Not for many hours did he have the pleasure of meeting the master of this place. Furvain spent the time pacing from room to room, surveying his new domain until he had seen it all, which did not take very long. Then he stared out at the lake for a while, but its loveliness, remarkable though it was, eventually began to pall. Then he constructed three quick verse epigrams that made ironic fun of his new predicament, but in all three instances he was oddly unable to find an adequate closing line, and he eradicated all three from his memory without completing them.
He felt no particular annoyance at having been captured like this. At this point he saw it as nothing more than an interesting novelty, a curious incident of his journey into the east-country, an episode with which to amuse his friends after his return. There was no reason to feel apprehensive. This Master Kasinibon was, most likely, some petty lordling of the Mount who had grown tired of his coddled, stable life in Banglecode or Stee or Bibiroon, or wherever it was he came from, and had struck out for himself into this wild region to carve out a little principality of his own. Or perhaps he had been guilty of some minor infraction of the law, or had given offense to a powerful kinsman, and had chosen to remove himself from the world of conventional society. Either way, Furvain saw no reason why he should come to harm at Kasinibon’s hands. No doubt Kasinibon wanted merely to impress him with his own authority as master of this territory, and to storm and bluster a bit at Furvain’s temerity in entering the district without the permission of its self-appointed overlord, and then he would be released.
The shadows over the red lake were lengthening now as the sun proceeded on in its journey toward Zimroel. Restlessness began to grow in Furvain with the coming of the day’s end. Eventually a servant appeared, an expressionless puffy-faced Hjort with great staring batrachian eyes, who set before him a tray of food and departed without saying a word. Furvain inspected his meaclass="underline" a flask of pink wine, a plate of some pallid soft meat, a bowl filled with what looked like unopened flower-buds. Simple fare for rustic folk, he thought. But the wine was supple and pleasant, the meat was tender and bathed in a subtle aromatic sauce, and the flower-buds, if that was what they were, released an agreeable sweetness when he bit into them, and left an interesting subtaste of sharp spiciness behind.
Not long after he was done, the door opened again , and a small, almost elfin man of about fifty, grey-eyed and thin-lipped, garbed in a green leather jerkin and yellow tights, came in. From his swagger and stance it was plain that he was a person of consequence. He affected a clipped mustache and a short, pointed beard and wore his long hair, which was a deep black liberally streaked with strands of white, pulled tightly back and knotted behind. There was a look of slyness about him, of a playful slipperiness, that Furvain found pleasing and appealing.
“I am Kasinibon,” he announced. His voice was soft and light but had the ring of authority to it nevertheless. “I apologize for any deficiencies in our hospitality thus far.”
“I have noticed none,” said Furvain coolly. “Thus far.”
“But surely you must be accustomed to finer fare than I’m able to offer here. My men tell me you are the son of Lord Sangamor.” Kasinibon offered Furvain a quick cool flicker of a smile, but nothing that could be interpreted as any sort of gesture of respect, let alone obeisance. “Or did they misunderstand something you said?”
“There was no misunderstanding. I’m indeed one of Sangamor’s sons. The youngest one. I am called Aithin Furvain. If you’d like to see my papers—”
“That’s scarcely necessary. Your bearing alone reveals you for whom and what you are.”
“And if I may ask—” Furvain began.
But Kasinibon spoke right over Furvain’s words, doing it so smoothly that it seemed almost not to be discourteous. “Do you, then, have an important role in His Majesty’s government?”
“I have no role at all. You are aware, I think, that high office is never awarded on the basis of one’s ancestry. A Coronal’s sons do the best they can for themselves, but nothing is guaranteed to them. As I was growing up I discovered that my brothers had already taken advantage of most of the available opportunities. I live on my pension. A modest one,” Furvain added, because it was beginning to occur to him that Kasinibon might have a ransom in mind.
“You hold no official post whatever, is that what you’re saying?”
“None.”
“What is it that you do, then? Nothing?”
“Nothing that could be considered work, I suppose. I spend my days as companion to my friend, the Duke of Dundilmir. My role is to provide amusement for the Duke and his court circle. I have a certain minor gift for poetry.”
“Poetry!” Kasinibon exclaimed. “You are a poet? How splendid!” A new light came into his eyes, a look of eager interest that had the unexpected effect of transforming his features in such a way as to strip him of all his slyness for a moment, leaving him look strangely youthful and vulnerable. “Poetry is my great passion,” Kasinibon said, in an almost confessional tone. “My comfort and my joy, living out here as I do on the edge of nowhere, so far from civilized pursuits. Tuminok Laskil! Vornifon! Dammiunde! Do you know how much of their work I’ve committed to memory?” And he struck a schoolboy pose and began to recite something of Dammiunde’s, one of his most turgid pieces, a deadly earnest piece of romantic fustian about star-crossed lovers that Furvain, even as a boy, had always found wildly ludicrous. He struggled now to maintain a straight face as Kasinibon quoted an extract from one of its most preposterous sequences, the wild chase through the swamps of Kajith Kabulon. Perhaps Kasinibon came to suspect, in time, that his guest did not have the highest respect for Dammiunde’s famous work, because a glow of embarrassment spread across his cheeks, and he broke the recitation off abruptly, saying, “A little old-fashioned, perhaps. But I’ve loved it since my boyhood.”
“It’s not one of my favorites,” Furvain conceded. “But Tuminok Laskil, now—”
“Ah, yes. Tuminok Laskil!” At once Kasinibon treated Furvain to one of Laskil’s soppiest lyrics, a work of the Ni-moyan poet’s extreme youth for which Furvain could not even pretend to hide his contempt, and then, reddening once again and again leaving the poem unfinished, switched hastily to a much later verse, the third of the dark Sonnets of Reconciliation, which he spoke with surprising eloquence and depth of emotion. Furvain knew the poem well and cherished it, and recited it silently along with Kasinibon to the finish, and found himself unexpectedly moved at the end, not only by the poem itself but by the force of Kasinibon’s admiration for it and the deftness of his reading.
“That one is much more to my taste than the first two,” said Furvain after a moment, feeling that something had to be said to break the awkward stillness that the poem’s beauty had created in the room.
Kasinibon seemed pleased. “I see: you prefer the deeper, more somber work, is that it? Perhaps those first two misled you, then. Let me not do that: please understand that for me as it is for you, late Laskil is much to be preferred. I won’t deny that I have a hearty appreciation for plenty of simple stuff, but I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I turn to poetry for wisdom, for consolation, for instruction, even, far more often than I do for light entertainment. Your own work, I take it, is of the serious kind? A man of your obvious intelligence must be well worth reading. How strange that I don’t know your name.”