Gonfal looked full at Horvendile, in frank surprise. “I was already planning for the South, though certainly I had told nobody about it. You are displaying, Messire Horvendile, an uncomfortable sort of wisdom which troubles me.”
Horvendile replied, “It is but a little knack of foresight, such as I share with Balaam’s ass.”
But Gonfal stayed more grave than was his custom. He asked, “What shall I find in the South?”
“What all men find, at last, in one place or another, whether it be with the aid of a knife or of a rope or of old age. Yet, I assure you, the finding of it will not be unwelcome.”
“Well,”—Gonfal shrugged,—“I am a realist. I take what comes, in the true form it comes in.”
Now Coth of the Rocks was blustering again. “I also am a realist. Yet I permit no upstart, whether he have or have not hair like a carrot, to give me any directions.”
Horvendile answered, “I say to you—”
But Coth replied, shaking his great bald head: “No, I will not be bulldozed in this way. I am a mild-mannered man, but I will not tamely submit to be thus browbeaten. I believe, too, that Gonfal was insinuating I do not usually ask sensible questions!”
“Nobody has attempted—”
“Are you not contradicting me to my face! What is that but to call me a liar! I will not, I repeat, submit to these continued rudenesses.”
“I was only saying—”
But Coth was implacable. “I will take directions from nobody who storms at me and who preserves no dignity whatever in our hour of grief. For the rest, the children agree in reporting that, whether he ascended in a gold cloud or traveled more sensibly on a black horse, Dom Manuel went westward. I shall go west, and I shall fetch Dom Manuel back into Poictesme. I shall, also, candidly advise him, when he returns to ruling over us, to discourage the tomfooleries and the ridiculous rages of all persons whose brains are overheated by their hair.”
“Let the West, then,” said Horvendile, very quietly, “be your direction. And if the people there do not find you so big a man as you think yourself, do not you be blaming me.”
These were his precise words. Coth himself conceded the coincidence, long afterward. . . .
“I, Messire Horvendile, with your permission, am for the North,” said Miramon Lluagor. The magician alone of them was upon any terms of intimacy with this Horvendile. “I have yet upon gray Vraidex my Doubtful Castle, in which an undoubtable and a known doom awaits me.”
“That is true,” replied Horvendile. “Let the keen North and the cold edge of Flamberge be yours. But you, Guivric, shall have the warm wise East for your direction.”
That allotment was uncordially received. “I am comfortable enough in my home at Asch,” said Guivric the Sage. “At some other time, perhaps—But, really now, Messire Horvendile, I have in hand a number of quite important thaumaturgies just at the present! Your suggestion is most upsetting. I know of no need for me to travel east.”
“With time you will know of that need,” said Horvendile, “and you will obey it willingly, and you will go willingly to face the most pitiable and terrible of all things.”
Guivric the Sage did not reply. He was too sage to argue with people when they talked foolishly. He was immeasurably too sage to argue with, of all persons, Horvendile.
“Yet that,” observed Holden of Nerac, “exhausts the directions: and it leaves no direction for the rest of us.”
Horvendile looked at this Holden, who was with every reason named the Bold; and Horvendile smiled. “You, Holden, already take your directions, in a picturesque and secret manner, from a queen—”
“Let us not speak of that!” said Holden, between a smirk and some alarm.
“—And you will be guided by her, in any event, rather than by me. To you also, Anavalt of Fomor, yet another queen will call resistlessly by and by, and you, who are rightly named the Courteous, will deny her nothing. So to Holden and to Anavalt I shall give no directions, because it is uncivil to come between any woman and her prey.”
“But I,” said Kerin of Nointel, “I have at Ogde a brand-new wife whom I prize above all the women I ever married, and far above any mere crowned queen. Not even wise Solomon,” now Kerin told them, blinking, in a sort of quiet scholastic ecstasy, “when that Judean took his pick of the women of this world, accompanied with any queen like my Saraide: for she is in all ways superior to what the Cabalists record about Queen Naama, that pious child of the bloodthirsty King of Ammon, and about Queen Djarada, the daughter of idolatrous Nubara the Egyptian, and about Queen Balkis, who was begotten by a Sheban duke upon the person of a female Djinn in the appearance of a gazelle. And only at the command of my dear Saraide would I leave home to go in any direction.”
“You will, nevertheless, leave home, very shortly,” declared Horvendile. “And it will be at the command and at the personal urging of your Saraide.”
Kerin leaned his head to one side, and he blinked again. He had just Dom Manuel’s trick of thus opening and shutting his eyes when he was thinking, but Kerin’s mild dark gaze in very little resembled Manuel’s piercing, vivid and rather wary consideration of affairs.
Kerin then observed, “Yet it is just as Holden said, and every direction is preempted.”
“Oh, no,” said Horvendile. “For you, Kerin, will go downward, whither nobody will dare to follow you, and where you will learn more wisdom than to argue with me, and to pester people with uncalled-for erudition.”
“It follows logically that I,” laughed young Donander of Evre, “must be going upward, toward paradise itself, since no other direction whatever remains.”
“That,” Horvendile replied, “happens to be true. But you will go up far higher than you think for; and your doom shall be the most strange of all.”
“Then must I rest content with some second-rate and commonplace destruction?” asked Ninzian of Yair, who alone of the fellowship had not yet spoken.
Horvendile looked at sleek Ninzian, and Horvendile looked long and long. “Donander is a tolerably pious person. But without Ninzian, the Church would lack the stoutest and the one really godfearing pillar it possesses anywhere in these parts. That would be the devil of a misfortune. Your direction, therefore, is to remain in Poictesme, and to uphold the edifying fine motto of Poictesme, for the world’s benefit.”
“But the motto of Poictesme,” said Ninzian, doubtfully, “is Mundus vult decipi, and signifies that the world wishes to be deceived.”
“That is a highly moral sentiment, which I may safely rely upon you alike to concede and prove. Therefore, for you who are so pious, I shall slightly paraphrase the Scripture: and I declare to all of you that neither will I any more remove the foot of Ninzian from out of the land which I have appointed for your children; so that they will take heed to do all which I have commanded them.”
“That,” Ninzian said, looking markedly uncomfortable, “is very delightful.”
Chapter III. How Anavalt Lamented the Redeemer
Madame Niafer arose, black-robed and hollow-eyed, and she made a lament for Dom Manuel, whose like for gentleness and purity and loving kindness toward his fellows she declared to remain nowhere in this world. It was an encomium under which the attendant warriors stayed very grave and rather fidgety, because they recognized and shared her grief, but did not wholly recognize the Manuel whom she described to them.
And the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion was decreed to be disbanded, because of the law of Poictesme that all things should go by tens forever. There was no fighting-man able to fill Manuel’s place: and a fellowship of nine members was, as Dame Niafer pointed out, illegal.