by Nancy Kress
“Chessie—”
“It’s very well documented. Prince Taefor of Eel, for instance, was gyved for sixteen years into believing he was an oak tree, and spent the whole time dawdling by an impassable ford, trying to grow leaves. And there’s notarized proof of the case of twin knights, Sir Ector and Landis, who were gyved asleep in mid-quest in an enchanted castle for 100 years. When they finally woke up, they’d completely forgotten what they were questing for and had to walk home empty-handed. And a magician turned—”
“Chessie—”
“—the Laird of Iverling, who was chasing the Questing Beast, into a large diamond, interrupting his quest until—”
“Chessie!” Kirila shouted, but when he stopped she had nothing to say. After a moment she offered, a little sulkily, “Larek’s not a magician.”
Chessie snorted. “Talk about the obvious. Of course he’s not a magician, magicians have brains. But you’re missing the point, Kirila. Gyve just isn’t all that rare. Forty-four percent of all quests—”
“Oh, for—Chessie, do you know how utterly ridiculous you sound? You sound like a Quirk, cramming the whole world into neat little numbers. And you told them that reductionism was a limited philosophy!”
“I didn’t say—”
“It makes me want to laugh,” Kirila said, not laughing. “It really makes me want to laugh.”
“Kirila, all I wanted you to see was—”
“I know what you wanted me to see! And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I hear the team riding in, and I promised Larek I’d meet him at the drawbridge.”
They stared at each other, the dog very still, the girl’s breast heaving under yellow satin. Tackma had sewn tiny imitation pearls around the neckline and on the girdle; the pearls caught the noon light from the window and shimmered like tears. In the distance a hunting horn sounded.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper, Chessie,” Kirila said. “It’s not worth quarreling over, is it? Some musty book.”
The horn sounded again, closer, silvery peals echoing faintly off the stone walls. The sound seemed to turn Kirila formal. She smoothed her ringlets, sat up straighter, and reached for her headdress. It was five-cornered, satin and pearls, and framed her face like a Gothic arch. From the top floated a useless wisp of yellow chiffon, fluttering in the breeze from the window.
“I wish,” Chessie said quietly, “that you had ever been able to see more than one thing at a time.”
She didn’t hear him. Rising in a straight regal column, she held out her hand and smiled, a smile as dazzling and empty as a soap bubble. “Again, my apologies, my Lord, for being so churlish. The fine sewing must have given me a headache. I know you have naught but my best interests at heart.” Again the dazzling smile; Chessie closed his eyes.
Kirila walked gracefully from the solar. Behind her trailed the yellow satin train, whispering over the stone floor. The train was edged with old, exquisite lace the color of cream; it had been in Tackma’s family for ages, and was considered a treasured, irreplaceable heirloom.
Sixteen
It was very difficult to be alone at Castle Talatour. In the month that he and Kirila had been there, Chessie had usually found it possible only in the forest, and he had spent considerable time there, exploring and hunting—it was curious how bringing down his own game was becoming less distasteful—while Kirila was occupied riding with Larek, or walking with Larek, or watching Larek perform those endless tiresome tricks on horseback. And why, Chessie thought, did none of the credit go to the horse, who had to carry all that stupid heavy armour?
Just now, however, he was not in the mood to seek his solitude in the forest. It had something to do with the navy-blue September night, and the warm soft wind, and that loathsome full moon, like a spreading yellow stain. Fretfully he roamed from room to room, his bent purple head ticking restlessly from side to side.
Queen Tackma was in the kitchen, kneading bread by candlelight and giving Ludie her daily dose of learning. “So I told you yesterday how to spell ‘love’,” she bellowed over the whap! of her solid fist on the dough. The bread sighed softly. “Nine years old, why can’t you spell ‘love’? And what are you writing, anyway—I don’t remember anything about love in the Gallic Wars.” Whap!
In the Great Hall, King Otwick was tipping lance points. Spread out on the scarred wooden table in front of him was a parchment copy of the season’s tournament schedule, weighted at the corners with odd bits of metal to keep it from rolling itself up. As he worked, the king hummed snatches of drinking songs and battle chants.
The serving girl was cleaning the bedrooms, scurrying from one to another with piles of folded sheets and calling down the stairs, “Now, Mum, where did you put them candles?”
The two ancient men that comprised the royal retinue were wordlessly drinking ale in the solar. The stables were full of the hunting dogs, who had no worthwhile conversation but did have fleas. Chessie might have gone to the mews—the hooded falcons had a brooding quality and wicked talons, both of which he presently found congenial—but he had seen Kirila and Larek heading that way. It seemed unlikely that she would spend time with the falcons, even for Larek, but Chessie put nothing beyond her in her present demented state, and even the hunting dogs would be better than more of listening to Kirila listen to Larek. So it was the forest then, after all.
As he trotted down a random dark path—the offensive moon had been sopped up by a cloud, thank heavens for puny favors—he puzzled about Kirila. She had courage; she could curse a river while drowning in it and not whimper afterwards. She could ride blithely alone on the most difficult and idealistic Quest he had ever heard of, and not abandon the vow because of disillusionment. She could treat him as though he were real, as though he had in full the prince’s identity which that damned Wizard had taunted him with losing, and not realize there could be any other way to treat him. It seemed to Chessie that Kirila had, in addition to the kind of intelligence that owed nothing at all to logical deduction and everything to an eager curiosity, that rarest of human qualities: endurance without bitterness. Then why a dunderhead like Larek?
There’s a piece missing here, he thought wearily. The trouble is, I don’t remember what it feels like to be in a human body, and this stupid dog’s body isn’t mine and I don’t really feel it, either, on a stomach-deep level—stomach? Is that the level I want? I wish I could remember. There’s something more, something about Kirila and Larek, but I can’t remember. Being enchanted is a bore.
The moon came out again, flooding the forest with mysterious light. The night air smelled of tart apples and fallen leaves. A sudden brown-tailed rabbit jumped from one dark thicket to an identical one across the path. In midair it made a soft, terrified non-noise as it spied Chessie.
“Don’t worry,” he told the rabbit loftily, “you don’t interest me in the least.” He kept trotting down the path with aimless desperation, the pads on the bottom of his purple paws falling soundlessly, until he stumbled over something in the narrow path. It was Kirila’s shoe, a new yellow satin slipper with a paste buckle. Tied on the buckle was a pair of satin bows. A moment later Chessie heard their voices, content and sleepy, from under a great birch whose branches dipped clear to the mossy ground.
“—hope it does.”
“Really, Larek?”
“Really. I do. And we’ll call him Laril, and by God he’ll be the best knight in twenty kingdoms, a real champion.”
“I hope he has your eyes.”
“Eyes?”
“Yes, that bottle green. When you looked at me...when I first...”
“Well, what man wouldn’t? God, Kirila, you’re so beautiful...”
A howl splintered the night and she gasped, pulling her gown in front of her in a gesture as old as womankind. “Larek! What’s that?”
“Nothing, darling...”
“But listen! It’s horrible, like something in pain!”
“No, no, it’s just a wolf baying at the moon. They do that
when it’s full. It’ll stop in a minute.”
But the howling went on, mounting to a chilling frenzied pitch and then falling in a drawn-out wail that made the blood cower backwards in suddenly rigid veins, again and again, long after the moon had fled behind the tattered clouds.
●●●
“You can’t!” Chessie shouted.
“Yes, I can!” Kirila shouted back. “Who are you to tell me what I can or can’t do!”
“Someone who sees farther than you obviously do! It’s...obscene, Kirila! That’s what you two are together—obscene!”
She gasped and put her hand over her mouth. They were in her cramped bedchamber at Talatour—Chessie had jumped in through the window, surprising Kirila as she languidly undressed—and they faced each other across the rickety candlestand, Kirila clutching the front of her new yellow satin gown over her breasts. Her hair fell around her face and cast on it weird shadows in the light from the single candle that danced madly in the drafts from the window. Jerking her hand away from her mouth, she pointed her finger, trembling with fury, at Chessie. They had long since lost both oars; the boat itself was capsizing.
“How dare you...’obscene’...were you sneaking around...”
Dogs, fortunately, can’t blush. “No, of course not!” Chessie lied furiously. “But anyone would only have to look at you! But that’s not even what I meant...he’s not your caliber, Kirila! My God, can’t you even see...his world is the size of a tournament field—”
“That’s not true!”
“—and he sees no reason to look beyond it, except to see all the spectators applauding wildly in the grandstands. He’s no different from Polly Stark, sees no farther, can’t you see that? Just a different obsession!”
“You’re wrong! He sees me!”
“As an accessory, like a well-fitting breastplate—no, more like a good horse! Listen to me, Kirila; Larek is what he is, and he’s happy with it. All right for him. But you need more—God, you’re supposed to be questing for the Heart of the World!”
“I’ve found it,” she said quietly. They stared at each other across the flickering candle, a long stare that only broke when a pale moth flew into the open window and straight into the flame. There was a horrible sizzling sound.
“Now you listen to me, Chessie, and don’t you dare say anything obvious about that moth,” Kirila said in the same quietly stony voice. Despite her half-dressed vulnerability and the grass-stains on her mincing satin gown, she had a curious dignity. “I’ve Quested for a year and a half. I’ve discovered the Order that explains at least the top layer of the world, and I’ve risked my life and my mind—both!—looking for the underlayers. I’ve taken care of myself, and I’ve killed a man when I had to. I know, now, enough about myself to know what I want, and it’s Larek.”
“No, you don’t!” he cried. “You only know now what your body wants, and you can’t see beyond that because it won’t let you! That’s its duty! But when that’s over and you’re left gyved, with your broken Quest stuck in you like...like a splintered arrow, it will fester, Kirila! It will! You won’t always be a bitch in heat!”
He spoke the last words in all innocence, from some part of him that was—or was becoming—truly a dog. But Kirila froze, first pale and then livid, and began to scream and fling her arms about, her gown falling away from her breasts and her loose red hair writhing around her twisted face.
“You can say that to me!” she screamed. “You! After I’ve hunted and cooked for you and—do you know what the trouble really is, Chessie? You’re jealous! Like a...a dog in the manger, that’s just exactly what you are, because you can’t have me yourself you hate Larek and deliberately misunderstand everything that—you don’t need a friend, you need to find a female dog and...” She trailed off and they stared at each other, appalled.
“Chessie,” she pleaded weakly, and passed her hand in front of her eyes. The hand was shaking. “You do just misunderstand—it is that, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“No,” he said heavily. “It’s that I do understand. Kirila, I knew a man once—I met him just before I met you, in fact—who had become a priest because his family wished it. They were aristocratic but poor, and he was a younger son—one of those primogeniture deals. When I met him, he was old, and dying, and full of a sort of bewildered guilt, because he had tried so hard all his life to fulfill his vowed duties, and had never once felt like a real priest. Do you know what he told me? That every night for the last thirty years he had dreamed the same dream, of his cassock walking down the aisle of the nave to say Mass. There was no one inside the cassock—it was just empty cloth. Every night for thirty years.”
“But he didn’t choose the priesthood of his own free will!”
“And neither are you!”
“I am! I am!”
“Like a lemming chooses the sea,” Chessie said contempuously. He paced the length of the cramped chamber—two strides and an aborted half-step—and when he returned, his face was crumpled with a resentful mourning.
“Kirila, if you marry him you will be miserable. You won’t let yourself just leave, I know you—” endurance without bitterness, he thought bitterly “—and you will be so miserable.”
“No, Chessie. I will be so happy.”
“I didn’t want to have to leave you.”
“You’re not going!”
“I have to! I have to find the Tents of Omniun—somebody has to!”
“But we could send out searching parties, bands of men...make inquiries...”
He was silent.
“We could!”
“You know it wouldn’t work. The Tents of Omnium aren’t the Grail, after all. No, we—I have to go myself. And if you were trapped in this wretched dog’s body, year after year, you’d do the same!”
Honesty kept her silent. Then she cried out, but already without hope, “Don’t go! Stay with me!”
“I can’t. Come with me.”
“I can’t!”
It is a terrible thing to see a Labrador retriever cry. The dog face is not built for it. The tears flowed out onto Chessie’s muzzle, gathering on the thick purple fur until there were enough of them to roll obliquely down his nose, hang suspended at the tip, and splash to the stone floor.
Kirila knelt beside him, painfully dry-eyed, the ends of her long hair dragging in the salty puddle. She put her arms around him and waited, staring bleakly at nothing, until he was done.
“Do you have a handkerchief?”
She offered him the one in her sleeve, a six-inch square of embroidered lace; he eyed it incredulously. A scrambled hunt turned up a large linen one in the pocket of her discarded tunic. She held it for him while he blew.
“Thank you.”
“Chessie—are you sure?”
“Are you? I’ll go now, Kirila; I couldn’t stand the wedding.”
She winced, but only said, “I hope you find it. With all my heart, I hope you find it.”
“I will. Good-bye, Kirila.”
“Good-bye. And Chessie...no, nothing. Good luck.”
He nodded and jumped out the window, a clumsy leap that barely cleared the stone sill. She sat there on the floor, looking at the black arch through which he had gone.
In her lap lay the wool tunic and the soggy handkerchief, puddled beside the drooping bodice of the yellow satin gown. Unknowingly, her fingers pleated and unpleated the sturdy woolen material, again and again. She was still there, dry-eyed, an hour later when Larek slipped quietly into the chamber, and she looked up at him as though she had never seen him before.
Seventeen
Queen Tackma planned the wedding. A letter had been written to Kirila’s parents—everyone had written a section of it, crowding the writing into precisely ruled-off boxes on the parchment—but it could not be sent unless a traveler on his way south should happen to pass through Talatour in the spring. The Queen had had to have the marriage settlement drawn up with the place for the dowry left bare until some future time, a
nd she fussed about this, in a low-key manner, for nearly a week. Kirila refused to look guilty.
The wedding was held on the last of the scarlet and lemon days of late autumn. The cool air tingled under the warm sun; asters and goldenrod struggled for territorial supremacy alongside every path; and mushrooms grew on tall slender stalks in the grass, looking, Queen Tackma said with sentimental approval, like little wedding bells. None of this was apparent during the ceremony, however, because the chapel windows were kept tightly closed, to avoid ruffling the bridesmaids’ hair.
The procession rode from the chapel between two lines of Larek’s teammates, the Jade Jousters, fully armoured and with lances held rigidly upright. Three pages, borrowed from Wek’s father, marched first, blowing trumpets with banners hanging from them. One banner displayed the coat-of-arms of Talatour (the basting stitches were still in the hem), one the arms of Kiril, and one the team emblem worked in silver thread on green velvet. After the pages came Kirila and Larek, both dressed in white velvet, riding slowly between the lines of lances. Larek rode his magnificent black charger, but Kirila was still on the brown mare because it had turned out that the only other horses at Castle Talatour were Otwick’s hunter, which, he said, would only respond to his own touch on the reins because of a “deucedly hard mouth,” and two splay-footed work horses.
Otwick and Tackma, who had ducked out of a side door in the chapel immediately after the vows and galloped doublemounted back to the castle to be there first for the official welcome, received the bridal couple in the Great Hall. A dais had been constructed especially for the occasion; it took up half the floor space. After the official speeches, there was a picnic outside, with boar and deer and chicken and goose and pheasant, and a great cake in the shape of a shield decorated with crossed lances made of marzipan and tied with green-and-white ribbons.
There was dancing, and feasting, and much toasting in wine and ale, the latter followed by a loud sing-along in which the nobility and the manor serfs, who had been provided with their own picnic in honor of the occasion, all joined in together. Kirila floated through the day, beautiful in a low-cut white velvet gown with a long train that kept winding itself around her ankles like an affectionate serpent. Her red hair was caught up at each side in two braided loops tied with white satin ribbons. Tackma had loaned her the silver filigree crown, and under it her face had the same blurred brilliance, giving back the sunlight in a glittering cloud with no sharp edges. She smiled at everyone, and started little misty sentences she didn’t finish, and drank seven goblets of wine.