11
Khaymak Barjazid said, “I have a thought, your grace.—You mentioned, some time back, your difficult relationship with your father and your brothers.”
Mandralisca shot him a startled, angry look. For the moment he had forgotten altogether that he had ever spoken of his painful childhood to Barjazid, or anyone else. And he was not at all accustomed to being addressed in a way that ventured to breach the walls he had erected around his inner life.
“And if I did?” he said, in a voice tipped with blades.
Barjazid squirmed. Terror came into the little man’s mismatched eyes. “I mean no offense, sir! No offense at all! Only that I see a way of intensifying the power of the helmet you hold in your hands, a way which would make use of—certain of your—experiences.”
Mandralisca leaned forward. The sting of the sudden intrusion into his soul still reverberated in him, but he was interested all the same. “How so?”
“Let me see how to put this,” said Barjazid carefully. He held himself like a man setting out to have a philosophical dialogue with a snarling, infuriated khulpoin, all yellow fangs and blazing eyes, that he has unexpectedly encountered on a quiet country road. “When one uses the helmet, one generates the power from within oneself,” said Barjazid. “It is my belief that one would be able to increase the device’s power if one were to draw on some reservoir of pain, of fury, of—I could almost say ‘hatred.’ ”
“Well, say it, then. Hatred. It’s a word I understand.”
“Hatred, yes. And so certain things occurred to me, sir, remembering what you had told me that day concerning your boyhood—your father. Your—early unhappiness—” Barjazid chose his words painstakingly, obviously aware that he was treading on dangerous ground here. He understood that Mandralisca might well not want to be reminded of the things that he had blurted out, so very much to his own surprise, that day that he and Barjazid and Jacomin Halefice were walking through the marketplace. But Mandralisca, controlling himself, signalled to him to go on. And Barjazid most artfully did: he hinted, he alluded, he talked in euphemisms, all the while painting the portrait of the boy Mandralisca eternally in fear of his savage drunken father and his blustering bullying brothers, suffering daily at their hands and storing up a full measure of loathing for them that would, one day, overflow upon the world. Loathing that could be turned into an asset, that could be harnessed, that could become a source of great power. And offered some suggestions concerning how that might be achieved.
This was all very valuable. Mandralisca was grateful to Barjazid for sharing it with him. But he regretted, all the same, having parted even for a moment the veil that shrouded his early life. He had always found it useful to have the world perceive him as a monster carved out of ice; there were great risks in giving someone a glimpse of the vulnerable boy of long ago who lay hidden somewhere behind that chilly facade. He would gladly call back, if he could, all that he had told this little man that strange afternoon.
“Enough,” Mandralisca said, finally. “You’ve made your point clear. Now go, and let me get down to work.” He reached for the helmet.
Late autumn in the Gonghars, shading into early winter. The light but unending rain of the warm season has begun to give way to the cold and equally endless rain of autumn, heavy with sleet, that will yield in another few weeks to winter’s first snows. This is the cabin, the squalid shack, the tumbledown ill-favored house, where the wine-seller Kekkedis and his family live, here in the sad little mountain town of Ibykos. The hour is far along in the afternoon, dark, cold. Rain drums on the rotting lichen-encrusted roof and drips through the usual leaky places, landing in the usual buckets with a steady pong pong pong. Mandralisca does not dare to light a fire. Fuel is not wasted in this household, and any fuel not consumed on behalf of his father is deemed a waste of fuel; no one matters here but his father, and fires are lit when his father returns from his day’s toil, not before.
Today that may be hours from now. Or, perhaps—the Divine willing—never.
For three days now Kekkedis and his oldest son Malchio have been in the city of Velathys, a hundred miles away, arranging to buy up the stock of some fellow wine-merchant who has died in an avalanche, leaving half a dozen hungry babes. They are due back today; indeed, are already more than a little overdue, because the floater that runs between Velathys and Ibykos leaves at dawn and reaches Ibykos by mid-afternoon. It is almost dark, now, but the floater has not arrived. No one knows why. Another of Mandralisca’s brothers has been waiting at the station since noon with the wagon. The third is at the wine-shop, helping their mother. Mandralisca is alone at home. He diverts himself with luxurious fantasies of cataclysms befalling his father. Perhaps—perhaps, perhaps, perhaps!—something bad has happened on the road. Perhaps. Perhaps.
His other way of passing the time, and keeping warm, is by practicing with the singlestick baton that he has carved from a piece of night-flower wood. That is the finest kind of baton, a nightflower-wood baton, and Mandralisca saved all last year, one square copper at a time, to buy himself a decent-sized stave, which he has whittled and whittled until it is of the perfect length and weight, and fits his hand so well that one might think a master craftsman had designed the hand grip. Now, holding the baton so that it rests lightly in his palm, he moves deftly back and forth through the room, feinting at shadows, jabbing, parrying. He is quick; he is good; his wrist is strong, his eye is keen; he hopes to be a champion some day. But right now he is mainly interested in keeping warm.
He imagines that his opponent is his father. He dances round and round the older man, mockingly prodding at him, tapping him at the point of each shoulder, beneath the chin, along his cheek, playing with him, outmaneuvering him, humiliating him. Kekkedis has begun to growl with fury; he lashes out with his own baton with a two-handed grip, as though swinging an axe; but the boy is ten times as fast as he, and touches him again and again and again, while Kekkedis is unable to land a single blow.
Perhaps Kekkedis will never come home at all. Perhaps he’ll die somewhere on the road. Let it be, Mandralisca prays, that he is already dead.
Let him have had an avalanche too.
The hills above Ibykos are snow-covered already, the wet heavy snow typical of the cusp of the season. Mandralisca, closing his eyes, pictures the rain pounding down, imagines it striking the black granite bedrock, slicing at an angle into the accumulated snowdrifts, working like little knives to cut them loose and send them gliding in billowy clouds down the side of the hill toward the highway below, just as the Velathys floater goes by—hiding it altogether from sight until spring—Kekkedis and Malchio buried beneath a thousand tons of snow—
Or let a sudden sinkhole open in the highway. Let the floater be swallowed up in it.
Let the floater swerve wildly off the road. Let it plunge into the river.
Let the engine die halfway between Velathys and here. Let them be caught in a blizzard and freeze to death.
Mandralisca punctuates each of these hopeful thoughts with furious thrusts of his baton. Jab—jab—jab. He whirls, dances, turns lightly on the tips of his toes, strikes while his body is facing more than halfway away from his foe. Comes in overhead, a descending angle, impossible to defend against, bolt of lightning. Take that! That! That!
The sound of the wagon pulling up, suddenly. Mandralisca wants to weep. No avalanche, no sinkhole, no fatal blizzard. Kekkedis is home again.