Chapter 58: Vivianne – They who stand
The Master Healer of Tuen was called Marie. She was a round woman with a small mouth and generous lips, a natural pout that probably drove the men insane. At the moment that pout was hidden into a line of sharp disapproval.
‘You abused your luck,’ she said, massaging Vivianne’s leg.
Vivianne’s lips were also hidden in a line of pain. Marie massaged with her fist, a punch rolling up Vivianne’s pain. When the Healer finished, Vivianne needed a few seconds to convince the blood to go back to her brain. Then, she asked:
‘Was my leg really broken?’
‘In three places,’ said Marie. ‘You’re right to be skeptical. Here in Tuen things work differently than in other places.’
‘Have you been to other places to make that comparison?’
‘I’m from Patire. Come from a village that exists no more. Starved, them all. We came here to escape Fulbert. My husband couldn’t serve under that king no more.’
Vivianne wasn’t interested in the couple’s history, but Marie went on:
‘So we came to Baynard and my husband died by draw.’
‘What else is different in Tuen?’ Vivianne asked.
Marie shrugged. Vivianne waited, but that was all.
‘You need rest,’ said the Master Healer.
‘And trousers.’
‘What’s wrong with the skirt?’
‘It’s a skirt.’
Marie shrugged.
‘Joanna can get you a pair of trousers.’
Vivianne tried to rest the rest but couldn’t find a comfortable position. Joanna brought her lunch upstairs, but late in the afternoon Vivianne decided to go down for some beer. As soon as she left the roon, the door opened downstairs and many voices came in from the streets. An avalanche of steps came up the stairs and two men appeared in front of Vivianne. They stopped and the three of them were still for the eternal fraction of a second. Those two men had no skin, only burns. They had no hair, no face. Their eyes shone from behind deformations, one’s nose was gone, the other’s mouth had melted down to his chin. Their hands were scars with fingers.
Then both men bowed and disappeared through a door, leaving Vivianne alone in the corridor. She raised her hand to her throat. Her lungs were paralized and she beat her own chest to bring them back to life. She reached the stairs and found Coalim sitting a few steps below her. She sat beside him and cried for a while.
‘You’ve seen Bojet and Germon,’ said Coalim.
She nodded.
‘I cried too,’ he said. ‘Even more when I saw myself in the mirror.’
She held his hand, the burnt one. He shivered.
‘I never thought anyone would touch that hand again.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, ‘that I’m unscathed and you are burnt.’
‘We’re alive because of you. The magic the Wraith put on you saved us four and also Clément.’
But had Clément survived? Vivianne wondered. Marie said that in Tuen things were different. Queen Adelaide, when she took her son away, might have signed his death sentence.
Downstairs, soldiers had taken the Plume’s hall and were chatting around Pierre. Hadn’t he left? Vivianne wondered. Maybe Captain Gaul had brought him back, but why?
Pierre came closer to the stairs and a small, weak-looking man took his elbow.
‘Nobody ever invited me to practice before.’
‘Was that a mistake?’ asked Pierre. ‘I apologize.’
‘A mistake? Perhaps. But don’t apologize.’
Pierre came up the stairs, Vivianne and Coalin leaned away so he could pass. A moment later, Líran came and sat with them, on a lower step. The storyteller wore a purple felt hat with a daisy. Coalim pointed to the door. Vivianne had to fold over her knees to see the door from where she sat. Standing at the door, shadows around his eyes, was Maurice of Tuen. The mayor crossed the salloon and called Joanna.
‘Cider,’ he said.
Captain Gaul tried to call his attention.
‘To my brother,’ Maurice lifted his cup.
Vivianne asked Coalim what he knew about the mayor and the captain of Tuen. Since he had the disposition of furniture, Coalim always heard things without being noticed. People talked in front of him as though he were indeed a chair. Vivianne took some time to notice his constant presence at the Rock. She saw him because of Clément. The king always noticed Coalim.
‘Gaul took the job because of the draw,’ said Coalim. ‘That is: the former captain was drawn to the Mouth od War. Gaul was second in command, but he was responsible for the military finances.’
‘He’s not a soldier?’ asked Vivianne.
‘Can barely fight.’
‘And Maurice?’
‘According to rumours, Olivier chose Maurice because Maurice was incompetent. An unssuccessful pig farmer.
Adelaide did the same in Deran: chose officers not for their competence, but because she could control them.
‘Olivier was wrong,’ said Coalim. ‘Maurice is good and people like him.’
At that moment, Gaul pulled Maurice close to the stairs so they could talk in private. Neither mayor nor captain noticed the three people on the stairs.
‘I need your support,’ said the captain. ‘Erla is already questioning me.’
‘Olivier rules Tuen, not me.’
‘Olivier is locked up in his palace, he took Henrique’s disease. But Erla will go against me and she speaks with Olivier’s voice. I think he’s leaving Franária. I think he’s going to Anjário. Fulbert is on the way and I can’t defend Tuen.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked Maurice.
‘I’m no soldier and you know it.’
‘I mean about Fulbert.’
I’ve sent men to check the roads. They never came back.’
Maurice’s gaze got lost for a moment inside his cup, then he lifted his face and put a hand on Gaul’s shoulder. Maurice was taller, but his posture gave the impression that the captain was bigger.
‘I trust you,’ said the mayor. ‘If you wish to give Pierre command of our troops, I’ll support you.’
Vivianne must have made a sound because both Coalim and Líran turned to her.
‘Pierre is a stranger,’ she whispered. ‘Nobody knows anything about him.’
‘He’s from the Frontier,’ said Coalim. ‘He’s been to the Land of the Banished.’
‘We din’t see him do that,’ said Vivianne. ‘These people believe too easily in the impossible.’
Líran frowned under the purple hat and focused her eyes on Coalim, who said:
‘Even if he’s done nothing of what they said, even if nobody said anything about him, even so they’d follow Pierre. He stands.’
‘He stands?’ asked Vivianne. She was amazed to hear Coalim reveal his thoughts.
Líran leaned closer.
‘A person who stands on a sea of kneeling people calls attention like an oak on pasture,’ he said. ‘The weak will crawl to him and beg for him to save them. The incompetent will give him the reins of their own lives. Rulers will tap him on the back and hide behind him when the arrows fly.’
Vivianne had never heard Coalim talk like that. She was afraid to breathe and interrupt the tsunami of words and emotions.
‘The lives and responsibilities of others,’ he went on, ‘is the price one pays for going forward when all others run. Stand up and your neck is in evidence. You are a target, and you die. People like me, we kneel, then we run.’ He turned brusquely to Líran. ‘Stop!’
Líran snapped like he’d hit her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to.’
When Líran stopped focusing on him, Coalin collapsed against the wall.
‘I didn’t mean it,’ she said.
‘Pierre is going to die,’ said Coalim. ‘They always die.’
Líran made as if to speak, then shut her mouth and stared at something behind Vivianne. It was Pierre. He was sitting a few steps up, one elbow on his knee, hand supporting his face. He stood up, beat the dust from his trousers, went down.
Líran moved like bamboo in the wind at his passage.
‘The story,’ she said. ‘I made a wish in return for my first kiss. I wanted to live mortal adventures. Nuille put me here, right here, in this broken Franária that can’t fly anymore. But the eagle shall not die without a fight.’
The delicate, dusty sunlight that pooled on the Plume’s floor intensified in gold and purple. Vivianne had the impression that the Plume couldn’t hole Líran inside as the storyteller spoke to herself:
‘There is a power. It seems to guide Pierre and it gathers our paths around him.
‘You mean fate?’ asked Coalim.
‘A thread of Fate in the tapestry of existence,’ said Líran. ‘A story. Franária has summoned a story in her defense. It is a risk. To pull a thread from destiny’s tapestry like that, to pull with her claw a yarn of power. The danger! The courage!’
‘How can a story be dangerous?’ asked Vivianne.
‘When a story is ignored, it crumbles into disaster,’ said Líran. ‘A story that implodes never dies alone.’
She pointed at the door.
‘I don’t know when the eagle summoned the story, but it was Pierre who began it, going to the Land of the Banishedf and coming back with a dragon scale in his pocket. The story is happening around him. Look,’ she said, ‘watch how it comes to him.’
From the outside furious voices of men and women invaded the Plume. They came in shouting, raising fists in the air, but they were unarmed. Vivianne recognized them as the people she had seen that morning guiding the wagons with grain.
‘Chambert has been taken,’ said a men. ‘They won’t let us get near the mill.’
‘Who would want to live in a cursed castle?’ asked Mayor Maurice.
‘People from Debur,’ said a woman.
The soldiers stirred. Coalim explained to Vivianne that one of Tuen’s scouts returned that morning with ugly cuts on his arms and face, and that the dissidents from Debur had done that. Coalim had barely finished when two men came in and Maurice of Tuen dropped his cup on the floor.
One of the men had black beard and white moustache. The other had one eye and a piece of leather sewn to his face where the other eye should have been.
Maurice’s cider hissed on the floor.
‘Luc,’ he whispered.
The man with white moustache crossed the Plume in a straight line, over tables and chairs, as though no one had aver taught him to stay on the floor. He jumped over the counter, giving Joanna a fright, took a cup and filled it, half milk, half beer.
The one-eyed man moved slowly and stood in front of Maurice. Vivianne couldn’t see the mayor’s face, but he was shivering. She leaned forward in an attempt to see more of the Plume.
Líran focused all of her purple attention on Pierre and everyone in the Plume turned to him like pieces of a mechanism. Vivianne imagined the machines from old, the wheels and teeth turning around a magic reactor.
Líran spoke of stories, Pierre underlined her purple with darkness, mystery, and the echo of a grey wolf’s howl. Maybe Pierre’s presence wouldn’t weight so much if Líran hadn’t iluminated everything with purple beacon of her eyes. Maybe it was her that would wilt without him.
Vivianne knew somebody had moved because the mechanism that guided all faces turned towards the counter. She couldn’t see what they were following until the man came into her view: the fragile, transparent man that had spoken with Pierre before.
‘I am Leonard,’ he told the Plume. ‘I am the Accident. We,’ he gestured toward the one-eyed man and the one with the white moustache, ‘are in Chambert. You wish to use our mill.’
Voices exploded, fists punched the air.
‘Your mill?’
‘Chambert doesn’t belong to you.’
‘You have no right!’
Leonard waited until everybody was silent.
‘You may enter Chambert anytime you want and use the mill. I only have one condition: that Pierre takes command of our soldiers.’
Vivianne tried to read Pierre’s face. He was serious, his forehead and jaw tense, but she didn’t knoe what kind of feeling ran behind his eyes. That morning he had left with his backpack. Captain Gaul had chased him to train the warriors of Tuen. Now this.
‘I’ve heard of you,’ said Gaul of Tuen. ‘Leonard the Accident. You were made a soldier by a coward king.’
‘I’m a soldier, not a leader. The king that gave me a uniform isn’t a leader either. The people who came with me from Debur follows in the shadow of a man who is not a man. Jean,’ he called and the man with black beard and white moustache jumped over the counter to stand by him. ‘Baynard’s defense is as thin as na eggshell and Fulbert won’t be long to get here.’
‘Is this the same Jean who attacked my scout?’ asked Gaul.
‘The only reason your scout is alive is because I was there,’ said Leonard. ‘Jean won’t bow to any human law. Face him and you will die. There is a reason people follow him: Jean is power.’ To Pierre, he said: ‘What is your answer?’
And the mechanism turned toward Pierre.
‘I eill stay a couple of days to help you organize your defenses,’ said Pierre, ‘then I will return to my primary purpose: to find the dragon.’
At the bottom of the stairs, the only two people who didn’t move with the mechanism were Maurice and the one-eyed man.
‘Luc,’ said Maurice. ‘I thought you were dead.’
‘I am.’
Maurice put na hesitant hand on Luc’s shoulder, like he was afraid the other man would disappear. They were both tall, Maurice a little more than Luc, but Luc was hard, seemed to have steel insteand of skin, rock in place of a face, and that leather nailed to his bones.
‘I don’t look after pigs anymore,’ said Maurice.
‘And I’m no hero. The War is too large.’