by Nancy Kress
“Meaning?”
“Yes, of course,” it said, leaning against a sagging tent pole on what might have been an elbow. The tent pole didn’t quiver. “Meaning. Truth. Direction. Relevance. Purpose. Something-Bigger-than-Oneself. The Nitty-Gritty. There’s a lot of that going around lately.”
“A lot,” Kirila repeated, bemused. She suddenly saw a collection of faces: Polly Stark’s looking up at the sky, Ap’s bending over the Book, Larek’s riding full tilt at Wek, Dorima’s smoothing her gown over her full hips. All the faces seemed to be growing on the same body, like a schizophrenic hydra, regarding each other with astonished suspicion.
“Then,” Kirila asked, her voice slowed by a curious disappointment, “Then all meanings that people...there can be...one just chooses?”
The hissing bat laugh was sibilant enough to make the tent walls quiver. “Why on earth,” the cloak said with scorn, “would you imagine you have a choice?”
It laughed again, this time with exasperated wonder. “You can’t choose what has meaning for you, like a pick from a litter of free puppies. Meaning is not that domesticated. It’s a cat.”
“A cat?” Kirila said. Chessie’s ears pricked up involuntarily.
“You know, you have a really annoying habit of echoing words and phrases. Yes, a cat. Meaning lives where it chooses, comes when it wishes, and, if you’re really lucky, breeds a messy passel of kittens in your closet a11 over your best shoes.” The cloak sighed. “You really had to ask that—I can’t imagine what kind of world must be gong on out there. Now for you, obviously, the question is the answer. Come, Dog, you do better. Make it worth my time. It takes Force to do this a couple of times a century, you know.”
Chessie took one quivering step forward. “I’ve been enchanted,” he explained in eager little squeaks. “I was a great prince, and a Wizard enchanted me into...this.”
“What Wizard?” the cloak shot back.
“Mogolord,” Chessie whispered; the effort seemed to exhaust him. His purple muzzle wrinkled in pain and his hind legs shook. Kirila realized that she had never before heard the Wizard’s name.
The canvas cloak looked impressed, although it was difficult to say exactly how it did this: a certain straightening of folds and a quick upward jerk of the wavering edge of the empty hood.
“Perhaps this is worth while, after all,” it said thoughtfully. “You want to be disenchanted?”
“Yes,” Chessie seemed to be trying to breathe; he added quickly, “Oh, please, yes!”
“Well, then, roll over. Oh, don’t look so offended—it’s standard procedure with all vertebrate enchantments. The heart’s underneath, you know. Now, if you had been turned into a spider...” It began a long, scholarly monologue on the location of the vital organs in various phyla, ending with a paean to the praying mantis, for its sturdy carapace.
Chessie lay on his back, his four paws in the air. Kirila knelt beside him, flashing a warning look at the canvas. Her hands were trembling. Above them the cloak finished its lecture and began to sway and chant in a slippery sing-song, dark words so ancient that clouds of dust billowed from their uttering and choked the stale air. Kirila sneezed.
The purple dog body began to twitch convulsively in time to the swaying of the cloak. The seizures grew more violent, and when Kirila reached out a hand to touch Chessie, she screamed and snatched it back, the fingers charred. “You’re burning him!” she cried hysterically. “Stop it! Stop it!” There was a blinding spasm of blue light, a wind that came from everywhere and nowhere, and a crash like the falling of a mountain, a mountain spewing rocks clear to Talatour...
When the dust had settled, Kirila was holding in her arms the wrinkled bald head of an old, old man, dressed in the pointed shoes and Harlequin tights of a jester, and around his wizened wrists and ankles were strings of tiny, tinkling silver bells.
●●●
“Kirila,” the old man quavered. Several teeth were missing from his sunken mouth and the word came out with extra, softly-clinking syllables: Kirl-lil-il-a.
“Shh, Chessie, don’t try to talk...Chessie?”
“Not a prince,” he said flatly. It hurt her to look at his face, terrible with mourning and betrayal. “I remember now. Not...what I thought I was. A jester!”
“It’s all right, all right,” she crooned, rocking him gently. “Look at the rich life traveling jesters lead—that you must have led! Exotic adventure, meeting people from kings to cowherds, seeing the world...”
“You don’t have to recruit me,” the bald man said irritably, and a little shock ran over Kirila—he sounded so much like the old Chessie. But, of course, he was...Chessie?
“That Wizard made me believe...Mogolord...” It didn’t seemed to hurt him, now, to pronounce the Wizard’s name, but Kirila held the wizened body more tightly, just in case. All at once he cried out, “I wish I’d stayed as Chessie and just become the dog!”
“No, you don’t!” Kirila cried. With a sudden pain so great it blinded her, she saw that his hands were twisted with an arthritis far more advanced than her own, the bones grown grotesquely through the joints and pinning them in fixed positions. Between the mangled joints and dirty nails were old stubborn callouses, in all the right places for plucking a lute. “You don’t mean that—you didn’t want to be a dog!”
“No. I wanted to be a prince, because you...are a princess.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter!” she cried. “Chessie, how could you think it mattered?”
“Deeper than bones,” he croaked, and she stared at him, not remembering, frantic because she saw at the corners of his mouth the first drops of blood, pale pink in the foaming spittle.
“I wasn’t this bad before,” the old man gasped. “Must have aged, even when the dog body didn’t...twenty-seven more years! And I was seventy-two when I was enchanted. Mogolord didn’t miss a trick, did he?”
“Oh, Chessie, there must be something we can do!”
“I doubt it—weren’t you listening to our fabric friend? We don’t have much choice,” he said, and fell into a paroxysm of coughing. Kirila clutched him tighter, murmuring wordless panicky reassurances, until the spasm passed. As she bent over him, the ends of her reddish-gray hair fell lightly over his unfamiliar, senseless hands. The silver bells tinkled faintly.
When the coughing had stopped, the old man said with querulous bitterness, “He might have at least left me my lute. We...I...we?...are going to need my lute, since apparently I don’t inherit a crown. Mogolord could have left me my lute!”
Just in time, Kirila stopped herself from glancing at his hands, which could never hold a lute again. She stopped her eyes in mid-glance, when the deep muscles had already received the signal to move but the eyeballs had not yet acted on it, and the resulting eye spasm, like a rope jerked one way and then instantly counterjerked, momentarily made her cross-eyed. As soon as she saw that Chessie had not yet realized about his arthritis, or about the slow dribble of pink blood, she determined with a fierce protectiveness that he should not realize about them. Feverishly Kirila began to talk, her distracting words tumbling out with such unthinking swiftness that they seemed not so much to be born within her as to flow through her, from somewhere else, like a spring rushing through numb rock.
“A crown doesn’t matter, Chessie, not to a real prince—it just doesn’t matter, it’s only an ornament, like earrings. What matters is the princely actions—keeping the royal code of honour, and serving the kingdom heroically in times of stress, and just sort of setting the tone of the place, for better or worse. Well, you did all that! What prince could have been more heroic or more princely about saving my life? You just tell me that!”
“You’d have swum out anyway,” the old man said, still querulous, but with a gleam of interest in his shrunken eyes.
“I don’t mean when I fell in the river. Any run-of-the-mill knight without armour could have pulled me out of that. No—I mean all those times you saved me from worse than those usual dreary dragon
s and ravaging giants. Three times, Chessie—including the last one, just last year at Talatour, I wouldn’t have had the simple courage to leave if you hadn’t arrived, and what would I have become if I’d stayed? What had I become? You saved me, Chessie. You were my noble protector, just like you promised that first time with the bat, you remember! You were always my most noble protector, saving me from myself!”
The decrepit face considered thoughtfully. “It’s a pity you couldn’t have returned the favor,” he said finally, but as he spoke he smiled, a bright warm smile with no shadow of the querulous bitterness. Kirila caught her breath in wild hope. The next moment, however, another spasm of coughing seized him, jerking the frail body as helplessly as a petal in the wind. When it had passed, the blood rushing onto Kirila’s tunic was no longer pink.
“Chessie...” Her mind went empty and for a moment she groped, blind, but then she had it.
“Chessie, listen. Listen to me. It’s like Granny Isolda. Yes, exactly like—just listen. She taught me, taught us, to see. Remember? To look at her paintings all the way through, down clear to the bottom, and disregard the shapes I thought I saw lying on the top of the canvas. Remember? The paintings of the apple tree, and the golden smoke, and...and the crown. And behind the paint and brushwork, all the time, was the real...I don’t know, the real matter. Living. The crown wasn’t just a certain round shape with points, it was...everything. Everything about everyone who had worn it, what they had done, what they had made it into. And you’re just the same!”
“I’m a certain round shape with points?” Chessie said, and the tremor in his voice, painful with hope, made her plunge on.
“Everything you ever did, what it made you into. Like the paintings. No difference. And what it made you into was a prince. Like with the paintings. A prince royal—Prince Chessie! You became Prince Chessie, and you are Prince Chessie! You are!”
The old man smiled. The smile still held a tremor, a remaindered skepticism, like the wobble of aspen leaves after the storm has passed on. But there was no wobble in the eyes. They looked at Kirila from the wrinkled face with the steadiness of bedrock, untouchable under the storm. Kirila felt herself go quiet under that look, itself so quiet with the proud, silent steadiness of kings.
“Prince Chessie,” she said formally.
“My Lady Kirila.”
“Do you feel...will you be able to...”
“No,” he said quietly. “I won’t.” After a moment he added, “Kirila, it doesn’t matter now.”
“Chessie—”
“It really doesn’t,” he said. In the still gloom his face shone faintly, like silver in a cave wall. The twisted hands were at rest on his lap, and from somewhere came thin music, or the remembrance of music, the plucking of a lute and the chiming of tiny, silvery bells. Kirila turned her head, looking for the musicians, and as she did so there was a terrible, final spasm of coughing. When it was done, the music had stopped.
She crouched over him, cradling the bald head in her bloody lap. The dark tent grew darker, and outside the small sunset noises began, crickets and tree frogs and the occasional low, cool call of a wigyn, homing toward the sheltering rampart.
When finally Kirila straightened and looked wearily around, it was twilight. The canvas cloak had collapsed upon itself and lay in the corner, a bundle of rags. The wind had stopped, and the blown debris rested in untidy scattered piles. The face of the dead prince shone coldly. As Kirila reached out to close his eyes, she suddenly saw, even in the half light, that they were brown, a light yellow-brown, the clear warm brown of carmelized sugar.
●●●
There was a shovel in the corner of the tent, rusted and covered with old spider webs, but surprisingly sturdy. When she had finished, Kirila knelt dry-eyed by the raw grave. She hadn’t yet begun to think, or to feel. All her motions were jerky, as though she didn’t know what her body would do until it had done it. From somewhere inside her tunic she drew a dagger, scratched and unsharpened, pockmarked with little discolored indentations where once there had been jewels. She stuck it upside own on the grave; the cross-guard and hilt formed a battered cross. After a moment she pulled it out again, wiped off the mud, and tried to bend the dagger over on itself. The tough metal wouldn’t bend, so she hammered it with the handle of the shovel, working with numb concentration, her tongue stuck out at the corner of her swollen mouth. When the dagger had been shaped into a crude circle, she placed it on the exact center of the grave, measuring critically from all sides. One side of the crossguard was driven into the earth, to hold against the wind. The other crossguard thrust upward on the front of the circle.
By the time she finished, it was dark. There was no moon, but the star light shone brightly, lighting the defiant circle of the little hammered crown.
Nine
When Kirila woke, she was cold, and nowhere more than at the heart. Cold dew lay heavy on her hands, on her clothes, on the hard grass. Except for the pale ghosts of the last stars, the sky was blank. Around her the sagging tents flapped listlessly in the dawn wind.
Chessie?
She thought his name rather than said it, and when she understood that this meant she had already accepted his not answering to it, she repeated it aloud.
“Chessie?”
Cold dew lay heavy on her hands, on her clothes, on the hard grass.
“Chessie?”
Except for the pale ghosts of the last stars, the sky was blank.
“Chessie?”
Around her the sagging tents flapped listlessly in the dawn wind.
Fury swept through her, a fury so sudden that she first widened her eyes in surprise, but then gave herself gratefully to its clean-winged assault, jumping up and flailing her arms over the raw grave.
“Chessie! You had no right to leave me here like this, do you hear me? No right. You got what you came for, yes you did! You got your disenchantment, even if it wasn’t what you hoped for you still got disenchanted, and I got nothing, nothing at all, I didn’t even—”
A wigyn landed on the grave. Kirila stopped flailing and stood still, her ricocheting fury coming to a sudden burning point, like loose sunlight focused through a lens. The tiny dragon hopped to the dagger-crown and began to preen, arching its body backwards to lick its wings with a miniscule darting tongue. In the blank light its crimson body was russet, the translucent wings dull as sleet. Kirila looked for a rock.
She didn’t find one, but the shovel still lay by the grave. Advancing on the wigyn with upraised shovel and a face not even Chessie would have recognized, something clenched inside her and turned over once, with edges sharp enough to slice bone. But she kept going, focused to burning, clenching the rusty shovel, and the whole rest of her life she had to wonder if she would have used it if the wigyn had not spoken.
“What’s at the Heart of the World?”
Kirila screamed and dropped the shovel. Probably the question alone would have made her drop it; no one had told her that wigyns could talk. But the scream came because the wigyn spoke clearly, indisputably in the voice that belonged to Ap.
Dropping to her knees—she narrowly missed landing on the shovel—Kirila covered her face with her hands. After a moment she peered through her fingers. The wigyn finished licking its wings and started on its forelegs, lifting each with dainty precision and being fastidious about the skin between the claws. When it had finished, it spread the wet wings and flew away. Kirila began to shake, each separate sliced bone rattly and lost.
Behind the draggled tents, the sun rose hard and red.
The second wigyn came at noon. It alighted on the dagger-crown and furled its miniature wings. Through them the mid-day sunlight glittered hard as diamonds. Kirila held her breath.
“What is at the Heart of the World?”
It was the hoarse whisper of the white jer-falcon at Polly Stark’s window, so exact in its riveting cadence that the jer-falcon might as well have been saying Ay l’endith melan kel. Kirila waited for the dark rushin
g to fill her ears, for the brilliant fading of the landscape, for the cold sinking of the hard ground. When none of this happened, she felt so perversely cheated that she began to shout.
“What’s at the Heart of the World? I’11 tell you what’s at the Heart of World! Nothing! Zero! Naught! Pain and destruction and shabbiness and dirt and...and...” Her voice faltered, then rose in a wild jangle that gave back no echoes.
“...and death! That’s what’s at the Heart of the World!”
The wigyn furled and unfurled its wings a few more times, then wandered off before Kirila could pick up the shovel. It sniffed at a clover, executed a few sloppy half-gainers, and circled lazily upward. The thought cut through her bitterness that never had she seen flight less like a jer-falcon’s.
●●●
When the third wigyn came, her fury had frozen. It iced her to the ground, cross-legged, cross-armed, and crystalline. Around her the grass leaned away and withered on one side.
The wigyn landed, turned around twice, and settled down to sleep.
“Ssso what’ssss at the World’ssss Heart, Princesssss?”
“You’re out of order,” Kirila said coldly. “The bat came first.” She waved the wigyn away with an arm gesture as explosive as ice cracking. It woke up and flew off.
Behind her the sun set, pale and thin as slush.
●●●
All the long night she paced. Light-headed from no food, she paced the triangular space between the three tents, never out of sight of the grave. Thirty strides from the first tent to the second, twenty-eight to the third, thirty-one back to the first if she turned her heel slightly side-ways on the last step. Over and again she whispered to herself that the bat’s voice had proven that the chronology was irrelevant, it could be any voice coming from the next wigyn, it didn’t have to be Larek’s. Maybe no wigyn would come at all, nothing would happen at midnight, she would just change direction and pace on back to the gate. There was nothing holding her here any longer. She would change direction and leave now, before she had to listen to some sunburned gnat use the young voice that had once told her...she would change direction and leave. Once, not changing direction, she paused near the grave and bent down, groping for the gray clods as if they were illusions.