by Nancy Kress
At midnight tiny wings whirred softly. Kirila squeezed her eyes shut, but when she opened them, a long time later, the wigyn was still there. It didn’t preen, or furl, or sleep. It gazed at her steadily, motionless, out of eyes the green of stained-glass windows on Easter morning. She started to close her eyes again, but the wigyn’s voice was not the young Larek. It was the Larek of the last boar hunt, the Larek of the feathered hunting cap over the bewildered middle-aged eyes, the Larek of the wrinkles like stiff waves on a frozen pond.
“Kirila—what’s at the Heart of the World? Really?”
She put out her hand, as if she were shielding the green eyes from the sagging tents, or as if she were falling. “I don’t know, Larek. I don’t know.”
The wigyn gazed at her a moment longer before it flew off, disappearing into the moonlight as Kirila’s tears finally came in great messy rushes. She sobbed and cried and swiped at her running nose, which turned red and crusted and swollen. But the tears themselves somehow changed in the falling, so that although they churned and sputtered off her blotched face in salty globs, they fell on Chessie’s grave in a pattering mist, gentle as spring rain.
She didn’t sleep, but lay quietly on the hard ground, curled on her side as lightly as a child. Just before dawn, as she had known it would, the wigyn landed. It flitted lightly to the dagger-crown, gazing at her with eyes a normal wigyn yellow. Kirila stayed as she was, lying with her hands between her knees to keep them warm, and waited, not knowing for what. Her mind was available but not initiatory, like a tired child who will go to bed if told to but not otherwise. The last stars flickered overhead.
“What’s at the Heart of the World?” the wigyn asked, in Granny Isolda’s robust, no-nonsense voice. For the first time Kirila noticed that its mouth never moved. “Well, come on, what’s at the Heart of the World?”
“I don’t know,” Kirila said. “Tell me. Please tell me.”
The wigyn made an impatient tsk-tsk. “Well, look. Look again.”
“But—”
“Look again. See.” It flew off, wings beating efficiently. Kirila didn’t watch it go. She sat up, forcing her saggy body with the tractable obedience that comes after hard sobbing, and tried to See. That proved too difficult, so she tried to merely think. The thinking felt odd, as though great slow air masses were shifting around behind her forehead, creating unaccustomed isobars and pressure zones.
“I wish that you had ever been able to see more than one thing at a time,” Chessie had once told her. Now, through her wept-out detachment, she tried. At first nothing came. The nothing was rather pleasant, cool and grey, and she would have been sorry to see it go if she could have roused herself to feel at all. After the nothing came one picture, then two, then a jumble that spilled out like a tureen of mixed vegetables, different in actual fact but sharing a communal buttery flavor.
Her bedroom at Castle Kiril. Her spur, dented on one side. Her third-form Latin workbook, with the serpent doodlings in the margin. Her favorite cushion, green velvet with button ends. Her yellow satin gown. Her burned apple tart. Her tapestry of the Creation of the Natural World. Her white feather, her crumbling map, her bunch of violets in a silver bowl. Her sling for her ten-year-old broken arm. Her favorite smells, cinnamon and horses; her favorite sound, rain on her roof; her favorite flower, goldenrod in October, her favorite...
She closed her eyes and slept.
●●●
When the last wigyn came, Kirila didn’t see it land. She opened her eyes and it was there, light and miniature, natural as air.
“Kirila,” said Chessie’s voice. “What’s at the Heart of the World?”
“I am,” Kirila said.
There was a light, unobtrusive noise, like music being played a long way off, and a brief second of sweet darkness. Then before her was a magnificent city of tents, rising on a grassy plain. They were made of silk, brocade, velvet, and other rich fabrics impractical for tents, striped and watered and flocked and embroidered with lions passants and chevrons d’argent and tiny fleurs-de-lys of gold thread that sparkled in the clear sunshine. Before each door hung a tapestry, Arachne-woven with silver-horned unicorns and jewelled crests and caroling angels so alive that their song floated on the crystal air. A gay warm breeze fluttered the flags and banners and pennants that lightly crowned the city, and the same breeze billowed the sides of the bright pavilions gently in and out, like breathing.
Kirila stood up and turned around slowly. She touched a red velvet wall; the velvet rippled richly under her finger, light flowing off it in crimson and scarlet and a nubbly magenta. It was all as real as blood.
Only the grave remained the same, bare and raw, crowned with a tarnished, bent dagger. The wigyn still perched on the crown. Kirila stood over it. She stood with the straight-limbed ease of heroes, clear-eyed and far-seeing, her weight lightly borne by her own power. Something about her was terribly wrong.
The wrong lay in her face. Power shone there, too, in the angular curve of her cheek-bone, the firm set of her nostrils, the steady lance of her eyes on Chessie’s grave. Power sheathed her face like a helmet. She looked as though she could never be duped, would never mistake desire for truth, could never give herself to a world not of her own making. It gave her a shining glow, white and cold as forged starlight. She was dazzling.
“Well,” said a voice behind her. Kirila turned slowly, a poised shining gesture perfect as marble. The canvas cloak stood behind her. It was still empty, but the crumpled fabric seemed to have been cleaned and ironed; it fell in crisp khaki folds with the sheen of good starch. Kirila watched it without surprise.
“So you found what’s at the Heart of the World,” the cloak said conversationally.
“Yes,” said Kirila. Her voice was strong and clear as diamonds.
“Quite a good job,” the cloak said. “The tapestries, especially. It’s been centuries since anyone did decent tapestries. The fellow before you—well, you saw what the place looked like when you came in. That one over there now, with the chevrons d’argent, that’s a tapestry anyone would admire. Very impressive color work. Almost museum quality, I should think.”
Kirila said nothing. She stood quietly in her self-starred power, like a solitary sun in a distant sky.
“The dog, now—I’m sorry about that. Still, I did the best I could. It wasn’t my fault things didn’t work out for him. I did my part.”
“Things did work out for him,” Kirila said in her diamond voice. Error in that voice would have been cosmically shocking, like planets being revolved around by suns.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Things did work out,” Kirila repeated. “For him.”
The cloak peered behind her, then behind itself, and finally, vaguely, overhead.
“He’s dead,” Kirila said, still in that clear, remote voice.
“But he found the Heart of the World?”
“He did.”
“How?”
She looked calmly out over the plain. The emerald grass shone with sunlight.
“Through me.”
“Ah,” said the cloak. It shifted a little, and the starched folds rustled. “Then the Heart of the World is located in yourself.”
Kirila didn’t answer.
“You shape the world, and you alone. But you already see that, don’t you? Of course you do. Just you alone, Number One, making the world for yourself however you want it to be. You in control. Just look, for example, at these tents—beautiful work, really, I wish I had your sense for fabric—and look at your face. No outside falcons or Holds or fool butterfly things could mislead you now, could they? You fill the Heart of the World. No room for anything else.”
Kirila shrugged. It was the kind of shrug that greets a self-evident remark: the neighbor who yells “Cold out today” when your eyelashes have iced together. The shrug rippled her shining vigor from the inside, like an unseen current billowing a sunlit sea. The cloak bent forward. Its empty hood seemed to be searching her face
for something it didn’t find.
“Of course, the dog didn’t know that. Something else besides his own quest was snagged in the center of his world.”
Kirila said nothing. Her face had the cool smoothness of white glass.
“Technically,” the cloak said, “he shouldn’t have been allowed in at all, except that he came with you. He didn’t have the Quality. The test rules out those without the Quality.”
A long moment passed. Finally Kirila asked, “What was the Quality?” and the canvas twitched in triumph.
“Why, complete single-heartedness. Giving yourself to one thing at a time. The quality of heroes and martyrs, all those who strive for perfection. You can’t go littering up perfection with trivialities and contradictions and ‘yes, but’s.’ Everything has to fit. One thing or another. A is always A. An exact measure for the absolute center. Like the exact degree for absolute zero.”
The cloak extended one canvas panel and bent it back toward its face, as though examining non-existent fingernails. “Of course,” it added carelessly, “you might want to give some sort of thought to how martyrs and heroes generally end up.”
Kirila had stopped listening. She gazed past him at the tent city she had called into being, gazing not critically but with a calm acknowledgement of its existence that held no arrogance and no wonder. The white power shone from her like a corona. The hood sighed, a low rustling of starched canvas.
“Still,” it said, “they are beautiful pavilions. Especially the brocade. But brocade isn’t too practical for tents, you know. Could anyone actually live in them?”
“I could,” Kirila said, and walked toward the gate. She moved with an easy, strong stride, the stride of perfect kings in perfect paintings. Behind her the canvas cloak was left appreciatively examining the jewelled crest over a pavilion door, but Kirila didn’t turn to watch him do it. He would leave no fingerprints.
●●●
The peasant boy was waiting for her in the same position she left him, like a royal guardsman on duty. He bowed again, a little less clumsily—he had had three days to practice—and started to ask about the dog. But, straightening up from his bow, he saw her face.
He was still half a child, and he fell back with a shriek that slid mid-way into a whimper. Then he remembered the half that was not a child and scrambled up to his feet so that he could drop down again, gracelessly, to one knee. Terror splayed over his round features. Looking at her ruined, perfect face shining with white power enough to shape a world, the boy felt his stomach shrivel into uselessness. Digestion was impossible in front of that face. Everything he had ever done or thought or been was impossible, paltry and tinny, in front of that face. But he could not look away.
Kirila started to pass from the kitchen. Behind her the terrified child heard himself croak, “My Lady!”
She turned, waiting.
The boy stood up. His face was so pale that on it appeared freckles not even his mother had ever seen. His shriveled stomach was heaving now, and he had wet his pants. But still he managed to get it said.
“My Lady—let me go with you. On. Your. Quest.”
She looked at him. His skinny bravado held even under her white single-truthed look, even though he knew, confusedly, that she was seeing an unwashed peasant child, uneducated, soaked at his crotch, and about to throw up.
“Please let me go, my Lady! I could hunt and scrub for you! I could make campfires! I could...I could be your noble protector!” And then he sobbed, because it was such a stupid thing to say, and because he was so terrified both that she would not take him and that she would.
But Kirila said, “My what?” The child didn’t answer, having turned to retch into a slop bucket, screening the retching with one pitiful outstretched hand.
“My what?” she said again, but not to the child. Her face was breaking up.
The white power was collapsing inward. Before the boy spoke, it lay over her face, sheathing it with shining, and the next moment it was sinking away, like light absorbed by black velvet. Just below her skin the perfect shining met the blotchy hectic grief, and their mingling made Kirila turn white, then gray, then a horrible painful maroon, as though she couldn’t breathe. The boy forgot to wipe his fouled mouth and stared at her, paralyzed. Before he could move, it was over, and she was Kirila again.
She knew she was Kirila again, whole, and that for a time she hadn’t been, although she hadn’t been anyone else, either. The contradiction held her momentarily still, but she wasn’t afraid of it. The soaked-in power was within her and she would seldom be afraid again, and never of contradictions. Standing in the middle of the dark kitchen, its corners shadowed the color of Chessie’s fur, she saw the old jester’s burnt-sugar eyes, and the last of the glass-smooth shining sank from her face, leaving the ridges and valleys of a real, rich, inhabited country.
The boy sank to both knees.
When she raised him, her arm trembled a little, but the gesture was sure, and she smiled. The child caught his breath.
“How old are you, boy?”
“Ten! Almost eleven! Oh, please take me with you, my Lady! I want to go on a real Quest! There’s nothing around here that’s really important, I want to see things and learn things! I want an adventure!” He was not afraid of her any more; it had something to do with the smile.
Kirila put out her hand. His cheek was soft as a fawn.
“Eleven.”
“Almost twelve!”
“Almost twelve.”
“Next month, my Lady! Just next month and I’ll be twelve!”
“Listen to me,” Kirila said. She added, “Listen, my Lord,” and the child wriggled with pleasure.
“It’s not yet your time, my Lord. There are a lot of things I have to do, and you are still too young to help me do them. I have to Quest south—”
“South!” breathed the boy. “The sea is south!” His round eyes widened, and in them she could see the dream naked: watery thunders and moonlit silences and grey-green waves whispering the world’s secrets to him alone. The sea. South.
“South,” she said, as gently as she could. “And it is not your time yet. It really isn’t, my Lord. No, don’t sulk—listen to me. When it is your time, and you do go for your Quest, don’t let anyone stop you—”
“Oh, I never would!”
“—or delay you. Consider carefully everything you see, and consider it all at once, if you can, and remember that...remember that...”
Kirila stopped. The child was waiting eagerly, standing on tiptoe in his thick peasant boots, for the words of wisdom from the powerful foreign queen. He didn’t recognize that he had just heard them. She studied him carefully, missing nothing: the curve of his plump cheek, the young red of his open mouth, the passionate ignorance mirrored in his dark eyes, so fervent to misunderstand whatever she told him.
“Remember,” she said slowly, “remember that purple is the sweetest color in the world.”
The child lowered his heels, disappointed. He started to protest but she smiled at him again and he blundered to one knee and bowed his head. Kirila would have raised him and told him all that bowing wasn’t necessary, but she saw that she wasn’t supposed to. She was supposed to leave him doing homage to her, the brave and mighty monarch from distant lands whom he had sworn to serve, the victorious champion of a fabled Quest. Elegance was called for. In a day or two, Kirila saw, he would probably nag his mother into weaving something purple for him to carry about on his farm chores. In a year she would have become a daydream, garlanded with the addition of seven mysteries and the subtraction of twenty years. He would call her Celestine, or Lucidida. In five years he would turn up at her drawbridge, prepared to swear fealty and slay giants, dressed in purple.
She could hear Chessie’s derisive snort, and she smiled with pain.
The boy stayed with bowed head until she waved to him from the edge of the forest. Then he scrambled up and waved frantically, watching her walk alone and with sure strides, her head
high. Never, he thought, had anyone walked on the ground like that—never. All in one piece she was, powerful and sad and gay and all alive-o.
The boy liked the cadence of this last thought and so repeated it several times, even though it wouldn’t scan. He made a little song out of it and chanted it to himself as he watched Kirila disappear into the forest, moving like a queen, questing south.
Afterword: Modest Expectations
The Prince of Morning Bells was my first novel. One’s first novel is like one’s first child: a unique and intense experience which no subsequent births, or books, can quite equal, the one that turns you into a mother, or an author. And, like parenthood, the entire experience of selling a book is always different from what you expected.
I didn’t expect the agent who handled the book to say ‘The Prince of Morning Bells’? Or ‘The Prints of Mourning Belles’? (Someday I’m going to get around to writing that second title.)
I didn’t expect to so fall in love with the original cover art, by Carl Lundgren. Most cover art for science fiction and fantasy, it seemed to me, was truly awful. But this was so appealing and so apt that I tried to buy the original at an art auction. It was beyond my budget, but I did buy one of Lundgren’s preliminary sketches, which still hangs on the wall in my study.
I didn’t expect my small son to read the book and become so upset that for years he refused to read anything I wrote in which “a nice person dies. Mommy! How could you do that!”
I didn’t expect as glowing reviews as I got, or as poor sales (go figure).
I didn’t expect so many readers and reviewers to identify my model for the book, Peter Beagle’s wonderful The Last Unicorn. In retrospect, I should have expected this; the resemblance in style is glaringly obvious. First-time novelists often learn by admiring imitation.