Melanthrix the Mage (14 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

“A NATURAL CHILD”

The Archpriest Athanasios, meanwhile, was en­grossed in his favorite pastime, searching for himself. Af­ter his discussion with Metropolitan Timotheos the previous month, he had pulled out the mass of documents and papers that he had compiled over the years, and had meticulously reexamined them one by one, discarding many, and putting aside just a handful of sheets that might yet have significance. He then considered his past history thor­oughly for the first time in a great many years.

Clearly, he had missed the obvious. There was a reason that he had been taken to Saint Svyatosláv's Monastery, and it must have had something to do with the laws of inheritance and bastardy. A few hours ago he had researched the relevant legislation himself. In
xxii
Arse­nios
i
was recorded a particularly interesting decree:

“Arsény
i
King of Kórynthia, in order to combat the plague of bastards now beset­ting the kingdom, doth hereby promulgate and enact the following statute:

i
. A natural child who can prove the parental ties to his father shall be enti­tled to a portion of his father's estate equivalent to one-half of the share al­lotted to each of his father's legiti­mate children, provided that the bloodline can be demonstrated conclusively by the mother and verified by a Psairothi judge. In the absence of any surviving legitimate children or grandchildren of his father's flesh, the natural child shall be entitled to the two-thirds portion of his father's estate that would have gone to the latter's legitimate children; and in such an instance he shall also be eligible to succeed to any title which his father might have held or been heir to at the time of his death, even when the parent has full brothers surviving of his own blood.

ii
. An exception shall be made if the father of the child shall, prior to his death, accept the child as his own, declaring such before a magistrate of the state or a priest of the church, and there­upon make appropriate provisions for the livelihood of that child, through endowing an apprenticeship, providing a marriage settlement, or ensuring some other emolument during the parent's natural life, or by providing similar legacies in his will. Having made such provisions, the father may declare, at his sole option, that any natural child who is his legal ward be disinherited from any additional title or estate that otherwise might accrue to him.

He had ignored any supplementary clauses that did not ap­ply directly to the situation at hand.

During the great conflict with Pommerelia, the number of natural-born children had greatly increased in the kingdom, due to the vagaries of war, and many of their fathers had never had a chance to acknowledge or adopt them. At the same time, some of the young men who would eventually have inherited titles and estates had been cut off abruptly in their prime, causing disruption in the normal pattern of succession. Some of these titles had be­come extinct, while others had passed to distant cousins who had never given a thought to the possibility that they might someday have the opportunity to sit as peers of the Kórynthi kingdom.

Yes
, Athanasios thought,
this might well be the an­swer, or at least the beginnings of one
.

And the priest was certain that Arik Rufímovich had known, or perhaps even had served, with his father. Who­ever had arranged the boy's exile had gone to a great deal of trouble indeed. This implied that the stakes had been very high in this particular case, and that the child might have been heir to an estate that was quite substantial, po­tentially from either side of his family.

Arik would likely have been captured at the fall of Borgösha in the year 1165, and then, according to his own testimony, have been paroled just a few months later. By spring of the following year he had already joined the Silent Souls of Saint Svyatosláv, and had retrieved the infant child Afanásy from wherever he had been birthed and weaned, after an apparently long and difficult journey.

Somewhere there would be records of these events. Even if the state and religious archives had been thoroughly purged, there would be items that had been missed, records whose significance would not be obvious except to the seeker-after-truth. Those were the documents that he would now attempt to find.

And that was why the Archpriest Athanasios was spending his free morning at Saint Ptolemy's House, the of­ficial State Archives of the Kingdom of Kórynthia, plowing through old documents and ledger books dealing with the war years, and looking for any clue to his origins. No one had questioned his presence, for his association with king and Council was well known at court. He had only to wave his hand, state “king's business,” and all doors were opened to him. Besides, who would suspect a churchman of deviousness?

The first thing he had to do was to confirm Arik's movements during that crucial period from 1163-1166. To this end he retrieved a set of ledgers marked
Military Ros­ters, 1160-1169
, which provided annual lists of the officers of all the standing regiments in the army of Kórynthia, as well as complete lists of some of the select units.
Les
Gardes Élites
were recorded at the end of each book. On May 1st of the year 1163, which was also the
xxi
st
year of the reign of King Makáry, the
Gardes
mustered 166 lancers. He would start with the assumption that his father was one of these men.

Athanasios recognized some of the names, including the then hereditary prince and his brother, plus some twenty or thirty scions of the noble houses of Kórynthia, among them Susafön, Myláßgorod, Scribónia, Braëntha, Isaúria, Pedanión, Láris, Tléshna, Brócchos, Zikhárra, Lickkaíra, Mattírëa, Zörzö, Iadirénna, Migginsch, Anaráxia, Assaël, Márö, Kranzhkör, Bórkiqvant, Linósz, Ubick, and others, but the rest were unknown to him. He assumed that they were either the offspring of the landed gentry, or younger sons of foreign nobility serving from states then allied with Kórynthia.

Ah,
there it was!

Halfway down the list was an “Arikhos o Rouphinidês,” noted as having enlisted as a Lieutenant on the 5th day of April in
xviii
Makarios
i
, three years earlier.

To this list the archpriest added several other names: King Makáry himself, the Pretender-King Ezzö the Elder, Ezzö's heir, Prince Kazimir, and other male members of both royal families.

Then he began excising those names that he either had known personally or could verify had actually survived the war. This reduced the number of possibilities by per­haps one-third. Of the 111 individuals remaining, another twenty-six were noted in other sources as having lived until at least 1165. Fifteen were confirmed as land-poor foreign­ers whose deaths meant nothing to their family's fortunes. Twenty-two were identified as having had similar situations in Kórynthia. That left forty-eight men who would have to be investigated further. He checked the roster book for 1165, but the page recording the
Gardes
had been torn from the volume; he could see several small pieces of the sheet still stuck in the gutter of the binding. The unit ap­peared to have been dissolved in the following year. Clearly, he was on the right trail!

He finally decided to scratch King Makáry, the pretender, King Ezzö, and Hereditary Prince Kazimir from his list, because any natural son born to these men, al­though he might have been entitled to inherit part of their material estates, yet would have had no legal claim to their thrones or pretensions except after those of any elder le­gitimate brothers, seniority still being a factor in such cases.

Further investigation in the peerage books cut an­other eleven individuals from his list, reducing it to just thirty-seven. These had been younger sons of the nobility whose elder brothers or their children had survived the war. He could probably trim the list a bit further with a trip down the street to the Church Archives. He would leave such research for another day, however.

Now for the second problem.

Arik had stated that he was taken prisoner by Pom­merelian forces at the fall of Borgösha in 1165. As one of the landed gentry, he would have been ransomed. Athana­sios found a volume from that year recording
Exchanges of Prisoners,
i
Kyprianos
iii
. On page after tedious page were noted the names of hundreds of detainees and their dates of parole. On the 6th day of September was an entry, about a third of the way down the page recording the men ex­changed at the Skopélosz Pass between Borgösha and My­láßgorod, one “Erich Rufím,
ætat
.
xxv
.” Fifteen staters had been paid for his release by “Harmon Rufím,
domi­nus
.”

So
that
much at least was confirmed. Arik had also mentioned returning home and subsequently resigning his commission. The question was: where had the resignation taken place, and had a report been filed at military head­quarters outside Paltyrrha? But his efforts here came to naught, for he could find no volumes that specifically recorded terminations of service. Such notations seemed to be scattered throughout the voluminous military
Annales
, with no easy way of locating a specific record.

The archpriest then thought to check Arik's original enlistment papers, and he did find a series of annual vol­umes providing such information. However, they were ar­ranged geographically, and it took an hour's difficult searching finally to locate what he was seeking. Under the heading of “Örtenburg,” the capital of Nördmark, one “Erik son of Rufím” had enlisted there as a sublieutenant on the 15th (not the 5th!) day of April in the year 1160, aged twenty years.

It was obvious that some effort had been made to keep these volumes current until the onset of the war in 1163 had overwhelmed the clerks. A number of enlistees, about a third, did have entries marked with “dec.,” “res.,” or “dism.,” plus an accompanying date in most instances. The rest of the records, unfortunately, among them Arik's, displayed no evidence of the soldier's ultimate fate, other than a set of abbreviations scribbled onto the final column of the page with some (but not all) of the entries. For Arik Rufímovich, the clerks had noted in several different hands the following groups of letters: “
sl, ng, fl, kg, cp, dd
.”

Athanasios studied the volume very carefully, but could make no sense of the code. He hesitated to ask one of the librarians, for fear of drawing unwarranted attention to his quest. He determined to locate the information in some other way.

He would be unable to discover when Arik joined the Silent Souls of Saint Svyatosláv until he visited Saint Alexios's House, the church archives. However, he might be able to verify Arik's statement that he had returned home after being paroled. The personal property tax rolls were arranged by county or barony and then by year, and further subdivided within each book into localities. Athanasios had to look long and hard, but he jumped up and clapped his hands when he spotted the item he was seeking. In the book for Nördmark, in the region called Oberpfitzner, on the 16th day of January in the year 1166, was recorded, with other names:

“Harmanos Rufímobich, 2 st.

“Harikos Rufímobich, 25 ob.”

So Arik had indeed made it home from his two-year ordeal. Just what had prompted him to leave the cozy confines of his family's estate in the middle of winter? What was so important about the child whom he had brought to Saint Svyatosláv's?

These questions and others would have to wait for another day. Now, alas, the archpriest must return to the
Scholê
for his afternoon class on “The Scrying of Entrails.” Lord, how he hoped that that dunderhead Pókazh would re­strain himself. Last time the room had reeked of vomit for hours thereafter.

Oh well
, he thought,
sufficient unto the day are the entrails thereof
.

He gathered together his notes, carefully filed the volumes back where he had found them, and quietly de­parted, brushing the dust from his cassock. None of the clerks noticed that he had left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“YOU'LL DO JUST FINE”

That evening the Princess Arrhiána and her stepson dined with her brother, Prince Arkády, and his family in his luxurious, well-appointed apartments in the palace. The adults ate on the enclosed balcony that overlooked the lights of the city, while the children were fed separately in a small alcove near the main dining room, and then packed off to bed, protesting sleepily.

“But I want to stay up and talk to the grownups!” wailed Rÿna to her governess. “Especially Auntie Rhie. She's my favorite! I never get to see her and cousin Val!”

“Hush, little princess,” said Márissa, tucking a stray lock back under her white lace caplet, and wiping her hands on the snowy apron covering her plain gray frock. She was the middle-aged widow of a former soldier from the provinces. Impoverished and reduced near to beggary after her husband's premature death, she had been brought to court through the offices of the hereditary prince. Her partial predecessor, the overworked and overwrought Kat­rina, had, after the incident with the orts, “taken the va­pors” and departed for Grüninsel, where, so she said, there were far better orts to be had than those available in the palace.

“Don't want no one touchin' mine orts,” she said loudly to Princess Dúra. “
Mine
orts!
Mine, mine, mine!
You can't share any of them!”

“Whatever is she talking about?” Arkády asked.

“I have no idea,” his wife said.

But they both agreed that Márissa was an excellent replacement, and a better disciplinarian than Katrina had ever been.

“Don't encourage your brother,” the governess told Princess Grigorÿna, hoping to appeal to her charge's better nature. “You know how he hurts the next day when he plays too much.”

“Oh, all right, Márissa,” said Rÿna grumpily. “But I do want to see Auntie soon.”

And with that she flounced off to her bedchamber, eyes flashing, curls bouncing, and Louisa clutched tightly to her chest. Once Rÿna had capitulated, Márissa had no problem in getting the other children off to bed. Ari went almost eagerly, for he was already beginning to feel the cost of his day of excitement.

Márissa shook her head sadly as she watched him hobble away.

Poor young master
, she thought.
Such a terrible affliction
.

Meanwhile, the adults were enjoying a sumptuous meal, the winter evening providing a pleasant backdrop to the tantalizing aromas rising from the varied dishes put be­fore them: tender peppered lamb, juicy game hens, and crisp vegetables, all delicately seasoned and cooked to per­fection, plus sweet, candied fruits and honeyed pastries loaded with dates and raisins, all washed down with flagons of Fontana's best, followed by tiny delicate cups of the thick, dark, sirrupy beverage known as
café
in Araby.

Arkády had requested Valentín's presence at the “adult” table on this night of nights, since the young man had reached his majority earlier that day; but for the same reason, he intended to keep the conversation light and in­substantial.

The view of Paltyrrha from the overhang was stun­ning. By the reddish glow of the setting sun they could see Saint-Basile's Quai interrupting the broad, slow-moving ex­panse of the great waterway. The Paltyrrh River was filled with ships and barges coming and going in both directions. In the distance the River Argus, which branched from the main stream just south of the city, snaked its way east to­wards the county of Arrhénë.

“It's good to be back,” said Arrhiána, after the last empty dish had been cleared from the table, and Arkády's servants had retired to a position where they could see and anticipate their master's wishes, but not overhear any private conversation.

“It's one thing to visit now and then,” she went on, leaning back on the comfortable, padded
banquette
, sipping her
café
, “but it's quite another to settle back into my old haunts. I've missed you so. Aszkán is pleasant enough, I suppose, but it's still the provinces, and we feel terribly isolated during the winter months, portal or no.”

Dúra laughed. “Yes, Rhie, you
have
been stuck out in the nether­lands, haven't you? As soon as we can shed our mourning clothes, I'll have my seamstress measure us for com­pletely new wardrobes, including court dresses and gowns!”

“Kásha!” Dúra suddenly said, as an idea oc­curred to her.

She turned to her husband, who had been yawning his boredom while gazing thoughtfully out over the city.

“Couldn't we organize a court ball to welcome Rhie back to Paltyrrha? These past few years, with the king at home....”

She chattered on, not giving Arkády a chance to an­swer.

“...It's
much
more lively now!”

“How
is
Papá?” Arrhiána asked, lines of con­cern etched on her normally smooth face. “He looked a little worn today, not at all the way that I remember him.”

Dúra started to reply, but Arkády shook his head “no.”

“Later,” he said, at the same time sending a silent message to his sister:
I'll discuss this with you privately
.

Changing the subject, he turned to his young cousin, who had been politely but somewhat impatiently listening to the conversation of his elders.

“Count Valentín,” the prince said, “tell us of your plans for the next year. What changes will you be making now that you're in charge?”

“Well, sir,” the young man said, eager to talk about himself for a change. “The War Council has asked me to call up the Arrhénë levies by April, and that's going to be my priority for a while. We have a long march to the west before we can join your expeditionary force. Our hilly terrain and numerous rivers will make it difficult for us to assemble our troops very quickly after the snows melt. We'll do what we can to speed things up, but as you know, things just can't be moved very fast.”

He paused to finish the dregs of his wine, and belched slightly.

“I'll need to hold some reserves back to deal with any problems on our own borders. The king was
most
in­sistent that I remain in Aszkán as Commander of the East­ern Marches. So I guess I'm going to miss all the fun out west,” he said wistfully. “I really wanted to go along, too, but Uncle Sándor will be commanding the Ar­rhéni Lancers and the Guards.”

“You'll do just fine, Val,” Arkády said, clapping the lad on his shoulder. “Never forget, it's only been a few years since the barbarian threat was crushed. They could always return, especially if they hear we're at war somewhere else; and if they arrive while we're in Pommerelia, you'll have the only forces capable of stop­ping them. You're our first line of defense, and that's a very important task.”

“Yes, I know, but...,” Valentín said, clearly disappointed.

“Arkásha,” Arrhiána interrupted her foster son, “I wonder if I could ask a favor of you. It's been a year or more since I've seen our sister, and even longer since I've visited Granny Brisquayne. I'd like to arrange a meeting with them both in Kórynthály tomorrow, and it would please me so very much to have you as my escort, if you can ar­range the time, of course.”

She simultaneously signaled the message:
I also need to talk with you!

The prince paused a moment.

“I have a staff meeting in the morning,” he said, “but I would be honored to accompany you in the after­noon, if that suits your schedule.”

“It does,” she said, “very well indeed. Let's go by way of the river, Kásha. We haven't done that for such a long time. I think the weather will hold, don't you? And now, even though I could enjoy the splendid view and the good company all evening, it's been a very long day for everyone. I still have much to do to get settled in my old apartments, and Val must transit to Aszkán this evening. Will you excuse us?”

After Arrhiána and Valentín had been sent on their separate ways, and the servants dismissed, Dúra turned to her husband.

“I wonder if she'll ever remarry?” she said.

“I don't know,” Arkády said, wholly uninter­ested in his sister's personal life. “If she does, I hope it'll be for love this time.”

“
We
haven't done so badly,” his wife said, twirling a lock of his light brown hair 'round her finger.

“We were lucky,” Arkády said, embracing her soundly. “Or at least
I
was!”

Her response was smothered by his kisses, and gradually degenerated into a short series of giggles, which very quickly became a set of long and short sighs.

“Out here?!” she finally managed to gasp.

“Ah, madame, we take our joy wherever we can find it,” he said. “And we probably shouldn't delay overmuch.”

“I hear thee and obey, oh prince.”

“Oh Drúsha!”

“Oh Kásha! Oh my!”