The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (2 page)

“I know you’re nothing but bones and flesh, with various combinations of blood or choler or melancholy in your veins. And you’re tiny things—mere mortals, as they say—subjected, from day one, to a host of calamities and infirmities. The list is endless. Pride, envy, desire, ambition. Plagues, insecurity. Raging disease. Loss. Factions and hatred among your own people! Ignorance and war. You humans fascinate me.”

Still no response, save the thrumming of insects and the quiet splash of an animal—a fish, perhaps.

“And yet,” the fecund continued, her unclear question devolving into a series of others, and from there into a customary ramble, “throughout these trials, time keeps moving, past your traumatic birth and childhood (which was most brief, spent hungry and snot-nosed in egocentric oblivion), past your self-indulgent adolescence (when you thought you could change everything, and that there was a small chance misery might pass you by), moving faster and faster, past your adulthood (if you were fortunate enough to make it that far), finally dragging the remaining few of you into old age and sweeping you along, toward eschaton!” As the last word echoed, the fecund shivered with what could only be mock dread. “Tormented race! Abandoned race! Oh, clouds have closed in, all right! (Or so they say: all I see when I look up is this damned stone ceiling.)”

Rolling again caused water to slosh against the walls.

“Do you know my opinion about this? Do you? Big deal, that’s what. Twelve gods once descended from the firmament. I saw them arrive. From my verdant home, I saw crowds gather around them as they touched down. Gods can offer many things, including salvation. But how did you people react? With suspicions and pettiness and incessant questions. Constant doubts. Backstabbing. Granted, the gods acted little better, in the end. There was stiff competition and vying for followers. There were fights, divisions. People killed each other. And the gods began to fight among themselves, too, brother against sister, sister against brother. In fact, there are the dead bodies of two of them—at least two, possibly more—out in the great desert, to the east. At least, I assume they’re still there. Long before the walls of your city were completed I saw them, scorched and pitted by sand, great polymer bones poking from the scorched earth.

“Who knows how many of the gods survived the battles? What was left of the pantheon took their cosmic balls and limped home, wherever that was.

“The bottom line is: humans had a chance to be spared life’s ailments and you blew it. You fought, you killed hundreds, and you built this awful city.”

Words faded softly down the long stone corridor. But the fecund’s eyes were not entirely open, as if she might even have been talking in her sleep.

“Now you are free again, in this place you call Nowy Solum. Free to scuttle aimlessly about, with only small expectations to live up to, arbitrary rules to follow, no agendas of a higher power to fulfill. You are created, you suffer, and you die. That’s it. Principal and mighty work—my little pink friends—you have fallen from the grace you so briefly attained.”

Here the monster chuckled and quickly snapped at a haspoid unlucky enough to get too close. Licking her chops brought in crunching chiton, legs, wings. Thick ichors dripped from the scales of her chin.

“F
or me, though—” she burped “—and for every other unfortunate soul of a more, uh, sophisticated nature (shall we say), who find themselves here with you—those who don’t fall into your rather rudimentary biological categories—we see things differently. Time, for example. Time could mean anything to us: the nightmare of an alien despot; cyclical, self-consumptive loops; a spectrum of theory existing altogether beyond your meager ken.

“Do you understand what I’m saying?

“Creatures like me are more—” a vague gesture with one clawed hand “—complicated.

“I mean, are we really in the same moment? Are we in the same place? Do we even speak the same language?

“And these gods, building up your hopes, coming down from on high and then battling it out, to leave you stranded, back you where you started. Who were they to me? Why should I care about them? Or about you?” She hissed and spat and blew steam out her nose. “Because I don’t. I don’t care. So let’s not even talk about gods. And don’t tell me they’re returning, or that they’ve been seen, flying overhead. This story is one of the last in your sordid history. Nowy Solum crumbles.”

At the waterline, where paler scales stretched to near translucency, ripples on the swamp made duckweed ride up and down. Setting her jaw, bands of muscle hardened the angled jowls, though it was difficult to tell if the monster was truly angry or not.

“Now,” she said, “where were we?”

The chatelaine reclined on her canopy bed, ensconced inside the palace of Jesthe, and decided, upon putting down her second cup of coffee—which was empty now, and clattering on her bedside table—that she would leave her chambers, go for a walk.
Perambulate
. Work the legs. She called to her women: fetch clothes suitable for outside, and fetch them quickly. Before she could change her mind. Lately there had been too many days of inactivity, laying about, drinking herself to sleep or staring listlessly out the window at the roofs of her city.

Out on the crowded streets, the day was gloomy, as most were, but it was not raining, at least, like it had been for the past fortnight. With almost a spring in her step, the chatelaine walked ahead of her servants, who awkwardly carried the various items they supposed a woman such as the chatelaine might need on a brief journey outside Jesthe. Servants were unaccustomed to any mood other than a somber one in their mistress and, frankly, they preferred when she stayed abed, moping.

Huffing and panting, arms laden, the women struggled to keep up.

Near the secondary refuse pile, at Hot Gate—a vast heap of steaming garbage against the sagging wall of an empty seminary—the chatelaine, who had been waving blithely to citizens, greeting them as they begged or jostled or otherwise tried to acquire food to feed their families, suddenly froze. She knew why she’d been impelled to leave her bedchambers at that particular second and go out, into Nowy Solum. The chatelaine was a woman who believed in destinies, and in the purposes of mysterious motivations, giving reasons to every gesture and idle action as if everything were ordained. (She had not always believed this, nor would she believe it for much longer, but on this day, the day of the walk, she felt sure that the mysterious and powerful forces of fate moved her and the lives of those around her.)

“I wish to speak to that girl,” she told her servants, pointing with an unsteady finger. Her heart raced.

The women squinted, shifting their loads, making faces to indicate their confusion and distaste.

“I don’t see any girls,” one finally answered, either the boldest or stupidest of the lot. Certainly the largest. “My Lady,” the woman added, as an afterthought, to try to make herself perfectly clear, “I see no girls.”

The chatelaine, who had continued to point all this while, shook her finger. “There!”

“I see two, well, there are two
melancholics
, in the garbage.”

“Yes, that’s right. And one of them is a girl. I wish to speak to her. She’s beautiful and I wish to speak to her.”

The servants did not know what to say. They were very uncomfortable and getting more uncomfortable with each passing second. (Though, working, as they did, for the chatelaine, this sensation was almost part of their job.)

“In fact,” continued the chatelaine, “I want her on the staff at Jesthe. Make sure she gets employment in my palace.” This was an incredible statement, thought the chatelaine of Nowy Solum. This was bold, brave. The world was changing and she, the chatelaine, would drive these changes. Just a few nights ago, they said, there had been reports of a heavenly body over the city. A god, some said. The chamberlain had almost smiled. Yes, the world was changing. She filled her lungs. She felt very alive. She had not felt this alive in a long time.

“Employ— But, marm,” complained the servants, “we need no more, not like her.”

Without humour, the chatelaine laughed. “I want this girl working up on
my
level. I want to see her in the Main Hall. I want to see her in the Dining Room. I want to see that pretty, tattooed face in my bedchambers.”

Silence again.

“I won’t put up with this, you know. Approach her!”

“But,” said another servant, very quietly, “she doesn’t really, uh, exist.”

“Nonsense.” The chatelaine wheeled. “Of course she exists. We can all see her. She’s right there!”

By this point, of course, the pair of kholics had taken note of the chatelaine and her entourage and had stopped doing what they’d been doing. They stood, filthy, knee-deep in garbage, eyes lowered, no doubt as uncomfortable as the chatelaine’s servants.

Under their masks, the girl and the boy had identical features, and must have been twins, though neither the chatelaine, nor certainly her women, had the capacity to notice such detail.

A jolt passed down the length of the fecund.

“Who’s there? Huh? I remember the cold vacuum of space, and a murdered body, floating face down in the river. Was the chatelaine heading out for a walk? Was I dreaming?” Her eyes flicked open. “These threads all drill into my head at the same time. What I’m trying to say is that there’s more to a story than events taking place in one location, to one person. You need to look at everything, at the same time, in the entire universe. Look at every person, every creature. Turn over every rock.

“See? In one glistening instant, plucked from the stream of time as it passes by: countless episodes, from a myriad of human lives, all vital, all entangled in a shared moment.

“So many threads . . .”

A few heartbeats of quiet, then a sigh.

“But we can’t follow them all, I suppose. You’re right. Too many lives. And there is more than just one universe. At times I get so overloaded. Here, in Nowy Solum, in your city, there are masons, derelicts, housewives. Human, cobali. Dog-faced cognosci.”

The fecund’s eyes had begun to nictitate again. Her skinny tongue flickered twice. Breathing slowed. Both eyes closed. If the fecund had not previously been asleep, she sure was now.

Grumbling servants fetched the girl—the nasty
kholic
—and led her into Jesthe through the side entrance. From there, up the East Stairs. This chore was accomplished at dusk, on the chatelaine’s order, when neither chamberlain Erricus or any of his palatinate were around, for their protests in the daily assemblies would have been most relentless and insufferably dull. As it was, in the days since the sighting of the celestial apparition, the smug attitudes and righteousness of the palatinate had been dreadful. But they were not welcome anywhere above ground level in the palace, and had not been welcome there since the chatelaine first inherited the city from her father; once the kholic girl was safely up in the living areas, with the chatelaine’s staff, she was pretty much in the clear.

Would the chatelaine tell her father about bringing the girl inside? What would be the point? He had retreated long ago, in more ways than one, up the towers, to the dungeon. He had his own problems. He would never see the girl either.