Karaman disappeared briefly and came back with two mugs and a few large crocks. "We make an excellent cider here," he suggested.
"I'll get drunk," Shadow growled.
Karaman chuckled. "That was what I said."
So they sat and quaffed cider and talked, and Karaman told of many things which should have been unbelievable and were somehow not when wrapped in his gentle, casual good humor. Shadow drank three mugfuls to each of Karaman's and eventually spoke of politics and attempted murder and of Vindax. The generation-long silence which had hung over Eagle Dome was breached, and slowly the nightmare vision standing guard in his mind became blurred.
"When was the prince born?" Karaman asked.
"Why?" Shadow said cautiously.
The old eyes twinkled in their wrinkles as the old man saw that Shadow was not quite drunk enough to lose all discretion. "Just nosy. He looks so like the duke."
"He did!" Shadow said. "But the duke says he never met you."
"Then call one of us a liar," Karaman replied. "Me, by choice--it would be safer. Aurolron must have noticed. I wonder why he did not disown the prince? Not in character!"
"He never met the duke," Shadow said, wondering if that was a lie also, thinking of that strange letter Ukarres had shown him.
Karaman smiled. "Once I spent several days with both of them together. Certainly call me a liar before you try it on the king."
A meeting between the king and the rebel? Fuzzily Shadow pondered that. It must have been a very well-kept secret. Yet he could believe this threadbare, patched old man more easily than Aurolron or his premier noble.
"Where? At Ninar Foan? On the Rand?"
Karaman shook his head, holding out the cider crock once more. "On the Range, at a little place called Schagarn."
"I know it," Shadow said, surprised. "One of the royal manors. He used it as a hunting lodge before he gave up flying."
"Right," Karaman said. The two men stared out over the hills for a while, waiting on each other to speak.
"Was the queen there?" Shadow asked at last. He saw the twinkle return to Karaman's eyes.
"No. We're a pair of old gossips, friend Shadow."
Shadow giggled drunkenly, then became serious. "So far as Vindax knows, it was not possible for the duke to have fathered him. He was born on 1374."
There was a long silence, then Karaman said, "I would not say this to anyone else, but you have earned his confidence and I shall give you mine. Yes, it was possible. Just. 1170 or thereabouts."
So the mystery was solved, here in far-off Allaban.
Karaman sighed. "It was my fault, I suppose, or at least I was the excuse."
"She betrayed her husband and her king at Schagarn?"
"Not there, but nearby. And I find it hard to think of it as a betrayal, Shadow. I suppose I am a romantic, or was then. They were a tragic couple. He was noble, she was royal. He was handsome, she was beautiful beyond legend. They were as much in love as two human beings can be, like eagles, yet doomed to have only a few precious hours together and then be forever parted.
"It was supposed to be a political meeting. Her father had just died, and she claimed to be queen of Allaban, so I had asked for her to be included. Aurolron had refused, saying he would speak for her as husband and as overlord. I had agreed to that. But after our business was over, after the king had left Schagarn and we were supposed to be leaving at first watch, Foan took me aside and said he had made arrangements. I said it did not matter now; he insisted, and I suppose I guessed. There were many guards, you can be sure, but they were watching the aerie and the stables. The two of us slipped away on bicycles to another house, not far off."
Shadow's knuckles were white as he gripped the cider mug, his alcoholic haze vanished like a burned leaf.
"There was no one else there except our host," Karaman said, gazing away into space and time. "No servants around. She gave me her word on the treaty without taking her eyes off Foan. The host tactfully suggested that he and I take a stroll. Soon I said I was weary and wanted to rest before our long journey began. Would he take me back to Schagarn? He did, and when we all arose at three bells, the duke was back also. So I suppose it was my fault. I suppose it happened, having seen the prince. Was I being deliberately nasty to Aurolron, I wonder?"
"Where was this exactly?" Shadow demanded.
"Oh, a lovely spot," Karaman sighed. "One of the old, old castles, fallen into humble straits as a local manor house. Set in a wooded dell with a tiny pond in front of it...ivy and gables and wild flowers...a storybook couple in a storybook setting. No, it could not have been betrayal. It was love, and surely love can justify itself."
The king's letter had said:his background is relevant.The king knew, then, and had been telling the duke that he knew.I think you owe me this.
"There is a dove cote and a rose tree in the courtyard?" Shadow asked. "The doves sit on the gables and purr?"
Karaman turned to stare at the tears on Shadow's face. "You know it?"
"Hiando Keep," Shadow said. "I also was conceived there."
And at Allaban there was Potro, who was the youngest of Karaman's many grandchildren, a collection of bones aged around three kilodays, wearing nothing but skimpy shorts and burned almost black by the sun, his hair bleached white and flying loose in a comic parody of his grandfather's. He whirled everywhere around the homestead without pause like a young eagle himself, flashing teeth and filling the air with impudence and laughter.
He was, Karaman said, as good a bird speaker as any, and the very day Shadow arrived, after he had been tended and rested and fed, Karaman led him out to sit on the grass under the trees. Then the old man seemed to snatch Potro out of the sky and sent him over to give Shadow a lesson.
"Right!" Potro said, sitting down cross-legged. "Eight points on a bird's comb, okay?" And he put his hands together and held up a row of skinny fingers, with his thumbs folded down.
"Right."
"You don't happen to play the flute do you?" Potro asked.
"Not that I recall."
"Pity. I'm teaching a flute player, and he finds it easier." The words poured out, as they spilled from the birds themselves. "So each point on the comb can be bent left or right or straight up, right? That's as good as we can do. I mean the birds can do sort of in between, but that's more shade of meaning, if you know what I mean, like being funny or so on. I can read a little of it, but even I can't do it much.
"So our fingers won't bend backward. We have to do straight for left and a little bent for straight up and bent a lot for right. Try that. Gawrn, you're stiff! So eight points for a word, a one-syllable word. This means 'egg.'" And he arranged eight fingers.
Shadow muttered under his breath and let his fingers be adjusted.
"Of course they don't hold it like that--they run it from front to back, and then the next word is starting before they've finished, the last one. Back to front for a question. And that's one-syllable words. Now, the word for 'water' has three syllables: this, this, and then this."
"You're too fast for me."
"That'sslow!" Potro said. "Way slow! I mean, they have to learn to slow down; your NailBiter is too fast for me yet, and even Gramps can hardly get what he says. He'll learn. But when you came over the pass, he'd probably been talking to the wilds before you even saw them. And in a minute or two, he'd have told them who he was and you were, and where you'd come from and where you were going and all about himself back to the egg. They can say more in a minute or two than we can talk in a day--If they want to, of course. They prefer to sing about it. Like they make up great long, long poems, and then they can take a whole day to say what a pretty hill that is, or something. Gabby, they are, but gawrn, can they go when they want to!"