Hart's Hope

"So you'll leave the benison and orison and psalm in order to do obeisance to a household gom?"

Orem laughed. He could not help laughing when Dobbick went into rhyme, and Dobbick knew it.

"Come, Orem. There's no choice that must be made today. As long as you're not bored with it, there's plenty of copywork to be done. When a man is certified a master cleric, he usually takes the vows or leaves, but we can make you a brother unsworn—it's an honorable role, and it recognizes that you are our equal in education, if not in holiness. But I'll no longer pretend that I'm your teacher. I don't read your manuscripts to correct them—I read them to learn what bright new things you have made them mean." Orem spoke the blunt truth then, though he knew it would hurt Dobbick. "How can you look at my work and find truth, when I am only playing games? If my jokes and riddles and puzzles look like truth to you, what can I think but that all your other truths are nothing but jokes and riddles and puzzles?"

Ashamed at having hurt his teacher, Orem again walked to the window and looked outside. There was a stir, a hurry about the people passing back and forth, and it wasn't even a market day. And then trumpets in the distance, getting closer. Was the army coming early, then? And would King Palicrovol ride in at their head? It was the only thing that really interested Orem much these days; the mere mention of King Palicrovol's name awakened something in the boy. What sort of man is King, Orem wondered, what sort of man is it who speaks and armies obey, who calls out and a thousand priests pray for him?

"You seem drawn to the window."

"It's the ba

"Which means you want it open. Do you think I don't know your way?"

You don't.

"You are not different from other boys. You dream of Palicrovol and his wicked and hopeless quest for a city he stole in the first place."

"He's a Godsman, isn't he?" Orem retorted.

"In name only. He keeps a few priests for show. It's with wizards that he guards himself against the Queen, more fool he."

Outside the window, the gate of the town's stockade was opening—yes, the King was coming, for outside the gate were soldiers ahorse and soldiers afoot, shining with steel breastplates and helmets. It was a dazzling sight, but soldiers held little glamour for Orem. It was the magic that drew his dreams. Not the magic of the Sweet Sisters, but the magic of the hundred-pointed head, the Antler Crown. It was King Palicrovol, whose wizards battled daily with the Queen. And as he thought of the King again, Palicrovol rode through the gate of Ba

He came closer, and Orem winced as the sun shone brightly, reflected off King Palicrovol's eyes. Where his eyes should have been there were two gold balls, shining in sunlight, so that the King could not possibly see anything. "The Queen looks through Palicrovol's eyes today," said Orem. "Why does she do it, when she has the Searching Eye?"

Dobbick was surprisingly angry when he answered. "If you had ever learned anything of God, you'd know that her Searching Eye can't penetrate a temple or a House of God, or the seventh circle of the seven circles. So why do you think King Palicrovol doesn't surround himself with priests to keep her sight out? Because he's black, too, at heart. Because he's the kind of man who'd rape a child on the steps of Faces Hall in order to steal the crown that was her only gift to give. God has no part of him, Orem. And God will have no part of you, if you draw yourself to magic the way you—"

The King turned his blind eyes from one side to the other, as if he could see to search. "No!" cried a strange, moaning voice, and it took Orem a moment to realize that it was the King who spoke so mournfully. "Oh, Inwit, not here, not through my eyes!" And then the King looked up, and the golden balls seemed to fix on Orem's face, and the King pointed at Orem's heart and cried, "Mine! Mine! Mine!"

Soldiers leapt out of line, and suddenly Orem felt himself being jerked back into the House of God. It was Dobbick, and his voice was thick with fear. "O God, O God, O seven times seven the dark days that come from incaution. O God, Orem, he wants you, he wants to have you—"

Orem was confused, but made no resistance as Dobbick dragged him out of the room. Compliance had so long been Orem's way that he had no strategy to escape the halfpriest's grip as he pulled him up and down stairs, through doors usually locked, and finally into a trap door leading to a hidden path.

"The House of God is old," said Dobbick, "from the dark days before God had His victory over all the strangers and all the powers. This path comes out near the river, well outside the stockade. Go home. Go to your father's farm and bid good-bye to your family, and then get away. Far away, to the sea, to the mountains, wherever the King can't find you."

"But what does it mean!"

"It means the King has some use for you in his battle. And you can trust this—it will be to your cost. A man like Palicrovol hasn't lived his three black centuries by paying his costs himself. In the games of power, there are only two players, and all the rest are pawns. Oh, Orem—" and the halfpriest hugged the boy at the secret postern gate, "Orem, if you had only stepped within the seven circles, just a step, you would have nothing to fear from him. God knows I hate to let you go."

"What's happening to me?" Orem asked, frightened as much by Dobbick's sudden expression of love and regret as by what had happened with the King.

"I don't know. Whatever it is, you don't want it."

But in that instant Orem realized that he did want it. In that instant he knew that the safety of the House of God was itself what he most hated. In the House of God he would never make a name for himself, or find a place, or earn a poem. Here at the postern gate he was at the verge of all three, he could feel it in the fear of his belly and the clarity of his vision.

"You're fifteen, you're only a child," said Dobbick. But Orem knew it was the age when soldiers went into the army, the age when a man could take a wife. Only in the House of God was fifteen young. "Ah, yes," said Dobbick, drawing the seven circles on Orem's face with a tender finger, "I was not wrong, you're no tool of Palicrovol's war, Orem. You're God's tool."

"Oh, we're all a tool, every one. You don't want to be a servant of God, do you? Well, serve yourself, Orem, and I think you'll end up serving God anyway."

And then it was God-be-with-you and gone, the gate closing behind him. Orem tramped down a short run of what looked like sewer but wasn't, and then clambered out of the end of the pipe, where it was fouled and tangled with silt and shrubbery. He heard the halfpriest call to him down the pipe: "Orem! Anywhere but Inwit!"

Anywhere but Inwit? Oh, no, Orem answered silently. Only Inwit for me. Whatever the King's pointing finger might have meant, it did mean this: Orem had a poem in him, and he meant to earn it out. And if Inwit was where God's man thought he must not go, then Orem knew that it was Inwit that called him. First home, as Dobbick had said, to bid good-bye, or his father would grieve. Then Inwit, where the world's water all flowed.

I am fast as a deer, Orem said to himself as he ran the country roads. He ran untired forever, it seemed, and then walked until the air came back to him, and then he ran again. His legs did not hurt him; the pain in his side came and almost killed him and then went away, abashed. And sooner than he would have thought possible, he was home. All those years that he yearned to come back here, and it was only this far all the time.