Beyond the Burning Lands (10 page)

The attendant warriors though not reaching his splendor were vivid enough. We would have looked shabby by comparison even on setting out, and we had traveled far and in conditions that offered small opportunity for grooming. Doubtless we were a sorry lot in their eyes. And yet . . . their boots, too, were pointed. Not quite to the length of those of the solitary rider but I would not have cared to sit a horse while wearing them.

Their leader raised one hand, open with facing palm. I noticed a broad belt and a long sword hilt, both thick with colored stones, but his aspect was peaceful. Greene signaled again, and we halted.

The man said: “Greetings. I am Kluellan, Colonel of the King's Guard. King Cymru bids you welcome to his city and his palace.”

Greene made courteous reply, his mustache points bristling but his manner easy. He had a talent for such things. I watched Kluellan while formalities were exchanged. He was not a big man but small, his face dark and thin with a wispy beard. And his horse, though caparisoned with a luxury beyond anything I had seen even in Ladies' jennets, was not remarkable: I would not have exchanged any one of ours for it.

This ceremony over, the Colonel rode beside Greene at the head of our column while his horsemen flanked us. The spectators made it a festive occasion, shouting and cheering and giving vent to bursts of song in surprising unison and tunefulness. The warmth of our welcome was as much beyond normal here as it had fallen short in Marlborough. It resembled a return after a victorious campaign and looking at some of the flushed faces and hearing the wild cries I wondered if they could have been drinking. But I dismissed the notion as absurd: it was not yet mid-afternoon.

•  •  •

I had thought, from the gleam in the peddler's eye when my brother gave him gold and from the tawdriness of the ornament which he had himself presented as a gift for Ann, that his land might be as poor in precious metals as he had admitted it was poor in stock. His greed over the gold box had made my suspicion sharper.

It was in stupefaction therefore that I sat down that night at the King's table. The table itself, running fully seventy feet down a dining chamber half as long again, was covered by a white cloth of spotless heavy damask, so far as I could see without a join in its entire length. On it stood a variety of silver vases filled—incredibly at this season—with red and white roses. Then there were the plates. In Winchester, where we did not reckon ourselves paupers, the Prince and his companions above the salt dined off silver and the Prince himself drank from a gold pot. Here the whole table was laid with gold: plates and pots and even forks.

Later I learned there was no contradiction between this and the peddler's greed. In our cities of the south it was true, as it always must be, that some men had more than others of gold and goods. But, polymufs apart, the difference between rich and poor was far less than it was among the Wilsh. The people of Klan Gothlen, all of them, loved color and sparkle, but only the nobility had possessions of much value: the commoners decked themselves with thin copper and colored glass.

The peddler, even without the gold box, had done well out of his trip; though not well enough to acquire nobility. This was something else I was to be astonished by in the Wilsh: nobility was not granted for bravery in battle but could be bought the way a man might buy a dog, or a bangle for his wife. As Yews had said, they were a trading nation. Someone like him, from being a peddler could become a merchant and, when at last able to buy a house in that part of the city surrounding the palace, be reckoned gentle for doing so.

Astonished and impressed as I was by the show of wealth, I tried to show nothing of it as I talked with King Cymru.

In person he was not unlike his Colonel, small and unprepossessing though with quick, lively eyes and a mouth given to smiling. He was called Cymru because the Kings of the Wilsh always took that name on their accession. He was the fifth Cymru of his line.

He wore a thin circlet of gold on his head, signifying royalty, but this, compared with his other adornments, had a bare and modest look. His doublet was of green silk, its puffed shoulders and long sleeves wired with silver and its front studded with gold buttons that each carried a pearl. His trousers, of darker green brocade, ended just below the knee; beneath them he wore a woman's silken stockings and shoes of crimson leather with gold buckles.

His beard and mustache were plucked and trimmed to a neatness that reminded me of fat Jeremy of Romsey and like Jeremy, he was scented. But whereas in Jeremy this had been a thing that caused men—even his own son—to despise him, here, as I had already found, it was a general custom. I had caught my first whiff of perfume when the Colonel greeted us in the street, and plenty since. Perfumers, it seemed, were important men and well paid for their services and the Perfumer Royal, a thin, white-haired fellow with surprisingly red lips, sat at this very table.

Cymru leaned toward me, his sweetness wrinkling my nostrils with faint nausea. He said:

“I am appreciative, Luke, of the honor your brother pays me by sending you, the Prince in Waiting, on this embassy. And of your own gallantry in accepting such a mission, and a journey into unknown and hostile lands.”

He had learned of my rank from Greene who now, I thought, may have regretted telling him. Greene himself, though commander of the expedition, had been relegated by the King in my favor. I sat at Cymru's right hand but Greene sat well down the table.

I said: “It was not a difficult journey, sire, with no real dangers. We were well led by our commander.”

Cymru smiled. “You are a modest youth.”

They were serving a dish of small roasted birds. The King took half a dozen and crunched one whole. I forced myself to follow suit but almost gagged as the delicate bones splintered between my teeth. The sensation was so unpleasant I scarcely noticed what the taste was like. I washed it down but the ale seemed not just spiced but perfumed; though that could have been the King's scent lingering in my nose. Cymru was chewing with evident satisfaction and reluctantly but with determination I reached for a second bird.

He gave no sign of noticing my difficulties. Between eating he put questions to me about the lands of the south and I answered them as best I could. I was on guard, despite the friendliness of our reception, against betraying anything of importance but it seemed the King was uninterested in military matters. His questions were all about our customs, and way of life.

I myself was trying to make sense of the habits of the Wilsh. I had been shocked to see that women sat down with men at the King's table, and drank with them, and talked and laughed and jested, with no apparent regard for decorum or modesty. But my disgust at this was nothing to what I felt over something I now noticed. The roast had arrived and, accompanying it, a dish was going round full of small yellow sticks which proved to be potatoes, weirdly prepared by being sliced up and cooked in boiling fat. It went to a man a few places down and he waved it away. I saw his hand as he did so: it did not end in fingers but in two nailless digits. This was not man but polymuf!

The King saw the direction of my look but did not read its meaning. He said:

“That is Snake, my Chancellor. A capable man.”

“Snake is a strange name.”

Cymru shrugged. “He got it as a child—from the way he walks. His knees and thighs are jointed unlike those of ordinary men. His hands are different also.”

I said, still finding it difficult to believe:

“And he is your Chancellor?”

“An excellent adviser,” the King said. “I do not know how I would manage without him.”

•  •  •

The shocks were not over for the night. After dinner we retired to another room, smaller than the banqueting hall but still big. It had several large windows, whose glass was not plain but colored and arranged to form pictures and designs. I saw birds and animals, trees and hills and rivers, and the figures of men and women. There were chairs, soft-cushioned, arranged in a crescent and I was given one at the center, beside the King. Some other nobles had seats and the rest stood behind. I saw Greene there, and also ladies standing.

Servants, who were not all polymuf, positioned themselves beneath the lamps which were suspended from the ceiling and had long chains attached to them. A sheet of white silk was let down to cover the facing wall, and the servants pulled the chains. This dimmed the lamps to no more than a faint glow. Then suddenly there was bright light on the white sheet and, a moment later, moving figures.

This did not disgust me as the sight of a polymuf at table had done, but it was unnerving. I knew what it was: a primitive form of what had been called the cinematograph, consisting of an optical system and a source of light. Our ancestors had used electricity for this last, as the High Seers did in the Sanctuary. Here a distant hissing noise told me that it came probably from the mixing of calcium carbide with water. The film was being turned by hand, as occasional jerks showed.

The plain fact was that such a thing, in civilized lands, would undoubtedly be called a machine and its use forbidden on pain of death. But here it was being operated in the royal palace for the entertainment of the King!

What was being shown was an absurdity. The figures on the screen were animals but too ridiculously drawn even to be taken for polybeast. There was a mouse and a cat, and the story told of the efforts of the cat to catch the mouse, which never quite succeeded. The cat was continually falling into traps or down holes, or being squashed by heavy things dropping on it, but none of this harmed it and it still pursued the mouse. The flickering scenes were so scratched and torn as to be barely recognizable in places, but the court seemed to watch with fascination and, though they must have seen it many times before, occasional bursts of laughter. Beside me King Cymru chuckled deep in his belly.

•  •  •

Edmund and I walked together in front of the palace. The terrace was more than a hundred feet long and half as broad, made of blocks of pink granite so polished and so cunningly put together as to seem a continuous stretch of stone. It was bounded by a balustrade of white marble. Behind us rose the palace, topped by its colored spires and onion-domes. In front was the river, which here broadened and tumbled down falls shaped something like a horseshoe. The palace had been built in this spot for no other reason except the view it would command. I had been told so by one of the nobles and repeated it to Edmund with contempt.

He said: “They put a high value on beauty.”

“But to site a palace for such reasons!”

Edmund smiled. “Your first thought, as mine, would be that it should be a stronghold. But then you would have walls around your city.”

“That also is lunacy. If their warriors were so powerful that they had no need of walls I might understand it, but when they ride in pointed boots. . . .”

“On ceremonial parade.”

“Even so! And would you fear them in battle?”

“Perhaps not. But things here are not as we are used to. What enemy do they have? There is no other city to challenge them. You have seen what the outlying savages are like. A rabble.”

“A rabble can turn dangerous under the prick of hunger. Or greed. This would be a fine place to plunder.”

“But for the same reason is a place to fear. And the city has its defenses. It lies snug in the fold of the hills. And has its crossbowmen.”

“Crossbowmen?”

“It is a sort of catapult for shooting arrows, sending them farther and faster and with more accuracy than a bowman could.”

“A machine?”

Edmund shrugged. “They do not ask such questions. But the approaches to the city are lined with hidden redoubts, armed with these weapons. I think the savages would have a warm time of it.”

It was the sort of thing that I should have been finding out. I said, more angry at this moment with myself than the Wilsh:

“It may be. I would still reckon that our army would cut through their defenses like a sickle through sun-dried corn. All this scent and finery and women drinking with men at table. . . . Have you listened to their Captains talk? Not of weapons or horses or tactics, but of whether the new fashion of wearing belt buckles at the side will last the summer!”

“They have a still newer fashion,” Edmund said, smiling. “They are much taken with Greene's mustache and have begun to wax the ends of their own. Have you not noticed? They have such a passion for pointed things I am surprised they did not think of it before. But you are too quick to condemn them, Luke.”

I drew a deep breath. “At any rate it is good to be in the open air. That chatter and those perfumes. . . . I do not think I could stand another banquet.”

“Have you forgotten there is one this evening?”

“I will plead sickness.”

“That would be unwise. The King's daughter is to be presented to you, remember.”

I groaned. “I had forgotten.”

She had been ill at our arrival with some fever that had kept her to her bed. Now she was recovered and was to join us in the evening.

Edmund looked over the balustrade at the sweep of river and the distant falls. Artificial islands had been set up in places and covered with plants that were hung with flowers. The plants were real but the flowers were made from cloth and servants rowed out each morning to see to them and change those that had grown shabby. He pointed past the islands to a building on the far bank built entirely of glass.

“Where they grow the King's roses,” he said, “long before any rose should bloom. The glass increases the sun's rays and they also have braziers to give warmth. They are capable in many things.”

I was not paying much attention. “Blodwen,” I said. “Imagine what she will be like, with such a name. Short and fat, dark and hairy.”

Edmund grinned. “Like Maud of Basingstoke, whom Jenny and I once picked for you to marry?”