Once Upon a Winter's Night (34 page)

Again the horn sounded, and again Scruff chirped in response.

“—only that we were man and wife. And so I took the name Clarisse”—she turned toward the man, and smiled into his eyes of brown—“and he, a master smith, it seems, took the name Georges. But in truth, as anyone in Lis will attest, we have not set one foot from this town in all the days following, and so, ma’amselle, you are mistaken in thinking we are those who we clearly are not. But if we have twins at Summerwood Manor, mayhap ’tis a link to our unknown past. We should go, Georges, to wherever this Summerwood Manor lies.”

The horn sounded for the third time, and the red coach began to roll.

“I am sorry to tell you this,” said Camille, “but a trip to the manor will gain you nought, for no one lives there now; they have all gone missing.”

“Missing?” said the woman, her face falling.

The man, the smith, looked at Camille’s rucksack and stave and waterskin and bedroll and said, “Mademoiselle, if you are to go on that coach . . .” He gestured.

Groaning in frustration, Camille turned and stepped into the road and held up an arm to the oncoming coach. It slowed.

“I am searching for my love,” said Camille over her shoulder to the pair, “somewhere east of the sun and west of the moon. When I find him, together we will seek all the others, those who vanished as well. And when we find them, then perhaps we will resolve the dilemma of exactly who you are.”

The red coach rolled to a stop. One of the lads jumped down and opened the near-side door and lowered the drop-step. “Ma’amselle.”

Camille looked up at the driver, and held up a golden coin and two silvers. “The lad will take it,” said Louis. “Your luggage, too.”

Camille gave the footman the coins and her bedroll and rucksack. He tossed the goods up to the lad atop, then handed her into the coach and closed the door after. Once inside, Camille turned and leaned out the door window. “I shall return, I promise.—And, oh, do you know of a place east of the sun and west of the moon, or know you a bard named Rondalo?”

The woman who called herself Clarisse and the man who named himself Georges shook their heads
Non
, then each raised a hand in au revoir, the smith calling out, “Bon voyage, and may you find what you seek.”

With a
chrk
of tongue and a crack of whip, Louis urged the eight horses forward, and the red coach surged into motion.

Inside, even as the passengers stared at this fille with a sparrow on her shoulder, Camille found a place among them. Judging that Camille was a bona fide passenger, the others introduced themselves, though Camille remembered not a single name, for her thoughts were quite occupied o’er the paradox of Blanche and Renaud.

Of a sudden Lisane’s words came back to her:
“Here is the two of cups upright; it indicates harmony between two souls . . . its position in the array seems to point to two souls you do know, yet mayhap in truth do not . . . your intuition, or mayhap your first thought, may be wrong.”

“Non!” Camille blurted aloud. “Not the same eyes! Hers were dark blue, not black! His were brown, not grey! They are truly not my dear Blanche and Renaud.”

At her outburst, the other passengers looked at Camille as if she had gone quite mad. But one, a rather gaunt and pasty-complexioned man, made a sacramental gesture and said, “Mithras knows, my dear, the eyes are the windows of the soul.”

And toward distant walls of twilight the red coach rolled on and on.

F
orty-two days altogether did Camille and Scruff spend in the company of the red coach, forty-two days and six twilight crossings to go from the village of Lis to the city of Les Îles. Two of those days had been lost because of broken wheels, and another day while waiting for a fresh team. An additional handful of days were lost owing to a daylong drenching downpour that had turned the road into a mire, and the horses had been hard-pressed to go but a mile or two to reach the very next town. There did Louis lay over until the road had dried out enough to press on.

All along the way—from Lis to Les Îles—Louis had often stopped to water and feed the horses and to allow the passengers and coachmen alike to stretch their legs and relieve themselves among the trees or within thickets or beyond rock outcroppings. At times on steep slopes to lighten the load and ease the haul, Louis had called for the passengers and footmen—Girard and Thoreau, both fourteen, both quite skinny, both madly smitten with Camille—to disembark and walk up the long hills, at other times to walk down; when this had occurred, Gautier, the obnoxious stout man—the one who had invited Camille to his bedchamber—complained that he had not spent good coin to slog all the way to Les Îles; and while the others had suffered his diatribes in silence, Scruff had chattered scoldingly, as if telling him to move along, and quietly, if you please.

They had passed through a succession of woodland hamlets and small towns, where they had taken meals and spent overnight in a variety of lodgings—from quaint to primitive to homelike. At each of the those stops, Gautier would imbibe entirely too much wine, and would then single out Camille and make quite lewd remarks; she had found ways to avoid him, though occasionally she was then afflicted with Eudes, the gaunt, pasty-faced man; he would find her and expound upon the evils besetting the world—mortal and Fey alike—and call for rigorous abstinence in all things, for surely that’s the way Mithras meant it to be, except, of course, for the purpose of bearing young, which no doubt Mithras desired. Much of the time in these various towns Camille had gone about and had spoken with the elders and others, but none knew of the place she sought, nor knew of the bard she named, and none had any maps whatsoever of Faery and in fact thought the notion quite odd. The red coach would leave next morn and press onward, and Camille’s spirits had fallen with each day, for nought would stay the withered blossom vanishing from the stave.

As to the other passengers, in general they had been pleasant, though at times they had complained of the jolting, or one or two had debated long and at times loudly with the pasty-faced disciple of Mithras over Truth and Devotion and the Meaning of Life.

Occasionally, Louis had told the passengers that there would be no town to stop in for a midday meal, and that he planned on pausing somewhere along the road for such, and he had bidden each of them to arrange for a small luncheon to carry on board. Gautier had always managed to acquire a bottle of wine to imbibe during these pauses, and then only the glares of all the passengers had quelled his lascivious remarks.

Along the route, some passengers had reached their destinations, and they had alighted and gone on their way with hardly a fare-thee-well. Occasionally new passengers had gotten on the red coach to travel the road to a village or town or sometimes just to a distant stead.

And so did passengers come and go, some pleasant, some silent, some quite loquacious.

During one part of the journey, they had come into a rather darkling forest, and Scruff had chirped and had grabbed a tress of Camille’s hair and had taken to the high vest pocket. There Louis had whipped up the horses, and they had flown through the region, jouncing and rattling bones, Gautier complaining loudly. Sometime later, although the horses yet sped, Scruff had emerged and had scrambled to his usual perch, and in but moments Louis had slowed the coach, allowing the lathered horses to plod. Shortly after, he had stopped for a while, allowing the passengers to stretch their legs, while he and Albert and Girard and Thoreau wiped the horses down and fed them a bit of grain, as well as bore buckets of water to them from a nearby stream. Of the woodland hindward, Louis had said nought, though the lads—Girard and Thoreau—kept eyeing the way aft.

It was during the very last leg of the journey that Camille and Scruff and stout Gautier had been alone in the coach, and Camille had had to forcefully rebuff more than one advance, Scruff chirping and pecking at the man’s fingers whenever a hand came near. At the very first rest stop, Camille had asked Louis if she and Scruff could ride on the seat beside him. Louis had taken one look at the stout man, and had called for one of the footmen to give over his seat to her. Girard and Thoreau had played some kind of finger game to see which would do so, and black-haired Girard had shouted in victory, and, even as he had helped Camille to a seat beside him, he beamed broadly at Thoreau, while fair-haired Thoreau had glumly climbed into the coach following after the stout man.

And so it was that Camille and Scruff were sitting high on a bench at the back of the red coach when Les Îles came into view.

“Oh my, Scruff, but look.”

The coach rumbled along the road high atop a riverside bluff, the river itself quite broad, five miles or so in width, a high, precipitous bluff opposite as well. And Camille saw spread out below them, there in the green flow of water, a city of red tile and white stone built on a series of sheer-walled, granite-sided islands all connected together by wooden spans and swaying rope-and-board bridges. Some of the islands were small, others quite large, yet about each were docks and piers, with boats of all manner moored in the stream or securely berthed in the slips; other boats as well could be seen plying the river. Wooden ladders and steps, or those carved in stone, rose some fifty to one hundred or so feet from the docks to the streets above, streets which bustled with commerce. Here and there, among the white stone buildings with their red-tile roofs, stands of trees grew; perhaps these were the parks Louis had spoken of, parks where minstrels sang and played.

“Oh, Girard, how many islands in all?” asked Camille, turning to the lad.

Girard, who had not spoken a word to her the full of the trip and who blushed madly whenever Camille had looked his way, with his voice breaking between that of a child and a youth, managed to say, “Nineteen, I think, or twenty, if you count that little one there.” He pointed downriver, and Camille saw a tiny isle set off quite a distance by itself with but a single dwelling thereon. No span connected it to the others, and Camille could see no ladders, no stairs, no dock along the facing sheer side.

Once more Camille looked directly at the lad. “Who lives there?”

Again Girard blushed. “Um, they say it’s the River Lady, though no one I know knows for certain.”

“River Lady?”

“Mm, hm. Eternally grieving, rumor tells, though I don’t know why.”

Camille frowned at the islet, then scanned for other isles. Across and upstream, a great cascade poured over the far-side bluff and down, its sound a distant roar. Farther upstream and along a curving-away turn, Camille could see a great notch in the near-side bluff, and there another river issued out into the main flow. Downstream the bluffs curved away beyond seeing, but just at the far bend, on the near side yet another river poured through a notch, though not a tributary as large as the ones upstream.

“Girard, I can only see three rivers; Louis said that the city was at the confluence of four.”

Red-faced, still Girard managed a sheepish grin. “Same mistake I made when I first saw this place, ma’amselle. The fourth river—”

“—Is the river itself,” said Camille, laughing. “How obtuse of me to not see it.”

“Then I suppose that makes me, um, obtuse, too,” said Girard glumly.

“Oh, forgive me, Girard,” said Camille, reaching out and taking his hand, which she found to be quite moist. “I did not mean to imply such.”

Releasing the lad’s hand, Camille turned her attention once again to the isles. “What are those great cages I see sitting along the docks?”

“Um, see the ropes leading up to those booms above? They winch cargo from the docks up to the city, or cargo from the city down to the docks. Sometimes people, too, those who can’t or won’t use the steps.”

“How clever,” said Camille. “But for me, I believe I’ll take the stairs.”

“You won’t have to if you don’t wish to, L-lady Camille,” said Girard, pointing ahead. “You can cross over on a bridge, if you wish. It’ll cost you a copper.”

In the near distance, a long rope-and-board bridge spanned from the bluff to the nearest isle.

“Of course, if you wish, you can take the ferry over instead,” Girard added, “though it’ll cost more, depending on which isle you’re ferried to.”

“I’ll take the bridge,” said Camille, “for I would walk the length of the city.”

“Bridge!” Girard called to Louis. Then he said to Camille, “Louis would stop there anyway, but I just wanted to make certain. And as for walking the length of the ville, it’ll take more than a day.”

“Know you of any good inns, somewhere near the midmost isle?”

“Well, there’s the Green Toad, but not for a lady like you. Then there’s—no wait, that’s quite bawdy, too.—Oh, I know, the Crown and Scepter, but it’s quite expensive and a bit out of the way. Still, a fine lady like yourself, ma’amselle, well, uh—”

Camille smiled as Girard stuttered to a halt. “Thank you, my friend,” said Camille, squeezing the red-faced lad’s still-damp hand. “The Crown and Scepter it is. Where might I find such?”

“Just stay on the main street across the isles, till you come to that big one yon. Then make your way along the road following the downstream bluff. It’ll be on your left midway along the rim.”

The red coach rumbled to a stop at the near end of the span. Like a flash, Thoreau slammed open the coach door and leapt out to hand Camille down, the fair-haired lad smirking at Girard, who was left to retrieve Camille’s goods from the roof and toss them to Thoreau, then clamber down from the footmen’s bench to deal with the stout man.

“Stupid boy,” Gautier snarled at Girard. “You don’t think I’m going to walk that, now do you?”