The Prince in Waiting by John Christopher

Author:John Christopher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

SEVEN

THE HIGH SEERS

THAT YEAR WE HAD STRANGE and distinguished guests at the Autumn Fair: the High Seers came to the city.

They came, three of them, black-cloaked on pure white horses, and the city turned out to greet them at the North Gate. It was not a greeting such as had been given to the army when we returned with the spoils of Petersfield. Then the people had shouted their acclamations for the Prince and his followers, and even I, riding with Burke at the head of the camp followers, had heard my name echo from the city’s walls. The High Seers were received in silence, but a silence that was perhaps more impressive than any noise, having reverence in it.

The crazy Christians on one side, there had been always some who were skeptical concerning the Spirits, and Ezzard’s powers as mediator and interpreter of their will. Many, possibly a majority, contrived to hold belief and disbelief in dubious balance. There was something there, they thought, but they did not quite know what, or what the extent and limitations of its authority might be. I think I was among them. Even though I had been angry with Martin for expressing blasphemy, it had been chiefly through anxiety over men’s response to it, not fear of what the Spirits might do. In part I believed in the Spirits—after all, they had named my father Prince and myself his heir, a Prince to be—in part, I doubted.

But it was hard for any to go on doubting after the fall of Petersfield. My father, calling on the Spirits for aid, had led his men in an attack against walls which, strong in themselves, carried also diabolical machines capable of throwing death from great distances: the camp, on which steel first fell, had been almost half a mile away. If there were no Spirits, or they had no power to help, the project was ridiculous, scarcely sane. But the Spirits had shown their presence and their strength, destroying the machine at the very moment that it belched out death, and by that destruction opening a way for our men to pour through and overcome the shocked and demoralized defenders.

In thankfulness my father had decreed the building of a new Seance Hall, three times the size of the old one. The High Seers were come to consecrate its foundation, and the city greeted them in awe. Each city had its Seer, with his attendant Acolytes, but the High Seers had always stayed in their Sanctuary beyond Salisbury, the holy place. There, it was said, they communicated with the Spirits not just fitfully, for an hour at a time, as Ezzard did, but continuously, even passing through from our substantial world to that strange invisible plane in which the Spirits had their being. It was wonderful that they should have left the Sanctuary and come so far, thirty-five miles at least, to honor us.

That evening the High Seers sat at the long table in the Great Hall, on my father’s right hand.

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