The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  “But, Chessie, why would people live here? I suppose the castle would be easy to defend—but from whom? And I don’t see any farmland or anything. How do they survive?”

  Chessie didn’t answer and she turned to him, first annoyed and then astonished. He was balancing on his hind legs with wobbly little dance steps, craning his neck and pricking his ears up and down like purple pistons.

  “Look—they see us!” he whooped. “That’s Granny Isolda herself in the window!” He whooped again and shot forward, bounding over the snow like a puppy. Kirila followed more slowly, leading the horses and frowning.

  When she reached the castle, Chessie was standing with his front paws on the shoulders of a huge old lady in a paint-spattered gown, licking her face with undignified extravagance and pounding the air frantically with his rounded otter tail. Kirila drew herself up to her full height and advanced to meet them with stately steps.

  “Kirila, this is Isolda,” Chessie said, dropping to the ground. His burnt-sugar eyes were still shining. “Isolda, this is Kirila, the one I told you about. She is coming with me to the Tents of Omnium after all.”

  “Actually,” Kirila said distantly, “it’s Dowager Queen Kirila of Talatour, but you may call me Kirila.”

  “I intend to,” smiled Granny Isolda. She was tall and massive, like a lumberjack, and had enormous feet. But despite her white hair and lined face and stringy neck, there was something about her that denied her age. Her eyes, as intensely blue as the dribbling patch of turquoise paint on one shoulder of her ill-fitting gown, had the jumping energy of young rabbits. Kirila pulled herself up even straighter.

  “You are welcome to Coldwater Castle,” added Granny Isolda.

  “Thank you,” Kirila replied coldly. “We shall probably require lodgings for all winter.”

  “So Chessie tells me.”

  “Naturally, I would pay whatever price you thought reasonable.”

  “That won’t be necessary.”

  “Oh, but I insist.”

  The two women smiled. Chessie looked from one to the other in bewilderment. He heard the quiet guns, but couldn’t see the reason for the war. He was not vain.

  “Well,” he said heartily. “Well! Here we are, and—well! Shall we go in?”

  There was a dark passage, hung with cloaks and galoshes and few dusty fishing rods, and smelling of newspapers used to wrap fish. Then they were in the Great Hall and Kirila, despite herself, gasped aloud and turned questioningly to Granny Isolda.

  The stone walls of the Hall vibrated with color—shrieked and preened and danced with it. Every square inch, except for the smoke-blackened chimney above the hearth, was hung with unframed canvas paintings, jostling each other like Mayday revelers. Kirila had seen only a few paintings on canvas before in her life, mostly chapel pictures of anemic saints dwarfing flat castles, and never any like these. Strange smoky mists, hard-edged blocks with the precise transitory edges of growing crystals, unholy secret smears like a substance in alchemical transit. Death-dark shinings like decaying marsh gases tried to sink behind the canvas they were painted on. None of the paintings actually moved—although it was difficult to be sure—but all of them seemed to: to shimmer and seethe and flow through unperceived patterns of events for which there were no words, or for which words would have been shabby bonds.

  “What are they?” whispered Kirila. “What are they?”

  “Look,” Granny Isolda said succinctly.

  Kirala moved to the nearest painting and looked at it. A small bright mist, like a puff of golden smoke, drifted above the center of the canvas.

  “What do you see?”

  “Golden smoke.”

  “Look again!” Granny Isolda commanded. Kirila stiffened angrily, but she looked.

  Behind the mist—no, in the middle of it, for it had more depth than she had seen at first, a vast depth, like the unsullied sweep of the future—were dark, struggling shapes, thrashing with a terrible blind fierceness, like...like...

  “Look again!” came Granny Isolda’s voice from some point far distant, and Kirila, without choice, clenched her face and stared, the long lines on her forehead meeting above her nose and fanning out at the temples.

  There was a faint noise in the air, a warm scratching song just below hearing, and the golden mist shifted and brightened, while the dark shapes howled and struggled, trying desperately and with the fear-filled effort of helpless heroes to show...to obtain...to hold...

  “Why, it’s a baby’s smile!” Kirila exclaimed.

  “Not bad,” Granny Isolda said grudgingly. “Incomplete, of course, but still—not bad.”

  Kirila glanced dazedly around the Hall. It was dark and a few guttering candles dripped pools of wax on a vast table littered with dirty dishes and congealing leftovers. Chessie was asleep under the table. Kirila suddenly became aware that she was exhausted, that her shoulders ached horribly, and that her stomach was growling with neglected indignation. Granny Isolda watched her, the paint-spattered gown littered with fresh toast crumbs.

  “You can’t expect it to come quickly, not at first,” the old woman said scornfully. “Seeing is a complex habit—how long did it take you to learn to read? Oh, there are naturals, but you’re not one. If I painted you, it would be a clear pond, with only a few water spiders on the surface, moving slowly.”

  “Then you’d be wrong,” Kirila said with such swift fierceness that Granny started, more surprised than she had been in a long time, and then smiled with the amused satisfaction of being pleased against expectation.

  Kirila turned, found a wooden settle behind her knees, and sank down on it. A moment later she was up again. “Why, Chessie said something once—a story about an artist and his paintings and forgotten mythical...” she trailed off, looked again at the paintings, and put her closed fist to her mouth like a child.

  “Ah, well,” said Granny Isolda. “Chessie knows more than he knows he knows. In some areas, less. Come and eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” said Kirila, who was.

  “Come eat anyway, so it won’t go to waste. We saved you venison and ale, and then your room will be ready. Come, child.”

  Resentful of the “child,” and mollified by it, and too weary to protest it, Kirila sat at the vast littered table and ate. The strained muscles behind her eyeballs, which she had never known were there, burned in various shades of red, so that her venison kept shading from rose to wine to scarlet and back again, She ate it anyway, too tired to care.

  ●●●

  “But where does all this food come from?” Kirila asked at breakfast, munching appreciatively on cold apple dumplings. The fare at Coldwater Castle was plain but ample. Around her in the Hall rose the conversations of the other diners, a dozen men and women splattered to varying degrees with paint, and the intriguing babble of three different languages mingled with the rattle of pans from the kitchen and with Chessie’s contented humming. He lay stretched out in front of the fireplace, idly playing chess against himself with a carved wooden set. The air in the Hall was cold, paintings not holding the same warmth as woven tapestries, and smelled of hot buttered toast, burning firewood, and paint thinner.

  “Do you farm?” she continued. “The land here seems too steep and rocky for that.”

  The young man across from her, whose name was Boru, hastily swallowed his mouthful of toast. “Four times each year—oh, excuse me, that was a crumb—four times each year a group of us go through the tunnel, sell our paintings to the kingdoms in the south, and buy supplies. I went last year. A horrendous trip, but, then, we have to eat. We take turns.” He made a rolling gesture with one hand, palm flicking quickly upward, to indicate taking turns. Kirila noticed his fingers, long and almost fleshless. They matched his long grey eyes, which seemed to see outward only incidentally. Otherwise, she thought, he looked like any journeyman carpenter, or possibly a gardener.

  “I don’t remember any artists coming to Talatour to sell pictures,” she said reflectively.
<
br />   “Ah, we always go anonymously. That’s why we live here, on this side of the tunnel—no one knows we’re here. Hardly. We never sell more than twice in the same place, and never at Talatour. No market there.”

  Kirila winced. “It must be hard to part with them.”

  The young painter’s expression altered, becoming for a moment that of an old soldier who feels an embedded arrow chip shift against the bone.

  “Yes,” he said quietly, “sometimes it is, yes.”

  “Can you earn enough...I mean, is there enough money in selling paintings to support all these people? Not,” she added hastily, “that the pictures aren’t worth it!”

  Boru smiled, a pale wintry smile. “Oh, the paintings are very expensive, although I suspect that afterwards most buyers can’t remember why they parted with that much gold, and some of them can’t even think why they bought a picture at all. Some remember, though.” His young face suddenly looked robbed, although all the usual features were in place. “I sold one to a duchess who wanted it for her bedroom wall. There was a lot of red in the painting, and red was her best color. All her negligées were red.”

  Kirila looked down at her plate. Chessie finished his chess game—he had lost—and said somberly, “I saw one while I was looking for...while I was traveling. The king had it hung in the nursery, and the young princes were drying wet mittens by slinging them over the frame.”

  “We usually don’t hear about such things,” Boru said, and Chessie instantly looked remorseful, “but when I do, it’s like a bucket of cold water dumped over one. Me. Us.”

  “Is that the reason,” Kirila asked softly, “for the name ‘Coldwater Castle’? To remind you that each painting eventually gets sold—a sort of continual living testimony to humility—and man’s littleness?”

  “Well, actually,” Boru said, looking uncomfortable, “the water in the kitchen is pretty cold. Mountain spring, you know.”

  Chessie rolled over on his back, all four legs in the air, snorting with laughter badly suppressed. Kirila determinedly ignored him.

  “What...what did you say you were working on just now?” she asked Boru. Chessie’s snorts turned to hiccups.

  “Soup.”

  “Soup?”

  “Yes, soup. I’m on kitchen duty tonight. We take turns at that, too.”

  At the far end of the Hall, Granny Isolda appeared in a doorway, her arms loaded with small bright jars of paint. “Good morning!” she called, waved awkwardly, and disappeared. Instantly Chessie was on his feet and following her, still hiccuping, his tail twitching as though it were thinking about wagging.

  “There goes one of the best,” Boru said, with reverence.

  “I think I’ll go for a walk,” Kirila said abruptly. Her apple dumpling had the sour taste of old mead.

  Boru stared at her. “Outside?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “But...why?”

  “Don’t you ever walk outside?”

  He shrugged. “In the summer, yes, it smells good. But there’s nothing to see out there now, and I don’t like the cold. It’s bad for my hands.”

  “Mine, too,” Kirila said, and went to find her cloak.

  ●●●

  It was snowing stingily, dropping pinched gray flakes with the grudging slowness of tithes in famine. The plain absorbed each flake seamlessly.

  Kirila fed the horses, climbed a little way down the mountain, and brushed off the snow that covered the lichens that covered a rock. The lichens wouldn’t brush, so she sat on them. There was a hard ball of misery in the general region of her stomach, like a bar of soap swallowed whole, and it was giving her indigestion.

  So this was what her great Quest had come to. A fuzzy question mark—it still bothered her that she hadn’t been able to tell Laril why she was going at all—and a tin-tasting jealousy of a woman old enough to be her grandmother. Well, her mother.

  The muscles behind her eyeballs still ached, and she rubbed her closed lids hard with closed fists, then looked again at the dingy plain. It looked the same, except that furry pink and lavender spots undulated between it and her eyes. Putting a gloved hand to each temple, she stared fiercely fiercely at the spots, willing them to become Tents, to grow shape and sparkle, to give her back...what?

  The spots faded, spots still.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Chessie! You startled me; I didn’t hear you.”

  “Not surprising—you were thinking hard enough to melt the snow. Can I ask what about?” Cautiously he slid down the last few feet to her rock, all four legs braced straight.

  “Chessie,” she said slowly, “if something was bothering you, tweaking at you when you least expected it, something you knew had no right to annoy you at all—what would you do?”

  “Crack all its bones and eat the marrow.”

  Kirila sighed. “It’s not that sort of thing.”

  “You know what the problem is, Kirila—you feel let down after all that travel. It’s the unplanned inactivity, that’s always depressing. Look, I know what you can do while we’re here this winter—Granny Isolda said she would give you painting lessons. There, I know you like to learn new things!” He squatted back on his purple haunches, beaming, expectant of praise.

  “I suppose,” Kirila said dangerously, “you asked her to.”

  “Well, yes,” Chessie replied modestly, “but you don’t have to thank me.” She didn’t say anything, and he added, “Unless you want to, of course.” Still she didn’t say anything, and he began to look a little sulky.

  “You don’t have to take lessons, you know. I just thought it would be better than staring at that accursed plain.”

  “You never look directly at it, do you, Chessie?”

  “Not if I can help it.” He scratched his ear with his hind foot, something she had never seen him do before. It was such a doggy gesture that she was obscurely shocked.

  “I’ll tell you what it is,” Chessie burst out suddenly. “The damn plain is always the same. So in winter there’s snow and in summer there isn’t—big deal. It’s unchanging, static, dead. Things should grow and age—” he winced a little, and the purple fur on his ears rippled “—or they’re not real, not really real. Variety is the spice of life, for all things there is a season, gather ye rosebuds while ye may, the only certainty is change, time marches on.”

  “Hup hup,” he added miserably.

  Pulling off one glove, Kirila put her hand on his neck. The dense short fur was warm. A little of the hard bar of soap melted.

  “I wonder why it is,” she said reflectively, “that misery really does love company. It seems so selfish.”

  “Sheer perversity,” Chessie said. His tone was still sour, but he moved his head from side to side, so that her fingers scratched the muscles in his neck. She clutched the fur tighter.

  A few more snowflakes fell, as hesitantly as if they expected to be recalled. Below them the plain stretched away like a soiled bed sheet long abandoned on a damp mattress.

  “Come on,” Kirila said. “Let’s go in.”

  Five

  No, no,” Granny Isolda said, exasperated. “That brush is too thick. Can’t you see what a thick line there will do to the proportions?” She loomed over Kirila’s painting, a massive black shadow blocking out the north light from the one window in the tiny bedchamber.

  “I want a thick line there,” Kirila answered calmly. “That’s why I chose a thick brush.”

  Granny Isolda shook her head—there was paint in her hair of some exotic color, burnt sienna or rose madder or desert ochre, riding gaily on the tumbled white curls—and went back to her own easel. The small square chamber was cramped with two easels jockeying each other to catch the late afternoon light, but Granny Isolda never really noticed. Nor was she aware, except in the most functional sense, of the jumble of brushes and paint jars and canvas stretchers and half-eaten toast—there was a mouse carrying this away, bit by bit—and crumpled gowns and scribbled notes to herse
lf that overflowed the room’s coffer onto the floor and the window ledge and the unmade bed. A bouquet of dried flowers fastened to a holder on the stone wall flaked off brittle petals that fell impartially on everything below, like rain. Granny Isolda noticed only the completed paintings hung on the walls nearly to the ceiling, and the nearly completed one on her easel.

  Kirila noticed everything.

  She had been “taking lessons” from Granny Isolda all winter, and had completed three canvases: a bouquet of self-consciously picturesque nasturtiums in a cracked brown jug, a mother duck followed by a fuzzy yellow duckling with three feet (one lighter than the others in an attempt to paint over it), and an anemic dragon who seemed to be breathing steel wool. Granny Isolda could look at none of them without shuddering. Currently Kirila was doing a portrait of Chessie, who was posing alertly, one eye on the toast-carrying mouse.

  “What part of me are you making thick?” he asked, trying not to move his jaw.

  “Your tail. You have a thick tail.”

  “Not too thick.”

  “Wrecking the proportions,” Granny Isolda muttered. “Not that there’s much to wreck.” She bent closer over her own work.

  “Can I see it yet?” Chessie said sideways.

  “Not until it’s done.”

  “Granny Isolda lets people see her work in progress.”

  “Different artists,” Kirila said with malicious serenity, “have different working styles.”

  Granny Isolda snorted loudly and dipped her brush into the paint. She sometimes wondered why she was giving Kirila these hopeless “lessons,” why for the second half of every afternoon Kirila and Chessie were both up in her chamber, making it impossible to concentrate, why she had become warily fond of this quiet middle-aged woman with the stubborn, idiotic Quest at the core of her conventional aesthetic perceptions. But she didn’t wonder too hard; Granny Isolda was too well acquainted with herself to leave room for much wonder. She liked the vitality in their amiable bickering, she liked the fact that Kirila never complained about the bare hardiness of life at Coldwater Castle—most of the infrequent guests had caustic comments about the primitive bathroom facilities, and this guest was, after all, a queen—and she was flattered by Chessie’s great, uncritical praise of her work. In addition, Granny Isolda was lonely. It was good to sit in the evening with people who did not fall into preoccupied fits of wrestling with the double vision of the world as one saw it and the world as one transformed it for art. Even if one reserved every right to the fits oneself.