They were lovers. She was the most captivating woman he had known: she eclipsed all the others, the friendly harlots, the high-strung daughters of noblemen. She was strange, sad, willful, seductive, brilliantly educated, an avowed recluse who surrounded herself with friends on her wild property. She refused to allow the grounds at Brovinhu to be cultivated; she loved the desolation of the woods. She would walk in the overgrown orchards with her two long, dove-colored hounds and hunt for coneys and pheasant in the tangled scrub of the fields. A thousand rumors encircled her: that she had been exiled from society for crushing the fan of the Duchess of Sinidre; that she feared to revive a forgotten scandal, a dead love affair, in the city; and the old story of her savage ancestry. Miros adored her too much even to ask her about these whispers, and at Brovinhu, surrounded by her friends, all excellent marksmen, all people who loved air, activity, and the wild woods, he saw the drabness of city society. Who could prefer the stuffy rooms with braziers under the tables, the compulsory visits to elderly noblewomen, to the great, dark hall at Brovinhu where one sprawled in front of the wood fire on thick carpets while the rain beat against the shutters? Who could prefer any place in the world to Ailin’s room with the high bed and the lurid Nissian hangings studded with fragments of mirror? In the mornings she would be sitting, smoking at her dressing table. She always rose before he did. Perhaps she never slept.
He spent the most glorious winter of his life, forgetting everything. And then, in the spring, she asked him to go back. “But it’s almost summer,” he said. He thought he would stay for another season. She refused: her husband was coming back, and her children, for the school holidays. He returned to Sinidre in despair and embarked on the year of torture which succeeded that brief, that paradisiacal winter: a year of secret letters, gifts, jealousy, midnight rides, meetings in parks, in village inns, in temple gardens. He often rode all the way from Sinidre to Ur-Melinei, sleeping in the long grass beside the road, only to be met in the village by her taciturn maid with the lame hip, with a note: “Impossible. Go back at once.” He was certain, by turns, that she loved him, despised him, longed for him, tired of him. He suspected her of taking another lover. He haunted the woods around Brovinhu and was almost shot by the gamekeeper, the arrow lodging in the top of his boot. When she refused to have him back for the winter, he knew she was deceiving him; but she wept and said that she was afraid of her husband: afraid for Miros’s sake. While he wished for nothing better than the chance to kill her husband honorably, in an open duel.
“You would kill him,” she said angrily. “You, an unaccomplished boy, would kill a lord of the Order of the Lamp?”
Miros departed in rage. And then, breaking every rule she had set herself, she came, disguised, to see him in Sinidre.
They had two days. They lived secretly by the docks, in the Kalak quarter, among vendors of raw fish and green tea laden with salt, in the shabby wood houses with nets hung up in the doorways, the shrieking of hungry gulls, the sound of Kalak being spoken everywhere. At the end she looked at him, deadly pale, and said: “Very well. Kill him.” It was all that he had asked for. He was ready to kill, or to die. But other forces opposed him: when he appeared at home he was summoned immediately to a radmakanid—a family council.
By this time the scandal had reached dangerous proportions. Anonymous letters had been received by his father and his uncles; even his great-uncle the Priest of Avalei had received one on the Isle, and had arrived in Sinidre in a fierce temper. Everyone Miros loved and respected most was there in the spacious sitting room with the polished wood floor, the tall harp in the corner, the room adjoining his mother’s latticed garden. They had drawn the curtains and lit only one of the lamps, for the priest liked his surroundings dim. Miros’s mother was there, twisting her overskirt in her fine hands, and her brothers, his four successful, strong-willed uncles; her sister, his aunt, who, he thought, looked at him with some sympathy; and his father, and Miros’s three brothers and one elder sister. In accordance with Olondrian tradition, it was his maternal uncles and not his father who headed the radmakanid, for Miros belonged to their House and would inherit through his mother’s family. Chief among them, the eldest and most powerful, was the High Priest. Miros sat quietly before them, his face lashed by their accusations as if by blows, and watched his brothers irritably examining their boots. He was given a choice: enter his great-uncle’s service, or join the army. He chose the army, even though soldiers were barred from fighting duels. “I want to be sent far away,” he sobbed, later, to his mother. “To go to the Lelevai, to the Brogyar country…” First, however, he had to complete the training in Sinidre, and he could not stop himself from writing to the baroness. He received a brief, constrained note in which she forbade him to write to her or come to Ur-Melinei, which showed him that she had been threatened. He was certain that his family had warned her, coerced her. He wrote again; her next note swore that it was her own will. And now he entered a terrible time of drinking, brawls, and gambling which resulted in his rejection from the army.
After this there was a year of almost suicidal despair. He drank in his bedroom, spent whole days asleep. And finally the woods called to him, and his horses, and his old friends, other young men, light-hearted, simple, and frivolous. He hunted in the Kelevain, riding closer and closer to Brovinhu. He dreamt he would meet her in the forest. His behavior was marked; the radmakanid met for a second time, and he was commanded to join his uncle on the Isle.
Somehow she heard of it. She wrote him a single letter, not long, but it was in her own voice, and he carried it with him still. She said she was glad he was going away; she missed him; there was no hunting at Brovinhu. She had been ill and was convalescent. The letter tore him from end to end with passion, elation, and grief; in this state he went out to drink the bars of Sinidre. There he blinded a man who mocked him, calling him a balarin. Only his uncle’s influence saved him from prison.
“You can’t imagine,” he went on in a hoarse voice, “what she is like. The fact that she has been ill… She is not like me. My brothers laugh, they say she is too sophisticated for me, that I can’t possibly keep pace with such a woman. Perhaps they are right. But I believe that she did—that she does love me. Perhaps it was for my sake that she fell ill! As I said, she is nothing like me, her emotions are finer, more turbulent, she doesn’t forget anything, she could never forget her sorrow… But I—I am of coarser stuff. I have told you of my unhappiness, but I have left out all my nights at the londo tables, the way I could vow to kill myself in the morning and be singing vanadiel and laughing in a tavern by dusk. I am fickle… my emotions have, I think, no real depth… But hers! She is worth a hundred, a thousand of me. Strangely, this is the one point on which all of us—my brothers, my uncles, myself—on which all of us are agreed.”
His hand relaxed on the blanket. A faint smile touched his lips. The light was fading, the sun sinking into the desert. We sat for a time in silence, and then he sang, very softly, a few lines of a comic song I had heard in Bain: