Mage Quest

V

In the morning, while Ascelin went to the stables to see if he could speed up the reshoeing of our horses, I went in search of the chaplain. I found him near the garden, playing volleyball with Arnulf’s children.

I had never seen Joachim play volleyball before; for that matter, though he often talked with Prince Paul and Gwennie on topics beyond their lessons and took them on walks through the countryside, I couldn’t recall him doing anything I would have called playing. But now he and his niece were matched against the two boys, using a low, child-sized net over which he towered.

“All right, we’re all tied evenly,” he said to them, laughing, when I came up. He straightened out his vestments. “Let’s stop there and give your uncle a chance to catch his breath. Yes, yes, we can play again this afternoon.”

As he and I walked into the garden and sat down on the bench where Claudia had sat playing the lute the afternoon before, he said, “I’m glad we were able to come. I wouldn’t want to miss my niece and nephews.”

I looked at him sideways. Any worry or concern he might have had about coming home after so long seemed gone, and he looked only happy and relaxed. He also made no attempt to explain or justify the Lady Claudia’s singing, which I myself would have felt compelled to do in the circumstances.

“Why did your brother really want to see you?” I asked. The flower-scented air was warm, and a bird sang from a nearby branch.

“He told you last night,” said Joachim, looking out across the landscape. He didn’t sound very concerned. “He’d hoped I’d have an idea of who or what might be responsible for his disappearing caravans, and of course he hadn’t dare say anything specific to me in a message that might be intercepted. I’m afraid I have no ideas that could help him. Now he’s asked me to keep alert for any clues while we’re in the East.”

“Has the Lady Claudia asked you again to transact business for the firm while we’re in Xantium?”

“No,” said Joachim in surprise. He turned his dark eyes on me. “This whole situation seems, I must say, more like a problem for a wizard than a priest.”

“I don’t understand it either,” I said, shaking my head slowly. “It sounds as though two separate people, at least one of them Christian, have mastered Ifriti: one whose Ifrit recovered the Black Pearl for him from the deepest rift of the sea, and the other who’s using his Ifrit to seize merchant caravans in search of it.”

“How do you master an Ifrit?” asked Joachim, just as Dominic had.

Joachim I trusted. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

The chaplain did not pursue the topic. In a moment he began humming softly, the same tune, I realized, that Claudia had sung the day before.

“Ascelin thinks your brother has the Pearl here,” I said abruptly.

Joachim smiled. “That seems unlikely. If it really does have the power to make its owner prosper, he wouldn’t be losing all those caravans.”

I didn’t like the thought of going ourselves into an East where at least one, if not two, Ifriti were making travelers disappear, and I also didn’t have much faith in Joachim’s brother. But I couldn’t say either of these things-or ask the chaplain if Claudia really was trying to seduce him. Instead I asked, “If Arnulf just wanted a priest’s opinion, didn’t he have a closer one to ask?”

This made Joachim look distressed as none of my other questions had. “Not one he knows and trusts. He hasn’t kept a chaplain since he’s been married.”

“Well, most merchants don’t,” I said, speaking from my own experience.

“Maybe not, but merchant families who live like aristocrats-which we certainly always did-have households like aristocrats, and that includes chaplains. My father always employed a chaplain, and of course Claudia herself is from an aristocratic background. But the chapel here in the house is now closed up, and they have to go to town for church service-if they go at all.”

“They don’t keep a wizard, either,” I said. “Even some of the smaller City merchants employ wizards.” The sharp business practices which Joachim had felt he could not follow at least did not include using illusion to improve the quality of the merchandise.

But Joachim wasn’t interested in wizards. “It was not Arnulf’s idea to dismiss his chaplain,” he said. “It was the Lady Claudia’s.” He abruptly stopped looking concerned. “You know, Daimbert, if I had decided to stay here, it would have been because of Claudia. But service to God took precedence, of course. It may not be a very humble thought, but I have wondered once or twice if the reason why she dismissed their chaplain, when they got married five years later, was some sort of oblique attack on the priesthood that had taken me.”

His eyes looked slightly ashamed but still highly amused at his own thoughts. The queen had worried that the king might come back changed from his experiences in the Holy Land. We weren’t more than six weeks out of Yurt, but so far so many new sides of people’s personalities were being revealed that the royal court might not even recognize us-assuming of course we reached home again.

If Joachim thought that the Lady Claudia was trying to make up for lost time now that he was here again, he didn’t say so. I wondered if her singing had all been quite innocent, and if I had an impure mind to imagine otherwise.

Hugo had asked Arnulf to let him look at some of the books in his study. He found the full story of King Solomon’s Pearl there, and he entertained us all at lunch with other accounts he had found of creatures who lived in distant countries.

I wondered, listening to him, how much of it he really believed or to what extent he was teasing Dominic, who took it all very seriously. “And did you know,” said Hugo, his eyes bright with excitement, “that if you go around to the far side of the world the people there all have enormous feet and toes so that they can cling to the earth and not fall off?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Ascelin, but as though he was thinking of something else. “You can’t fall off the earth. Besides, there’s nothing but the Outer Sea on the far side of the globe.”

It was hard to tell how many of the travelers’ tales Hugo had picked up were real and how much imagination. Much worse monsters than anything he described could and did live in the northern continent of wild magic, even though I did not think they frequently visited the East-or at least hoped not. Ifriti were real, but I was not nearly as sure about the people whose faces were in their bellies. Arnulf, who must have had excellent information about the East, made no attempt to contradict Hugo on anything.

But this thought gave me another. I had been assuming that Arnulf must himself make the journey east regularly, but maybe if one were a very wealthy merchant one did not, relying instead on one’s agents. If he had been personally attacked, and his caravans were beginning to disappear, he might well prefer to send someone else-such as us-than to go himself.

The next morning, our horses were finally ready, our clothes all clean, our boots resoled, our armor and harnesses both polished. The air seemed sultry for this early in the summer as we mounted our horses in the wide courtyard.

“We were delighted to have you all,” said Arnulf genially. “Be sure to stop here again on your way home.”

The Lady Claudia came out of the house at the last minute, carrying a small foil-wrapped parcel that looked, from the way she held it, heavy for its size. Paying no attention to anyone else, she walked up to Joachim’s horse.

“I want you to have this,” she said in a low voice, not meeting his eyes.

“What is it?” he asked with a smile.

“It’s a present. But don’t open it yet. Wait to open it until you’re far from here.”

I had a sudden dreadful suspicion of what that small package contained.

Joachim shrugged and unbuckled his saddle-bag to slide it in on top of his Bible. He took Claudia’s hand affectionately for a moment, but I did not see him look back as we all rode out a moment later.

I however glanced back over my shoulder, to see the Lady Claudia, looking quite small in the spacious court of her manor house, waving her handkerchief after us.

There were rumblings of thunder in the distance as we headed back toward the great eastern route. “Do you have your weather spells all ready, Wizard?” Dominic asked.