Jonas saw nothing of that, being still sprawled on the floor of the howdah, where he was cutting his hands free with the dagger. I made up for him, for I beheld everything as I stood upright, balanced against the pitching of the baluchither’s back and holding up my sword, red now to the hilt. A hundred faces turned toward us, with the face of the exultant on the throne among them, and the heart-shaped face of his consort; and in their eyes I saw what they must have seen at that moment: the great animal bestridden by a headless man, its forequarters dyed with his blood; myself standing erect upon its back, with my sword and fuligin cloak.
Had I slipped down and sought to flee, or tried to goad the baluchither to greater speed, I would have died. Instead, by the virtue of the spirit that had entered me when I saw the long-dead bodies among the refuse of the mines and the eternal trees, I remained as I was; and the baluchither, with no one to guide him, trod forward steadily (Vodalus’s followers dodging aside to make a path for him) until the dais supporting the throne and canopy were before him. Then he halted, and the dead man pitched forward and fell on the dais at Vodalus’s feet; and I, leaning far out of the howdah, struck the beast behind one leg and the other with the flat of my blade, and he knelt.
Vodalus smiled a thin smile that held many things, but amusement was one of them, and perhaps the foremost. “I sent my men to fetch the headsman,” he said. “I perceive they succeeded.”
I saluted with my sword, holding the hilt before my eyes as we were taught to do when an exultant came to observe an execution in the Grand Court. “Sieur, they have brought you the anti-headsman — there was a time when your own would have rolled on fresh-turned soil if it had not been for me.”
He looked at me more closely then, at my face instead of at my sword and cloak, and after a moment he said, “Yes, you were the youth. Has it been that long?”
“Just long enough, sieur.”
“We will talk of this in private, but I have public business to do now. Stand here.” He pointed to the ground at the left of the dais.
I climbed from the baluchither with Jonas following me, and two grooms led the beast away. There we waited and heard Vodalus give his orders and transmit his plans, reward and punish, for perhaps a watch. All the boasted human panoply of pillars and arches is no more than an imitation in sterile stone of the boles and vaulting branches of the forest, and here it seemed to me that there was scarcely any difference between the two except that the one was gray or white, and the other brown and pale green. Then I believed I understood why all the soldiers of the Autarch and all the thronging retainers of the exultants could not subdue Vodalus — he occupied the mightiest fortress of Urth, greater far than our Citadel, to which I had likened it.
At length he dismissed the crowd, each man and woman to his or her own place, and came down from the dais to talk to me, bending over me as I might have bent above a child.
“You served me once,” he said. “For that I will spare your life whatever else befalls, though it may be necessary that you remain my guest for a time. Knowing that your life is no longer in danger, will you serve me again?”
The oath to the Autarch I had taken on the occasion of my elevation had not the strength to resist the memory of that misty evening with which I have begun this account of my life. Oaths are only mere weak things of honor compared to the benefits we give to others, which are things of the spirit; let us once save another, and we are his for life. I have often heard it said that gratitude is not to be found. That is not true — those who say so have always looked in the mistaken place. One who truly benefits another is for a moment at a level with the Pancreator, and in gratitude for that elevation will serve the other all his days; and so I told Vodalus.
“Good!” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder. “Come. Not far from here we have a meal prepared. If you and your friend will sit with me and eat, I will tell you what must be done.”
“Sieur, I have disgraced my guild once. I only ask that I may not be made to disgrace it again.”
“Nothing you do will be known,” Vodalus said. And that satisfied me.
Chapter 10
THEA
With a dozen or so others we left the glade on foot, and half a league away found a table set among the trees. I was placed at Vodalus’s left hand, and while the others ate, I feigned to and feasted my eyes on him and his lady, whom I had so often recalled as I lay on my cot among the apprentices in our tower.
When I had saved him, mentally at least I had still been a boy, and to a boy all grown men appear lofty unless they are of very low stature indeed. I saw now that Vodalus was as tall as Thecla or taller, and that Thecla’s half-sister Thea was as tall as she. Then I knew them to be truly of the exalted blood, and not armigers merely, such as Sieur Racho had been.
It was with Thea that I had first fallen in love, worshipping her because she belonged to the man I had saved. Thecla I had loved, in the beginning, because she recalled Thea. Now (as autumn dies, and winter and spring, and summer comes again, the end of the year as it is its beginning) I loved Thea once more — because she recalled Thecla.
Vodalus said, “You are an admirer of women,” and I lowered my eyes.
“I have been little in polite company, sieur. Please forgive me.”
“I share your admiration, so there is nothing to forgive. But you were not, I hope, studying that slender throat with the thought of parting it?”
“Never, sieur.”
“I am delighted to hear it.” He picked up a platter of thrushes, selected one, and put it upon my plate. It was a sign of special favor. “Still, I own I am a trifle surprised. I would have thought that a man in your profession would look on us poor human beings much as a butcher does on cattle.”
“Of that I cannot inform you, sieur. I have not been bred a butcher.”
Vodalus laughed. “A touch! I am almost sorry now that you have consented to serve me. If you had only elected to remain my prisoner, we would have had many delightful conversations while I used you — as I had intended to — to cheap for the unfortunate Barnoch’s life. As it is, you will be away by morning. Yet I think I have an errand for you that will consort well with your own inclinations.”
“If it is your errand, sieur, it must.”
“You are wasted on the scaffold.” He smiled. “We will find better work for you before long. But if you are to serve me well, you must understand something of the position of the pieces on the board, and the goal of the game we play. Call the sides white and black, and in honor of your garments — so that you shall know where your interests lie — we shall be black. No doubt you have been told that we blacks are mere bandits and traitors, but have you any notion of what it is we strive to do?”
“To checkmate the Autarch, sieur?”
“That would be well enough, but it is only a step and not our final goal. You have come from the Citadel — I know, you see, something of your journeyings and history — that great fortress of bygone days, so you must possess some feeling for the past. Has it never struck you that mankind was richer by far, and happier too, a chiliad gone than it is now?”
“Everyone knows,” I said, “that we have fallen far from the brave days of the past.”
“As it was then, so shall it be again. Men of Urth, sailing between the stars, leaping from galaxy to galaxy, the masters of the daughters of the sun.”