The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  Only one moment stood out clearly. Toward late afternoon the knights had boisterously rigged up an impromptu joust, and Kirila sat on the ground with the other ladies, noisily cheering them on, oblivious of grass stains. As she turned to set her goblet on a convenient rock, a small red speck dropped out of the sky and perched on the rock first. Kirila hiccupped in surprise; she recognized it from Chessie’s descriptions as a wigyn. No more than two inches long, the wigyn had the fragile, finished perfection of the miniature. A tiny arching body the crimson of autumn maples ended in a tail pointed as a shard of diamond. Miniature fierce claws gripped the rock. The wigyn’s eyes, flecks of yellow light, gazed at her from above transparent, crimson-veined wings. But what had made Kirila gasp was that around its neck the wigyn wore an impossibly small collar, and worked on the collar in hair line tracings of gold was the ancient rune that represented a tent.

  Kirila swung around, breathless and wide-eyed, to tell Chessie, and he was not there. She suddenly felt that someone had kicked her, and she looked in panic around the throngs of giggling ladies and mock-fighting knights, unable to think why it was that they were making all that braying noise, what it was that she was doing in this too-tight gown with yards of fabric tangled around her feet. Then she saw Larek coming toward her across the grass, someone else’s broken lance in his hand, and the panic fled.

  “Larek, I just saw a wigyn...on that rock right over there...” The tiny dragon was gone.

  “A wigyn? No, you couldn’t have—they’re extinct, and anyway—Kirila, did you see that last fall I gave Wek? The ground is muddy over there, see, and I knew the only way I could get enough speed was to—” As he talked, his his hand moved possessively over hers, the long brown fingers tracing the hollows of her palm and wrist. A slow liquid burning began to spread upward from her hand, and gradually she forgot the wigyn. The late afternoon sunlight slanted behind Larek and flared around his burnished cherrywood hair, and she saw his head as in a High Church painting, backed with a flat platter of gold.

  Book Two

  One

  A lunatic boar was running loose in the forest. It was the wrong season for it—generally boars went mad in the autumn, not at the height of the summer—but this one had gained a jump on the crowd and was dashing about the woods, foaming and bellowing and charging at pursuers and tree stumps. Boars are near-sighted, and going mad had not improved this one’s vision. For a fortnight the local gentry had been dashing about after it, coming home with enthusiastic tales of near-misses and harrowing surprise encounters, but no hunter had actually so much as grazed the beast’s tough hide. Peasants and woodcutters were warned to keep their children inside. A titled lady, who had been known to champion such unpopular causes as lighter armor for tournament horses and feeding falcons while they were still in the rufter-hood stage of hunger training, remarked that she felt sorry for the poor, misunderstood thing, and received no social invitations for the next month. Bloody tales of men killed or maimed by other wild boars in other wild-boar seasons graced dinner tables for miles around.

  Kirila, Queen of Talatour and Crown Princess in Absentia of Kiril, was folding laundry in the Great Hall of Castle Talatour, wearing one sandal and thinking vaguely about the boar. She always wore one sandal when folding laundry. Ordinarily in the summer she went barefoot, tucking up her wool gown and kirtle a little above her ankles in order to feel the sweet-scented rushes sigh softly under each step on the cool stone floor. But the clotheslines, strung between apple trees, were marched over by purposeful lines of ants on their way from one tree to another, walking stolidly over the drying clothes and squeezing past each other if they happened to meet from opposite directions. Usually several ants rode into the castle in folds of kirtles or petticoats or tunics. Kirila shook out each garment—they smelled of dry sunshine—before she folded it, and stepped with her one sandal on the ants that were shaken to the floor. A patch of floor had been cleared of rushes for this operation.

  Castle Talatour had changed little in the twenty-five years since she had first seen it. The sagging great beam still sagged—although no lower—the geese still littered the castleyard and drawbridge with their droppings, and bits of stone still crumbled off the outside walls when there was a high wind from the north, falling into the moat with a soft splash. There had been a plan, the spring after Larek’s and Kirila’s wedding, to replace the tapestries in the solar, but Larek had found a charger at the April Horse Fair that was the steadiest-gaited beast he’d ever seen, a canter like a rocking cradle, damned if it wasn’t. The charger, though a once-in-a-lifetime bargain, had been expensive.

  The changes had all been in the Queen.

  Middle age can splay out in comfortable loose roundness, or it can go gaunt and angular, with all the flesh not absolutely essential discarded from the bones, as a marathon runner will strip down for the long haul. Kirila had gone angular. Her foot in its ant-stamping sandal was thin and bony as an alchemist’s skeleton swathed in sheets for the night. Her cheekbones were high ridges jutting over coarse-grained skin. There were wrinkles at the corners of her mouth and eyes. There were also, in a sort of strange non-linear inheritance, two bewildered lines across her forehead like those that had once puzzled the face of the dead King Otwick. Her red hair, cut short during childbed fever and so offended that it never grew again, curled close to her face in drooping tendrils the color of old rust. She slowly folded one of Laril’s jerkins, fumbling a little with the laces, for her hands were knotted with a premature arthritis, the fingers stiff and swollen around the endless gleam of her gold wedding ring. But despite the arthritis, and the laundry, and the barren tricks of middle age which had aged her so much more than a mere count of years would appear to justify, Kirila looked what she was: a queen. It showed in the way she held her head, and looked at the jerkin calmly, and let the expression of her idle thoughts play freely near, but not on, the surface of her eyes. “Deeper than bones,” she had told Chessie twenty-five years ago, and had spoken more truly than she knew.

  “Mother,” a girl’s voice called from the solar, “is my brown cloak mended yet?”

  “No, Dorima, it’s not.”

  “I asked Gwyneth to do it yesterday.”

  “Gwyneth has quite enough to do. If it’s torn, I think you’ll have to mend it yourself.”

  The girl strolled into the Hall. “It’s not important. I think I’ll just forget it. After next week I probably wouldn’t wear the old cloak anyway. Brant is sending to his cousin, the Queen of Rentis and Glyde, for her dressmaker for me.”

  “That’s nice of him.”

  She shrugged. “I asked him to.”

  As Princess Dorima crossed the Hall and sat on a bench near her mother, her richly curved body swayed with a sensuousness that was natural enough to be convincing and yet restrained enough to hint at some practice. Her buxom figure in the low-cut satin gown, coupled with her small height—Kirila topped her daughter by a full head—and glossy black curls, should have given Dorima the look of a ripe hoyden, cuddlesome and given to pouting. She could, indeed, pout when pouting seemed called for, making a delicious red-lipped moue in which her eyes, clear grey under carefully-plucked brows, remained completely uninterested, but anyone who tried to cuddle her never repeated the mistake again. It happened in the natural course of events that from time to time there turned up at Castle Talatour a genuine ripe cuddlesome hoyden, and these the Princess Dorima regarded with amused scorn untouched by pity. When Kirila looked at her daughter she often had the odd sensation that it was herself who was the younger, and that Dorima was the oldest thing in Talatour.

  “Do you want me to fold those for you, Mother?”

  “No, thanks—the exercise is good for my fingers. Did you tell Gwyneth to expect Sir Brant for dinner, too?”

  “He’s not coming.”

  Kirila stopped folding laundry, standing with a hose suspended limply from each hand like wrinkled icicles.

  “Why not?”

  “I aske
d him not to.” Fastidiously she chose the ripest blackberry from the pewter bowl on the table and bit into it with small white teeth. No juice ran down her chin.

  “Do you think that’s kind?” Kirila asked slowly. “It means so much to him to see you.”

  “So after next week he’ll see me all he wants. He’s marrying me, isn’t he?”

  “Dorima—are you sure? I know I’ve never felt I should question your...I mean without the riches and his...Sir Brant is so much older than you and is the...would you marry him if he weren’t rich?” Kirila felt a perfect fool. Responsibility, she thought crossly, and not for the first time, should be portrayed as a jester’s cap. With harlequin patches.

  The young princess gave her mother a long, speculative look, running her grey eyes from the shorn, rusty hair—there was an apple twig tangled in it—to the hitched-up skirt of faded wool, missing nothing. After a moment she shrugged again. “No.”

  Kirila measured her daughter, and finally said simply, “You will be unhappy.”

  “No,” Princess Dormia said with equal simplicity, “I won’t.” She ate another berry and then suddenly laughed, a throaty exotic laugh that seemed to have layers, like orchids growing in granite. “Are you suggesting, Mother, that it would be better if I married for ‘love’?”

  “No,” Kirila said, and went on folding petticoats.

  Dorima waited, and when there was no qualification or dis- claimer or maternal platitude forthcoming, she raised her chin and eyed her mother with a certain surprised respect.

  “Well, then, why should I be unhappy? Brant won’t suffer for it. I shall be just the wife he wants. And I will have just what I want—riches and a place in the world. I know enough about myself to know what I want.”

  Kirila winced, as if a sudden cold wind had blown over her. “What you want,” she told her daughter slowly, “what you think you want now, may not be what you will always want.”

  Another of Dorima’s husky laughs simmered on the air. “But, Mother, I’ve always wanted the same thing—I don’t take whims or notions. For some people who are so flighty they change their desires constantly, that may be true. But not for me. After all, only the single-minded deserve to get what they fight for.” She cocked her head to one side and eyed Kirila quizzically. This was such an odd conversation, really, to be having with her quiet, dowdy mother, always so completely absorbed in her little chores around the castle. The Princess was seventeen years old.

  “Besides,” she finished, reaching for another berry and bringing her provocative dimple into play, “I really can take care of myself, you know.” She smoothed her gown over her hips.

  Kirila smiled, a complex smile of reassured sadness and puzzled regret and a kind of middle-aged harshness toward her daughter’s supercilious dimples. The only flavor not stirred into the smile was contempt, not so much as a single clove. Endurance without bitterness, Chessie had thought once; he would have recognized the smile, though the young princess did not.

  “When is Laril due home?” Dorima asked.

  “It depends. The tournament ended two days ago, but he was going to join your father for some hunting and they planned to stay at Castle Rumtyn with Uncle Wek and his boys.”

  Dorima made a pretty grimace and began an involved story about Wek. Her light, mocking voice told the story well, with the stinging wit that had pricked for her a place in a society richer, more established, and more bored than that of the now middle-aged Jade Jousters. The team still met once a week, puffing down the lists and squinting at the chalked scores after each heavy fall. At the end of the season there was a banquet, with creamed chicken and peas, for the team and their families. The winning knight was presented with a loving cup, pewter painted to look like silver.

  As Dorima talked, Kirila watched a mouse that had sneaked into the Hall. The mouse was brown, with the sleek fat body of summer, and when he crept past the arched window, the sunshine struck red glints from his glossy coat. He carried something in his mouth, a bit of grain or a flake of pastry crust, and he moved with the illegal stealth of a portly burglar, his tail a reluctant accessory trailing nervously behind.

  “—and so the Queen of Rentis just drew a discreet silence over the whole preposterous spectacle!”

  “You know, Dorima,” Kirila said conversationally, “it always surprises me that you should pick out a target like Wek for your stories. I should think it would be like using an exquisite rapier thrust to kill a spider. The rapier always ends up with all those silly-looking insect legs on its blade, don’t you think?”

  Dorima’s jaw dropped, and then she laughed appreciatively, her eyes gleaming. “You really do let us underestimate you, don’t you, Mother? What actually does go on in that quiet head of yours while you fold this—” she gestured demeaningly “—this washing?”

  Kirila smiled and said nothing. A horn sounded in the forest and the mouse leaped into the air, balancing for a second on the tip of his tail. He dropped his unneeded bounty and waddled hastily out the door, a fat failed thief. Kirila chuckled.

  “Sometimes,” Dorima said speculatively, “I almost get the very odd impression that you don’t—Mother? What is it? What’s wrong?”

  The horn sounded again, closer, and Kirila froze, one of Larek’s jerkins half-folded in her hands. Now she dropped the jerkin and ran out the door, her gown whipping around her ankles. At the far edge of the drawbridge she stopped, moaned once, and put her fist to her mouth, waiting.

  A procession wound slowly into the castleyard from the forest. Laril rode first, a hunting horn slack in his hand, his young face clenched in indignant grief. Next rode Wek, on a broad horse capable of bearing his great weight. He led a black charger skittish under the draped body of a man slung limply across the saddle. The nostrils on the charger flared uneasily, and his side was caked with the blood and spongy bits of flesh that oozed from the gashed belly of his still master. Wek’s horse danced sideways away from the smell of blood. Behind them came a row of mounted middle-aged men with feathers in their jaunty hunting caps and somber, bewildered eyes.

  “Kirila—I’m sorry,” Wek blurted. She saw with a numbed shock that he had been crying. “That mad boar gored him—just busted out from the underbrush, he never even knew what was coming, we thought the thing was over on the other side of the stream...”

  “I killed the damn boar, Mother, with one clean shot! I got it good!” Laril cried, and she jerked up her head to glare at him with such fury that he fell silent, shocked and bewildered. He had been crying, too, and his beard was matted in stringy clumps.

  “Bring him into our bedchamber,” Kirila directed quietly. Somewhere behind her she heard Dorima scream and she turned just in time to see the girl topple over in a graceful faint, but she didn’t go to her daughter. She walked next to Larek’s body as Laril and Wek, the latter puffing and gasping, carried him over the shaky drawbridge. Her hand reached out and smoothed the thin hair, no longer the color of polished cherrywood, back from the wrinkled face. The wrinkles were stiff, like frozen waves on a pond. A little crowd gathered to watch as the knights carried the body into the castle, but Kirila hardly heard their murmurs. She was aware of nothing as the shuffling procession passed her in the Hall, until she reached down and picked up Larek’s half-folded jerkin from where she had dropped it on the stone floor, near a little pile of squashed ants.

  Two

  There was a little tension about the inscription on the tombstone. A month after the funeral the stone had still not been erected, and a gathering took place at the castle to discuss the matter, the various participants straggling in through a cold, steel-gray afternoon. It had just finished raining, or was about to rain, or perhaps even was raining with fine suspended droplets that wrapped the forest in a cotton-wool mist torn by unpredictable gusts of wind with no staying power. A fire had been lit in the Great Hall, and candle flames fenced with the drafts.

  “I think,” began the squat little priest, pulling his cloak more tightly around him
, “that a religious theme is always best. The most instructive, and, of course, the truest, for as St. Rendus has so beautifully reminded us in that portion of his inspired writing in which the—”

  “Like what?” Laril asked brusquely.

  “Well, such as, for example, what would you think, my Lady, of ‘Weep Not For Him That Is With God’?”

  Kirila, now Dowager Queen of Talatour, looked at the faces gathered around the wooden table. Tackma’s withered tomato face was blotched with weeping, swollen and puffy between the dusty black of her gown and the dusty black of her wimple. Ludie, a pale dreamy maiden lady of thirty-four, given to spiritual experiences and uplifting poetry, had colorless tears in her colorless eyes. Every few seconds she dabbed at them with a black lace handerchief three inches square. Dorima looked dewy; she could cry without reddening her eyes or smudging the black kohl on their lids. Her expensive black velvet gown fitted her full breasts tightly, and the eyes of her silent middle-aged husband watched her every movement with bemused adoration. Laril’s whole head was damp and clammy-looking, as though the new King of Talatour had plunged it into a bucket of cold water before joining the assembly. Only Kirila herself was dry-eyed, her taut skin sallow against the black of her mourning.