Jamie the red, p.1
Jamie The Red, page 1
THE PROPHECY
“You will travel, and far, by water as well as by land,” he said to Jamie in his soft, lilting voice. “The water beneath you is gray sometimes, sometimes a blue that hurts my eyes.
“Also, I see a great stone city, with a dark woman there. A dark woman who calls herself friend. Battles—many battles, and many dead, and much blood. Your blood too, but not your death—not from what may be seen. What may not be seen is…”
The voice trailed off, and Jamie shifted impatiently. He was not worried about dying. The question was—would he return to the valley, and if so, when?
Ace Science Fiction Books by Gordon R. Dickson
ALIEN ART & ARCTURUS LANDING
THE ALIEN WAY
COMBAT SF
THE FAR CALL
HOME FROM THE SHORE
IN IRON YEARS
JAMIE THE RED (with Roland Green)
LOVE NOT HUMAN
MASTERS OF EVERON
NAKED TO THE STARS
ON THE RUN
SPACEPAW
THE SPACE SWIMMERS
SPACIAL DELIVERY
TIME TO TELEPORT/DELUSION WORLD
The Childe Cycle Series
DORSAI!
LOST DORSAI
NECROMANCER
SOLDIER, ASK NOT
THE SPIRIT OF DORSAI
TACTICS OF MISTAKE
Gordon R. Dickson
with Roland Green
JAMIE THE RED
An Ace Fantasy Book I published by arrangement with the authors
printing history
Ace Original . April 1984
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1984 by Gordon R. Dickson and Roland Green
Cover art by Walter Velez
This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. For information address: The Berkley Publishing Group, 200 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN: 0-441-38245-2
Ace Fantasy Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016.
printed in the united states of america
Contents:-
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter One
The fight began on the stone staircase winding up the wall from the first level of the old keep tower that, standing alone, had been the solitary ancestor of the castle.
The two Jamies—the Red and the Black—rolled locked together down the hard steps to the grateful softness of the earth and bracken and muck that was the floor of the stables on that lowest level. The horses whinnied and reared in their stalls as what seemed like half the rest of the inhabitants of the castle flooded down behind the two struggling bodies to stand about them in a circle and watch—giving them plenty of room, for after all they were princes of the blood and it was a contest between the two that had been expected for some time now.
At first sight, they both seemed to be fairly evenly matched. Jamie the Red was a full head taller than his older half brother and well-muscled, as were all the five sons of Walter, the King—and, for that matter, Moraig, his daughter. But Jamie the Black was built like a mountain oak, with enormous breadth of shoulders and muscle that made his younger brother seem almost slight by comparison. He was also four years the older, for Jamie the Red had just turned nineteen, and Jamie the Black was of a hard, bitter disposition, so that most of the people of the castle watching tended to favor the younger one of the two.
Being related by blood, neither made any move to draw the dirk at his belt or the short knife in his right boot. It was fists, feet, knees, nails, teeth, and—for one moment—in Jamie the Red’s hand a stool that had strayed from the pens of the kitchen milk cattle. But the Black knocked it out of our Jamie’s grasp and closed with him again.
Indeed that was the usual error of Jamie the Black that, once enraged, he had no thought but to get those long, powerful arms of his around his opponent and crush him into submission. Jamie the Red, on the other hand, was determined to avoid exactly such a happening; and, beyond that, he was looking for a chance to maneuver into a position in which he could have his older half brother at a disadvantage. He had almost been caught at the bottom of the stairs, when Jamie the Black had ended their tumble with a firm grip on him. However, by the good fortune of being the one on top, and therefore in a position to grind the Black’s face into the soft floor of the stables, our Jamie managed to escape and get back on his feet. From then on the fight became the next thing to a fencing match, with fist blows being traded instead of sword cuts.
Jamie the Red was an observer by nature. In fact, this had always been the most noticeable thing about him; and sometime since, concluding that he was better fitted than his oldest brothers to follow as King after his father, he had begun a campaign to fight his way up the ladder of his older brothers, so to speak. It had been a literal campaign, with careful plans and study of each of his opponents. He had scouted the weaknesses of each of his older siblings more intensively than ever before in his life; and arranged, when the fights actually came, to take advantage of those weaknesses.
In the case of Jamie the Black, the elder’s vulnerability lay in the fact that he was not either as quick or as mobile as his younger brother. Now, seeing his chance, Jamie gave ground, pretended to stumble backward. He dodged, picked up a handful of bracken and shoved it in Jamie the Black’s face; then ducked around behind the other to catch him in something halfway between an armlock and a stranglehold; and together they fell to the floor.
The younger Jamie was effectively and happily proceeding to strangle the other into submission when there was a stir among die people ranging around in the stables and up the staircase; and Hamish, the oldest of the King’s sons, shoved his way through, followed by Moraig, their one sister, Andrew, the middle brother, and young Simon, after Jamie the youngest of the six.
The common run of people in the castle had, of course, not dared to interfere until this moment. But it was a different matter with Hamish there.
“Grab them,” Hamish snapped sourly to the men closest to him. “Pull them apart!”
Hamish himself helped. Multiple pairs of hard-calloused hands separated the two Jamies and held them apart from each other.
“And that’s enough of that,” Hamish said. “Bring them along to Father.”
He turned and led the way up the stairs. The crowd parted before him; and the family group continued upstairs into the living quarters of the castle, to its newer section, which was a great deal more comfortable than the old, having even some glass in the windows on third and uppermost level. There they found Walter, the King—their father—trying on a new pair of boots as he sat on the edge of his bed.
The common herd, of course, had dropped back out of sight as the royal chambers were approached. The Princes and the Princess came in alone. Walter looked up at them all with disfavor.
“What now?” he demanded harshly.
“Fighting, Father,” said Hamish; with a gleam, thought Jamie the Red, of more than slight triumph in the eyes of the oldest brother’s saturnine face.
Walter’s eyes sought Jamie the Red.
“You again?” he said.^
“It was him who started it!” said Jamie the Red, all injured innocence.
Walter’s eyes went to Jamie the Black “Is this true?” he asked his second son.
Jamie the Black had had time to recover from the bull-like fury into which he always fell when actually fighting. He hung, his head.
“Yes, Father,” he said.
“You sheep-wit!”
’ said Hamish to Jamie the Black. “Do you think our Jamie doesn’t know how to get you into a fight anytime he wants it?”
“Aye,” said Walter. His eyes fixed on Jamie the Red. “Out. The rest of you, all of you, out! Our Jamie, you stay.”
“Shouldn’t I stay too, Father?” asked Hamish.
“Out, I said!”
Hamish reluctantly went. Moraig also lingered, until a glare from under her father’s gray-thatched eyebrows drove her out of the room.
“And close the door behind you!” shouted Walter.
As the door swung heavily to and latched, the King turned back to stare at his fifth son. Jamie the Red was doing his best to look both penitent and bewildered. Walter glared at him grimly.
“All right, boy,” said the King. “There’s no curing you; and I warned you. Didn’t I say I’d send you off unless you stopped what you were doing?”
“Doing, Father?” said Jamie.
“Don’t play the idiot with me!” roared Walter, starting to his feet and wincing as a fold in the top of one of the new boots, the right one, bit him sharply across the toes. “The whole castle doesn’t call you ’the clever one’ for nothing! You know what you’ve been doing. I know what you’ve been doing. You’re not going to do it here, do you hear me?” ___
Jamie did, of course, know very well what he had been doing; but he was more than a little startled that the King, his father, should have divined his purpose—which was simply to win such an ascendancy over hi
.…But his father was still talking.
“It’s the others, Father,” muttered Jamie. “They’re always picking on me because I’m younger.”
“I said stop taking me for an idiot, boy!” Walter’s voice dropped to an unhappy growl. He limped across to the window in the round wall of his bedroom and looked out for a minute at the valley surrounding the spur of rock on which the castle stood. “It’s not easy on me to send one of your dead mother’s sons out of this valley. But it’s no case of them picking on you, and you know that as well as I do. It’s you who’s out to beat them all down—yes, and including Hamish as soon as you’ve got Jamie the Black tamed. You’ve got your eye on following after me in authority here, boy; and I tell you it’s not going to be while I’ve anything to say about it. This crown and all that rides with it is going to belong to the oldest son, and that’s Hamish.”
“I’d make a better king, Father,” said Jamie, greatly daring. “And now you know it.”
“I know nothing of the kind!” roared Walter, turning back to him. His bushy full beard, its black now beginning to be streaked with white, bristled with his anger. It was a fearsome sight. Jamie was the tallest of the tall sons, but his father overtopped him by some inches. “I know just the opposite! You think you’d make a better king, but you would not! And I’ll tell you why you would not! There’s things you’ve never learned—and I think you never will. One of them is that people make the clan, make the kingdom and the country. But you think only of yourself and what you could do, ruling and owning them all. That’s not the sort of king will rule our people long. I don’t care how well you can fight, how clever you are; in the end it’s not your strength that keeps the kingdom, it’s the strength of those who love you. You live only by their help; and that’s what you’ve never learned. It’s what you’ll never learn; and without it you’re a danger to us all. Therefore, you go!”
Jamie the Red had heard this threat from his father before; but he had never really taken it seriously. To him, the world beyond the valley was a fascinating place in which anything could happen; and part of him yearned to go out and adventure in it. At the same time, it was not a real world. Reality was here; and the thought that he could be separated from this castle and this valley, this land where he had grown up, was unthinkable. For the first time now, staring at the hard set of his father’s features, hearing a new note in the older man’s voice, the thought woke in him that the King might mean exactly what he said.
“You’d not really banish me from home?” He heard himself saying the words as if it were somebody else speaking.
“Do you think I like doing it?” snarled Walter.
He limped back to his bed and sat down. Slowly, he started taking off his new boots and pulling on the comfortable shapes of his older ones, fitted to his feet by many days of rain, then sunshine. “As long as you were small, I could close my eyes to what you were doing. Now you’re grown, and I can’t. You must go, our Jamie, and that’s the end of it! Now—go make yourself ready to leave, tomorrow!”
He stood up. Jamie’s head was in a whirl. Disbelief still smothered him like a witch’s garment. He turned and stumbled out.
The chamber that Jamie shared with Simon lay in the wall of the keep. With his hands clasped on top of his head he could not stand upright in it, and with his sword in either hand he could stand in the middle and touch all the walls. The window was no more than an arrow slit, shuttered with a board.
It was still no pleasure for Jamie to look upon it in the knowledge that he might never do so again. No, would not do so again. His father’s decision was made, and there could be no altering of it; not even the attempt, without shedding kin’s blood. And to be known as a man so lost to all law and good reason could do nothing to give him back what he was about to lose.
So he sat on the bed with all that he might find useful in the world beyond the valley strewn upon the floor at his feet. He saw none of it at the moment, except the sword laid across his knees, its blade gleaming with fresh oil and the tarnish picked out of the silverwork on the hilt. He was picking up a file to work on the edge when the door opened.
It was his sister Moraig and his youngest brother Simon. Moraig’s hair was tangled and her usually sharp blue eyes were red. Simon, who had just this past year seemed to gain knowledge of what to do with his hands and feet, had turned back to being a gawky youth.
“You’ve been to see Father,” Jamie said. Moraig nodded. “And,” Jamie went on, “it was wasted breath.”
“You owe her more thanks than that,” said Simon. “She went on her knees to him.”
Jamie’s eyebrows rose. Moraig on her knees was something no one had seen outside of church since she had been five years old. It was said that she was still unwed only because Walter did not want to be at feud with the kin of her husband after she broke said husband’s head over the first blow he struck her. Certainly she had no lack of any quality useful to draw men to her, at least those who did not mind being overtopped by at least two fingers’ breadth and outridden on nearly any horse over any kind of ground.
“Thanks, my sister,” said Jamie. “But you might have known there was no good to be done for me, and perhaps some harm to yourself. This is Hamish’s hour of triumph. With his place carved in stone for all to see, he’ll not be as easy about seeing you unwed as Father’s been.”
If Moraig had been a cat, her ears would have been back and her bristling tail lashing from side to side. Before she could say a word, Simon spoke.
“Jamie!” he blurted out. “If you’ve got to go, then take me along with you.”
Moraig stared suddenly at the youngster, then turned to stare again at Jamie.
It was on the tip of Jamie’s tongue to say yes, if only to see the pain in his father’s eyes as the youngest son rode off with the one who had been exiled. Besides, Simon was the one brother Jamie was close to. But a feeling he had never felt before laid its hand upon him, a feeling more for Simon than for himself. He would not insult his brother by asking “Do you mean that?” nor did he doubt Simon’s firmness of intent. His sense, yes, but not Simon’s willingness, to ride beside his older brother out through the Pass of the Black Rocks into the world beyond.
Yet, it was tempting. For a moment more, Jamie let himself imagine the two of them riding south, ever south, side by side, guarding each other’s backs until they reached the Great City of Constantinople and joined its Guards. They would both rise to command companies, each attract the favor of some rich merchant with a fair daughter, both command more men and wealth than their entire valley held, even for its King…
Jamie sighed.
The thought was folly. Simon had only wom a man’s sword for a year, and was far from being able to use it with a man’s skill. What purpose did it serve, to have your back guarded by a boy who could barely guard his own? And if he was your kin, and you were bound to let anything done against him draw you into a fight, a fight which might indeed turn out to be a trap set for the both of you…And then there was what Hamish would say, and how little their father would do to keep him from saying it.
Slowly, Jamie shook his head.
“It can’t be, Simon,” he said, softly—for him. “I’m sorry. You’ve something to do here in the valley, and that’s to stand by your sister. When I leave, there’ll be only the one of us to care for her as you and I’ve always done, and as a brother should. Andrew hardly looks beyond his lute and his books even if he wasn’t too short-sighted to use a bow, and with little more muscle than Moraig herself. Against Hamish, or even against Black Jamie, Andrew’s no more than a stalk of grass in a gale. So, it’s up to you.” (,
