Whiskeyjack
Page 20
Its head faced away from us, oriented towards the north wall. That was the way corpses were laid out, with their faces towards the pole. I was glad that someone had decided to honour the dragon that way, and wondered who it had been.
It was the colour of green jade, the colour of my mother’s honey-crock, and of the well-head between village green and white-washed inn in the village of St-Noire, which between them had held two answers to its riddle.
Its tail narrowed, then flared at the tip to a flattened portion shaped like the spade in a deck of cards or one of the heart-shaped leaves of the Tillarny limes of the Woods. Golden spikes ran the length of its spine, culminating in the great crown of golden horns around its head. One wing was folded tightly against its side, the other outstretched until the spine on the end of its leading rib touched the far wall.
The dust motes eddied in the draught from the open door. They passed through the shafts of light pouring in from the high windows, now brilliant, now invisible. When I had run through the Woods in the hours before midnight, running to reach the village of St-Noire to answer the dragon’s riddle, fireflies in their hundreds of thousands had filled the darkness around me in a river of light like the River of Stars famous from the poets.
“It is very definitely a dragon,” pronounced my grandmother, and with that I recalled the party at my back.
I sneezed, half out of habit, and beckoned the Scholars and Inspector Quent to follow me to its head. My father said, “I’ll tell the Darts and the General that we’re here,” and departed. I wrestled with an incongruous hurt that he did not want to examine the dragon his son had slain. We did ought to tell the Squire we were here; and he could not say what he thought with so many strangers present; and ... and I was disappointed.
“Who was that man?” demanded the Marchioness: a better question than she knew.
“My great-uncle’s companion,” Hal replied easily. “Will you take my arm, Marchioness?”
I turned back to my little group. “This is Inspector Quent,” I said, and looked hopefully at Dominus Lukel.
“Dominus Vitor of Quance, Professor of Anatomy, and Domina Enory of Oakhill, whose specialties include magical creatures and curses.”
She smiled reassuringly. “Just in case. There are stories about dragons and their effects.”
I stared with sinking heart at the dragon. All I needed was for it to have been exerting a baleful influence across the barony.
“You do not seem to have inflicted any injuries back here,” Inspector Quent said thoughtfully. “Will you—that is, if the Scholars are amenable, would you please take us through the battle as it appeared to you?”
“Certainly,” I replied, trying to sound enthusiastic, and led them to the head and the ruined eye. I stared at it for a moment, then transferred my attention to Dominus Lukel, whom I knew best. “We were, as you heard, in a large pavilion out in the field. Hal and I had entered the cake competition. We’d just finished our entry, I was still holding a cake knife and a spatula, one in each hand, when I noticed that part of the roof was on fire.”
I paused there while Hal and my grandmother joined us. Hal smiled at me. I felt relieved to have him there with me, as he had stood beside me on other occasions. “The dragon was silhouetted against the canvas when we looked up. Everyone froze. It climbed down through the hole its fire had made.” I made a vague gesture to indicate its motion. “It stopped in front of my uncle, who was petrified with fright. The dragon smiled at him and said something about him being a fine rabbit for the eating. No one else did anything so I said ‘Hey!’ and the dragon looked at me.”
I wouldn’t mention that Mrs. Etaris, of all present, had been the only other person to grope for a weapon. Dominus Lukel smiled with eager interest. “What did you do then?”
The side door of the grange opened. Ben and Sir Hamish came in, half-hidden by the folded wing and out of my direct line of vision. I swallowed disappointment (was my father not coming at all?) and turned back to Dominus Lukel.
“I asked it what it was doing. Coming for its payment, it said. Then it opened its mouth and started to go back towards my uncle.”
“Yes?” Inspector Quent’s voice was all mild encouragement. “You saw the dragon turning with open mouth towards your uncle, and?”
“I didn’t want him to be eaten.”
“Of course not.”
No need to go into all the details of my vindictive desire for him to pay for what he had done, which at the time I was half-convinced was the murder of his brother my father.
“There was no time to think, nor any need to. All I thought was that Dominus Lukel had told us that a dragon’s three weaknesses were its eyes, its armpits, and the very base of its jaw, at the top of its throat. All I had were the spatula and the cake knife, so I—” I stopped, frowned. “I can’t remember if I threw the spatula first or vaulted the table.”
“Vaulted the table,” said Hal.
“Right. I vaulted the table—our table, that was—then jumped onto the one next to my uncle, and then I threw the spatula into the back of its throat to make it swallow.” I started to act out the motions, finding my memory clear with the movements. Dominus Lukel was nodding with great encouragement. “The dragon swung its head at me. For a moment its jaw was exposed but I could see a glow and I thought, I didn’t want to stab into its fire, and then there was the palate—I suppose we can see if it’s really asbestos? We had a debate in class about that, and I didn’t want to chance it in the moment.”
“Dear Emperor,” said Inspector Quent faintly.
“Shh,” said Dominus Lukel.
I gestured with the hand that had held the knife. “So when it came towards me, I jumped and grabbed hold of one of its horns—I’d thrown the spatula, did I say that?—and got my knees to grip on either side of its snout, and stabbed down into its eye with the cake knife. I was worried I would miss the optic nerve opening ... we had talked about that, too.”
Inspector Quent walked up to peer at the knife. Its hasp was barely visible in the congealed jelly of the eye; the bent tip stuck out about an inch at the base of the skull.
“I was worried I would miss the brain,” I said, a bit lamely.
Dominus Lukel said, “Jemis is one of the finest students I have ever had.”
“He clearly inherited his father’s battle-courage,” murmured Inspector Quent, shaking his head.
The Chancellor inclined her head to me. “We are very proud to have had Mr. Greenwing as a student at Morrowlea.”
“Oh yes,” breathed Dominus Vitor, but his attention (thank the Lady) was on the dragon. “May I?”
“Please,” said Sir Hamish, coming forward to introduce himself. Domina Enory drew from her reticule a handsome pair of hand-held spectacles made of wood, silver, and crystal.
I found Hal beside me, and behind him Mr. Dart (and when had he come in?). “Zauberi glasses,” Hal said, indicating the spectacles. “To show magic in visible form.”
We watched the Scholars at work. Domina Enory continued her examination through the glasses. Dominus Lukel, Dominus Vitor, and the Chancellor began measuring various external features of the dragon. They quickly drew Hal, Mr. Dart, Inspector Quent, and me to assist with this task.
I was vaguely aware of other comings and goings. Someone brought chairs for the Marchioness and General Ben, so they could sit in estate to watch us work and gossip of times, people, and places long since gone. I rather wanted to listen to their tales, half-hearing names out of poetry and history. I consoled myself that there would be other occasions. Tales from the Astandalan court was something I could ask my grandmother about next time I had a dining engagement with her.
Eventually they ran out of externalities to measure. The rest of us drew back to allow Dominus Vitor and Domina Enory to discuss the best way to anatomize the dragon without indissolubly soiling the broad wooden planks of the grange floor. I found myself this time next to my father, who had returned who-knew-when in the proceed
ings. Perhaps he had been the one to bring the chairs for the General and the Marchioness.
We were a little apart from the others, close to the wall, not far from the great curve of the haunches. I wondered vaguely about how dragons reproduced, whether like basilisks they were made by magic and intent, whether they truly were mere (mere?) manifestations of chaotic magic, or whether they could mate and procreate like any other animal.
“I am glad you didn’t let it eat Vorel,” my father said softly. He leaned back against the wall, out of the slanting shaft of light. The dust motes were still still brilliantly dancing; the saffron-and-honey scent of the air was stronger. I sneezed, my throat thick, the malaise roiling my insides as the air grew heavier. It had been so much better when I’d been preoccupied with the numbers of measure and ratio.
“I was tempted,” I admitted very quietly. “That was right after I’d first begun to wonder if he had ... murdered ...”
“Thank you,” he said even more quietly.
My nose and throat ached. I turned my gaze firmly back to the activity around the carcass. Domina Enory had her glasses up again, to examine everything in the room—looking for traces of a blood curse?—including us as part of the audience.
I wished in fierce defiance of my constitution’s stupid weakness to magic and the hollowness left by the wireweed that I could shout out my father’s name, that he stood right there beside me. I turned my head at the thought to tell him that I was so glad that he was alive that I could almost not bear it—
Out of the corner of my eye I saw swift movement. I turned my head sharply. Domina Enory had crossed the space between us—and the moment was, once again, lost.
I took refuge in a clean handkerchief. She still had the glasses up; they made her eyes appear huge, the pupils distorted.
It was no surprise, really, when she said: “Young man, did you know you were cursed?”
Chapter Twenty-Four: Two Sticks and a Stone
“There is always the question,” wrote one of the poets of the ‘Two Sticks and a Stone’ school, “of what, precisely, is being revealed by being hidden in a code. If known to none it is dumb and pregnant of inaccessible meaning as an animal and not to be considered language; if known to one and one alone it is solipsism and worse than inaccessible, for it is as deliberately exclusive of all the rest of creation as a suicide; if known and knowable to all it is taken for granted and inaccessible through its lack of mystery. It is the code known by a few that creates an inexhaustible mystery in the space between sense and significance and sign. In short, it is the intimation of esoteric meaning that creates the poet and reveals through the commonplace the divine.”
Lady Pinel was generally held to be a better poet than theorist, but the passage had struck me and stuck with me. In the game of Poacher the signs of cards and sequence and interruption had a layer of sense, of meaning, that was accessible to anyone with half an hour’s instruction in the game. The deeper level of significance was built out of the doubled and redoubled encodings of the cards and their conjunctions.
The poems of the Two Sticks and a Stone poets were often read as simple, even naïve, descriptions of everyday objects, situations, and people. Unlike the more famous Voonran puzzle-poets whose works had inspired the school, the poems were not immediately and unabashedly difficult. The art of the Gainsgooding conspirators was cheerful, popular, even celebratory: only once one stumbled into an incongruity between sense and significance and sign—most often by seeing in a grouping of images or objects (or, still more, subjects) the echo of another style or school’s celebrated symbolic meanings—that one began to realize there might be a mystery in what had seemed opaquely and complacently bland.
Ariadne nev Lingarel wrote a lengthy narrative poem about her experiences in prison. For centuries it had been read as a fine example of a minor poet of the Entrian School, who were much given to autobiographical narrative poetry that at its best rose up into extraordinary acts of communion between one naked soul and its audience.
On Being Incarcerated in Orio Prison had a few such passages. These were excerpted in anthology collections of regional or period poets. Appreciative readers who turned to the full text were usually daunted by the thousands upon thousands of lines of beautifully turned poetry whose insights into nature or architecture or society were disappointingly never as powerful as those three or four passages where the poet cried out the state of her soul.
Paging through the volume, looking for the context of my favourite one of these, fresh off the correspondence with Mr. Dart about the Gainsgooding conspirators and the Two Sticks and a Stone poets, I had come across a sequence describing the furnishings in the fair Ariadne’s cell—and noted one odd, old-fashioned word for the fabric of a cushion.
If I had not just written a letter to Mr. Dart explaining why the word ebraöni was used by one of the conspirators not only because it was a much better metrical fit in the line than the usual word in Antique Shaian for wool but also because the literal translation, ‘mountain-cloud’, was used by a very famous Voonran haiku poet—the very one, indeed, whose book my father had carried with him everywhere—to refer not only to wool but to having the wool pulled over one’s eyes, like fog rolling down a mountainside.
Well, if I had not just written all of that in a letter, I, like all the rest of her readers, would also have passed over the fair Ariadne’s use of the word as metrically convenient and a pretty echo of Lo en Tai.
Half joking to myself I had begun to examine the poem using the tools I had learned for the Gainsgooding conspirators. Entirely to my amazement the competent, lovely, and mostly undistinguished poem began to reveal dizzying chasms between sign and sense and significance.
I had fallen steadily more ill as I tried to unfold even the beginning layers of meaning. I had gone on long runs; I had told Violet my half-baked theories that the poem was, first, an answer to the conspirators (who had never been connected with Ariadne’s near-contemporaneous treason; but then again some of the primary conspirators had never been identified except by the pregnant absences of certain key links in the games of the poets); and, secondly, a reflection of, even a revelation of, the secrets of the prison.
Not that any of this had been coherent to anyone but me.
Domina Enory took me to the back corner of the grange to work through what she described as my ‘most incredibly fascinating’ magical signature. My father was called over by Dominus Lukel to apply his strength to flipping over the dragon. As Mr. Dart’s arm prevented him from being of much assistance to this (considerable) effort, I waved him over to join us.
When I introduced him, Domina Enory gave him a cursory, mostly inattentive glance halfway through and halfway over her magical spectacles. Then she did a classic double take and lifted the glasses to examine him more carefully.
“And you,” she breathed.
Mr. Dart looked alarmed. “I say, domina!”
She lifted an ironic eyebrow. “You must expect some reaction to your arm?”
Relief flitted very quickly across his face. “Most people have not said anything, ma’am, except for how bad a break it must be to be so long healing.”
“It appears stable for the moment, so if you will concur I shall continue to examine Lord St-Noire first.”
“Certainly,” he said.
“Mr. Greenwing,” I corrected. I glanced across automatically at my father, who had set his shoulder to the dragon’s chest. Surely—
My thought went nowhere as Domina Enory moved her arm and an eddy of air brought saffron and sneezes to my nose.
“Excuse me,” I said when I could, smiling apologetically at her.
Domina Enory regarded me gravely through the Zauberi glasses. I felt as exposed and uncomfortable as when Sir Hamish turned a painterly eye on me. I should grow a beard, I thought inconsequentially; and wondered whether I would look more like my father if I did.
“Is there, Lord St-Noire—”
“Mr. Greenwing.”
Mr. Dart reached out and set his hand on my shoulder. I was grateful for the touch. I felt dizzy.
“The dragon ...”
“It is not the dragon.”
Domina Enory’s cool academic dryness almost masked her intense desire to know and to understand. Her regard was unwavering. “Mr. Greenwing, you appear—unsurprised, I might say, that there is a curse; deeply shocked that it is to do with that man; and yet almost immediately resigned to the fittingness of its being so.”
My face was far too open.
Mr. Dart’s fingers dug into my shoulder. One connected with a knot of tension, causing a kind of almost-pain to sproing through my system.
“Yes,” I said finally, dully, confused, and, yes, resigned, and, again, yes, expecting something else to happen.
“Please would you expand?”
She must be a good tutor. I wondered briefly whether I could conceivably go not for Law but instead for magic ... but at the end of a degree in Law I would have a useful profession. Lawyers were never out of fashion.
Mr. Dart said, “Perhaps the professor will be able to help you.”
I stepped back, and back again, away from his touch and her intensity. The back of my legs hit a chair and I half-fell into its seat. Domina Enory said nothing about any irregularity of conduct, instead coolly and composedly drawing another chair from the line along the wall in which to sit. Mr. Draw drew a third out to close the circle, which gave an illusion of privacy, if not security.
I took a deep breath. “Domina, may I have your word that you will keep these matters to yourself unless I tell you otherwise?”
She considered for a moment before nodding. I could see her regret for a lost paper (or, who knows, a monograph; I would not have been entirely surprised if I had a fascinating enough magical signature, by this point of the year, to warrant one). It took a moment, but I was able to make myself say, “I hope some of it, at least, will cease to be secret soon.”