I had to think. You see, if I refuse to marry, my father will send me to the convent. So I can't refuse to marry, I can only refuse each suitor. You see?" He did; though if she had given him time to think, he would have thought that she must in the end accept either marriage or the convent, being, after all, a girl. But she did not give him time to think. "So the suitors keep coming; and it's like Princess Ranya, in the tale, you know, with her three questions, and all the young men's heads stuck on poles around the palace. It is so cruel and wearisome</emphasis>" She sighed, and leaning on the parapet beside Andre looked out over the golden world, smiling, inexplicable, comradely.
"I wish you'd ask me the three questions," he said, wistful.
"I have no questions. I have nothing to ask."
"Nothing to ask that I could give you, to be sure."
"Ah, you've already given me what I asked of you – not to ask me!"
He nodded. He would not seek her reasons; his rebuffed pride, and a sense of her vulnerability, forbade it. And so in her sweet perversity she gave them to him. "What I want, Dom Andre, is to be left alone. To live my life, my own life. At least till I've found out… The one thing I have questions to ask of, is myself. To live my own life, to find out my own way, am I too weak to do that? I was born in this castle, my people have been lords here for a long time, one gets used to it. Look at the walls, you can see why Moge has been attacked but never taken. Ah, one's life could be so splendid, God knows what might happen! Isn't it true, Dom Andre? One mustn't choose too soon. If I marry I know what will happen, what I'll do, what I'll be. And I don't want to know. I want nothing, except my freedom."
"I think," Andre said with a sense of discovery, "most women marry to get their freedom."
"Then they want less than I do. There's something inside me, in my heart, a brightness and a heaviness, how can I describe it? Something that exists and does not yet exist, which is mine to carry, and not mine to give up to any man."
Did she speak, Andre wondered, of her virginity or of her destiny? She was very strange, but it was a princely and a touching strangeness. In all she said, however arrogant and naive, she was most estimable; and though desire was forbidden, she had reached straight into him to his tenderness, the first woman who had ever done so. She stood there quite alone, within him, as she stood beside him and alone.
"Does your brother know your mind?"
"Brant? No. My father is gentle; Brant is not. When my father dies, Brant will force me to marry."
"Then you have no one . . ."
"I have you," she said smiling. "Which means that I have to send you away. But a friend is a friend, near or far."
"Near or far, call to me if you need a friend, princess. I will come." He spoke with a sudden dignity of passion, vowing to her, as a man when very young will vow himself entirely to the rarest and most imperilled thing he has beheld. She looked at him, shaken from her gentle, careless pride, and he took her hand, having earned the right. Beyond them the river ran red under the sunset. "I will," she said. "I was never grateful to a man before, Dom Andre."
He left her, full of exaltation; but when he got to his room he sat down, feeling suddenly very tired, and blinking often, as if on the point of tears.
That was their first meeting, in the wind and golden light on the top of the world, at nineteen. The Kalinskars went back home. Four years passed, in the second of which, 1640, began the civil struggle for succession known as the War of the Three Kings.
Like most petty noble families the Kalinskars sided with Duke Givan Sovenskar in his claim to the throne.
Andre took arms in his troops; by 1643, when they were fighting town by town down through the Molsen Province to Krasnoy, Andre was a field-captain. To him, while Sovenskar pushed on to the capital to be crowned, was entrusted the siege of the last stronghold of the Loyalists east of the river, the town and castle of Moge. So on a June day Andre lay, chin on folded arms, on the rough grass of a hilltop, gazing across a valley at the slate roofs of the town, the walls rising from a surf of chestnut leaves, the round tower, the shining river beyond.
"Captain, where do you want the culverins placed?"
The old prince was dead, and Brant Mogeskar had been killed in March, in the east. Had King Gulhelm sent troops across the river to the defense of his defenders, his rival might not be riding now to Krasnoy to be crowned; but no help had come, and the Mogeskars were besieged now in their own castle. Surrender they would not. Andre's lieutenant, who had arrived some days before him with the light troops, had requested a parley with George Mogeskar; but he had not even seen the prince. He had been received by the princess, he said, a handsome girl, but hard as iron. She had refused to parley: "Mogeskar does not bargain. If you lay siege we shall hold the castle. If you follow the Pretender we shall wait here for the King."
Andre lay gazing at the tawny walls. "Well, Soten, the problem's this: do we take the town first, or the castle?"
But that was not the problem at all. The problem was much crueller than that.
Lieutenant Soten sat down by him and puffed out his round cheeks. "Castle," he said. "Lose weeks taking that town, and then still have the castle to breach."
"Breach that – with the guns we've got? Once we're in the town, they'll accept terms in the castle."
"Captain, that woman in there isn't going to accept any terms."
"How do you know?"
"I've seen her!"
"So have I," said Andre. "We'll set the culverins there, at the south wall of the town. We'll begin bombardment tomorrow at dawn. We were asked to take the fort as it stands. It'll have to be at the cost of the town. They give us no choice." He spoke grimly, but was in his heart elated. He would give her every chance: the chance to withdraw from the hopeless fight and the chance, also, to prove herself, to use the courage she had felt heavy and shining in her breast, like a sword lying secret in its sheath.
He had been a worthy suitor, a man of her own mettle, and had been rejected. Fair enough. She did not want a lover, but an enemy; and he would be a worthy, an estimable one. He wondered if she yet knew his name, if someone had said, "Field-captain Kalinskar is leading them," and she had replied in her lordly, gentle, unheeding way, "Andre Kalinskar?" – frowning perhaps to learn that he had joined the Duke against the King, and yet not displeased, not sorry to have him as her foe.
They took the town, at the cost of three weeks and many lives. Later when Kalinskar was Marshal of the Royal Army he would say when drunk, "I can take any town. I took Moge." The walls were ingeniously fortified, the castle arsenal seemed inexhaustible, and the defenders fought with terrible spirit and patience. They withstood shelling and assaults, put out fires barehanded, ate air, in the last extremity fought face to face, house after house, from the town gate up to the castle scarp; and when taken prisoner they said, "It's her." He had not seen her yet. He had feared to see her in the thick of that carnage in the narrow, ruined streets. From them at evening he kept looking up to the battlements a hundred feet above, the smoking cannon-emplacements, the round tower tawny red in sunset, the untouched castle.
"Wonder how we could get a match into the powder-store," said Lieutenant Soten, puffing his cheeks out cheerfully. His captain turned on him, his hawk-eyes red and swollen with smoke and weariness: "I'm taking Moge as it stands! Blow up the best fort in the country, would you, because you're tired of fighting? By God I'll teach you respect, Lieutenant!" Respect for what, or whom? Soten wondered, but held his tongue. As far as he was concerned, Kalinskar was the finest officer in the army, and he was quite content to follow him, into madness, or wherever. They were all mad with the fighting, with fatigue, with the glaring, grilling heat and dust of summer.