Otherwise: Three Novels by John Crowley

by John Crowley

  There was, lastly, Younger. Younger was huddled down in his chair, turning an empty cup, looking as though someone had struck him and he didn’t know how to repay it.

  When the red-jacketed messenger approached them they all looked up, expectantly; but it was only letters from the Drum, from Fauconred; Redhand tucked them away unread… “The Queen,” he said to Learned, “has fled, Outward. No one knows how she escaped, or where Black Harrah is.”

  “Red Senlin let them slip.”

  “He would. Graceless as a dog among birds.” Redhand’s voice was a deep, gritty growl, a flaw left by the same sword that had drawn a purple line up his throat to his ear; he wore the beard to hide it.

  “Where is Young Harrah?” Learned asked. The friendship between Black Harrah’s son and Red Senlin’s was well-known; they did little to hide it, though their fathers raged at it.

  “Not imprisoned. At Red Senlin’s Son’s request—or demand. He will fly too; he must live. Join his father…”

  “Will Red Senlin be King now?” Younger asked. “Does he wish it?”

  “He could bring war with his wishing,” Learned said. “He would.”

  “Perhaps,” Redhand said, “he can be dissuaded.”

  “We can try,” Learned said. “The reasons…”

  Trembling with suppressed rage, his father cut across him. “You talk as though he were a naughty child. He is your uncle, and twice your age.”

  “He must listen, anyway,” said Younger. “Because he can’t do it without us. He knows that.”

  “Must listen,” Old Redhand said bitterly. “He will abide by your wishes.” His hands were tight fists on the table.

  “He will,” Redhand said.

  “And if he won’t,” Old Redhand shouted, rising out of his seat, “what then? Will you cut off his head?”

  “Stop,” Learned said. “The guests…”

  “He is here because of you,” Old Redhand shouted at his eldest son. “You, the Great Protector Redhand. Because of you and your army he thinks he can do this thing.”

  “He is rightful King,” said Younger softly, drawing in spilled drink on the table.

  “Little Black is King,” said his brother Redhand.

  “My King,” said his father, “shortly to be murdered, no doubt, whom I fought for in the Outlands, and against the Just, and whom Red Senlin fought for and in the old days…”

  “The old days,” came his eldest’s gritty voice, cold with disgust. “If time turned around, you could all be young again. But against the advice of the old, it keeps its course.” He rose, took up his gloves. “And maybe it means to see Red Senlin King. If by my strength, then by my strength. You are gone foolish if you stand in our way.”

  His father rose too, and was about to speak, shout, curse; Redhand stood hard, ready to receive: and then there was a noise at the back of the hall; messengers, belted and armed, were making their way to the head table. Their news, rippling through the assembly as though from a cast stone, reached the head table before its bearers:

  The Great Protector Black Harrah is dead. The richest man in the world, the Queen’s lover, the King’s King, has been shot with a Gun on the margin of the unplumbed lake.

  The way from Redhand’s house to the Citadel lay along the Street of Birdsellers, up the steep way through the Gem Market, along Bellmaker’s Street; throngs of City people, lashed by rumor, called out to Redhand, and he waved but made no replies; his brother Younger and a crowd of his redjackets made a way for them through the frightened populace. “Redhand!” they called to him. “Redhand… !”

  They said of the family Redhand that they had not walked far from the cottage door, which in an age-long scheme of things was true. Old Redhand’s great-grandfather was the first Defender; he had been born merely a tenant of a Red lord whose line was extinguished by war and the assassinations of the Just. But it had always been so; there was no Protector, however great, who somewhere within the creases of history had not a farmer or a soldier or even a thief tucked.

  Why one would wish to plot and strive to rise from the quiet pool of the Folk to be skimmed from the top by war, feud, and assassination was a question all the poets asked and none answered. The Protectorate was a selfish martyrdom, it had never a place empty. The laws and records of inheritance filled musty floors of the Citadel. Inheritance was the chief business of all courts of the Grays. Inheritance was the slow turning of this still world, and the charting of its ascendancies and declinations took up far more of the world’s paper and ink than the erratic motions of its seven moons.

  At Kingsgate, men Redhand recognized as old soldiers of Red Senlin’s, wearing ill-fitting King’s-men’s coats, barred their passage. Redhand summoned an unshaven one with a pot in his hand. When the man came close, frankly comradely, but shaking his head, Redhand leaned over and took his collar in a strangling grip.

  “Goat,” he growled, “get your mummers out of my way or I’ll ride them down.”

  He would almost have preferred them not to move.

  Their hooves clattered down Kingsgate Alley between the walls of blank-faced, doorless mansions, pierced only far above by round windows. Somewhere above them a shutter clashed shut, echoing off the cool, shadowed stone walls.

  Down at the puddly end of the alley was a tiny doorway called Defensible, a jackhole merely in the great curving wall of a rotunda: one of only three ways into the vastness of the Citadel.

  The rotunda that Defensible let them into one by one was unimaginably old, crudely but grandly balconied, balustraded, arched and pierced. They said that this rotunda must be all that the Citadel was, once; that it was built up on older, smaller places that had left traces in its walls and doors. They said that the center of its figured stone floor was the exact center of the world; they said that the thousand interlaced pictures that covered the floor, once they were themselves uncovered of centuries of dirt, and explained, would explain all explanations… Two bone-white Gray scholars looked up from the space of floor they were methodically cleaning to watch the spurred men go through.

  “Where will he be?” Younger asked.

  “The King’s chambers.”

  “The King. Has he…”

  “He’ll do nothing. Not yet.”

  “What will you tell him?”

  Redhand tore off his bonnet and shook his thick hair. He pulled off his gloves and slapped them into the bonnet, gave them to Younger.

  The doors of the Painted Chamber were surrounded by loafing guards who stood to some kind of attention when Redhand approached. Ignoring them, he hunched his shoulders as though disposing burdens on his back, left Younger and the redjackets at the door and went in, unannounced.

  Red Senlin was there, and his two sons. The eldest was called simply Red Senlin’s Son; it was he who was intimate with Young Harrah. The other Redhand had not been seen at court; his name was Sennred. At Redhand’s entrance the three moved around the small room as though they were counters in some game.

  The Painted Chamber had been an attempt of the ancients at gentility, no doubt once very fine; but its pictured battles had long since paled to ghostly wars in a mist, where they had not been swallowed up in gray clouds of mildew. And the odd convention of having everyone, even the stricken bleeding pink guts, smile with teeth made it even more weird, remote, ungentle.

  With a short nod to the sons, Redhand extended his hand to his uncle. “Welcome home.”

  The Great Protector Red Senlin was in this year forty-eight years old. A battle in the Outlands, where he had been King’s Lieutenant, had left him one-eyed. A scarf in the Outland fashion covered the dead one; the living was cold gray. His dress was the simplest, stout country leathers long out of fashion and ridiculous on any but the very high.

  Redhand’s father dressed so. Before him, Redhand wore his City finery self-consciously.

  Red Senlin took his hand. “Black Harrah is dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shot by the Just.”

&
nbsp; “Yes?”

  Red Senlin withdrew his hand. Redhand knew his tone was provoking, and surely no Protector, even against his greatest enemy, would have a hated Gun used—and no one of Red Senlin’s generation would have a man slain secretly. “By a Gun, nephew,” he said shortly.

  “These are unlovely times.” Behind him, Senlin’s younger son, Sennred, stirred angrily. Redhand paid a smile to the dark, close-faced boy. So different from his tall, handsome older brother, whom nothing seemed to offend—not even the attentions of Black Harrah’s son.

  Red Senlin mounted the single step to the painted chair and sat. “Black Harrah’s estates are vast. Half the Black Downs owes him. His treason forfeits… much of them.”

  “His son…”

  One gray eye turned to the blond boy leaning with seeming disinterest at the mantel. And back to Redhand.

  “Has fled, presumably to join his father’s whore and other traitors. Understand me. The King will be at liberty to dispose of much.”

  It was an old practice, much hated by the lesser landowners and long considered dishonorable: seize the property of one’s fallen enemies to pay the friends who struck them. Redhand, after the battle at Senlinsdown, had come into valuable lands that had been Farin the Black’s. He chose not to visit them; had made a present of them to Farin’s wife and children. But he had kept the title “Great” that the holdings carried. And certain incomes… It angered Redhand now more than anything, more than not being consulted at first, more than his father’s maundering about the old days, more than the compromise to his oaths to the Blacks, to be so offered a price to make his uncle King.

  “The Harrahs and their Black kin will not take it well, your parceling out of their property.”

  “Let them take it as they must.”

  “You make a war between Red and Black. And whoever dies in that war, on either side, will be kin to you.”

  “Life,” said Sennred coolly, “is not so dear as our right.”

  “Your—right.” Somehow Sennred reminded him of his brother Younger: that same quick anger, that look as of some secret hurt.

  “Must I rehearse all of that again, nephew?” Red Senlin snapped. “Black took the crown by force from King Red’s son…”

  “As you mean to do?”

  “My father’s father was nearest brother to King Red’s son…”

  “And Black was half-brother to King Ban himself.”

  “But it was my father’s father who in the course of things should have been King!”

  “But instead swore oaths to Black.”

  “Forced oaths, that…”

  “That he swore. That my grandfather’s father swore too. That you and I in turn have sworn to Black’s son’s son.”

  “Can be set aside. Your brother Learned could sway the Grays to affirm me in this.”

  “And forfeit all credence with the world by such deceit?”

  “Deceit? I am even now Little Black’s heir, in default of heirs of his flesh!”

  “You know the Queen is with child.”

  “By Black Harrah!”

  “That matters nothing to the Blacks. They will swear oaths to Little Black’s child with one hand on her great belly.”

  “Cousin.” Red Senlin’s Son spoke quietly from where he lounged at the mantel. “I think I have heard all this argued before, between my father and yours. The part you take your father took often.”

  Redhand felt his face grow hot suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” the Son went on lazily. “It all seems of another day to me.”

  “It means nothing to me either, Defender,” Redhand said fiercely. “But there are others…”

  “It seems to me there are prizes to be won,” said the Son, cutting across Redhand more sharply now. “It seems to me that Little Black is a cold pie left over from our ancestors’ feasts. My oath to him makes him taste no better to me.”

  “He is weak-minded,” Redhand growled, not sure whether he was accusing or excusing.

  “Yes,” said Red Senlin’s Son. “We are fallen on evil days. The King goes mad, and old oaths no longer bind.” He smiled a sweet smile of complicity at Redhand, who looked away. “We are protected only by our strength.” He took Redhand’s arm in a sudden strong grip. “We will be King. Tell us now whether you support us in this or not.”

  Redhand regarded the blue, uncaring eyes. Red Senlin might be grown evil, dishonorable, gone sour in repetition of old longings; might, in a passion of vanity, betray old alliances. He might, in his passion, be slain. Might well. But this blue boy was a new thing in the world; he would never lose, because he cared for nothing. And suddenly a dark wave rose under Redhand’s heart: he didn’t want to be an old man yet, sitting by the fire with his father, shaking his head over the coming of evil days without honor: he wanted suddenly very much to win while he could.

  “Since oaths are thrown away,” he said, releasing himself from the Son’s grip and stepping back to face the three of them, “why, then I won’t swear, and I ask no swearing from you. Until I see no further hope in you, I am yours.” Red Senlin struck the throne arm triumphantly. “But this I do swear,” he went on, raising his arm against them, his voice gravelly with menace. “I am no dog of yours. And if you kick me, I will bite you to the bone.”

  Later, when Sennred went unasked with the Redhands to the door Defensible, Redhand could almost feel his dark mistrustful eyes.

  “If we must do this thing,” he said at last when they stood in the ancient rotunda, “we must at least pretend to be friends.”

  “I don’t pretend well.”

  “Then you must learn.” He gestured to the beetling arcades above them. “If you would live here long.”

  When they had gone, Sennred watched the two Gray scholars working in the long, long shafts of dusty afternoon sun at their patch of floor, dusting with delicate brushes, scraping with fine tools, copying with colored inks what they uncovered.

  “A pattern.”

  “Part of a pattern.”

  Crowned men with red tears running from their eyes held hands as children’s cutouts do, but each twisted in a different attitude, of joy or pain he couldn’t tell, for of course they all smiled with teeth. Behind and around them, gripping them like lovers, were black figures, obscure, demons or ghosts. Each crown had burning within it a fire, and the grinning black things tore tongue and organs from this king and with them fed the fire burning in the crown of that one, tore that one’s body to feed the fire burning in this one’s crown, and so on around, demon and king, like a tortured circle dance.

  3

  “If Barnol wets the Drum with rain,” sang Caredd, the Protector Red-hand’s wife, “then Caermon brings the Downs the same; if Caermon wets the Downs with rain, the Hub will not be dry till Fain; if Barnol leaves the Drum dry still, then… then… I forget what then.”

  “Each week has a name,” the Visitor said.

  “Each week,” she said.

  Barnol had wet the Drum with rain, and now, two weeks after, Caermon brought the same to Redsdown. Beyond the wide, open door of the bam, the hills, like folded hands, bare and wooded, marked with fence and harrow-cut, were curtained in silvery downpour. It whispered at the door, it ticked on the sloping roof, entered at chinks and holes, and tocked drop by drop into filling rain barrels. Safe from it in the wide, dim bam, Caredd searched for eggs in the hay that filled an old broken haywain. The Visitor followed, as he had almost continually since Fauconred had brought him there: always polite, even shy, but following anyway everywhere he was allowed, attending to her as a novice would to an ancient Gray.

  “Why those names?” he asked. “What do the names mean?”

  “I don’t know.” It was the answer she gave most often to the questions, but never impatiently. Where Fauconred would have thrown up his hands in red-faced exasperation, she merely answered, once again, “I don’t know.”

  Caredd was more than ten years younger than her Protector husband, and seemingly as ea
sy and fair as he was dark and troubled. Reds-down, his property, was her home, had been her father’s and his father’s father’s—he a minor Defender who had married in turn one neighbor’s widow and the other’s only daughter, and became thereby Protector of wide and lovely holdings. Caredd, riding as soon as she could walk, knew all its mossy woodlands and lakelets, stony uplands and wide grainfields, and loved them as she loved nothing else. She had been few other places, surely, but surely had seen nothing to compare; and she who loved the gray vacancies of the glum fortress-house caught chills in the gray vacancies of her husband’s town mansion.

  For sure she loved Redhand too, in her fashion. Loved him in part because he had given her her home as a wedding gift when it seemed nearly lost. Her father and brother had been ambushed on a forest road by the Just, robbed and murdered; her weak-minded mother had flirted with one malcontent Red lord after another until she had been nearly tried for treason, and her estates—beloved Redsdown—had been declared forfeit to the King: thus to Black Harrah, in fact.

  And then Redhand had come. Grave, dour almost, unfailingly polite, he had wooed the disoriented, frightened tomboy with rich gifts and impatient, one-sided interviews, explaining his power at court, her mother’s jeopardy—till, in a stroke of grownup wisdom, she had seen that her advantage—thus her heart—lay with him.

  So there had been held in the rambling castle a grand Redhand wedding.

  Of that day she remembered disjunct moments only, like tatters of a vivid dream; remembered waiting in the tiny dark vestibule before the great hall for their cue to enter, pressed tight against him, surrounded protectively by his mother, his brothers, his sweating father, how she had felt at once safe and frightened, implicated yet remote; how Mother Red-hand laughed, horns called from within, butlers whispered urgently from the narrow door, and how with a full rustle of many gowns the bright knot of them had unwound into the thronged hall hung with new red banners and filled with the resinous hum of many instruments.

  She remembered how the guests had dusted them with salt and wound paper thorns around their wrists, and laughed though it meant suffering would come and must be endured; and how the country people gave them candied eggs for their pillow. And she remembered when later they had taken down her hair and taken away her cloudlike gown and she had stood shyly naked before him beneath a shadow of pale lace…