Mage Quest

to reach the Holy Land.”

I had met the bishop only once. As a wizard, I was always a little skeptical of claims of great authority by members of the organized Church, and our brief meeting hadn’t made me take to him personally. But I knew Joachim thought of the bishop almost as a father. I, on the other hand, had lost my parents when small and certainly didn’t consider the masters of the wizards’ school as substitute fathers-for one thing, I knew they would have resisted any suggestion that I was their son.

“Well, it would be silly for us to go west to the City to start our trip,” I said absently. “We know Sir Hugo and his party were fine when they left home. By going southeast, we’ll be able to pick up the pilgrimage route well along, without a lengthy detour.” But then something the chaplain had said struck me. “Wait a minute. I lived all my life in the City before coming to Yurt, and I don’t remember it having holy sites.”

Joachim looked up at me and smiled, something he didn’t do very often. “Of course it has holy sites, even if a merchant’s son and a young wizard never paid any attention to them. Christianity began in the Holy Land, but the City was the capital of an empire then, and early missionaries tried to establish the true faith there as well. Many of them were martyred in early years by imperial forces, and the places where their holy bones were laid to rest became shrines for the faithful.”

“Oh, churches,” I said with a shrug. “Of course the City has a lot of churches. We couldn’t visit every holy shrine in the western and eastern kingdoms anyway. It would take much too long to get to the Holy Land, and you’d never keep track of them all. Besides, Yurt has its own shrine, with the Holy Toe of Saint Eusebius the Cranky, if someone just wanted to see a holy site.”

Joachim didn’t answer. In the black linen of his vestments, he almost merged into the shadows of the room. I wondered if he had something else on his mind but didn’t like to press him. I turned on a few more magic lamps to brighten the dark corners and got up to pour more wine.

“It will be good to see my family,” the chaplain said unexpectedly as I handed him his refilled glass.

“Your family?” Joachim rarely spoke of his family, although I knew he had at least one brother. I had the sense from something he had once said that he had been supposed to inherit the family business, and a certain coolness had crept into his relations with his relatives when he decided to become a priest instead, but I had never had any details.

“Yes.” He glanced at me briefly, then looked away. “My brother has been asking me to visit for close to a year now. He says I should really meet his children before they grow any bigger, which is true, but I did not feel I could take the time away from my duties here. He wrote again this week and asked me to stop and see them on our way to the East. They’re only a short distance off our route, so when I talked to the king about it he said we would all go there. Now I’m trying to remember how long it’s been since I’ve seen him.”

So that was what had been on Joachim’s mind, I thought. I was relieved that he had not been worrying about the bishop. The bishop intermittently imagined some undue influence on the chaplain from his friendship with a wizard, although as far as I could tell I had never been able to influence Joachim in anything.

“You’ve seen your brother at least once since I became wizard here,” I said. “You met him over in the cathedral city of Caelrhon.”

“Six years ago,” said Joachim with a nod. “But I haven’t seen my brother’s wife since I left home for the seminary, and I’ve never seen their children at all.”

“Is there any particular reason why he wants to see you now?”

“He didn’t say specifically,” said Joachim, his dark eyes distant. “In his last letter he hinted at some problems coming out of the East and affecting the family business. For a moment, I even wondered if it might have something to do with Sir Hugo’s disappearance, but that would be too much of a coincidence. After all, almost all luxury trade is connected to the East in some way.”

I waited to give him a chance to say something more about his brother. When he didn’t, and silence again stretched long between us, I used his mention of Sir Hugo to bring the topic back to the major purpose of our coming quest.

“What do you think can have happened to Sir Hugo’s party?” I asked. I myself had no good ideas, in spite of six weeks of theorizing. Although Zahlfast and the other masters of the wizards’ school seemed relieved that someone had volunteered to go look for Evrard, they also had no ideas.

“Death, illness, imprisonment, loss of money, loss of will to return,” said Joachim, which seemed to sum up the possibilities. “If they are dead, I am glad they were first able to visit the holy sites where Christ’s feet trod.”

I decided not to respond to this last comment. Instead I said, “It is a perilous journey, even now.”

“It must always be somewhat tense in the East,” the chaplain agreed. “Politically, there are a few independent governors still left over from the fall of the Empire, then the emirs, and the royal Son of David-and that’s only the beginning. It must also be complicated on a religious level, because the Children of Abraham and the People of the Prophet also have holy shrines in the Holy Land, as well of course as the Christian shrines.”

“Don’t they all worship the same God?” I asked. If the organized Church had always lacked interest for me, comparative religion had had even less.

“There is only one true God,” said Joachim dryly.

“I’ve mostly been thinking about the glamour of the East,” I said, deciding that now was not the time to learn more comparative religion. “All the different peoples and cultures. The spices, the flowers, the bazaars-”

“How about the different magic?” the chaplain surprised me by asking.

“Well, there certainly is only one true magic,” I said self-righteously. “But you’ve got a point. The mages there work their spells somewhat differently than we wizards, and there are different magical creatures. The school doesn’t even teach eastern magic now, although they used to have one wizard who taught it, forty or fifty years ago. They sent me an old copy of his textbook to take along, Melecherius on Eastern Magic.” The thick book made a bulge in my neatly-packed saddle bag.

“I’ve even heard that one can still see Ifriti east of the Central Sea,” I added. “I hope we can see one. It would be enormously exciting, although it would probably be dangerous too … It seems there may be a lot of dangers before us.”

Joachim glanced at me from under his eyebrows. “Otherwise there would be less merit in the voyage.” I gave him up. Tomorrow we would be leaving for places I had never seen, and experiences I could not imagine, and my best friend on the trip was filled with concerns I had no intention of sharing.

We left at dawn. Five of us were mounted, although Ascelin was too tall to ride a horse for more than short periods and would walk beside us. The king, the two princes, and Hugo all wore light armor under their cloaks. Joachim didn’t, because he said it would be inappropriate for a man of God, and I didn’t, because I didn’t want to be bothered by the extra weight. Three pack horses, heavily laden, were ready to follow us. I thought that even though King Haimeric said he was going as a simple pilgrim, not a king, no one who saw us would doubt that our group consisted of four aristocrats, a priest, and a wizard.

The horses’ breath made frosty clouds around their noses, and a paper-thin layer of ice lay on the puddles among the courtyard’s cobblestones. But the sun, rising pale orange in a cloudless sky, promised warming weather. Everyone in the castle turned out to see us off. Paul and Gwennie, hand-in-hand, watched from a doorway. Behind them stood the duchess’s twin daughters, three years younger than the royal heir.

The queen smiled up at the king, her cheeks dry although her eyes seemed unnaturally bright. “I know it will be hard to send messages regularly,” she said, “but if you’re near a telephone, do call, or if you meet someone coming this way, do write!”

I was going to miss the queen too, but I couldn’t tell her. For one thing, I was quite sure she would not miss me in the slightest. All I could do was watch her say good-bye to the king and imagine it was me.

But then my eye was distracted from the royal couple by the sight of the Duchess Diana and Prince Ascelin on the far side of the courtyard. She had climbed onto a mounting block so she could reach him, and they stood with their arms around each other, paying no attention to anyone else.

“Now, are you sure you know everything you’ll need to do in the rose garden this summer?” asked the king, seeming more concerned with his garden than his family. “The entire blossoming season will be over by the time we’re back. Remember what I told you to do if thrips start to infest the blooms again.” But then he suddenly leaned down from the saddle and kissed his wife, something I had never seen him do publicly before.