How wonderful the world would be if emotion could be dosed with logic so easily! I am sorry, Sir D'Arcy, but your married status inevitably precludes any further communication between us....
"Look!” Edward pointed out at the sunlit village beyond the little diamond-pained windows. A Gypsy wagon was being hauled along the street by an ancient nag. Dogs barked, small boys ran after it.
He watched as it disappeared around the corner. “Last time I was here, a Gypsy told my fortune. That's a different wagon, though."
"You believe in that stuff?"
He twisted his face. “I didn't used to, but that one hit the mark pretty well. She said I'd have to choose between honor and friendship. Sure enough, I was forced to abandon Eleal when I might have been able to help her."
"Come off it, Edward! That might just as well have applied to Ysian."
His eyes glinted like razors. “I don't rat on my friends very often. Abandoning Ysian, if that's what I did, was the honorable thing to do. You might like to know the rest of the prophecy, though—Mrs. Boswell the Gypsy also said I'd have to choose between honor and duty, that I could only find honor through dishonor. Explain that one, because I can't!"
Was there a chink here to work on? “Well, if your duty is to enlist, but the honorable thing is to avenge your parents’ murder—"
"Never give up, do you?” Even Edward could lose his temper. If that happened she would have lost any hope of making him see reason.
"You haven't seen Ysian in a year?” The girl was the only bait she had to coax him back to Nextdoor and away from the Western Front.
He flashed a look of exasperation at her. “Told you,” he mumbled. “She's at Olympus, working for Polly Murgatroyd. She's very nice—Polly, I mean. I wrote to her before I crossed over—to Ysian, I mean.... “He frowned, dabbing at his mouth with the napkin. “As the man who promised to deliver the note then tried to kill me, she probably never got it."
"You weren't at Olympus?"
He shook his head, chewing. “I took two years to get there and when I did, I didn't stay long. The Committee decided it was too dangerous, both for me and for everybody else—didn't want Zath sacking the place in the hope of catching me. I was packed off to Thovale, which is very small and rural, but not too far away. I helped set up some chapels there. I became a missionary!” He laughed gleefully. “Holy Roly must have turned in his grave! But we all do ... they all do it."
"You'd make a good preacher.” She could just imagine him running his parish like a school dormitory.
"I didn't! I can't ever believe that I know better than everyone else. I don't like telling people what they must think. It's immoral!"
"Doesn't a stranger make a good preacher?"
"Yes,” he admitted glumly. “I could pack in the crowds. I converted heathens to the Church's new and improved heathenism. My heart wasn't in it, though. Jumbo Watson can convert a whole village with a single sermon. I've seen him do it."
Alice abandoned the Ysian campaign. If he could stay away from the girl for a whole year to do something he did not believe in, then thoughts of Ysian were not going to discourage him from enlisting.
"The Liberator?” she said. “It's a noble title—calls up memories of Bolivar, William Tell, Robert the Bruce. Doesn't it tempt you at all?"
He rolled his eyes in exasperation at her persistence. “Not too terribly frightfully, no. There were a couple of times—and the Filoby Testament predicted them both. I almost gave in to Tion, because he said he would cure Eleal's limp. That was a very close-run thing! And then in Tharg, the prince—” He popped a jammy, creamy morsel in his mouth and chewed blissfully.
"What about the prince?"
"That didn't work either, but it came close, too. That particular prophecy ends, but the dead shall rouse him. That's me, rouse me. And that part did work, Alice, because I saw the dead—in Flanders. How many lives has this war cost?"
"No way of knowing. What you read in the papers is all censored."
"Well, the dead speak. They say it's my turn. I have to do my bit, and that's that.” He glanced at his wrist and then at the grandfather clock in the corner.
She sighed. Two more miles to Harrow. Her legs ached already. “Time to go, isn't it?"
Edward nodded. “Wish I hadn't eaten so much.” He surreptitiously slid the last scone into his pocket. He grinned sheepishly when he saw that she had noticed. “Another offering."
Alice shook her head in disbelief. It was Friday afternoon in England and they were on their way to meet a god.
46
SHAME! SHAME! TO THE MAN GOETH D'WARD, SAYING, SLAY ME! THE hammer falls and blood profanes the holy altar. Warriors, where is thine honor? Perceive thy shame.—Verse 266.
The divinely inspired gibberish echoed and reechoed in Dosh's head as he was swept along a milling street in Tharg. Insects droned, people shoved and jostled; heat and noise and stink. That passage made no sense at all at this point in history. How could the prophecy of D'ward's death be fulfilled before all the others about him? The trouble with the Filoby Testament was that too much of it made sense only after it had happened.
What about Verse 1098, then? That was the one that intrigued Tion so much. Something about the Liberator being slow to anger, and then, Eleal shall be the first temptation and the prince shall be the second, but the dead shall rouse him. It certainly referred to the Liberator. It might well apply to this very afternoon. Something was about to happen, something so momentous that it had caught the eye of the seeress all those many years ago.
Tharg was the largest city Dosh had ever seen, bigger even than Joal. It well deserved its reputation as the ugliest. The buildings were of somber stone, with high plain walls and tiny windows, every house a fortress. There was no color, no decoration, not a carving in sight. The men wore tunics of drab brown or khaki, boys yellow or beige, although all had a touch of the sacred colors at the neck. Women were not in evidence. Doors and shutters were tarred, not painted. The streets were narrow trenches, hot and airless, straight as spears.
They were also thronged with huge crowds of impatient, hustling, urgent freemen, all hurrying in the same direction he was heading, and most of them much taller than he. He was having trouble keeping D'ward in sight. Fortunately the Liberator was taller than most, his distinctive black hair bobbing above the tide like a cork. He was gaining. He seemed not to care that every man in the crowd bore a sword and aggressive jostling might be fatal. Very likely he was deliberately trying to lose his unwanted follower.
Gods did not make mistakes. That thought, too, Dosh kept repeating like a mantra. Prylis had extracted the Liberator from the army so that the ephors would abduct the wrong leader. When Prylis had released him this morning, had he not known what D'ward would try to do? Because he had let him go, then he must have been certain that it was now too late—mustn't he? Golbfish must be dead already, mustn't he? Could gods make mistakes?
Maybe a minor god like Prylis could. Everyone was heading for the temple, because there was to be an announcement—Dosh had gathered that much from remarks overheard. He dared not ask questions, lest he be denounced as a foreigner. Thargians were never nice to foreigners, especially Thargians in mobs, and the air stank of dangerous passions already. Angry, armed male mob ... no women, no slaves? The women would all be at home in those narrow-windowed prisons of houses, being mothers.