The householders were gone though, by the warmth of the soup pot sitting on the hearth, they’d not been gone long. “Probably plowing,”
Pelmen murmured. If so, they would be at it all day. “I hope you’ll not mind if I borrow your home,” he announced, “and a bit of this cooling soup. I promise to make it worth your while.” In a small pocket on his sleeve was a golden coin he’d brought it for just this purpose.
His garments belied the wealth tucked into that sleeve. He was clothed in rags, specially selected from the costume cart late the previous night. Through the early hours of the morning he had carefully sculpted lines of age into his face by candlelight, until he looked every bit the aged peasant he would soon portray. His artistry with makeup had nothing to do with wizardry. It was stage magic, a skill that had often proved useful to him and which would need to again, if he were to survive within Ligne’s castle.
It didn’t take long for him to feel that he knew the small cottage as well as its owner. That done, he shot through the open window on flashing brown wings. He had a rendezvous planned with Maythorm, and he wasn’t about to miss it
Maythorm did nothing in half-measures. He either loved something or he loathed it, and he had loved the play he’d witnessed the night before.
“Wasn’t it marvelous?” he gushed to Craghimp, the taciturn, stolid soldier who’d drawn the unenviable task of guarding Maythorm’s body on this trip. Craglump didn’t usually talk much, which made him the perfect companion for Maythorm, since the handsome Lord of Entertainments rarely stopped. “The class of the Festival, obviously.
Such elegance on stage! Berliath, as Ligne, caught our hearts as if they were doves and held us, fluttering, until the final curtain!”
“Yeah.” Craglump nodded.
“And Eldroph-Pitzel! Such thunderous power as the shrewd tactician who engineered her rise! His voice, like a fist of iron, hammered upon our senses with the ringing zest of a joyful blacksmith!”
“Right.”
“Who’s that?”
Craglump sat up rigidly in his saddle. Maythorm’s change of tone startled him he realized he’d been half asleep. “Who? What?”
“There.” Maythorm pointed. They had topped a tiny rise, and he’d spotted a ragged, barefoot peasant racing away from them.
“Oh. Just a peasant,” Craglurop muttered, almost disappointed.
“But why is he running?” Maythorm asked, and he spurred his mount to pursue the retreating figure. “You there,” he shouted when he came abreast of him. “Why are you running?”
“To get out of the storm!” the peasant shouted, and he scurried on ahead as Maythorm reined in and tossed a puzzled look at the sky.
“Storm?” he asked. He chased the peasant down again, this time blocking the old man’s path. The winded runner leaned on his knees, gasping for breath. “What storm?”
Maythorm sneered, winking his amusement at Craglump, who had now caught up.
The peasant looked up to meet the court ling gaze and puffed, “The one that’s on its way!”
“Why, there isn’t a cloud in the ”
Lightning tore open the heavens, and Maythorm’s eyes jerked upward in disbelief and terror.
“Took my wife just that way not four years ago. I’m to my cottage!”
the old man yelled and he raced toward a clump of woods just ahead of them. Maythorm and Crag-lump took one horrified look at each other and pursued him. Actually, they arrived at the single-roomed dwelling well before he did, and were comfortably inside when he huffed up to the doorstep. He saw them crowded together at the open window, peering skyward. Had they been watching the ragged peasant instead of the bright, clear heavens, they might have caught the quick flash of a smile he allowed himself as he closed the door behind him.
Maythorm and Craglump had an eventful morning, to say the least. Balls of colored fire danced before their eyes with hypnotizing power. At times their peasant host disappeared, and a screeching bird of prey swooped over their heads and glided between their legs. Each time they dashed for the door to escape, bolts of lightning collapsed upon the cottage, threatening to rend its rafters from their moorings, and the two cowered in one another’s arms. The dizzying whirlwind of incredible occurrences spun round them faster and faster, until both were giddy with confusion, and they dropped, unconscious, to the stonework floor.
They remembered little of the morning’s activities when they came to themselves later that afternoon. They were seated in their saddles, then horses casually plodding the dusty road toward Chaomonous. Each felt a bit embarrassed at dozing off, and hoped the other hadn’t noticed. Maythorm compensated by bursting into a new review of the previous night’s performance, using even more superlatives than before.
“I’ve never seen Gerrig so powerful! What a wondrous instrument he’s made of his voice! And Danyilyn! The exquisite delicacy of her performance could curl the hairs of a cavern bear! I certainly must look that luscious beauty up when they arrive in the palace,” the lady-killer drooled.
Craglump wasn’t listening. He was watching with a curious discomfort the lazy flight of a falcon, as it skimmed the treetops to their left, heading southward toward Pleclypsa.
That night, a weary peasant woman found no soup left in her pot but the gold piece she found in the bottom of the kettle more than made up for the loss.
Through tedious days of silent enchantment, amid much earnest effort and sweating of walls, the castle had managed finally to regain full consciousness of its rooftop areas. It wished almost immediately that it hadn’t A good part of its motivation for moving into these rebuilt upper structures first was to get at that strange annoyance it felt marginally aware of, but couldn’t quite comprehend. Now it understood thoroughly. Too thoroughly. And at that moment, the indignity was happening again.
Plop.
The Imperial House of Chaomonous reacted much the same as would anyone else who awoke from a long nap to find someone had built a birdcage on his head. It cursed. Eloquently.
Filthy, loathsome, tasteless, stupid…
Such phrases could not begin to translate adequately the castle’s lucid descriptions of the fowls who befouled its roof tiles. Its vocabulary of expletives was extensive, involving unfavorable personal comparisons that might have both shocked and delighted Chaon historians.
Unfortunately, they were lost on both the stupid, feathered objects of its wrath and the stupid human officials who might have been able to do something about the problem. Which simply infuriated the castle further.
Plip-splip.
Despicable pigeon! May a sadistic eight-year-old pluck your feathers!
May your beak rot off! May your eggs crack even as you lay them!
In spite of such venomous outbursts, the birds that populated Ligne’s aviary continued to consume their birdseed, and persisted in all of their other normal biological functions
Flip.
That pigeon has sealed its fate! the House cried aloud to no one but itself. In fact, it wasn’t a pigeon at all, but rather a long-tailed, two-colored warbler. It was an exotic specimen, as were all the birds in Ligne’s aviary, and was a real prize, having been brought from somewhere far away upon a merchant’s spice-ship. The castle couldn’t have been less concerned with such distinctions. A bird was a bird, and while the House could tolerate a certain degree of relationship with such necessary winged creatures as hunting falcons and blue-flyers, nothing in its long experience had prepared it for such regular, repeated humiliation.
It had already concentrated much attention on the gigantic grillwork itself. In its vivid imagination the House fantasized the cage toppling from the roof to the cobblestoned streets of the city far below. What foul-feathered flutterers managed to survive in the twisted wreckage would be free, then, to fly off and besmirch some other, less august manor!