“I hope not, Your Highness.”
“Why? Surely you hope to influence him, as his priest? I understand you’ve been made a priest now—a priest of the Stone.”
She said the words slowly and carefully, with the shadow of a smile, like a child repeating a lesson and hoping for praise.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
“You grit your teeth—are you ill?”
“No, Your Highness.”
His legs were trembling. She gazed straight into his face, malicious and amused. He avoided her eyes, looking instead at the amethysts in her high black hair, at the dancers whirling behind her under the lights.
“Veimaro.”
“Yes, Teldaire.”
“Look at me. Yes, that’s better. It’s not so terrible, is it? I’m not entirely repulsive to look at, I hope? No, I know you can’t answer that, don’t bother. I wonder what you know about me? I mean, besides what the papers say—that I’m pretty and know how to dance. I don’t suppose my intelligence comes up in the newspapers much—not that I read that trash. But I assure you, veimaro, I am not stupid. My husband is a very young king. Very young. He requires guidance. Do you know what the Old Telkan said to me before he died?”
He thought: You are even younger than the king. She was only eighteen. In her little face, her eyes glowed like a blacksmith’s tongs. “No,” he said.
“He said: ‘My dear, you are more than decorative, and this union is more than political. My nephew is but a man of dough. He needs fire to bake him.’ I can only suppose he meant that I was to play the role of the oven. He said it to me in this very room. At my wedding.”
She smiled sweetly. “The Old Telkan was a very cautious man, though people remember him as a pleasure-loving prince. He was careful to make sure that people thought of him in that way. Olondrians like a king who is large and strong and cheerful. I know this, although I’m Nainish. And you—you’re from Bain, aren’t you, veimaro? So you must know it even better than I. Olondrians rule the world, but their national character is essentially weak. Isn’t that odd? They’re like children. Now, look at Ahadrom.”
He looked. Across the room, the young king sweated under the lamps, buttoned into a black coat that shone like a beetle’s carapace.
“Gray as a cod,” the Teldaire said, “and miserable as a victim of the toothache. I suppose he looks happier when he’s tucked away with you? With you and your High Priest and his old father. And the Stone, of course. Is he happier? Tell me. Does he ever smile?”
“Our work is not done for pleasure, Your Highness.”
Her eyes widened. “You snap! Very good! I knew you had it in you. I think we might become friends after all.”
She slipped the chain with the star over her own head. “I’ll wear this for you, as a token. And you,” she concluded with her bright laugh, “will leave the bread in the oven.”
Leave the bread in the oven! As if Velvalinhu were a kitchen! And it was, it was, he thought as he stamped out of the ballroom in fury: a stinking kitchen, begrimed with soot, where the empire’s wealth poured in the back door, and princes, like dirty scullery boys, stood with their hands in the pots. But he would not be part of it—he’d starve first! “Who is she?” he raged in the little room where his High Priest sat beside the fire, and the Stone stood heavy in the corner, covered with a black cloth, and Ahadrom I drowsed in his low chair.
“Who is she? This chit of a girl—she dares—! Where did she come from?”
“Nain,” the old priest said mildly.
“Yes, but how did she get her claws into the Telkan?”
“You are very angry, my child,” the priest observed. “Remember: A quiet heart is a clear doorway, through which may enter the horsemen of the gods.”
Elarom’s puffy, discolored hand wandered over his chest, found the strings of his robe and drew them tight. Even in the spring he felt the cold. His trembling sent a pang through Ivrom’s heart. “Forgive me, Master,” the younger man said.
Ahadrom I made a snuffling sound and jerked upright, looking blearily about him.
“You,” said Ivrom, turning to the Telkan’s father. He would not say “my lord”; such words had been banished from this holy place; in this room, he did not even call the Telkan “Your Highness.”
“Yes?” Ahadrom I said, startled.
Ivrom knelt in front of him, bringing his face level with that of the former Duke of Tevlas. Ahadrom I had a round old face and a pitiful straggling beard; his head was bald, his eyes poor; he rarely managed to speak two words of sense together. But he will speak sense to me, Ivrom thought grimly, if I have to slap him awake. “Tell me about the queen,” he said.
“Iloni,” Ahadrom I murmured with a hint of fondness. “Eyes like grapes. Such watercolors . . . on the terrace . . .”
“Not that one. I mean the new queen, Firvaud.”
“Oh, that one!” the old man chuckled. “Graceful. Like a little black goose.”
“How did she meet your son?”
“It was . . . they came to Ashenlo. All the family together. For the—was it a wedding? In winter. Tanbrivaud, perhaps.”
“They came from Nain in winter?”
“Yes, in a . . .” Ahadrom I skimmed his hand across his robed knees.
“A sleigh?”
“Such handsome children. The girls had very sharp feet. Marks in the parquetry, you know, from dancing. Then the falcon died. Beilan was so sad. The grave, all afternoon, digging. The ground was frozen . . .”
“Tell me about Firvaud.”
“Oh, that one! A little veil. Little quick hands. In the parlor for hours. The needle flew . . .”
“She made herself look industrious.”
“Eh?”
“And what else? About Firvaud.”
The old man yawned. “A good girl. Came to look at the Stone.”
Ivrom turned to the priest. “She saw the Stone?”
“Oh, yes,” Elarom said, smiling. “In those days we had more freedom. We worked in a little lumber room in the west wing of the house—do you remember that, Ahadrom? The corridor was very long and dark, but anyone who got to the end of it could find us. The servants used to visit at night sometimes. We’d make them tea, Ahadrom and I. Young Firvaud came several times. She seemed quite interested, as I recall.”
That flint-eyed, shiny-haired, dancing wretch. With the Stone.
“What did she wear?” Ivrom asked hoarsely.
Elarom hesitated, but Ahadrom spoke up with sudden confidence. “White. All white. She and her sister and brother. White jackets, white frocks for the girls. White shoes. They’d lost their father that year, you see.”
Ivrom left the room. He was finished with the two old men. They had given him enough to begin. And then, the room of the Stone was windowless, stuffy with the fire burning, and he felt the need of expansion now, of distance. In his own apartment, the nurse was asleep on her cot with the child beside her. He passed the solid darkness of their shapes in the airy darkness of the room. He stepped out onto the balcony, into the smell of rain. His new apartment, bigger than the one he had shared with Tenais, commanded a view of parks and gardens flecked with lamps. He breathed the sweet, humid air, filled with the exaltation of hate, remembering the night his child was born. A company had passed on horseback then, hallooing in the dark. She had been among them—Firvaud of Faluidhen—probably in the lead, her little boots snug in the stirrups.
He saw her. In her dark green cloak. Her face turned in the torchlight, the laughing mouth. He saw her three years ago, before he knew she existed: demure in her white mourning frock, in the formal parlor at Ashenlo, white ribbons in the black cream of her hair. She was doing needlework—very fine, with her fine sharp fingers! She would be sure to put on an attitude of sadness. Her father had died of
a catarrh in the autumn. Perhaps, when she spoke of it, she managed to produce a tiny tear. He could see it all so clearly! Her father had been a general in the Olondrian army, fighting the Brogyars along the northeastern border; the handsome award of appreciation the family had received from the empire upon his death had financed this trip to visit the Prince of the Realms. That money had purchased the girls’ exquisite lace stockings, which made it look as if some snowy nymph had breathed upon their calves; their dresses were of the softest wool; their cloaks, in typical Nainish style, were richly embroidered with silver on the inside. Who could doubt that Firvaud, with her sinuous dark beauty, appeared to advantage in her mourning clothes, like a black flower in a silver vase? And then the way she widened her eyes—the way she took the prince’s arm, when they walked among the trees of the frozen gardens! Her vivid face, rosy with cold, peered out of her white fur hood. “Tell me about the Stone, I am so interested!” And Ahadrom II—Teskon, as he was called then—the great, slow, credulous fool, with his mouth half open—he had been taken in!
Nothing Ivrom discovered about the queen’s family afterward caused him to alter this initial vision. And he learned a great deal about them, for he made it his business to know all that could be known about the House of Faluidhen. He knew their names by heart: Mardith, the reclusive matriarch, never married, who controlled the family finances from her castle of Rediloth; her sister Tanthe, petite and pretty, her hair dyed fox-red, who often visited Velvalinhu, her slight frame brilliantly clad in the latest fashions; and Tanthe’s three children: wine-loving Fenya, a bachelor with tea-colored eyes that were large and “full” like the eyes of the heroes in Lindioth’s paintings; Firvaud the queen; and the tall, timid younger sister, Firheia, whom a journalist had nicknamed “the Nainish Rose.” Ivrom knew them all. He endured plays and celebrations, sitting stiff and often too hot in his black robe, in order to observe them: Lord Fenya dancing a stamping Nainish klugh, Lady Tanthe cooling herself with a peacock fan. He observed the pained expression of Lady Firheia, blushing fiercely in a gown that was far too tight across the bust, as her mother surreptitiously prodded her toward the table where Lord Irilas, the Telkan’s brother, tossed back a cup of wine. Ivrom smiled coldly. The Teldaire glided up to him: “Welcome, friend! Look, I am wearing your token.” She pulled the jeweled star from between her little breasts. Let her laugh. That night, in his room, he pored over her history in a book called The Nains, written by her great-aunt:
The lords and ladies of Faluidhen are descended in a direct line from Braud the Oppressor, the conqueror of Nain: not from his first union with the unfortunate Nardis of Lokhond, but from his second, with Singheia of Bar-Oul. His kingly relations disputed his choice, for which we are thankful: for their stubborn opposition to the match, their prejudice against the Nains, sparked an investigation in which Singheia’s exalted lineage was revealed.
“Have we forgotten,” asked Dardh, her cousin and primary defender at the open council held in the fortress of Niva, “the scourge of that accursed folk, the Drevedi, and the manner in which they captured and bore away the daughters of Nain?” Thus did the Nainish princes scorn to seek a link with the conquering western nobles; they claimed the goddess Avalei as ancestress, she who was also the mother of Elueth and of the Drevedi whose wickedness had once shattered the countryside. Naturally there were many who cried that one could not join with the line of kings by claiming to be descended from a vampire; however, only two years previously, Nerod of Beal had proved his rights to that princedom through the same cunning logic. Singheia’s curiously colored fingernails, which a historian of the time compares to “fragments of brown crystal,” were displayed as proof of her heritage, and the wedding took place at Niva without delay: the first between a noble Lath and a noble Nain.
In addition to her strange fingernails, the bride is said to have possessed “eyebrows like ravens’ feathers” (though she probably combed them upward), an army of nine thousand skilled warriors, and a weathered castle crumbling on the shores of the Inland Sea. Her son was that Gara whose true name was either Mavelok or Mavedok but who took the name of the mighty fortress he built in the Haramanyi, from which he defended his lands against the Brogyars, slaying with his own hand the terror of the north, Muisegh of the Boars. Able in war, he was also a brilliant diplomat in times of peace, and successfully protected his domain from the ever-greedy Laths through a combination of diplomacy and belligerence.
“And they who possess the sweet lands of the west,” reads his epistle to his cousin, Aurik of Bain, “with its vineyards and noble breezes, can scarcely be tempted by this country of burning dust and savage hills of ice; though if they please, they may come and take it from me.”
The veiled threat did its work, and in a generation, as the Laths had feared, the Balinfeil was in the hands of the Nains. They did not hold it continuously; they were harried from both the north and the south, and fought many bitter battles in self-defense. Hargilu, the eighth descendant of that house, which had already become known by the name of the Gara-Hiluen, was defeated and slain at Ora, his sisters were forced into shameful exile, and his followers went into hiding in the mountains. For many years we find it hard to trace them, though they always record new births in the precious Book of Singheia’s Children. We see them taking to ships for a time, finding sanctuary with Dauvor the Wielder of Iron, fighting in mountains and drinking out of their helmets. This sad period was ended at last by Merva the Dog—so called by his enemies, though he accepted the title with laughter—who, having prepared the army for rebellion, slew his Lathni lord and claimed his lady, Queen Vaihar, as his wife. Several happy generations followed (“happy” in the sense of those distant times, when kings maimed themselves at games of rings-and-arrows and sustained themselves on pigs’ feet). It was during this period that the fruitful lands in the foothills of the Ethenmanyi became known as “Faluidhen.” Here, in the twilight of Nain, King Brom visited, and was astonished by a purple tablecloth purchased in the west.
He was that great lord known as Brom the Last, not because he was the last of that name but because with him an era passed away, the era of Nainish independence, ancient and warlike values, and the wedhialsu that were once sung every evening. For the reign of his nephew Tandrus coincided with that of Ilherin the Sunny Prince, whose mighty army destroyed the gods of Kestenya, and who attacked the Nainish princes not with arrows, but with objects of fine make, such as the fatal tablecloth of Faluidhen, which now hangs in the castle of Rediloth. Conquered by greed, the Nainish princes fought one another for places in a foreign court and competed to stamp out the language of their fathers. Ilherin’s army was welcomed with banners, and the noble Princess Ridh, who had sought to poison him, was flogged to death. Within three generations the Nainish nobility were speaking the Olondrian tongue, and the word “Telkan” was used as a matter of course. There was great peace and prosperity. “We are all conquered,” wrote Nabien of Bar-Theil, “whether by force, by strategic unions, or by the pleasure of the gods.”
Ivrom closed the book and turned on his back. In the next room his child wailed briefly and then fell silent, soothed by the nurse. He thought of the House of Faluidhen, the House which—if the queen bore a child—would one day see their issue on the throne. A bitter, resentful, grasping House, humiliated by the submission of the Nains, riding toward power on the twin horses of money and marriage. They traded in fruit, in opium, in livestock, in silver, in Nissian slaves, in tobacco, in wool, in timber, and in their own daughters. Ivrom was not surprised when, three years later, the younger daughter of Faluidhen married Irilas, the dashing Duke of Tevlas, adding another knot to the family’s bond with the Royal House—“They’ve been planning it since the girl was born,” he crowed. He shared this opinion with the nurse, as there was no one else about—no one but the child who, though she could talk, was not yet capable of reasoned argument, and knelt at a little table, her drawing pencils before her in a ro
w.
He slapped his desk. “The second goose is slaughtered,” he shouted, “and sizzling in her fat!” His own vulgarity delighted him; he felt impatient when the child stared at him in dismay and the nurse replied with a barely perceptible nod. This nurse was a pale, awkward peasant from among the king’s olive growers—capable, Ivrom thought, but very dull-witted. It was his fate to be surrounded by people who did not understand him, to never, never discover his own people. . .
“A winter goose,” he cried coarsely. “For Tanbrivaud!” It was the Feast of Lamps; Tanbrivaud Night was only five days away. The windows were closed against the chill, but still the sound of the wedding celebration seeped in from the Tower of Mirrors. The child could hear it as she lay in bed. Her nurse lit the little red lamp and told her a story about an enchanted goose. While in the next room her father paced alone, laughing and shouting. “Breast meat! Oh, so tender!” It was her first memory.
But we are not concerned with the child’s memories. We are concerned with him, with his genius. He had begun to write. He had begun, carefully and with pain, to collect the lines written on the Stone and record them in a white book. He submitted each phrase to Elarom for discussion, and to the small group that had gathered around the old man: volatile, nervous, yearning people, mostly failed priests and priestesses of one sort or another, who looked lost, like strange paupers, in their black robes. When the weather was fine they sat on a terrace, arguing and sweating. The devotees of the Stone had pockmarked skin, dandruff, bad breath, bad teeth. There was an exquisite thrill in watching their faces in the shade of a rare fern tree whose starry blossoms were meant to adorn a noblewoman’s sash. And there was an exquisite humiliation in asking them to critique his work, to correct his usage of one of the many languages found on the Stone, to offer suggestions which Elarom might approve, nodding quietly, his eyes melancholy and full of light. Sometimes, when they worked in the room of the Stone, one of Ivrom’s colleagues discovered a line of writing—then Ivrom would rush forward, pushing the others aside, pushing aside even the one who had found the frail, etched trace, in order to put his hand on it, to mark it with his touch. This was his right, because he felt more than the others, he suffered more cruelly. The others read, yes, they studied—but they also laughed. Sometimes, from his high window, he saw them playing at dakavei on the lawn, gawky as crows running over the grass.
The Winged Histories Page 12