“But wouldn’t that be ondié?” I asked.
“Yes. Everything is ondié on that day. Everything is unmade, and then re-made. How, I am not sure. It hasn’t happened for almost a hundred years. My mother is the oldest person in the palace, so no-one living has ever seen it, except her.”
“Has she ever talked about it?”
“Very little. It is sacred. She was very young. All I ever remember her saying is ‘there was swirling.’”
“There is swirling in almost every protocol dance.”
“True. So we will have to wait and see which one of my siblings or nephews and nieces is chosen.”
“But not you?”
“No,” said Yestril, humbly, making just a sketch of the exclusion gesture, “It cannot be me.”
“I am glad,” I said. I do not want to be the king’s concubine. How would either of us know what to do?
The queen has indeed died. They have carried the coffin up and down the stairs and buried her in the royal cemetery in the grounds, hiding the hole in the yellow-green grass under a mountain of yellow flowers. Everyone seems purposeless and slow, heavy with grief. It seems hard for people to make decisions. Children and old people have spent most of the last two days sleeping. I expect an announcement about the coronation dance will go out soon.
No announcement has gone out. The majordomo has just left our apartments. He was here to consult me about the coronation dance. Me. He seemed utterly dazed. He came to me as an expert in the old dances, bringing an elaborate gilded book with them, the archival copy of the coronation dance notation. He begged me to read it, comment on it, and then help to organize it.
He promoted me to a first-rank performer, just like that. I tried to explain to him that surely there are more appropriate people—what about the four existing first-rank teachers of the sigil groups? Apparently they are having trouble co-operating, affected by the universal lethargy. The officials are desperate to get on with the ceremony but in their lassitude cannot do it themselves. “Why can’t you?” I asked him.
“Things will be better after the ceremony,” said the majordomo, vaguely, making a faltering gesture that looked to me like a propitiation. “It will all come back together.” He was so piteous I took the book from him and agreed to help. Usually he is a brisk, suspicious, controlling man who doesn’t even like me.
The old queen was right. There is swirling. More than any other protocol dance I’ve ever seen. It looks a bit like a marriage dance, and a bit like a rank-ascension, but more complicated than either. There are many interlocking rings of dancers, moving in different directions; the pathway notation looks like the design of some enormous machine full of cogs. It reminds me of some kind of flow chart that I must have seen once in management school, years ago. There are signs in the margins that I think indicate speed—sometimes the dancers are whirling very fast. And the numbers of people involved are shocking—it comes to over a thousand.
But the most shocking thing about it is that it is full of sigil violations. It’s saturated with ondié through and through. I would imagine even reading it would make most people very nervous, or even ill. For the most part the sigil groups cohere; they make their own rings and proceed in the expected cardinal directions. But suddenly, at irregular intervals, the directions will reverse and the spring group will be rotating counterclockwise, the fall groups will be facing stark south, and other unthinkable things will happen.
How can I ever get people to do this? When I couldn’t get my student Onder to do a single ondié step for his class?
I’ve just shown the weird notation to Yestril. He is dispassionate. He, like me, is not affected by this depression of energy that has struck everyone, so it is not that. I wonder if he is sliding back towards one of his wordless times, t7hough none of the usual signs are there. Maybe he is just protected by his rank: he does not have to picture himself trying to shepherd a thousand terrified, angry, confused people through an extraordinarily complex dance. He says just to let the ceremony proceed: it has worked before. This is not very helpful.
Yarren is asleep, like most of his classmates. I conclude this is a good sign; he is fully connected to the system that expresses itself in the sigils, chemical, metaphysical or whatever it is. He is not sigil-blind. Yestril and I, the blind ones, though, are apparently the only free agents around at the moment. His highness is going to have to help me a bit more.
I’ve co-opted all the royal messengers. They have gathered representatives of every floor, every tribe, every clan, every trade, every rank. I’ve put all these people into their groups. I’ve had them practice all their parts separately. Just that was harder than I could have imagined. People are willing, even eager, to take orders. Normally bossy people can be led around like children. But they find directions hard to remember. Even the most basic things are becoming hard to remember: namely, the sigil-taboos. I have seen it with my own eyes. The wrong people touch each other, or fall into line, and they don’t notice. It sends a chill through me every time, a feeling of disorder. If I weren’t so horribly busy I would be in a panic.
Yarren, at least, sees none of it. He is still sleeping, through a third day. There are no children in the dance.
There can be no full rehearsal. None at all. The book specifies. The coronation dance can only happen once, and out of it the ruler is chosen. I can find no notation that explains how. I have to assume it’s at the end but there are no instructions.
Now Yarren’s cot is empty. He is gone. The halls are completely silent. I have called for servants but none have come. Peering out the door, I see the doorwards are gone. The hall guards at the distant end of the corridor are gone. The floor is strangely shining in the cold light of dawn that falls from the windows.
Yestril and I rush out in panic. My bare feet touch cold coins, strewn everywhere. The floors are littered thickly with them, small triangular pieces with holes in them: gold, silver, bronze. They stick to my feet as I move. Yestril and I walk over the shining carpet of coins toward the central well of the palace, the spiral of the stairs. I rush forward but behind me Yestril stops, plucks a coin off his sole, and says, in a whisper, as if to himself, “Crichtén.”
He arrives beside me to gaze out on the staircase in wonderment. Every single inhabitant of the palace is there, from grandmothers to babes in arms. The sick have risen from their beds and crawled, or been carried. All the formerly sleeping children are there, including Yarren, several stairs down. He is with one of the doorwards, who is not compatible, holding his hand. We walk out to the landing and see ranks of people filling every stair, three deep, packed in like fish in a barrel. Every stair is crammed. There is no room to move. There are thousands of people. They are blank and calm and docile. Most are standing, though a few are sitting or supported.
Pol’s mother, our neighbor, is standing squashed next to a housemaid who is an incompatible. The apothecary is sitting on a stair, leaning against the legs of a man who is an incompatible, and his business rival. All sigil order is gone.
Yestril and I stare at each other in amazement. “The between place,” he whispers.
There is a ripple in the crowd, and a head comes toiling towards us through the ranks. It is Prevostán. He seems weary, but brighter than the rest. “Do you see?” he says, “You see what has happened? They are all hardingrhán now. No tribes. No sigils. This is what the vows are for! Why I went tribeless. I see it now. So we can make it through this day. And now you two, the sigil-blind, are here. Why do you suppose that is?”
“It is time for the strong dance,” replies Yestril.
“Yes,” says Prevostán, “Now.”
So I call them, the thousand dancers, and they come.
The process takes hours, messengers, shuffling, falls. All the groups gradually reassemble, remembering each other at least that much, and move slowly toward the throne room. They sidle out of the stairwell, clinking and clattering over the abandoned coins, and leave the majority of the people ther
e, arrested.
The throne room had always seemed unnecessarily big to me before. Now I understand its size. By noon it is full of enormous rings of people, concentric or intercalating all over the huge space. The members of the royal family, the potentials, are all gathered silently in a kind of octagonal form made by the intersection of many rings. As far as I understand from the notation, they never dance. Yestril and I stand up on the balcony that the queen had formerly used for her addresses and look down on the motley, silent crowd.
There is no music. Music is rarely used in protocol dance. The feet and the bodies are speaking and you have to be able to hear them. All the windows are open, even though it is freezing; the book insists. A thousand people stand there vacantly, expectantly.
“What do I do?” I whisper in agony to Yestril. The dancers are so far away. They look like the little dots used in the notation.
“Direct their attention here.”
I call out loudly “Mark!” as I would at the beginning of a lesson. Every single person in that room has been trained in protocol dance. They wake up as if from a trance, look around, join hands, and look up toward my voice. Two thousand eyes meet mine.
“Hold up your hands,” says Yestril, quietly.
I hold up my two hands, palms out, toward him. The energy of the crowd sharpens and focuses. Yestril holds up his hands with a flourish of rank and presses his palms to mine. We look at each other and breathe twice.
There is an arc. There is a connection. There is swirling. The people move in their rings, in their variegated steps, changing directions. Sometimes I see them as moving dots; sometimes I see faces I know. Somehow these tired, witless people are moving incredibly fast. I hear two thousand trampling feet, but I also hear a hum or a thrum or a sob in the air, a huge, directionless voice droning. I feel it in my bones and skin, a deep vibration. I see colors flash on the walls, sigil signs and cardinal directions lighting up as if electrified. Outside the open windows, the yellow-green lawn ripples in the cold wind, changing hue slowly, from hot gold to lemon to aquamarine, in a long rhythm. There is a hot, metallic smell in the air.
I drop hands with Yestril. The connection does not break; whatever enormous, wordless power it is continues to breathe through us all, everyone in that room, in the palace, in the grounds, the world. Most of it is pleasurable but I am conscious of sudden, frightening, wrenching reversals, occasional sickening waves of revulsion. After a while I can associate these with the moments of reversal I see in the dance below me. The fall sigils face south; the springs cross the room on the wrong tangent; a group of winters cross hands with summers: wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Every one is a blow that makes me cringe. When the chains of linked people go the right way, the right hands touch, I feel great wellbeing, calm, spaciousness, fullness, affection, like a dog licking someone’s hand. I am feeling the sigil bond. Even me.
The painful feelings intensify as the dance goes on. The reversals are harder and harder to last through, an itch on the inside of the skin. I have a feeling, each time it happens, of cranking, or tightening, or winding backwards, tautening. Pressure is building up, running through everything, inside and outside, unbearable. Finally, in the last cycle of the final iteration of the dance—the whole thing repeats three times—the four sigil leaders of the central rings all meet and touch and it explodes.
There is no bang or flash of light, just a sudden vertiginous feeling of shooting upward, a jangly tingling that runs from the soles of my feet to the top of my head. The dancers below me all seem to flicker or jump. Then the dance goes its final coda with all persons and sigils in their proper places, everything righted. We look over into the group of potential royals, and only one is standing. The rest are on the ground, unconscious.
Yestril’s third brother: Ranil. The king.
People are shaking their heads, rubbing their eyes. Their shoulders sag. It is over. But not for me. There is no more rising effervescence, but a terrible black suction into an upward void, pulling pulling pulling. I scream and hold on to Yestril and to the railing, clutching the stone, every cell protesting movement upward, movement away.
The pull ceases and I fall down.
A murmur passes through the crowd below, an outcry. Four members of the royal family, in their octagonal enclosure, are gone. There are tears, complaints, railing. But there will not be any serious attempt to explain it. Soon enough this will be one of the things that “do not command attention” or “do not happen among us.” Protocol is restored. The majordomo can go back to despising me.
If people dropped their crichtén on the stairs as they did in the hallways, the sweepers will be rich forever. The new king’s first problem will be redistributing all those lost coins. People won’t be able to get home without them.
I stagger up from the balcony floor. Yestril puts his arm around me and we creep away toward the stairs to find Yarren, who by now has no doubt dropped the hand of the doorward in horror. When we find him, we will take him straight back to our hallway.
Somebody will give us crichtén.
DALE BAILEY
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
PRINCIPAL FERGUSON’S TESTIMONY
Before Miss Ferguson found Maude Lewis’ body in the school gym, none of us believed in the teenage werewolf. There had been rumors, of course. There always are. But many of us viewed Miss Ferguson’s discovery as confirmation of our worst fears.
Not everyone shared our certainty. There had been only a fingernail paring of moon that late February night, and a small but vocal minority of us argued that this precluded the possibility that Maude’s killer had been a lycanthrope. It was common knowledge, they contended, that werewolves only struck during full moons, often adding that one only became a werewolf by surviving the bite of another werewolf. No such attack had been reported.
The rest of us refrained from pointing out the errors in this fount of superstition. Instead, we asked the skeptics to consider the facts of the case as Principal Ferguson reported them to the Rockdale Gazette. She had been working late as she did most nights, partly, we believed, because she was lonely, having no family to go home to, and partly to accommodate Maude’s practice schedule. Maude was a talented gymnast who harbored hopes of a college scholarship and often stayed well into the evening to practice her tumbling runs and stunts.
Around eight o’clock on the night in question, Principal Ferguson had heard a brief shriek of terror. What she found when she investigated sent her flying back to her office in a seizure of panic and horror. She would not soon forget what she’d discovered in the gym. Some creature with superhuman strength—surely, it could not have been a man—had snapped Maude’s back like a twig and draped her supine body over the balance beam. It dangled there like it had no bones at all. Her abdomen had been torn open, spilling out glistening loops of yellow entrails. The stench was terrible. You wouldn’t think a pretty girl like Maude would have had such smells within her, Miss Ferguson said.
THE ARREST OF TONY RIVERS
In a press conference the following afternoon, Police Chief Baker dismissed the rumors of a teenage werewolf, and announced that Detective “Don” Donovan, the lead investigator on the case, had already made an arrest.
Tony Rivers, a junior, had also been in the school that night. Tony had been working after hours as the custodian for almost a year by then, ever since his father had succumbed to brain cancer, leaving Tony and his mother to make their way as best they could. Tony had told some of us about his father’s transformation as the tumor ate into his brain. A gentle man, Ted Rivers had, by the end, become foul mouthed, and prone to fits of rage. To those closest to him, Tony had confided that though he tried not to think about his father’s death, it weighed constantly upon him: when he was doing his homework or watching TV, when he was pushing a broom down the halls of Rockdale High. It was the first thing he thought about when he woke up. It was the last thing he thought about when he went to sleep.
This was the grief-stricken young man
the police had found standing over Maude Lewis’s body. Tony’s explanation for his presence was perfectly reasonable: he too had come running in response to Maude’s scream, arriving scant seconds after Miss Ferguson had locked herself in her office to call for help. Detective Donovan had taken him in for questioning anyway. Under interrogation, Tony said that he always escorted Maude home after Miss Ferguson locked up the school. It seemed unwise to let her walk alone, given the rumors that a teenage werewolf stalked the streets of Rockdale. Tony also admitted to an unrequited crush on Maude. And yes, she had recently—the night before her murder, in fact—rebuffed an invitation to join him at the Junior-Senior Prom. Had her snub angered him? Detective Donovan wanted to know. Did he approach her again the night of the murder? Did he lose his temper when she rejected him? Where was he when Maude died?
Tony barely had time to respond to one query—often incoherently—before the next arrived. His panic mounted, and when Detective Donovan confronted him with the final and most damning question of all—why had his hands been so bloody?—Tony’s answer made no sense. I couldn’t stand to see her all torn up like that, he said. I was trying to put everything back inside her.
Detective Donovan consulted the police chief. Tony Rivers was in a cell soon afterward.
The streets of Rockdale were safe, Chief Baker told us at his press conference. We had nothing to fear.
OTHER CASES OF TEENAGE LYCANTHROPY
Our situation was not unprecedented. Other towns had been plagued by rumors of teenage werewolves: strange tracks in the snow, lupine howls in the lonesome morning hours.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Vol. 4 Page 11