by Nancy Kress
“I think ‘Weep Not’ is a little conventional,” Kirila said, “and not...right for Larek.”
“He was an angel, an angel,” murmured Tackma.
“Perhaps, then, a more personal sentiment,” said the priest. “But still religious. You could begin with, ‘Larek, Beloved Husband of—’”
“No!” Kirila said so sharply that the priest gaped at her, open-mouthed. The others looked bewildered, except for Dorima, who glanced at her mother with cynical sympathy and said swiftly, “That’s also very conventional. Common, really.”
“I have composed a poem for my dear, dear brother,” Ludie whispered. “Perhaps, dear sister, you would find it more appropriate. It helps us to remember what we must never forget, the spiritual side of our natures. Never, never. If I may...”
“Certainly, Ludie,” Kirila said. “Go ahead.” Ludie pulled out a much-folded piece of lavender notepaper from the negligible bodice of her gown, unfolded it, cleared her throat with a sound like a baby bird, and looked around at them all with sudden damp shyness.
“Begin now,” Kirila commanded, gently but unarguably. Her family shifted their collective gaze to her; since Larek’s death she seemed to them to have changed, become somehow more definite. She had even begun to gain a little weight. Then they all shifted back to Ludie, who read in a throbbing voice:
“The angels tear their golden hair
From night to golden dawn
Because the gold is fled from Man—
Our golden man is gone.
And when the golden sun doth rise
And, like yellow butter seep,
O’er the jeweled carpet of the grass
Even it will weep.”
There was a long silence. Kirila, stunned, glanced around the table.
“The ‘it’ in the last line,” Ludie explained, “is of course the sun. I wasn’t sure whether to use ‘it’ or ‘he’. Is it clear, do you think?”
“An angel,” murmured Tackma. “My Larry was an angel. A beautiful sentiment, Ludie—I wish he could hear it.”
“Amen,” said the priest in a strangled voice.
“But it’s a little long, Ludie,” Kirila gasped. “To fit on the tombstone, I mean!”
“Yes,” the priest echoed fervently. “Oh, yes—I’m afraid so!”
“An angel,” said Tackma.
“When Brant’s cousin died, the Prince of Rentis,” said Dorima, “the tombstone was kept simple and dignified, as befitted his rank. It said simply—what was it again, Brant? You tell them.”
“Oh, I say, wouldn’t dream of intruding on this decision,” Sir Brant said. “A family matter, really.”
“But we all want to hear it, darling,” Dorima said, looking at her husband sideways.
“Well, then, if you don’t mind a bit of my family, my dear fellow,” Sir Brant said, nodding at Laril and standing up to give himself room. He fixed his gaze at some indeterminate point on the wall and recited in a well-bred monotone: “Sta viator! Hic jacet Carl Brant Telor Glyn, Prince of Rentis and Glyde, Duke of Corthin and Breed, Captain of the Light Guards, Knight Exemplar, Son of His Majesty Rushel Brant Amil Glyn III and Renata Salvyn, nee Bora, a Princess of the House of Tothis, Founded 472. Rest in Peace.”
Sir Brant was rewarded by a luscious smile from his wife, made an aristocratic deprecating gesture with his pudgy fingers, and sat down again.
“Mother,” Laril said abruptly, “what inscription would you like? It’s you who should choose, after all.” He shook his head; little droplets of cold water flew off his beard and spattered the table.
“I don’t know,” Kirila said. “I just don’t know.”
Laril went over to the fireplace and poked at it with an ancient iron poker, bent slightly in the middle when someone had once tried to use it as a crowbar to pry at the rusted hinges of the drawbridge. He sent a shower of sparks leaping up the chimney and, without turning around, said in a low voice, “You know what I would really like to see on the tombstone? The team arms. Father never went much for this lace-doily poetry or religion or family rank, but he loved his jousts better than anyone I ever saw, and he was damn good in his day. The tourney field was his whole world!”
“A secular drawing!” the priest exclaimed. “You can’t do that—it’s almost blasphemy!”
“And just too odd,” Dorima said. “I couldn’t disagree with you more, Laril. It will be laughed at everywhere!”
“No poetry,” Ludie moaned. “No homage to the fleeting frailty of the flame!”
“Wordly considerations at the time of death—”
“No. He’s right.” Kirila looked at each of them from steady dry eyes. “It’s appropriate, and it’s what Larek would have wanted. The Team was his whole world.” She stopped and closed her eyes briefly, as if in pain. “We can have an inscription under it,” she added to the priest. “‘A soul rides to God,’ or something like that. But Laril is right; the team arms go on the tombstone.” She rose and picked up her black shawl. “I’ll walk to the stonemason’s and tell him.”
“It’s awfully wet, Mother,” said Laril. “I’ll go.”
“No. I’ll go.”
“Well, ride at least.”
“I’ll walk.”
“But it’s so wet—I’ll saddle the mare. She’s so gentle that you’ll be perfectly comfortable.”
“I’ll walk.”
“Mother,” began Dorima, with a quick glance at Sir Brant, “it really isn’t fitting that you—”
“I—am—walking—to—the—stonemason’s,” Kirila said, each word distinct and precise. She nodded fiercely at the company, pulled her shawl over her head with a clumsy movement of the twisted fingers, and fumbled at the door bolts, their eyes burning on her back. Laril disapprovingly unbolted the door for her and cold mist slid into the room. Behind her, Tackma murmured, “An angel,” and Dorima watched the door through which her mother had gone, while her white hands with their long polished nails carefully smoothed the rich fabric of her exquisitely-cut black velvet mourning gown. It had cost a small fortune.
●●●
The stonemason received Kirila’s commission with the sort of bow that stonemasons save for tombstone orders: respectful, sad-faced, and curiously gratified; tombstones are expensive. Slowly Kirila started back toward the castle, her gown and shawl already sodden, and then paused. She took one step toward the forest, two toward the castle, made a restless uneven turn like the revolving of a wooden figurine on a breaking music box, and then struck out across the muddy hay field toward the churchyard. Wet hay grudgingly parted before her wetter skirt. Larek’s grave, already covered with vine shoots of tender green, was at the foot of an ancient stone wall along which were buried all the Kings of Talatour. He lay next to Otwick, with space between them for Tackma when the time should come. The space on the other side, Kirila supposed, was for her.
The grave had lost the raw newness of a month ago; softened by the vines and the fog, it looked as though it were a necessary part of the Churchyard, a piece of a puzzle that had belatedly been fitted into the opening left for it. Kirila gazed at the vines steadily, an unreadable expression shifting, not on her face, but just below the surface of the sallow skin, like a school of fish gliding in a murky pond. She sighed and aimlessly held up one finger, testing the wind. It didn’t seem to be from any particular direction. She lowered the crooked finger and ran it over the very small ruby on her wedding ring, and slowly the expression crystallized into a subdued, puzzled amazement.
“Ah, well,” she said aloud, and didn’t know what she meant.
Thunder groaned somewhere in the west. She sighed again and turned toward the castle, then checked the turn and gave a sudden terrified yelp as a dark shape leaped from behind the wall and wavered on top of it, dim and terrible in the fog. Kirila’s whole body went on tiptoe and she jammed her fist against her mouth as she squinted tensely into the mist.
“Kirila!” the shape cried. “I couldn’t get in!”
S
he gasped. “Chessie?”
“It’s me! I got all the way there and then I couldn’t get in!”
“Chessie...is that really you?”
He cleared the grave in a wide leap and landed beside her, quivering. She dropped to her knees in the mud and groped with one hand, as if she were blind. His thick coat was covered with burrs, mud, twigs, dried blood, and one upside-down wilted rose, clinging with its thorny stem to his haunches.
“Chessie.” And then, again, “Chessie. I can’t believe it...”
“It’s me, all right. Kirila, I got as far as the Tents of Omnium, but then I couldn’t get in—there’s a spell on the whole place. No one may enter the Heart of the World who doesn’t have some special quality—they wouldn’t even tell me what, stupidest peasants I ever saw—and I tried for over a year, but I don’t have it. Whatever it is. And the place is impregnable, although you wouldn’t think so to look at it. Nothing worked, not bribery or force or underground tunnels or an airlift by this buzzard I hired or trickery or drugging the gatekeeper with laudanum. Kirila, if there were two of us, then maybe you....it’s my only chance! Do you think that Larek would let—just for six months, I know the way now—and if you could only—”
Kirila made a gesture toward the grave, half simple pointing-out and half wordless plea, and Chessie broke off. After a moment he whispered, “Larek?” She nodded. Not so much as glancing at the mounded earth with its struggling vine shoots, he crept closer to Kirila and peered into her face as intently as she stared back at his.
He had not changed at all. Under the mud and burrs his dense coat was as purple, his flesh as firm, and his muscles as taut as the night he had snapped the bat’s spine with his strong young jaws. All the expressions that could ever be in his burnt-sugar eyes were as familiar to her as the course of a recurring dream, and she saw with glad envy that he still had all his teeth.
“I’m sorry,” Chessie said softly.
“It was a quick death. He had no time to feel pain.”
“I didn’t mean for Larek’s death,” he said, and she glanced at him quickly. He was watching her eyes, into and past them, and she felt the unexpected sting of hot virgin tears. She hadn’t cried in twenty years.
Dashing at the tears, Kirila caught him looking at her twisted hands. Then he glanced again at her face, startled.
“You didn’t even see my face till just this second,” she said wonderingly, slipping her shawl down around her shoulders. “That wasn’t what you were sorry about at all.”
“No.” There was a fragile silence.
“Twenty-five years, Chessie. But not for you.”
“No,” he agreed again. The fog drifted between them in displaced wisps. “Sometimes I forget.”
“Where have you been? How did you find it?”
“I started with the peerage records, and memorized every kingdom, duchy, city, fief, or privy stairs even vaguely connected with bells. Kirila, I’ve been farther than you’d think possible—or than I thought before I tried it—checking on them. At some places I would hear of other bell-names not on my original list, and I traveled to those, too. Nothing. Nobody was missing an old prince who had had some sort of run-in with a Wizard thirty-six years ago. It took me twenty-five years to check all the bell places in the world—I can speak six languages now, more or less—and nothing. So then I set out north to find the Tents of Ominum, and finally I did. But, Kirila, they wouldn’t let me in! So I thought if someone else who really wanted in was with me, someone...”
Chessie looked at her again. This time his light-brown eyes missed nothing, moving from the fever-cropped hair to her lined, sallow skin to the arthritic fingers pleating and unpleating the muddy black mourning gown. He saw the stiff awkwardness with which she sat on the wet ground, and the dull gleam of her wedding ring on a finger so twisted that the ring could not be removed, and the way the flesh on her neck was faintly blue from the drizzled cold. Painfully he looked away, out over the mist-shrouded hay field.
“Could I ask you, Kirila, for...for a hot meal at Talatour? And a few nights lodging? A hot bath would be wonderful, I would really appreciate it if I could maybe have a hot bath, and a meal...”
“Chessie,” she said, “I’m coming with you.”
Three
Everyone hated the idea. Laril fumed and fretted, pointing out the difficulties of traveling in autumn, the possibilities of highwaymen or other dangers, the unseemlineness of a woman—and a Queen!—riding alone, and the whole futility of setting out to a place no one had heard of except a trick talking dog. He didn’t like Chessie, and said so. Laril was an earnest young man, broad-shouldered and stocky, and given to a bluntness in conversation which he later tried to soften, generally unsuccessfully, by long muddled explanations of what he had really meant.
“But why, Mother, aside from the dog, and he could get someone else to help him, do you want to travel to this Tents of Omnium?” he asked. It was a question Kirila had asked herself often, puzzling about it in her bedchamber late at night while owls hooted contentedly outside her window. She remembered that long ago her Wizard had asked the same thing, and that she had stammered then, too.
“I don’t know,” she told Laril truthfully.
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“Then why go?” he cried in anguished exasperation, but she merely pointed out that this was where the conversation had begun. Finally he produced the ultimate argument.
“I could just forbid you, you know, Mother. I mean, I am your sovereign.” He folded his arms across his chest and stared at her forbiddingly from under downy eyebrows drawn close together.
“You could,” she agreed. She stared back, a direct stern look he never remembered seeing before—Larek had been the one who always disciplined the children—and before that unexpected, proud directness, he quailed a little and switched tactics.
“We all love you, Mother,” he mumbled. “And I will need your help to run the kingdom. Please stay.” The eyebrows rushed apart and he looked at her pleadingly, not like a little boy, but the way a man, laying aside the unfair advantage of armour, pleads from a position of voluntary subservience with a woman. She smiled at him, and was glad that his eyes weren’t green.
Queen Tackma came to her as Kirila was checking over the pile of camping supplies amassing in her bedchamber. The old woman laid a hand on Kirila’s arm and spoke in a quick whisper, as though they were in the middle of a large, gossip-hungry crowd.
“Sweetheart, listen. Just listen a minute. So you want to go look for a second husband, I can understand that. For a woman to be alone is not good. But why go as far as these Tents—you don’t need a sheik. Have you considered the Baron Lapthel? He’s a little older than you, I know, but he’s such a nice man. And he has only the one daughter.”
Kirila patted Tackma on the hand, a gentle light pat because of her own arthritis. “I’m not ready to get married again, Belle-mere. And certainly not to the Baron.”
“Oh, I know, he’s not Larek, may he rest in peace, but believe me you could do worse.”
“I’11 tell you what—when I am ready to marry again, I promise I’ll come talk to you first.”
“Good,” Tackma said, nodding. “Good, that’s good. You always were a good daughter-in-law, Sweetheart. Quiet all the time, but we knew we could count on you.”
“Yes,” said Kirila, and went back to checking items off her list. Bedroll, skinning knife, striking flint, first-aid kit, spoons.
Only Dorima said nothing about what the others now called “Mother’s little trip,” but she watched Kirila speculatively from under her delicate arched brows.
Kirila bought a horse, a sturdy gray mare with a wide barreled chest that bespoke patient endurance, and then added a second pack horse. A seamstress had made her tunics and divided skirts—Laril disliked these intensely—of serviceable dark green wool. She had a hooded cloak lined with thick fur, and high leather boots. At her waist was a dagger, a plain dagger with a
n unadorned steel hilt. Laril, having finally decided that this expedition was one of those inexplicable follies that come to women of a certain transitional age and must just be accepted by the uncomprehending masculine world, had offered her Larek’s dagger. It was very expensive, with jewelled crossguards and pommel and the arms of the Jade Jousters engraved on the blade, surrounded by a swarm of artistic curlicues. After turning it over and over in her hands, Kirila had given it back to him, saying that it was best that he, as King, keep all his father’s arms together. The gear for the expedition had all been packed and strapped in place on the two horses for a test run.
“One more thing,” Chessie said slowly, on the night before they were due to leave. “I see you’re not taking bow and quiver.” Carefully he avoided looking at Kirila’s hands.
“I can’t hunt any more,” she said calmly.
“Well, actually, I do,” Chessie said. He looked sheepish.
“You?”
“It was the only way to eat, in some of the places I’ve been. And after a while it became very satisfying. Raw, bloody meat is so...so hearty. You really should try it. Anyway, we won’t starve.”
The corners of Kirila’s mouth twitched. “I’m a willing audience. But we wouldn’t have starved anyway. The pack horse can carry a lot of dried supplies, for after we get beyond local inns. And here...look.”
She knelt on the floor, took a leather pouch from inside her tunic, and opened it. Gold and silver showered out onto the floor with ostentatious clinks, followed by a single perfect diamond that glittered with the hauteur of a fertile queen bee in a hive of sexless workers.
Chessie blinked stupidly. “What’s that?”
“That,” said Kirila, her voice grim, “is a new wardrobe of velvet and silk gowns, with fur tippets, sleeves to the ground, and three kinds or matching headdresses. And this,” she added, picking up the diamond, “is a castleful of furniture, hangings, and silver plate.”
Chessie glanced around. They were in Kirila’s bedchamber, two walls of which were grimy with generations of candlesmoke so embedded in the irregularly chipped stone that it was impossible to scrub it out. The remaining two walls were hung with faded tapestries that might or might not have depicted the siege of some long-forgotten fortress.