Chapter 1 #3
The duchess, still scarlet, said, “I shall make of the unicorn’s horn a wedding present to the king of France. You shall take the hide, God willing, for all the world to marvel at, Monseigneur.”
Her look was soft, earnest. And when she put out her hand to be kissed, he did so with less than his usual coldness.
They got rid of La Trémoille at last. The general had unbent considerably at the thought of hunting a unicorn, though he stared daggers all the while at poor Henri.
He even ate some marchpane, though he grimaced, and drank his cup of wine—Anne had made sure it was the sweet kind that gave you a headache—and then took his leave.
The servants came in his wake to draw the cloth and clear away the boards and trestles.
Soon there would be proper feasting in the great hall.
Anne finally gave in to the fit of laughter that had been trying to burst out of her all that while.
When she looked up, wiping her eyes, Henri was grinning too, still wearing that ridiculous hat, and that started her off again.
She said, “Let us hope the feast tonight contains a few bearable dishes; one cannot subsist on marchpane.”
“Lord, how do you do it? One moment my sister is there, and the next there is a ninny blushing on cue. And yon Frenchman’s no fool, yet he swallowed that nonsense about future unchastity.”
Anne said, “He was pleased with his own superiority. It makes people unwise.”
She had not let any of her councilors, not even Jean de Rieux, assist at the comedy she played for La Trémoille.
Henri was the only one she needed, and a great crowd would merely increase the odds that someone would let something slip.
But La Trémoille had not been gone a candle-mark when De Rieux hurried up the stairs.
“What did the general say?” he asked urgently. “What does he want?”
Henri was still grinning. “He had no idea what struck him. The duchess has that effect. And, of course, I gave my sister vital assistance.”
Anne had resumed her accustomed chair and was putting minute stitches in the vast watered-silk sweep of an altar-cloth; she said austerely, “We have convinced the general to delay any talk of my marriage to the king of France until after we all go hunt unicorns in Brocéliande.” She turned her altar-cloth in the firelight, wishing for her favorite thimble. Being gold, it had been sold too.
De Rieux looked tolerably blank. “But—why? There are no unicorns. Or, there have been no sightings. Not these twenty years.”
“That,” said Anne, “is entirely beside the point. We have bought ourselves time.”
“To what purpose? You have bought yourself a week or two, no more; it will not make a difference.”
Anne laid the cloth aside. “That’s where you’re wrong. Consider only—” She broke off.
Her court diviner was called Calyx; no one recalled his birth-name, except for some dusty scribe in the Diviners’ Guild.
Every diviner took a Latin name upon achieving his mastery.
Calyx stumbled into the duchess’s garderobe now, three parts drunk.
That was to be expected. Calyx was an oenomancer, who read his divination in the dregs of wine.
With a bleared eye, carrying bottle and cup in his slack hands, he said, “You sent for me, Highness?”
Anne leaped up, pausing only to see that her maids-of-honor tidied her altar-cloth away and secured the needle.
“You are a welcome sight, Auspex”—that is what diviners were called in the formal language of the court.
She pulled him at once to the deep window embrasure, with the rain sluicing past the leaded panes.
Diviners needed clear light for their auguries.
Anne had sometimes wished for a court diviner whose gift came in a more practical form—the Guild contained diviners by dice and clouds and water and candlelight—but the Guild also kept a relentless grip on its masters and would not send a gifted young diviner to work in a court as beleaguered as hers.
Especially not with its sovereign a woman unwed.
Calyx was old and his eyes were bloodshot, his hair swooned greasily from a velvet cap of uncertain cleanliness, his mouth was a sea of wine-stained stumps, and she could wish that his gift did not require quite so much drinking.
But her father had liked Calyx. And Anne loved and missed her father.
Divination was a useful and necessary art, although it was neither infallible nor omniscient.
It could answer only those questions rooted in the bodily senses.
A diviner might be asked, What color are the slippers of the Sultan in Stamboul?
every day for a year and never get it wrong.
More difficult were moods and intentions; names and numbers were impossible.
To divine a place was possible, but only if the diviner could put a place-name to the colors or sounds or smells he found in his augury.
Most diviners specialized in a small area.
Who is the betrothed of the duchess of Brittany?
was a question that could be answered by a skilled diviner, working diligently—royal diviners kept careful physical descriptions of sovereigns—and one that Anne lived in mortal fear of the French court asking.
But it had been Pliny the Younger, a diviner himself, who discovered the chief use of divination.
For, as he said in a letter, if the emperor’s auspices can tell him the color of anything in the world, but the name of nothing, then all we must do is assign words to colors.
Now kings and generals and ambassadors and grand seigneurs all communicated via diviner.
Diviners carried colored squares of cloth, and each cloth meant something like safe or war or beset or yesterday.
The exact code changed from court to court.
To send a message, the diviner merely laid down cloths in order and the recipient’s diviner asked his clouds or dice or wine or beetles to tell him, What colors lay today upon the table of the duchess of Brittany’s diviner?
Diviners were kept busy relaying such messages all over the continent.
Anne said quietly to Calyx, heart beating fast, “Where is my messenger from Flanders?” Calyx could answer only if the messenger had come near enough to Nantes.
Calyx drained his cup to the dregs, peered at the sludge on the bottom, and said, squinting, “The northwestern road. Will be here by nightfall or a little after if the rain keeps on.”
Anne bit her lip. The plan she was slowly forming was too complex to share via any code of colors. She said abruptly, “Calyx, is it true that there is no divination possible beneath the eaves of Brocéliande?”
Calyx stiffened. The moving rain-light grayed his face and made him seem older. “That is a cursed place for diviners,” he said at last.
Anne leaned forward. “Why? Is it true, then?”
She had the impression that he would prefer not to answer. But he had to. It was one of the codes of the Guild, that a diviner must answer every direct question from his principal, and never lie. He turned his cup in restless hands. “No. Not exactly.”
“What, then?”
Reluctantly, he said, “A diviner can set his inward sight upon Brocéliande. But he sees nonsense. If he persists, he goes mad. The chronicles say that long ago it was just the same if any man tried to use divination upon the korriganed or any piece of their realm in the Lost Lands.”
Anne clasped her hands, pleased. Her nascent plan depended on this peculiar quality of Brocéliande. She did not fear the korriganed. They had not been seen for five hundred years.
“But,” added Calyx, setting down his cup with a click, “the forest is dangerous. Merlin the Enchanter was vanquished there, caught in the coils of the Queen of the Lost Lands, and no man of greater wisdom has lived since the world began. I beg you will not meddle with Brocéliande, Highness.”
“No more than I must,” said Anne, and smiled reassuringly at him.
He did not look reassured.
Anne bade her diviner go and drink something gentler than wine and get some sleep, then turned back to the fire. To De Rieux she said, “My messenger will be here at nightfall. You needn’t fret until then. Go and change, Jean. It may be a long night.”
Something in his heavy face lightened. “That is welcome news, Highness,” he said.
Henri was still lolling in a chair by the fire, now addressing gallant remarks to Madeleine of Chateaubriant, the cleverest of Anne’s maids-of-honor. The lady was wearing a very demure expression that said she was enjoying herself. Damn them both, there was no time.
Anne crooked a peremptory finger at her brother.
Henri came over, reluctantly. “Sister, if you have more schemes involving hats and lying to the French—”
She interrupted, “I need you to go and intercept the messenger from Flanders and bring him here tonight. Secretly. La Trémoille mustn’t know. The northwestern road.”
Henri did not look enthusiastic. Madeleine was very beautiful and the rain had not let up.
Anne said sympathetically, “I know. But you may lounge about in comfort after the realm is preserved.”