The Blue Star

by Fletcher Pratt

III

She 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.”

22
THE 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 the step was taken, they could only hope to carry matters through at the port office. Hinze was a thin man in a sailor’s jacket, who looked over his shoulder back at the captain as he led them down the cobbles to a brick building that Lalette remembered all too well. “You will find it a good voyage. The ship is tight as an egg, but the food not too good,” said he.

There was a doorman in his coop, who directed Hinze down a hall, whereupon the girl clutched Rodvard’s arm and said; “I do not like this. I—”

(A silly remark, he thought.) “We cannot run away now,” he said. “It is the only chance”; and Hinze was back to say that the protostylarion would entertain them at once, there could be only a moment of waiting. They looked at each other apprehensively; Lalette leaned against a wall and closed her eyes, and a man came down the hall to call them in.

Rodvard led the way into a room where a little man sat behind a desk with lines of disobligingness set round his mouth. He said; “You wish to leave the dominion of Mancherei for the barbarous Green Islands?”

“It is because of a family matter,” said Rodvard. “My wife and I—”

The protostylarion looked at Lalette’s hair, down in the maiden-sweep, then quickly at Rodvard and back to her face. Wrinkles shot up the middle of his forehead. “Wife? Wife? What is your profession? Where is your certificate of employ?” He came up out of his seat (like a small bear, Rodvard thought), peering the more intently at the girl. “Ah, I have it! I know! You are the one I registered for the Myonessae. The Dossolan; and a witch, too. Guards! Guards!” His voice went treble; two or three armed men tumbled into the room.

“An inquiry!” said the protostylarion, flinging up his arm to point at the couple as Hinze shrank back. “These two for an inquiry! I accuse her of being a runaway Myonessan!” The face was distorted (the thought behind it one of the purest delight and triumph). “Be careful with her; she is a witch!”

Rodvard was gripped above the elbow and jerked stumbling to the door, catching only a glimpse of Lalette’s despairing face. Outside, people stopped and goggled as the two were hurried along and into a carriage, with a guard beside each. “I am sorry,” began Rodvard, but one of the guards said; “Close your clack; no talking among prisoners.” (His eyes spoke a brutality that would have taken pleasure in a blow.)

They came to a structure with a battlemented gate, like a small fortress; an odor of sewage emanated from it. A pair of guards brought forward bills in salutation to those entering. Rodvard and Lalette were swung into a gate-house, where a man lounged at a window—an officer by his shoulder-knot. One of the guards said; “These two are in for an inquiry. Authority of the Protostylarion Barthvödi. He says to be careful of the woman, she’s a witch.”

The officer looked at Lalette appreciatively, then seated himself at the desk and drew out a paper. “Your names and professions,” he said.

Rodvard gave his; Lalette checked over the profession (wishing to cry out that she would not give it, wishing to defy the man). The officer looked at her. “You are warned,” he said, “that I am diaconal, and your witchery will be wasted on me.”

“Oh,” she said, and half-choking; “Myonessan.”

“Which couvertine? . . . The more trouble it is to obtain the information, the harder it will be with you.”

“Lolau.”

The officer turned to one of the guards. “Go to the couvertine of Lolau and inform the mattern that she is to come here tomorrow morning at the fourth glass for an inquiry in the matter of Demoiselle Lalette.” He addressed the other guard. “You wait here while I draw the proclamation calling for information on this Bergelin, then take it around.”

(Rodvard thought of Leece, and wondered what she would say in answer to the proclamation), (Lalette of facing Dame Quasso again.) Another pair of guards came in to take them to stone cells, set in the wall of the fortress. Rodvard saw Lalette vanish into one and heard the door clang behind her, then was himself thrust into another. There was a stool and straw on the floor, an archery-slit for the only lighting. The place stank, the origin of which odor was a bucket beneath the archery-slit. He sat on the stool and tried to think, but the turmoil of fear held him so that he could do little more than run around back and over his own conduct like a mouse, to ask where he had stepped wrongly and what else he could have done to make things come out other than they were. This was the morning when Leece . . . and he would have been bound to her for life. . . . No, that could not have been the right path. Farther back, then? When he asked that, he went off into a train of reminiscence in which thought almost ceased.

His throat was dry, there was no water in the cell. Nor did he seem to have near neighbors, all being silence around, save that somewhere a tiny drip of water increased his thirst. Would he be able to hold anything back tomorrow morning at the inquiry, where an Initiate would surely question? Round the circuit of his failure his mind ran again, and slid off into a consideration of present circumstance. He rose, going to the iron-bound door, but even the small trap in it would not open from his side. Alone.

Not for the first time. How like the imprisonment on the ship this was, and how dark the prospect had loomed then! Out of that he had risen, but to what? A choice between Leece and this. A wave of misery swept across him, and then he thought of Lalette, and her misery equal to his own, and maybe more.

But this was no help either, and he began to examine his prison, finger-breadth by finger-breadth, for something that might take his mind away from this procession of regrets and anxieties toward a future he could not know. There were only accidents of the wall at first, in which he tried to see pictures and carvings, making up a tale for himself, like those in the ballads. This had not gone far when he came to a trace of writing which looked as though someone had tried to wipe it out, for there were only a few words to be read:

“Horv . . . in the month . . . only for lov . . . God.”

A cryptic message, indeed; he tried to imagine the tale behind it, and how the love of which these Amorosians forever gabbled had brought someone to this cell. This caused him to ask himself whether it was really love for Lalette that had brought him there; for that matter whether he loved her, and what love was; and to none of these questions could he find a satisfactory answer, because he kept comparing her with Maritzl and wondering whether the emotion were the same. But this in turn brought a deep weariness; he flung himself on the straw to rest and work the matter out; and so doing, fell into an uneasy slumber—product of his sleepless night—in which he dreamed that the world was ruled, not by the God he had been taught to believe in, nor disputed by the two gods of whom the Amorosians spoke, but by three demons, who sat in a closed space with smoke pouring from their mouths, and decided what penalties should be exacted for witchery.

A key grated; he woke to see the trap being pulled back from without, and a voice said roughly:

“Here’s your banquet, my lord. The sweetmeats come with the dancing girls.”

A plate was thrust through, with a pewter mug of water. On the former were some vegetables, cold and sticky, and no table utensils, but Rodvard was in a mood of hunger that forbade him to be over-nice and he ate, saving part of his water to cleanse his fingers after the meal. It was hardly done before the trap opened again, and the outer voice demanded; “The tools, pig-face. The administration doesn’t give souvenirs to its guests.”

Rodvard passed the dishes through and seated himself again. Time ticked; the light that had been fading when he woke was all gone, he had slept so much that he could do so no more and the uncertainty of his lot held him from consecutive thought. Somewhere outside there was a thin cry and a sound of feet. Then quiet again, but for the briefest space; and now another key grated, in the main lock of his door. It was flung open; in the space stood a small man and a dark, with no cap. Behind him, a smoky torch held by another showed this first visitor to be holding a naked sword, that dripped, plash, plash, on the stone.

“You are Bergelin?” he said. “I call myself Demadé Slair. The revolt has begun. Have you the Blue Star safe?”