Читать книгу Lands of the Earthquake - Henry Kuttner - Страница 6

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Mist hung in the open courts of Kerak. Attendants in archaic garments ran forward to help the riders dismount; they crossed a stone-flagged pavement, invisible in mist, and entered a half-seen door. The cold smell of stone and the fragrance of wood-fires closed about them as they went down a corridor and into a great stone hall high enough to have a drift of mist like miniature clouds hanging in layers under the vast ceiling.

This was a room out of another age. Boyce had seen pictures of such halls many times, but he had certainly never thought to stand in one, looking down the length of the room toward the dais at one end with a bright fire roaring in the chimney and men and women in the garments of six hundred years past lounging before the blaze.

He followed Godfrey over the rush-strewn floor toward the dais. There were women there, in bright velvets, belted with jewels. The breath came suddenly thick in his throat. He knew no more about her than the outline of her body against a crystal window and the flash of a brilliant face glancing once at him across her shoulder. But if she sat here on the dais, he would know her. And perhaps she did. Perhaps she did....

A great voice rang out suddenly.

“Well, Godfrey! What skulker from the marshes d’you bring us now?”

Boyce started violently and paused among the rushes, staring toward the speaker. He knew the voice. He knew it as well as his own. He had heard it somewhere very lately—not with the arrogance that was in it now, but with the same inflections, the same pitch and pacing of phrase—the same voice.

Godfrey took his arm and they went up the steps of the dais and stood before the speaker, Boyce staring hard.

“A stranger from our own land, I think, Sir Guillaume,” Godfrey was saying. “A stranger from home—or a spy. I found him in the marshes fleeing from the Huntsman’s pack.”

The man in the high-backed seat of honor by the fire lolled at his ease, glaring up at Boyce under thick brows. He was a big man with immense strength in every line of him under the long velvet robe. His tanned face was seamed with the scars of old sword-strokes but his blue eyes were very bright and the mouth beneath a drooping yellow moustache had the arrogance born of a life-time of command.

And it was a face Boyce had seen before—seen very recently. A face of haunting familiarity. This was nothing out of his dreams or his forgotten memories. He knew this face.

“Your name, stranger?” Sir Guillaume demanded peremptorily. Boyce was aware of a sudden flush. He did not like the man. It was more than any quick surface dislike. There was antagonism between the two. He saw it on the Crusader’s face and felt it on his own.

“I am called William Boyce,” he said shortly.

At Sir Guillaume’s shoulder a black-browed woman in green leaned forward. She was looking from the knight’s face to Boyce’s.

“A moment, Sir Guillaume,” she said softly. “I think—is it only my fancy, messires, or is there a likeness here?”

The others stirred in their chairs and bent to follow her gaze. But Boyce understood even as the woman spoke. He knew—and the knowledge was a flash that almost stunned him—what lay at the root of the familiarity in Sir Guillaume’s face and voice. This was impossible—it could happen only in such a dream as he walked in now.

Sir Guillaume was himself, given a few more years of age and a life-time of arrogance. The face and the voice were his own!

Guillaume was gaping at him. Now he rose and glared under bent brows into Boyce’s eyes, and they were exactly of a height. Blue eyes scowled at blue eyes. Identical mouths set angrily.

“Even to the names, Sir Guillaume!” the woman in green said. “He is called by your name in the English tongue. William du Boyce—”

“I am Guillaume du Bois, certainly,” the knight growled, still staring in the other man’s eyes. “But if there is likeness here I do not admit it!”

A young page, kneeling on the edge of the dais, had been polishing a great Norman shield. Godfrey bent and snatched it up.

“Look, Sir Guillaume,” he said.

Guillaume stared for a long moment into the mirrory steel. He glanced at Boyce and then back again, and his face began to suffuse with rage and something like terror.

Suddenly he flung down the shield. It struck the floor with a hollow clang and above the noise Guillaume roared with anger.

“Sorcery! By the Lance, this man’s a sorcerer! Seize him!”

Godfrey’s big hand closed on Boyce’s arm. Boyce himself, too bewildered to think clearly, shook it off with angry violence. The old French forsook him in his anger, and he could only shout in English,

“Let me go, you fool! I’m no sorcerer! I—”

His voice was swallowed up in the roars that swept over the dais as the men upon it scrambled to seize him. Two of the women screamed, and the greyhounds lounging by the fire sprang up with yelps of excitement. A moment of pandemonium reigned upon the dais.

Then above it a great, deep voice rose commandingly.

“Let him go, messires! Let the man go, I say!”

Reluctantly the turmoil subsided. Boyce, looking up with the rest, saw a tall man in black robes standing in a doorway at the head of the dais. Without being told, he knew who it must be—Tancred the Mage.

There were cabalistic symbols on the dark robe the magician wore and his head was turbaned like that of an eastern prince, but the face beneath the turban was not what Boyce had expected. Tancred’s beard was white and long, but his brows were black and met above his nose in a perpetual, imperial scowl. He wore emeralds in his ears and his fingers were heavy with flashing stones. He looked like a man who could command men even without the power his magic gave him.

“Is there no peace at all in Kerak?” he demanded in a deep voice. “Even while the castle still rocks on its foundations from the assaults of sorcery, must we have brawling on our dais?”

“All sorcery is not without the walls, Tancred,” Sir Guillaume said loudly. “Look upon this man and me, and judge whether the City has not sent us another spy to—”

Tancred laughed and came down the dais slowly.

“Spy he may be, Guillaume. But there are other ways than sorcery to make two men alike. Are you so certain, Guillaume, that no kin of yours walk the earth?”

Guillaume was not to be appeased.

“I know magic when I see it. This stretches coincidence too far.”

Tancred paused before Boyce, pulling at his white beard thoughtfully. Black eyes burned into Boyce’s.

“Perhaps it does.” The magician nodded. “But brawling give us no answers. There are better ways of smelling out City spies.” He glanced around the dais and his eye moved past Boyce and paused. Boyce turned.

In a corner of the chimneypiece a young man sat huddled under a fur-lined cloak. It was not cold here, and Boyce saw that sweat stood on the youth’s pale forehead, but he shivered from time to time under the robe, and a shaking hand clutched at the collar to hold it close about him.

“Here is young Hugh,” Tancred said, his voice stern. “Most of you know the story of Hugh of Mandois. He went out scouting last week and the men of the City took him. He lived a week in the City.” There was loathing in the word. “And Hugh came back as all our men do—whoever return from the City. His wits half addled because of the things he saw.”

Tancred crossed the dais and bent above the huddled youth.

“Hugh, lad—Hugh.” The boy looked up. “Hugh, we have a question for you. Look at this man here, standing beside Sir Guillaume.”

Boyce met a pair of dazed blue eyes with shadows in them. For an instant he knew that look. He had seen it in the mirror in his own eyes many times, when he strove in vain to recapture some of the memories of his lost year. That same dazed blankness, with a hint of shadows beneath.

Had he himself ever walked the City, and looked upon the things that drove men mad?

“Tell us, lad,” Tancred’s voice went on. “Have you seen this man before? Do men in garments like his visit the people of the City? Is this man a spy, Hugh?”

Hugh of Mandois lifted his haggard stare again to Boyce, and for an instant Boyce was all but certain he would know him. He was all but certain that in his lost year he might indeed have walked those streets and met young Hugh upon them.

Too many strange things had happened to him already in the past few hours for him to feel sure of anything. His likeness in face and name to Guillaume was the final straw. Now he felt himself ready to believe or disbelieve anything Tancred might tell him of himself, so long as it offered a solution to the mysteries around him.

Hugh of Mandois let his shadowy, half-mad eyes rest a moment longer upon Boyce. Then he lowered them again, huddled the robe around his shoulders and shook his head dully.

“I do not know,” he said in a thin voice. “I do not know.” A shiver went over him and he turned back to the fire.

Tancred’s big shoulders lifted beneath the black robe in a shrug.

“For Hugh’s sake, I wish he could remember,” he said, half to himself. “For his own sake, I wish we could rouse him. Well—” He looked back at Boyce speculatively. “He must go to the Oracle, of course. He—”

“Wait a minute,” Boyce said abruptly.

Heads turned, murmurs rose. The people on the dais stared at him out of angry, suspicious faces, Guillaume’s nearest and glaring with that inner hatred which the two men who bore the same name and the same face had felt so instinctively for one another.

“I’m no spy,” Boyce said, stumbling over the archaic French. “The Huntsman should have proved that—he tried to kill me. But I didn’t come here by choice. And I won’t—”

Tancred laughed.

“Prove your point by the way the mist blows,” he said, “but not by anything the Huntsman does. His ways are more uncertain than the clouds. Still, if he hunted you here and failed to kill you, be sure he had a reason of his own.”

“Who is the Huntsman?”

Tancred’s face darkened. The black brows wrinkled together above the black eyes.

“Perhaps you know better than we.”

“All right,” Boyce said in sudden anger. “Take me to your Oracle, then. Let’s have it over with whatever it may be, and then I’ll have some questions of my own that demand an answer.”

“Well spoken, stranger.” Tancred was smiling again. “Come.”

He swung aside with a sweep of the cabalistic black robes and waved a commanding arm.

Boyce moved after him half doubtfully. But Guillaume, grinning a wolfish grin beneath his drooping moustache, walked on one side of him, and Godfrey Long-shanks stepped up on the other.

“Now we shall know the truth about you, spy,” Guillaume said. “March!”

Beyond the door through which Tancred had first entered a narrow stairway rose, winding in the thickness of the wall. Glancing behind him, Boyce saw that everyone who had been lounging on the dais was following them. The women picked their way up the steps delicately, holding their long skirts in ringed hands. The men shouldered after, whispering among themselves. The walls echoed with their voices and the shuffle of feet on stone.

They went up a long way. Boyce began to suspect that they might be mounting to the top of the donjon-keep that towered highest of all over Kerak. Through slit-like windows he caught glimpses of the misty plain spread out far below, of the last rings of magical fire dying away around the foot of the crags like fading rainbows in the fog. And across the valley the City was a blur of colored lights veiled and revealed again as the blue-green clouds drifted over it.

The light had not changed here since his wakening. He wondered if they had day and night in this mysterious, incredible land, or if the same dim half-brightness dwelt always over the fog and the mountains.

An arched hallway opened up before the climbers. Boyce, between his two guards, cleared the last of the steps and followed Tancred’s broad back down the hall. A hush had fallen over the crowd now. Even their feet no longer shuffled. They walked almost on tiptoe, and he could hear Godfrey breathing fast beside him. Whatever the Oracle might be, the castle people seemed to hold it in something like dread.

There was a curtained doorway at the end of the hall. Purple velvet hangings embroidered all over in a pattern of silver webs hid what lay beyond. Tancred laid one big hand weighted with rings upon the heavy folds. He turned then, his eyes searching the crowd. There was a rustling among them, and one quickly drawn breath seemed to sweep the throng.

“Stand forth, stranger,” Tancred said in his deepest voice. “Stand forth and face the Oracle!”