Wiping his eyes, King Rudof laughed once. “You misspoke. The king does not govern the nation. You taught me that yourself.”
Powl shrugged. “He does if he is not careful. You, I know, will be a good king, Rudof.” Powl gestured with an open hand toward me. “My madman, here, would not be. Not in any world like this one.”
The king turned his grieving eyes on me and I started in place, for I had forgotten my own existence. He cleared his throat. “You love your madman, Daraln. You gave him the best and highest and only gave the rest to me.”
I did understand King Rudof, and I would have given him my rags, my dowhee, and all my art to assuage the pain I had caused him.
“‘Best and highest’ are traps, sir,” said Powl, with a shade of his usual manner, which softened again as he added, “I love you, Rudof. I have since you were born.”
“My king!” It was Leoue, shouldering his way past the captain of guards to glare with face twisted from Powl to myself and back. “You have permitted him to bewitch you once again! It is his ‘best and highest’ skill, if you like those words.” He pointed not at Powl but at me.
“That creature is walking evidence of his treachery—issued by a traitor tool, out of a woman enemy to our very blood, and nurtured in treason and dishonorable arts by Daraln. He is named King of Hell with good reason!”
I could not understand this talk of blood and tools and nurturance. I found myself walking, bare-handed, from Powl’s side toward the duke.
“What he is telling you very poetically, Nazhuret,” my teacher called from behind me, “is that you are the child of Eydl, Duke of Norwess, and of his noble Rezhmian wife, Nahvah, and that your maternal uncle and name-father was Nazhuret, poet, scientist, and warrior; cousin to the Sanaur.”
In my mind came these things: the picture of a blond noble on a heavy charger, in heavy armor, to which Powl had called my attention “for the quality of the print”; the words “and my nurse wept openly, so perhaps it was more than romance at a distance”; the tiny lady with a dress of clouds who might or might not have existed and whose baby pissed on me.
These visions took no time.
It was Rudof who next spoke. “So all that is true, Powl? About the boy? I heard it from Leoue, but he is a dog with one bone on the subject of mixed blood.”
Powl sighed, and I stared at him. “He is not a boy, sir. He is your age exactly. I have known him for who he is almost four years now. Since he… came into the observatory on the hill one day. I knew what secret, southern name they had given the child who vanished, and when I saw Nazhuret, there was that in his face, in the flavor of his thought, in his incurable innocent bluntness, that brought my old friend to me in the flesh.”
“You did call me,” I said to Powl. Out of all that wild tale, that was all I could pick out for meaning. That I, too, Powl had known from birth. Perhaps cared for. “I didn’t come to you by accident.” He opened his mouth, but said nothing for a long while. At last he smiled and shook his head, but not as for a negation.
Again to Powl only, I said, “I knew most of that: not about the duke and the poet, but the essential part. That I was half and half. In fact, it’s rarely out of my mind.”
I was standing an arm’s length from King Rudof, my back to him, and once again I was behaving as though the king were nobody. His lean, ruddy hand came to rest on my shoulder, and the duke stepped over the grass. “No, sir. Don’t touch him. Remember that your father had his father slain!”
King Rudof widened his eyes in alarm. “Leoue! Who exactly is it you want to remind of that?”
Powl scratched his chin as he said, “True, Leoue. One father killed another, though it was not by the royal command that the boy’s mother and uncle were poisoned. And if you are trying to use Nazhuret as a tool against the king as you used the king as a tool against Norwess, you are far out of frame. This man is not usable like that.”
“Poisoned?” asked King Rudof, glancing around the small assemblage for information. The Duke of Leoue, too, glanced around him, down the long drive to the blur of blue and black and white and yellow behind the gate. Then he raised his voice, shouting “assassin!” and his own sword—a saber, despite his civilian garb—made a single swing, which slit the throat of the incomprehending guard captain and continued toward the head of the king.
I leaped, though I was blocked by the king and could not be in time. Powl leaped, too, with great speed, but could not be in time. King Rudof only had a moment to fix his eyes on the bullmastiff who had turned on him.
Powl could not be in time, but he was after all, because when he slammed the king aside, Leoue’s blade was slowing in the air, and his furious stare was at nothing. Powl watched the duke fall at his feet, and out of the back of his bull neck, right at the junction of the skull, protruded the hilt of an effete, jeweled little throwing dagger. The sort of dagger one can spin.
Arlin was three yards away over the grass. She stared at the brilliant little thing in the man’s neck, more like a hair clasp in appearance than a tool of death.
She glanced up confused, past the king, past the earl, to me. “Did I do that, Nazhuret?” she asked, and rubbed a sweaty hand on her thighs.
Powl almost sprang to her. “You have no memory of it?” She shook her head vaguely, still looking over to me.
Then King Rudof bent his back and lolled his head, as though he were about to vomit on the body of the duke. But at a sound he stood straight, both hands out—a picture of command—to greet the scrambling guards. “Sheathe your weapons. It is over. No need for you. Leoue only… announced his own attempt at murder.”
I went to Arlin and took her arm, which was stiff and chill. She glared at me, and I thought she might cry. I feared she might say something unforgivably impudent to the king, for he made third in the trio of men surrounding her, and he shook her shoulder lightly. “Lad. Lad. Civilian!” She met his eyes.
“I owed you already,” said the king, “and now my debt is immense. Don’t stand there starved and frozen any longer—he was never your friend as he was mine—but tell me what the King of Velonya can do for you.”
Though her expression was slightly impudent, it was not unforgivably so. “Thank you, sir. I do ask something.” We all waited for her to continue, and I, for one, had no idea what she would say.
“Is the Red Whip prisoner still alive?”
Rudof stared blankly and so did I. “Yes. To my best knowledge. Do you want him freed?”
“No, sir. I want you to take this traitor’s body”—she gestured at her own dagger without looking—“and show it to the man. Then perhaps his silence will end.”
Now King Rudof took a shuddering breath. “It shall be done, of course. Is that what you think?” He rubbed his hand through his bright hair and began to pace: himself again. “That he was responsible for the attack on us?”
“What attack?” said Powl sharply, glancing from the king to Arlin and back.
King Rudof wore a skull grin. “So there is something you don’t know, Daraln?” As he looked at Powl, the expression flowered into a smile.
Powl widened his eyes. “Oh, that attack,” he said.
That evening the king stopped his progress in Sordaling, and as we all had followed him, I still had not set foot in Powl’s own residence. I had a strong sense of predestination about that.
Three of the richest men in the city turned their houses over to the use of King Rudof’s guard and company. I’m sure they were glad for the opportunity, for they said so repeatedly, in nervous chorus. I was given a bath in a gold-rimmed tub hot as soup and with two footmen scrubbing me together, and then—as they did not know what to make of my rarefied accents and earthy appearance and unearthly name—they wrapped me in a white woolen shirt and breeches with a red silk sash around my middle, as though for a peasant’s wedding.
I do appear more nearly normal that way than in a skirted coat.
I considered dropping in at the school, to see whether it still stood, b
ut after consideration I found the idea a dead bore. Instead I went to seek out Arlin.
I found her equally scrubbed, though I doubt with footmen. I had considered the possibility (with trepidation) that I might find her stuffed into woman’s apparel, sitting sullen and defeated in some corner. I had underestimated Powl, however, either in his sympathy or his strong ideas of what was his business and what was not, and I came upon her (him) slouching on a marble staircase, legs spraddled, dressed in dashing red and black breeches, with a plate before her and a wineglass in her hand.
I sat down beside her, stared at her immaculate tawny hands, and caught a scent of sandalwood.
“You look good yourself,” she answered, though I had been silent. “Still tired, and your nose is a little burned…” She pushed her elbows off a stair and sat upright. “The rider still did not admit anything,” she said, and it came to me that Arlin had a much more lively interest in the affairs of the crown than I did. I ventured to guess that the prisoner didn’t know who had hired them. Arlin cut me off. “The captain of Leoue’s personal guard, however, was less obdurate. Leoue was after the regency and thereby the government.” Her laugh was pointed. “Civilized people cannot stand against persuasion like barbarians.”
I thought about that, resting my elbows on my knees and my chin in the tent of my hands. I wondered aloud how I would act in such circumstances, and she replied “unbreakable.”
She slid toward me over the slippery stones and said insinuatingly, “Nazhuret, I don’t see why you think you can refuse to be a duke when you are one already. I don’t believe the title is optional.”
I told her, not for the first time, that if Eydl was my father—“He is,” she interrupted smugly—and if his marriage to a Rezhmian was legal and valid—and at this her eyes went pale with anger at me—then still his title had been negated and his possessions revoked.
“King Rudof will negate the negation. It probably is already done, if I know the redhead. And the estates that went to Leoue—”
I stood up to leave her in midsentence, and she caught my hand. “No. Forget it. I apologize, Zhurrie. No more talk of dukes. I know better. I know what you are. All along I knew.
“It would be a bad trade for you. It’s just that I had hoped for employment with the Duke of Norwess. Sounds so impressive, doesn’t it? Very old Vesting.”
I did sit down again, and linked my hand in hers. She slipped from it, muttering the word “boy-lover,” so instead I linked my fingers around one knee and rocked on the stairs. “I have no way to employ you, comrade,” I said, “But I could certainly help you waste your time.”
She had been drinking and she sprayed wine all over the waxed marble stairs, except that it wasn’t wine but brandy. “Besides, Arlin, you have the favor of the king. You don’t need more for advancement.”
With her face in the glass again, she said, “But I had my heart set on the favor of a duke.”
Before I could open my mouth to speak, Powl was climbing up to us. He looked critically at the speckles of wet on the stairs, took out his handkerchief, and wiped dry a place to sit.
“Nazhuret, I have been looking for you.” I looked away from Arlin, drawn from what might have been an important moment by this voice I had feared I would never hear again.
He glanced at both of us and continued, “I have been studying medicine this past year. Are you interested?”
“Of course,” I said, but to my distress Arlin had risen and was stepping over me.
“It is not the usual curriculum of medicine, though…”
“Of course not.”
“I guess I shall just have to find another duke,” Arlin was saying, but Powl, without turning, put his hand behind her knee and made it necessary for her to sit down again.
My teacher smiled distantly at me. “You should see your face, Nazhuret. Your father was just the same.”
Arlin stared, half offended, half perplexed, at the hand on the joint of her knee that had led her down so easily. “I want you to know that Helt Markins was an honest man, after his own lights,” Powl said to her. As her scowl blossomed blackly, he added, “He wanted to save his country from a foreign influence that he felt would inevitably drown the culture of his fathers. And he was right in all that. In two more generations this will be a very different realm.”
Arlin’s expression flickered with something like anger, and also like enjoyment. With an air of producing an unexpected ace she answered him, “Every two generations—no, every one generation—this is a very different realm. There never was any ‘old Vesting’ culture, except in the packed-away memories of old men.”
Powl regarded her intently for some seconds, then spoke. “And you really don’t remember throwing the dagger at all?”
She cleared brandy from her throat. “Well, as to that, it seemed more politic at the moment to withhold any… commitment to the throwing…”
“Don’t lie to me, Arlin,” said Powl flatly. “That is one problem I never had with Nazhuret. Besides, you are trying to deny what is likely the finest thing you have ever done. So far.”
He turned back to me those eyes, ironic, interested, without disruptive passion. He smiled interrogatively. “This one is already half mad,” he said to me.
“No porcelain hands,” I stated, probably with my unhappy soul in my face again. Arlin glared at me, confounded.
Powl’s concern wrinkled his forehead up to where the hair once had been. “Do you have fears you will be… replaced, Nazhuret? You needn’t.”
I shook my head violently. “Not by her, Powl. By you!”
They both sat and stared at me, like the audience at a theater.
“I took you correctly,” said Powl, nodding.
Then Arlin gave a snort and wiped her damp hair from her face. “Zhurrie, you’re impossible,” she said, but uncertainly, “Penniless, and a monk besides. Are you trying to cut me out of yet another employment here?”
“I’m not a monk,” I told her.
“He’s not a monk,” said Powl in pain, seeing no trust on her face. “He was not a monk when he came to me and I certainly did not create him one. There are no celibates on this staircase, unless you are one, madam.
“And Nazhuret, I have no interest in consuming your friend utterly, no more than I had in doing the same with you. As you remember. Conversation, elucidation to mutual benefit. For more than these, you must go to someone else.” He fluttered his hand indifferently. “To each other, for example.”
Arlin was scowling in belligerent confusion, her back against the cold marble wall. “What does all that mean?” she demanded. “What is he saying?”
I thought a moment, took my courage in both my hands, and asked Powl for the key to the observatory.
My king, I have been at this memoir all the autumn, winter, and into the first thaw, and though it has grown out of my expectation, I am at last finished with telling you things you already knew. I have learned that too much of seeing oneself through another’s eyes is not instructive but destructive, and I hope I have not done you a wrong. But then, the people of sixteen years ago are not with us now, anyway. Until your command, I hadn’t thought to dig the ghosts up again. There’s no small amount of pain involved in looking back to one’s youth.
(This morning in the grinding room a chance placing of two mirrors showed me the top of my head, and right at the crown there is either an old scar or a spot of incipient baldness. I don’t want it to be baldness—my face is original enough—and if I had courage I would ask Arlin how long the spot has been there. No hurry; I will find out sooner or later.)
That you should have asked for this history so soon after the death of our teacher was very appropriate, and it has helped to reconcile me to that shocking lack and emptiness. I would have had little on my mind this past year but Powl anyway, and you have given purpose and structure to my grief.
It was fitting that he should die over a table of laboratory equipment, going out quickly, like a candle. He had
used that heart well, though he had not shown it often.
I have carried tremendous sympathy for you, Rudof, all these years, knowing what you desired and had to sacrifice for the sake of the nation. Once Powl was kind enough to call me “the stone I flung into places I could never go myself” (that was only once, and then after a good dinner), but that seems the greatest irony of all his ironies.
You, Rudof, are an eagle by nature, welded to chains by the responsibility of your birth. I am (if I know myself) a small bird of the sort that collects pebbles and makes nests of leaves (and pecks repeatedly at mirrors; I mustn’t forget that), and yet Powl grafted on to me a limitless power of flight.
So now I end. I enclose Arlin’s profound respects (they are difficult to win, you well know, and she feels I have treated her shamefully in this narrative), Nahvah’s embarrassed courtesy, the various orphans’ confused obedience, the horses’ whinnies, the buzz of a newly awakened bumblebee over my paper, the bellow of someone’s amorous bull in the distance, and all the weathers of Norwess Province, for your enjoyment in Vestinglon.
Do not mourn Powl, or any of your dead too much, old friend. I share your feelings; I see him daily, when I am not looking for him, and I hear his voice.
But I repeat again that first thing Powl or my own madness revealed to me, on the cold stone flags of an ugly brick building, at the raw age of nineteen:
Death is before life and after it and in it all together, suffused with a light as perfect as the rays of the sun. It comes not as an insult, nor a defeat, nor does it serve as a boundary to the free soul.
This I do remember.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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