The Kingdom of Little Wounds

by Susann Cokal

“I don’t hate you, Ava!” He seems shocked. It seems I’ve finally excited his kindlier side, the one he used to show me all the time.

  He holds me at arm’s length and studies my swollen eyes, my red face. “Ava, tell me about your father,” he says.

  I choke. “What do you mean?”

  “I need everything you know about him.”

  “Will that help with his case?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  I realize. I flinch. But I should not be surprised; I’ve thought it before. “It’s for your chronicle. Just for your chronicle?”

  He opens his mouth, hesitates.

  “Can’t you do something to help? If I tell you everything . . . Could you help then?”

  He is almost shamefaced. He is just a historian, with no will to better any life but his own.

  And yet. And yet he is the one hope that presents itself to me now. I untie my cap and let the yellow braids fall to my waist. Jacob used to tell me my hair was one of my greatest treasures. I get down on my knees and take Grammaticus’s big hand in mine. “Please?”

  I wait to see if he’ll accept me. My heart hammering, hoping he’ll say yes, not just because I need his help but because, above all, I need to hold another soul within my arms.

  POX

  WHEN Nicolas Bullen says the unthinkable, Isabel tries to swoon, but it cannot be convincing; she is too stunned. It’s strange that she doesn’t swoon anyway, on her own, but she doesn’t.

  Poxed, she thinks. Pox.

  As she lurches away, Nicolas catches her wrists. His pale eyes melt into hers. “How old were you? Thirteen, fourteen, how old?”

  The Italian — or French — Fire: half the lords who passed through her father’s castle had it. They used to declare that they burned with love for beautiful Isabelle des Rayaux and her sisters; in their bedchambers, the girls joked among themselves about the true cause of the burning. They had nothing but contempt for the lords, though they could not help kissing the handsome ones from time to time. As Isabel did that time behind the tithing barn, just after her visit to Uncle Henri’s château, when she longed for beauty and amours.

  A branch breaks apart in the fire. Isabel says, “I came to this court as a virgin. The documents are clear.”

  Nicolas picks up her hand and begins to stroke the back of it, lightly tracing the scars that came of administering medicines to her children. Not of pox. She will not even think it lest Nicolas somehow hear her thoughts.

  “Isabel,” he whispers. “Isabel. How did you feel when that first red sore appeared . . . frightened, disgusted with yourself? Was it in your mouth, behind your teeth, or somewhere even more hidden? Perhaps you thought nothing of it, as the first chancre does not hurt . . . But then came the aches and the rashes and the throbbing head. Is that when you started covering yourself in mercury? Or did you wait till years later — age eighteen, nineteen? — with the boils and the white pus and the gleet . . . How you must have feared it! A sign from God — a condemnation! But you were already married and expected to produce a child. Children. Who were bound to fall ill themselves.”

  At his touch, Isabel is dazed. “I have always been true to my husband,” she says, with the image of Candenzius’s face before her, the memory of his fingers inside.

  “There are many kinds of betrayal, my lady. And many people who would be interested to know you’re afflicted.”

  The fire pops again, another shower of embers.

  “Afflicted.” She allows her eyes to close. That beautiful dizziness, the quicksilver mer-girls . . .

  “You do know that you’re quite mad,” Nicolas says gently.

  “Mad?” Her eyes open.

  “It happens as the disease progresses.” He continues to stroke her hand. Under his touch, the scars itch, which feels somehow good, even though it reminds her of those old days of the rashes on hands and feet — how she had to wear gloves even at meals, and dancing was agony. She told herself this was some little infection, not a great one, not that pox, and she learned to make unguents to soften the skin and soothe the burning. But there were all those nights of swiving Christian . . . then the bellies, the pains, miscarriages, the joy when her first live baby was born, followed by another and another and another . . .

  Christian: he was not poxed. Was he? Should she have Candenzius investigate his corpse?

  Nicolas says, “It would be a shame if this madness were to interfere with your daughter’s reign. Or your son’s.”

  Isabel shudders. She has spent her entire existence protecting some reign or other.

  “I can describe how your life will be,” Nicolas says, tracing a circle around the ruby newly on her finger. “Now that you have reached the age of madness, it will go and come in waves. Some days you’ll feel quite clear, and others you will be exhausted unto death.”

  “I am weary,” she says. Her eyes droop. “But I am not unwell.” She suspects herself of lying; everybody lies.

  Nicolas continues, “Many days you will not remember; these will be the good days. Other days will be painful. You will rave; you will hurt yourself. Your children, alas, can expect the same.”

  “The children,” she murmurs. “I did not . . .” She can’t bear to say more. She is admitting nothing. “Candenzius . . . the treatment . . . mercury . . .”

  “Krolik.” Nicolas runs a sharp fingernail down the inside of her palm. “He’s a good man. His special guaiac unguent is effective in treating the pox. Wouldn’t you like to be cured, like your daughters? And he’ll keep your secret. If, that is, he’s appointed to a position in which he is able to keep secrets. Under a man to whom he vows discretion.”

  “My husband made him Master of the Nursery.”

  “Which is how he knows the truth about you. And the children.”

  Isabel feels dizzy, confused. Convinced, almost. She takes another sip of her special wine. “Am I really mad?” she asks.

  “And will only grow madder.”

  In a way, this is a relief. It explains so much, and it removes a burden. The burden of deciding about things, of fighting. Now she can simply be.

  Nicolas keeps stroking her palms and wrists with that long, light touch. It has become pleasurable, though she sees it’s turning her skin red. “You must relax, my Queen. You must let yourself be taken care of.”

  “The baby,” she says, wishing his hand would move toward her belly.

  “The baby, of course. The baby will be taken care of too.”

  She looks at the ruby, now on her hand instead of his. “I may ask for what I want? I may make a condition?”

  “Of course.”

  Recklessly: “Then I want Candenzius.”

  “Very well.” Nicolas’s expression does not change.

  “I can have him?”

  “You may have anything you want. You have the power to elevate as you wish.” He pauses, strokes the inside of her wrist. “Of course, it would all be easier if you were to designate someone to assist you. A second regent, as it were. One who would carry out your commands. One who would see to the worst business of the kingdom for you, so you can concentrate on yourself. And on your secret.”

  He has abandoned the idea of a substitute regent in favor of a cooperative one. Isabel feels she’s won a point without arguing it; she is already victorious — though even in her madness, she knows the Count is manipulating her. “The Duke of Marsvin?” She can test Nicolas, a little, as he tests her.

  He bends, breathes on her wrist in a way that warms her to the core. “Or someone else. Your most willing servant.

  I,” he adds baldly.

  Christian trusted him; why not Isabel?

  “And you would send me Candenzius?”

  “He could come to you tomorrow.”

  Isabel feels the first real happiness in months. “I need him to examine me. He must check on the baby.”

  “Whatever you wish.”

  Whatever you wish — has anyone ever said this to Isabel and meant it?

/>   “I want the dark nurse too,” she says. “The one who sees after my daughters — she can help Candenzius. Sophia always said she could soothe a stomachache. And I’m going to keep this ring,” she adds, for clarity.

  His eye on that red stone, Nicolas bows.

  Thus the affair is settled.

  Beatte never were so happy. She sing her self in bed whilst the maids bring arms full of fancy clothes that once belong to her sister, her mother, her cousins. They now will be made to suit an apparent queen. Every kind of gleaming thing, cloth of silk and metal, embroideries, jewels.

  What of this one, Majesty? ask those ladies, and What of this? Each dress will become more rich, at least so long as she be queen. Old Lady Drin who have become chief in-waiting promise it. She thinks may be to make Beatte beautiful in this way.

  Beatte hugs her self. She loves it all, she loves to be queen, she forgets to feel her pains and itches. She sing-sing-sings.

  And this one? ask Bridget Belskat.

  Beatte raise her voice to sing the louder.

  The song I do not recognize. It sound like some thing to which nobles might dance, but Beatte be too weak for dancing, and any way a dance is unpermitted on the day in which every one is to weep till mid night. Beatte hums and watch the work and does not appear to know how far her life will change, for be cause she now have status of a queen she must also have more lessons to prepare her for it, and more guards to protect her from plots, and more ladies and more maids and hours with her councillors and regent. She will see the days of glass leaves and fairy stories as a kind of story in they selves, some thing that is pretty to think but not possible to believe.

  Or so it seem to me, who have charge of Gorma still and am rocking her bed to soothe her tears. She weep not for her father and his dying but for the fact of not under standing how her sister be elevated and she is not. The ladies may explain till they finger tips turn purple, but they cannot make her under stand about the law of being born first, even if the birth be of a girl. The new ruler might be monster or a goat, for all the logic Gorma see.

  Give her a soothing draught, say pocky Belskat. Another nurse go to mix it.

  If I had one single tongue, I might tell Beatte about logic, how it belong only to the men and occasional lady with the power to twist and braid it. It mean no thing to the rest of the world.

  “Not fair!” cry Gorma. “Not fair!” I rock the harder, till the nursey bring her cup. This time no body give me a slap. They want Gorma rocked away.

  When she sees Gorma drinking, Beatte’s eyes do shine. The ladies shake out a skirt of violet silk.

  At last I know what she is singing, so happy she could burst. It is a funeral song of this place, sung fast.

  For one moment I press my hands together like saints in church. Gorma scream at me to rock again.

  A king of the Trolls wanted a child so badly that he vowed to turn his barren wife out of his palace or, at best, kill her in a way that would outpain the pangs of childbirth.

  His queen, then, wanting nothing more than to please him, decided to present him with a child and call it their own. She combed the twigs and hollows of the forest for a suitable infant to steal but could find none; nor was there a healthy baby among the cradles of the few humans who managed to eke out a living in Troll territory. She had almost despaired of the project — and her husband was sharpening his cruel Troll fingernails, for he planned to execute her himself — when the idea struck that she did not need to find a baby in their domain after all, but might in fact go looking in another element entirely.

  So it was that she borrowed a boat and went rowing out over the sea with a net such as is used to catch herring. She spent a day and a night and another day on the waves, until she managed to fling her net wide enough to capture a tiny, wriggling, sparkling mer-baby, a boy, who was perfect in every way except that his complexion was paler than that of the Trolls and that instead of legs, of course, his body ended in a tail.

  These things could be disguised, at least for a time. She swaddled the child tightly and fed him from a cut in her own breast, rowing valiantly back to her husband’s castle and claiming that the exertion had brought on the birth of a child she did not know sat in her belly. She pinched the baby’s cheeks to a satisfying ruddiness and praised her husband for planting such a robust creature within her.

  The infant thrived on salt water and raw fish, which fortunately the Trolls found in abundance; and if he wept when he heard the keening of his kind in the distance, well, all babies cry, and this one’s sobs were pleasingly melodious. The queen delighted in bathing him herself and in giving his fat cheeks those ruddying pinches.

  It was only years later, when the age of swaddling was past and her husband at last saw the child’s tail, that the queen discovered her first feelings of remorse. She realized that instead of netting a baby and bringing it back, she might have kept rowing until she reached a more hospitable land where she could have started her life anew.

  Instead, she watched as the Troll king sliced down the center of their son’s tail with one long talon, and when the bloody operation failed to produce a boy who could walk around on two legs, he ordered both the child and the queen put to death. This was swiftly accomplished, as the boy had already died from his cruelty and the queen was ready to try her luck in the afterlife.

  Under the sea, the mer-people never forgot the insult, for they were capable of intense feeling too. Whenever the Trolls tried to venture beyond their own bay, the mermaids sang throaty songs to make sailors leap from their boats and drown in trying to reach them. Thus the Troll population grew ever smaller, until there were only a few descendants of that horrible king hiding in a forest that the humans had cut back, such that there was almost nothing left but rock and a few bean stalks.

  REX NOSTER PROMPTUS EST

  THE noble body of Christian V, last king of the Lunedies (perhaps), lies in the amber-lined cathedral. He is watched over by monks who have rowed out from Saint Peter’s, the same monks who (once Doctor Krolik made a quick, nervous inspection) washed the corpse, emptied it of certain viscera and effluvia, stitched its open parts shut, and dressed it in Christian’s most splendid robes: green silk, white ermine, gold brocade; the sharp-tined crown of state and the jewel-encrusted sword of justice.

  The cathedral crackles as amber walls swell and contract. It echoes. Is this one voice or many? The monks.

  The monks pray for Christian’s soul. They pray for his daughters, his wife, his wife’s belly, his people. They praise God.

  Nicolas Bullen comes every day. He prays, too, with his head in his hands, his ears ringing with the sound of his own sobs, so that he hears none of the monks’ songs, none of the rustlings, creakings, and pops that show he is never alone at the corpse-side.

  And Sophia the Wraith Princess is always there. She has become impish in her after-death; with her rosy skirts held high, she dances on her father’s chest as she could never manage on the flat floors of life. She leads her sisters and brother in a lively galliard across the body, over the catafalque, around and around the statues who make stony partners for the dance. They creep into Nicolas’s breeches and make him feel the pain of every stony boss inside. They tweak the monks’ noses and blow in their ears to make them drop the notes of their prayers.

  The wraith children gather up those fallen notes and fling them to the rafters, black dots of echo. They sing to Christian, Awake, awake! — though they are afraid of having him among them. He might save the land and spoil the party. They feast on his body, suck the eyes from between the lids, reach up his anus and tie what innards he has left into knots.

  So runs Isabel’s fancy when she remembers her husband.

  This time, the gestures of love seem empty. Virginity is nothing and dangers feel merely sad.

  Surrendering my maidenhead was not nearly as grand a gesture as I expected. A stab of pain, a quick exclamation, and then Grammaticus lay sleepy on his back. I burned for a few hours and tied on a mo
nthly cloth, but I still felt the same inside myself.

  Could I love Grammaticus? I ask myself while we undress as much as is necessary, while he touches and licks and rocks his way into me, loosing showers of dust from his bed curtains and exciting a creak in the bed’s old wooden joints. I keep wondering till he shudders and goes still.

  No, I decide then, I do not love him, and I no longer wish I did. He is now simply a fact in my life. He’s the person I hope will at least preserve my father’s memory in a positive light, if he will still do nothing to alter what he calls the flow of history by asking for Klaus Bingen’s release. The person who provides some tiny measure of comfort as I wait for doom to lower itself over me.

  No, I do not love him.

  Suddenly I grasp Grammaticus tightly, fiercely, as if I am drowning and he is the only bit of flotsam left from the ship bearing me forward.

  “Ava,” he murmurs, sighing, with more puzzlement than affection in his voice.

  This life together is not what he longs for, either; he, too, lives with disappointment. Over Midi Sorte, I suppose — she who stares coldly past the both of us if by chance she sees us together. She has been elevated to companion and personal attendant of Queen Isabel, who is said to have demanded her by name. Not even Christina-Beatte could call Midi back to the nursery; Count Nicolas, who shares the regency with Queen Isabel, has made sure of that.

  I feel sick. My heart pounds. This happens not just in my hasty, secretive couplings with Arthur Grammaticus but all the time, as I eat and scrub and haul my buckets from the cisterns to the slop drains and rubbish heaps. While Midi Sorte glowers at me in the Dowager Queen’s rooms and hisses if I make an unexpected noise. While I empty the Queen’s chamber pot and turn the contents over to her doctors or dispose of them in the jakes; while I try, fruitlessly, to wash the stink of hard work from my hands and restore them to their seamstress softness.

  It is endless, this task of cleaning rooms that never looked dirty until I started to scrub them. They now seem to be nothing but filth, so quickly does it renew itself. I think again of silver coins and how long I’ll have to work to earn the rest of my passage to Denmark. Or if I’ll have to spend them all to buy some comfort for my father — I cannot hope to buy his freedom, not unless some miracle spins filth into gold.