then on, either.”
When we stopped for the night in a hollow sheltered by evergreens, Joachim asked me, “Why have you been watching me all day? Afraid your wizardry might not have healed me fully?” There was an amused glint in the back of his dark eyes.
“I didn’t heal you with wizardry,” I said patiently. “Let me explain it again. The words of the Hidden Language by themselves have little power either to sicken or to heal. Certainly there are herbs, potions, compounds, and the like, products of the earth, that will do both, and some wizards in the old days used to do as much with such compounds as with the real forces of magic. But nowadays most wizards avoid such messiness. All I did was what my predecessor in Yurt used to do: use the spells of wizardry to discover, and at most augment, the powers of growing things. Herbs’ attributes can provide a shortcut, or even go where spells do not go, but they are inherently unpredictable. I can’t be nearly as confident about a healing herb as I could be about a modern spell.”
I stopped in the middle of this academic discourse and smiled at him. “And I think you know me well enough to realize that even my modern spells don’t always work quite the way they’re supposed to.”
“I’ll take my chances on the quality of your spells,” he replied, with the same almost amused look. But then he became more sober. “I’m sorry, Daimbert, that I waited so long to open Claudia’s present. Now you’ll never know what was in it.”
“It’s not worth worrying about,” I said. I didn’t want to think any more about a woman who had hypocritically tried to remind her brother-in-law of her former love for him, just so she could give him an object so accursed it would nearly kill him.
But Joachim had more to say. “I hope you don’t think me foolish, Daimbert, but in a way I was testing myself during our visit. I realized that, at some level, I had stayed away from my old home for so long because I was afraid that I might regret my decision to become a priest.”
“And did you?” I asked in trepidation.
“Of course not, and that was one of the best parts of the visit. I deliberately spent time talking to Claudia, and was pleased to find that I felt brotherly affection for her as my brother’s wife and my niece’s and nephews’ mother, but nothing more.”
“Is that why you let her sing love-songs to you?”
The chaplain stretched out his long legs in front of him. I was relieved that he took my question with new amusement, rather than as an insult. “The songs she was singing had nothing to do with
I looked at the chaplain thoughtfully. Joachim always assumed that everyone was a sinner, without letting it bother him, but it occurred to me that he also resisted thinking real evil of someone whom he liked and trusted. I had always hoped that the fact that he was willing to be friends with me was an indication that I was really virtuous the whole time. But that he would not even consider the possibility that Claudia had been trying to seduce him-or at least persuade him with seductive hints to take a “gift” from her unquestioningly-now made me wonder how deep my own virtue might actually go.
“The next time we reach a place with a telephone or a pigeon loft,” said Joachim, “I will send her a message and apologize for losing her present. I just hope it wasn’t anything very valuable.”
It grew slowly colder as we climbed during the next two days, and several times there were patches of snow in the ditches at the side of the road as well as on the towering peaks above us. But late in the afternoon of the second day we finally reached the pass and looked out eastward, a stinging wind in our faces.
Before us stretched broad green meadows, scattered with low wooden buildings and clumps of stunted trees. Cows grazed in the meadows, and smoke rose from several chimneys. But we were not looking at the meadows. Instead our eyes were drawn to the mountain to our left, which rose at least a mile higher than the high saddle on which we stood. We had caught glimpses of it as we climbed, but the mountain we were on had hidden its true size from us.
“The Snow Giant,” said Ascelin, “and to our right is Diamond Mountain.” This more southerly peak was scarcely lower. Storms swirled around their upper reaches, covering them with white mist, but suddenly a gust of wind a mile above us cleared the clouds away, and the peaks seemed to glare down at us with the same unbearable cold which I had felt, on a much reduced level, in the eyes of King Warin.
We turned our attention then to the scene before us. The meadows, bright with flowers, sloped slowly down from where we stood, but several miles away the land started to rise sharply again, and grass gave way first to a line of dark evergreens and then to ice. The tips of the icy peaks were touched by pink from the sun behind us.
“I hope we’re not going up those mountains,” said the king. “I’m not sure my old bones would make it.”
Ascelin laughed. “Don’t worry, Haimeric. “We’re out of the western kingdoms now and over the pass. Our road will swing around the bases of the rest of the mountains we meet.”
“Does the king of this kingdom have a telephone?” asked Joachim.
“We’re not in a kingdom,” said Ascelin. “Up here in the mountains most of the countries are very small-even smaller than Yurt-and are run by elected councils. And I’d be surprised if anyone east of the pass had a phone. They’re a little old-fashioned here.”
“Come on,” said Dominic. “Let’s get down out of the wind.”
For the next week we traveled through scenery so glorious that it would have been worth the journey by itself, and yet so over whelming that I felt exhausted from more than riding at the end of the day. I was constantly reminded that, while magic might draw on the powers that had shaped the earth, those powers were so immense that all the wizards who had ever lived could only move them very slightly.
Ascelin was right that the worst of our climbing was behind us. Our road stayed in the valleys, narrow or broad, beneath the peaks, or at worst worked its way across the grassy lower slope of a mountain. With a view that often stretched for miles in all directions, we worried less about a surprise attack. We passed a number of tiny, jade-green lakes caught in folds of the landscape, reflecting the peaks above them.
The first two nights we asked hospitality from farmers near the road. In return for a few coins, they cheerfully put us up in the haylofts in the back of their houses, warm with the breath of the cows beneath, and gave us cheese and pancakes with honey and wild strawberries for supper. At night, listening to the dull clang of bells as the cows moved below us, I began to relax for the first time since we had seen King Warin’s castle rising against the sky.
At the second farm there were two little girls in starched white aprons and tight braids, who kept creeping up to see us and then dashing away in giggling excitement. Ascelin looked after them in what I considered inexplicable melancholy until I realized that they must remind him of his own twins.
By the third day, our road joined the first of the much more heavily used roads that crossed the passes further south, carrying trade and travelers between the eastern and western kingdoms, even though the main routes to the East were still to the west of the mountains. Now there were regular inns; their rooms, though small, were scrupulously clean, and the featherbeds were nearly as soft as the ones in the Lady Claudia’s guest rooms. Cheese seemed to be featured at every meal.
The second inn had a pigeon loft. The innkeeper was a little dubious about trying to send a pigeon message any distance, especially over the high passes. He warned us darkly about the difficulties of messages that had to be transferred several times. But Joachim sent Claudia a letter, Hugo wrote his mother, and both the king and Ascelin sent letters to their wives. None of them told me what they put on the tiny rectangles which were all the pigeons could carry.
After a week in the mountains, our route began, almost imperceptibly at first, to lead us lower and away from the highest peaks. Then we rounded the base of a mountain and saw before us not another mountain but a glimpse of a distant blue plain. Ascelin, who had been striding in the lead, stopped short.
“This is as far east as I’ve ever gone,” he said. “We’re leaving the little mountain republics here, and once we reach the plain we’ll be in the eastern kingdoms.”
“Then we’ll be leaving peaceful territory,” said Hugo, “to go into a land of war.”
“Well, almost,” said Ascelin. “You have to realize that these mountains are so peaceful in part because all the restless young men go down to fight in the pay of the eastern kings.”
