Otherwise (8 page)

Though woolly clouds rose over and crossed the valley, to them now it seemed that the valley turned beneath still clouds, sharp and clear as though painted for some vast pageant. So the wind too, which moved the clouds, seemed to be rather the valley’s passage through still air: they at its center watched the world turn beneath the sky.

Then the turning valley entered new country: the clouds it moved under were denser, gray as lamb’s wool, and the valley moved faster through cool, wet air that stirred their hair and opened their nostrils. The valley groaned in its quickened passage, ground rocks perhaps that sparked pale lightnings: then its forward edge passed through a curtain of rain, and the fat drops filled up the air, startling them and dispelling their dream. They moved close, back into the dense grove that was suddenly noisy with rain; found themselves tasting each other’s rain-wet flesh.

His hunger surprised her; she herself felt cool, poised, as she liked to feel before doing a dangerous thing, though often didn’t; she relished the feeling now, helping his helpless-eager hands undo her. She let him feast on her, let herself by degrees expand with heat out of her reserve until she must cry out: letting herself cry out felt like falling backwards when something soft is sure to break the fall. Her cry stilled him, his hands grew less sure; so she began to take him, moving the smooth homespun from his smooth flesh.

Thunder beat on them. The grove grew wild and dark with storm.

It had always fascinated her, blind, eager, so helpless and vulnerable and then too imperious, not to be denied. She felt once again poised, but now on some higher peak, ready to leap yet delaying. He made some motion toward her, it didn’t matter, this one held her with its blind eye: when she took it, it leapt in her hand as though startled.

Around her as she woke the grove let drops fall from leaf to shuddering leaf. Outside, the clouds were dark rags against pale night sky where only the brightest stars could be seen. Around the meadow sat many, in dark groups of two or three, the long black of their Guns sharp in the weird light. More came from the forest and the valley below, noiselessly, calling out in the voices of night things to announce themselves. Adar was gone.

It was this she had come for.

At the meadow’s center, a pavilion, a gesture toward a pavilion—two slim stakes, a gauzy banner, a rug thrown over the wet grass. On the rug Someone to whom, singly, each in the meadow came. Nod waited, watching, till she felt some invisible motion in the whole of them that brought her to her feet, moved her in her turn to the pavilion.

Slim, soft, white as Death, maned with white hair, the Neither-nor perched upon the rug like an ungainly bright bird. Laid out on the painted board before It were the painted cards of an oblong deck.

The Neither-nor, neither man nor woman, arbiter of the Just, keeper of the Fifty-nine Cards and of all secrets. It—not-he-not-she—resolved in Its long, fragile body the contradictions that the rulers of this world (and their Gray minions especially) would keep at war: ruler and ruled; good and evil; chance and certainty; man and woman.

Since the Just had been, such a one had guided them; since the first appeared, ages ago, to free men from tyranny. That first Neither-nor had appeared out of nowhere, pure emanation of the Deep or the heavens, bearing in one hand the Cards, in the other a Gun—sexless, without orifice or pendants; birthless, without omphalos; deathless, who had only Departed and left nothing behind.

This Neither-nor, successor to the first, holy body of Chalah, Two Hands of Truth, threw down Its paint pot and bit of mirror in disgust. In this light, Its eyes could not be made to look the same…. Its anger passed, dispersed by a motion of the Two Hands. Nod came close to sit before It; It turned Its fabulous head to look at her; within the softness of Its face Its eyes were still fierce and male somehow. For this Neither-nor was not clean of sex, not truly neither, but only both, vestigially. It had been taken, soon after birth, by the Just, raised up to be successor to the old Neither-nor when It would die. So this one would die, too: was only human, however odd. But there was this Providence, and always (the Just believed) had been: the Neither-nor was Just, most Just of them all; wise; chose well from the Cards whom the Guns would speak to; watched their secrets well, and would die to keep them secret. It was enough. The Neither-nor received their love, and gave them Its love freely, even as It dealt Death.

“Child.” With a jingle of bracelets It reached out a Hand to stroke Nod’s shorn head. “Many have told me of Black Harrah.” Its fluid fingers turned and turned the Cards. “Do you know. I have a stone, a leaf, a bit of earth from the places where six of your brothers and sisters lie, six who drew Black Harrah from my cards?” Nod could say nothing. The Neither-nor regarded her, a tiny smile on Its mauve lips. “Do you come again then so soon to draw another?”

“What else could I do, Blessed?” It was not bragging; in the winey, wind-blown night, chill after rain, here before fate, Nod felt transparent; her words to the Neither-nor seemed so truthful as not to be hers at all. The Neither-nor lowered Its head, made a tiny motion, turned a first card. Nod began to speak, telling what her life had been, plainly; what she had seen; who of the great she had been near. Once the Neither-nor stopped her, said over what Nod had said: “In Redhand’s train, dressed in red domino…”

“A naked face, his eyes not like men’s eyes. In the battle with the Queen, it was he who saved Redhand when he fell…”

She watched as the Neither-nor turned down a card: it was an image of Finn, with a death’s head and a fire lit in his belly. It had this motto:
Found by the lost
“Strange,” the Neither-nor whispered. “But no, not him… Go on. Is there Young Harrah in it?”

No, Nod thought. Not both father and son. Let the cards say not so… She went on slowly, watching the silent fall of the cards.

“They call themselves Brothers of the Stag.” She swallowed. “They are both Red and Black, and say they have put aside their quarrel to all serve the King. Young Harrah is their chief…”

The Neither-nor turned down a card. “Not Young Harrah, then. Here is Chalah.”

The deck the Neither-nor read from contained fifty-two cards, each a week, and seven trumps. These trumps were they whom the Grays called the Possessors, whom the Seven Strengths did endless war with in the world and in men’s hearts. The Just knew otherwise, that there were but Seven and Seven alone, and contained the contradiction that for their own ends the Grays had turned into open war so long ago. At the turn of each trump, the Neither-nor named it; for it was these Seven who ruled Time, which is the Fifty-two.

Chalah, who is Love and its redemption, is also Lust and its baseness.

Dindred, who is Pride, Glory, thus Greatness in the world’s eyes, is also blind Rage, thence treachery and ingloriousness.

Blem, who is Joy and good times, Fellowship and all its comforts, is too Drunkenness, Incontinence and all discomforts.

Dir, who is Wit, is the same Dir who is Foolishness.

Tintinnar is the magnanimity of Wealth, the care for money, thus meanness and Poverty.

Thrawn is Strength and Ability, exertion, exhaustion, and lastly Weakness and Sloth.

These six, when they fall upon a name, shelter the one named, or throw obstacles in the path of the Just were they to pursue him; thus Chalah, for a reason the Neither-nor could not tell, protected Young Harrah. Nod went on, her heart beginning to tap at her ribs.

“Redhand stays apart from them, though he wears the badge too. He gathers strength. His brother Learned is a dark Gray. His brother Younger holds the castle Forgetful. His father is slain, all his father’s honors and lands are his. He is greater than the King…”

Lips pursed, the Neither-nor turned down the last trump.

Rizna is Death. Death and Life, who carries the sickle and the seed-bag, and ever reaps what he continually sows.

“You are brave,” It says in Its sweet, reedy voice.

“No.”

“Implacable.”

She cannot answer.

“Just.”

“Yes.”

“I think you are.” It slides Rizna reversed toward Nod. “Are you afraid?”

“Yes.” Till Death—his or hers—they have been wedded here.

Tears have suddenly begun to course down the Neither-nor’s white cheeks. It is an ancient being; so many fates has It read, so many It has sent to death; weeps now because It can see nothing.

“Redhand,” Nod says, trying to take him by the name. “Redhand.”

The Arbiter Mariadn is dying.

The old, old grayest of all Grays lies propped on pillows within her chaste apartment. Its casement windows have been opened to the garden, though the doctors think it ill-advised, and a breeze lifts the edges of many papers on tables.

Her face is smooth, ashen, calm. Before sunset, before morning surely, her heart will stop. She knows it.

Through all this week they have come, the great Grays and the lesser, from every quarter, from the court, the law offices, the country seats, foregathering here like a summer storm. For a time she could feel their presence in Inviolable, in the chambers outside her still room; they have mostly faded now. Her world has grown very small; it includes the window, the bed, the servant ancienter even than herself, her dissolving body and its letting go—little else now.

The servant’s face, a moon, orbits slowly toward her.

Has he come yet?
she thinks she asks. When the servant makes no reply, she says again, with pain this time, “Has he come yet?”

“He is just here.”

She nods, satisfied. The world has grown very small, but she has remembered this one thing, a thing expressed in none of the wills and instruments she has already forgotten. She would have it over; does not wish it, an oath in an autumn garden, a thing still left to do, to intrude on her dissolution, a process that has broken open all her ancient locked chests, torn down her interior walls, let past light in to shine on present darkness: the light of a farm on the Downs, in the spring, in seedtime, warming young limbs and brown earth…

He has been there some time when she again opens her eyes.

“Learned.”

“Arbiter.”

“They will not deny me…” She stops, her lips quivering. She must not ramble. There must be strength for this. There is: she draws on it, and the world grows smaller. She calls her servant. “Call them now. You know the ones. Those only.”

She takes his warm hand in her cold. “Learned, lean close… Learned, my successor will be named by the Councils. Hush, hush…” He had begun some comforting words. There is no time for that; her time spills as from a broken clock. “Help me now. For our Order’s sake. You must; you have no choice, no reason to deny me that can stand. Lift me up. They’ve come.”

A cloud of smoke at me bed’s end coalesces into faces, forms. Many she has known since they were boys and girls; it seems they have changed not at all. She must be firm with them. “I would have Redhand succeed me.” She cannot tell if they are looking at her, at Redhand, at each other. It is too long ago to remember which is which, who would accede, who would be swayed by which other. It doesn’t matter. “There is no time or strength left me to argue it. Take him at my word or do not. But let not one of you desire my place. Shun it. I place on Redhand only labor and suffering. Remember that. If you will not have him whom I name, let whomever you name have your pity and your love.”

All done; and the last of her strength leaks away. She finds it hard to listen to the words spoken to her, Arbiter, Arbiter; she has forgotten why this man should not be excluded from her world like all else, except that his hand is warm and his voice pleasant though senseless.

Done. Sunset has come suddenly, the room is dark. Her little world with a grateful sigh shuts up small, smaller than a fist; it draws to a fine point and is gone.

And yet, and yet—strange: even when she is cool on the white-clothed bed, still the sunlight enters soundlessly in at the casements, the wind still lifts the corners of many papers on tables. In the garden trees still drop blossoms on the paths that go their ways; Learned Redhand at the casement can see them, and can feel on his face the hot, startling tears, the first he has shed since he put on Gray.

3

T
o my best-loved Caredd, at Redsdown:

He who bears this is known to you, and can tell you much that is too long for this.

You must know that the Arbiter Mariadn is dead. It was her wish, and the Grays in Council acceded to it, that my brother Learned be successor to her. This is great news and cause for celebration
—
no other in our family has risen so high in
this.
The ceremonies & all else attendant on this have been secret in part & I have heard of them only through Learned’s hints, but it is all very solemn and grand.

So this must be celebrated! You write me that the lambs are fallen & the rabbits everywhere bold; well, then, there will be a feast at Redsdown, such as this soft age has not seen, that your father’s father might have been satisfied to sit at I leave it to your good judgment, & know that all you do will honor us.

If it cannot be Rokesweek Eve, write quickly and give it to Ham to carry.
I will say
Rokesweek Eve if I hear nothing.

My
duty etc. to our mother there, and kiss my
girl
for me. I mean to set out this week eve.

By he who bears it, at the Harbor, Devonsweek

Beneath his signature, in his own tiny, long-tailed hand:

Caredd, there are those here who say they are not enemies to me and whom I do not fear but
mistrust They
are partly the King’s creations; they are little men of no consequence, for all they wear the King’s badges and style themselves Brothers of the Stag. If such a feast as I mean could show such ones what it is to be Protector of men and lands, such would not be from my purpose. I know you know my mind; you ever have.
R.

She folded the crackling paper and smiled at its bearer. “Welcome to Redsdown,” she said. “Welcome back.”

“It’s good to be back.” This the Secretary knew to be the right response, but in fact it seemed to him odd in the extreme to have returned here: it was the first place on his journey he had returned to, and he half-expected that from here he would return to the horsegathering, the Endwives’ cottage, the egg… “And good to see you.” It was: her autumn-brown eyes and careful hands, her auburn hair stirred in him the devotion he had felt that autumn. He watched her, feeling himself suddenly to be One, as he had felt the King and Redhand to be One… no. Not wholly like.

She took his arm and led him up through the garden he had found her in, the garden mad with spring and sun, toward the low dark of the hall. “You are Secretary to my husband now.”

“Yes.”

“No longer Possessed, or some creature?”

He couldn’t answer.

“You’ll keep your secret, then.”

“I don’t know how to tell it.”

“You must have many new ones now. City secrets, policy…” She summoned up vague and dangerous knowledge with her hand.

“I am a Secretary,” he answered. “It’s not… what was intended, I don’t think. If I could, I would forget—all else. It’s sufficient.”

“Learned…”

“Taught me much. To read. To learn old knowledge.” Like a shudder, he felt it come and pass again:
Leviathan.
“Yet never who or what I am. I intend now to serve Redhand.”

She looked at him; his blank face still showed no trace of a man behind it, the eyes were still pools of unknowable dark.

“And serve you too,” he said. “If I am allowed.”

She smiled. “You have grown gracious in the City. Yes. Serve me. Tell me of these Brothers of the Stag and if there is danger to Redhand. Help me in this feast.” Her smile faded. “Watch Redhand. You saved him in battle. You have strengths that frighten me. Watch Redhand, ever.”

He would. If it were not the Task he had been made to do, not the Direction he had been made to take, it came from her. It would do.

Late, late, Redhand came to her. Below, the guests who had arrived with him at sunset went on with their play, though now it was near sun again. All night since his arrival, he had been with her only as master of Reds-down with its mistress; she had watched him shepherding his City friends and these Brothers of the Stag from drink to supper to drink again with a set and icy smile she had not known before. She had watched him, and Learned, for whom after all tomorrow’s feast was made, left out of jokes or made the butt of them—so it seemed to her, though they both smiled, and Redhand poured cup after cup of drink, not drinking himself, as though he were afraid of Blem’s indiscretion…

And then late, late, after she had been driven to bed by the malice and queerness she felt in the King and his young men, Young Harrah especially, Redhand came to her.

Plunged himself within her warm coverlets, silent, hasty, so needful it was hard for her to keep up with him, yet so fierce that he carried her along as in a storm.

Later, a chill summer rain began.

It seemed to Redhand that it always rained when he came to Reds-down. Always. Passion spent, he felt that fact weigh on him with an awful injustice, filling him with black self-pity, till he must get up from the bed and pull on his shirt, light a light and go to the gray window to watch it fall.

In a while, awakened by his absence, she called to him in a small voice.

“It was the rain,” he said.

She stirred within the bedclothes. “What do they intend?”

“They?”

“Below. The King.”

He said nothing, not knowing himself.

“Harm? To us?”

“And if they did?”

Rain fell with a constant sound. The darkness spoke to him again: “The King,” she said. “Young Harrah is… They have some plan.”

“They come at my invitation. To a feast. They have no plan.” It put him in mind of them, hinting smugly at what they did not dare execute, at revenge they were too weak to take, power they could not seize. Not from Redhand. His head drew down to his wide shoulders, bull-like, as he thought of them. “Let him suck the King. Let them make their jokes, who holds the King’s scepter. They are insects at a candle flame…”

She knew then, as she held still to hear his gritty voice, that she had been right, that the King intended if not her husband’s death then his ruin; and that Redhand did not know it.

The feast day brightened; the rain began to blow away toward the City.

“Shall we go in, then?”

Fires had been lit in the apartments and anterooms of Redsdown, despite the new summer; the old house’s chill was not to be banished by a few weeks’ sun. Learned Redhand stood before one, his hand with its dark agate ring on the carved mantel. In his other hand he toyed with a bit of flame-red ribbon.

“He comes,” Fauconred said, “to a feast, with an armed guard larger than his host’s household.”

“A king’s prerogative,” Redhand said.

“Do you suppose,” Learned said, “he has come to steal our jewels? Ravish our pages?”

Fauconred ran his fingers through his burr of gray hair. “I do not suppose, Learned.” He turned to Redhand. “If I may, I will take my feast with the guard.”

Redhand shrugged. “Now let us go in. Caredd…” He took her arm.

Learned turned from the fire, discarding into it the bit of ribbon, which was consumed before it met the flame, so fine a stuff it was.

Wide doors were thrown open, and they entered the hall, and all assembled rose with a murmur for the grayest of all Grays.

The last juggler dropped his last ball and was not invited to pick it up again. The musicians, prettily arranged around the entrance arch on a scaffolding or trellis of beams, flower- and banner-decked, fell silent; the musicmaster glanced at the steward, who glanced at Redhand, but received no cue.

There was the King left, and Young Harrah at his left side, and a few of the Brothers of the Stag. There was Redhand on the King’s right side; there were some few others at the great tables piled high with ravished roasts and pastries; some of them were asleep, face down on the wine-and grease-stained tablecloths.

“Splendid,” the King said. “So… antique.”

Alone at one long table from which the Arbiter and Caredd and the rest of Redhand’s house had departed, the Secretary to Redhand sat, peeling a fruit he did not intend to eat.

“More of this?” Redhand asked, motioning a cup-bearer. The King motioned him away.

Also sitting alone, the King’s brother Sennred watched the high table, keeping one hand on his sword. (Weapons, the feast-steward had said, were not allowed within the banquet hall. Sennred had not replied, and the steward had not repeated himself. Sennred’s sword slept with him. For sure it would feast with him.)

“This,” said the King, “is a man’s place. Here, on land that is his, with his dependents around him. A good farmer, a good neighbor.” Young Harrah giggled. “Your father and his must have sat here…”

“The land is mine by marriage,” Redhand growled.

“Oh. I remember. The Red madwoman.”

Redhand said nothing.

“I wonder,” the King said, “what it is you find in the City so precious as this you leave behind.”

Redhand felt a sudden chill of premonition. All this was another of their jokes, it had a cruel point to cut him with he hadn’t seen yet. He saw, though, that Young Harrah had stopped toying with the remnants of his feast.

“My duty,” he said carefully, “requires me in the City.” The King was not looking at him. “I have the City’s gem, given me by your father.”

The King reached out and with his long, careless fingers lifted the heavy jewel that hung from Redhand’s chain. “Will you give it to me, then?” He asked it coyly, teasingly, as one would a token from a lover.

“It is not mine to give.”

“Is it, then,” the King asked, “mine to give?”

“It is.”

“And mine to take? It seems to me,” he said, not waiting for reply, “that one with so many dependents, lands, a wife and daughter, might find this stone a heavy weight to bear.”

Seeing at last what they intended, a weird calm subsumed Redhand’s fears; he felt suddenly no further obligation to fence with them. Only let them not mock him further. “You’ve come for this.”

“We will not leave without it.” Young Harrah’s voice was a light, melodic one; its tone never varied, no matter what he said with it. “I have seen enough of country pleasures for one year; the sooner gone the better.”

“You see,” the King said, “perhaps someone without these other responsibilities, someone…”

“Attached only to the King,” Young Harrah said, smiling. “Someone…”

“Stop this.” Redhand stood, tore the jewel from the chain and flung it down along the table. “I bought it with my father’s blood. Can you return me that price?” He kicked back his chair the better to see Young Harrah where he sat; the chair’s fall resounded in the high hall.

“You,” he said. “Can you?”

Young Harrah regarded him. “Return you your father’s death? I wish I could. It’s not pleasant to remember.”

“Not—pleasant.” There was a sudden mad edge in Redhand’s voice that made his Secretary stand.

“Your father,” Harrah said coolly, “did not die well.”

From the table Redhand snatched up a long bone-handled carving knife; the King stood to block his way, and Redhand threw him aside, reached Harrah and pulled him to his feet; slapped Harrah’s face once, again.

Sennred was up, sword drawn. The King took Redhand’s shoulder, Redhand pulled away and threw over the long table before them, dragged Harrah through the wreckage of dishes and cups to the center of the floor.

“Did not die well! Did—not—die well!” Redhand bellowed.

The Brothers of the Stag rushed forward shouting, and the King too, crying out, “Sennred!”

Redhand from a table took up another knife and thrust it into Young Harrah’s hands. “Now fight me! Fight me,
woman!”
Again he slapped Young Harrah, and blood sprang from Harrah’s nose.

Sennred reached them first, and turned to face the King and his Brothers, the quick sword against them. “Stand aside,” he said quietly. “It is not your quarrel. Stand all aside.” And they must.

Harrah held the knife before him, a quarry’s fear in his eyes, and backed away, stumbling on spilled cups and rubbish; Redhand, heedless, moved on him, slashing with the unwieldy weapon, shouting at Harrah to fight. For a moment, desperate, Harrah stood, resisted; Redhand took a cut on the cheek, and at the same moment drove his blade deeply into Harrah’s neck.

Harrah screamed, fell; his blood leapt, spattering Redhand. He twisted once, tried to rise, plucking at the blade in his throat; and then lay still, eyes wide.

There was a moment when no one moved, no one spoke.

Then someone struck Sennred from behind as he looked down, stunned, at Young Harrah; he fell sprawling across the floor, and the guests made for their host.

“Redhand!” The Secretary stood beneath the scaffolding at the archway. “Here!” He threw his arms around one of the thick beams that supported the structure and began pulling. It groaned, the musicians leapt and scrambled. Redhand ran through, with Farm’s bastard son close behind. The Secretary strained, crying out with effort; the scaffolding swayed, splintered and collapsed before the archway, blocking pursuit.