“Seems like a lot of work,” Lan said finally, since Azrael was waiting. “It would take a lot of time.”
“Only so much as the task required. I set no schedule before you. And you would not be so far,” he added, spreading his hands to display his full magnanimity. “I could visit nightly, if you desired so much of my company. We could yet take our evening meals together. Plainer fare, perhaps, but the taste can only be improved away from this—” He swept a dismissive stare over the lower tables of his dead court. “—stale farce.”
“I can’t help but feel you’re trying to get rid of me,” she said, trying to pretend she was joking.
“No.” His eyes flickered. “No, Lan. I’m trying to keep you.”
And with that, he picked up his wine and went back to fake-watching his musicians.
Since he obviously intended that to be his last word, it was up to Lan to say, “You said we were moving on this morning. Is this how you want to do it? By sending me away to grub in the dirt while you roll around with—”
He laughed once, loud and bitter, and drank more wine. “You would think that,” he muttered. “You alone would think that.”
“What, then?”
“Is it so impossible to imagine I may simply wish to fill your empty hours with some pleasant distraction?”
“Yeah, it kind of is!” she shot back. “Why do I need to be distracted?”
He drew back, first frowning, then scowling, and finally thoughtful.
“The city that Haven was,” he said at last, picking his words with obvious care, “was the jewel of this land. And it has become the jewel of this world. Perhaps the last jewel. Haven is a strongbox, confining what it safeguards. The dead are content to be held. I have made them so. I am content…” There must have been more to that thought, but in the end, he only shook his head and turned it back on her. “You are not. This, I accept. The living rarely thrive in captivity. But I would have you happy.”
“And this is your answer? Run me off to North Nowhere and tell me to plant a garden?” Lan rolled her eyes. “You’re just like my mom, giving me chores because she thinks I’m bored.”
He did not smile, but had a smile pulled from him, very much against his will. “Of all the comparisons you could have made…your mother?”
“I call it like I see it. But okay, fine. If you think I’ve got to do something, maybe I could help you.”
His expression, what she could see of it, never changed, but his thumbclaw scraped down the side of his cup, shaving away a soft curl of gold as proof of some kind of emotion. “You would not offer if you had the slightest notion what I do with my days.”
“You have affairs.”
He rocked back, then leaned forward and peered at her as from a great distance, saying, “I what?”
“Have affairs,” she repeated, thinking he must have misheard her.
His surprise did not diminish. If anything, it increased. “Why on Earth would you say so?”
She laughed, bewildered. “Because you told me?”
He stared at her at least a full minute before saying, “Elaborate.”
“The day after I first got here, when we were having breakfast. I asked what you did all day and you said you had affairs over all the muss and fuss of running a city, or whatever it was you said.”
He tipped his head back to search his immortal memory and finally said, with laughing comprehension, “Civil affairs. The minutiae of managing a city such as Haven. The demands upon my day…are many. It was true once,” he mused. “In the beginning, there were fortifications to make, assaults to repel, enemies to vanquish. Strategies had to be devised. Every success or failure had to be measured, dissected, and adjusted for the next conflict. And then the reconstruction, which entailed meetings with advisors, most of whom were of my own raising, each one requiring considerable research in order to imbue them with the necessary foreknowledge and expertise. For years, my every hour was occupied. Now do you know what I do?” he asked, pouring another glass of wine and smiling in a distinctly ill-humored way as the servant whose job it was to mind his cup fidgeted behind him. “Nothing. I do nothing. I have a number of rooms about the palace set aside for the purpose and most days, I merely go there and wait until it is time to come out.”
“And this makes you late for dinner? Twice?”
“No. Most days, I said, but not today. And not tomorrow,” he added with a return toward that black mood than had shadowed him on his entrance, but before it could settle, he shook it off himself. “The odd diversion does present itself upon occasion. I have some…small matters requiring my attention at the present, but not, I think, for much longer.”
“Then you go back to sitting in a dark room and doing nothing all day?” Lan shook her head, picking currants out of her pigeon pie even though she already knew she wouldn’t be eating it. “Sounds like you’re the one who needs a hobby.”
“I have one. Taming the wild women of the north.”
“How’s that working out for you?”
He sighed and held up his hand, flattened, to rock it stiffly back and forth. His unfamiliarity with the simple gesture made it into something alien, something that should be painted on walls for men to puzzle over thousands of years from now. If there were any men left in a thousand years. Seeing it didn’t exactly warm her over, but she did find herself thawing.
Picking a last currant out of her pie, Lan waved a servant over. “Send this to Cassius,” she ordered, passing her plate up.
The servant looked at Azrael, who said, “Chloe. In the south garden room. Why?” he asked Lan, sounding only mildly curious as he inspected his wine.
“I don’t like the thought of her sitting up hungry all night.”
His smile twitched a little broader, although he did not look at her. “And why would she do that?”
“Because she’s expecting you.” Lan pushed her chair back and slipped her hand forcefully into his. “And you won’t be coming. Well…not with her, at any rate.”
“This is precisely what I mean when I say you need taming,” he remarked, unmoving.
“So tame me.”
He grunted, started to drink, then cocked an eye up at her and put his cup down again. “I propose a compromise.”
Lan’s eyes narrowed. “I’m listening.”
Gently breaking her grip on his hand, Azrael picked up the bottle of wine. “For Chloe,” he said, holding it out for the servant to take. “She’ll want something to drink with her dinner…and something to break on the wall when she realizes I will not be calling on her tonight, if…?”
“If I get a bloody garden. Tell you what,” she said, rolling her eyes at herself and her pudding heart. “Any day I’m not out staring up at Master Wickham’s stupid buildings and learning the difference between soffits and eaves, I’ll plant all the stupid flowers you could ever want.”
“And on the nights that follow those days, I am yours, entirely.” His head cocked and his gaze drifted to an unfocused point over her head. “I’m not accustomed to using that as an incentive rather than a warning, but, as an expert negotiator of my acquaintance once said, ‘Whatever works.’ Now hear me, Lan, I’ll not chain you to the garden, but if you should make other arrangements for your mornings, I shall make other arrangements for my nights and I will not allow you to interfere with them.”
Lan scowled. “Fine, but I am not going to hike across the whole of bloody Haven every day. If I’ve got to do this, I’m doing it here on the palace grounds. All right?”
He thought it over, his eyelight fluxing several times before it steadied. “Agreed,” he said and smiled faintly. “Shall you have swans?”
“Hell, no. Wait, yes. Give me all the swans, as many as you can scrape up. And on an unrelated note,” she added, as Azrael finally allowed her to pull him from his throne, “where exactly is Felicity’s room?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Lan had grown up in greenhouses and knew them very well. She did not know gard
ens, except as the narrow stripes of flowering green that the mayor’s Missus tried to scratch up around the edges of her house and even that was mostly herbs for her kitchen. But since coming to Haven, she had become fairly familiar with the flowery sort of garden, if still not comfortable with them, useless bloody things that they were. There was a garden visible through every outward window in the palace. Even the inward windows opened on a garden of sorts, although nothing grew there but pikes and those who meditated upon them.
Yet in all the time Lan had lived in the palace, she had never seen the garden Azrael gave her or even guessed at its existence. It had been well hidden, tucked away behind the greenhouses, beyond the lawn, through some trees, and a goodly walk down a path, hidden from all but a crow’s eye. It was, in fact, as far from the palace as any place could be and still be considered ‘on the grounds’, as if even the person who had designed the thing knew it was ugly and was ashamed to let it be seen.
And, oh, was it ugly.
Lan knew she didn’t have the fondest feelings for gardens, but even she knew when something was pretty and when it wasn’t. This wasn’t and what was more, it wasn’t in such a deliberate and methodical fashion that Lan walked there for some time, just to soak it all in. So much effort had gone into assuring its ugliness that it tipped over into being, if not appealing on an aesthetic level, at least worthy of admiration.
Great care had been taken to ensure no soil was visible to the wandering eye. Crushed gravel covered the ground; larger blocks of stone made a path and even steps where necessary; boulders grew like tumors from this grey flesh. If it was all rock, it might—maybe—have seemed peaceful in one of those cultured ways folk like Lan couldn’t understand, but it wasn’t. There had to have been dozens of varieties of plant here, but even in flower, they brought no life to the garden. The brightest blooms were not quite white, the darkest shadows, not quite black. Any color they did have—soft blues or pinks or lavenders—were washed out and lost by the overabundance of grey that lay over every flower, every shrub, every stand of trees. Beds of dusty miller and campion were as mildewing rags dropped over the ground. The frosty white hairs that should have invited a furtive touch on painted ferns and lamb’s ear instead seemed the carriers of some unknown contagion. The air smelled of sweet sage and eucalyptus, yet the longer she had to breathe it in while looking at this ashen landscape, the more that good smell seemed to become one of blight.
The path that Lan followed drew itself in increasingly narrower circles through silvery lilies, sprays of pale acacia, and lacy-leafed centaurea toward the sunken center of this grey garden, until it came to a flat bottom, marked by a ring of what had been seven grey-barked trees. Four of them had been carefully burnt to blackened trunks. The remaining three were willows of some sort, with drooping branches that, in this place, could only suggest despair. At the center of this ruin, like an idol around which all the rest of this horrible place slouched in worship, had been set a towering pillar of grey stone, wrapped with chains.
“What,” said Lan upon reaching this unsettling monument, “the hell is this?”
Master Wickham, to whom had fallen the task of showing her to her new acquisition and who had strolled complacently along beside her as she viewed it in all its ghastly glory, now turned away from his inspection of a clump of flannel flowers and joined her. “It’s quite common for formal gardens to be designed around a focal point.”
“Great, now it’s got to be formal,” Lan muttered, not too quietly. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
“No,” she said, even more sarcastically.
“Oh.” He peered at her a moment longer, clearly puzzled, then let it go and focused on what was, for him, the point. “A more naturalistic design would be a pleasant change from the…ah, rather over-styled areas about the grounds. You might consider—”
“He said he wanted a garden. A real one.”
“All right,” he said, after a reproving glance over the tops of those spectacles he wasn’t wearing, “but you still needn’t go in too formal a direction. A traditional cottage garden can be quite charming, particularly in a setting like this one.”
Lan looked around in something like horror, trying very hard to see the charm, but failing.
“I meant the location,” said Wickham. “The trees and such, not…” He gestured mutely at their surroundings, but although his arm waved out over beds of artemesia and lavender, both their eyes were drawn to the sunken center of this crater and to the tumorous god that squatted there.
They both stared at it for some time.
“That is the first thing that’s coming out,” Lan declared at length. “In fact, if this is really up to me, it’s all coming out.”
“If, did you say?” Wickham raised one eyebrow. “I had taken to understand you knew you were to have a garden. If not this one specifically, at least one of your own.”
“I knew, all right.”
He waited, then coughed politely into his fist and said, “Forgive me an impertinent observation, but you don’t seem very happy to have it.”
“Why the hell would I be? I didn’t ask for this. This is more of Azrael’s nonsense about dollygirls doing more than dollying for him. Bettering,” she said with a scowl. “That’s what Serafina called it. ‘Bettering’ myself. Bugger that. I can already grow a damn peach tree. I can grow marrow and beans and barley besides. I grow food. I don’t see how a stupid bloody flower is supposed to be so much better than that. Can you eat a flower?”
“Several of them, certainly.”
She gave him a withering stare.
“So plant a productive garden. Fruit trees are lovely in bloom.”
“He has a hundred greenhouses,” said Lan dismissively. “He wants flowers and shit.”
“I see.” Wickham surveyed the garden with a critical eye, turning his back to the bound pillar just as if it could really be trusted not to lash out with those chains and grab him. “First things first, as they say. We might look at some books—”
Lan sighed.
“—or better yet, tour gardens elsewhere in Haven,” he continued, hearing her but choosing not to respond. “Perhaps you can find something that inspires you to better enthusiasm than ‘flora and feces’.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“I don’t breathe, as a matter of common—Oh, that’s another of your apothegms,” he said, rolling his eyes. “How droll. Now, I read up on some of the basic elements of landscape design after meeting with our lord this morning, so I’m quite comfortable to advise you up to a certain point. I’ll have one of the master groundsmiths answer any further questions concerning, oh…soil suitability and shade tolerance and the like, but I’m quite keen to get started today, if you are. Where would you suggest we begin?”
“By clearing all this out, I reckon.” Lan planted her hands on her hips in unconscious imitation of her mother and kicked at the stones lining the path. “If you can’t pull it all up, set it on fire. Hell, bury it. Fill it in, pave it over, and let’s start with flat earth.”
“Oh, don’t do that,” said Master Wickham with a polite furrow of his brows. “This area could be magnificently repurposed as a pond. And the path itself is quite well-designed with an eye toward creating miniature space and movement. It would be a shame to waste it.”
“If you say so. Like it’s not wasted already, hidden all the way out here.”
“Oh no. If she hid it, it was merely to ensure that no one saw it before she was finished. She very much intended it to be seen.” Master Wickham clasped his hands behind his back and ran his gaze slowly across the garden, bed by bed. “And I’ve no doubt it had the desired effect.”
“She?” But as soon as she said it, Lan realized she knew who ‘she’ was. There was only one person in Haven who would think of making a living garden that looked so dead. Or at least, there had been only one. “Lady Tehya?”
“She used to go for wal
ks about the grounds. I think he must have thought she enjoyed being out of doors, as opposed to just being away from him. She appears to have set him right.” Master Wickham turned away to inspect a small grove of beech trees sticking like bones out of a mound of grey grass. “She was very good at saying things without speaking, wasn’t she?”
“Well, that changes things,” said Lan, fighting the bubble of alarm now welling up through the tar of gloom that lay invisibly over the whole of this grave masquerading as a garden.
But Wickham seemed genuinely puzzled. “How so?”
“This is a test, isn’t it? Or a trap. Or…” That bubble popped, beading gloom with paranoia. “Are we sure Azrael sent us out here? Could Cassius have had something to do with it?”
“He spoke to me directly, Lan. For the first time in ages,” he added in a wistful aside. “It was nice.”
“But he surely doesn’t mean for me to…to tear it all up!”
“If that’s what you want to do with it, that is precisely what he expects you to do. Shall we begin?” Wickham waited a few seconds, then clapped his hands briskly together, apparently taking her silence for enthusiastic assent. “Capital. Clearing the site should take several days and in the meantime, we can have a look at our lord’s hothouses and nurseries to see what we have available to us. There’s a beautiful Japanese garden in Holland Park you might find interesting. The eastern aesthetic lends itself well to small spaces like this one and would allow us to repurpose some of this stone in a more pleasing manner. And we could build a tea house,” he added brightly. “I picture something after the sukiya style, with a thatched roof, subdued colors…perhaps a broader table than is strictly necessary. I should like to hold lessons there upon occasion. And take tea. What do you think?”
Lan looked back at the chain-wrapped pillar. With the shadows of the burnt trees thrown across it and the leaves of the willows fluttering in the wind, it almost seemed to be breathing. She had to suppress a shiver that had nothing to do with the chill in the air. “I think I should talk to him before I do anything.”
Land of the Beautiful Dead Page 45