Hart's Hope Part 20

Then voices came from below.

"Look. Snow again." It was Craven.

"Already? The time has been so short." Weasel.

"Eleven months. Rather long, I thought." Urubugala.

Do they know that I am here? thought Orem. He almost gave them an island in the Queen's Searching Eye, so they could converse in privacy; then it occurred to him that there might be things he could learn by listening unnoticed himself. For a moment, accidentally, he could eavesdrop the way the Queen did all the time.

"How we all look forward to the joyous day," said Craven. "The birth of a little offspring."

"Beauty's rebirth and replenishment. Power for another few centuries or so. Does the Little King yet know his part in it?"

"I think not," said Weasel. "No, he does not."

"Should we tell him?" asked Craven.

Weasel answered quickly. "I think we must."

"No," said Urubugala.

"It's always better to know the truth."

"Can he stop it?" asked Urubugala. "If he tried to stop it, all would be destroyed. For the Queen to renew herself, all her power must be placed in the living blood. He will play this part better if he knows nothing."

"More merciful that way," wheezed Craven.

"Yes," said Weasel. "But will he thank you for his mercy?"

"I care nothing for his thanks," said Urubugala. "The cost of power is never paid by the one who wields it."

And then silence. He did not even hear them leave.

Orem knew nothing of the books of magic. From his time with Gallowgla.s.s, however, he knew this much: that the price of power was blood, and whatever gave the blood must die. Beauty was coming to the time of her renewal. And they would not tell Orem of his role in it because all her power must be placed in the living blood. In that moment he reached the obvious conclusion. The blood of a hart was more potent than the blood of a rat; the blood of a man more potent than the blood of a hart; and the blood of a husband more potent than the blood of a stranger.

What blood does Beauty shed for her near infinite power? The blood of her bedded husband, the Little King.

Suddenly his almost empty life in the Palace made sense. He was the fatted calf. Beauty had bedded him and conceived his child because otherwise he would not be her true husband and so would not have power enough for her. Probably she awaited only the birth of their child, and he would die.

He leaned on the railing now because he could not stand. He was still in the cages after all. He had not been saved when Beauty sent for him. He had simply been set within her plan. For an hour he watched the snow and mourned himself.

As he mourned, he foresaw many versions of his death. Would she ridicule him then, in his last moments? Or thank him for his sacrifice? More powerful than the mere blood of a husband would be the blood of a husband shed willingly. What if Beauty asked me to give my blood freely? Does it occur to her that a man might gladly die for her? He imagined himself going to her and offering his life-but he knew that she would laugh at him. She thought him ludicrous even now; he could not make a grand gesture with her watching, for it would seem ludicrous even to him.

He also thought of escape. But after thought, he scorned that, too. Had he come out of Banningside to Inwit, come from Wizard Street to the Palace, just so he could escape at the very moment that was plainly meant to be the meaning of his life? He had wanted a name and a song and a place, hadn't he?

And after an hour spent thinking such thoughts, he decided he could bear having his life end this way. He was reconciled to being a p.a.w.n in Beauty's game.

Then, suddenly, he remembered lying down in his cage because he was too weary to keep walking in the snow. He felt the other men's spit on his shoulders and face. Even when you have no hope, you do not die of sleep when you can die struggling.

Why was I brought here? Why was I I brought here? Beauty does not know that I am a Sink. It was the Sisters who showed her my face in a dream. Perhaps I was meant to overhear this conversation tonight so that I would remember that Queen Beauty is my enemy. Though I still dream of her, though I stammer and feel the fool when I am with her, perhaps I am meant to use my power to weaken her. brought here? Beauty does not know that I am a Sink. It was the Sisters who showed her my face in a dream. Perhaps I was meant to overhear this conversation tonight so that I would remember that Queen Beauty is my enemy. Though I still dream of her, though I stammer and feel the fool when I am with her, perhaps I am meant to use my power to weaken her.

If I am to die, let it not be as a willing sacrifice. Let me die knowing that while she can take my life from me, I have also taken something from her. Perhaps I have time enough in the days before the child is born to help Palicrovol. A year I've been here, and in that time I have done nothing at all with the power I have except have a few secret but trivial conversations. I may be weak, but I am the only person who can thwart the Queen at all. And if she discovers me, so much the better. Let her kill me in rage, so that much of my blood is spilled and wasted. It will be my turn to laugh at her.

It was a very satisfying story that he told himself, and it led him to do everything that he ought to do. No one but Orem himself would be hurt when he discovered that he was never meant to die at all.

The War of Beauty and the Sink That night Orem resumed the war that had begun with a single skirmish almost a year before. He found King Palicrovol nearer than a year ago, but not by much. The greatest change was in the number of men who were with him-he was gathering his armies in earnest now, and Orem could not even guess their number. The circle of wizards was still with the camp, and inside that the circle of priests, and inside that King Palicrovol, a.s.sailed by the sweet and terrible magic of the Queen.

Calmly and thoroughly Orem undid all her magic around the King. This time he was more discriminating-he left the magic of Palicrovol's wizards alone. The Queen did not respond quickly, and Orem used her sluggishness to cut great swathes in the cloying sea of her Searching Eye. Carefully he widened the area where she was blind, and soon it became clear that she could not even find King Palicrovol. Orem opened his eyes and looked at the candle by his bed. He had only worked an hour, and she was groping and incapable.

Back when he was pranking with his power, that would have been enough. Now, however, he knew that he had only begun. It was not enough to blind her around Palicrovol. He stretched himself to the utmost and blinded her view of whole cities, of whole counties, while she concentrated on finding Palicrovol again. Within the city of Inwit he devastated her power entirely. From wall to wall of her city, and for a mile or more outside, he undid all her spells of binding. Only King's Town itself did he leave alone, not because he could not undo her power there, but because it was better to let her think that her opponent could not pierce those defenses. defenses.

This time two more hours had pa.s.sed, and Orem returned to Palicrovol one more time. The Queen still had not found him. But to make sure, he undid her so far around him that she would not find him in a day or more, if she kept searching at the same rate. Let Palicrovol have a whole day of rest. And tomorrow, I'll let him have another, if I can.

You remember that night and that morning, Palicrovol. It came almost a year after the first respite, when you first learned that another power stirred in the world. All night you waited for Beauty's vengeful counterthrust, but it did not come. In the morning your wizards tried to pretend that they had wrought your salvation, but you knew that they had not. The priests pretended that they had said some new and efficacious prayer, but you laughed at them. You knew there was no explaining what had come, only that whatever this power was, it was kind to you. There was balance in the world once more, the wheel had turned, and you began your yearlong march toward Inwit, toward the city too long denied to you. This time, you believed, you would overcome.

Bathers in the Pool Although he stayed awake hours later than usual, Orem awoke before dawn. He recognized the faint light outside his window. It was the Hour of the Outmost Circle, the time that he was wont to waken in the House of G.o.d. Not only was he awake, but he also felt refreshed and vigorous for the first time in months. He stood up from the bed and walked briskly back and forth in the room, surprised at how good it felt to move quickly again. He was a soldier; he was at war; he was alive.

Orem stood at the window and searched to see how much of last night's undoing Beauty had been able to repair. He was pleased to see how little, really, she had done. Palicrovol was still undiscovered. Perhaps more important, though, even Inwit itself was not restored to the level of control she had had before. Each member of her Guard had been bound to her with a spell of loyalty to her and friends.h.i.+p for his fellow guards. Many of the guards in the city had been brought back, but not all. They didn't instantly fall to quarreling among themselves or betraying her, of course. What mattered was that in a single night he could undo more than she could redo in the hours when he slept.

He was too exhilarated this morning to stay indoors. Though the sky was only faintly light, he dressed and wound his way through the rooms of the Palace, heading for the nearest door to the Park. It was woods he needed, the wild woods that no gardener tended, where it was a summer morning today despite the heavy snow blanketing the city outside the Castle walls.

There was a hurry about the servants that he pa.s.sed, and urgency, sometimes even fear. That was a sure sign that Queen Beauty was feeling out of sorts. The servants always scurried then. Silently Orem apologized to them for making their day a bit more difficult than usual today. Queen Beauty, his poor wife, had perhaps had little sleep.

As quickly as possible he lost himself in the woods, wandering as he pleased until he found himself at the high west wall of the Castle. He walked north along the wall until it curved in sharply at Corner Castle, where the Lesser Donjon waited, the prison of the great, more dangerous in its gentle way than the Gaols. He could hear from within it, faintly, a distant cry; perhaps, he thought, it's only a sound from the city beyond the wall. It was not. Orem pressed his ear against the stone of the tower and the sound came clear. It was the scream of a man in agony; it was the scream of the worst terror a man can know. Not the fear of death, but the fear that death would delay its coming.

Orem could not conceive of the torture that would arouse such a cry from a human throat. The stone he leaned against was cold, and he s.h.i.+vered. The sun was now half-hid behind the western wall, and already the air was getting cooler. He left the tower and the suffering man inside it. He wondered if his own throat could ever make a sound like that. If it did, he would not know it: when such a sound is made, its maker is past hearing.

He walked back a different way, through the woods again, but this time brutally, thrusting the brambles out of the way and letting them whip back savagely in his face. He let his s.h.i.+rt tear, let his face bleed; pain was a delicious language, one that he knew how to understand. Then he came suddenly to the Queen's Pool.

It was water from the Water House, the pure spring that flowed in an endless stream as if G.o.d himself were pumping, right in the heart of the Castle. The Baths of the Water House were public and the water good; but most of the water went somewhere else, went in aqueducts to the Temples, to the great houses and emba.s.sies lining King's Road and the even more exclusive Diggings Avenue, went in bronze pipes to Pools Park, where the artists dwelt outside the Palace, and came here, to the Queen's Pool, where few ever bathed and the water was as pure as a baby's tears. Orem stayed back in the trees, just looking at the water rippling in the breeze, transparent, green, and deep because the sun had not yet risen far enough to s.h.i.+ne from the surface.

While he watched, two visitors came to the pool. The first to come was an old man in a loincloth, and Orem knew him: the mad servant who called himself G.o.d and had no pupils in his eyes. He came and stood across the pool from Orem, looking down into the water. Orem did not move.

They seemed to wait forever, both of them statues in the gathering night.

Then came the second visitor, and she saw neither Orem nor the old man. Weasel Sootmouth, as hideous in dawn as in bright daylight; she seemed not to see the servant any more than she saw Orem. She stood beside the water, and then undressed to bathe. It was ungracious of him to watch poor Weasel's bent and shapeless body. She would surely be ashamed for a man to see that her b.r.e.a.s.t.s hung like empty feedbags, that her legs and knees were gawky and overboned. Yet he could not leave as she descended the steps into the pool, partly because he had the strong feeling that although she gave no sign of seeing him, she knew the old man was there, and had come here to meet him.

She swam slowly, barely rippling the water, never splas.h.i.+ng at all. She is misnamed, thought Orem: Not weasel but otter is her animal self. Then she dove under the surface.

Now the servant who called himself G.o.d moved, throwing wide his arms. Green flashed his eyes, a light so bright that Orem looked away. And when he turned to watch again, the old servant was naked, p.i.s.sing savage green into the water, his eyes bright green and staring into the wood. Still Weasel had not come up. The green spread s.h.i.+ning across the water until the pool was all suffused with that living light. Still Weasel stayed beneath. Then the old man bowed and bent and knelt beside the pool, and dipped his head into the water up to the neck. Only then did Weasel rise, only her head above the surface, as if those faces could not live on the same side of the water. She seemed not to notice the vividness of the pool.

The tableau broke; the old servant pulled his head from the water, and Weasel turned to him, reached out and touched him. Perhaps they spoke: Orem could not hear. She kissed his brow and the servant-wept? Sobbed or cried out or spoke a single word, Orem could not tell. Then the servant arose, taking his loincloth, and walked haltingly into the well-trimmed path that would take him to the Palace. Weasel swam a few minutes more until the water gradually grew dull and ordinary. But Weasel did not become dull. Orem looked at her and realized that it was not an accident the Queen kept her close at hand. Those nearest the Queen were those most tortured; the quiet ugly woman who had come with him on so many jaunts with Belfeva and Timias was more than she seemed, surely, or the Queen would not torment her.

He cast his net for her, and counted the layers of spells, the depth of the spells the Queen had laid to pen her in, and yes, as he suspected, she was bound and tortured. Who are you, Weasel? Prisoner here as much as I, and perhaps as hopeless. I who will die, am I luckier than you? For I will soon be free of her, and you will not, bound forever in the company of a Queen who grieves you as she can; and she can so exquisitely give grief.

It was then that Orem first loved Weasel Sootmouth. Not for her flesh-Orem had known the body of the Queen. Not out of pity-he knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden that the Queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter. And because when she swam in the pool and kissed the servant who called himself G.o.d, she was, oddly enough, beautiful. Does that surprise you, Palicrovol? That of all people, your son could look at Weasel Sootmouth and see beauty?

The Queen Discovers Her Husband Orem returned to the Palace well before the hour when he usually awoke, and now he was weary from too little sleep and the unaccustomed exercise. He planned to rest awhile, but a servant met him at the door.

"Queen Beauty has been looking for you."

"Oh," said Orem.

"She wants you to come to her at once."

For a terrible moment he thought that his war with her was already over, that she had found him out and meant to kill him now. He did not feel as brave as he had felt yesterday on the portico. Then he realized that if it were death she intended, she would not have entrusted her message to this quiet servant. So he followed the servant to a place in the maze that he had not known existed; Beauty's apartments were well-masked, both with magic and with the illusions of clever artisans. Having gone to her once with a guide, however, the illusions were spoiled for Orem and he could find his way again easily. As for the spells, they never worked on him at all.

Queen Beauty lay in her bed looking out the window when he arrived. The servant left him alone with her. The door closed, and she turned to him.

"My Little King," she said.

Her beauty was undiminished, but her weariness could not be hidden. After all, it was a living beauty that she had, and her face was not unexpressive. She was tired, she was worried, she was grim, and her belly was heavy with the child that she had carried for eleven months. Only then did it occur to him that the pregnancy might be sapping her strength, and that was why she could not respond well to his attacks on her in the night.

"I fear I've ignored you far too long," she said.

"I've made friends."

"I know," she said. "Weasel tells me that you're pleasant company."

He could not hide the fact that it pleased him to know that Weasel Sootmouth had said such a thing-he was young enough to make more of that than was really in it. "Does she think so?"

"It's your child in my belly, you know. I'm weary with the waiting, and the child weighs me down. You should cheer me up."

"How can I?"

"Tell me things. Tell me about your country home. Tell me about childhood on the farm. They say your rustic stories are amusing."

It was a grotesque hour he spent then, telling tales of High Waterswatch to the woman who meant to kill him. It galled him to tell of his father and mother to her-but what other stories could he tell? She laughed a little when he told her of his early attempts at soldiering, and how the sergeant regarded him as unfit. She seemed interested in everything, even tales of how a farmer knows when the grain is near to harvest, and whether a cow is full of twins, and the signs of a storm.

"Look outside, and tell me if a storm is coming."

He looked. "No storm today or tomorrow," he said.

"But there'll be a storm all the same. Hart's blood, but I wish that it would come."

He turned and looked at her, wondering if she wished for the storm or the baby growing in her. Her hands were folded across the gravid mound beneath the blankets of her bed, but she was gazing neither at the window nor at her belly. When the child came, his life would quickly end, he knew. But surely he would live to see his child. Surely his future would not forbid him that.

At last, near noon, she wearied of him.

"Go now," she whispered. "I need to sleep."

He started for the door with triumph singing in his heart. She needed to sleep indeed. That was his doing, and it would be a long time before she slept well, if he had his way.

But she stopped him at the door. "Come to me again," she said. "Tomorrow, at the same time."

"Yes, my lady," Orem answered.

"I've used you badly, haven't I?" she said.

"No," he lied.

"The G.o.ds are restless," she said. "They don't bide well under discipline. Do you?"

Orem did not understand. "Am I under discipline?"

"I only noticed it today. You look like him." him."

"Who?"

"Him," she said. "Him." Then she turned her face away from him to sleep, and he left.

Orem did not understand it, and I did not tell him, but you you know, don't you, Palicrovol? She began to love him then. And part of why she loved him was because he looked like you. Does it make you laugh? Three hundred years of torturing you, and her hate for you had twisted into love. Not that she meant to free you. Never that. But still it ought to flatter you. You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love. know, don't you, Palicrovol? She began to love him then. And part of why she loved him was because he looked like you. Does it make you laugh? Three hundred years of torturing you, and her hate for you had twisted into love. Not that she meant to free you. Never that. But still it ought to flatter you. You're the sort of enemy your enemy must love.

This is the way the paths of our lives entwine and cross and go apart: If she had sent for him the day before, even then he might have loved her. But she did not send for him until she was afraid; she was not afraid until he undid her work; he did not undo her work until he was past loving her. If only we could stand outside our lives and look at what we do, we might repair so many injuries before they're done.

22.

The Birth of Youth The tale of the birth of Orem's son, Beauty's son, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d grandchild of King Palicrovol, in all the world no child more beautiful and bright.

The Burning Ring Orem's war with the Queen made him almost frenetic during the days, as if he had to work off some of the power he stole from her. As she neared the time of delivery, he harried her more and more, so that she spent her days exhausted after battling futilely all night. Orem, however, spent his days in ever more active games. Timias and Belfeva were surprised, but gladly joined him, even when he indulged in madness like racing horses with the cavalry on the parade ground or competing with Timias to see which of them could throw a javelin the farthest. Timias was not the sort to let Orem win, and so Orem, untrained in any of the manly arts, invariably lost. But he kept at it furiously, and gradually improved.

When Beauty went into labor for the birth of Orem's son, he was climbing up a wall of the Palace, racing to the top with Timias. This was one compet.i.tion where agility and endurance counted for more than brute strength and long practice, and Orem was holding his own. He was nearly to the top, in fact, when he noticed a sharp pain like a candle flame on his leftmost finger. He looked, and saw that his ruby ring was glowing hot. He could not take it off, not without falling a hundred feet or so. Instead he endured it, climbed the rest of the way to the top, and only then tried to pry it off his finger. He could not.

Weasel and Belfeva were there, watching. "Help me," Orem said.

"You can't take it off," Weasel said. "The ruby ring will burn till the child is born. It isn't really burning you. Anyway, you should be glad-it's proof that the child is not only yours, but also a son."

"The child is being born," Orem said. Then this was the last day of his life, he was sure. He walked to the lip of the roof, reached down, and helped Timias to the top.

"You won," Timias said, surprised. "I didn't think you had it in you."

"I kept looking down," Orem said. "The thought of death makes me quick."

Suddenly Weasel cried out in pain.

"What is it!" they demanded, but she would not tell.

"Orem," she said, "you must go to your wife."

"At a birthing? The father?"