The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗
- Author: Fletcher Pratt
Book online «The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt [essential books to read .TXT] 📗». Author Fletcher Pratt
Far in the interior a step sounded, coming. The door was thrown back to show a fat beldame with a robe gathered round her, whose hand trembled slightly with palsy.
“What is it?” she said. The light was above and behind her, he could not see her eyes to use his jewel.
“I am from the office of account,” he said (depending upon sudden inspiration), “in the matter of the Demoiselle Asterhax.”
“A poor hour to be coming,” she grumbled. “Ay, ay, the Lalette. I will call the mattern. They will take her in the morning.”
She moved aside to let him enter, and as she did so, the light caught her face. (His glance, quickened by emergency, caught in those muddy eyes a green flash of mingled hate and greed.)
“Wait,” he said, and touched her wrist. “Perhaps it is not needed to rouse anyone.” (That covetousness—if he could use it.)
“What do you mean?”
“It is a simple matter; not official accounts.” He fumbled out a coin or two and pressed them in her hand.
The fat face moved into a leer. “Eh, eh, so that’s the story. Want to take her, do you? And poor Mircella will be blamed, maybe sent for instruction. It should be worth more.”
(Money again; he experienced a moment of panic.) “I am from the office of account,” he repeated. “I am to take her there to close her reckoning. You will have the perquisite of her possessions.”
“He, he, and you the best perquisite. It should be worth more.”
“Sh, someone will hear us.” He found another pair of coins. “This is all—if not, give back the rest and call your mattern.”
He turned; she clutched his arm, grumbling in her throat (and he could see she did not believe him in the least, but would be satisfied if given a story to tell). “Come. Come.”
Another stair-journey through a silent house, this time upward. The place had the indefinable perfume of many women. The guide shuffled along in a dark almost complete; Rodvard heard the chink of keys, then a tick against the lock and the door opened.
“Strike a light.” Rodvard felt a candle pressed into his hand; being forced to give his attention to it, Lalette saw him first when the light flared, he heard her gasp and looked past the little flame to see her standing with disheveled hair, so lovely beyond the imagined picture that he could not resist running across the room to kiss her astonished lips. She must have been sitting fully dressed in the dark.
“Rodvard! How did you come here?” The fat woman shuffled in the background, and he:
“No matter now, it can wait. We must go quickly.”
She stared at him like a sleepwalker. “Where?”
“Hurry.”
There were no more words between them at this time or place. Lalette turned in the feeble light to make a package, but the fat woman said; “Nah, my perquisite,” so she only snatched a cloak. The beldame addressed Rodvard; “Now you use your knife on the lock to show where it was picked, then leave it. Then they know my story is true, a man was here.”
He hacked at the brass plate that held the keyhole for a moment, and fortune favored by letting one of the screws come loose with a snap, and the fat woman clawed his arm to indicate that was enough. She led the way down the stair, Rodvard could see no eyes, and he and Lalette were suddenly out the door.
IIIShe turned to face him under the dead tree.
“You do not want me any more. How did you find me? Where did you come from?”
(He thought: out of one pattern-dance of compulsions and into another.) “I do want you or I would not have come. I could not help it. Did you not receive my letter?”
“I suppose you have some story to cover your utter desertion.”
“I swear I left with Dr. Remigorius a letter for you, telling how I was called to Sedad Vix on the most urgent of affairs; and then things happened. I will tell you.”
“Then it is true. You are one of the Sons of the New Day.” (The eyes were hidden, but the tone told clearly how deep was her anger and despair.)
“I have come for you,” he said, simply.
She uttered a bitter little laugh. “It is somewhat late, my friend. I am one of the licensed whores they call Myonessae, and now an attainted criminal.”
“I know—and so am I for bringing you from there.”
She took three steps in silence. “Where are you taking me?”
“A tavern.” (He had not thought, this was part of the plan he had been too excited to make.)
“Do you lodge in it?” (The voice was so small that he knew something lay behind the words.)
“I have been working in the office of account, and learned of your trouble there,” he said, inconsecutively.
She turned toward him in the dark street, where far down, someone walked with a light, the hand on his arm trembling a little. “Oh, Rodvard—they would have put me in that prison for instruction and then turned me into the street without an obula.”
“I know. See—that is what we are looking for.”
An inn it was, a palpable inn, beyond the corner, with light streaming from its windows. They entered through the public-room where a table of men with mugs before them all turned their heads like sunflowers. One of them whispered behind a hand, and there was a snicker. A lugubrious person in a dirty apron came to the inner door and said yah, he would give them welcome for the night. Supper? No, said they both, and a small girl with her hair in tight braids showed them to a room where there was only one chair and a bed where they would sleep together for the first time since the night in Dame Domijaiek’s room, now in a far country and long ago. (Rodvard thought: she is wearing her hair down as an unwedded girl, and that is why they snickered.) She sat on the edge of the bed, tossing her head back.
“Rodvard,” she said, “you have been unfaithful to me.”
“No!” (He answered in reaction merely, and the thought that crossed his mind was not of the maid Damaris, but of Leece, now perhaps herself sleepless, and waiting for the dawn, when—) “Your Blue Star is still bright.”
She did not move, only crossed her eyes in a spasm of pain. “I think perhaps it was another witch. I know one put a spell on you. Did you know I saved you from it? You can go to her, if you wish; even take the Blue Star. I do not want it any more.”
“Lalette! Do not talk so.”
He stepped to her on the bed, slipped his arm under both hers where she supported herself, leaning backward, and drove her down, his lips seeking hers. She met him passively, neither giving nor avoiding. “Lalette,” he breathed again.
Now she twisted in his arms. “Ah, men think there is only one way to resolve every problem with a girl. It was that I wished to get away from. I will go back.”
He released her then, and lay beside her, unspeaking for a moment. Then:
“And be sent for instruction and then turned out? It was that I came to save you from.”
“Oh, I am grateful. I will not go back, then, and you can have what you have bought.”
(There was a torture in it that he should at this moment think of Maritzl of Stojenrosek.) He double-jointed to his feet and began to pace the floor. “Lalette,” he said, “truly you do not understand. We are in real danger, both of us, and cannot afford bitterness. I have not been in this country long enough to know its laws, but I know we have broken more than one; and they are very intent after both of us, you as a witch and me with the Blue Star, even though they say witchery is not forbidden here. Now I ask your true help, as I have helped you.”
“Ah, my friend, of course. What would you have me do?”
She sat up suddenly, with a tear in the corner of her eye (which he affected not to notice), all kindliness; and they began to talk, not of their present emergency, but of their adventures and how strangely they were met there. He gave her a fair tale on almost all, except about Damaris and Leece. She interrupted now and again, as something he said reminded her of one detail or another, so that neither of them even thought of sleeping until the candle burning down and a pale window spoke of approaching day.
“But where our line lies now, I do not know,” he concluded.
Inconsequentially, she said; “Tell me truly, Rodvard, about the Sons of the New Day.” (Her face was toward him as she spoke; he was astonished to catch in her eye a complex thought, something about feeling herself no better than the group she considered thieves and murderers.)
“Well, then, we are not murderers and steal from none,” he said (as she, remembering the power of the jewel, lowered her head; for she had not told him of the fate of Tegval). “We are only trying to make a better world, where badges of condition are no more needed than here in Mancherei, and men and women too, do not obtain their possessions by being born into them.”
“That is a strange thing to say to one who was born into a witch-family,” she said. “But no matter now. What shall we do? I doubt if we can reach the inner border before they set the guards after us, and with the case of this captain against you, you cannot now return to Dossola. Or can you? We might get a ship that would take us to the Green Islands. I have a brother there somewhere.”
“Who’s to pay the passage? For I have little money. Much of my gain has been withheld to pay for the things I needed when I came.”
“And I no money at all. But did you come here from Dossola by paying? Can we not offer service?”
He (thought of the one-eyed captain and the service demanded then, but) took her hand. “You are right, and it is the only thing to try,” he said. “Come, before any pursuit fairly starts.”
They crept down the stairs, hand in hand, like conspirators. At the parlor Rodvard sacrificed one of his coins to pay for his night’s lodging. (The thought of Leece and what she would be doing at this hour was in his mind as) they stepped into a street from which the grey light had rubbed out all the night’s romance to leave the city drab and wintry.
A milk-vendor met them with his goats and gave a swirl of his pipes in greeting. There were few other passengers abroad, but more began to appear as they drew near the harbor area; carters and busy men, and hand-porters. Presently they were among warehouses and places of commerce. Beyond lay the quays and a tangle of masts. Here was a tavern, opening for the day; the proprietor said that a Captain ’Zenog had a ship at the fourth dock down, due to sail for the Green Isles with the tide. The place was not hard to find, nor the captain either, standing by the board of his vessel, strong and squat, like a giant beaten into lesser stature by the mallet of one still stronger.
“A Green Islands captain, aye, I am that,” he said. “I’ll take you there on the smoothest ship that sails the waters.”
Said Rodvard; “I do not doubt it. But we have no money and wish to work our way.”
Bluff heartiness fell away from him (and the glance said he was suspicious of something). “What can you do?”
“I am a clerical, really, but would take other labor merely to reach the Green Islands.”
Lalette said; “I have done sewing and could mend a sail here and there.”
The captain rubbed a chin peppered with beard. “A clerical I could use fair enough, one that could cast accounts.” He looked around. “Most of you Amorosians, though—”
Rodvard said joyously; “I am not of Mancherei, but Dossolan, educated there, and can cast up an account as easily—”
“There’d be no pay in it. The voyage merely,” said the man quickly.
“We will do it for that,” said Rodvard, and touched Captain ’Zenog’s hand in acceptance. The squat man turned. “Ohé!” he shouted. “Hinze, take these two to the port office and get them cleared for a voyage with us.”
22THE LAW OF LOVE
(For a moment after the man had spoken, Rodvard felt as though he were falling.) He looked at Lalette (and saw the same black fear was in her also), but
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