by Nancy Kress
“Kirila,” he whispered, “did you steal it?”
She laughed, a spontaneous pealing laugh that echoed off the blackened walls. In the Great Hall her family paused in their various occupations—when had they last heard her laugh like that? They had never heard her laugh like that. Usually Mother only smiled.
“Part of your dowry, from Kiril?” Chessie hazarded.
“No, that was spent long ago. These are from my daughter, Dorima. Gowns and furniture and silver plate. She married a very wealthy man. Chessie, do you have children?”
“I don’t know,” he answered quietly.
Quickly Kirila put out her hand and stroked his neck. “I meant as a dog.”
“Certainly not!”
“Well, then, don’t. No, I don’t mean that...just don’t have children who already know everything.” She got up from the floor, putting one hand on the bed to hoist herself carefully. “We’d better get some sleep.”
●●●
They started a little past dawn. Kirila had been up for over an hour, dressing and eating and working on her hands. When she first awoke, the knuckles were puffy and the fingers tapered stiffly, faintly mauve at the tips. After lighting the fire laid in the fireplace, she held her hands to it, flexing each finger joint and massaging each knuckle, turning her hands patiently over and over near the heat. Her lips pressed together in a thin tight line as she worked. Gradually the fingers began to move freely, the tips turned rosy, and the puffiness subsided. When she and Chessie rode from Castle Talatour, she was holding her bridle in a loose, easy grip, her spine aggressively straight.
Everyone was up to see them off. Ludie dabbed at her eyes with a lavishly embroidered handkerchief, Laril kissed her with a transparent mixture of sulky anxiety and the bluff comradeship he used when other knights started off on quests, Tackma mouthed wordlessly, “Remember—the Baron!” The visiting Sir Brant, gorgeously arrayed in parti-colored silk tights and a sort of short puffed skirt over his pot belly, bowed with well-bred disapproval. Dorima made her mother a deep, mocking curtsy, shuddered at the tunic and divided skirt, and shook her head—elaborately dressed even at this hour in curls intertwined with ropes of pearls—with cynical tenderness.
Riding north, toward the kingdoms of Larek’s boyhood, Chessie and Kirila saw few people. None of the nobility were as yet out of bed, and the serfs busy in the field ignored them. It was the end of August, easing into harvest time, and the fields lay langorously full and ripe in the goldenrod air. Rich sunlight streamed down on Kirila’s hands.
They lunched at a small inn and rode on. In midafternoon Chessie suggested a nap in an apple orchard.
“Oh, no,” Kirila said brightly. “Let’s go on; I’m not at all tired.” Chessie looked at her doubtfully, but he kept trotting along the dusty road that wound between neat fields and pastures and past clumps of mud and wattle huts. Just as the sky was setting up for the sunset production, they came to an old stone inn where the road crossed a small river. The smell of roasting venison drifted seductively on the warm air.
“How about this? It looks clean.”
“Let’s ride some more before dark,” Kirila suggested. She pulled obliquely on her bridle and the mare did a sprightly little dance. “Why lose traveling time!”
They trotted on. Chessie kept darting little sideways glances at Kirila; she would slump forward, then straighten her spine with an almost audible snap. On her forehead and upper lip clung little beads of wetness. All around them the sky turned red and orange and gold, and then the colors ran together and turned muddy, like a child’s painting brushed at too vigorously and too long. It was after dark when they stumbled up to a dilapidated wooden inn with a sign that proclaimed itself to be the Red Cabbage. The cabbage on the sign had bleached to a sickly salmon.
“Now, we are going to stay here,” Chessie said crossly. “I’m exhausted.”
They were the only lodgers. A yawning innkeeper brought Kirila an undercooked dinner and they ate it in the deserted hall, before a fireplace that had not been cleaned of last winter’s ashes.
“Tell me about the route,” Kirila said. “After we pass through all these tiny kingdoms there are mountains, I know, but what beyond that? Larek had never been in the mountains. Do we go over them?”
“There’s a pass.”
“Difficult?”
“No, not very.”
“And then what?”
Chessie was concentrating hard on his chunk of meat. “Kirila, I think it would be better if I told you each next step as we get to it, instead of the whole thing all at once.”
She stopped chewing on the stringy roast. “Why?”
“It just would.”
“You can’t do that, Chessie,” Kirila said quietly. Looking down at her lap, she chose her words with painful slowness. “The last twenty-five years I’ve been...there was a lot of...often decisions were made and then I was told about them afterward. But this Quest is mine, too—I started it before I met even you, remember—and...and it’s mine, too. I want to know the route.”
“Yes, of course,” he said softly. “I’m sorry. After the mountains there is a high, rocky plain, and then a forest, not large but very, very thick. It’s the one the Renkin meant in his riddle. The Tents of Omnium are in a clearing in the forest. The plain is very large, and completely barren—we’ll have to take all our supplies onto it, except for water. I don’t think we can cross it until spring. We’ll have to stay the winter at a castle I know of on the far side of the mountain pass.”
“So it won’t take just six months after all.” Wound in her voice, threaded through the flat words like dry rot in old timber, was a panicky anger. Chessie had always told her the truth; she counted on that. It was bedrock.
“I didn’t lie to you, Kirila,” he said quickly, then hesitated.
“Didn’t you?”
“No! It would have taken six months if you...that is...when I thought...” He looked miserably at the floor.
“When you thought what?” Kirila asked dangerously. A part of her was amazed at how good the luxury of anger felt; it had been years since it was within her price range.
Chessie continued to study the floor—termites had made an interesting pattern of grooves and splinters in the planks—and then abruptly looked straight at her, his own voice rising. “You know what. When I thought of you as still twenty years old.”
“It doesn’t matter all that much!”
“For a trip like this, it does.”
“That remains to be seen,” Kirila said loftily. She brushed the crumbs off her skirt and rose. “I’m going to bed, Chessie. Good-night. Sleep well.” Spine very straight, she marched from the room and climbed the stone stairs to her chamber, running up them with quick, light steps.
Chessie sighed.
●●●
Someone was knocking on her head, short staccato knocks like the yelps of an injured puppy, and it hurt. Sleepily Kirila told him to stop, but the knocking kept up until her head separated itself from the door and she became aware that the knocking was on one, the dull throbbing in the other.
“Daybreak,” the innkeeper called through the door and went away, his feet swishing down the corridor as though he still had on slippers.
Outside the inn window was formless gray. Kirila ached through the legs and back from the unaccustomed day in the saddle, but she limped to the fireplace, lit the scanty tinder, and heated water, wincing when she lifted the iron cauldron off the fire with her puffy, mauve-tipped fingers. Grimly she went to work on her arthritic hands.
“You overslept,” Chessie said. He had spent the night at the foot of the stairs that led to her chamber, disdaining the flea-ridden mat which the innkeeper had provided.
“A comfortable bed,” Kirila said gaily. The gaiety was a little flat around the edges. Chessie looked at her closely and she smiled, moving slowly.
Riding through another hot bright day, they passed through the fiefs of Weflyn and Zandt and part of the ki
ngdom of Kiendor. Kirila drove them at a relentless pace, stopping only for meals and traveling long past dusk. Chessie trotted effortlessly alongside the mare, and the chalky white dust from the road gradually covered his dark purple fur and lightened it to a ghostly lavender.
They spoke little during the day. Toward dark a pretty little inn presented itself; again they were the only lodgers, few people traveling during harvest. Kirila’s hair as she ate her dinner was gray under the dust, and the skin under her eyes sagged in gray ridges.
“Chessie,” she said in the sort of voice people use when they feel they ought to be saying something, “how exactly did that Renkin riddle go again?”
He looked at her in surprise. “Don’t you remember?”
“Not word for word...”
Chessie quoted:
“Not over, not under, the mountains of old;
Across where the ancient was lost;
And then in the forest none can be in,
Ere the final proved rampart is crossed.”
He intoned the words solemnly, and they sounded odd in the brightly painted inn parlour, like a Gregorian chant in a nursery school. “Kirila, how could you forget it?”
“What does it mean, ‘not over, not under, the mountains of old’?” she asked, ignoring his question.
Chessie assumed his lecturing stance: purple forepaws braced firmly apart, ears slightly pricked, burnt-sugar eyes thoughtful and a little stern, like a schoolmaster with a bright but unruly sixth form.
“One goes not ‘over’ or ‘under’ the mountains because there is a pass, and one goes through. One cannot be ‘in’ the forest because it is very thick indeed, and so one goes under it.”
“Under it?”
“In a manner of speaking. You keep close to the ground, where the entangling foliage is lighter—that sort of ‘under.’ The ‘final proved rampart’ points both to the fact that the Tents themselves are completely surrounded by a high rampart and to the test, the ‘proof’ that one must successfully pass, and then one is allowed to enter.” He added, scowling, “Some ones, anyway.”
“And the second line? What ‘ancient was lost’ on the plain?”
Abandoning his lecture stance, Chessie said sheepishly, “Actually, I don’t know that. I never found out.”
Kirila nodded and lifted her goblet. Her hand shook from weariness, sloshing wine onto the table, and Chessie looked painfully away.
“Kirila,” he said suddenly, trying to sound as though he had just thought of it, “Did you ever have...do you ever have any more of your visions of the Tents of Omnium?”
Tracing pictures in the spilled wine with the tip of one finger, she said slowly, “I did, at first, and then they stopped.” She paused. “No, they didn’t just stop—I stopped them, somehow. They were like a...a toothache. And you know how it is—after you’ve succeeded in getting the tooth out, you just don’t think about it anymore.”
Chessie held his breath. “But there’s an empty place where the tooth was,” he said.
She didn’t answer. After a while he let his breath out—the whites of his eyes were turning blue—and hazarded, “Did you ever tell your children about your Quest? When they were small, maybe, just sort of mention it to them? As a bedtime story or something?”
“No.”
He thought about that, and finally said, apologetically, “I think I would have told them, if I had been you.”
“No. You wouldn’t have,” Kirila said. Chessie thought about it some more, staring hard at the floor, and when he looked up to answer he saw that the Dowager Queen of Talatour was asleep, her dusty face pillowed heavily on the table, lying in the pictures traced in spilled wine.
●●●
The morning was half over before Kirila walked into the inn parlour. Chessie had been pacing up and down, fretting over the gray rain slanting down outside the window, and impatiently he bounded over to her. “Good morning! Your breakfast is ready over there and you—“ Abruptly he stopped.
Her face looked plundered. Rising too late to heat water and massage her hands, she was trying to keep them hidden in a fold of tunic, but Chessie saw the twisted, mauve-tipped fingers and puffy knuckles, made worse by the wet weather. Something turned over inside his purple chest, and he added twenty and twenty-five again, but it still came out to no more than forty-five. He tried it in Base Twelve; she looked older than even that.
“Kirila,” he began softly. She shot him a warning glance, gulped her food, and swung her cloak in a swashbuckling arc toward her shoulders. One side missed and hung limply to the floor. She swung it again, stepped on the hem with her boot, and cursed volubly. A third swing landed the cloak on both shoulders, and she snapped up the hood.
“Let’s go.”
Chessie noticed that she had not tried to tie the hood strings. “Kirila...”
“Let’s go!”
They rode through the monotonous gray rain, over a road increasingly rocky and wild. Crops gave way to pasture land, mile after mile of it, dotted with wet goats. Once the horse picked up a stone in her shoe, and Kirila dismounted heavily and removed it. It took her a long time and much fumbling, and when she again mounted her face was drawn and her lips set tightly together. When Chessie could stand it no longer he burst out. “For heaven’s sake, Kirila, we can’t—“
“Look,” she said. “There’s a farmhouse, almost a small manor, perhaps they’ll give us lunch.” She urged the mare into a canter.
The farmer met them in the yard, stolid and peasant-obstinate until she showed him a piece of silver. His face changed so that he looked considerably less like a peasant—it hadn’t been all that convincing an imitation in the first place—and he bowed them into the kitchen, expansively directing his wife to “give a ‘ardy feed to ‘er Ladyship.”
Kirila slumped down on the wooden settle and closed her eyes. After a moment she opened them again and looked about.
The kitchen was neat and warm and prosperous, and smelled strongly but not unpleasantly of goats, overlaid with the peppery fragrance of soup. Everything that could possibly be scoured and polished had been; even the metal fittings on the goatskin winebags shone like silver. Kirila was reminded, for the first time in years, of Polly Stark’s tiny cottage. The reminder jolted curiously. The farmer’s wife, however, ample and talkative, with an immense white cap that rose twelve inches into the air above her broad, scrubbed face and ended in two linen strips hanging back over her shoulders like kite’s tails, dispelled any resemblance. Chattering all the while she served the steaming soup and crusty bread, she sang snatches of border ballads, jigged in place to an especially lively tune, and asked questions for which she fortunately didn’t await the answers. Kirila was almost too tired to eat; when the hot soup burned her tongue, she scarcely noticed. Only the warmth coming up through the pewter spoon handle to her twisted fingers penetrated her mechanical spoon-lifting.
“Oh, I didn’t know we had company,” a voice purred. Kirila looked up, and blinked. Even Chessie, ravenously lapping soup from a bowl on the floor, stopped eating and stared, a piece of goat meat dripping motionless from his jaws.
The woman in the doorway was heavily powdered over skin that lay in creases and ridges and patches where the flesh itself was being eaten away—there was arsenic in the powder, to keep it smooth—like a bog under gritty snow. Her eyes were heavily lined with kohl, her mouth a bright red gash. She was gorgeously dressed, in a wine velvet gown so low that her breasts, unmatched divan pillows stuffed with limp feathers, were confined only by a hard-working silver ribbon. The black hair on the top of her head did not match her long plaits, which in turn did not match the grayish kiss-curls on her forehead.
“My Lady, this is my sister Elaine,” said the farmer’s wife. She added wickedly, “My older sister,” and Elaine threw her a furious glance. “Elaine, this is the Lady Kirila.” Kirila was not using her royal title, to avoid embarrassing Laril.
“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” Elaine cooed, and
sat down very close to her brother-in-law. An overpowering smell of dried myrtle smothered those of goat and soup. The goat farmer inched down the bench until he was half off the edge, braced only by his outstretched muddy boot.
“Have you come far, my Lady?” asked Elaine. One of her front teeth had been gilded to match her necklace.
“Not very,” Kirila gasped, unobtrusively dissipating the dried myrtle by waving her spoon at a fly. “From Talatour.”
“Oooh, Talatour! My brother-in-law was there once, weren’t you, Ham? He’s so well-traveled, my Lady.”
“No,” said Ham. He slurped the last of his soup and clumped toward the door. As he passed his wife, Kirila saw them exchange old, amused glances, and he lightly slapped her generous rump.
“Well, I know it was some place that sounded like that,” Elaine called after him, tipping her head to one side. After the door closed behind him she said to Kirila, “He’s so modest; he’s really just wasted as a goat farmer, you know. I keep telling him so.”
The farmer’s wife snorted.
“But tell me, my Lady, and do forgive me if I’m being impertinent—but aren’t you a teeny bit afraid, traveling all alone?”
“Oh, I’m not alone, madam,” Kirila said. The soup was reviving her; she was thinking that Chessie really shouldn’t underestimate her endurance in that annoying way. “Chessie, there, is traveling with me,” she told Elaine. “He’s not really a dog, he’s a prince—enchanted, you know.”
“A prince!” Elaine exclaimed. “How exciting!” Chessie looked up, alarmed.
“Oh, yes,” Kirila continued glibly. “And so strong and brave—he’s saved my life at least a half-dozen times!”
“Fancy that,” Elaine said. Her black eyes were gleaming in their deep craters of powder.
“And quite handsome, too.”