Gavinius, the brother for whom Mandralisca cared least of all, was wandering at large in the plaza, drunk—no surprise that!—and reeling around in a blundering rampage. Flushed and sweaty, clad only in a loosely flapping linen apron, he was roaming from one stone column to the next, blowing kisses to them as though they were pretty maidens, all the while bawling some raucous song. A leather flask of brandy dangled from one shoulder. A couple of his women—his “wives,” Gavinius liked to call them, but there was no evidence that that was so in any formal sense—followed along cautiously behind him as though they hoped somehow to steer him back inside the palace. But they were taking care not to get too close. Gavinius was dangerous when he was drunk.
He came to a lurching, staggering halt as the Count came into view.
“Mandralisca!” he bellowed. “At last! Where have you been, fellow? Been looking for you all day!”
The big man went stumbling forward. Mandralisca swung himself quickly to the ground. It would not be the part of wisdom to remain astride his mount in the presence of the Lord Gavinius.
Of the five brothers, Gavinius was the one who most closely resembled their late father Gaviundar: a huge big-bellied red-faced man with a wide, florid face, unpleasant little blue-green eyes, and great fleshy ears that sprang out at acute angles from the nearly bald dome of his head. Though Mandralisca was a tall man, the Lord Gavinius was even taller, and very much greater in bulk. He took up a stance that was almost nose to nose with Mandralisca and stood rocking alarmingly back and forth on the massive tree trunks that were his legs, squinting at him blearily. “You want a drink, Count? Here. Here. Look at you, you’re dusty all over! Where have you been?” Clumsily he unfastened the strap of his brandy flask, nearly dropping it in the process and catching it only by a desperate swipe of his huge paw, and pushed it toward Mandralisca.
“I thank you, milord Gavinius. But I have no thirst just now.”
“No thirst? Ah, but you never do. Damn you, why not? What a sorry stick of a man you are, Mandralisca! Have some anyway. You should want to drink. You should love to drink. How can I trust a man who hates to drink? Here. Here. Drink!”
Shrugging, Mandralisca took the flask from the bigger man, held it to his lips without quite touching it, pretended to take a swig, and handed it back.
Gavinius corked the flask and flipped it casually over his shoulder. Then, leaning close into Mandralisca’s face, he began thickly to say: “I had a dream last night—the most amazing—it was a sending, Mandralisca, a true sending, I tell you! I wanted you to speak it for me, but where were you? Damn you, where were you? It was such a dream—”
“He was away north of the Zimr, you booby, carrying out a punitive mission against the Vorthinar lord,” came a dry, hard voice suddenly from one side. “Isn’t that so, Mandralisca?”
Gaviral, it was. The only really clever one of the bunch: the future Pontifex of Zimroel, if Mandralisca had his way.
The interruption was a welcome one. Dealing with Gavinius, drunk or sober, was always an irritating business, and it could be perilous besides. Gaviral was capable of being dangerous in his own cunning way, but at any rate there was no risk of his grabbing you up in some bone-crushing demonstration of manly affection, or simply crashing down drunkenly upon you like a toppling tree.
“I have been in the north, yes, milord,” said Mandralisca, “and the mission has been accomplished. The Vorthinar lord and all his men went up in flames these five days past.”
Gaviral smiled. Alone in this brotherly herd of great uncouth oxen he was a wiry man, small and fidgety, with quick flickering eyes and a narrow, twitchy mouth. He was built on such a different scale from the others that quite possibly he was not his father’s son at all, Mandralisca sometimes suspected. But he did have the reddish hair of the whole Sambailid clan, and the distinctive coarseness of feature, and their irrepressible rapacity of spirit. “Dead, are they?” Gaviral said. “Splendid. Splendid! But I had no doubt. You are a good staunch faithful man, Mandralisca. What would we ever do without you? You are a jewel. You are our strong right arm. I commend you with all my heart.”
There was profound condescension in Gaviral’s effusive tone, an airy insincerity, a lurking disingenuousness, that blared forth in every syllable. He spoke as one might speak to a servant, to a lackey, to a minion—that is, one might speak that way if one were a fool and did not understand the proper ways of addressing those upon whom you are dependent, inferiors though they might be.
But Mandralisca betrayed no sign of taking offense. “Thank you, milord,” he said softly, with a grateful little smile and a nod of his head, as though he had been honored with a golden chain, or a knighthood, or the gift of six villages in the fertile north. “I will cherish these words of yours. Your praise means a great deal to me—more, perhaps, than you can realize.”
“It is not so much praise, Mandralisca, as a simple statement of the truth,” said Gaviral, seeming very pleased with himself.
He was the brightest of the five brothers, yes. But what Mandralisca knew, and Gaviral did not, was that Gaviral was not half so bright as he thought he was. That was his great flaw. He was easy enough to deceive: merely let him think you were in awe of his superb mind, and he was yours.
Gavinius now broke in abruptly. “I dreamed,” he said, returning to his theme as though Mandralisca and Gaviral had not been speaking with each other at all, “such a dream! The Procurator came to me, will you believe it? Walked up and down before me, looked me in the eye, said marvelous things to me. It was a sending, I know it was, but whose was it? Surely not the Lady’s. Why would the Lady send the Procurator’s spirit to me? Why would the Lady send me a dream in the first place?” Gavinius belched. “You have to explain it to me, Mandralisca. I’ve been hunting for you all day. Where have you been, anyway?” Then he turned away, scuffing about for his flask in the red sand of the plaza. “And where has my brandy gone? What have you done with my flask?”
“Go inside, Gavinius,” Gaviral said in a low but insistent tone. “Lie down. Close your eyes for a while. The Count will speak your dream later for you.” The little man gave his hulking brother a sharp thump on the breastbone. Gavinius looked down, blinking in astonishment, at the place where he had been struck. “Go. Go, Gavinius.” And Gaviral thumped him again, tapping a little harder this time. Gavinius, still blinking, went lumbering off toward his palace like a befuddled bidlak, with his women tagging along just behind.
The Lords Gavdat and Gavahaud had by this time appeared in the plaza, and Mandralisca saw Gavilomarin coming toward them over the ridge that separated his palace from the others. The brothers clustered around their privy counsellor.
Soft, jowly-faced Gavdat of the cavernous nostrils, as soon as he learned of the successful result of Mandralisca’s mission, let it be known that his casting of a thaumaturgic horoscope had made that outcome a certainty. He fancied himself a wizard of sorts, did Gavdat, and dabbled ineptly in magecraft and spells. Vain bull-necked Gavahaud, as ugly as his brothers but convinced to a marvelous degree of his own beauty, offered Mandralisca congratulations with a dainty foppish salute, doubly grotesque in so heavyset a man. Big flabby Gavilomarin, a pallid-souled negligible person who obligingly agreed with anything any of the others might say, clapped his hands in a simpleminded way and giggled happily at the news of the burning of the keep.
“So may they all perish, those who oppose us!” said Gavahaud sententiously.