ERROL AND HIS STAG were summoned by the assembly of the guildmasters, held in the Great Hall at Fremantle. The regnat’s guards were now following the orders of a council led by Margaret Thebes. Errol was made to give an accounting of himself and all he had done. A great many subjects were gone over, particularly the burning of the guild work, whether the ships were still downriver waiting for beasts, and how the city had come to be under such a state of siege. The meeting ran on while the guild towers slept.
In the small uurs, Errol spoke his mind, telling what he had known and seen of the streets and the scriptorium and gaol. The guildmasters wanted to know whether it was the knotting spikes that had caused the quarantining of the city. Errol did not know. But he said the spikes were uncommon, which meant they had the capacity for great ruin or great good, depending on whose hands they were in. They asked after the double walker, Utlag. Errol said his whereabouts were unknown. Then Errol described the great emptying of gaol, the release of the frightened, worn inhabitants of the pits.
“I am nagged by a question,” he said. “I asked it of the double walker, and got no answer. I ask it now of you.” A thousand guildmasters held silence, waiting. “What makes us rise?”
“Lines, of course,” said one of the guildmasters.
“I don’t mean it literally, friend. What makes us people of high thought, high action? Rather than low.”
The guildmasters conferred among themselves.
“A steady balance of work and sleep,” called out one.
“Festivities, to break up the work year,” said another.
“Meat pies.”
“The presence of children.”
“Private bedchambers.”
“Praise for work well done.”
Margaret Thebes, who led the assembly, remained silent as she had been through it all, neither joining the rising support for Errol nor detracting from him. When the room was done, she asked, “How do you answer your own question, runner?”
Errol said, “It is all new to me. I am far from understanding.”
“Tell what you know,” said Margaret.
Errol put up his hands in a gesture of resignation. “I believe a stag will fail to thrive under the same conditions in which, for example, a snake will flourish. A stag cannot do a snake’s work, or a snake a stag’s. Or eat what a snake eats. Or live where she does. Or spend his day in the same way. Or learn what she learns, not even how she learns it. But under the right conditions for each, in the right habitat, they both thrive.”
Someone said to go on.
“I have seen that any beast can be turned low by fear, or rise with courage, if—”
“If what?” said Margaret Thebes.
Errol hesitated. “I don’t think I know,” he said.
“Tell it,” called out a guildmaster. “Don’t keep secrets from us.”
“It is not stubbornness that keeps me from saying it.”
“Think in a new way.”
“All right, then. I am thinking of Theseus and the labyrinth, and the Minotaur and the ball of string. The thread saved Theseus, for it led him back out. I, too, was saved by a thread.”
“The thread to your stag?” a guilder asked.
“Yes and no. I could not live without the stag. But it was another thread, a binding thread as strong as silk rope, a thread to someone else—” He hesitated. “There are no words to describe this, none that I know. It was uncommon. It was a pulling force.” He seemed now to be talking to himself. “I felt pulled by her, somehow, pulled home like I had never been before.”
“Ha! The word you’re looking for is love!” roared a guildmaster, and the room burst into laughter and hoots of appreciation and calls for the name of the runner he loved.
Errol met Margaret’s gaze. He thought he saw anger in it, and dislike. He wondered what he could ever have done that would make his own mam find him so repulsive.
“How could such a small thing as knotting spikes be such a great force?”
“The tiniest thing can carry great power,” said Errol. “It is what we do, when we come upon something that has uncommon power, which tells us who we really are. This is not confined to the knotting spikes. Or to the uncommon objects in the tales in our libraries. It is also true of the uncommon powers of invention, of work, of the written word.”
“Of love!” a young guildmaster yelled out. This was Cwym Teifi, the coracle guildmaster.
“It seems to me the high triumphed this time,” said a guildmaster standing in the doorway. “Thanks to a runner of skill.”
“If I understand your remark, then I must thank you for the compliment. But I am reminded of lost men and women who might disagree with you.”
When it was over, the assembly asked Errol to wait on the roof. In less than a quarter uur, they called him back to the hall, and offered him a position in Fremantle. The position in Fremantle.