Sagaria (25 page)

“There is an old road through the high hills we could take,” said Sir Tombin the following morning as Sagandran and Perima were stretching their stiff muscles (Perima attempting to do so with a modicum of elegance). “It’s been so long since it was used that perchance King Fungfari’s searchers will not know of it.”

He stretched a muscle or two of his own. Only Flip had enjoyed a good night’s sleep in the cramped confines of the carriage. Sir Tombin had insisted on sleeping on the floor between the two bench seats. During his many periods of wakefulness, Sagandran wondered if Sir Tombin hadn’t been wise rather than
noble in his insistence. The seat Sagandran was stretched out on was lumpy in all the wrong places, no matter how he twisted his body around to try to conform to the bumps. Even the floor must surely have been more comfortable. He’d heard Perima shifting often as well, and known that she was going through the same torments. She had found the bench acceptable enough when she’d dozed off during the afternoon; she must have been more exhausted than Sagandran thought.

The rain started to fall steadily again and made Sagandran’s muscles feel even sorer and more inflexible than they already were.

“Is it breakfast time yet?” demanded Flip, who’d been infuriatingly bright and jolly ever since waking the rest of them.

“Hush, small companion,” said Sir Tombin, a rare note of testiness creeping into his words. “In a little while. There are more important matters to capture our attention just now.”

“This road you mention,” said Sagandran, rotating his wrist gingerly, “is it a secret?” His mind filled with images of smugglers carrying contraband across wild, mountainous countryside.

“Not so much secret, I say,” replied Sir Tombin, “as forgotten. I wouldn’t know of it myself were it not for an old friend of mine happening to live on it not too many miles from here in the Loristo Valley. He chose to dwell there precisely because the road has been forgotten, and he wished for the world to forget him as well.”

“What sort of friend?” inquired Flip brightly.

“He was a well-regarded mage in his youth – a magic-user. By the time I met him, he’d decided to withdraw from the world and become a recluse.” The Frogly Knight sighed. “He was one of the wizards I asked to try and lift the witch’s curse from me, but even he couldn’t succeed in doing that, alas. We became firm friends, however, and whenever I find myself straying within reach of the Loristo Valley, I call by to see how he’s getting along. No one else ever does, which is the way old Samzing likes it.”

“A mage,” said Sagandran eagerly. “Wow! Like Gandalf, you mean?”

“I don’t know of this Gandalf of yours, nor of any other Earthworld mages,” said Sir Tombin with just a hint of reproof, “but I suspect the resemblance to your acquaintance is not strong. Samzing is a little, well, eccentric. Peculiar. How can I put this?”

“Nuts,” said Perima, her nose pressed against the opposite window as she tried to see if Snowmane was all right.

“Ah, that’s a little—”

“Bats,” she amended. “Crackers. Bonkers.”

“You are so harsh, young lady,” lamented Sir Tombin, picking up Flip and popping the door open on his side of the carriage. “It grieves me. Suffice to say, Samzing and a fruitcake share quite a lot in common.”

He dropped out into the world with an ominous splash, leaving Sagandran and Perima on their own.

“He’s right, you know,” said Sagandran. His rotten night had left him in a critical mood. “You can be pretty nasty and heartless when you want to be. Sir Tombin obviously cares quite a lot about this Samzing. You didn’t have to be so offensive.”

Perima whipped her head around to stare at him. “Sagandran of Earthworld,” she hissed. “Yesterday you saw me at my weakest. You’ve managed to work your way into my heart; I don’t mind admitting it. I don’t want to throw you back out again, but I’ll not let you see me being weak again. This is a tough world you’ve found yourself in – at least, the part of it that is Mattani, for all I sometimes joke about it. You saw my father. To you, he’s probably a figure of fun, someone to laugh at, with all his petty meanness and spite. Yes, you’re right to see him as an object of derision, because that’s what he deserves. But at the same time, you’ve got to realize that he quite literally holds the power of life and death over everyone who’s unfortunate enough to live in his horrible little rathole of a kingdom. Weakness and compassion aren’t useful attributes to have if you come from the court of the high and mighty King Fungfari. They’re liabilities. They can be fatal. People have lost their heads because they’ve shown too much of a capacity for kindness or sorrow. Because I’m not just an ordinary Mattanian, but a Princess of the Blood Royal, it’s even more dangerous for me than for just about anyone else to show any weakness. Weakness is a luxury I may not permit myself.” Her voice was caustic. Her eyes were shiny with barely repressed tears – barely repressed but nonetheless repressed, and firmly so.

“Which means, Sagandran, that most times I try to stop myself from feeling too much. You’ve made this a lot more difficult for me, because I like you far more than I ever intended to let myself like anyone, ever. I don’t want to lose that, however dangerous it might be for me, and I don’t want to lose you either, but I also have to maintain my defenses. So if sometimes I make cruel jokes, that’s because if I didn’t, I’d be letting you see that I cared. Yes, I could tell how fond Sir Tombin is of his friend, and I knew how horrid I was being. But that’s my armor, don’t you see? It’s the only armor I have and I’m keeping it. You don’t have to like it if you don’t want to. You don’t have to like me, either, if you don’t want to.”

She shut her mouth tightly and, pushing forcefully past him, followed Sir Tombin out into the rain.

Sagandran felt as if he ought to have something clever to call after her, but he
didn’t. His head was spinning from what she’d said. He pottered around inside the carriage for a few more minutes, tidying things that didn’t need tidying. When finally he stuck his head out the door, he could see Perima standing next to Snowmane, talking earnestly to the horse. Maybe she could say things to Snowmane that she couldn’t say as easily to the rest of them, not even to Sagandran. Or maybe Sagandran was the hardest of all for her. She’d said Sagandran had worked his way into her heart. Maybe that made it even more difficult for Perima to say what she really felt. It dawned on him that one definition of strength might be the ability to show weakness. Perima wasn’t that strong.

Yet.

And neither, come to think of it, was he.

The rain eased a little.

Whistling with assumed nonchalance, as if the things Perima had said just bounced off him, he opened the carriage door and climbed down into the mud and went to see if Sir Tombin required any assistance.

“I’ll say this about the old road,” declared Flip, “it may be drier than the highway, but it’s a whole heck of a lot bumpier.”

As if to acknowledge his words, the carriage hit a rock and leaped a full yard in the air before landing with a crash. Sagandran grabbed his little friend in midair to stop him from shooting off into the bushes that pressed close to the road on either side.

The rain had stopped again, but the air was still wet. Sir Tombin had at last acknowledged that he was weary of driving the carriage, and had succumbed when Sagandran insisted he and Flip could do the job just as well, especially since Snowmane seemed to understand what Sagandran wanted him to do without having to be given commands. Now they were on the old road, Snowmane kept following it wherever it might lead. Sagandran had the reins draped across his knees, but this was more for show than anything else.

The old road seemed to know how to climb and how to descend, but nothing in between. Everyone aboard the carriage – and Sagandran was certain Snowmane felt exactly the same, only more so – wished that for just a short spell the road would take them on the flat, but so far it hadn’t chosen to. The horse had spent the entire time since leaving the broader highway either straining to haul them up some crazily steep hill or struggling equally hard to stop them from careering down the other side. Sagandran would call out to Snowmane to take a rest at the top and bottom of the hills. The horse would allow himself just a minute or two,
his flanks going in and out like bellows and steaming, even in the dampness, before he trudged determinedly onward. Flip was right in his incessant complaints about the bumps too. If someone hadn’t deliberately scattered boulders and ruts around the roadway with malicious intent, Nature had done a very good imitation.

How long
, Sagandran thought miserably,
is this going to go on? My bottom must be blue from bruises.

The last time he’d been thrown around like this had been three or four years ago, when Dad had taken him on a little tramp trawler. The sea had been rough that day, and the vessel had been battered about by terrifyingly huge waves. Standing on the bow, half-hidden under Dad’s heavy waterproof jacket and with Dad’s strong arm clamping him firmly in place, Sagandran had loved every moment of it. He’d not realised how many times he’d whacked bits of himself against bits of the boat until later, when Mom had gone into a fit of tut-tutting over the bruises she found as she undressed him that night for his bath. Today, by contrast, he was aware of every jolt and thump his body was suffering, and he wasn’t enjoying the experience at all.

He wondered how Perima and Sir Tombin were faring inside the carriage. He suspected they were having a long and earnest talk, despite all the buffeting. Sir Tombin seemed a good sort of fellow to have a long and earnest talk with.

Just like Dad.

Sagandran’s eyes were stinging for some reason. He wiped his sleeve across them, forgetting that he was still clutching his little friend.

“Oi!”

“Oh, sorry Flip.”

Sagandran set the small creature down on the seat beside him once more, only for another bump to send Flip flying again.

“Can you stop that?” cried Flip as Sagandran retrieved him.

“It’d help if you were a bit bigger and heavier,” Sagandran grumbled.

“Just be thankful I’m not. I feel like biffing someone’s nose, and yours is the nearest.”

“Big talk, small fry. I wonder how far I could throw you if I really tried?”

The badinage continued between them. Sagandran wondered if they were doing the same sort of thing that Perima had been talking about: insulting and threatening each other because it was a way of not admitting the depths of their friendship.

He also suddenly realized he knew something about Perima that she didn’t know he knew. She hadn’t sneezed again, not once, since they’d let her out of the barrel, and he suspected she hadn’t needed to sneeze at all while she was in there either. Yelling out to them that she was really, really desperate to “powder her
nose” would have been, in some obscure way, an admission of weakness, whereas attracting attention through irresistible sneezes wasn’t. He smiled, liking her more than ever despite all her prickliness and bugbears.

They lurched wearily to the crest of the next hill and Snowmane paused. Before them was the deepest valley they’d yet encountered, and Sagandran’s heart sank as he thought of how laborious it was going to be for poor Snowmane to drag them up its other side. Then he saw something that caused him to pick up the reins for only the second time. He twitched them to tell the horse he wanted this halt to be more than just a brief breather.

“Sir Tombin,” he yelled. “Come out here and have a look at this.”

The carriage rocked as the Frogly Knight emerged.

“Ah,” he said, “we’re here. That’s old Samzing’s house.”

In the valley below, beside a small lake, stood a dilapidated cottage. Sagandran would have taken the building to be an abandoned derelict had it not been for the coil of smoke rising from its chimney. In fact, now that he looked more carefully, he could see that it wasn’t much like a cottage at all. It was more like a lighthouse with small towers sticking out from the main structure in incongruous places. Surrounding it were avenues of beautifully kept maple trees, not the tumbledown wall he’d thought was there at first.

He wondered how his eyes could have deceived him like this, and then he remembered that Sir Tombin’s friend, Samzing, was a mage. Maybe the ramshackle cottage was what Samzing wanted people who arrived unannounced in Loristo Valley to see – at least at first, before he’d decided whether they were welcome visitors or otherwise. The wizard must have detected them almost as soon as they’d arrived at the brow of the hill overlooking the valley, then scanned them in some magical manner to make sure he wanted them to know he was there. Perhaps Samzing had even been able to tell that Sir Tombin was one of their party.

This last supposition of Sagandran’s proved to have been perfectly correct when, at last, a drooping Snowmane brought their carriage to a halt in front of the lighthouse-like building. There was a tremendous crashing and banging going on within, but it paused just long enough for a cracked voice to yell, “Quackie, you rogue. Forgive me this sorry welcome, but …”