"Should I?"
"I think so," said Walter. "Of course, I grant you no one remembers anything but The Highwayman, out of all his poems, nowadays. But Tales of a Mermaid Tavern, and that other long poem of his - Sherwood - they've both got genius in them. You know, there's that part where Oberon, the king of elves and fairies, is telling his retainers about the fact Robin Hood is going to die, and explaining why the fairies owe Robin a debt - "
"Never read it," grunted Malachi, ungraciously.
"Then I'll quote it for you," said Walter. "Oberon is talking to his own kind and he tells about one of them whom Robin once rescued from what he thought was nothing worse than a spider's web. And what Noyes had Oberon say is - listen to this now -
" '…He saved her from the clutches of that Wizard,
'That Cruel Thing, that dark old Mystery,
'Whom ye all know and shrink from…!' "
Walter broke off, for a thin, pale-faced young man in a dark business suit, holding a void pistol with a long, narrow, wire-coil-shielded barrel, had stepped from the lilac bushes behind Malachi. A moment later another gunman joined him. Turning, Walter saw yet two more had appeared from the bushes at his end of the terrace. The four pistols covered the two old men.
" '… Plucked her forth, so gently that not one bright rainbow gleam upon her wings was clouded… .' " A deep, vibrant voice Finished the quotation, and a very tall, erect man with dark hair and lean, narrow-boned face, carrying the book Walter had just been reading with one long finger holding a place in its pages, stepped through the same french window from which Walter had come a few moments before.
"… But you see?" he went on, speaking now to Walter, "how it goes downhill, gets to be merely pretty and ornate, after that first burst of strength you quoted? Now, if you'd chosen instead the song of Blondin the Minstrel, from that same poem - "
His voice took on sudden strength and richness - half-chanting the quoted lines in the fashion of the plainsong of the medieval monks.
"Knight on the narrow way,
Where wouldst thou ride?
'Onward,' I heard him say,
'Love, to thy side!'
"… then I'd have had to agree with you."
Walter bent his head a little with bare politeness. But there was a traitorous stir in his chest. The magnificent voice, the tall, erect figure before him, plucked at Walter's senses, trained by a lifetime of subtleties, with the demand for appreciation he would have felt toward a Stradivarius in the hands of some great violinist.
Against his will, Walter felt the pull of a desire - to which, of course, yielding was unthinkable - to acknowledge the tall man as if this other was a master, or a king.
"I don't think we know you," said Walter slowly.
"Ahrens is my name. Bleys Ahrens," said the tall man. "And you needn't be worried. No one's going to be hurt. We'd just like to use this estate of yours for a short meeting during the next day or two."
He smiled at Walter. The power of his different voice was colored by a faint accent that sounded like archaic English. His face held a straight-boned, unremarkable set of features that had been blended and molded by the character lines around the mouth and eyes into something like handsomeness. The direct nose, the thin-lipped mouth, the wide, high forehead and the brilliant brown eyes were all softened by those lines into an expression of humorous kindness.
Beneath that face, his sharply square and unusually wide shoulders, which would have looked out of proportion on a shorter man, seemed no more than normal above the unusual height of his erect, slim body. That body stood relaxed now, but unconsciously balanced, like the body of a yawning panther. And the pale-faced young gunmen gazed up at him with the worshipping gaze of hounds.
"We?" asked Walter.
"Oh, a club of sorts. To tell you the truth, you'd do better not to worry about the matter at all." Ahrens continued to smile at Walter, and looked about at the lake and the wooded margin of it that could be seen from the terrace.
"There ought to be two more of you here, shouldn't there?" he said, turning to Walter again. "Another tutor your own age, and your ward, the boy named Hal Mayne? Where would they be, now?"
Walter shook his head, pleading ignorance. Ahrens' gaze went to Malachi, who met it with the indifference of a stone lion.
"Well, we'll find them," said Ahrens lightly. He looked back at Walter. "You know, I'd like to meet that boy. He'd be… what? Sixteen now?"
Walter nodded.
"Fourteen years since he was found…" Ahrens' voice was frankly musing. "He must have some unusual qualities. He'd have had to have them - to stay alive, as a child barely able to walk, alone on a wrecked ship, drifting in space for who-knows-how-long. Who were his parents - did they ever find out?"
"No," said Walter. "The log aboard showed only the boy's name."
"A remarkable boy…" said Ahrens again. He glanced out around the lake and grounds. "You say you're sure you don't know where he is now?"
"No," answered Walter.
Ahrens glanced at Malachi, inquiringly.
"Commandant?"
Malachi snorted contemptuously.
Ahrens smiled as warmly on the ex-soldier as he had at Walter, but Malachi was still a stone lion. The tall man's smile faded and became wistful.
"You don't approve of Other Men like me, do you?" he said, a little sadly. "But times have changed, Commandant."
"Too bad," said Malachi, dryly.
"But too true," said Ahrens. "Did it ever occur to you your boy might be one of us? No? Well, suppose we talk about other things if that suggestion bothers you. I don't suppose you share your fellow tutor's taste for poetry? Say, for something like Tennyson's Morte D'Arthur - a piece of poetry about men and war?"
"I know it," said Malachi. "It's good enough."
"Then you ought to remember what King Arthur has to say in it about changing times," said Ahrens. "You remember - when Arthur and Sir Bedivere are left alone at the end and Sir Bedivere asks the King what will happen now, with all the companionship of the Round Table dissolved, and Arthur himself leaving for Avalon. Do you remember how Arthur answers, then?"
"No," Malachi said.
"He answers - " and the voice of Ahrens rang out in all its rich power again, "The old order changeth, giving place to new …" Ahrens paused and looked at the old ex-soldier significantly.
" - And God fulfills himself in many ways - lest one good custom should corrupt the world," interrupted a harsh, triumphant voice.
They turned, all together. Obadiah Testator, the third of Hal Mayne's tutors, was being herded out through the french window into their midst, at the point of a void pistol by a fifth young gunman.
"You forgot to finish the quotation," rasped Obadiah at Ahrens. "And it applies to your kind too, Other Man. In God's eye you, also, are no more than a drift of smoke and the lost note of a cymbal. You, too, are doomed at His will - like that!"
He had come on, farther than his young guard had intended, to snap his bony fingers with the last word, under the very nose of Ahrens. Ahrens started to laugh and then his face changed suddenly.
"Posts!" he snapped.
Tension sprang like invisible lightning across the terrace. Of the four gunmen already there, three had left off covering Walter and Malachi to aim at Obadiah, as he snapped his fingers. One only still covered Malachi. Now, at the whip of Ahrens' voice, the errant gunmen pulled their weapons almost in panic back to their original targets.
"Oh, you fools, you young fools!" said Ahrens softly to them. "Look at me!"
Their pale and guilty glances sidled back to his face.
"The Maran - " Ahrens pointed at Walter, "is harmless. His people taught him that violence - and any violence - would cripple his thinking processes. And the Fanatic here is worth perhaps one gun. But you see that old man there?"