The Winged Histories (15 page)

The prince worked. His throat was a pale arrow. He still possessed the famous winglike lashes that graced the portrait
Death, with Kite
, but the color had abandoned his cheeks and his skin had lost its wonderful elasticity, so that it was more like granite than (as the journalists said) almond butter. It was rumored that his lungs were diseased. It was rumored that he had contracted an ignoble illness and was being treated with mercury. He worked every day until sunset, foregoing all daylight duties and pleasures. Gloom hung about him like fog. His translations were excellent.

Ivrom spent a great deal of time on the mainland that autumn and early winter, proselytizing and debating in the temples. It seemed strange, considering the time of year, the dampness, and the increasing pain in his hips, for him to choose that season for travel, but only to those unaware of the heavy numbness that had taken up residence in the room of the Stone, a numbness in the shape of a prince. Though the prince did nothing to offend, his presence acted on the spirits like an eclipse. At this time, the priest’s daughter, who was often alone with him, took to roaming in the palace gardens. She’d run up and down the outdoor flights of steps in her mannish boots and circumambulate the Long Gardens in rain, underneath her white umbrella. Sometimes she held the umbrella aside and let the rain beat on her face. After one such journey, she entered the room of the Stone and heard the prince’s voice. A half-strangled whisper, caught in the moment before he knew she was there. “Will it change,” he muttered. “Will it change will it change will it change.”

Will it change. The door clicked behind her. The prince looked up.

His heavy-lidded eyes like a pair of dead coals.

She busied herself shaking out her umbrella. She propped it against the wall and pushed back her damp hair. Her nervous fingers caught in the strings of her coat.

When she had hung up her coat and brushed off her skirt, he was still looking at her. She gave him a half-smile. “
Good morning, Your Highness.
”

For a moment he stared, and she feared she had insulted him somehow—should she have bowed? But then he answered: “
Good morning.
”

His voice was surprisingly deep, gravelly, unused. And somehow this low, rough voice reminded her that he was still a boy. He was a boy, and that day, the sixth of Brome, the month of Melancholy, he had kissed a jade stone in the Temple of Heth Kuidva. A day of wind and reluctance. In parts of the empire the frogs were already going to sleep. His head looked terribly heavy, bowed on his slender neck. A few nights ago, wandering the halls, as she did more and more often these days, the priest’s daughter had happened upon the Dedication of Instruments. No, that is false—she had not happened upon it, she had gone there deliberately. Why lie, why now, after all this time? She knew what was happening every day, she had the almanac by heart, she was familiar with the draped galleries above the Hall of a Thousand Tapers. She knew she could hide there unobserved and look down into the hall where the Teldaire sat on a pale blue throne as magnificent as a cake, her black hair shining, her laugh ringing to the ceiling as musicians, seated around her on the floor, presented their instruments. Talk, laughter and fractured notes of music filled the air. The Teldaire inclined her head to each limike and harp. Because she was queen, she was said to have the best ear in the empire. If an instrument pleased her, she blessed it by rubbing a bit of her spittle into the wood.

At her side, standing, the prince. He wore white boots and a beryl-green suit. His bowed shoulders were swathed in a violet cape. His plaited hair sparkled under the lights, studded with chrysolite pins. His face looked devastated. His face was like a wilderness.

Now in the room of the Stone she rose and approached his table. “What have you been working on?”

He spread his papers out and showed her the work. As she looked at the even lines of script she forgot, for a moment, her compassion for his sufferings, for his rigid, barren, and ritualistic life. She forgot that she had intended to speak to him of reading as prayer, of work as sustenance. She had planned to use herself as an example, hoping to break through his reserve. “Sometimes I want to die,” she was going to say. But reading his papers her heart thudded. “This is all wrong,” she said.

“Wrong?”

“Yes, yes.” She shifted the papers, searching them. “This isn’t what my father gave you. It’s not in the Ancient Tongue.”

“No, it’s in plain Olondrian.”

“But how—he didn’t give you this.”

“No. I found it myself. On the Stone.”

She drew in her breath and let it out slowly. “You’re not supposed to do this. You’ve transcribed an orphan! You were supposed to do what my father asked.”

“I did,” he said. “I finished it. I didn’t have anything to do. I took some impressions—
look.
” He showed her papers covered with pencil rubbings. He had laid the papers against the Stone, collected the markings with this crude method, and then transcribed them in his elegant hand. “
On the seventh day of the Month of Mur the Abomination of which we shall speak appeared upon the borders of this our village of Ambrelhu
. . .”

The priest’s daughter covered her face. “All this work. I’m so sorry.”

“What’s an orphan?”

She explained, quoting her father’s favorite line.

The prince repeated it with a faint smile. “
A curse on these orphans darkening my path
.”

“So it won’t do any good. This work. I’m sorry. It’s useless.”

The prince was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Look at me.”

The priest’s daughter looked. In the green radiance of the lamp his face had a mineral sheen. A face like a desert. A smile like a broken mirror. “Do you think,” he said stiffly, “that any amount of writing will do me good?”

“
I don
’t know,” she heard herself saying. But it was a lie.

Her father’s voice reached them from the hall, harsh, disapproving—he must be speaking to the Telkan. Their fathers were coming: one soft as jelly, the other a hard knife. The prince held her eyes, and she wanted to tell him: No. No. She wanted to say: No, this work won’t do you any good because in the end you will be claimed by whoever is stronger. My father, your mother, your aunt. The one who wins. And that person will wield you like a scepter to rule the empire. You will appear on feast days, she wanted to tell him, in gold brocade or a black wool robe, but you will appear as a sign of power.

There was no time to say all of this, so she bent down and whispered a single word, the one she did not have the courage to say to herself: “
Run
.”

Perhaps this is why, years later, the prince referred to her as his friend. At any rate, he never returned to the room of the Stone. He began to be seen at parties instead, loud, mocking, careless. He collected
a
fortune in paintings. He ran off to Bain and explored the Evmeni Quarter. Then he ran farther: to the Lelevai and the army, after receiving a brief letter from his cousin Tavis, who had herself recently escaped to military school. “There’s good fun up here,” she wrote. The prince stowed away on a merchant ship on the northern sea. When his mother learned of it, she tore down her curtains, screaming.

Ivrom, of course, was furious, humiliated. The trap sprung, the pheasant flown.

His daughter did not run away. She stayed. She stayed to carry on the work of the Stone, to convey her father through the halls in his wheeled chair, to organize his notes. She stayed to listen to him grumbling over his bowl of soup. His monologues grew fiercer when the prince returned to Velvalinhu after years in the military, not to rejoin the work of the Stone but to take up ostentatiously with the High Priestess of Avalei, whom Ivrom kept virtually a prisoner on the Isle. “I must get him back! I must get him back!” the priest fumed. One night, when he and his daughter had quarreled because he would not permit her to attend a limike concert, she startled him by bursting out as she knelt to build up the fire: “You care more for the prince than you ever did for me.”

Sometimes she took out the prince’s orphaned text, which she had secreted in her own writing box. His looping handwriting progressed like fine embroidery. She would read his work and think of him bent over the table, trying to put some meaning into a life weighed down by duty. Not everyone reacted that way to the life of the palace; some thrived on it; the Teldaire was one of these. But for the prince Velvalinhu was a place of torture. Suffering throbbed in every line of his cold face flecked with ceremonial silver. She thought she could read this misery even in his handwriting. “
We mention in passing that the weather was cruel . . .
” How strange to look at his text again after all these years have passed, now that I know the prince for what he is: a butcher.

On the seventh day of the Month of Mur the Abomination of which we shall speak appeared upon the borders of this our village of Ambrelhu. It was first observed by shepherds and other humble folk, always at night, and was taken for a figment of Dream rather than a deadly actuality. The Monster was blamed for the disappearance of sheep—and this, too, in the minds of the judges and responsible men of Ambrelhu, seemed to support the idea of its being merely a Phantom, devised by the shepherds to excuse what their negligence had brought to pass. It is true that a boy of twelve years was so terrified by the Apparition, that he became nearly demented and had to be carried back to his hut, and that no amount of threats and violence on the part of his uncle could induce him to return to the fields. But this was seen as an isolated incident, and we deemed it best to proceed as usual, issuing no warnings or commands, but continuing quietly to supervise the daily life of this our town, until some event of note should take place.

It is thus that we date the appearance of the Creature from the seventh of Mur, though it had almost certainly arrived before that time. On that day, or rather evening, a certain Meirin of East Ambrelhu was returning from a visit to her father’s home in the country. Dai Meirin is an educated woman and a lady’s maid in the house of the Honorable Simyas of Ambrelhu, and her employers vouch for her truthfulness, further stating that she is given neither to drunkenness nor to fits. It was after dusk, for Dai Meirin had spent longer than expected at her father’s house and was returning later than she had intended. She affirmed in a private interview that she was walking quickly and with her head bent low against the autumn wind. The kerchief with which she had covered her hair came loose, and she stopped to tighten it, setting down for that purpose a basket of foodstuffs which she was bringing from home. It was upon raising her head that she saw, in a stand of trees beside the road, “a boy in torn clothes with horns growing out of his forehead.”

Dai Meirin states that the boy was of an astonishing beauty, despite his unnatural pallor and the unruliness of his clothes and his uncut hair. This hair was black and curly, but, though it fell over his brow, it was clearly parted by the marks of pollution. Forsaking her basket, Dai Meirin ran for the village, arriving half dead with terror to receive the kind ministrations of her employers. She glanced behind her only once, to see that the Creature was not pursuing her, but examining the contents of her basket.

Following this incident, steps were taken to preserve the security of the village. Sentries both stationary and ambulatory were posted, and armed escorts were provided for the protection of travelers and all those, such as woodcutters and shepherds, who were required to leave the town. Some days passed without incident, but on the eighteenth of Mur, the Abomination, driven no doubt by hunger to attempt to cross our borders, was surprised in a peasant’s pigsty by the owner of the pigs, one Koivan the Juggler, so called by his neighbors for his proficiency in that art. Aroused from sleep by the clamor of his pigs, Koivan, carrying a torch, arrived at the pigsty to find the Creature seizing a suckling. The lusty peasant shouted for assistance while the Creature, perhaps surprised by the strength of the other’s voice, fled into the darkness. In so doing, it stumbled over a fence and released the stolen piglet, which was afterward burnt alive in the Temple of Avalei at Virna. A search was conducted by torchlight, but the Creature was not discovered. It was assumed that it had escaped into the Aravain.

Realizing our peril, we now proposed to destroy the Monster before it was able to cause further harm to our citizens. We mention in passing that the weather was cruel, crows thronged the village in numbers, and many of us had fallen victim to accidents. To rid ourselves of evil, we set iron traps in several barns on the outskirts of the village, leaving these places apparently unguarded, while posting obvious sentries in other locations. The traps were moved every twenty-four hours and regularly anointed with blood and milk by the priestess. But the cunning of the accursed Beast enabled it to avoid these snares—nor did it cease to torment and harass us. It was seen in the very center of the village, by several witnesses, exiting a broken window of the bakery.

On the second day of the Month of Ami we followed a peasant tracker into the Aravain. A recent snowfall assisted the tracker’s efforts. Accompanied by dogs, we traced the Creature to its lair, where we discovered the remains of a fire and the carcass of a squirrel. There was also a pile of cloth, roughly in the shape of a swallow’s nest, which was found to be composed of garments stolen from the village. The Creature, however, was not there. We divided our party into three and spread out through the precincts of the forest. The Abomination was discovered, pursued, and at last brought to bay in a snowdrift where the valiant Lord Avras shot it in the shoulder. This writer can uphold the testimony of Dai Meirin, that the Creature was young, beautiful, and clad in assorted rags. Bleeding from the shoulder, it uttered the words “I am a Lath” before our courageous villagers brought it down with the blows of their cudgels. Its remains were burnt in the forest, and the village and countryside purified by the priestess. And may Avalei never fail to protect Her own.

What is the difference between a king and a monster?

A tremor is moving through the palace like an earthquake. A sense of fear. At night, torches waver across the Alabaster Court, but they look lonely now, fugitive, with no spirit of celebration.