His Majesty's Elephant (10 page)

Rowan thought the piglets looked rather rangy and dark. Maybe the boar was not a devil after all. Maybe he had been coming to visit the sow, and the child had got in his way, and somehow made him angry. Children could do that. They were very good at it.

But she was no less desperately uneasy. She had not dreamed what she saw in the night. She knew that as well as she knew anything. There was a sorcery on her father. Soon or late, it was going to strike.

At least her headache was gone. The clean air and the fast pace had swept it away. Galla had stopped throwing her head against the bit as she did when she wanted to punish Rowan for not riding enough, and settled down to a level pace.

The noisy idiots who had gone after the aurochs came back as noisy as ever, but their horses were blown; they whooped and shouted at the back of the hunt, where they had to work harder to annoy Rowan. The hounds had gone quiet except for an occasional yip.

Rowan ducked under a branch and thought about slowing Galla down for a bit, to let her get her breath. Her father's big grey was dark with sweat but going steady.

The quiet shattered with the clamor of hounds.

Rowan knew the song of boarhounds on boar. So did everyone else. Horns brayed. Men hallooed.

The chase was on.

oOo

The Emperor and his men hunted the boar through the tangled wood. Rowan hunted the Emperor. At length the wood grew so tangled that horses could not run; the hunters dismounted and left the horses with the servants and a few disgruntled squires, and pushed on afoot.

Rowan was not a sedentary lady. She rode her pony, she walked in Aachen and about the palace, she was not so many months past hoydening in the woods. But this was a run to leave even a trained warrior winded and staggering: beating through brush and briars, leaping fallen trees, catching skirt or sleeve on branches or thorns.

Some of the hunters had shed their cloaks to run easier. Rowan paused briefly to do the same, and to kilt her skirts up higher. She had trews on underneath, which was fortunate. The brambles were fierce.

Her father was still in sight, his helmet bobbing and ducking through the wood, up a slope and down again, and over a trickle of stream. One or two people stopped to drink, but Rowan pressed on, because her father did. He was not a graceful runner, and when he was tired he limped from an old wound, but he was fast enough for that, and he never seemed to tire.

It was a small gratification to see how red-faced and breathless the men around her were becoming, and how more of them fell back, the farther they went. The ones who stayed in the race were the huntsmen, who were used to running on foot, and the most stubborn of the noblemen, and the Emperor's squire. And Rowan, who was so dizzy with exhaustion that she did not even feel it any longer.

She had been running forever. She would run forever. Over this log, round this tree, through this knot of brambles.

The hounds had changed their song again. This deep-throated bellow meant that they had the boar at bay. She heard its snorting, and a shrill squeal followed by the yelp of a hound in pain.

She had to catch her father before he reached the boar—she knew that in her bones. She had to stop him, let another make the kill. But he was a whole furlong ahead of her, as far away as the moon, and as uncatchable.

Then he was right in front of her, and she crashed into him.

Her feet could not stop running. Her lungs could not find air.

He staggered but did not go down, half whirling, his eyes vivid with anger, till he saw who it was. Rowan clung to him and gasped.

Through the darkness that came and went in front of her eyes, she saw what had made him stop: a clearing, and at its end a wall of stone, and at the foot of the wall a milling, howling, battling half-circle of hounds, and in the center of the half-circle, the boar.

The wall was a crag with water running down it, too little to be reckoned a waterfall. The boar's absurdly tiny hooves churned the mud of the base. The hounds, white and red and brown, were speckled black with mud. One or two had leaped in too close: their sides were stained scarlet.

The boar's eye seemed redder yet. It glared at the hounds, the hunt, the world that had betrayed it and would drive it to its death.

No boar ever went alone into the dark, if it could help it. This one slashed at a dog that sprang for its hamstrings. Rowan saw the white tusk pierce the brindled side, saw it catch and tear, and the dog go flying, trailing blood and entrails.

Her father pried her arms loose from around his middle. He said something; she thought it might have been, “Stay here,” and advanced on the boar. His spear was leveled, its bronze head gleaming darkly.

There were others moving in, but they gave place to the Emperor. A few were laughing as men will when they fight. Most were silent, intent.

No raw boys had come this far, at this speed. These all knew how great the danger was, how deadly fast a boar could be, how terribly strong.

Rowan had no spear. She had never been taught to use one. She had to stand helpless as she too often did, and for once she was not inclined to pray.

Prayer had not stopped Michael Phokias. Why would it stop a maddened boar?

Guilt stabbed her. She said a quick
Gloria Patri
, never taking her eyes from her father.

He advanced without haste, seeming to ponder each step before he took it. At just the right point, outside the circle of dogs and in the direct path of the boar's escape, he dropped on one knee and braced his heavy spear in the ground and nodded to the huntsmen. They dived into the pack of dogs, hauling them off, whipping and cursing and making a deafening din.

The boar was occupied with the innermost circle of hounds, the best and the bravest, who harried it mercilessly while the pups and the lesser dogs dropped away. When there was no circle but the inner, the master huntsman lashed the flank of a spotted bitch. She turned on him; he leaped back. The boar saw the opening and charged.

It hurtled straight out of the circle, straight at the Emperor. All that was between him and tusked death was the blade of his spear, and its shaft, and the guard a bare arm's length from his hand.

The boar was mad with rage, its flank torn by a flashing strike as it passed the spotted bitch, its tusks red with hounds' blood. It flung itself full on the spear, driving up and up it, slashing, squealing, snapping in the Emperor's face.

The spear rocked, and slipped in the soft earth. The boar fought its death, twisting on the shaft that impaled it. Only the iron crosspiece held it, and the Emperor's strength.

He seemed rooted in the earth, swaying like a tree in a gale. But he was holding; meeting the boar eye to reddened eye.

The boar died in pieces like the hound it had killed. First its hindquarters went limp, then its scrabbling forefeet, then its jaws opening, closing, its head twisting to slash at its own pain, its eyes filming over, the whole heavy body sagging against the shaft of the spear.

The Emperor held for a while after the boar was dead, to be sure of it. When it was completely still, he drew back carefully.

His squire sprang in to brace the spear, in case the boar revived before the huntsmen could make sure of it. The Emperor straightened, a little stiff, but grinning like a boy.

One of the lords sent up a shout.
“Montjoie!”

“Montjoie!”
the others echoed him, exultant.
“Montjoie! Montjoie! Montjoie!”
And over and under and around it: “Carl! Carl! Carl! Carl!”

Carl the Emperor took the cheers, like the victory, as his due. He gutted the boar with his own hands and gave the dogs their tribute, and left the rest of the butchering to the huntsmen. And all the while he smiled, delighted with himself and his world.

Rowan was smiling, too. She could hardly help it. The boar was thoroughly and inarguably dead. Her father was as thoroughly alive.

They all came out of the thickets singing, with the boar trussed to a pole and a pair of brawny lads carrying it, to find the horses and the stragglers all gathered under the trees. The Emperor had stopped at the stream to wash the blood from his face and hands, but it stained his coat still, his badge of honor from the hunt.

He bade Rowan ride beside him on the way back. She was glad to do that, though she was feeling ill again.

The scent of the boar's blood seemed to wreathe everything, thick and cloying. She was having trouble seeing clearly.

The Emperor seemed to be wearing a chain about his neck, a narrow strand of silver so tarnished it was black. But he owned no such chain, and no jewel to suspend from it. It was a trick of the light, or of the way his coat was fastened. Or maybe the boar's blood had sprayed and darkened, and seemed to circle his throat.

But when she blinked, it did not go away. And when they came out of the forest's dimness into a day still fully light, and showed the boar's carcass to the villagers, he had the mark still, or the chain, or whatever it was. She was afraid to call it what it must be: the sorcerer's spell made somehow visible, maybe because she was too tired not to see it.

The villagers were glad in a dour way. The slain child's mother said nothing. She stared at the boar as if to commit it to memory, and her face wore no more expression than it ever had.

“Good wife,” said the Emperor, “would you be wanting to take this as the wergild for your son?”

The woman seemed not to hear him at first. Then she shook herself hard, so hard Rowan heard her teeth click together. “No,” she said, or Rowan thought she said, indistinctly. And louder: “No. Take it and eat it. We won't touch flesh that ate our son's flesh.”

Some of the hunters looked queasy at the thought, but the Emperor inclined his head. “As you wish. Good day to you, and God's blessing on you and the rest of your sons.”

“I have no more sons,” said the woman. She stood like a tree as they rode away, eyes fixed on the ground where the boar had lain, where its blood had seeped into the earth.

oOo

When they were out of sight of the village, the Emperor shook his head. “There's a sad grim creature,” he said.

“Maybe she'll come out of her grief now the boar is dead,” said Rowan.

“Maybe,” said the Emperor.

She could see that he did not believe it. Nor, much, did she. People who grieved could do strange things, but this woman looked as if she had been born grieving.

Well, thought Rowan. The boar was dead, and would kill no more children. “Father,” she said, “will you eat the boar tonight?”

He raised his brows. “So you think she was right?”

“I don't know,” said Rowan. “It's just... what if it lived on manflesh?”

“Oh, I doubt that,” he said. “Its entrails were full of beech-mast and acorns—good boar sausage, and no meat that we could see.”

“Then maybe it's not the boar that killed the boy.”

The Emperor laughed, which almost made her angry. But he was not laughing at her, not really. “Then we'll have to go hunting again. But I think it was the right one. Adalbold is a very good tracker, and he says that this is the boar that left spoor in the village.”

“I hope so,” said Rowan, crossing herself to make it surer. The Emperor's neck seemed clear now of marks or scars. She had been tired, that was all, and worn out with being afraid for him.

A little farther on, the road was wider and clearer. Some of the younger men, seeing that the Emperor was inclined to be lenient, surged around him.

The Emperor's stallion fretted and bucked. He laughed and let it go.

Rowan was almost caught behind, but Galla was never one to miss a race. She leaped from sedate trot into flying gallop.

They ran past fear, past grief, past anything at all but the glory of speed. The grey stallion was just ahead, taunting Galla with his heels. She set her head and pinned her ears and showed him what she thought of that.

Her mane whipped Rowan's hands. Her back surged and sank, surged and sank. Her hooves thudded on the packed earth. The stallion's rump was level with Galla's nose, then her neck, then her shoulder.

Carl turned his head. He was laughing.

He leaned forward over his horse's neck, urging it on. But Galla was having none of it. They were neck and neck now, grey stallion, bay mare.

It happened very slowly. Rowan did not even know what she was seeing till afterward. It seemed that the chain about the Emperor's neck thickened to a cord, and from a cord to a rope. And drew suddenly tight.

One moment he was racing, laughing, urging his stallion to outrun that upstart of a mare. The next, he was falling, tumbling slowly like a juggler at a fair, arms and legs like the spokes of a wheel, horse vanishing from beneath him, earth rising to meet him.

Rowan had no memory of reining Galla to a halt, hauling her around, sending her plunging back toward the man on the ground. But Rowan was there, still mounted, and he was there, still fallen, and she knew nothing, not even whether he was alive or dead.

The Emperor was alive. That was all, at first, that Rowan cared for. But alive was not enough.

He could not ride or walk or talk. He had to be carried back to Aachen, mute and staring, with such a look of shock in his eyes that Rowan wanted to howl.

They thought he had had an apoplexy. His doctors discoursed learnedly on its causes and effects, and debated endless treatments, each more preposterous than the last. They had the Emperor in their power at last, who had always mocked and scorned them, and they were taking full advantage of it.

Someone else drove them out before Rowan could, with as much sheer rampant gusto as the Emperor ever had. And well she might: the Abbess Gisela was great Carl's sister. She did not look so very much like him, slender silvery creature that she was, like the niece who was named after her, but she had her brother's sharp wit and his strength of will.

Rowan, seeing her, burst into tears.

“There now,” said the abbess when the last of the doctors had fled in a flapping of robes, and the servants were left to look after the Emperor in peace. “Suppose you tell me what happened to him.”