Somehow he wasn’t sleepy, in spite of having slept only four hours the night before, and all the drinking and running around of this evening. He sat down at his table in the dark dining room. As usual, he thought, Aurelianus managed to duck the question I most wanted an answer to, which is: Who or what am I in this vast scheme? Why has everyone from Ibrahim to Bacchus taken an interest in me?
He silently lifted his chair further back into the shadows then, for he heard two low voices in the kitchen conversing in Italian.
“Is there any word from Clement?” asked one.
“As a matter of fact,” replied the other, “it looks like he will send troops this time. He’s even trying for some kind of temporary truce with Luther so that the West can unreservedly unite against the Ottoman Empire.”
The two speakers emerged from the kitchen and started up the stairs without noticing Duffy. One was Aurelianus and the other was the swarthy, curly-haired young man, Jock, who’d pulled his hat down over his face when Duffy had passed him earlier in the evening.
Huh! the Irishman thought; didn’t Aurelianus tell me in Venice that he didn’t speak Italian? And speaking of Venice, it was there I first saw this Jock fellow, who introduced himself, that Ash Wednesday evening, as Giacomo Gritti. What connections are these?
The sorcerer and the young man ascended the stairs, and their whispering voices died away above. Those two are working together, then? Duffy mused. That would explain why young Gritti saved my life and directed me to a safe ship, that morning on the Venice docks, though it certainly doesn’t shed any light on the ambush he and his brothers sprang on me the night before. Unless that fight was somehow staged... ?
One thing is sure—I’ve been lied to a number of times, and can’t even guess why. I don’t like it when strangers pry into my affairs, but I absolutely can’t bear it when they know more about my affairs than I do myself.
He stood up and walked to the servants’ hall, picking up an empty beer mug on the way.
He placed his feet carefully on the cellar stairs as he descended them so as not to awaken the sleeping Gambrinus, and then padded cautiously across the stone floor to the door the ghost had gone through that afternoon. The hinges must have been recently oiled, for they didn’t squeak when the Irishman slowly drew the door open. He groped his way to the huge vat in the pitchy blackness, and then felt for the lowest of the three spigots. It turned grittily when he exerted some strength; then when he judged he’d drawn half a cup he shut the valve and, closing the vat-room behind him, hurried up the stairs to the dining room.
He lit the candle at his table and peered suspiciously at the few ounces of thick black liquid that swirled in the bottom of the mug. Looks pretty vile, he thought. Then he sat down, and even without bringing the cup to his nose he smelled the heady, heavily aromatic bouquet. God bless us, he thought rapturously, this is the nectar of which even the finest, rarest bock in the world is only the vaguest hint. In one long, slow, savoring swallow he emptied the cup.
His first thought was: Sneak downstairs, Duffy lad, and fill the cup this time. He got to his feet—or tried to, rather, and was only able to shift slightly in his chair. What’s this? he thought apprehensively; I recover from a lifetime’s worth of dire wounds only to be paralyzed by a mouthful of beer? He attempted again to heave himself out of the chair, and this time didn’t move at all.
Then he was moving—no, being carried. He was exhausted, and a frigid wind hacked savagely through the joints in his plate armor. He rolled over, moaning with the pain in his head.
“Lie still, my King,” came a tense, worried voice. “You’ll only open your wound again if you thrash about so.”
He groped chilly fingers to his head, and felt the great gash in his temple, rough with dried, clotted blood. “Who... who has done this?” he gasped.
“Your son, King. But rest easy—you slew him even as he dealt you the blow.”
I’m glad of that, anyway, he thought. “It’s frightful cold,” he said. “My feet are as numb as if they belonged to someone else.”
“We’ll rest soon,” came the voice of the attendant. “When we reach the bank of yonder lake.”
He painfully raised his head from the pallet on which he was being carried, and saw ahead a vast, still lake reflecting the full moon. After a while he was set down by his two panting companions, and he could hear water splashing gently among rocks and weeds, and could smell the cold, briny breath of the lake.
“My sword!” he whispered. “Where is it? Did I—”
“Here it is.” A heavy hilt was laid in his hand.
“Ah. I’m too weak—one of you must throw it into the lake. It’s my last order,” he added when they began to protest. Grudgingly, one of them took the sword and strode away through the shadowy underbrush.
He lay on the ground, breathing carefully, wishing his heart wouldn’t pound so. My rushing blood is sure to force the wound open again, he thought, and I’ll die soon enough even without that.
The attendant came back. “I’ve done as you said, Sire.”
Like hell, he thought. “Oh? And what did you see when you threw it in?”
“See? A splash. And then just ripples.”
“Go back, and this time do as I said.”
The man shambled away again, confused and embarrassed. It’s the jewels in the hilt, the dying man thought. He can’t bear to think of them at the bottom of the lake.
The attendant looked subdued and scared when he returned this time. “I did it, Sire.”
“What did you see?”
“A hand and arm rose out of the water and caught the sword by the grip, before it could splash, whirled the sword three times in the air, and then withdrew below the surface.”
“Ah.” He relaxed at last. “Thank you. I want to leave no debts.”
A boat rocked at the edge of the water now, and a woman in muddy shoes leaned worriedly over him.
“Our son has killed me,” he told her, controlling his chattering teeth long enough to speak the sentence.
“Put him aboard my boat,” she said. “He’s not long for this world.’
He awoke frightened, on a hardwood floor, not daring to move for fear of attracting the notice of something he couldn’t name. It was dark, and he didn’t want to rouse his memory. Whatever has happened, he thought, whatever this place is, whatever is the name of my enemy—and myself—I’m better off ignorant of them. If I know nothing, admit nothing, acknowledge nothing, perhaps they’ll leave me alone at last, and let me sleep. He drifted again into treasured oblivion.
Chapter Thirteen
“INSENSIBLY DRUNK! I expected it, of course. And on my beer, which I daresay you neglected to pay for, eh?”
Duffy opened his eyes and blinked up at Werner. He tried to speak, but produced only a grating moan; which was just as well, since he’d intended to voice only reflexive abuse. The Irishman loathed waking up on the floor, for one couldn’t, in that situation, pull the covers up and postpone arising. One had immediately to get up and begin dealing with things.
Getting to his feet proved a little easier than he’d expected. “Shut up, Werner,” he said quietly. “Don’t mess about in things that don’t concern you. And tell one of the girls to bring me a big breakfast.” Werner just stared at him, anger growing in his face like a spark on a fur cloak. “Did you even hear,” Duffy went on, “about the siege gun somebody tried to blow this place up with last night? If it hadn’t been for those Vikings in the stable, you and the rest of the city’s dogs would right now be scavenging through a rubble pile on this spot.” Werner looked only bewildered now. “Your beer,” Duffy added contemptuously, shambling to his table and collapsing into a chair.