‘Well, maybe it is, but don’t destroy my dignity entirely.’
‘Dolmant’s very wise, your Majesty,’ Emban assured him. ‘He understands the language of diplomacy.’
‘Oh, really?’ Ehlana said with heavy sarcasm.
‘Should I convey your Majesty’s greetings to the Archprelate as well?’ Emban asked her.
‘Of course. Tell him that I’m desolate at being separated from him – particularly in view of the fact that I can’t keep an eye on him. You might also advise him that a little-known Elenian statute clearly says that I have to ratify any agreements he makes with the Earl of Lenda during my absence. Tell him not to get too comfortable in those pieces of my kingdom he’s been snipping off since I left, because I’ll just take them back again as soon as I get home.’
‘Does she do this all the time, Sparhawk?’ Sarabian asked.
‘Oh yes, all the time, your Majesty. The Archprelate bites off all his fingernails every time a letter from her reaches the Basilica.’
‘It keeps him young,’ Ehlana shrugged. She rose to her feet. ‘Now, friends,’ she said, ‘I hope you’ll excuse my husband and me for a few moments so that we can say our goodbyes privately. Come along, Sparhawk,’ she commanded.
‘Yes, my Queen.’
The morning fog had lifted, and the sun was very bright as their ship sailed out of the harbor and heeled over to take a southeasterly course which would round the southern tip of the Micaen peninsula to the Isle of Tega. The ship was well appointed, although she was of a slightly alien configuration. Khalad did not entirely approve of her, finding fault with her rigging and the slant of her masts.
It was about noon when Vanion came up on deck to speak with Sparhawk, who was leaning on the rail watching the coastline slide by. They were both wearing casual clothing, since there is no real need for formal garb on board ship.
‘Sephrenia wants us all in the main cabin,’ the Preceptor told his friend. ‘It’s time for one of those startling revelations we’ve all come to love and adore. Why don’t you round up the others and bring them on down?’
‘You’re in a peculiar humor,’ Sparhawk noted. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘Sephrenia’s being excessively Styric today,’ Vanion shrugged.
‘That one escaped me.’
‘You know the signs, Sparhawk – the mysterious expression, the cryptic remarks, the melodramatic pauses, the superior manner.’
‘Have you two been fighting?’
Vanion laughed. ‘Never that, my friend. It’s just that we all have little quirks and idiosyncrasies that irritate our loved ones sometimes. Sephrenia’s having one of her quirky days.’
‘I won’t tell her you said that, of course.’
Vanion shrugged. ‘She already knows how I feel. We’ve discussed it in the past – at length. Sometimes she does it just to tease me. Go get the others, Sparhawk. Let’s not give her too much time to perfect this performance.’
They all gathered in the main salon below decks, a cabin which was part dining room and part lounge. Sephrenia had not put in her appearance as yet and, after a few moments, Sparhawk understood what Vanion had been talking about. A familiar sound began to emerge from the lady’s cabin.
‘Flute?’ Talen exclaimed in astonishment, his voice cracking in that peculiar adolescent yodel which afflicts human males at the onset of puberty.
Sparhawk had wondered how Aphrael intended to get round the rather sticky problem of explaining her identity. To have appeared to the others as Princess Danae would quite obviously have been out of the question. Flute was quite another matter. His friends all recognized Flute as Aphrael, and that would eliminate the need for extended explanations. Sparhawk sighed as a rather melancholy thought occurred to him. He realized sadly that he didn’t know what his daughter really looked like. That dear little face which was engraved on his mind almost as deeply as Ehlana’s was only one in a long line of incarnations – one of thousands, more than likely.
Then the door to Sephrenia’s cabin opened, and the small Styric woman emerged with a smile that made her face look like the sun coming up, and with her little sister in her arms.
Flute, of course, was unchanged – and unchangeable. She appeared to be no more than six years old – precisely the same age as Danae. Sparhawk immediately rejected the possibility of coincidence. Where Aphrael was concerned, there were no coincidences. She wore the same short linen smock belted at the waist and the same plaited grass headband that she had been wearing when they had first met her. Her long hair was as black as night, and her large eyes nearly as dark. Her little bare feet were grass-stained. She held a simple many-chambered set of goatherd’s pipes to her bow-like lips, and her song was Styric, set in a complex minor key.
‘What a pretty child,’ Ambassador Norkan observed, ‘but is it really a good idea to take her along on this mysterious mission of yours, Prince Sparhawk? I gather there might be some danger involved.’
‘Not now there won’t be, your Excellency,’ Ulath grinned.
Sephrenia gravely set the Child Goddess on the cabin floor, and Flute began to dance to the clear, sweet music of her pipes.
Sephrenia looked at Emban and Norkan. ‘Watch the child closely, Emban, and you too, your Excellency. That should save us hours of explanation and argument.’
Flute pirouetted through the cabin, her grass-stained little feet flickering, her black hair flying and her pipes sounding joyously. This time Sparhawk actually saw the first step she placed quite firmly on insubstantial air. As one mounting an invisible stair, the Child Goddess danced upward, whirling as she climbed, bending and swaying, her tiny feet fluttering like birds’ wings as she danced on nothing at all. Then her song and her dance ended, and, smiling impishly and still standing in mid-air, she curtsied.
Emban’s eyes were bulging, and he had half fallen from his chair. Ambassador Norkan tried to maintain his urbane expression, but it was slipping badly, and his hands were shaking.
Talen grinned and began to applaud. The others laughed, and they all joined in.
‘Oh, thank you, my dear ones,’ Flute said sweetly, curtsying again.
‘For God’s sake, Sparhawk!’ Emban choked. ‘Make her come down from there! She’s destroying my sanity!’
Flute laughed and quite literally hurled herself into the fat little churchman’s arms, smothering his pale, cringing face with kisses. ‘I love to do that to people!’ she giggled delightedly.
Emban shrank back even further.
‘Oh, don’t be silly, Emban,’ she chided. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. I sort of love you, actually.’ A look of sly mischief came into her eyes. ‘How would you like to come to work for me, your Grace?’ she suggested. ‘I’m not nearly as stuffy as your Elene God, and we could have a lot of fun together.’
‘Aphrael!’ Sephrenia said sharply. ‘Stop that! You know you’re not supposed to do that!’
‘I was only teasing him, Sephrenia. I wouldn’t really steal Emban. The Elene God needs him too much.’
‘Has your theology been sufficiently shaken, your Grace?’ Vanion asked the Patriarch of Ucera. ‘The little girl in your lap who’s blithely trying to lead you off down the flowery path to heresy is the Child Goddess Aphrael, one of the thousand Younger Gods of Styricum.’
‘How do I greet her?’ Emban asked in a squeaky, frightened kind of voice.
‘A few kisses might be nice,’ Flute suggested.
‘Stop that,’ Sephrenia chided her again.
‘And what are your feelings, your Excellency?’ the little girl asked Norkan.
‘Dubious, your – uh…’
‘Just Aphrael, Norkan,’ she told him.
‘That’s really not suitable,’ he replied. ‘I’m a diplomat, and the very soul of diplomatic speech is formal modes of address. I haven’t called anyone but colleagues by their first names since I was about ten years old.’
‘Her first name is a formal mode of address, your Excellency,’ Sephrenia said gently.
‘All right, then,’ Aphrael said, slipping down from Emban’s lap. ‘Tynian and Emban are going to Chyrellos to fetch the Church Knights. Norkan’s going to the Isle of Tega to help Sparhawk lie to my – uh – his wife, that is. The rest of us are going to go get the Bhelliom again. Sparhawk seems to think he might need it. I think he’s underestimating his own abilities, but I’ll go along with him on the issue – if only to keep him from nagging and complaining.’
‘I’ve really missed her,’ Kalten laughed. ‘What are you going to do, Flute? Saddle up a herd of whales for us to ride to that coastline where we threw Bhelliom into the sea?’
Her eyes brightened.
‘Never mind,’ Sparhawk told her quite firmly.
‘Spoilsport.’
‘I’m really disappointed in you, Sparhawk,’ Kalten said. ‘I’ve never ridden a whale before.’
‘Will you shut up about whales?’ Sparhawk snapped at him.
‘You don’t have to get so touchy about it. What have you got against whales?’
‘It’s a personal thing between Aphrael and me,’ Sparhawk replied in a grating tone. ‘I won’t win many arguments with her, but I am going to win the one about whales.’
The layover of their ship at Tega was necessarily brief. The tide had already turned, and the captain was quite concerned about the inexorably lowering water-level in the harbor.
Sparhawk and his friends conferred briefly in the ship’s main salon while Khalad directed the sailors in the unloading of their horses and supplies. ‘Do your very best to make Sarathi understand just how serious the situation here really is, Emban,’ Vanion said. ‘Sometimes he gets a little pig-headed.’
‘I’m sure he’ll enjoy knowing how you really feel about him, Vanion,’ the fat churchman grinned.
‘Say anything you want, your Grace. I’ll never be going back to Chyrellos anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Make a special point of letting him know that the name of Cyrgon’s been popping up. You might want to gloss over the fact that we’ve only got Krager’s word for Cyrgon’s involvement, though. We are sure about the Troll-Gods, however, and the notion that we’re facing heathen Gods again might help Sarathi tear his attention away from Rendor.’
‘Was there anything else I already know that you’d like to tell me, Vanion?’
Vanion laughed. ‘Nicely put. I was being a bit of a meddler, wasn’t I?’
‘The term is “busy-body”, Vanion. I’ll do everything I can, but you know Dolmant. He’ll make his own assessment and his own decision. He’ll weigh Daresia against Rendor and decide which of them he wants to save.’
‘Tell him that I’m here with Sparhawk, Emban,’ Flute instructed. ‘He knows who I am.’
‘He does?’
‘You don’t really have to step around Dolmant so carefully. He’s not the fanatic Ortzel is, so he can accept the fact that his theology doesn’t answer all the questions in the universe. The fact that I’m involved might help him to make the right decision. Give him my love. He’s an old stick sometimes, but I’m really fond of him.’
Emban’s eyes were a little wild. ‘I think I’ll retire when this is all over,’ he said.
‘Don’t be silly,’ she smiled. ‘You could no more retire than I could. You’re having too much fun. Besides, we need you.’ She turned to Tynian. ‘Don’t overwork that shoulder,’ she instructed. ‘Give it time to completely heal before you start exercising it.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied, grinning at her authoritarian manner.
‘Don’t make fun of me, Tynian,’ she threatened. ‘If you do that, you might just wake up some morning with your feet on backward. Now give me a kiss.’
‘Yes, Aphrael.’
She laughed and swarmed into his arms to collect her kisses.
They disembarked and stood on the pier as the Tamul vessel made her way slowly out of the harbor.
‘They’re sailing at the right time of year anyway,’ Ulath said. ‘It’s a little early for the hurricanes.’
‘That’s encouraging,’ Kalten said. ‘Where to now, Flute?’
‘There’s a ship waiting for us on the far side of the island,’ she replied. ‘I’ll tell you about it after we get out of town.’
Vanion handed Norkan the packet of letters Sparhawk had so laboriously written. ‘We can’t be sure how long we’ll be gone, your Excellency,’ he said, ‘so you might want to space these out.’
Norkan nodded. ‘I can supplement them with reports of my own,’ he said, ‘and if the worst comes to the worst, I can always use the talents of the professional forger at the embassy here. He should be able to duplicate Prince Sparhawk’s handwriting after a day or so of practise – well enough to add personal postscripts to my reports, anyway.’
For some reason Sparhawk found that very shocking.
‘May I ask a question?’ Norkan said to Flute.
‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I won’t guarantee that I’ll answer, but you can ask.’
‘Are our Tamul Gods real?’
‘Yes.’
Norkan sighed. ‘I was afraid of that. I haven’t led what you’d call an exemplary life.’
‘Don’t worry, Norkan. Your Gods don’t take themselves very seriously. They’re considered frivolous by the rest of us.’ She paused. ‘They’re fun at parties, though,’ she added. She suddenly giggled. ‘They really irritate the Elene God. He has absolutely no sense of humor, and your Tamul Gods are very fond of practical jokes.’
Norkan shuddered. ‘I don’t think I really want to know any more about this sort of thing,’ he said. He looked around. ‘I’d strongly advise you to leave town rather quickly, my friends,’ he told them. ‘A republican form of government generates vast quantities of paper. There are questionnaires and forms and permits and licenses for almost everything, and there have to be ten copies of every single one. Nobody in the government wants to really make a decision about anything, so documents are just passed around from hand to hand until they either fall apart or get lost someplace.’
‘Who finally does make the decisions?’ Vanion asked.