“Agion, perhaps Sir Bayard is a little tired, and . . .” “Never mind, Galen,” Bayard said wearily. “For both of you deserve to know, since all of this concerns you.”
And he began again, with another lurid tale, as his audience rode beside him.
“My childhood promised to be not unlike yours, Galen. I was the heir to a large castle in central Solamnia.”
“Which is very like my childhood, sir,” I agreed sarcastically. “For after all, I am about third down the line to inherit a rattrap of a moat house in northwest Coastlund.”
Bayard ignored me, bent on continuing his story, determined to teach me something or kill us both in the process. Is there any story of any successful man’s childhood that is not a hard luck tale?
“It was no soldiers of Neraka, no bandits from Estwilde, who were to rob me of my birthright, my castle and lands which took years to recover. No, none of our old enemies conspired to take my inheritance from me. Instead, it was our own people who rose against my father one summer night—around this time of year, it was, when I was fourteen. They killed my father and mother. Killed the house servants and retainers, too, for ‘harboring sympathy for the oppressors,’ it was. And when I was fourteen, they would have killed me, had not my good luck and their excitement conspired to save me.”
“The villains!” I exclaimed, thinking that exclaiming something was what was expected of me. I was wrong, evidently. Bayard turned to me, frowned, and shook his head.
“Not villains. Though I, too, thought so at fourteen, and swore to avenge myself upon them and all of their kind. I was too young to understand either their anger or my oath. Not villains, for the most vicious result of the Cataclysm—when the world collapsed and the landscape changed—was that the poor suffered first and most, Galen. I knew nothing of that at the time I swore my oath, knew nothing of the rage that arises when one sees someone not starving simply because he or she was born not to starve. I learned of that rage firsthand in Palanthas.”
“Palanthas?” I interrupted. “Let me get this straight. You were orphaned down near the Vingaard Keep, left alone at fourteen, and you still found the courage and the wherewithal for a week’s journey alone, through the Vingaard Mountains, to the city of Palanthas?”
Agion, too, had become attentive, the name “Palanthas” having roused his thoughts from nowhere. He turned and addressed my protector.
“Palanthas, Sir Bayard? Thou hast visited Palanthas?”
“Yes, Agion. And dwelt there.”
“Then perhaps thou canst tell me. Do they eat horses in Palanthas?”
I thought it was centaur superstition and prepared to laugh, but saw Bayard nodding in response.
“The poor do, Agion, when they can get them. But they get them rarely, and are forced to survive on other things. Indeed, I know this firsthand, as I was saying.”
He continued, his eyes on the road ahead of him, while I looked at Valorous, at the pack mare, and tried to imagine them gracing a table.
“. . . so the keep safely behind me, I rode half a mile away, to where I could no longer see the flames from the watch-tower, only the smoke. Then I picked up the westbound road and was out of my father’s lands, into what we once called ‘hostile country.’ Now it seemed to me that the hostile country was what I was leaving behind, what I would have inherited had the times stayed the same.”
He paused, drew Valorous to a halt.
“We’ll stop here and eat. A flank of goat can spoil even in brisk autumn weather, if you aren’t careful.”
Whatever had come to pass in Palanthas, and whatever it had to do with di Caelas, Sir Bayard Brightblade had learned the lessons of survival.
The story paused at the fireside, the goat flank turning on a makeshift spit, Agion standing, watching around us for anything drawn to the smell of roasting meat.
“Enough story for now,” Bayard insisted. “You should rest.”
I nodded, then cast a sideward glance at Agion, now idly nuzzling an apple and staring off behind us toward the west and the swamp he could probably barely remember.
I dozed awhile at that stopping place, as did Agion. Bayard picked up telling his tale to us where he had left off, when we were once again on the road southeast, passing through countryside flat and dreary—the landscape for which Coastlund is justly famous. As I watched a hawk wheeling in the deepest part of the eastern sky, he resumed.
“The journey to Palanthas was a perilous one, for the Vingaard Mountains are wretchedly cold at any season. Had it not been summer, the outcome of my story might well have been different.
“Palanthas, of course, is justly famous for its riches, for the library and the colleges and the splendid tower to which mages from all over Ansalon come to be tested and instructed. If that were all that pertained to the city, its love of learning and of wisdom,” he stated, smiling ironically, “I would surely have found better welcome there.”
I imagined the city of gold, a paradise seated on a hill overlooking drab countryside in all directions. I did not know then that, despite its riches and glimmer, Palanthas was a rough port town sloping into a deep water harbor, and that from that harbor came mariners who spoke in languages none of us had heard or would ever hear again, men who carried daggers with intricate handles and with poison lacing the toothed edges of the blades.
Bayard’s story was the first I had heard that hinted at the poverty, the dice and the knives upon which the city’s foundation lay. I listened, unbelieving at first, but the parts of Bayard’s story “went from one to the other,” as Alfric had said before he sank beneath a sea of swampy mud. Agion, however, needed less convincing. He nodded agreement throughout—not that he had been to Palanthas, of course, but that he was sure that the seamy side was the only side of human cities, where small, violent, two-legged creatures gathered in their places of stone and baked mud and dead wood.
“When I arrived in Palanthas,” Bayard explained, leaning forward and picking a burr from Valorous’s mane as the horse slowed to a walk, “there was nothing for me in the southern part of the city. Shops there were, and merchants everywhere you looked, and most cared nothing for buyers, intent as they were on buying the wares of other merchants in their attempts to be, say, the only tea merchant, or the only furrier in the city. Those who indeed were looking for someone who might buy their goods looked only to the rich—to the mages in coaches, to the spice traders in their gowns, who rode through the streets on their thoroughbred horses. Can you imagine keeping high-strung horses such as those pent in a city?
“No, there was no employment for me there. I could not even buy food with what little money I had saved from my room at the keep—these merchants were not interested in paltry sums.
“So to the west of town I went, through the ruins of the old temples devoted to gods these people had set aside because such gods were ‘inconvenient.’ It was here I saw the fabled Tower of High Sorcery, from a distance only and for a short time only. I had no energy to admire architecture. . . .”
Well, it gives you an idea. As Bayard spoke, went on with his tale, a layer of bitterness began to cover every event he touched upon. And I began to understand, when I heard how he slept on the docks, dodging the rats and the cutthroats and the press gangs, why he had turned to burglary when the hunger and the cold began to weigh upon him. Sir Bayard told us of how, finally, the hunger and cold had overwhelmed him in the midst of rifling the chests in a wealthy East End house, how he had found nothing but blankets, had wrapped himself in one and fallen asleep, only to wake in the custody of a Solamnic Knight who was staying in the house on a visit to Palanthas and had, consequently, carried few riches with him for a burglar’s taking. He told of how the Knight had known another Knight who had known another who had known Bayard’s father, and how only then—through this knowing of someone who knew—could he escape the cold and the hunger and the poverty. How only then, many years hence, a Solamnic army at his back, could he set about to recover his lands and the castle at Vingaard Keep.