2.Economics of Horvendile
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AND meanwhile too the Redeemer’s wife, Dame Niafer, had sent a summoning to each of the nine lords that, with Manuel, were of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion: and all these met at Storisende, as Niafer commanded them, for a session or, as they more formally called it, a siege of this order.
Now this fellowship took its name from the banner it had fought under so destroyingly. Upon that sable banner was displayed a silver stallion, which was rampant in every member and was bridled with gold. Dom Manuel was the captain of this fellowship; and it was made up of the nine barons who, under Manuel, had ruled Poictesme. Each had his two stout castles and his fine woodlands and meadows, which he held in fealty to Dom Manuel: and each had a high name for valor.
Four of these genial murderers had served, under the Conde de Tohil Vaca, in Manuel’s first and utterly disastrous campaign against the Northmen: but all the nine had been with Manuel since the time of the great fighting about Lacre Kai, and throughout Manuel’svarious troubles with Oribert and Thragnar and Earl Ladinas and Sclaug and Oriander, that blind and coldly evil Swimmer who was the father of Manuel; and in all the other warrings of Manuel these nine had been with him up to the end.
And the deeds of the lords of the Silver Stallion had fallen very little short of Manuel’s own deeds. Thus, it was Manuel, to be sure, who killed Oriander: that was a family affair. But Miramon Lluagor, the Seneschal of Gontaron, was the champion who subdued Thragnar and put upon him a detection and a hindrance: and it was Kerin of Nointel—the Syndic and, after that, the Castellan of Basardra,—who captured and carefully burned Sclaug. Then, in the quelling of Othmar Black-Tooth’s rebellion, Ninzian of Yair, the High Bailiff of Upper Ardra, had killed eleven more of the outlaws than got their deaths by Manuel’s sword. It was Guivric of Perdigon, and not Manuel, who put the great Arabian Al-Motawakkil out of life. And in the famous battle with the Easterlings, by which the city of Megaris was rescued, it was Manuel who got the main glory and, people said, a three nights’ loan of the body of King Theodoret’s young sister; but capable judges declared the best fighting on that day was done by Donander of Évre, then but a boy, whom Manuel thereafter made Thane of Aigremont.
Yet Holden of Nérac, the Marshal of St. Tara, was the boldest of them all, and was very well able to holdhis own in single combat with any of those that have been spoken of: Coth of the Rocks had not ever quitted any battle-field except as a conqueror: and courteous Anavalt of Fomor and light-hearted Gonfal of Naimes—who had the worst names among this company for being the most cunning friends and coaxers of women,—these two had put down their masculine opposers also in gratifyingly large numbers.
In fine, no matter where the lords of the Silver Stallion had raised their banner against an adversary, it was in that place they made an end of that adversary: for there was never, in any time, a hardier gang of bullies than was this Fellowship of the Silver Stallion in the season that they kept earth noisy with the clashing of their swords and darkened heaven with the smoke of the towns they were sacking, and when throughout the known world men had talked about the wonders which these champions were performing with Dom Manuel to lead them. Now they were leaderless.
These heroes came to Storisende; and with Dame Niafer they of course found Holy Holmendis. This saint was then very lately come out of Philistia, to console the Countess in her bereavement. But they found with her also that youthful red-haired Horvendile under whom Dom Manuel, in turn, had held Poictesme, by the terms of a contract which was not ever made public. Some said this Horvendile to beSatan’s friend and emissary, while others declared his origin to lurk in a more pagan mythology: all knew the boy to be a master of discomfortable strange magics such as were unknown to Miramon Lluagor and Guivric the Sage.
This Horvendile said to the nine heroes, “Now begins the last siege of the Fellowship of the Silver Stallion.”
Donander of Évre was the youngest of them. Yet he spoke now, piously and boldly enough. “But it is our custom, Messire Horvendile, to begin each siege with prayer.”
“This siege,” replied Horvendile, “must nevertheless begin without any such religious side-taking. For this is the siege in which, as it was prophesied, you shall be both against Judah and against Jerusalem, and against Thebes and Hermopolis and Avalon and Breidablik and all other places which produce Redeemers.”
“Upon my word, but who is master here!” cried Coth of the Rocks, twirling at his long mustachios. This gesture was a sure sign that trouble brewed.
Horvendile answered: “The master who held Poictesme, under my whims, has passed. A woman sits in his place, his little son inherits after him. So begins a new romance; and a new order is set afoot.”
“Yet Coth, in his restless pursuit of variety, has asked a wholly sensible question,” said Gonfal, the tall Margrave of Aradol. “Who will command us, whonow will give us our directions? Can Madame Niafer lead us to war?”
“These things are separate. Dame Niafer commands: but it is I—since you ask,—who will give to all of you your directions, and your dooms too against the time of their falling, and after that to your names I will give life. Now, your direction, Gonfal, is South.”
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, amfor the North,” said Miramon Lluagor. This sorcerer 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 Nérac, “exhausts the directions: and it leaves no direction for the rest of us.”
Horvendile looked at this Holden, who was withevery 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 Saraïde: for she is in all ways superior to what the Cabalists record about Queen Naäma, 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 Saraïde 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 Saraïde.”
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 preëmpted.”
“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 Évre, “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 god-fearing pillar it possessesanywhere 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, “isMundus 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.”