Zombies vs. Unicorns (15 page)

From the stony under-rooms of the castle, up we went. The floor flattened and the walls dried out and we passed the occasional terrifying thing: a suit of armor from the Elder Days; a portrait of a royal personage in silks bright as sunlit water, in lace collars like insect wings; a servant with a tray with goblets and decanter so knobbed and bejeweled you could scarce tell what they were.

“Here’s the place,” said the humorous guard as we arrived at a doorway where people were waiting, gentlemen hosed and ruffed and cloaked, with shining-dressed hair, and two abject men about to collapse off that bench, they leaned so spineless and humiliated.

The guards at the door let us straight in, to a room so splendid, I came very close to filling my pants. It was all hushed with the richest tapis, and ablaze with candles, and God help me, there was a throne, and the queen sat upon it, and at the pinnacle of all her clothing, all her posture, above her bright, severe eyes and her high forehead filled with brains, a fearsome crown nestled so close in her silvering reddish hair, it might have grown into place there. Under her gaze my very bones froze within me.

“Give your name and origins,” said the guard, nudging me.

“My name is Manny Foyer, of Piggott’s Leap, Your Majesty.”

“Now bow,” the guard muttered.

I bowed. Oh, my filthy boots were sad on that bright carpet! But I would rather have looked on them than on that royal face.

“Daughter?” The queen did not take her attention from my face.

I gaped. Was she asking me if I
had
a daughter? Why would she care? Had she confused me with some other offender?

But a voice came from the shadows, beside, behind the throne. “I have never seen him in my life. I don’t know why he has been brought here.”

The queen spoke very slowly and bitterly. “Take a
close
look, daughter.”

Out of the shadows walked the princess, tall and splendidly attired, her magnificent hair taken up into braids and knots and paddings so elaborate, they almost overwhelmed her little crown. Her every movement, and her white fine-modeled face, spoke disdain—for me, for her mother, for the dignitaries and notables grouped about in their bright or sober costumes, in their medals and accoutrements or the plainer cloaks of their own authority.

She circled me. Her gown’s heavy fabrics rustled and swung and shushed across the carpet. Then she looked to her mother and shrugged. “He is entirely a stranger to me, Madam.”

“Is it possible he rendered you insensible with a blow to your head, so that you did not see his face?”

The princess regarded me over her shoulder. She was the taller of us, but I was built stockier than her, though almost transparent with hunger at this moment.

“Where is my constable? Where is Constable Barry?” said the queen impatiently, and when he was rattled forth behind me, “Tell me the circumstances of this man’s arrest.”

Which he did. I had my chance to protest, when he traduced me, that I had not touched the lady, that I had only been adjusting her clothing so that my fellows would not see her so exposed. I thought I sounded most breathless and feeble, but while the constable continued with his story, I caught a glance from the princess that was very considering of me, and contained some amusement, I thought.

There was a silence when he finished. The queen dandled my life in her hands. I was near to fainting; a thickness filled my
ears, and spots of light danced at the edges of my sight.

“He does not alter your story, daughter?” said the queen.

“I maintain,” said the magnificent girl, “that I am pure. That no man has ever touched me, and certainly not this man.”

The two of them glared at each other, the coldest, most rigid-faced, civilized glare that ever passed between two people.

“Free him,” said the queen, with a tiny movement of her finger.

Constable Barry clicked his tongue, and there was a general movement and clank of arms and breastplates. They removed me from that room—I dare say I walked, but truly it was more that they wafted me, like a cloud of smoke that you fan and persuade toward a chimney.

They put me out the front of the castle, with half a pound-loaf of hard bread to see me home. It was raining, and cold, and I did not know my way, so I had quite a time of it, but eventually I did find my road home to Piggott’s, and into the village I tottered late next day.

My mam welcomed me with relief. My dad wanted my word I had done no wrong before he would let me in the house. My fellows, farm men and hunters both, greeted me with such ribaldry I scarce knew where to look. “I never touched her!” I protested, but however hard I did, still they drank to me and clapped my back and winked at me and made unwholesome reference. “White as princess skin, eh, Manny?” they would say, or, “Oh, he’s not up for cherry-picking with us, this one as has wooed royalty!”

“Take no notice, son,” Mam advised. “The more you fuss, the longer they will plague you.”

And so I tried only to endure it, though I would not smile and join in their jesting. They had not seen her, that fine girl in her a-mussment; they had not been led to her through the flowering forest by a magical horse with a horn in its head; they had not quailed under her disdain, or plumped up again with hope when she had looked more kindly on them. They had not been in that dungeon facing their deaths, nor higher in the palace watching the queen’s finger restore them to life. They did not know what they spoke of so lightly.

I thought it all had ended. I had begun to relax and think life might return to being more comfortable, the night Johnny Blackbird took it into his head to goad me. He was a man of the lowest type; I knew even as I swung at him that Mam would be disgusted—Dad also—by my having let such an earwig annoy me with his crawlings. But he had gone on and on, pursuing me and insisting, full of rude questions and implications, and I was worn out with being so fecking noble about the whole business, when I had never asked to be led away and put beside a princess. I had never wanted picking up by queen people and bringing into royal presences. Most of all, I had not wanted, not for a moment, to touch even as much of her clothing as I touched, of that young lady, let alone her flesh. I had never thought a smutty thought about her, for though she were a beauty she were much too imposing for a man like me to do more than bow down before, to slink away from.

Anyway, once I had landed my first thump, to the side of
Blackbird’s head, the relief of it was so great, I began to deliver on him all the blows and curses I had stored up till that moment. And hard blows they were, and well calculated, and curses that surged like vomit from my depths, so sincere I hardly recognized my own voice. He called pax almost straightaway, the little dung piece, but I kept into him until the Pershron twins pulled me off, by which time his face was well colored and pushed out of shape, the punishment I’d given him.

After that night people left me alone, and rather more than I wanted. They respected me, though there was the smell of fear, or maybe embarrassment—bad feeling, anyhow—in their respect. And I could not jolly them out of it, having never been that specimen of a jolly fellow. So I tended then to gloom off by myself, to work when asked and well, but less often to join the lads at the spring for a swim, or at the Brindle for a pot or two.

We were stooking early hay when the soldiers came again. One moment I was easy in the sunshine, watching how each forkful propped and fell; the next I came aware of a crowding down on the road, like ants at jam, and someone running up the field—Cal Devonish it was, his shirt frantic around him. As soon as he was within the distance of me, he cried, “They are come for you, Manny!” And I saw my death in his face, and I ran too.

The chase was messy and short. I achieved the forest, but I was not long running there before my foot slipped on a root, then between two roots, and the rest of my body fled over it and the bone snapped, above my ankle. I sat up and extricated
myself, and I was sitting there holding my own foot like a broken baby in both my hands, knowing I would never run again, when the soldiers—how had they crossed the hay field so fast?—came thundering at me out of the trees.

“What have I done?” I cried piteously. They wrenched me up. The leg pain shouted up me, and flared off the top of my head as screams. “’Tis no less true now, what I said, than it was in the spring!”

“Why did you run, then,” said one of them, “if you are so innocent?” And he kicked my broken leg, then slapped me awake when I swooned from the pain.

Up came Constable Barry, his face a creased mess of disgust and delight. “You
filth
.” He spat in my face; he struck me to the ground. “You animal.” He kicked me in my side, and I was sure he broke something there. “Getting your spawn upon our princess, spoiling and soiling the purest creature that ever was.”

“But I never!”

But he kicked me in the mouth then, and thank God the pain of that shatterment washed straight back into my head, and wiped his ugly spittle-face from my sight, and the trees and the white sky behind it.

Straight up to the foot of the tower he rode, the guard. He dismounted jingling and untied a sacking bag from his saddle. It was stained at the bottom, dark and plentifully.

“You have someone in that tower, I think, miss,” he says to me. “A lady?”

“We do.” I could not tear my gaze from the sack.

“I’m charged to show her something, and take her response to the Majesty.”

“Very well,” I said.

He followed me in; I conveyed his purpose to Joan Vinegar.

“Oh, yes? And what is the thing you’re to show?” And she stared at the bag just as I had, knowing it were some horror.

“I’m to show the leddy. I’ve no instructions to let anyone else see.”

“I’ll take you up.” Joan was hoping for a look anyway. So was I. He was mad if he thought we would consent to not see. Nothing ever happened here; we were hungry for events, however grim.

Up they went, and I walked back outside, glanced to my gardening and considered it, then followed my musings around to the far side of the tower, under the arrow slit that let out of the lady’s room.

It was a windless day, and thus I heard clearly her first cry. If you had cared about her at all, it would have broke your heart, and now I discovered that despite the girl’s general lifelessness, and her clear stupidity in getting herself childered when some lord needed her purity to bargain with, I did care. She was miserable enough already. What had he brought to make her miserabler?

Well, I knew, I knew. But there are some things you know but will not admit until you have seen them yourself. The bag swung, black-stained, before my mind’s eye, a certain shape, a certain weight, and the lady cried on up there, not in words
but in wild, unconnected noises, and there were thuds, too, of furniture, a crash of pottery. I drew in a sharp breath; we did not have pots to spare here, and the lady knew it.

I hurried back to the under-room. Her shrieks sounded down the stairs, and then the door slammed on them, and the man’s boots hurried down, and there he was in the doorway, a blank, determined look on his face, the bag still in his hand, but looser, only held closed, not tied.

He thrust it at Joan as she arrived white-faced behind him. “Bury this,” he said.

She held it away from her skirts.

“I’ll be off,” he said.

“You’ll not sleep, sir, or take a bite?” said I.

“Not with that over me.” He looked at the ceiling. We could hear the lady, but not down the stairs; her noise poured out the arrow slit of her room, and bounced off the rocks outside, and in at the tower door. “I would sooner eat on a battlefield, with cavalry coming on both sides.”

And he was gone. Joan and I could not move, transfixed by the repellent bag.

“She has gone mad,” I said.

“For the moment, yes,” said Joan, as if she could keep things ordinary with her matter-of-fact tone.

We exchanged a long look. She read my question and my fear; she was not stupid. “Outside,” she said. “We don’t want to sully our living place wi’ this. Fetch the spade.”

We stepped out in time for a last sight of the horseman a-galloping off into the trees. The gray light flared and fluttered
unevenly, like my heartbeats. Joan bore the bag across the yellow grass, and I followed her into the edge of the forest, where we had raised the stone for old Cowlin. Joan sat on Cowlin’s stone. She leaned out and laid the bag on the grass. “Dig,” she said, pointing. “Right there.”

She did not often order me about, only when she was very tired or annoyed, but I did not think to question her. I dug most efficiently, against the resistance of that bastard mountain soil, quite different from what we had managed to rot and soften into the vegetable garden. The last time I had dug this was for Cowlin’s grave, and the same sense of death was closed in around us, and of the smallness of our activity among the endless pines, among the endless mountains.

While I dug, Joan sat recovering, her fingers over her mouth as if she would not let words out until she had ordered them better in her head. Every time I glanced at her, she looked a different age, glistening like a wide-eyed baby the once, then crumpled to a crone, then a fierce matron in her full strength. And she would not meet my eye.