The Old King

PHARUS

Pyrathis. The last week of the thaw. Eighty-seven days to midsummer.

In the Hall of the Long Shadow, with his three sons watching and eleven clerks pretending not to, Pharus Sandspell put out his right hand over the arm of the throne and called one grain of sand up off the black stone.

It came, as it had come every morning for ninety years, a speck of gold in the white bars of light from the slit windows, and he let it rise as far as it would. A thumb's width short of his palm it stopped and trembled. Yesterday it had touched. The day before, it had touched and stuck.

Nobody in the hall breathed. A man could find that frightening, or he could find it informative, and at one hundred and four Pharus had long ago chosen informative, because fear was heavy and he had very little left to lift with. He let the grain fall, and heard it tick on the stone, and every clerk's pen began to move again at once.

The throne had been carved from a single black stone to make whoever sat in it look enormous, and it made Pharus look like a doll left on a temple altar. Tobb had got him into it. Tobb had got him out of bed, too, an hour ago, and walked him round the small worn rug by the bedroom's balcony door, as he had every morning for thirty years, without ever having been told why.

His sons stood where they always stood, each one early so that no brother might be alone with their father for a breath.

Aris had stepped forward at the door to take his father's arm, gray-bearded, heavy-lidded, his hand already out, and Pharus had let him reach and then given the arm to Michael. Michael took the weight without a word. He was thin and dark and his hands were all burn-scar, and he smelled faintly of something that was neither hot metal nor frost; Michael never had words when hands would do.

On the steps below the throne Milo didn't get up. He was writing in a small book, and he looked up and smiled, and went on writing. He had learned young that his father noted who reached first. He had his dead mother's laugh, and Aris had never forgiven either of them for it.

"Father," said Aris. "You look well."

"I look a corpse propped in a chair. Sit down, Aris. You're in my light."

Aris sat. Pharus noted, as he noted most things, that his eldest had a new ring on his left hand, plain silver, with its face turned inward to the palm.

"Tell me."

Grain. Water. Two oasis towns quarreling over a well. A tax shortfall on the coast, which Aris blamed on smugglers and Milo, without looking up, blamed on Aris.

"Your brother's figures," said Pharus, "or yours, Milo?"

"Mine. His are prettier." Milo turned a page. "The smugglers on the coast all bank with a cousin of his steward's. It's a small cousin. It isn't a large shortfall. I only mention it because Aris is so tired, and I worry the numbers are getting away from him."

Aris's heavy lids came up. For a moment there was something in his face that Pharus had last seen in it the day Milo was born, and named for Pharus's own father.

"I'll look into it," said Aris.

"Do," said Pharus. "And the east workshop."

Milo stopped writing. Aris found something to look at on the far wall.

"Done," said Michael. "On time. We lost fewer this time."

"The workers?"

Michael's burned hands closed. "Two more this month."

"Double the widows' purses." Pharus didn't turn his head toward Aris, who held the treasury; Aris was already writing it down. "A man who dies for Pyrathis should leave his widow rich. It makes the next man braver."

The east workshop stood against the cliff on the palace's eastern edge, long and low and windowless, with walls six feet thick and three sets of bronze doors one inside the next. Between the second and the third, even at noon in high summer, a man could see his breath.

It was quieter than a temple. Long benches ran under low lamps, and workers moved between them in padded robes and gloves to the shoulder, never speaking. Their breath smoked. A young one had a patch of gray on his cheek the size of a thumbprint, smooth and polished-looking. He saw the king looking and turned his face away, and Pharus let him.

Michael didn't. He stopped at the young man's bench and took off one of his own gloves, and with his bare scarred fingers he turned the worker's chin to the lamp and looked at the gray patch, and went on looking.

"When?"

"Ten days, Prince." The young man's voice was steady. "It doesn't hurt."

"It won't, until it does." Michael put the glove back on. "You're off the benches. Go to the north stores and count sacks. Full pay."

"Prince, I need the—"

"Full pay. And your sister's boy can have your place next year if he wants it, and if he doesn't, he gets the purse anyway." Michael walked on before the man could thank him, and Pharus, following on Tobb's arm, saw his son's jaw working as though he were chewing something that wouldn't go down.

"That's three you've taken off the benches this year," Pharus said, low.

"Four." Michael kept his eyes on the bench. "I can make the room colder, or I can make the men stay in it longer. Not both, Father. I've counted it both ways. Someone has to choose which men."

"And you choose."

"Somebody should, who knows their names." He stopped by the far wall. "Aris would choose by the ledger. You'd let me choose and not ask."

"I'm asking."

"No," said Michael, "you're counting."

At the far wall, on a bench under a single lamp, lay a cloth with shapes beneath it. Michael put his hand on one corner to lift it.

"Leave it," said Pharus.

Michael's hand stayed where it was.

"I know the number," said Pharus. "I don't need to see it."

He knew it as he knew his own teeth. Under the cloth, in gray felt, lay nine dark stones each the size of a palm, and in eight of them the little skull had come up crisp as a seal in wax, and in the ninth it had come up soft, like a face under water. Two men for each stone, this winter. That was the number.

He had found these last years that he would rather not hold some numbers in his head at all. Some numbers, once you held them, you began to wait for.

He held his hand an inch above the cloth until the cold came up through the linen into his palm and into the small bones of his wrist, and the grain he hadn't known he was holding under his other palm fell, and rolled, and he heard it tick on the stone.

"The soft one won't keep," Michael said. "A month. Maybe two. I'd put it in the first box."

"Then put it in the first box. Five, under the first storm."

"Up the salt track, then. Not the Spire." Michael didn't make it a question. "Markwin's men have been standing too near the carts at the mountain road since the thaw. Sniffing."

"Up the salt track," said Pharus.

"And the other four?"

"Three at the autumn rains."

Michael waited. He could count to nine as well as any clerk.

"And one stays in your felt," said Pharus, "and you never write it down."

His son looked at him over the cloth for a long moment. "Haze counts by the box, Father."

"Haze counts what it is shown." Pharus held out his arm for Tobb. "Show it boxes."

The minotaur was nine feet tall and had to duck its horns under the great door.

It wore a long coat of brown leather over a body as broad as a buttress. It had a bull's face, broad and dark, a ring of hammered bronze through the nose, and small, deep, wholly unhurried eyes. It stood in the middle of the Hall of the Long Shadow with its hands folded and regarded the king of Pyrathis as a mountain regards a man who has come up it in the wrong shoes.

"Grath," said Milo. "Emissary of Markwin, Lord of the Spire."

"From today the Spire is closed to your carts," said Grath. "Covered or not."

Aris half-rose. Grath gave him nothing, not even a glance.

"Lord Markwin gives no reason, and you will not ask for one." Grath's great head turned slowly until it pointed at Michael, standing at his father's left. Its nostrils flared once. Then again, longer, and the bronze ring in them trembled.

"You," Grath said. "You have come from a cold room."

Michael didn't move. Only his burned hands closed at his sides.

"It is on your coat," said the minotaur. "On your hands. My lord told me what I might smell in this hall. He did not tell me what it means, and I did not ask him, because I saw his face when he told me." The small eyes went back to the king. "I find it is standing beside your throne."

Somewhere at the back of the hall a clerk dropped a stylus, and every head turned at the sound, and turned back.

"My son," said Pharus mildly, "runs our glassworks. Glass is cooled in cold rooms. You are welcome to tour them."

"I would rather not," said Grath. "I would rather go home. And my lord gave me one more thing to say, King, word for word, if I smelled what he thought I would smell." It didn't hurry. "At the thaw, the Lord of the Spire wrote to the Queen of Varlin, who stood beside him on that flank. If his emissary does not come home, she will know why before the moon turns." The bronze ring caught the light. "That is so you will not trouble yourself about the road. My lord is a careful man. He thought you might be tempted."

It bowed, short and heavy, and ducked under the door, and the floor seemed to hold the sound of its feet well after it had gone.

"Kill it," said Aris. "On the road. Before it reaches the Spire."

"It has just told you, in words a child could follow, what happens if you do." Pharus didn't open his eyes. "Markwin smells cold on my son's coat and writes to a queen. A queen has a minotaur's nose and a minotaur's letter. Neither is worth anything in a court. A dead emissary is worth a great deal. No."

"Then tell Haze. Let Haze deal with Varlin."

"If I tell Haze a queen has been told, Haze will ask how much, and how, and whether Pyrathis can keep its own house. Then Haze will begin to wonder whether it needs Pyrathis at all." Pharus opened his eyes and looked at his eldest son until his eldest son looked at the floor. "I will write myself. Today. In my own hand. No one else writes. Do you understand me, Aris?"

"Yes, Father," said Aris.

He wrote it at sunset on the balcony, with the light going red over the river and the blanket over his knees.

There was no clerk in Pyrathis he would trust with this, and no son. He had Tobb set the ink and the board on his lap and wedge the pen between the three fingers of his right hand that still obeyed, and then send himself away.

It took the better part of an hour. The pen hadn't been in that hand for nine years. He made each letter in three movements, set and test and set again. The nib caught and spattered, and twice he had to stop for the coughing, and once to lift a grain from the blotter and see that he still could. The man who read it would see an old man's scrawl, and know exactly how much it had cost, and that was part of the message.

Halfway through, the board began to slide off his knees, and a hand caught it.

Aris. Pharus had not heard him come out onto the balcony. His eldest crouched by the chair, heavy and awkward, a gray-bearded man squatting on his heels the way a boy does, and held the board level with both hands so the pen could find the line again. He kept his eyes on the river so as not to read.

"You taught me my letters on this board," Aris said. "You held it for me. I pressed so hard I went through the paper, and you said a king should write as if every word costs him something." He was quiet a moment. "I've been trying to write like that for forty-odd years. Nobody reads it."

Pharus finished the word he was making. It took as long as a grain takes to settle.

"Put it down, Aris," he said. "I'll manage."

Aris set the board on his father's knees, very carefully, and stood, and his knees cracked, and he went in.

The mountain road is shut. The goat smelled the workshop on my son. It has a friend in Varlin. Expect the next as agreed. Make no move against the mountain; it is what they want. P.

When he was done, the skin of the middle finger had split at the knuckle from the pressure of the pen, and a bead of the dark slow stuff that was not quite blood had come up and run down onto the board. He looked at it with interest. It was the first time in a year he had made himself bleed by trying.

He sealed it with his own ring, pressing with the heel of his hand, and gave it to Tobb.

"A rider. Our best. The north road to the coast by night, and the Dron packet from there."

Tobb took it and went. Milo, passing on the stair below with his small book, looked up at the balcony and said nothing, which from Milo was a speech.

Tobb came back after dark to turn down the lamps. He set a cup at the king's elbow and said in his gray voice, as he might have mentioned the weather:

"The rider's gone, Majesty. There was another before him."

Pharus called a grain off the lamp-base. It rose a finger's width and fell back.

"Whose?"

"Prince Aris's groom. On the prince's own horse. An hour after the minotaur." Tobb turned a lamp down. "He carried nothing that I could see. But the prince gave him his ring at the stable door. The plain silver one. For a token, I'd guess, so whoever he's sent to will know who sent him."

Pharus closed his eyes.

One minotaur with a nose. One queen in a red city with a minotaur's letter. One reader at the far end of the north road who would receive, inside the same week, an old king's scrawl saying make no move, and a prince's silver ring saying whatever Aris had told the groom to say, which would not be that. And one eldest son who had wanted, his whole life, to be the son a great man wrote back to.

"Shall I send after him, Majesty? The ford's high. A man on a fresh horse could have him back by morning."

Pharus wanted it so badly his hands moved on the blanket. Bring the groom back in a guard's grip with the ring in his fist. Hold it up in the Hall of the Long Shadow in front of the clerks and the cousins. And Aris on his knees in the long shadow, fifty years old, finished. He'd never be king after that. He'd never be anything.

He thought of the board held level on the balcony.

"No," said Pharus. It cost him so much that the split knuckle opened again under the cloth. "Let them both arrive. I would like to see who answers. And if it is the wrong one, I'll take the blame for having raised him."

When Tobb had gone, he measured the road the only way he trusted now, in grains let fall. Eight days by road and packet to Dron for a good rider, a day to be read, eight days back. Seventeen days for an answer. The grain fell a little shorter each day, and on the day it would not leave the floor at all he would not leave his bed; he had found that out at the winter solstice and not told Tobb.

A thumb short this morning. A finger's width tonight. The distance was going faster than it used to.

He still had two things he hadn't spent, a miser's last coins: a stone in Michael's felt that Haze had never seen, and a Door that went to Dron, where the boxes passed.

He turned his hand over on the blanket, palm up, empty, and lay looking at it.

Then he got one foot out from under the blanket, which took as long as the letter had, and hooked the corner of Tobb's rug with his toe, and drew it back.

The ring was burned brown into the stone, lines and angles, as wide as a cartwheel. He had not opened it since the night he laid its twin, five summers ago, into the boards behind the chair on Daniel's dais at Dron, kneeling on a cushion while the treaty clerks were drunk downstairs: a gift, he had told Daniel, for the day one of them had something the other would want. He put his hand down over the edge of the bed toward it, palm down, as he did for the grain, and asked.

Nothing. Then nothing, for three breaths. Then one line of the ring went gold, and the next, slowly, like a fuse taking, and the air above it thinned. Through it, faint as a smell from another room, came salt and tar and woodsmoke, and a hall he had stood in once, five summers ago, carried there by road on a litter at ninety-nine to put his ring to the sea-treaty with Dron that the Emperor's peace had left out. Banners. A long floor. The dais.

It still remembered him.

Then it began to drink.

His hand went first. He watched the skin on the back of it dry and tighten and go gray, as fruit goes in a week of sun, and the nails yellow at the rims. Something let go in his jaw; a tooth he had kept a hundred years came loose against his tongue. His heart stumbled, and caught, and stumbled. He could hear the salt-wind on the other side, and somewhere far off a man laughing in a big careless voice, and the gold lines brightened with every beat he lost.

He shut it. It fought him. It took more to shut than to open, and when the last line had gone brown again he lay with his gray hand hanging over the bed's edge and the loose tooth in his mouth and could not, until the lamp had burned down a finger, lift so much as his eyes.

When he could, he called a grain off the floor. It didn't come.

An hour later, when he tried again, it rose a finger's width and fell.

He lay getting his breath, and looked at the gray hand, and understood what it had told him. Once more. Every grain he lifted until then was a grain he would not have at the far end.

So he would not lift them. He would not walk to the hall. He would lie here and spend nothing, a grain a morning to know where he stood, and Tobb would think him dying, and let Tobb think it. A miser could live a long time on a last coin, if he never once took it out of his coat.

Toward dawn Tobb came in to open the shutters, and set the lamp-base by the bed, as he did every morning, so the king could call his grain and know where he stood.

Pharus looked at the lamp-base. Then he put his gray hand under the blanket, and kept it there.

"Not today, Tobb," he said. "Nor tomorrow. Take it away."

End of Chapter 3