‘It may be too late,’ Spideog said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Winter is close here but it may already have arrived on the mountain. The pass may be impassable.’
‘Then we have to go now,’ I said, getting to my feet. ‘Mom, you said yourself that maybe the gods want me to find a cure for Dad, well maybe they wanted me to read this manuscript. Look, Mom, I don’t want to defy you but I gotta talk to this Oracle guy.’
She stood and I braced myself. It’s never a good idea to get into a conflict with my mother. She hugged me and said, ‘Promise me you won’t do anything foolish.’
‘Who me?’ I said, flashing a House of Duir smile.
‘And dress warm.’
Araf, Brendan, Spideog and I set off at dawn. It was freezing out but I didn’t complain. I was excited to be doing something other than just reading. Brendan and I spent all of the previous night trying to borrow warm clothes off my students. I felt sorry for a few who gave us wool underwear. Tomorrow they would find out from Dahy that I didn’t have the authority to give them vacation. I may have looked like I got dressed in total darkness but I was toasty. I tried to dissuade Brendan from coming, on the count that it might be too dangerous, but he insisted. ‘I’ll be right by your side,’ he said. I was a touched by his loyalty until he continued, ‘I go where Master Spideog goes.’
Dahy saw us off. Before I mounted Acorn he whispered in my ear, ‘If you get into trouble, trust Spideog. He is arrogant and annoying and he talks nonsense and I really do not like him – but he is a good man under pressure.’ He gave me a leg-up. As he guided my foot into the stirrup he lifted my trouser cuff and strapped a leather sheath, containing one of his knives, to my leg. Then he pulled down the cuff, patted my leg and winked at me. I saluted the Master with a nod of the head.
Araf and I wanted to bring half a dozen soldiers to help pitch tents and cook and maybe set up a base camp but Spideog said we had to travel light and fast. ‘If we beat the snows it will only be by days,’ he said, ‘and it will be a good thing for you two princes to go without your handservants for a while.’ Dahy was right – he was annoying.
We travelled hard and while the sun was in the sky we took no breaks. On the morning of the third day we saw the peak of Mount Cas. It looked close but it took two more days to get to its foothills. On the fifth day we found a field and set up a base camp where we left the horses to graze. After that we went on foot. It took a day to reach t the cuse of the main peak and then another day of circling the mountain to find the trail up. The days were cold and the nights freezing but there was no imminent threat of snow. The night before we started our ascent Spideog disappeared and came back with a couple of pheasants that he had convinced to give up breathing so we could eat. There was little talk over dinner. Araf and Brendan turned in early but something in the old archer’s eyes made me think that he was troubled, so I just sat with him by the fire and matched his silence. Finally he blurted out, ‘I want to know why.’
I waited for him to say more but when he didn’t, I asked, ‘Why what?’
He didn’t look at me; he just kept staring into the fire. ‘Why I was unworthy.’
‘Who says you are unworthy?’
He pointed up the mountain. ‘The Oracle. The last time I was here he told me that I was unworthy. I didn’t ask him why, I just accepted it. This time I want to know.’
‘Well, I think it’s probably ’cause he’s nuts and has been breathing thin air for too long. One thing you are not is unworthy. Even Dahy respects you.’
He looked at me. ‘How do you know that?’
‘He told me.’
That brought a crooked smile to Spideog’s face. ‘It must have pained him to tell you that.’
I laughed. ‘I think it did.’ I stirred the fire with a stick and felt the extra warmth on my face. ‘I found a letter of yours in the library.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yeah, it was a letter you wrote to Dahy after the Fili war.’
‘Really? Oh, I think I remember someone collating material for some sort of an archive. Good gods, that was so many years ago.’
‘It seemed to me that you and Dahy were friends.’
After a sigh he said, ‘We were. More than just friends, we were comrades in arms.’
‘What happened?’
‘What else? A girl. I thought he stole her from me. He thought I stole her from him. In the end we fought. She said that she loved each of us equally and it was tearing her apart. She left us both and I disappeared into the Real World. Dahy always said he wasn’t mad about the girl, he claimed he was really mad about me leaving my duties but that is a false memory on his part. It was the girl. I needed to get away from him but more importantly I needed to find some peace of mind. I went to the Real World which was a pretty barbaric place back then. I didn’t discover what I was looking for until I travelled east. In Asia I found that the answer lies within, and as a bonus I learned their way of fighting. It was exciting and it changed my life. Everyone thinks that fighting is about brawn but in the east I learned that success in a battle comes from thinking.’
‘Dahy says that you know.’
‘I’m not surprised; Master Dahy is the most natural fighter I have ever known. He didn’t have to study to be as good as he is.’
‘It sunds to me that you two still like each other.’
‘Maybe.’
‘What happened to the girl?’
‘She found another, a man better than both of us.’
‘Well, I think you are both great men,’ I said, standing. It was time for bed. ‘It sounds to me that this two- timing woman screwed up a great friendship.’
Spideog rose, his face grimaced in the firelight. ‘You really shouldn’t speak that way about your grandmother.’
Chapter Fourteen
Spideog would say no more that night. I went to bed trying to remember what Dad had told me about his mother. It wasn’t much. He once told me that she left on a sorceress quest when he was still a baby and had never returned, but that was all I could recall. It was well into the next day, after the camp was packed and we were hiking up the trail, that I got a chance to speak to Spideog in private. It turned out that the love of his and Dahy’s lives was indeed my grandmother, Macha the Sorceress Queen, the Horse Whisperer, Mother of the Twins of Macha – Dad and Cialtie.
‘By the time I had come back from the Real World she had married Finn,’ Spideog said.
‘How did you deal with that?’
‘I had found peace in Asia. She was my queen and Finn was my king – I re-entered into the service of the House of Duir.’
‘But you never took a wife after her.’
‘No,’ he said. There was so much emotion in that one word I didn’t have the heart to ask him any more.
The path up got steeper and narrower. By midday I was exhausted and ready to stop but Spideog was not a ‘stopping for lunch’ kind of guy. He was a ‘one foot in front of the other’ kind of guy. We walked into the night until we found a place where the trail widened enough to make camp. It was cold and windy but dry and we all went out like candles in a hurricane.
The trail got ledge-like on the morning of the second day. Around one bend a small stream had frozen where it crossed the path. It was nothing too dangerous but Spideog lashed us together with ropes. He said one can never be too careful and it would be disastrous if he lost one of the two princes, to which Brendan replied, ‘What am I,
