The True Game Read online

  The way to Windlow's House led through forest which had never been burned or cut within memory. The trees loomed like towers, vast as clouds. The trail was needle-strewn and redolent of resin, sharp and soft in the nostrils. Flowers bloomed in the shade, their secret faces turned down toward the mosses, and the trickle of water was around us. We led a considerable pack train from which I understood that Windlow's House was supplied from the High Demesne, unlike the Schooltown I had known with its own farms and merchants. We asked if this were so, and the guide replied that except for garden stuff, meat, milk, and wool, and firewood, which was cut by the School's own servants, all supplies came from the King.

  The place was a day away from the High Demesne, set at the top of a south sloping valley, a single white tower with some lower buildings clustered at its foot. It looked very lonely there. However, when we arrived we found the place well staffed. The kitchens were bustling, the stables clean and swept, the courtyard gleaming with fresh washed stones. The men who had come with us unloaded the train, received a meal, and went back the way they had come. Only we were left, with some three or four Gamesmen from the High Demesne who evidently rotated duty in keeping watch on Windlow's House. Of Windlow, we had seen nothing yet. NOR did we until the following morning. Then we found him in the garden behind the tower, wrapped in a thick blanket in the warmth of the early sun. I had never seen anyone so old before. He was frail, tottery, his face wrinkled like an apple dried in the barrel. But, when he smiled at us we knew his mind was not dulled, for his glance twinkled at us in full knowledge of who we were.

  "So, released by my old student the High King at last, are you? I wondered how long he would hold my guests this time. Last time I was lucky to get to see them at all. He protects me, you know." He winked outrageously and drew a serious face. "He says he believes I much need his protection." And his eyes sought heaven in a clown's mockery.

  Silkhands laughed and sat down beside him, taking his hand in hers. The rest of us simply sat around soaking up the sunlight, waiting for him to be ready to question us or speak to us, as he chose. It was very peaceful there, and I amended my earlier thought of loneliness. Peace, rather. Content, A vast quiet which was not at all disrupted by the cackle of fowls in the yard or the bustle of the laundress crossing the yard.

  "Now," said the old man, "tell me everything about everywhere. My Talent was never large, and of late it has reached no further than the kitchen garden. I see a plague of moth there, but not until late summer." Once again he winked and drew that clown's face, and this time I knew it for what it was, a cover for more serious things, a nothing to hide thoughts that were deep as oceans.

  He caught my eye and said, very quietly, "You may speak, lad. Your thoughts are not spied upon here and now. In my garden today, no Demon intrudes."

  So, as Silkhands held him by his wrist and worked her way with his aged arteries (so she later said) we told him everything that we knew and guessed about the world outside. We told him especially of the Bright Demesne and of Himaggery's invitation. "He needs you, Sir, " we said. "He says to tell you that he needs you, to come to him for now is a time when you should…"

  At this he was quiet before beginning to talk in his gentle voice about the distance, the time it would take, the weariness of the journey, and of the High King. We all knew that none of it meant anything except his talk of the High King, and we all knew the High King did not intend to let him go. "He was once my student, a proud, haughty boy, Prionde." Windlow said. "He wanted my love, my adoration. What is the Talent of a King, after all, if it cannot inspire adoration? Even then, I think he knew he would be a King. But, what good is a Master who can be summoned and sent like a little tame bunwit? What good a Seer who is blinded to the qualities of those around him? So, I could only give him my teaching. He gave me respect, but no understanding. He would not understand what I so much wanted him to learn, so when the time came that he could, he held me captive to his ignorance, as though to say, 'See, I have power over this Gamesmaster! What are his teachings worth? I command his obedience, and what I do not understand is not worthy of understanding. ' So, he preens in his possession of me, for others respect me arid he believes his possession gives him prestige. He does not know that he possesses nothing. Nothing. This rack of bones is nothing.." He fell asleep with that word, the sudden sleep of the very old. Silkhands stayed beside him, but the others of us wandered about the garden, looking at the thousand varieties of potted herbs, from the tiniest to some the size of small trees. Their combined fragrance in the sunwarmed space made us dizzy.Later there was more of the same kind of conversation, but Windlow seemed more alert than before.

  In the evening Yarrel and I chased fireflies in the meadow.I had never seen them before, and we took immoderate pleasure in behaving like infants. Chance drank a great deal of wine and traded tall tales with the kitchen people. It was a generous and pleasant time.

  By the third day, Silkhands' work with the old man had made a difference we could all see. He was more alert, more erect, and his questioning of us was quick and incisive. Silkhands said she had made small changes in the flow of blood to his brain, had added a chemical here or there, dissolved bits of cloggy tissue in one place and another, and built small walls other places. "It is only small repair," she said. "I cannot stop age nor forestall death. It-will come, still, inevitably. But the small weaknesses and pains of age, those I can ameliorate, and to do it for him is a pleasure. His mind in mine feels like sunshine and rain."

  With his incisive questioning came also his own dialogue with himself. We heard for the first time about his own life, about who and what he was.

  "They named me Seer," he ruminated, remembering a time long past. "They named me Seer for I knew, as Seers do, what would happen in future times. Small things. A fall of rain here. A wager won there. The outcome of a Game. The life or death of a man. As a Talent it is seldom controllable, never dependable, and yet when it happens, it is unmistakable. Well. Every Demesne must have a Seer or two, or six, or a dozen. The more the better coverage, so they say. And so I became a Seer, attached to a King. That's the best place for a Seer. At least the meals are dependable. Well, Seers have a lot of time on their hands. Seeing doesn't require time. I began to read. Books. Old books, mostly. There aren't many new ones except among certain classes of pawns and the Immutables. I read those, too. Everything. Old books half rotten. Old books all mouldy. Old books in pieces. Old books about still older books. You would not believe the trash which accumulates in the cellars of old School Houses or in old towns the Immutables no longer use or in some old ruins. I stopped thinking of myself as a Seer and began to think of myself as a Reader. Well, what one reads, one learns, of course, and it was not too many decades before I realized that all those books were the bits and pieces of a puzzle, shards of a broken pot, clues to a great mystery. It was all there, boys, in the past. Something shaped differently from the way things are shaped today."

  "Were you the only one, " asked Yarrel. "The only one reading? How did you get about? All those travels?"

  The old man smiled. "Oh, told small lies and begged small favors. Whenever there was a particularly good Seeing, I'd beg a boon of the King, or the Prince, of whomever it happened to be at the time." He smiled to himself at some ancient, innocent villainy. "Seers wander about a good deal, anyhow. It is said to improve the quality of the vision. And, as to your question, boy, no I was not the only one. Most of the others were Necromancers, however, or Shapeshifters, or Rancelmen. You don't know Rancelmen? A little like Pursuivants. Their Talent is finding things which are lost. "Well, I believed that there was a mystery in the past, far back, in the time of Didir and Tamor perhaps, at the beginning of things. I came to believe there would be a document, a book, a certain book…called the onomasticon, the Dictionary of True Names. I came to believe I would find it, that I needed to find it. Once I could learn the right names for things, you understand, I would be able to decipher the puzzle. You understand?"

&
nbsp; "You mean that if there had been different names for things once and we knew what those names were we could…know how things started?" Yarrel seemed bemused by this idea. "But we wouldn't even understand those words."

  Windlow was patient. "We might. They might not be strange words, you see, only words used differently. Or, so I think. And as I read the old books, then older ones and older still, I saw that the meanings of words did change. I stopped being a Seer and became a Historian." He mocked himself with pursed lips, as though we should not take him too seriously. Silkhands, however, took everything seriously. "That is not a name in the Index, sir. I know all the names in the Index, every one, and that one is not among them…"

  "I know, " he hushed her. "Of course, I know. But it could be there. It isn't a strange word, you see. All of you know immediately what it means."

  Yarrel said, "Well, yes. Among the pawns there are vegetarians who believe in eating only vegetables. And librarians who believe in keeping books. So, an historian would be…someone who believes in…keeping history?"

  "But it isn't in the Index, " complained Silkhands. "It has nothing to do with Talents…"

  "It really does," said the old man. "It takes certain talents to read and study and remember."

  "Those aren't Talents," she said.

  He shrugged. "Not in today's world, no. But, in History they may have been talents. History. Of the Game. Of the world. Why is a King a King? Why are Sorcerers what they are? Who was the first Immutable, and why?"

  "That's religion." I objected. "All of that is religion."

  "Well, lad, I thought not, you see. I thought that if one asked a question and then found a definite answer to that question it was most certainly not religion. I thought it was History. But then, most Gamesmen believe precisely as you do, so it turned out I was not a Historian, after all. I was a Heretic."

  I made the diagonal ward to reflect evil. I didn't believe for a moment he was a Heretic, but it was the automatic thing to do. He didn't have horns, for one thing, and his teeth didn't drip with acid. Everyone knew that Heretics were like that. I found him smiling at me in a pitying sort of way which made me squirm.

  "I don't think you're a Heretic." I said. "I don't."

  "That's kind of you, " he said drily. "I do appreciate that. I wish the High King would accept your opinion as fact, but he is a very religious man. Still, perhaps if one sends enough Rancelmen into the world to find what is lost, one may come up with some answers. Now, I find myself suddenly very tired…"

  So, we went away to let him nap in the sunshine among the herb-scent and the birdsong and the laundrywoman's slap, slap, slap of wet clothes and the far-off call of the herdboys in the meadow.

  "You know, I understand what he means about words meaning different things," said Yarrel. "In the village when I was a child, when the Gamesmen marched in Game Array we called it 'trampling death. ' In Mertyn's House we learned to call it a Battle Demesne of the True Game."

  "I learned to call it True Game as a child," said Silkhands. "But when the stones came through the roof of our house, I called it 'death.' "

  What they said was true. If it had been Yarrel beneath the whip, stoking the war ovens, I would not have called it "True Game." When Mandor played me at the Festival, I did not think of it as "True Game".I called it "betrayal" in my head. But still, I was baffled by one thing.

  "How does he know there is such a book as the one he is searching for?" I asked. "To send all those Rancelmen searching? How does he know?"

  "Peter, sometimes I think you do not think, " complained Yarrel. "The old one is a Seer. He told us so. He has Seen the thing he searches for, probably Seen it in his own hands at some time in his future, maybe here in this place which is another reason why he will not come with us to Himaggery."

  The old man had been so gentle with us, so twinkly in his glances and humorous in his speech, I had not thought of him as a Seer, not even when he had said it was his Talent. Then, too, he had not the gauze mask with moth wings or any of those appurtenances which lend awe to the Seer's presence. This led me to the thought that it might be easy to pretend to be a Seer. After all, if one pretended to have visions of the far distant future, how would anyone know if they came trueor not? This idea was exciting, for it was the first time I could remember myself "imagining." By evening, I had thought up several other ideas which were interesting and quite original. When I tried them out on Yarrel, it seems he had thought of most of them first, and I was embarrassed. Still, I was at least getting the idea.

  The next day in Windlow's garden he said, "If I talk heresy to you, you may become tainted and some Demon will pick it from your heads and tell someone, perhaps the High King, who will feel he should do something dramatic about it such as flaying you all, or selling you to pawners for transport to the southern isles or something else equally unpleasant. So, let us talk religion instead."

  "Sir." I interrupted him, "did not Mertyn send us to you for Schooling? If we are to be Schooled, surely there is some work we should be doing. If we are not to be Schooled, then we must be careful not to impose upon your hospitality .."

  He gave me a look which saw through me to the bones of my feet. I felt it distinctly; my soles tingled. "My School House is much diminished, boy! The High King's sons are long gone into the Game, not that they were allowed to learn much from me. The sons of the followers are gone out into the world as well. There are few young at Evenor. The High Lakes of Tarnoch echo no more with childish laughter and the splash of boyish play. I know this. Am I not a Seer? Long since I told Prionde that his Kingdom would dwindle, that he would crow at last like an old cock upon nothing but a dung heap, ashes and broken crockery. So I told him, but I made the mistake of telling him why. History, I said. Not Seeing. Since that time, the visions have come, but he chose to disbelieve them. I tell you, lad, that men will believe if one says, 'The Gods say…'They will believe if one says, 'I had a Vision…' They will believe if one says, 'It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold…'But, if one says, 'History teaches, ' then they will not believe. "Mertyn sent you here for Schooling. So, I'll school you. Himaggery sent you here for his own reasons. They will be fulfilled. So, be, patient. Talk to me here in my garden while the sun shines. Chase the firebugs of the meadow in the evening. Flirt with the maidens who keep the tower clean and prepare our meals. Be at peace. The other will come soon enough!"

  So, he taught us. "Do you remember the chart of descent from Didir and Tamor?" he asked us. "Can you recite it?" I told him I could not. We had seen it, of course. It hung upon the wall in Mertyn's own rooms, and I had seen it there on the day he had warned me against Mandor, but we had never learned much about it. We had not studied religion much, in Mertyn's House.

  "I want you to learn it, " he told us, then quoted it off to us line by line for the first of ten or a dozen times. "In the time of the ancestors was born Didir, and she had the Talent to Read what lay in the minds of all about her, so they named her Demon and she was taken from them. And in that same time was born Tamor, and he had the Talent to rise into the air and fly so that he looked down upon the habitations of men so that they named him Ayrman, which is to say Armiger, and he was taken from them to another place. And from the union of Didir and Tamor was born a son, Hafnor, an Elator. And from the family of Didir after many generations came Sorah, named Seer, daughter of that line. And from the line of Didir and the line of Hafnor came a son, Wafnor, who was the first Tragamor. And of a son of Hafnor and a daughter of Sorah was the first Healer born, a daughter, Dealpas. "And of the family of Dealpas and the line of Sorah came a son, Thandbar, the Shapeshifter, and of his line Shapeshifters forever to the current time. And from the line of Wafnor came Buinel, Sentinel, and of that line Sentinels to the current time. And of a mating between Wafnor's line and Hafnor's line came Shattnir, Sorceress, and of her line and the line of Sorah came a daughter, Trandilar, a Great Queen, and of her line Kings and Princes to the present time. And, of that line after many generations, ca
me Dorn, a Necromancer, and of his line Necro-mancers to the present time.

  "And of the pawns who served our forefathers was bred a new people, the Immutables, which was planned and done by Barish and Vulpas, Wizards of the twelfth generation of the Game, and from that line have come Immutables to the current time. But Barish and Vulpas were sought by the Council for they had committed heresy in creating these Immutables. So did the Council claim them pawnish and forfeit and sent to have Barish and Vulpas slain. "But the Immutables which they had made fled into the mountains and the caves and bred there a numerous people, so that when they came among the Gamesmen once more in a later time they could no longer be used and were proof against all the Gamesmen could do."

  Silkhands had been writing down as much of this as she could, and I saw Yarrel mouthing it to himself to commit it to memory.

  That noon we figured it out and put it into a chart on a piece of parchment like the one I remembered on Mertyn's wall. We showed it to Windlow in the afternoon, and he chuckled at it. "Very good, " he told us, "but learn it the way I told it to you, for that is the way it is written in the books of religion. If you think of it in that way, the Demons will not think you are fulminating heresy."

  That night we were saying that we could not see what all this nonsense was about "heresy." He had not told us anything so very wonderful or different. Chance heard us and said, "Well, do not dwell upon difference, boy, if you want to stay living. A little heresy may be all right in his garden among the pet birdies and the pot plants with the guards half asleep and leagues between this place and the world. You may think what you like here, but how do you unthink it before we go away again? Hmm? And you would have to unthink it, lad, or you would not last a handful of days."