Sword
All the cities in that pleasant kingdom suffered from earthquakes, but the one called Kettő had taken those cataclysms to wife. Travelers leaving the Dancing City feel the tremors in their legs for days afterward, like sailors suddenly cast ashore. Even the infants of Kettő know like dogs when a quake is about to begin. They feel it in their soft bones, in the cartilage of their flat noses. There are still days, to be sure, days when the balconies and colonnades know no other turmoil than the play of shadows on their stones. Mothers still sing of the Quiet Summer, when not a drop of water was spilt in all the hundred houses of Kettő and all the nets and straps of daily life were, for a time—and what a time it was!—laid to rest. But it was not to last, no summer ever is, and to be truthful, many were glad when the world began to shake again. They had not known how to live without. The Quiver is life, the Quiver is death. All the old men sipping thick tea in the afternoons had taken to yelling at anyone who would listen that this degenerate world was slowing down, growing lazy and weak, unable even to shake off its own dust like it used to. And what would the younger generation become now, without the Quiver to keep them agile, sharp, and clever? Layabouts, that’s what.
The rules of survival in Kettő were simple and short, and the Beggar Finial had obeyed them all the days of his life. Strap, net, and door. If you had your strap and you had your sleeping nets, there was nothing at all to fear from a little clearing of the geological throat. After all, God’s Fingers were always there to catch you. The Dancing City bristled with them: little curls of stone or iron jutting out of the masonry like errant nails, a little face on the head of each one, laughing or vomiting, depending on your religious philosophy, and the two schisms had long since divided Kettő into a patchwork of loyalties and blood feuds, the market district marching on crusade against the launderers’ grotto, the millers excommunicating the bakers and the bakers excommunicating the millers. The Beggar Finial picked his way among the territories of the faithful every day, scraping coins to fill his belly, caring nothing for whether the tiny faces laughed or retched, for millers or for bakers, as long as he could still get a bit of bread out of them. And if he felt an earthquake coming in his cartilage, he slipped the holes on either end of his strap, thick as a wrist and wide as a forearm, over two of God’s Fingers, and hung there safe until the dance was done. You walked with your strap, you slept with your net so as not to tumble out of bed, and sometimes you could fall asleep there, hanging between two faces, perhaps happy, perhaps near to death, rocked into dreams by the motion of the world.
The Beggar Finial had once hoped for more in this life. He hoped for a family, he hoped for a trade, he hoped for that beast called satisfaction that always ran faster than he. He had always had the feeling, as deep in him as marrow, that he was special, favored by whatever passed for fate. No matter how low his station, how miserably bruised his pride, how furious his empty stomach, he could not take off that suspicion of his own greatness. He blamed his mother, for calling him beautiful and strong. He blamed his father, for praising him for even so much as waking up of a morning. And he blamed Kettő, the whole of it, for since he had no house, he considered all the city his manor, and holy wars had made his manor filthy, cluttered, strewn with bones and swords and broken tabernacles, for neither side would lower themselves to do the tidying up, since, as far as both were concerned, they hadn’t made the mess to begin with. But in the cold, still nights when he had not even the Quiver to keep him company and reassure him, the Beggar Finial knew full well what sin had cost him his grace.
When the Beggar Finial was a child, beautiful and strong and often-praised, he was walking alone along the border of the city, where the windows in the wall were tallest and finest, and the light streaming through them colored like a feast. He had come upon a heap of rubbish left over from the Greengrocers’ Crusade, boots and skulls and some poor dead men’s straps and nets and swords and tridents and bandages washed up like driftwood against the hinges of the Only Door, that massive wooden thing that towered over him so, that led Out and Away, the most important destinations imaginable. The Only Door was the last rule of Kettő—you must never open it, you must never go through it, you must pretend as though there is no door in the wall at all. It was not remotely the only door, so he’d no idea why everyone called it that. You could get to Öt and Tizenkét and Nyolc and Három and any place you cared for through a hundred other arches and paths and stairs and doors. But the Only Door was locked, and every mother, including his own, who would allow him anything, said that to open it was death. Some madness had overtaken the Beggar Finial then, the madness of the young or the male or the spoiled or the bored he never could tell, then or after. Why couldn’t he open this door? Why shouldn’t he? Why should idiots get to slaughter each other over whether a nail in a wall was happy or sad while he, Finial, the most excellent and special boy in Kettő, should be forbidden to use a door? In his thwarted rage, the boy took up one of the old swords and heaved it into the Only Door with all his beautiful strength, leaving it stuck in the ancient wood like another of God’s Fingers.
The city began to convulse, and it was none of that pleasant after-breakfast shuddering or tolerable teatime tremor that the old men said built character. It was the end of the Quiet Summer, and the world quaked and staggered and rattled until whatever good and special fate was in the Beggar Finial was shaken from him like the last dry peapod in a straw sack.
Kiss
Once, in the grips of one of Vnuk’s quince-fevers, the crown prince Ispan came to the door of her sickroom in the broken spire. He leaned against the stove-in red wood and bronze bolts of the door. Being a live boy in a dead body, he did not mind the cold or the fasting or even the sharpness of the shattered wall and roof where once, possibly, a real basilisk had done its duty. Yet, for all the rules the little gang of aristocrats stepped upon daily and nightly, he would not go past that door and into Vnuk’s private territory.
“Hullo, Vnuk,” said the prince, peering over the ruin of the door. The top half had been sheared away, as if by some awful claw. “I have brought you a cup of paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, a backgammon board with red velvet on the inside and pieces carved like foxes from Sedria, a tinderbox and candle from Geza, some cherry vodka from Szemmel and Szagol, and a book from Archfiend the Lesser called A Census of the Infernal Regions, Volume Two: The Wasteland of Water, at least I think so, it is in Latin. It looks very juicy. What do you and he do together in that little birch-tar chapel?”
Vnuk looked up at the stars of the constellation Scorpio, which did seem somehow cool and pale and medicinal as they streamed through the shattered brickwork. “We talk about rabbits,” she said quietly.
“Rabbits are boring,” sighed Ispan. “They’re so small and there’s so many of them but all they do is…twitch. Have you summoned a demon yet? You’ve been at it long enough.”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“I bet you can’t, I bet you can’t even do a little tiny one, like the demon who makes you trip on the cobbles when there wasn’t anything to trip over, I bet you can’t even do him.”
“I could if I wanted.”
“Could not.”
“Could so.”
“You couldn’t, Vnuk, you really couldn’t. You needn’t feel shame on it, though. Girls can’t be diabolists.”
“And dead boys can’t inherit thrones. You will tell me when you plan to abdicate, won’t you?”
Ispan looked stricken. The stars in the dead, flat eyes of the crown prince looked like dandelion seeds sinking beneath black seas.
Vnuk relented. Her little shoulders softened. She came to the door and took his gifts, setting them on the floor beside her pitcher of water and basket of boiled white eggs. The two looked at each other over the slashed slats, each wondering if it had really been a basilisk who had done it, each wishing it had finished the job.
“What would you make him do,” whispered the daughter of Lord Bittern, “if
I did summon a demon?”
The corpse prince shrugged. He had never considered it. In his mind, once the demon was there, huge and sulfurous and horned and roaring and flaming and all the rest, you had all the entertainment you could ever pray for. “I don’t know, what are you supposed to do with demons once you’ve summoned them?”
“They can do anything. Anything in the world you could ever want. Only you’ve always got to pay for it. They’re very strict capitalists, demons. Archfiend the Lesser says that the old king summoned Amusdias to solve the famine, and that’s how he got the whole idea of killing all the songbirds, and also how he got them to all hold still for their trials and executions and such. And the diabolists brought forth a demon for poor King Blancmange, which is why if you break one of his laws you get kidney stones and you start talking backwards and your fingers fall off one by one until you stop what you’re doing.”
“I would make him change everything so I could marry you,” Ispan interrupted. His grey, green-veined lips trembled. He remembered his mother, staring down at him with her eyeless face, her bronze pangolin tail thrashing against the flagstones, in a wintry rage. You would have no heir out of that walking privy-house but a mute brick, swaddled in silk and rocked to sleep by an idiot.
Vnuk reached out her hand. Ispan laced his fingers through hers. “And what would you pay for that?”
“My soul.”
“They don’t want your soul, Ispan. The Devil wants your soul, but he comes for it in the end and not before. Demons want only your pain. It is their food and their wine. It wouldn’t…come out the way you want it. Do you know what happened after all the songbirds died?”
“Yes, yes, a demon’s bargain will turn on you. Everyone knows that. I don’t care.” Ispan reached one moldering hand out. Vnuk laced her warm fingers through it. “I wish I was small enough to live inside you,” he said helplessly.
In the light of Scorpio, Vnuk answered him: “When the songbirds were gone, there was no one to eat the grasshoppers and the beetles, and so they ate up even more of the harvest than before. So the perfumers and the alchemists invented a poison to kill grasshoppers and beetles, since they are too stupid and innocent to stand trial. It worked, and everything smelled like African violets for weeks and weeks, which was very nice, I suppose, but it killed all the bees as well, and then there was no one to carry pollen from flower to flower and nothing fruited at all, just endless flowers blooming and blooming and falling away dead onto the dry ground. It’s not the summoning that’s any trouble. It’s like whistling for a dog. A dog that you know for certain is going to eat you as soon as it can. Nearly the whole of a diabolist’s education is to get for himself a mind big enough to see the whole trick, all the way through to the end. All the way through to us being born and everything that’s still to come.”
“My mind is big,” sniffed the dead prince Ispan. “As big as the sky, as big as the wall.”
Vnuk shut her eyes. She tired so easily in the autumn, when the quince she loved so turned on her. Ispan took the moment. He could not stop himself if he wanted to. He leaned over the ruin of the door and kissed her lips, his cold mouth against the warmth of her. He almost felt the weight of the kiss. He almost felt her life. “I wish I were big enough to be your home,” she breathed. But then she said: “Is there really an army out there? Led by a flawless woman atop a basilisk?” when the kiss was done. “You must tell the truth after a kiss.”
The heir to the throne said nothing, could say nothing. He was a child, still. He knew no more than she. His dead eyes reflected the dark, but not the stars.
“Go and look in the granary,” she sighed. “Go up the ladder, all the way to the back, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels, and see there the size of your mind.”
When he had gone, Vnuk ate her evening meal in private, as she preferred to do, since it disturbed the appetite of others. She took up the teacup full of stolen paprikas from Kulacs’s mother, opened the great grey door in her belly, and placed it inside.
Blood
There had long been a saying: the gods do not speak clearly, except in Tizenharóm. The Amaranthine Bible said it, as it usually did, in an earthier fashion: In any old city, in Kettő and Öt and Nyolc and Kilenc, in Egy and Negy and Tíz and Hét, in Tizenkét and Siks and Tizenegy, you can hear the gods in the sound of the wind in the trees and the flowing of the water in the aqueducts and the laughter of children and all that church-a-day rot. But in Tizenharóm, they’ll blow out your eardrums.
Tizenharóm was an alpine city, so near to the roof of the world you could see the rafters and the thatching. The only season there was winter. The only export was prophecy. The only industry was religion. The city was a carnival for monks and priests and abbots and popes, the streets lined with stalls selling candy in the shape of the childlike god of death and cider in mugs carved to represent the face of the eyeless mother goddess. If you were lucky at the ring-toss, you might win a doll of the two-faced god of wisdom, or the corpulent god of sorrow with his infinite beard rendered in real yak-fur. There were no dark alleys or wicked shadowy gutters in Tizenharóm; everywhere there was light. Even the narrowest, most unremarkable crack in the masonry had its own small candle to engolden it, to sweep away the night and make it bright enough to please the exacting palette of heaven. The wax never burns down and the flames never gutter—it is said that Narthex the Lamplighter struck her match when first she heard the divine voice, so startled and frightened was she, half-deafened in the primeval dark, and then another and another, each time the gods spoke so her humble ears could hear them clearly, and though Narthex is long gone, her little flames will never go out until the end of days, for light is the blood of the gods, and it runneth through the veins of the world without ceasing. It was a city that glittered and a city that sang—even the meanest, most untrafficked crossroads had a musician trilling out hymns, high and soft, at every hour on the hour.
But all roads in Tizenharóm led to one place, and all the attractions and pleasures were subservient to it. For in the center of the city, there was a hole. The queue to kneel and put your eye to it wound through all those stalls and candies and ciders and rings tossed against dowels, all Narthex’s candles and all those hungry musicians, six years, six months, and six days long. Folk have died in that queue, been buried and canonized where they fell, for anyone who dies awaiting audience was sanctified before their last breath dispersed in the air. The hole was gouged from a simple wall, a meaningless expanse of brick, stained with the markings of living and dying in a city, the rear wall of a library specializing in romances and unauthorized histories. Once, in the days of Narthex, when Tizenharóm knew what a shadow was, there had been a red brick there, red as though it were sodden with blood. But now there is nothing, a simple space, and if you kneel there, if you kneel and quiet the beating of your heart and the beating of your mind and the beating of your soul agains the bones of your body, you can hear that voice that Narthex heard, and puzzle it through as others have done, until you can make a prophecy of there are rabbits in the drains and carry it down from the heights to the city of your birth, and make it mean good or bad crops, victory or defeat in war, a girl child or a boy.
But it was nothing so mysterious and interpretable that Narthex the Lamplighter heard when the world was new and fresh as the boil on a pot of paprikas. She heard only one word, a word that frightened her so badly she invented fire to chase off her horror of that bodiless voice saying:
Love.
Heart
Go and look in the granary, Ispan repeated to himself. Up the ladder, behind the oat bales and the millstones and the rack of six broken shovels.
The late afternoon sun slashed down gold and dark like war banners through the rafters of the barn. The ladder spiked his fingers with splinters, but being dead, the boy felt nothing. The oat bales pricked his hands with bristles, but being dead, no blood ran. The millstones bruised him and the shovels scraped his toes
as he dragged them from the wall, but Ispan cared not at all for that, no corpse ever could. He cared only to prove to Vnuk that his mind was as big as hers, so that she would summon them a demon to change the world for them, to break it in half so that she could be his queen and they could belong to each other, a kingdom of two.
There was nothing behind the shovels but cobwebs and mice droppings and the leavings of light. Somewhere, far off, long and distant in the east, a soft boom of thunder opened and shut like a hand, but Ispan, in his irritation, paid it no attention at all. He would have left then, scrambled back down the ladder with the utter joy of someone who has proved a friend wrong, and run to tell Vnuk how he had not been one little bit afraid of the granary no matter how crawly she had made it sound, except that a mouse screamed just then, and the prince looked to see if he had crushed the poor thing without knowing, for being dead, he had no feeling at all in his body, and often ruined things unawares.
In the shadow of the sixth shovel blade lay the corpse of a barn-mouse with a tiny bronze harpoon in its side. Something was slowly dragging the carcass across the floorboards toward a house no bigger than a Christmas bun. Something small and strange and furious in the dance of dust-motes. Something with the body of a man, the head of a camel, the wings of a dragon, and the legs of a draft horse. The house was a pleasant wee thing, its chimney puffing away, built with cast-off shafts of old wood and horse nails and wheatstalks, thatched with green oats, with a lovely, complex design drawn around it on the floor of the granary in pale chalk. It looked to Ispan like a rose made out of mathematics. Once the creature hauled his kill over the edge of the chalk, he slit its belly and began to cut the meat into steaks and bacon and offal for sausages.
Far off, but not quite so far now, the thunder echoed again.
The creature with the head of a camel finally looked up into Ispan’s gaze.
The Future Is Blue Page 22