Servants came with a tub, stripped his wrap from him and plunged him into the warm water. Some carried out his clothes; others mopped and scrubbed the floor while his back was harshly scrubbed and his hair was sudsed and wrung clean like the mop. The dried urine and crusted spittle of the cages came off into the water; they bore the tub away and came with another and washed him all over again, then toweled him before the fire, cut his hair and combed it, and dressed him in a simple shirt with an elaborately figured chain belt that glowed yellow as gold. Yellow as gold, thought Orem, but even then it did not occur to him that it might be gold. He would not have been able to tell real from sham anyway.
The magistrates looked at him one more time, to be sure. Orem did not care what they decided. It was enough to have felt the smooth cloth on his clean and aching skin, to have felt the heat of the fire, to have touched the warm brick with every finger and found that each one tingled alive, to test his feet and have them respond, living and warm.
Apparently he was the man they were looking for. “Yes. Yes, that will do. The best we can do.” They brusquely apologized to him. “A terrible mistake, Orem, my boy. Just a mistake, could happen to anyone, you won’t complain of this, will you?”
Complain? What did he have to complain of? Only keep me warm, he said, only keep me warm and clean and dry and I have no complaint at all. He fell asleep again before the magistrates left.
18
The Dance of Descent
How Orem Scanthips met Queen Beauty face to face, and loved her.
THE TORTURED TREES
They brought him to the palace in a twelve-wheeled carriage drawn by eleven horses, but he didn’t think to count. Though he was still not fully strong again after his ordeal in the Gaols, he was dazzled by the wonders of the Palace, and gazed out the window at the mosaic-covered walls, the gilt minarets, the turquoise roofs, the bright-painted sculptures that grew in profusion beside the whitestone drive. The history they depicted was lost on Orem, but he recognized the perfection of these works of human hands.
But when he saw the sculptured garden in the circle of the palace drive, he was disturbed. Others had seen the trees and bushes growing to form elephants and giant roses and had admired them. The cleverness of the lovers grown in leaves; the heroic sculpture of the Battle of Greyling Mountain—Orem did not think they were clever or noble. He had enough of his mother in him to hate the violence done to the trees; he had enough of his father to be profoundly disturbed to see this verdure in the cold of early winter.
Then came the hands of the servants, so many hands silently touching him, lifting him weak and flexible from the carriage. “Don’t the leaves fall here?” he asked.
“For a week, whenever the Queen chooses,” said an oldish man. “Autumn pleases her from time to time, if only to have spring again the following day.”
It was then that Orem understood the power of the Queen. He marveled that he had ever dared to challenge her. Whatever punishment she meted out to him, he knew now that there was no hope of resistance. He had been a shark trying to gnaw away at the shore, sharp-toothed and dangerous, yet unworthy of his adversary.
THE VIRGIN DANCER
They took him through rooms larger than the town of Banningside, whose ceilings looked as distant as the sky. All the walls were layered seven times in tapestries and metalwork and stone. There was no marble that was not living with the figures of men and animals engaged variously in killing and in coitus. There was no iron that was not silvered, no silver that was not inlaid with gold. The furniture was made of heavy woods, yet all was delicately carved so that there were thousands of tiny windows in the wood and it looked as if the weight of it was borne by dark and insubstantial lace. And through it all no one spoke to him, so that only gradually did he come to realize that it was not for vengeance that the Queen wanted him.
After all, in the villages and farms it was done only symbolically, for they were poor. It was the Dance of Descent, of course, the last thing Orem could have expected. And it was done for real. He realized now that the carriage that bore him to the palace had twelve wheels, that one of the six teams of horses that drew it was incomplete. As he entered the Palace he was surrounded by ten armored men, their shields marked with nine black stones. The red-shirted barber cut his hair in eight passes of the shears, and now seven naked women with blood on their thighs immersed him six times in hot water and five times in cold, so that he was given the sacrament of the Sweet Sisters the only time in his life a man may receive it.
The only time in his life that a man may receive it, and at that he finally thought to count; counted the women and still could not believe. Not for this, they could not have brought him to the palace for this. Yet when the women left, four doors opened and through each came a young boy, naked, without manhair. He could not doubt, though he did not understand. He himself had been one of the Four Virgin Boys at three of his brothers’ Dances of Descent. On the farm the Three Oils had been pig fat, sheep fat, and chicken fat, and they had jostled and joked as they anointed and scraped. There was no joking now. The four young boys who knelt around him as he lay naked on the stone floor were sober and worked strenuously.
The oils did not reek of animals; they were delicate yet strong of scent, and the boys rubbed them firmly into his skin, each oil in turn, scraping his body between the oils. They did not even speak to ask him to turn himself over; instead, their thin childish arms reached out and their small hands gripped him firmly, and he was turned abruptly without any volition of his own, and yet without any discomfort, either. The odor of the oils went into his head, and he felt a slight aching between his eyes. Yet it was a delicious pain, and the scraping of his body was a pleasure he was not prepared for. It left him weak and relaxed and trembling, and he reached gratefully for the first of the Two Cups when they brought it in.
No rough clay cups here. The Cup of the Left Hand was a crystal bowl set in a lacy gold cradle that rested on the top of a thin spiral stem. The liquid in it was green and seemed to be alive with light, a smooth light that did not flicker with the dancing of the lamps on the walls. As he reached for the cup with his left hand, Orem was filled again with fear. This was the stuff of poems, but he was not ready, had not been warned. I am like Glasin Grocer, chosen by chance for adventures that only the Sweet Sisters could have predicted. I am not ready, he cried out inside himself; but still his hand reached out, and though he trembled he spilled no drop of the green. In the villages it had been a tea of mints; here it was a wine, and when it touched his tongue the flavor went through him like ice, bringing winter to every part of his body, so that he felt it sharply in his fingers, and his buttocks clenched involuntarily. Still he drank it all, though when he was through, his body shook violently and his teeth chattered. Steam rose from the empty crystal cup.
The Cup of the Right Hand was made of stone, plain unpolished stone with no figuring or sculpture on it, except that it was cut to make the proper bent curve required even on the farm. The soul of the woman he had drunk, and now he reached down with his right hand to pick up the soul of the man. The stone was not as heavy as he had expected, and he nearly spilled, but the thick white fluid was heavy and slow as mud, and did not slosh easily over the edge.
This time when he sipped the drink was hot, and did not penetrate as quickly as the cold. On the farm it had been cream, and perhaps it was cream here, too; but it was sweet, painfully sweet and hot enough to burn his tongue. Yet he drank the thick stuff down, and set the cup aside slowly, relishing the heat as it fought the cold within him and won. He knew that his skin was flushing, that his face was red. He gasped his breaths and knelt on all fours, his head hanging down nearly to the floor as his body absorbed the heat of the soul of the man.
Then the servants bore away the Two Cups, and others led him to a golden chair covered with a thick velvet cloth, where he sat waiting for the One Red Ring. Not made of painted wood, the ring they brought; it was carved whole from a ruby, a thing whose val
ue was so beyond Orem’s understanding that not until long after did he realize that the price of that ring would have bought a thousand farms like his father’s farm, with enough left over to buy ten thousand slaves to work them.
Which finger? How did his brothers ever decide? All his future could hinge on this one choice.
He raised his left hand, the hand of passion, without much thinking of the meaning of it, only because that was the hand that wanted to rise. The servant picked up the ring between forefinger and thumb and waited for Orem to choose. And he chose: the one finger no man would ever choose. He chose the last finger, the small finger, the finger of weakness and surrender. He flushed with shame at his choice, but knew that he could make no other. Why? he asked himself.
But he did not know the why of anything today. It was too quick, too strange, too inexorable. He had thought to earn a poem. Instead, he had just completed the Dance of Descent, and somewhere nearby was the woman he was to marry. Marry, now, at sixteen years of age; and with all that had passed in the Dance of Descent, Orem had little doubt who his wife would be, though it was a thought so outrageous that he would never have dared to name her name aloud.
To his surprise, he was not asked to arise from the chair. Instead, with the ruby ring on his leftmost finger, he sat in the chair as porters passed rods through rings on its sides and lifted him up, bore him from the room. There was no door at that end, but the wall itself parted in a great crack from floor to ceiling, and then slid aside, and he was carried into the presence of the Queen.
BEAUTY’S GENTLE WEDDING TO HER HUSBAND’S SON
Behind him the doors slid shut again, and the only light in the room was the moonlight that came through great windows and was reflected off a thousand mirrors on the walls. In the mottled silver light, he saw her standing alone and naked in the middle of the floor, her bare feet white and smooth as the cold marble they seemed carved from. Do you doubt that I can describe her? Her hair was long and full, and reached below her waist; the hair of her head was the only hair on her body, and she could have been a child except for the small, perfect breasts that, in their slow and tiny rise and fall, were the only proof that she was alive.
Her face he recognized. It was the perfect, pleading, loving, inevitable face of the woman in his dream. She was the virgin, begging for his gentlest love. She was Queen Beauty, and she was now his wife.
He stood from his chair, keenly aware of his own thin, unproportioned body, tanned and weathered from the waist; yet soon he had scant thought for shame at what little he had to offer the only perfect woman in the world. For she raised her hand, and it was her right hand, and the golden ring she wore was on the impossible finger, the finger he could not have hoped for; the small finger of her right hand, her rightmost finger, and as he walked to her, his hand upraised, the rings on their fingers rested the same distance from the fingertip.
If he had chosen to surrender all his passion, she had chosen to surrender all her will.
“Are you a virgin?” she whispered, her voice soft and urgent.
He nodded.
It was not enough. Impatiently she asked again. “My boy, my husband, my Little King, has your seed ever spilled inside another woman’s womb?”
And Orem spoke, though where he found his voice he wasn’t sure. “Never.”
She leaned forward and kissed him. It was a cold kiss, yet it lingered and Orem did not want it ever to end. As she kissed him, her breasts leaned in to touch his chest, and then they met hip to hip, and her left hand was behind his back and she clung to him. He did not think of the unfaced sisters of the whore he had been unfit to use; he had neither need nor wish to worry about what his body could and could not do. The kiss ended. “I will never love you,” she whispered. “You will never have my heart.” But the tones of her voice rang with love, and Orem trembled at the power she had without using any magic at all.
Should he answer? He could not. For he had worn the ring on the hand of passion, and that was a vow to love forever and completely. Yet in his heart he knew, without knowing why, that he would never love her, either. His heart was surrendered, but not to her; her will was surrendered, but not to him.
“We will have a child,” she said softly, leading him to the place where the floor gave way to a vast sea of a bed.
“It will be a boy,” she said as they knelt together and her hands softly touched him.
“I will give him all of myself,” she said, “and that is why there will be none of me for you.”
They lay together all the night, and the twelve-month child was conceived. Orem knew the moment that it happened, for the Queen cried out in joy, and for a moment her eyes were too bright to look upon. I am in and of you, Orem said silently.
Two times you had her body also, Palicrovol. Once she did not want you, and once you did not want her. But did you ever look into her face and say I am in and of you? You gave her no Dance of Descent, King of Burland. Do you begrudge her this: that once in her life she had a man who loved her with his whole heart, if only for that moment?
And if it tortures you to know that another man was with her in her life, console yourself with this: he only knew her but the once, though for weeks afterward, Orem had only to think on some moment of that night with Beauty and his body would be roused, would violently spend itself, all in a few seconds from the memory of it. When Beauty possesses a man, Palicrovol, is he to be held responsible for what his body does?
Yet I will not pretend that she forced him the way she forced you. Orem knew as no other man could know that none of it was magic. She had worked no spell on him that night. She could not have, for a twelve-month child cannot be magically conceived. What Orem felt for her was genuine, and not just for love of her perfect flesh. I know Orem truly, and I know that when he loved his bride it was not a Queen he loved, but rather the girl Asineth as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.
Is that why you hate him so, Palicrovol? Because he knows the woman that she might have been?
19
The Queen’s Companions
How Orem came to be called the Little King and met those who would most kindly, most cruelly use him.
THE LOVE OF BEAUTY
Who can blame Orem Scanthips for awaking in wonder, surprised at joy? For the first time in his life the truth was better than the dream, and more improbable. For that first hour he thought he had found name and place and poem, all in one, and that all were happy. Sunlight danced from a thousand mirrors. And more:
I believe that if Beauty had been kind to him, he would have loved her, and so we and the gods would have been undone.
Yet if Beauty had been able to be kind, it would not have taken her death to release us all from bondage.
So we go in circles. And here is the cruelest circle of all, Palicrovol: I believe that, by the end of her life, Beauty loved Orem Scanthips as much in her way as the Flower Princess loved her King. Though Orem was born when Beauty had already passed three centuries of life in power, still the girl Asineth had found her lover—a dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it. That is how he was unlike you, Palicrovol, and that is why she loved him.
Poor Beauty. May I not pity her, of all people? She loved him, but she had only learned one way to show her love—through cruelty and abuse. After all, whom did she love most in all the world? Those who had dwelt at her right and left hand for fifteen score years: Weasel Sootmouth, Urubugala, and Craven. That was what she knew of love. No wonder Orem never recognized her love when she gave it to him. Even now, if he knew that she had loved him, it would break his heart.
But he did not know, and does not know, because this is how she served him from the first day of their life as husband and wife:
THE NAMING OF THE LITTLE KING
In the morning they dressed him in brocades and velvet, clothes so heavy that at first they bowed him and made him look a bit ridiculous. He did not know how to wear the r
obes of a King—that is not born in a man, as you know. Then they led him through the palace, whispering to him the names of the rooms so he could ask for them again, though he did not yet know what to do with the Chamber of Stars or the Hall of Asps, the Porch of Keening or the Room of the Dancing Bulls.
At the foot of a stair he saw an old man who seemed out of place, for instead of livery he wore only an old soiled wrap, and was covered with wood-colored stains. The old man’s back was twisted, as if he had been wrung by great hands. He bent over the stair, pouring a clear fluid onto the wood and rubbing, rubbing it into the grain. Orem only paused to avoid stepping in his work. The man looked up at him. His eyebrows were heavy as moustaches, but they were the only hair on his face. The skin of his face was transparent, and the veins and arteries pulsed blue and red just under the surface. Eyes deep as amber, thick as cream, and with no pupil in them at all, none at all.
“Are you blind?” Orem asked softly. Surely he could not see without an aperture for vision; yet didn’t the eyes look up at him?
“To light I am blind,” whispered the old man, not taking his gaze from Orem’s face.
Where had he seen such eyes? “Who are you?” Orem asked.
“I am God,” said the old man. He smiled, and his mouth had neither tongue nor teeth nor anything at all—just blackness behind the lips. Then he bent again to his work, and the servants gently insisted Orem up the stairs.
Who but the Little King would have spoken to an aged, naked servant oiling the wooden stairs? This is sure: only one who carried with him an invisible hole in Queen Beauty’s Searching Eye could have heard the answer that Orem heard. He did not understand; he did not forget, either, despite all he learned of Queen Beauty before the hour was up.
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