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From that transformation I learned much. I had never played one of your swaggering, bullying young nobles; being a second son instills a certain humility even in an aristocrat. Yet I could not help feeling set apart from ordinary men. I was waited on, bowed to, served, and pampered; men spoke softly to me and made formal gestures of respect, even when I was a child. I was, after all, the son of a septarch, that is to say a king, for septarchs are hereditary rulers and thus are part of mankind’s procession of kings, a line that goes back to the dawn of human settlement on Borthan and beyond, back across the stars to Earth itself, to the lost and forgotten dynasties of her ancient nations, ultimately to the masked and painted chieftains enthroned in prehistoric caves. And I was part of that line, a man of royal blood, somehow superior by circumstance of birth. But in this logging camp in the mountains I came to understand that kings are nothing but men set high. The gods do not anoint them, but rather the will of men, and men can strip them of their lofty rank; if Stirron were to be cast down by insurrection, and in his place that loathsome drainer from Salla Old Town became septarch, would not the drainer then enter that mystic procession of kings, and Stirron be relegated to the dust? And would not that drainer’s sons become blood-proud, even as I had been, although their father had been nothing for most of his life, and their grandfather less than that? I know, I know, the sages would say that the kiss of the gods had fallen upon that drainer, elevating him and all his progeny and making them forever sacred, yet as I felled trees on the slopes of the Huishtors I saw kingship with clearer eyes, and, having been cast down by events myself, I realized that I was no more than a man among men, and always had been. What I would make of myself depended on my natural gifts and ambitions, not upon the accident of rank.
So rewarding was that knowledge, and the altered sense of self it brought me, that my stay in the mountains ceased to seem like an exile, but more like a vacation. My dreams of fleeing to a soft life in Ma
I might be there yet, only I was forced into flight. One woeful winter afternoon, with the sky like iron and the threat of a blizzard over us like a fist, they brought the whores up from town for our regularly appointed night of frolic, and this time there was among them a newcomer whose voice a
I laughed and tried to persuade everyone that she was drunk or mad, but my scarlet cheeks gave me the lie, and the loggers peered at me in a new way. A prince? A prince? Was it so? They whispered to one another, nudging and winking. Recognizing my peril, I claimed the woman for my own use and drew her aside, and when we were alone, I insisted to her she was mistaken: I am no prince, I said, but only a common logger. She would not have it. “The Lord Ki
Late that night, when the revelry had ended, my employer came to me, solemn and uneasy. “One of the girls has made strange talk about you this evening,” he said. “If the talk is true, you are endangered, for when she returns to her village she’ll spread the news, and the police will be here soon enough.”
“Must one flee, then?” I asked.
“The choice is yours. Alarms still are out for this prince; if you are he, no one here can protect you against the authorities.”
“Then one must flee. At daybreak—”
“Now,” he said. “While the girl still lies here asleep.”
He pressed money of Glin into my hand, over and beyond what he owed me in current wages; I gathered my few belongings, and we went outside together. The night was moonless and the winter wind was savage. By starlight I saw the glitter of lightly falling snow. My employer silently drove me down the slope, past the foothills village from which the whores came, and out along a back-country road which we followed for some hours. When dawn met us we were in south-central Glin, not overly far from the River Huish. He halted, at last, in a village that proclaimed itself to be Klaek, a winter-bound place of small stone cottages bordering on broad snowy fields. Leaving me in the truck, he entered the first of the cottages, emerging after a moment accompanied by a wizened man who poured forth a torrent of instructions and gesticulations; with the aid of this guidance we found our way to the place my employer was seeking, the cottage of a certain farmer named Stumwil. This Stumwil was a fair-haired man of about my own height, with washed-out blue eyes and an apologetic smile. Maybe he was some kinsman of my employer’s, or, more probably, he owed him a debt—I never asked. In any case the farmer readily agreed to my employer’s request, and accepted me as a lodger. My employer embraced me and drove off into the gathering snow; I saw him never again. I hope the gods were kind to him, as he was to me.
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The cottage was one large room, divided by flimsy curtains into areas. Stumwil put up a new curtain, gave me straw for my mattress, and I had my living quarters. There were seven of us under that roof: Stumwil and myself, and Stumwil’s wife, a weary wench who I could have been persuaded was his mother, and three of their children—two boys some years short of manhood and a girl in mid-adolescence—and the bondsister of the girl, who was lodging with them that year. They were su
I paid a fee for my lodging, and I helped also with the chores, though in winter there was little to do except shovel snow and feed the fire. None of them showed curiosity about my identity or history. They asked me no questions, and I believe that no questions ever passed through their minds. Nor did the other townspeople pry, though they gave me the scrutiny any stranger would receive.