Dragon's Trail

II: MINUET-2

“We should be so lucky,” Jarrod sighed. “I assume, from your trappings—” he motioned, “—they gave you some sort of honorary rank? A social standing?”

“Yeah. Chancellor.”

“Which is?”

“As best I can gather, it’s equivalent to a knight, more or less. It’s not a martial rank, though. Non-landholding nobility. They call it a ‘palace lord.’ Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, yet.”

Jarrod grunted, and fought his way into a thick gray sweater-tunic like Carter’s that was woven tightly and scratched his neck. He pulled the collar of the undertunic through it. “Nobility,” he echoed. “So there’s a class system? Caste system?”

“They have a robust working class,” Carter said. “There’s no mass production, so it’s all artisans. The merchant class is better off than they are. There’s a trade society, too, and some of them are rich enough to buy their own nobility. A couple of the merchant families have as much power as the royalty. Think of the Medicis, the Welsers. Patricians.”

“Interesting.”

“Very. You, they may knight,” Carter supposed. “All you’d have to do is show ‘em what you got. I bet they’d knight you in a minute.”

Jarrod grinned inwardly at the praise, but tried to remain as stern and businesslike as he could manage. “And this is not a reality show?”

Carter wiped his forehead. “Jarrod.”

“Okay, fine. Did they bring my rapier?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. I’m sure it’s safe. We’ll get it.”

“Let me see that,” Jarrod motioned to the sword at Carter’s side.

Carter cleared the blade from its scabbard and handed it to Jarrod. “Everyone carries these in the castle. It’s a standard design, but they’re still not mass-produced.”

Jarrod could see the weld lines in the firelight, the spine made from twisted iron bands hammered into a herringbone pattern with steel edges. Gorgeous.

Heavy damned sword, though.

“Armor?”

Carter spent the next few minutes running down the weaponry and armors he’d seen about. Jarrod winced at Carter’s estimation of the technology as comparable to the Late Dark Ages in Europe: axes, spears, and mail armor augmented with iron and leather seemed the outfit of the typical soldier. The officers were better-equipped and the knights, better still. Distinct from medieval chevaliers in grandeur and function, and observedly distant from the concept of chivalry as Carter knew it, the knights of the royal orders were an elite contingent proficient in weapons and field tactics, trained-from-birth killers who pledged their lives to the king. Carter had mixed it up with one on his first day, wooden weapons and leather helmets, and was quite impressed.

“You didn’t try him with your greatsword,” Jarrod assumed.

“Ah, no.”

Jarrod tried a few cuts through the air with the sword and flipped it around in his hand a few times. The piece, while functional and well-balanced, was heavy for its size and not entirely historically accurate. The wide blade shouldered out at the crossguard, with a deep fuller for half its length that lent it considerable forward momentum. It was a hack-and-smasher, built to break armor, or break a man inside his armor.

“Yeah, that’s a beast, all right. What about shields?”

“I’m seeing center-held roundshields and some teardrops, great big ones. Not a lot of finesse, either. They’re real crash and bashers. The swords are secondary. They mainly use spears and axes. The knights use swords, but they’ve had a lot more training than the grunts.”

Jarrod stood five feet seven inches tall, and in fighting trim weighed in at just under a hundred and fifty pounds. “Yeah, how big are these guys?”

“Big,” Carter admitted. “The knights, especially. I’d guess that the nobility has more meat in their diets. I’m seeing knights six feet, six-two. Big, wide guys. Lots of power. Some of the women in the lists are about your size, but, ah . . . I mean . . .”

“Women?”

Carter nodded slowly, quietly.

Jarrod looked up from the sword at the sudden silence. “Women fighters?”

The giant only smiled. A slow, broad smile.

It was infectious. “Oh, man, sign me up,” Jarrod begged.

“Sign yourself up. Here,” Carter handed Jarrod his boots.

Jarrod was thankful that someone had taken the care to bring not only his blade, but his boots, which were sturdy, leather-and Gore-Tex hikers. There was a practicality to the choice, a horse-sense that, to Jarrod, resonated with a medieval mind-set and further cemented the reality he was finding around him. “C’mon,” said Carter. “I’m starving.”

“Yeah, me, too.” He rolled the words off his tongue. Me, too. Me, too . . .

It jarred Jarrod like few things ever had. A revelation that slammed him on the head nearly hard enough to knock his fillings out. The room spun.

Carter steadied him. “You okay?”

Jarrod stammered with a few awkward phrases, quietly, at first. What he was hearing in his skull were clicks and pops and nasal, alien vowels. His tongue was doing backflips in his head.

“Jarrod?” Carter asked again, looking into his eyes with considerable concern. “You okay?”

Jarrod shook his head, tangled hair falling from his hands in incomprehension. “Carter—”

“Yes?”

Only it wasn’t ‘yes’. Not quite. A terse word, an acknowledgment. But what Jarrod heard was sure as hell not, ‘Yes.’

“We’re not speaking English.”

The Lords’ Hall was nearly empty. It was between mealtimes, and Carter assumed the time by his best guess to be about two in the afternoon.

Quick math brought Jarrod an answer of fourteen stone tables, each capable of seating probably a dozen people if they refrained from wild gesticulation. An old man in fine purple and black clothes sat at the end of a table alone, reading a letter and slurping soup from a wooden bowl and spoon. A boy in dirty clothes and two girls in simple dresses and aprons cleaned tables, and a pair of even dirtier boys stacked logs with some commotion by a wall-length fire pit. Coals glowed like a forge, blasting welcome warmth halfway across the room.

Carter led him back to the kitchens.

“Is it cool to just go back there?” Jarrod asked. The word he’d unwittingly substituted for cool didn’t quite have the connotation he’d wanted, becoming instead more of an allowed, but his usage had less of a stern inflection, and a bit more spark to it. A raw language, brimming with barked profanities and innuendo.

The cook was a round woman of indeterminate age, in an unremarkable dress with a long blonde braid and a kerchief to hold her hair back. She had a cheerful smile, and greeted Carter with a curtsey. He bowed, as did Jarrod.

“Back again, eh?” she giggled. “I’ll have some dandy ready in a moment. You know where the food is,” she assumed, and went about grinding what Jarrod swore were coffee beans. They certainly smelled like coffee beans.

“Where did she get coffee beans?” he asked under his breath. Carter sliced and gutted a large yellow potato thing and ladled it full of gloriously thick stew. He handed it to Jarrod, along with an ornate wooden spoon, licking his fingers.

“Mmm, damn, that’s good.”

“You’re not afraid of that?” Jarrod asked.

“I once ate a sandwich I found in a drawer.”

Jarrod stuck his finger in the stew, wondering how long it had been sitting out, whether the meat was tainted, and what else was in there. There wasn’t a refrigerator in sight, and he’d come down with strange things around the world by accepting food on the advice of his stomach instead of his brain.

The stew was hot enough to likely be sterile and smelled of alien spices and garlic. Lots of garlic. “Carter . . . the coffee?”

Carter made a point of stopping everything else he was doing. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”

“Okay, I’ll ask.”

“Don’t ask.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s rude. And you’ll draw attention to yourself.”

“Carter, there is no coffee anyplace this cold. Coffee doesn’t grow in places this cold. Chicory, I’d believe.”

“Dandelions,” the cook replied from behind them. Though plump, she had a nimble footstep. “Roasted dandelion root,” she admitted. “We call it dandy. Do you like it?”

“It smells . . . like something from our homeland that I’m very fond of,” said Jarrod.

She smiled again, all dimples and motherly manners. “I took it you two were foreigners.”

Jarrod rubbed his stubbly chin. “Ah, you could say that, yes. Forgive us our mannerisms, my lady.”

Carter made himself a potato-bowl of stew similar to Jarrod’s, and they took a seat at a near table.

Jarrod tore at the potato, which was sweet and slightly carrot-y. Carter could see the younger man’s hands shaking, and put his own hand on Jarrod’s wrist to steady it.

“I’m scared,” Jarrod told his stew.

“It’s okay, man. Hell, I freaked.”

“Why us?”

Carter again made a point of stopping what he was doing.

“Why not you? What I’ve been asking myself for the past few days is, why me?”

Jarrod attacked his food, which was hot, oily, and heady with thyme and garlic and something he couldn’t remember the name of that reminded him of Turkish coffee. The meat was stringy with a slight organ flavor—venison of some type. He was halfway through when the cook brought him a plate piled high with fried vegetable nests drizzled in butter and honey, and a cup of the dandelion-root tea. When his food was gone, Jarrod drained his tea—which was so like coffee that it could have been coffee, replete with cream and sweetener—and picked grounds from his teeth.

“You better?” asked Carter.

“I’ll make it,” Jarrod pushed himself away from the table.

“You want a beer? You’ve got to try the beer. They’ll put a brewer in jail here for making bad beer.”

“Good,” said Jarrod. “But no beer, yet. I want to go talk to somebody and I want to be sober.”

“Yeah, okay.” Carter whistled, waking three large brindle bulldogs near the firepit. He set their plates on the floor, and one of the dogs lumbered up and trotted over. They left as the dogs took to their job.

Jarrod stood in the doorway, watching as the dogs mopped up the mess, and Carter clapped Jarrod on the back. “It’s gonna be okay. I think you’re gonna love this.”

Carter pushed open the door. “Jarrod, this is Master Crius Lotavaugus, Lord High Sorcerer of Gateskeep.”

Crius stood behind his desk and threw up the rock sign with grave formality. “Dude,” he announced sagely.

“Roll with it,” Carter advised, before Jarrod could even turn to ask.

Jarrod shook his head with a disbelieving smile. “We’ve met.” He dropped to one knee with a flourish. “Sir, I owe you an apology for my rudeness and a tremendous debt for my life.”

“An apology is hardly necessary,” said Crius. “Your refusal to lease me your sword arm distinguishes you as a man of honor. Arise, sir.”

Jarrod rose with the elation of a batter who’s watched his line drive bounce off the foul pole into the left-field bleachers.

“Please, be seated. Are you well?”

“Thank you, sir,” said Jarrod, sitting in a chair before Crius’s desk. “I’m very well. Whoever healed me did fine work.”

“Do you wish the Chancellor to stay?”

Jarrod looked behind himself. “Chancel—oh. Yeah. Yes. Please. Carter?”

Carter hulked by the door like an oversized palace guard. “Right here.”

“Jarrod Torrealday,” Crius knew his last name, and Jarrod could only assume he had been speaking with Carter at length. “Lord of . . .?”

“Knightsbridge,” Jarrod answered. Knightsbridge was the name of his family estate in Connecticut. “My father would, uh, be Lord of Knightsbridge.”

“Jarrod, Son-Lord of Knightsbridge.”

Suddenly, irresponsibly, overwhelmingly, Jarrod wanted this gig.

He longed to tell Crius of his schooling at the Academie d’Espée, Paris; and at the Royal College of Arms in Cambridge; and of his junior World Cup saber title; and his black belt in Judo.

But he knew he wouldn’t have to. The job was his. All his qualifications would come through revelation, as he moved across this, his Disneyland, like a hurricane.

“What we have—why you’re here,” Crius began, slouching back in his chair, “is the result of a most unfortunate turn of events. Unfortunate for our kingdom, mind you; not necessarily for you.

“This is—we are—the Kingdom of Gateskeep. How much has the Chancellor told you?”

Jarrod wanted the whole damned thing to buttress Carter’s claims. “Not a lot. How far back can you begin?”

The sorcerer bit his lip in thought, scooted his chair around, leaned forward a bit, and sighed.

“Long ago, a race of beings—we called them The Demons—came to us. They had done what we had never done, what we had never allowed ourselves. They had developed, from our water wheels and fires, what came to be known as the New Magic. They knew, or claimed to have learned, why trees grow, why fires burn. They could create fire—any of them—with tools they all carried. They had tools to kill, tools to take the place of maps, tools for mounts, tools for light. Not unlike what I’ve seen of your world.

“The danger, we realized from the inception of our allegiance with The Demons, was that of power without discipline. Any fool among them could create fire, which we all know is the most dangerous element in existence. Similarly, any madman of their ranks could kill. Effortlessly. They had cast out their gods and taken their salvation into their own hands.

“This was The New Magic. The Demons’ Way.

“Here, we train our strongest minds to bend the will of the Universe. We become the sorcerers and the healers. Understand, there is a tremendous amount of discipline a sorcerer must undergo. To inflict harm, to create malignancy in any form, is forbidden. It is schooled out through the rigors of instruction.