A Dream of the Heaven

Chapter 10 (Part 2 of 2)

He did not need his steward to wake him the next morning.  In the dark of the dying night he quickly rose, shook his limbs and dressed in simple clothes.  He took a candle and went downstairs, collecting water and washing his face before breakfasting on bread and fruit.  The steward soon appeared, rubbing his eyes.  Isendrin had no stable boy and he sent the steward to saddle his horse. 

The exile was just strapping on a sword when the steward came back.

“Your horse is saddled, my lord,” he said, eyelids drooping.

“Good.”  Isendrin rummaged in his coinpurse and held two silver nobles up to the candlelight.  “One for you, one for Goodwife Audlin, enough to sustain you if you need new employment.  And tell her to prepare my dinner as usual.”

“Thank you, my lord.”

The steward, staring in perplexity at his master and the coins in his hand, eventually wandered back up the stairs. 

Isendrin opened his front door, filling his lungs with the cold, black air.  He looked behind him into the hallway – his battered green overcoat, ignored whilst he had been putting up with capes, cloaks and overwrought jackets, was draped untidily on a chair in the corner.  He put it on, blew out the candle, and left the house.

Monruath was almost entirely silent.  Only the dewy musk of the air and the morning songs of the occasional nightingale betrayed the coming dawn.  He could just make out the thin path winding down towards the rear of Chancellor’s Hall, cloaked in mist.  It would be one of those summer days that began wrapped in bright white mystery, then burst into blue and green in the mid-morning.  That time seemed some distance away.

As he rode, questions nagged at his mind, dark thoughts of impending disaster, but he made no effort to suppress them.  Honesty was the best course.  He knew that he could beat Aventine.  Equally he knew that he could lose and he knew what loss could entail.  Most clearly, though, he knew that there was still one moment which he could not properly anticipate.  All battles – and he had fought many – were preceded by that moment, but on each occasion it held new impulses, impossible to judge beforehand.  More than the knowledge of Aventine’s skill or the expectation of the clash of blades itself, it was the impending arrival of this moment that most unnerved Isendrin, as it had always done.  With every step his horse carried him towards Lawsend, it drew nearer.

Something in the mist grew less oppressive as the first, dimmest shades of light made their way over the sleeping city.  To his right Isendrin became aware of the immense walls of Chancellor’s Hall, girded by an iron fence, but on his left there was nothing but grass receding into the gloom of the city’s parkland.  Somewhere nearby he could hear faint sounds; the snorting of another horse.  He saw the outline of a rider.

The two brothers did not speak to one another when they met.  Isendrin brought his horse close and clasped his brother’s shoulder, but he could not make out Imlon’s expression in the dark, only the slow nodding of his head.  They rode through the parkland in silence.  Ten minutes later, they passed over the Golding Brook and found themselves in Lawsend Park: the most quiet and deserted part of the enormous, furious city.

Just up the path a man was waiting, dressed in sombre gray.  Isendrin could see his severe look in the growing light.

“This way, Lord Held.”

The brothers dismounted and followed him off the road to a circle of ancient beech trees, whose boughs formed a canopy over the even, grassy ground.  Four black-clad figures awaited them: a groom, a servant, a nobleman – and Torchan Aventine.      

As he led his horse forward Isendrin sized up his opponent, with his high shaved head, the athletic posture, that contemptuous mouth beneath a proud gaze; but that singular moment which he sensed approaching did not show itself yet.  The same concepts that had been with him since Aventine had thrown down the glove crossed his mind – win, lose, life, death, pain – but as yet they did not trouble him.