Interim Errantry 2: On Ordeal Page 4

  The tone was mild, but the gaze that Nelaid was resting on his son was cool and hard as steel.

  “Then why don’t they appreciate it?”

  “Because no one likes to be beholden,” his father said, in the voice one uses to repeat a simple lesson for the hundredth time to a child who hasn’t been paying attention. “Powerlessness in the face of threat, or the perception of it, routinely provokes fear and anger in the threatened. Though we protect them from the threat, to expect gratitude from everyone is unrealistic. These attacks will unfortunately always be part of our lives. And, in time, yours…”

  His kingly father’s calmness was driving Rho mad… the resignation, the acceptance. And this was a state he was going to be expected to achieve. “It shouldn’t be like this!”

  “Yet it is.”

  “It doesn’t make sense!”

  “Reason is not always everything,” his royal father said. “Unfortunately.”

  “There must be somewhere that it is,” Rho muttered. “Somewhere that people are taught better, learn better…” Though where that might be, he had no idea.

  “Also unfortunately,” his father said, “it’s not other worlds we deal with: it’s this one.” Too well Rho knew it. He had only rarely been off planet, having been told that Wellakh was his business, and he needed to learn it thoroughly before adding other worlds to the mix. “But I cannot blame you for wishing yourself elsewhere, my son. The turf’s always browner on the other side…”

  “Where there’s turf left at all,” his lady mother said softly.

  He’d heard it a hundred times from them, this saying and its response, as if they were playing some old game with each other. It had never bothered him before. But right now, today, this minute, it was somehow too much to bear.

  Rho bowed his head and started picking at his food again, which to his relief Nelaid took as a signal that his son wasn’t interested in taking his protests any further in this direction. The King went back to his discussion with Rho’s lady mother, and Rho drank his berrydraft and tried to get a grip on himself. But the unbearability of everything just kept grinding in on him: the unfairness of anyone daring to attack his mother, the fact that she and his royal father thought that such occurrences were just the way life was… and that there was no way he could be of help to them.

  Because he hadn’t been offered wizardry. It was one of those subjects the family had simply stopped discussing, because there was nothing to be gained but pain. No one wanted to return again and again to the uncomfortable theory that there was something wrong with Rho, some weakness, some hidden aspect that made the Powers unwilling to allow him access to the gift that was buried in his spiritual heredity, if not in his physical one.

  And with it or without it, he would never be able to be as good a king as his father was. There Nelaid sat, royal to the bone even in tatty work clothes with dust clinging to the folds. Kingship was rooted in his soul, intertwined with the wizardry and with the sense of authority that his communion and relationship with Thahit lent all the rest of his life. Rho looked at him and thought, I will never have what you have. From now till the day I die, never will I have it…

  Often enough, in the past, his father would've said to him, You may yet. But in the look they exchanged right now was the hopelessness of it, because Rho could not believe it… and his father, understanding this, was thinking, I will not torment you, my son, by insisting on what you are so certain is not true.

  Rho dropped his gaze to his plate again, trying one last time to shove all these inconvenient feelings down inside him and out of the way… but he had no luck. Can’t stand it. Simply can’t…

  He pushed his little side-table carefully away, pushed his chair back and stood up. His mother and father looked at him in surprise.

  “I beg your pardon,” he said, “royal sire, royal mother; I pray you hold me excused.”

  He knew permission would not be withheld. His father simply looked at him and nodded his head once. But Miril said, “Son, where will you go?”

  Rho turned away toward the staircase. “The other side.”

  ***

  He headed to his own rooms down at the far end of the second floor, waved the door open, waved it shut behind him… and then stood there, suddenly breathing hard, gazing around him as if at a place he didn’t know.

  Even up in their private wing, by his parents’ preference the decorating was kept quite sparse and spare. Neither his mother nor his father much liked the idea of leaving personal belongings out where visitors could see them, the whole purpose of the city house being to have a place where people from the government and the various city-states’ management organizations could have a place to meet with the Sunborn. “Instead of making them come halfway around the planet,” his mother would say, “and making them more unnerved about meeting with us than they already are.”

  “Instead of making them come to the other half of the planet,” his father would murmur, almost a growl, “and reminding them exactly what we are good for.”

  Rho tightened his mouth against the response to And what are we good for? —Dying for them. Quickly he made himself busy gathering together into a little satchel some of the clothes and belongings he kept in the city house and didn’t care to leave about as clues for the hired help who might possibly sell them, or the knowledge of them, to someone who meant him ill—or more likely, one of his parents. An electronic storyscroll or so, a favorite item of clothing—one of the casual pieces of wardrobe that he preferred when he didn't have to be seen out in the street as one of the Sunborn, always in danger of being held up as a good example to—who, exactly?

  Whom, he could just hear his mother saying.

  He laughed, a soundless breath of it. Whom. For whom am I possibly a good example? None of his schoolfellows cared what he did or said or thought (unless of course it turned up on one of the scandal feeds, when it was worth a certain amount of snickering behind his back). What does it matter? Nothing matters, really. I am useless. Best then to go do it on the other side of the world, by myself.

  He was packed. Rho headed down to the end of the corridor and the little one-step-up dais that held another transport pad with a control plate set in the wall behind it. He stepped up on the pad and reached out to touch the plate. No need to to enter a combination; this pad went to only one place on the planet.

  Rho closed his eyes, already sick of looking at the walls of the city house, and relaxed into the warmth of the transport process as all around him the walls of the city house faded away.

  ***

  It was just one tall narrow peak standing up from a landscape that had once been blasted bare when Thahit flared worst—that most deadly of all its ancient flare events that Wellakhit mostly called amn Mahhev, the Great Burning. The peak of Sunplace itself was a piece of social and architectural history, the result of centuries of intermittent labor as the institution of the Sunlords had gradually established itself.

  As the decades after the Great Burning rolled by and the long slow repair of the planet’s atmosphere and biosphere continued, the world’s governments had decided that the remaining wizards of Wellakh’s two main wizardly lines—now mostly known as the Guardians of Wellakh or the Guarantor Lords—should be given a place of their own to live in perpetuity. It should (it was decided) be spectacular enough to adequately express their world’s gratitude to them, but also isolated enough to give them a place in which to rebuild their depleted numbers in security. If there was purposeful irony in Sunplace’s location at almost the exact center of the destruction, no one spoke of that openly. The official explanation was that such a location allowed the Sunlords to be in the best possible position to supervise and evaluate the ongoing work of repairing the weather and land on the maimed side of the planet. Mostly the Sunlords (at least while in office) tended not to mention publicly that the location certainly ensured their absolute attention to quality control, since if anything went wrong with that work, they would be the
very first to suffer.

  The building itself—insofar as something that started out as an item of terrain could be considered a building—was now the symbol for many things: the disaster of the Burning, the Burning’s repair and the repair’s ongoing maintenance, the now-royal family that presided over the project, and the institution of Wellakhit royalty itself. Over the centuries that followed the establishment of the Guarantee, Sunplace’s original tawny igneous stone had been tunneled and carved into endless halls and chambers, lobbies and vestibules, parlors, galleries and terraces, dwelling-rooms, tiring-rooms, studies and libraries, guest lodgings and storerooms, and particularly the Great Rooms intended for purposes of ceremony, government, and the maintenance of Thahit and its neighboring space.

  The city-house’s installed transport pad was keyed to a spot directly outside the main doors of what was called “the Great Room” to distinguish it from all the lesser ones. Now used as a throne room and formal reception space, it was vast, having initially been the space where much tunnelling and stoneworking equipment had been stored in Sunplace’s earliest days. When it was repurposed it was extravagantly redecorated in the most formal design of the day, heavy on bright enamels and ornate geometric stonework and inlay in colored stone, with a vast polished floor featuring a stylized map of the side of Wellakh that had been damaged, with ancient buildings and temples and mighty buildings of old all picked out in inlays of semiprecious stone and bright metal.

  The doors to the Great Room proper were open, a sign that the King was not in residence. Otherwise they would have been shut in token of the traditional need to keep him safe. Rho stood there for a few moments just outside the open doors, looking through them into that huge space all hung with banners and tapestries coming apart with age. He thought once more of something he’d said when he was very small, making his father scowl a bit and his mother laugh out loud: It doesn’t matter how much they did to it to make it pretty. It’s still an equipment shed.

  Rho sighed, wishing someone had taken some thought about the inconvenience of where this pad dumped incoming royalty. Then again, he thought, turning to head down the right-hand branch of the hallway that ended in the Great Room’s expansive vestibule, maybe they did give it some thought. Here, you royals, take a good look and be reminded why we spend so much of the planet’s national product on you each year! Because there was never going to be a time when their work would truly be finished… when the Guarantors could push their personal manifestations of wizardry to one side and say, “Fine, we’re done. Now it’s your problem.” Because after the repair was finished, naturally the maintenance phase would follow. And because what responsible workman refuses to take care of something once it’s repaired? It needs to be kept running…

  Running. Even in his unhappy mood Rho had to smile a little ironically, because over the sound of his footsteps echoing against the corridor’s high vaulted ceiling, he could hear just that: someone way down at the other end, around the curve of it, running toward him.

  Staff. There were always staff here—curators, clerical people and so forth: they had their chambers, meeting spaces and lodging rooms some levels further down in the mountain. Whoever was on watch this shift had been alerted by the activation of the transport pad in the city-House, and was now racing along the corridor toward him to find out which of the Sunborn it was and what they needed.

  Rho just kept plodding along with his satchel over his back. Some paces and breaths later he saw the liveried servitor come running around the curve ahead, dressed in the gold and black robes of the Sunborn’s support staff, and carrying one of their short golden ceremonial spears. The spear had an energy weapon hidden in it, Rho knew. All the staff were trained in the aggressive arts—the sense being that any of them might have to protect the Sunborn at any moment. Which makes you wonder: how many of us have been attacked here, where we’re supposed to be safe, as opposed to in the city, where a certain level of danger is part of the job? It was worth looking up when he was in a mood like this, rather than wasting on some morning or afternoon when he felt better about his life…

  “Lord Prince,” said the servitor as he got close enough to Rho that he didn’t have to shout to be heard. “Are you alone? Are your royal father or mother coming?”

  Which is what they really want to know, Rho thought. I’m just an extra dinner guest to most of the people here. If the Sun starts to blow up, no need to talk to me…

  “The Sunlord and the Queen have not disclosed their plans to me,” Rho said. “You may assume I’ll be here alone tonight unless you hear otherwise from the city house.”

  “Will you be desiring dinner, Prince?”

  “Thank you, I ate in town. Are my chambers open?”

  “They should be, my Prince. The great door and the terrace doors would have been opened for airing just now, as usual every third morning.”

  Rho nodded. It was of course early morning here; Thahit would be just rising, as he was just leaning toward his setting in town. “My thanks,” Rho said; “that will be all.”

  The servitor showed signs of lingering to see if Rho would think belatedly of anything else he might need. This was suddenly unbearably grating, and more than anything Rho would have liked to just yell at him “I don’t need you, be off!”. But if he did something like that, sooner or later his father would hear of it and make his life painful. Royalty has its prerogatives, my princely son, but a man who treats servants badly deserves no respect from anyone, high or low—

  And unfortunately his father was right. “Really,” Rho said, “that’s all, please go finish breaking your fast—” Because he could see a few crumbs of morning-cake still clinging to the man’s undertunic, missed in the fellow’s haste to get into livery and get up here.

  The servitor bowed. “My thanks, my Prince,” he said, and took himself away.

  Rho sighed and walked along more or less in the servitor’s tracks. His rooms were a bit more than a quarter-hour’s walk from here, up stairs, down stairs, along narrow corridors and broad ones. He walked the route more or less automatically, for (faced with surroundings that he knew from his earliest years and could have walked blindfolded) what he kept seeing in his mind’s eye was the events of—was it just an hour or two ago now? It seemed impossible. The park, the tree, the road, the frontage of the city-house, the figure of his mother, the three men running toward her— And that little gesture, so small, and the way they fell. And I could do nothing. Nothing…

  But that was the way it was going to be, and Rho was just going to have to cope with never being able to make the twin of that little gesture himself. As his people reckoned age, it was late for him to be offered the Art. Rho had been passed over, and that too was just the way it was. There was nothing to be gained by pretending otherwise.

  Finally he came almost to the end of his route, and the knowledge of that pushed him out of the wearily repeating loop of imagery. Rho took a deep breath and stepped out the last doorway into the sunlight, onto the terrace that fronted on his rooms.

  There, outside the glass doors giving on the terrace, Rho dropped his satchel and went to lean on the terrace’s balustrade. The wide view spread out beneath him in all directions—the golden and crimson gardens of Sunplace, famous even in other neighboring star systems, laid out like a giant rugged carpet ornamented with endless swirls of abstract design laid out in a thousand vibrant shades. It was all a little shadowed at the moment, the colors muted until the Sun came up: but when it did, all this vista would blaze, vivid, a defiant shout of color fairly vibrating against the blue-green of the sky: You tried to kill us and you failed. We are not dead yet!

  And the view had more import than was what might seem obvious at first glance. In a way the tended garden was a symbol of the far greater endeavor taking place all across the world’s far side, and which still had so far to go. When you came in from space there was no missing that unique and terrible silhouette, one half of the planet shining much brighter than the other,
its albedo unnaturally high to the point where from halfway across the system you could see whether the blasted side or the less-damaged one was turned toward you. Even the tiny glint of fire in the sky as seen from one of the inner planets had a different color temperature depending on whether the live side or the dead one was turned toward you.

  Well, perhaps not dead dead; not any more. The thousands of being-years spent by Wellakh’s wizards since the Burning on the slow repair of the flare-scorched side was an ethical pursuit as well as an economical one. Though reclaiming half the world for the planetary population was always an issue, the older and greater one—from the Guarantors’ point of view—was that the planet was in its own way a being, one that misadventure had befallen. It had been maimed, and had a right to be made well by those who lived on it and were its caretakers. A work never really to be finished, Rho thought. But one worth doing.

  He leaned there, letting his eyes rest on the view for a while and soaking in the pre-dawn quiet. Above the gardens, which seemed in these conditions to stretch to the edge of the world, the morning twilight was dissolving fast with Thahit’s approach. The sky just above the sunward horizon was going fiercely bright with a red-gold much like the shade of his father’s hair. Sometimes when their moods and schedules coincided, the two of them or the three of them leaned here together and watched it—the inexorable approach of their family’s chief concern, the reason they were royalty and the reason their lives came under such frequent threat.

  The light increased, becoming increasingly difficult to look at. Rho leaned there, weary, blinking, and thought of what his father usually did when they were here together. There was a salute one rendered to the Aethyrs, acknowledging what they had made—besides everything else, of course: this dangerous splendor, on which all life depended and which once had almost destroyed all life here.