The Return of Fitzroy Angursell, page 24
“No small magics, quick responses. It’s all been carefully regulated great workings for me.”
The fire stirred sluggishly. I could help with that, at least, a magic entirely instinctual, and even remembered to wait until he had withdrawn his hands before I helped the new wood catch.
“Thank you,” he said, and helped me shake out our bedding. Most of the water seemed to have beaded up and run off, and I truly did have a more than ample sufficiency of pillows and blankets, so was able to provide us with a new set, arranging the others in proximity to the fire to dry off.
Masseo watched me settle down on a new down pillow enclosed in what seemed to be a sumptuous dark purple velvet. “How many pillows do you normally sleep with?”
“I can’t say I’ve counted them recently. Three or four, I suppose.” I visualized my bed. “Perhaps six.”
“Six!”
“Why, how many do you have?”
He was laughing now. “One.”
“How restrained of you.”
The fire was burning brightly and cast off a goodly warmth. The air was not cold, but the dowsing had chilled me and the fire felt lovely. The magic was moving more quickly as the world turned towards morning.
“You’ve changed a lot,” Masseo said.
I wanted to say, So have you, but I just looked at him, his face softly illuminated by the firelight. He smiled crookedly.
“Like that: exactly like that. When would you have ever let an opening like that go without a return comment?”
He stretched out on his blankets and cushions, still watching me, the light dancing in his eyes. I stayed where I was, thinking that even if I didn’t particularly like the old eating couch style, it was good to know how to recline on one elbow in situations like these.
“It’s not bad,” he said, a note of concern creeping into his voice. “Merely … different. That you’re so calm and collected now.”
Serene, my inner, sarcastic voice commented. I could have said it aloud: there were no guards or servants or courtiers or flunkies or attendants or ministers here, just a dear friend. But my tongue would not move. His hilarity and disbelief at discovering me an emperor of Astandalas was too fresh.
Masseo shifted and looked into the fire. I could see he was smiling. In so many ways it was a lovely change. He had been so dour.
“You’re much happier.”
He rolled over onto his back, looking up at where my invisible canopy blocked the rain, the firelight catching the water in sheets of gold. “You’re not going to go back to sleep, are you?’
“I’ve slept my usual amount.”
He sighed, a put-on sigh that made me smile. My wrist had started to throb so I lay down, stretching out on my back, mirroring his position. I felt oddly vulnerable, the magic moving below us, reaching out beyond the bounds of the world, the dark jungle shadowy and invisible beyond the circle of pillars, the sky opaque. The air moved softly around us, bearing fine droplets of water at times, and the green, musky scent of the jungle.
Masseo’s voice came quietly, meditatively, out of the dark.
“That last night in the Silver Forest … The magic leapt up suddenly, at least as far as I was concerned. We were waiting for you to come back from the river. It was such a strange place … all silver and brown. I’d expected it to be like the Moon’s country, but it wasn’t. It was magical, but a different sort of magic.”
Ancient Shaian magic not dissimilar from that on this land, woven in and through with later developments of Schooled magic. That forest was one of the great protections around Astandalas, silently guarding the once-vulnerable northern approach to the city and (as I found out later) housing in its innermost groves a summer palace for the Imperial family.
“There was something like an earthquake, though I don’t remember if the ground actually moved or if it just felt as if it had. Like a ripple through the world, as if the trees and land were nothing more than reflections or those illusions you used to do. We all looked at each other, and I remember that Pharia took a step towards Damian and then—she wasn’t there. Just gone. He stepped towards her, crying her name, and he hadn’t even finished speaking when he disappeared.
“I was sitting on my pack while I undid my bootlaces, so I grabbed it. By then it was clear something had happened. I looked across the camp at Sardeet even as Gadarved and Pali and Ayasha all disappeared. She smiled at me, and I remember thinking it wasn’t a sad expression, even though I knew it was the end—I don’t know why but I did—and she said, ‘He will come back as unexpectedly as he has left. Until we meet again—fare well!’ And even as I was thinking, of course, this was something to do with you, she was gone.”
The canopy above me was blurring. I squinted my eyes shut against the bright reflections. How many times had I wondered what they had thought, in those final moments when the Silver Forest was roused against them?
“Masseo,” I said, but my voice cracked.
“Hush,” he said, gently. “I’m speaking now.”
That had been a joke, older than Masseo’s friendship even. Jullanar used to say it in exasperation and then as a joking-but-serious indication that I was interrupting too often, too excited to listen, too … much.
“Jullanar and I were the last ones. It seemed it was taking a step that caused everyone to disappear, so we gathered everything we could reach without moving, and then Jullanar said to me, bravely, ’See you on the other side!’—and—and she was gone. And then it was just me, and I took a breath and stepped and … and then I was in far western Voonra.”
The Silver Forest protections, once roused, dispersed any enemies randomly across the breadth of the Empire.
“I suppose I could have looked for the others, but Sardeet was a bit of a Seer, you remember, and there was something in the way she said Farewell, and the way the magic felt, and the way … we’d been arguing quite a bit, that last month or two, hadn’t we? We’d been a little too successful. We were entering our thirties, well, except for Ayasha and Gadarved who were already older, and I know Pharia and Damian were wanting to settle down, at least. But you were so adamantly adventurous …”
I had somehow forgotten those arguments. I dug my fingers into the velvet and silk of the cushions under me. The textures, even the scents rising from the fabric, were familiar. I could have been lying on my bed in the Palace, staring up at the canopy, drapes shutting out sight of my attendants though they could hear me and I them.
A breeze swirled over my hot face and brought with it the definitely outdoor odour of the jungle, green and growing and muck and something creamy and warm, like vanilla or chocolate, some night-blooming flower. And it was Masseo I could hear breathing, not Pikabe or Ato or Zeraphin or any of the others, and beneath the velvet and the silk were not the smooth antique linens of my sheets but a thin mat and below that stone.
The magic pressed close.
“I suppose,” Masseo went on thoughtfully, “that I had always felt that being part of the Red Company was a gift—a reprieve—it never seemed quite real, though it was also the most real part of my life. Everything about it was so absurdly extravagant. … Once I was by myself again it felt like a dream, and I was awake in the real world again.
“I didn’t go looking. I wandered around the hinterlands of western Voonra for a while. It was a place I’d never been to before, strange and wonderful in many ways, though very insular and suspicious of strangers. I acquired some tools and a pony-cart and became a travelling farrier and blacksmith, going from village to village plying my trade. It wasn’t exciting work, by any means, but it took a long time to adjust to being just Tika Smith, as they called me there, no one special at all, not Masseo Umrit of the Red Company, hero of a dozen songs and participant in many, many more.
“It was a happy time, those years before the Fall. Artorin Damara was a good emperor, as far as those things go.”
“Thank you,” I said dryly.
He chuckled.
I wished I understood what he thought I did mean by these comments.
“I was in Voonra during the Fall. Where I was, it mostly took the form of a series of earthquakes, and the collapse of anything that had been built by magic. One building would dissolve into bricks and mortar dust, the next one to it would be perfectly fine except for the plumbing having melted and run out of the building … some roads and bridges were fine, other times the rivers themselves had been diverted with magic and they ran backwards or upside down or turned all the fish in them into air-breathers. There are places there where fish come swimming through the air towards you. It was all very odd.
“I worked where I was, a city called Vaelorjel, to help with the reconstruction, rebuilding a town, a country, a world. It was hard but satisfying work … lots for a smith to do.” He fell silent for a few moments, and when he continued his voice was softer, regretful. “I had a neighbour, a widow. She was very lovely and took a fancy to me. It should have been—”
He stopped, took an audible breath, and started again. “It should have been simple. I loved her dearly, and she returned my affections, but … when it came to the point of courting, I … couldn’t. How was I to tell her that I had been lying the whole time? Or that … Fitzroy, do you know where I’m from?”
“You never said,” I replied.
“That wasn’t what I asked you.”
I lay there for a while. “I was under an enchantment that prevented me from telling you, from telling anyone, who I truly was. You were all so kind about letting me keep my secrets. I knew from the magic that you were born on Zunidh, but that’s it. I never quite figured out your accent.”
“I always wondered why you never pressed about that, when you were willing to ask impudent questions about literally everything else. I took it as you being raised with rather different social mores than normal people.”
“That was true enough.”
The fire crackled. Something beyond the circle of firelight, beyond the pillars, made a deep hurr hurr noise. I touched the magic and felt a wash of reassurance. Whatever it was meant us no harm.
Masseo seemed to be focused on his own thoughts, for he made no indication he’d heard anything. I felt obscurely pleased I’d noticed something he hadn’t. Then I remembered he was not one of my guards, that we were equals, and that I too had my responsibilities for his safety.
“I am from Zunidh,” he said into the quiet. “The Azilint. It doesn’t matter where exactly.”
His voice made it clear it did matter, and also that he wasn’t going to tell me.
The Azilint is an archipelago off the eastern coast of Southern Dair, mountainous and well-forested. The islands tend to be large, but they are so craggy that communication across ridges has always been difficult and it is specific valleys that hold identity. The Azilinti were not at all related to the Wide Sea Islanders, but they shared something of the fierce local pride.
People from the Azilint said: I am so-and-so from such-and-such village. The head of my carving is such-and-such. If pressed, they would name their valley, then their mountain, and finally, reluctantly, their island. And when they had done so it was always clear that the island was so fundamental a part of their identity that they could barely conceive of being unattached to it. Most Azilinti carried long wooden staffs, carved with the emblems of their place and their own doings. Each island had its own particular wood that no one else would use.
“When I was a very young man,” Masseo said, “I was infatuated with a girl in my village. We fancied ourselves in love—perhaps we were. We thought our passions strong enough, pure enough, to protect us from all the social censure. We were caught, of course.”
The cultures of Zunidh are, and always have been, many and various. Some had no issues with any form of sex, so long as all parties consented; others held much stricter views, down to those for whom it was only within the specific bonds of marriage that it was acceptable.
Clearly Masseo’s village was one of the stricter ones. I knew some horrifically strong laws from the Azilint. Sexual crimes were almost always punished as harshly as possible, often with execution. Not that I condoned rape or assault in any form, but some of the Azilinti islanders held very narrow ideas of what forms of attraction were permissible, and it had required a great deal of effort to persuade them not to execute out of hand two men or two women who loved each other. They were still usually exiled, but at least they could fashion a life for themselves.
“I was sixteen, and legally a man,” Masseo said. “She was fifteen, and legally a child. According to our laws, it was rape.”
I curled my fingers until my nails pressed through the cloth onto the hard stone, and willed my heart to stop stuttering. Somehow, in all the years we had travelled with each other, this had never come up.
His voice was flat. I felt the magic pause, listening. I would have been worried if I had not known Masseo for ten years, and seen him in his village more recently, for wakeful magic judges, and answers like to like. What door opened for us at dawn would be a response to this midnight confession.
“The village convened a council. The law stated that rapists were executed, thrown over the cliff to be eaten by sharks. They knew it was mutual, consensual; that we had thought it love. But they knew that I knew it was wrong, that we should have waited a year, that we should have been married. … They decided that I was no longer and nevermore would be a part of their village. They stripped my family name from me, broke my staff, and cast me out in exile. Umrit means no-name.”
In those dozens of songs I had written about him, about the Red Company, I named him thus. Masseo Umrit: a name known even to the halls of heaven.
“They tried to be merciful, in their own way. They did not kill me; and they did not refuse me my first name. The last thing my father said to me was that I would never again be a son of his, but that perhaps I could one day be a man.”
I would have expected his voice to be savage, but although it was flat the pain seemed muted. I listened carefully. I am considered a good judge of character; and I remembered that dour, unhappy journeyman blacksmith outside his master’s forge, who shoed our horses and looked so wistfully at us when I spontaneously invited him along to adventure.
He had come, all the way to the divine lands on the other side of the Sea of Stars, where we dallied in the Moon’s garden and drank honey-wine from the meads of the Sun.
“I had nothing, knew nothing, was nothing. I was so angry and lost. I fled, stowed away on the first ship I found, stole food and money … found myself falling further and further into crimes I would never have imagined myself able to commit, a month before. I hated myself more and more, but what else was I to do?”
If that happened nowadays—and I was not so certain it did not, could not, happen, in the Azilint or elsewhere—there was the annual stipend. A net to catch one falling, whoever and wherever they were.
Back then there had been nothing except the kindness of strangers, and a strong young man fallen into crime would not be considered a worthy recipient of kindness.
“Along the way I stole from a man who caught me. He was a blacksmith, a hard man, and he said that he would exact every ounce of bread and every penny of coin from me in hard work.”
He was silent for long enough that I ventured a question. “You stayed?”
“I didn’t have any choice. He chained me to the anvil for the first six months.”
That startled me into laughing. “Really? Surely that was illegal even in Eritanyr’s day.”
“No one cared. My master paid his taxes and no one liked him much, but he was a talented smith and reckoned a most upright man. Six months incarcerated for petty thievery was legal punishment, and the local authorities didn’t mind him feeding me in return for heavy labour. And it was heavy, fourteen, fifteen hours a day. For the first two months I was so tired all the time I couldn’t think. And then, as I started to get used to the work, and my muscles developed, I discovered I … liked it. It was something I could do. At the end of the six months, when my master unchained me, I asked him to take me on as a formal apprentice.”
His voice quirked. “He was an even harder master when I was free than when I’d been chained to his anvil. But I learned a great deal from him. He was exceedingly moral in a narrow way, very much this is right and that is wrong, nothing in the middle. Either the work was done right, or it was done again until it was. Nothing less than that. Either the iron held, or it shattered and was reforged until it was strong again. He reforged me.”
“Until one day Damian and Jullanar and Pali and I came gallivanting along—”
“And showed me how bright the soul could be. How bright I could shine. You wrote all those wonderful songs about me, about us, and gave me—oh, Fitzroy, you gave us all the means and the opportunity to be great. Most of us don’t start where you did, you know, or Damian or Pali. Jullanar and I used to talk about it. We needed to be pushed.”
I had my own thoughts about Jullanar, who was my very first friend and did more to support my following of my vocation than Masseo or possibly even she herself knew, but the creature out beyond the circle of pillars made its hurr hurr noise again and I remained silent, listening.
Masseo sighed. “I tried to become a man my father might have been proud to have for his son, but I could never forgive them for casting me out, killing me in every way except the final one. I can understand it, but I could never accept it.”
He breathed hard for a few moments before he collected himself enough to continue.
“When Larima, the Voonran widow, talked to me about courting, I realized that I had misconstrued the friendship I had valued so much, and I—I had never told her that I was Masseo Umrit of the Red Company, and I don’t think she ever guessed. I am not so flamboyant as you.
“No one is as flamboyant as you, not even Sardeet, and she tried. Oh, Fitzroy, I have missed you so!” His voice wavered, then he continued. “I couldn’t tell Larima the truth—I wasn’t brave enough—and I couldn’t stay, not when I had hurt her so despite my good intentions. I left, travelling again, but this time not happily. I was pursued by the ghosts I thought I had long since laid to rest.
