The Redemption of Althalus

CHAPTER NINE

‘Why should we care if she kills him, Em?’ Althalus asked. ‘It’s the Knife we want, not some half-grown little boy from Arum.’

‘When are you going to learn to look beyond the end of your nose, Althalus?’ Her tone was a bit snippy, and there was enough condescension in it to be offensive.

‘That’s about enough of that, Em,’ he told her crisply.

‘Sorry, pet,’ she apologized. ‘That was a little nasty, wasn’t it? What I’m getting at is that everything is connected. Nothing happens in isolation. Eliar’s probably some crude, unschooled barbarian from the back country of Arum, but he did pick up that Knife back in Albron’s arms-room. It might have been a whim, but we can’t be sure of that until we test him. If he can’t read what’s written on the blade, we’ll pat him on the head and tell him to run along home. If he can read it, though, he’ll have to come with us.’

‘What if he’s like I was before I came to the House? I couldn’t even read my own name back then.’

‘I noticed. It won’t matter whether he can read or not. If he happens to be one of the selected ones, he’ll know what the writing means.’

‘How will we know if he’s got it right?’

‘We’ll know, pet. Believe me, we’ll know.’

‘Why don’t you enlighten me? Tell me what the word on the blade is.’

‘It varies. It’ll mean something different to each person who reads it.’

‘Emmy, that doesn’t make any sense at all. A word’s a word, isn’t it? It’s supposed to have one specific meaning.’

‘Does the word “home” have a specific meaning?’

‘Of course it does. It means the place where a man lives – or maybe the place he originally came from.’

‘Then it has a different meaning for each person, doesn’t it?’

He frowned.

‘Don’t beat yourself over the head with it, pet. The word that’s carved into the Knife-blade is a command, and it tells each one of the people we have to locate to do something different.’

‘It can’t just be one word, then.’

‘I didn’t say that it was. Each reader will see it differently.’

‘It changes, then?’

‘No. It’s permanent. The writing stays the same. It’s the reading that changes.’

‘You’re starting to give me a headache, Em.’

‘Don’t brood about it, Althie. It’ll make more sense to you once we get the Knife. Our problem right now is getting the Knife – and Eliar – away from Andine.’

‘I think I’ve already got the answer to that one, Em. I’ll just buy them from her.’

‘Buy?’

‘Pay her to give them to me.’

Althalus, Eliar’s a person. You can’t buy people.’

‘You’re wrong about that, Em. Eliar’s a captured soldier, and that means that he’s a slave now.’

‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Of course it is, but that’s the way things are. I’ll have to rob a few rich people to get enough gold to buy Eliar and the Knife. If Arya Andine’s as dead-set on butchering Eliar as Sergeant Khalor seems to think she is, I’ll need lots of gold to persuade her to sell him to me.’

‘Maybe,’ she murmured, her green eyes going distant. ‘But then again, maybe not. If we use the Book right, she’ll be more than happy to sell him to us.’

‘I’ve come across vindictive ladies before, Em. Believe me, it’ll take a lot of gold. If Sergeant Khalor was anywhere at all close to being right, she’s developed a strong appetite for Eliar’s blood by now. Let’s see if we can find some rich man’s house. I’ll rob him and then we can go and make Andine an offer.’

‘There are other ways to get gold, Althalus.’

‘I know – mining it out of the ground. I don’t care for doing it that way. I’ve seen a lot of deep holes in the mountainsides of Kagwher, and from what I hear, only about one in a hundred has turned up even a speck of gold.’

‘I believe I can improve on those numbers, pet.’

‘I still don’t like chopping at the ground, Em. It makes my back hurt.’

‘That’s because you don’t get enough exercise. Let’s move right along. We have several days’ travel ahead of us before you get to start digging.’

‘There isn’t any gold down here in the low-country, Em.’

‘There is if you know where to look. Ride on, my brave boy, ride on.’

‘Was that supposed to be funny?’

They rode south across the parched grainfields of Perquaine for the next several days, moving at a steady canter. It was about mid-afternoon on the third day after their meeting with Sergeant Khalor when Althalus reined in and dismounted.

‘Why are we stopping?’ Emmy asked.

‘We’ve been pushing the horse a bit. I’ll walk alongside to give him a rest.’ He looked around at the sun-baked fields. ‘Skimpy,’ he observed.

‘What is?’

‘This year’s crop. It looks to me as if it’s hardly going to be worth the trouble to harvest it.’

‘It’s the drought, pet. It doesn’t rain much any more.’

‘We should be getting close to the coastline, Em. It always rains along the coast.’

‘We’re a long way from where the coast is now, pet. We talked about that back in the House, remember? The ice locks up more of the world’s water every year. That causes the drought and lowers the sea-level.’

‘Are we going to be able to repair that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Melt the ice so that things go back to the way they’re supposed to be.’

‘Why do men always want to tamper with the natural order of things?’

‘When something breaks, we fix it, that’s all.’

‘What gave you the absurd idea that it’s broken?’

‘It’s not the way it was before, Em. To our way of looking at things, that means that it’s broken.’

‘Now which one of us is thinking the way Daeva thinks?’

‘Drying up the oceans and turning the world into a desert doesn’t make things better, Em.’

‘Change doesn’t necessarily mean improvement, Althalus. Change is just change. “Better” and “worse” are human definitions. The world changes all the time, and no amount of complaining’s going to stop it from changing.’

‘The sea-coast shouldn’t move around,’ he declared stubbornly.

‘You can tell it to stop, if you’d like. It might listen to you, but I wouldn’t make any large wagers on it, if I were you.’ She looked around. ‘We should reach the place we’re looking for sometime tomorrow.’

‘Have we been looking for someplace special?’

‘Sort of special. It’s the place where you’re going to start working for your living.’

‘What an unnatural thing to suggest.’

It’ll be good for you, love – fresh air, exercise, wholesome food –’

‘I think I’d sooner take poison.’

They set up a rudimentary camp in a scraggly thicket some distance back from the road that evening and started out again shortly after dawn.

‘There it is,’ Emmy said after they’d ridden for a couple of hours.

‘There what is?’

‘The place where you do some honest work, pet.’

‘I wish you’d stop rubbing my nose in that.’ He looked across what appeared to be a long-abandoned field at a kind of knoll, sparsely covered with stunted, tired-looking grass, ‘Is that it?’ he asked.

‘That’s the place.’

‘How can you tell? It’s just a hill. We’ve passed dozens of others just like it.’

‘Yes, we have. This one isn’t an ordinary hill, though. It’s the ruins of an old house that’s been covered with dirt.’

‘Who buried it like that?’

‘The wind. The ground’s very dry now, so the wind picks up dirt and carries it along until it comes to something that blocks it. That’s where it drops the dirt.’

‘Is that the way all hills get built?’

‘Not all of them, no.’

Althalus squinted at the rounded hillock. ‘I think I’m going to need some tools. I’ll dig if you insist, Em, but I’m not going to do it with my bare hands.’

‘We’ll take care of it. I’ll tell you the word to use.’

‘I still think it’d be easier just to rob somebody.’

‘There’s more gold in that hill than you’re likely to find in a dozen of the houses we’ve passed. You say that you’ll need gold to buy Eliar and the Knife from Andine. All right, there’s the gold. Go dig it up.’

‘How do you know there’s gold there?’

‘I just do. There’s more gold in those ruins than you’ve ever seen before. Fetch, boy, fetch.’

‘That’s starting to make me a little tired, Em.’

‘If you’d do as you’re told the first time, I wouldn’t have to keep telling you over and over again. You’re going to do what I tell you to do eventually anyway, so why not just do it immediately instead of arguing with me?’

‘Yes, dear,’ he gave up.

‘Good boy,’ she said approvingly. ‘Good boy.’

She gave him instructions on how to manufacture a shovel with a single word and then directed him to a spot about fifty paces up the south side of the slope. As he led his horse up the hill, he saw some very ancient limestone building blocks half buried in the soil. They’d obviously been sawed square when the house had been erected, but wind and weather had rounded them to the point that they were almost indistinguishable from native stone. ‘How long ago was the house abandoned?’ he asked.

‘About three thousand years ago. The man who built it started out in life as a plowman. Then he went up into Arum before anybody else went up there. He wasn’t really looking for gold, but he found some.’

‘Probably because he got there first. Why did he go to Arum if he didn’t know there was gold there, though?’

‘There’d been a slight misunderstanding about the ownership of a certain pig. His neighbors were a little excited about it, so he decided to go up into the mountains for a while to give them time to calm down. I’m sure you understand. This is the place, pet. Get down off the horse and start digging.’

He dismounted, lifted Emmy out of the hood of his cloak and set her on his saddle. Then he took off his cloak and rolled up his sleeves. ‘How deep do I have to dig?’ he asked.

‘About four feet. Then you’ll hit some flagstones, and you’ll have to pry them up. There’s a little cellar under the stones, and that’s where the gold is.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Quit wasting time and start digging, Althalus.’

‘Yes, dear,’ he sighed, and very reluctantly thrust his shovel into the dirt.

The drought had made the soil very dry, so digging wasn’t really as hard as he’d thought it would be.

‘I wouldn’t throw the dirt so far down the hill, pet,’ Emmy suggested after a while. ‘You’ll have to shovel it all back in the hole when you’ve finished.’

‘What for?’

‘To keep somebody from finding the gold you’ll have to leave behind.’

‘I’m not going to leave any, Em.’

‘How do you plan to carry it?’

‘You’re sitting on him, love. He’s a strong horse.’

‘Not that strong, he isn’t.’

‘How much is there here?’

‘More than our horse can carry.’

‘Really?’ Althalus began to dig faster.

After about a half hour, he struck the flagstones Emmy had told him about. Then he widened out the hole he’d dug to give himself some more room. He leaned his shovel against the side of the hole, knelt on the stones, and began to probe between them with his bright steel dagger. ‘Exactly what am I looking for here, Em?’ he asked. ‘These flagstones fit together so tight that I can’t get my knife into the cracks.’

‘Keep looking,’ she instructed. ‘The one you want to find fits a little more loosely.’

He kept poking until he found it. The dirt the patient centuries had blown in had sifted down into the cracks between the stones, and it took him a while to dig it out with his dagger-point. Then he resheathed his dagger, took the shovel and began to pry.

The stone lifted out rather easily, followed by a rush of stale-smelling air. There was an open space of some kind below the flagstones, but it was too dark down there to see anything. He pried up another stone to let in more light.

There were tightly piled stacks of dust-covered bricks in the cellar, and a hot surge of disappointment came over him. But why would anyone take so much trouble just to hide bricks? He reached down through the hole and brushed the dust away from one of the bricks.

He stared at it in absolute disbelief. The brick which had been concealed by centuries of dust was bright yellow.

‘Dear God!’ Althalus exclaimed, brushing away more dust.

‘He’s busy right now, Althalus. Could I take a message?’

‘There must be tons of it down here!’

‘Told you,’ she reminded him smugly.

The gold had been cast into oblong blocks, each about the size of a man’s hand and slightly thicker. They weighed about five pounds apiece. Althalus found that he was trembling violently as he lifted the blocks out of the hole and laid them on the flagstones.

‘Don’t get carried away, Althalus,’ Emmy suggested.

‘Twenty?’ He said it with a great reluctance.

‘I don’t think the horse would want to carry any more.’

Althalus forced himself to stop at twenty of the gold blocks. Then he replaced the flagstone, shoveled all the dirt back into the hole, and uprooted a number of nearby bushes. He replanted the bushes in the freshly dug-up dirt to conceal his private gold mine.

Then he fashioned a couple of bags, put ten blocks of gold in each, tied them together and hung them across his horse’s back just behind his saddle. Then he remounted, whistling gaily.

‘You’re all bubbly this afternoon,’ Emmy noted.

‘I’m stinking rich, Em,’ he said exuberantly.

‘I’ve been noticing that for several days now. You’re long overdue for a bath.’

‘That’s not what I meant, little kitten.’

‘It should have been. You’re strong enough to curdle milk.’

‘I told you that hard work didn’t agree with me, Em,’ he reminded her.

They crossed the River Osthos late that afternoon and made camp on the Treborean side. To keep the peace, Althalus bathed, washed his clothes and even shaved off the past month’s growth of beard. Emmy definitely approved of that. They rose early the following morning, and three days later they caught sight of the walls of the city of Osthos. ‘Impressive,’ Althalus observed.

‘I’m sure they’ll be glad you approve,’ Emmy’s whisper sounded inside his head. ‘How did you plan to gain entry into the palace?’

‘I’ll come up with something. What’s the word for “stay away”?’

‘“Bheudh”. Actually “bheudh” means “to make someone aware of something”, but your thought when you say the word should get your meaning across. Why do you ask?’

‘I’ll have to go about on foot to locate certain officials, and I’d rather not have some rascal steal my horse. He’s very dear to me right now.’

‘I wonder why.’

Althalus rode some distance away from the road and, with Emmy’s instruction, he converted five of his gold blocks into coins marked with the idealized picture of a stalk of wheat which identified them as having come from Perquaine. Then he rode into the city, where he stopped by a clothier’s shop and bought himself some moderately elegant garments to disguise his rustic origins. Emmy chose not to comment when he emerged from the shop.

He remounted and made his way to the public buildings near the palace to listen and to ask questions.

‘I wouldn’t go anywhere near her, stranger,’ a silvery-haired old statesman advised when Althalus asked him about the procedure for gaining an audience with Arya Andine.

‘Oh?’ Althalus said, ‘why’s that?’

‘She was difficult before her father’s death, but now she’s graduated from difficult to impossible.’

‘Unfortunately, I have some business I have to discuss with her. I’d planned to talk with her father, the Aryo. I hadn’t heard that he’d died. What happened to him?’

‘I thought everybody knew. The Kanthons invaded us a month or so back, and they sent their mercenaries down here to lay siege to our city. Our noble Aryo led our army outside the walls to chase those howling barbarians off, and one of the scoundrels murdered him.’

‘My goodness!’

‘The murderer was captured, naturally.’

‘Good. Did Arya Andine have him put to death?’

‘No, he’s still alive. Arya Andine’s still considering various ways to send him off. I’m sure she’ll come up with something suitably unpleasant – eventually. What line of business are you in, my friend?’

‘I’m a labor contractor,’ Althalus replied.

The statesman gave him a quizzical look.

Althalus winked slyly at him. ‘“Labor contractor” sounds so much nicer than “slave trader”, wouldn’t you say? I’d heard about the assault on your city, and I understand that your soldiers captured several of the attackers. I thought I might stop by and take them off your hands. The owners of the salt mines in Ansu are paying a lot of money for strong, healthy slaves right now. Captured soldiers bring a premium price in the salt mines, and I pay in good gold. Do you think Arya Andine might be interested?’

‘The word “gold” is very likely to get her attention,’ the courtier agreed. ‘She’ll want to keep Eliar, the young fellow who killed her father, but she’d probably be willing to sell the others to you. What might your name be, my friend?’

‘I’m called Althalus.’

‘A very ancient name.’

‘My family was sort of old-fashioned.’

‘Why don’t we step over to the palace, Master Althalus?’ the courtier suggested. ‘I’ll introduce you to our impossible Arya.’

The old gentleman led the way to the palace gate, and he and Althalus were immediately admitted. ‘The soldiers will look after your horse, Master Althalus,’ the silvery-haired man said. ‘Oh, my name’s Dhakan, by the way. I tend to forget that strangers don’t know me.’

I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Lord Dhakan,’ Althalus said, bowing politely.

Emmy, who’d been sitting rather primly on the saddle of their horse, dropped sinuously to the stones of the courtyard.

‘Your pet, Master Althalus?’ Dhakan asked.

‘She tends to look at it the other way around, my Lord,’ Althalus replied. ‘Cats are sort of like that.’

‘I have a pet turtle myself,’ Dhakan said. ‘He doesn’t move very fast, but then, neither do I.’

Osthos was an ancient city, and the throne room was truly magnificent. It had a marble floor and stately columns. At the far end was a raised dais backed by crimson drapes, and there was an ornate throne on that dais. Imperious Andine, Arya of Osthos, sat upon that throne. She was quite obviously not paying the slightest bit of attention to the droning speech being presented by a stout man wearing a white mantle. The speech was a diplomatically gentle suggestion that the young Arya wasn’t paying enough heed to affairs of state.

Andine was young – very young, in fact. Althalus judged her to be no more than fifteen years old. Everyone else in her throne room had white hair, the only exception being a similarly youthful kilted Arum, who was chained to a marble column at one side of the dais. That young fellow was receiving imperious Andine’s undivided attention. She was looking directly at him with her huge, almost black eyes, and she was absently toying with a large laurel-leaf dagger.

‘That’s the Knife, pet,’ Emmy silently exulted.

‘Is that the murderer chained to that post?’ Althalus whispered to Dhakan a bit incredulously.

‘Sick, isn’t it?’ Dhakan replied. ‘Our glorious, but slightly warped, leader hasn’t let him out of her sight since the day he was captured.’

‘Surely she has a dungeon.’

‘Oh, yes, indeed she does. The other prisoners are all there. For some strange reason, our little girl longs for the sight of the young ruffian. She never talks to him, but she never takes her eyes off him. She sits there playing with that knife and watching him.’

‘He looks just a bit nervous.’

‘Wouldn’t you be?’

Then Emmy, her tail sinuously flowing back and forth, daintily crossed the marble floor and went up onto the dais.

‘What are you doing?’ Althalus sent a startled thought at her.

‘Stay out of this, pet,’ her voice came back. Then she raised herself up, putting her front paws on the marble throne, and meowed inquiringly at the young Arya.

Andine jerked her eyes off her captive and looked at the green-eyed cat at her knee. ‘What an adorable kitten!’ she exclaimed. ‘Where did you come from, Puss?’

‘My apologies. Your Highness,’ Althalus said, stepping forward. ‘Emmy, you come back here.’

Arya Andine gave him a puzzled look, ‘I don’t believe I know you,’ she said. Her voice was rich and vibrant, the kind of voice that stirs a man’s spirit.

‘Permit me, Your Highness,’ Dhakan said, stepping forward and bowing slightly. ‘This is Master Althalus, and he’s come here to discuss a business matter.’

Emmy gave another inquiring meow.

‘Did you want to come up here into my lap, Puss?’ Andine asked. She leaned forward and picked Emmy up. She held the cat out and looked into her face. ‘My,’ she said in her rich voice, ‘aren’t you adorable?’ Then she put the cat in her lap. ‘There,’ she said, ‘was that what you wanted?’

Emmy started to purr.

‘Master Althalus here is a businessman, Arya Andine,’ Dhakan said. ‘He deals in captives, and since he heard about the recent attack on our city, he’s stopped by to inquire about the possibility of buying those barbaric Arum prisoners from you. I recommend that you give him a hearing, Your Highness.’

‘What on earth would you do with them, Master Althalus?’ Andine asked curiously.

‘I have a number of contacts in Ansu, Your Highness,’ Althalus replied. ‘The owners of the salt mines there are always in the market for strong young men. A salt mine uses up workers at a ferocious rate.’

‘You’re a slave trader, then?’

Althalus shrugged deprecatingly. ‘It’s a living, Your Highness. Slaves are a valuable commodity. I buy them in places where they’re an inconvenience and take them to places where they can be put to work to pay for their keep. Everybody benefits, really. The one who sells them to me gets gold, and the one who buys them gets laborers.’

‘What do the slaves get?’

‘They get fed, Your Highness. A slave doesn’t have to worry about where his next meal’s coming from. He gets fed even when the crops fail or the fish aren’t biting.’