Mirror Kingdoms: The Best of Peter S. Beagle

by Peter S. Beagle

  He would have buried her right then, if he could have, to keep the rock-targs from finding her body and learning that the Qu’alo were mortal and gone. But there wasn’t anything he could do, not for her, not for them, so he went away and he waited, the way she told him to. I can’t tell you how long—how long does it take insects, little animals to strip away the rotting flesh from a twelve-foot giant? All I know is, as long as it took, your Grandfather Selsim lived alone in the woods, same way he’d lived for eighteen years. Except now he slept in the giants’ old nests for the comfort of the smell, and he said he talked a lot to imaginary human beings, because he needed the practice after such a time of thinking Qu’alo thoughts in Qu’alo silence. And he thought about the world he almost remembered, and about what Yriadvele had asked of him, and whenever it was that he finally went back to the scaffold and pulled away the dead branches, there were the bones, and he knew what to do with them. You’re making faces again, stop it.

  No, there hadn’t been any rock-targs there, he could tell. They wouldn’t come anywhere near the smell of the Qu’alo, as they still won’t, all these years later. Your grandfather took Yriadveie’s bones, one by one, and he ground them up as fine as he could, stone against flat stone, and he ate them. No, I don’t know how long it took him, what they tasted like. I don’t know if he just ate them or drank them in water, or sprinkled them over some nice kami leaves. All I’m sure of is that he ate Yriadvele’s bones, all of them, and then he stood up from there and he walked back to the trail over Torgry Mountain, and on down the other side, and he kept walking. And in time he came to this flat, hazy country where we live today, and settled to farming, and married and started our family, all that time ago. And that’s the end of the story, and I’m in the barn, and you’re asleep, good night.

  What? Well, I told you, that’s why we’re all tall, that’s why I know you’ll be tall soon enough. Now do you understand me? We’re whatever’s left of the Qu’alo, you and me and the rest of our family—they’re in our bones now, because of your Grandfather Selsim and his giant friend. Mind, we just got a bit of their height that’s all; we didn’t get the hairiness or the stink—the gods do get something right once in a while. And if any of us got any of those great, slow, wonderful thoughts, I surely haven’t noticed it. But maybe those are inside you, who knows? Who knows what a little boy who can’t keep his eyes open to ask any more questions is thinking, hey? Good night, then, good night.

  What? In ten bloody years, that’s when I’ll have the strength to tell you another story. Most exhausting work I ever did. I swear I don’t know how your mother manages every night. And that bloody jejebhai’s going to wait till I’m finally asleep, I know that much for certain. Good night, boy. Let go of my hand. Good night.

  KING PELLES THE SURE

  Once there was a king who dreamed of war. His name was Pelles.

  He was a gentle and kindly monarch, who ruled over a small but wealthy and completely tranquil kingdom, beloved alike by noble and peasant, despite the fact that he had no queen, and so no heir except a brother to ensure an orderly succession. Even so, he was the envy of mightier kings, whose days were so full of putting down uprisings, fighting off one another’s invasions, and wiping out rebellious villages that they never knew a single moment of comfort or security. King Pelles—and his people, and his land—knew nothing else.

  But the king dreamed of war.

  “Nobody is ever remembered for living out a dull, placid, uneventful life,” he would say to his Grand Vizier, whom he daily compelled to play at toy soldiers with him on the parlor floor. “Peace is all very well—a fine thing, certainly—but do you ever hear ballads about King Herman the Peaceful? Do you ever listen to bards chanting the deeds of King Leslie the Calm, or read great national epics about King James the Docile, King William the Diplomatic? You do not!”

  “There was Ethelred the Unready,” suggested the Grand Vizier, whose back hurt from crouching over the carpet battlefield every afternoon. “Meaning unready for conflict or crusade, unwilling to slaughter needlessly. And King Charles the Good—”

  “But it is Charles the Hammer who lives in legend,” King Pelles retorted. “William the Conqueror—Erik Bloodaxe—Alfonso the Avenger—Selim the Valiant—Ivan the Terrible. Our own schoolchildren know those names… and why not,” he added bitterly, “since we don’t have any heroes of our own. How can we, when nobody ever even raids us, or bothers to challenge us over land or resources, or attempts to annex us, to swallow our little realm whole, as has happened to so many such lands in our time? Sometimes I feel as though I should send out a dozen heralds to proclaim our need of an enemy. I do, Vizier.”

  “No, sire,” said the Grand Vizier earnestly. “No, truly, you don’t want to do anything like that. I promise you, you don’t.” He straightened up, rubbing his back and smoothing out his robe of office. He said, “Sire, Majesty, if I may humbly suggest it, you would do well—as would every soul dwelling on this soil that we call home—to appreciate what you see as our insignificance. There is an old saying that there is no country as unhappy as one that needs heroes. Trust me when I say in my turn that our land’s happiness is your greatest victory in this life, and that you will never know another to equal it. Nor should you try, for that would show you both greedy and ungrateful, and offend the gods. I urge you to leave well enough alone.”

  Having spoken so, the Grand Vizier braced himself for an angry response, or at least a petulant one, being a man in late middle age who had served other kings. He was both astonished and alarmed to realize that King Pelles had hardly heard him, so caught up was he in romantic visions of battle. “It would have to be in self-defense, of course,” the king was saying dreamily. “We have no interest in others’ treasure or territory—we’re not that sort of nation. If someone would only try to invade us by crafty wiles, such as filling a wooden horse with armed soldiers and leaving it invitingly outside the gates of our capital city. Then we could set it afire and roast them all—”

  He caught sight of the horrified expression on the Grand Vizier’s face, and added hurriedly, “Not that we ever would, of course, certainly not, I was just speculating.”

  “Of course, sire,” murmured the Grand Vizier. But his breath was turning increasingly short and painful as King Pelles went on.

  “Or if they should come by sea, slipping into our port on a foggy night, we would be ready with a corps of young men trained to swim out with braces and augurs and sink their ships. And if they struck by air, perhaps dropping silently from the sky in dark balloons, our archers could shoot all them down with fire-arrows. Or if we could induce them to tunnel under the castle walls—oh, that would be good, if they tunneled—then we could….”

  The Grand Vizier coughed, as delicately as he could manage it, given the panicky constriction of his throat. He said, “Your Highness, meaning absolutely no disrespect, you have never seen war—”

  “Exactly, exactly!” King Pelles broke in. “How can one know the true meaning of peace, who has no experience of its undoubtedly horrid counterpart? Can you answer me that, Vizier?”

  “Majesty, I have known that experience,” the Grand Vizier replied quietly. “It was far from here, in a land I traveled to as a boy. I shared it with many brave and dear and young friends, who are all dead now—as I should have been, but for the courtesy of the gods, and the enemy’s poor aim. You have missed nothing, my lord.”

  He seemed to have grown older as he spoke, and the king—who may have been foolish, but who was not a fool—saw, and answered him equally gently. “I understand what you are telling me, good Vizier. But this would be only a little war, truly—no more enduring or consuming than one of our delightful carpet clashes. A manageable war—a demonstration, one might say, just to let our rivals see that our people are not to be trifled with. In case they were thinking about trifling. Do you see the difference, Vizier? Between this war and yours?”

  With another king, the Grand Vizier would have considered
long and carefully before risking the truth. With King Pelles, he had no such fears, but he also knew his man well enough to recognize when hearing the truth would make no smallest difference to what the king decided to do. So he said only, “Well, well, be sure to employ great precision in choosing your foe—”

  “Our foe,” King Pelles corrected him. “Our nation’s foe.”

  “Our foe,” the Grand Vizier agreed. “We must, whatever else we do, select the weakest enemy available—”

  “But that would be dishonorable!” the king protested. “Ignoble! Unsporting!” He was decidedly upset.

  The Grand Vizier was firm in this. “We are hardly a nation at all; we are more like a shire or a county with an army. A distinctly small army. A more powerful adversary would destroy us—that is simply a fact, my king. You cannot manage a war without attention to facts.”

  He was hoping that his sardonic emphasis on the notion of managing such a capricious thing as war might deter King Pelles from the whole fancy, but it did not. After a silence, the king finally sighed and said, “Well. If that is what a war is, so be it. Consider our choices, Vizier, and make your recommendation.” He added then, rather quickly, “But do arrange for a gracious war, if you possibly can. Something… something a little tidy. With songs in it, you know.”

  The Grand Vizier said, “I will do what I can.”

  As it turned out, he did tragically better than he meant. Perhaps because King Pelles had never wanted to know it, he truly had no notion of how deeply his land was hated for its prosperity on the one hand and coveted on the other. The Grand Vizier had hoped to engineer a very brief war for the king, quickly over, with minimum damage, disruption or inconvenience to everyone involved, and easily succeeded in tempting their little country’s nearest neighbor to invade (in the traditional style, as it happens, by marching across borders). But his plan went completely out of control in a matter of hours. Wise enough to lure a weaker country into a foolish attack, he was as innocent, in his own way, as his king, never having considered that other lands might be utterly delighted to join with the lone aggressor he had bargained for. An alliance of territories which normally despised each other formed swiftly, and King Pelles’s land came under siege from all sides.

  Actually, it was no war at all, but a massacre, a butchery. There was a good deal of death, which was something else the king had never seen. He was still shaking and crying from the horror of it, and the pity, and his terrible shame, when the Grand Vizier disguised them both as peasant women and set them scurrying out the back way as the flaming castle came down, seeming to melt and dissolve like so much pink candy floss. King Pelles looked back and wept anew for his home, and for his country; and the Grand Vizier remembered the words of Boabdil’s mother when the Moorish king looked back in tears from the mountain pass at lost Spain behind him. “Weep not like a woman for the kingdom you could not defend like a man.” But then he thought that defending things like men was what had gotten them into this catastrophe in the first place, and decided to say nothing.

  The king and his Grand Vizier scrambled day on wretched day across the trampled, smoking land, handicapped somewhat by their long skirts and heavy muddy boots, but running like a pair of aging thieves all the same. No one stopped them, or even looked at them closely, although there were mighty rewards posted everywhere for their heads, and they really looked very little like peasant women, even on their best days. But the country was in such havoc, with so many others—displaced, homeless, penniless, mad with terror and loss—fleeing in every direction, that no one had the time or the inclination to concern themselves with the identities of their poor companions on the road. The soldiers of the alliance were too busy looting and burning, and those whose homes were being looted and burned were too busy not being in them. King Pelles and the Grand Vizier were never once recognized.

  One evening, dazed as a child abruptly awakened from a happy dream, the king finally asked where they were bound.

  “I have relatives in the south country beyond those hills you see,” the Grand Vizier told him. “A cousin and her husband—they have a farm. It has been a long time since I last saw them, and I cannot entirely remember where they live. But they will take us in, I am sure of it.”

  King Pelles sighed like the great Moor. “Better your family than mine. My cousins—my own brother—would demand a bribe, and then turn us over to the conquerors anyway. They are bad people, the lot of them.” He huddled deeper into his ragged blanket, shrugging himself closer to their tiny fire. “But I am the worst by far,” he added, “the worst, there is no comparison. I deserve whatever becomes of me.”

  “You did not know, sire,” the Grand Vizier offered in attempted solace. “That is the worst that can be said of you, that you did not know.”

  “But you did, you did, and you tried to warn me, and I refused to listen to you. And you obeyed my orders, and now you share my fate, and my people’s innocent lives lie in ruins, and it is my doing, and there is no atoning for it.” The king rocked back and forth, then stretched on the ground in his blanket, as though he were trying to bury himself where he lay, whimpering again and again, “No atoning, no atoning.” He hurt himself doing this, for the ground was shingly and rock-strewn. The Grand Vizier knew he would see the bruises in the morning.

  “You were a good king,” the Vizier said. “You meant well.”

  “No!” The word came out as a scream of agony. “I never meant well! I meant glory for myself—nothing less or more than that. And I knew it, I knew it, I knew it at the time, and still I had to go ahead, had to play out my toy battle with soft, breakable human bodies, breakable human souls. No atoning….”

  There was nothing for the Grand Vizier then, but to say, as to a child, “Go to sleep, Your Majesty. What’s done is done, and one of us is as guilty as the other. And even so, we must sleep.”

  But he himself slept poorly—perhaps even worse than King Pelles—in the barns and the empty cattle byres and the caves; and the king’s piteous murmurings as he dreamed were hardly of any help. There was always the smell of smoke, from one direction or another; at times there would come noises in the night, which might as easily have been restless cows as pursuing spies or soldiers, but there was never any way for the Vizier to make certain of either. All he allowed himself to think about was the need to guide the king safely to shelter from one night to the next—further than that, his imagining dared not go, if he meant to sleep at all. And even if we find my cousin—what was her husband’s name again?—even if we do find their farm, what then?

  By great good fortune, they did find the Grand Vizier’s cousin, whose name was Nerissa—her husband’s name was Antonio—and were welcomed as though they had last visited only days ago, or a week at most. The little farm was a crowded place, since Nerissa and Antonio, with no children of their own, had gladly taken in their widowed friend Clara and her four, who ranged in age from six to seventeen years. Nevertheless, they received King Pelles and the Grand Vizier unhesitatingly: as Antonio said, “No farm was ever the worse for more hands in the fields, nor more faces around the dinner table. And whoever noticed the smudged and sunburned face of a farmworker who wasn’t one himself? Have no fear—you are safe with us. In these times, there is no safety but family.”

  So it was that he who had been the king of all the land and he who had been its most powerful dignitary became nothing more than hands in the fields, and were grateful. Neither was young, but they worked hard and long all the same, and proudly kept even with Antonio and the others when it came time to bring the harvest home. And every evening, King Pelles told stories about wise animals and clever magicians to Clara’s children, and later the Grand Vizier conducted an informal history lesson for the older ones, in which their mother often joined. Still an attractive woman, she had clear brown skin and dark, amused eyes which were increasingly attentive, as time passed, to whatever the Vizier said or did. Antonio and Nerissa saw this, and were glad of it, as was the king. “Your
cousin has wasted his life on my foolishness,” he said to Nerissa. “I am so happy that she will give it back to him.”

  When the Grand Vizier could do it without feeling intrusive, he listened—with the back of his head, perhaps, or the back of his mind—to the king’s fairytales. They were not like any he had ever heard, and they fascinated and alarmed him at the same time. Few had what he would have considered happy endings, especially as a child—the gallant prince frequently failed to arrive in time to rescue the princess from the dragon, more often than not the poison was not counteracted, the talking cat could not always preserve his master from his own stupidity. Endings changed, as well, with each telling, and characters wandered from one story into a different one, often changing their natures as they did so. On occasion grief flowed into overwhelming joy, though that outcome was never something you might want to bet on. The Grand Vizier constantly expected the children to become frightened or upset, but they listened in obvious absorption, the younger ones crowding each other on the king’s lap, and all four nodding silently from time to time, as children do to express trust in the tale.

  Maybe it is the way he tells them, the Grand Vizier thought more than once, for King Pelles always had a special voice at those times, different than the way he spoke in the fields or at evening table. It was a low voice, with a calmness in it that—as the Vizier knew—had grown directly from suffering and remorse, and seemed to draw the children’s confidence whether or not the words were understood.

  Yet content as King Pelles was in his new life, fond of Clara’s children as he was, warmed far deeper than his bones by being a true part of a family for the first time… even so, he still wept in his sleep, whispering brokenly, “No atoning….” The Grand Vizier heard him every night.