Guivric the Sage did not reply. He was too sage to argue with people when they talked foolishly. He was immeasurably too sage to argue with, of all persons, Horvendile.
“Yet that,” observed Holden of Nérac, “exhausts the directions: and it leaves no direction for the rest of us.”
Horvendile looked at this Holden, who was with every reason named the Bold; and Horvendile smiled. “You, Holden, already take your directions, in a picturesque and secret manner, from a queen—”
“Let us not speak of that!” said Holden, between a smirk and some alarm.
“—And you will be guided by her, in any event, rather than by me. To you also, Anavalt of Fomor, yet another queen will call resistlessly by and by, and you, who are rightly named the Courteous, will deny her nothing. So to Holden and to Anavalt I shall give no directions, because it is uncivil to come between any woman and her prey.”
“But I,” said Kerin of Nointel, “I have at Ogde a brand-new wife whom I prize above all the women I ever married, and far above any mere crowned queen. Not even wise Solomon,” now Kerin told them, blinking, in a sort of quiet scholastic ecstasy, “when that Judean took his pick of the women of this world, accompanied with any queen like my Saraïde: for she is in all ways superior to what the Cabalists record about Queen Naäma, that pious child of the bloodthirsty King of Ammon, and about Queen Djarada, the daughter of idolatrous Nubara the Egyptian, and about Queen Balkis, who was begotten by a Sheban duke upon the person of a female Djinn in the appearance of a gazelle. And only at the command of my dear Saraïde would I leave home to go in any direction.”
“You will, nevertheless, leave home, very shortly,” declared Horvendile. “And it will be at the command and at the personal urging of your Saraïde.”
Kerin leaned his head to one side, and he blinked again. He had just Dom Manuel’s trick of thus opening and shutting his eyes when he was thinking, but Kerin’s mild dark gaze in very little resembled Manuel’s piercing, vivid and rather wary consideration of affairs.
Kerin then observed, “Yet it is just as Holden said, and every direction is preëmpted.”
“Oh, no,” said Horvendile. “For you, Kerin, will go downward, whither nobody will dare to follow you, and where you will learn more wisdom than to argue with me, and to pester people with uncalled-for erudition.”