“We made no secret of it.”
“Perhaps we should have done.” I was depressed at my own ignorance and naiveté. Why had I thought the man had given up? All our ruminations were interrupted, however, by a blast of chill from above. Silkhands threw one glance behind her, cried “Afrit,” and rode madly for the timber, we after her in our seemingly permanent state of confusion.
“Is it looking for us?” I asked. She shook her head. Another blast of chill came from another direction. She frowned.
“What is going on up there?” She led us toward rising land from which we might see the countryside around. We found a rocky knuckle at last and climbed it to peer away across a wide valley. Our way led there, straight across, to a notch in the hills at the other side. It was not a way we would take. Drawn up upon the meadows were the serried ranks of a monstrous Game, files of Sorcerers and Warlocks standing at either side, glowing with stored power. Wagons full of wood lined the areas of command where pawns struggled beneath the whip to erect heavy sections of great war ovens. Above the command posts Armigers stood in the air, erect, their war capes billowing about them, rising and falling like spiders upon silk as they reported to those below.
“Lord of the seven hells,” said Chance. “Let’s get away from this place.”
Silkhands looked helplessly across the valley. Our way was there. Our way was blocked. We could not wait until the Game was over. Games of this dimension sometimes went on for years. We could not go around too closely or we risked being frozen in the fury of battle. Silkhands had no power to pull from those mighty ovens and thus protect us in the midst of war.
“Borold,” she cried, “why are you not here when I need you?” Her brother could have tapped that distant power. We were forced to a fateful decision which meant that we were to come to the High Demesne. Had we gone across the plain, we would have gone no further. We did not know it, but we were awaited in that far notch of hills.
Strange, how all plays into the hands of mordacious fate. Mertyn used to say that.
“We’ll go far around,” said Silkhands, and Chance agreed. It was all we could do. And we would not have done well at it except for Yarrel. It was he who read the maps, who found the trails, who found camp sites sheltered from the wind and rain, who kept the horses from going lame and us from being poisoned by bad food or worse water. He bloomed before my eyes, growing taller and broader each day. I woke one morning to find him standing beneath a tall tree looking out across the land, his face shining like those pictures one sees of the ancient pictures of Gamesmother Didir with the glory around her head.
“Yarrel,” I said, “why were you ever in Schooltown? What was there for you?”
He hugged me even as he answered. “Nothing, Peter. Except a few years during which my mother needed not worry about me. We pawns sometimes have short lives. My beloved sister was used in a Game, “lost in play” by some Shapeshifter who needed a pawn and cared not who it was. We are not considered important, you know, among the Gamesmen. If they wish to eat a few hundred of us in battle, they do it. Or use up a few of our women in some nasty game, they do that. By buying my way into the House, they protected me for a time.”
“Bought your way in?”
“With horses. Fine horses. Paid for my rearing, my schooling. Who knows. It may have done me good. Certainly, I know more than my family does about Gamesmen. And Games. And what can and cannot happen. To most of us the Game is a true mystery. If I get back to them, I will have a school of my own — for pawns. To teach them how to survive.”
“Then you never expected to develop talent.”
“No. To get me into the School, mother had to lie, had to say I was Festival got, by a Gamesman. I never believed that. My father is my father, like me as fox is like fox, no more talent than a badger has, to be strong, to dig deep.”
“You could live among the Immutables, be safe there.”
“Yes,” he replied somberly. “I have thought about that in recent days.”
Yarrel my friend, Yarrel the pawn. Yarrel Horselover, my own Yarrel. Yarrel who had helped me and guided me. I saw him as in a mist, struggling beneath the whip to assemble war ovens, to cut the monstrous wagon toads of wood. Yarrel.
“How you must hate us,” I said. “For all you’ve lived among us since you were tiny…”
“I suppose I did. Still do, sometimes. But then, I learned you are the same as us. You want to live, too, and eat when you are hungry and make love to girls — oh, yes, though you may not have done so yet — and sleep warm. The only thing different is that you will grow to have something I have not. And that something will change you into something I am not. And from that time on, I may hate you.” He was thoughtful, staring out across the fog-lined vales, the furred hills, the rocky scarps of the range we traveled toward. When he went on it was with that intrinsic generosity he had always shown.
“But I do not hate Silkhands. Nor Himaggery. And it may be I will go on liking you, as well.”
“There were no games at the Bright Demesne.” I don’t know why I said that. It seemed important.
“No. There were no games, and I have thought much about that. All those Gamesmen. All that power. And no games at all. What did happen, the Dragon, I mean, was regretted. It means something. In Mertyn’s House we never learned…never learned that there was any…choice.”
Choice. I knew the word. The applications of it seemed small. One glass of wine or none. Bread or gruel. Stealing meat from the kitchens or not. Choice. I had never had any.
“It is hard to imagine…choice.” I said. He turned to me with a face as remote as those far scarps, eyes seeing other times.
“Try, Peter,” he said. “I have tried. I think sometimes how many of us there are, so many pawns, so many Immutables, all of us living on this land, and we have no Game. Yet, for most of us the Game rules us. We let it rule us. Imagine what might happen if we did not. That’s all. Just imagine.”
I was no good at imagining. Yarrel knew that well. For a time I thought he was mocking me. I was nettled, angry a little. We worked our way more deeply into the mountains, struggling always toward a certain peak which marked the pass into Evenor, and the way was hard. We talked little, for we were all weary. Far behind us in the valley were still smokes and confusions of battle. Ahead were only mountains and more mountains. I went on being angry until it seemed boring and foolish, and then I tried to do as Yarrel had asked and imagine. I tried really hard, harder than I had ever tried in Mertyn’s House. It was no good. I could not think of choices and pawns and all that. And then in the night…I found myself standing beside my horse on a low hill overlooking the field of battle. I could see the ovens red with heat, the Armigers filling the air like flies, raining their spears and arrows down onto the Gamesmen below. I could hear the great whump, whump of boulders levered, out of the ground and launched by teams of Tragamors and Sorcerers, hand-linked as they combined their power to raise the mighty rocks with their minds.
Behind enemy lines I could see the flicker as Elators twinked into being, struck about them with double daggers, then disappeared only to flick into being again behind their own lines. On the heights Demons and Seers called directions to the Tragamors and Armigers while Sorcerers strode among the Gamesmen to give them power. Shifterbeasts ran through the ranks, slashing with fangs or tusks, or dropped from the air on feathered wings to strike with blinding talons. And on each side, at the center of the Game, stood the King and the Princes and the other charismatics to whose beguilement the armies rallied. Among the wounded walked Healers, each with a Sorcerer to hand.