Fictions

by Nancy Kress

  “If it were demonic, it would do you more good,” a voice said quietly.

  I whirled around. By the door sat the rat. He was a rat no longer but a short, ratty-faced man, thin and starved-looking and very young, dressed in rags. I looked at his eyes, pale brown and filmy, like the floating colors in dreams, and I knew immediately that I was in the presence of one of the Old Ones.

  Strangely, I felt no fear. He was so puny, and so pale. I could have broken his arm with one hand. He wasn’t even as old as I was, despite the downy stubble on his chin—a boy, who had been a rat.

  What danger could there be in magic that could not even free itself from a locked room?

  “You’re not afraid,” he said in that same quiet voice, and if I had been, the fear would have left me then. He smiled, the saddest and most humble smile I have ever seen. It curved his skinny mouth, but it never touched the washed-out brown of his eyes. “You’re a bold girl.”

  “Like my mam,” I said bitterly, before I knew I was going to. “Bold in misfortune.” Except, of course, that it wasn’t her who would die a slow and painful death, the lying bitch.

  “I think we can help each other,” he said, and at that I laughed out loud. I shudder now, to remember it. I laughed aloud at one of the Old Ones! What stupidities we commit from ignorance!

  He gave me again that pitiful wraith of a smile. “Do you know, Ludie, what happens when art progresses?”

  I had no idea what we were talking about. Art? Did he mean magic arts? And how did he know my name? A little cold prickle started in my liver, and I knew I wouldn’t laugh at him again.

  “Yes, magic arts, too,” he said in his quiet voice, “although I was referring to something else. Painting. Sculpture. Poetry. Even tapestry—everything made of words and colors. You don’t weave tapestry, do you, Ludie?”

  He knew I did not. Only ladies wove tapestries. I flushed, thinking he was mocking me.

  “Art starts out simple. Pale. True to what is real. Like stone statues of the human body, or verse chanted by firelight. Pale, pale stone. Pale as straw. Simple words, that name what is true. Designs in natural wool, the color of rams’ horns. Then, as time goes on, the design becomes more elaborate. The colors brighter. The story twisted to fit rhyme, or symbol, or somebody else’s power. Finally, the designs are so elaborate, so twisted with motion, and the colors so feverish—look at me, Ludie—that the original, the real as it exists in nature, looks puny and withered. The original has lost all power to move us, replaced by a hectic simulacrum that bears only a tainted relation to what is real. The corruption is complete.”

  He leaned forward. “The magic arts are like that, too, Ludie. The Old Ones, our blood diluted by marriage with men, are like that now. Powerless in our bone-real paleness, our simple-real words.”

  I didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. His skin was so pasty; maybe a brain pox lay upon him. Men didn’t talk like that, nor boys either. Nor rats. But I wanted to say something to cheer him. He had made me forget for a few minutes what awaited me in the morning.

  “A slow and painful death,” . . . the rack? The red-hot pincers? The Iron Maiden? Suddenly dizzy, I put my head between my knees.

  “All you have to do,” the Old One said in his thin voice, “is get me out. Of this room, of the palace, of the courtyard gate.”

  I didn’t answer. A slow and painful death . . .

  “Just that,” he said. “No more. We can no longer do it for ourselves. Not with all this hectic . . . all this bright . . .” I heard him move wearily across the floor, and then the spinning wheel being righted. After a long moment, it whirred.

  I raised my head. The wheel was whole, with no break in the shining wood. The boy sat before it on a bale of straw, his ashen face sad as Good Friday. From under his fingers, winding around the spindle turning in its wheel-driven whorl, wound skein after skein of feverishly bright gold thread.

  Toward morning, I slept, stretched out on the hard stone floor. I couldn’t help it. Sleep took me like a drug. When I woke, there was not so much as a speck of chaff left in the room. The gold lay in tightly wound skeins, masses and masses of them, brighter than the sun. The boy’s face was so ashen I thought he must surely faint. His arms and legs trembled. He crouched as far away from the gold as possible, and kept his eyes averted.

  “There will be no place for me to hide,” he said, his voice as bone-pale as his face. “The first thing they will do is paw through the gold. And I . . . have not even corrupted power . . . left.” With that, he fell over, and a skinny rat lay, insensible, on the stone floor.

  I lifted it gingerly and hid it in my apron. On the other side of the door, the bar lifted. The great door swung slowly on its hinges. He stood there, in turquoise silk and garish yellow velvet, his bright blue eyes under their thick lashes wide with disbelief. The disbelief changed to greed, terrible to watch, like flesh that has been merely infected turning dark with gangrene. He looked at me, walked over to finger the gold, looked at me again.

  He smiled.

  I tried to run away before the wedding. I should have known it would be impossible. Even smuggling out the rat was so hard I first despaired of it. Leaving the room was easy enough, and even leaving the palace to walk in the walled garden set aside for princesses, but getting to the courtyard gate proved impossible. In the end I bribed a page to carry the rat in a cloth-wrapped bundle over the drawbridge and into the woods, and I know he did so, because the child returned with a frightened look and handed me a single stone, pale and simple as bone. There was no other message. There didn’t need to be.

  But when I tried to escape myself, I couldn’t. There were guards, pages, ladies, even when I went to bed or answered the call of nature. God’s blood, but the rich were poor in privacy!

  Everywhere, everyone wore the brightest of colors in the most luxurious of fabrics. Jade, scarlet, canary, flame, crimson. Silks, velvets, brocades. Diamonds and emeralds and rubies and bloodstones, lying like vivid wounds on necks brilliant with powder and rouge. And all the corridors of the palace twisted, crusted with carving in a thousand grotesque shapes of birds and animals and faces that never were.

  I asked to see the prince alone, and I came at him with a bread knife, a ridiculous thing for bread, its hilt tortured with scrollwork and fevered with paint. He was fast for so big a man; I missed him and he easily disarmed me. I waited then for a beating or worse, but all he did was laugh lazily and wind his hands in my tangled hair, which I refused to have dyed or dressed.

  “A little demon, are you? I could learn to like that . . .” He forced his lips on mine and I wasn’t strong enough to break free. When he released me, I spat in his face.

  “Let me leave here! I lied! I can’t spin gold into straw—I never could! The Old Ones did it for me!”

  “Certainly they did,” he said, smiling, “they always help peasants with none of their blood.” But a tiny line furrowed his forehead.

  That afternoon a procession entered my room. The prince, his chancellor, two men carrying a spinning wheel, one carrying a bale of straw. My heart skittered in my chest.

  “Now,” he said. “Do it again. Here. Now.”

  The men thrust me toward the wheel, pushed me onto a footstool slick with canary silk. I looked at the spinning wheel.

  There are so many different kinds of deaths. More than I had known just days ago.

  I fitted the straw onto the distaff. I pushed the wheel. The spindle revolved in its whorl. Under my twisting fingers, the straw turned to gold.

  “ ‘An Old One’,” mocked my bridegroom. “Yes, most certainly. An Old One spun it for you.”

  I had dropped the distaff as if it were on fire. “Yes,” I gasped, “yes . . . I can’t do this, I don’t know how . . .”

  The chancellor had eagerly scooped up the brief skein of gold. He fingered it, and his hot eyes grew hotter.

  “Don’t you even know,” the prince said, still amused, disdaining to notice the actual gold
now that he was assured of it, “that the Old Ones will do nothing for you unless you know the words of their true names? Or unless you have something they want. And how could you, as stinking when I found you as a pig trough, have anything they wanted? Or ever hope to know their true names?”

  “Do you?” I shot back, because I thought it would hurt him, thought it would make him stop smiling. But it didn’t, and I saw all at once that he did know their true names, and that it must have been this that gave his great-great-grandfather power over them for the first time. True names.

  “I don’t like ‘Ludie,’ ” he said. “It’s a peasant name. I think I shall call you ‘Goldianna.’ ”

  “Do it and I’ll shove a poker up your ass!” I yelled. But he only smiled.

  The morning of the wedding I refused to get out of bed, refused to put on the crimson-and-gold wedding dress, refused to speak at all. Let him try to marry me bedridden, naked, and dumb!

  Three men came to hold me down. A woman forced a liquid, warm and tasting of pungent herbs, down my throat. When I again came to myself, at nightfall, I was standing beside a bed vast as a cottage, crusted with carvings as a barnacled ship. I wore the crimson wedding gown, with bone stays that forced my breasts up, my waist in, my ass out, my neck high. Seventeen yards of jeweled cloth flowed around my feet. On my finger was a ring so heavy I could hardly lift my hand.

  The prince smiled and reached for me, and he was still stronger, in his corrupted and feverish power, than I.

  The night before my son was born, I had a dream. I lay again on the stone floor, chaff choking the air, and a figure bent over me. Spindly arms, long ratty face . . . the boy took me in his arms and raised my shift, and I half stirred and opened my legs. Afterward, I slept again to the whirring of the spinning wheel.

  I woke to sharp pain in my belly. The pain traveled around to the small of my back, and there it stayed until I thought I should break in two. But I didn’t shriek. I bit my tongue to keep from crying out, and when the pain had passed I called to the nearest of my ladies, asleep in my chamber, “Send for the midwife!”

  She rose, rubbing her eyes, and her hand felt first for the ornate jewels in which she slept every night, for fear of their being stolen. Only when she found they were safe did she mutter sleepily, “Yes, Your Grace,” and yawn hugely. The inside of her mouth was red as a wound.

  The next pain struck.

  All through that long morning, I was kept from screaming by my dream. It curled inside me, pale and wispy as woodland mist in the morning. If . . . maybe . . . God’s blood, let it be true! Let the baby be born small, and thin, and wan as clean milk, let him look at me with eyes filmy as clouds . . .

  Near the end, the prince came. He stood only inches inside the door, a handkerchief over his mouth against the stench of blood and sweat. The handkerchief was embroidered with gold and magenta threads. Above it his face gleamed brightly, flushed with hope and disgust.

  I bit through my lip, and pushed, and the hairy head slid from between my legs. Another push, and he was out. The midwife lifted him, still attached to his bloody tether, and gave a cry of triumph. The prince nodded and hastily left, clutching his handkerchief. The midwife laid my son, wailing, on my belly.

  He had a luxuriant head of thick bright hair, and lush black eyelashes. His fat cheeks were red, his eyes a brilliant, hectic blue.

  I felt the dream slide away from me, insubstantial as smoke, and for the first time that morning I screamed—in fury, in despair, in the unwanted love I already felt for the vivid child wriggling on my belly, who had tethered me to the palace with cords as bloody and strong as the one that still held him between my legs.

  I walked wearily down the palace corridor to the spinning room. My son toddled beside me. The chancellor met me outside the door, trailing his clerks and pages. “No spinning today, Your Grace.”

  “No spinning?” There was always spinning. The baby always came with me, playing with skeins of gold, tearing them into tiny bits, while I spun. Always.

  The chancellor’s eyes wouldn’t meet mine. His stiff jeweled headdress towered two feet in the air, a miniature palace. “The Treasury has enough gold.”

  “Enough gold?” I sounded like a mocking-bird, with no words of my own. The chancellor stiffened and swept away, the train of his gown glittering behind. The others followed, except for one courtier, who seemed careful not to touch me or look at me.

  “There . . . is a woman,” he whispered.

  “A woman? What woman?” I said, and then I recognized him. He had grown taller in three years, broader. But I had still the stone he gave me the day he carried the stricken rat beyond the courtyard gate.

  “A peasant woman in the east. Who is said to be able to spin straw into diamonds.”

  He was gone, his rich velvets trembling. I thought of all the gold stacked in the palace—skeins and skeins of it, filling room after room, sewn into garment after garment, used for curtain pulls and fish nets and finally even to tie up the feet of the chickens for roasting. The gold thread emerged blackened and charred from the ovens, but there was always so much more. And more. And more.

  Diamonds were very rare.

  Carefully I took the hand of my son. The law was clear—he was the heir. And the raising of him was mine. As long as I lived. Or he did.

  My son looked up at me. His name was Dirk, but I thought he had another name as well. A true name, that I had never been allowed to hear. I couldn’t prove this.

  “Come, Dirk,” I said, as steadily as I could. “We’ll go play in the garden.”

  He thrust out his lip. “Mama spin!”

  “No, dearest, not today. No spinning today.”

  He threw himself full length on the floor. “Mama spin!”

  One thing my mother, damn her lying soul, had never permitted was tantrums. “No.”

  The baby sprang up. His intense blue eyes glittered. With a wild yell he rushed at me, and too late I saw that his chubby fist clutched a miniature knife, garish with jewels, twisted with carving. He thrust it at my belly.

  I gasped and pulled it free—there was not much blood, the aim of a two-year-old is not good. Dirk screamed and hit me with his little fists. His gold-shod feet kicked me. I tried to grab him, but it was like holding a wild thing. No one came—no one, although I am usually surrounded by so many bodies I can hardly breathe. Finally I caught his two arms in one hand and his two flailing legs in the other. He stopped screaming and glared at me with such intensity, such hatred in his bright blue eyes, that I staggered against the wall. A carved gargoyle pressed into my back. We stayed like that, both of us pinned.

  “Dirk,” I whispered, “what is your true name?”

  They write things down. All of them, all things. Births, deaths, recipes, letters, battles, buyings and sellings, sizes, stories—none of them can remember anything without writing it down, maybe because all of it is so endlessly complicated. Or maybe because they take pride in their handwriting, which is also complicated: swooping dense curlicues traced in black or gold or scarlet. They write everything down, and sometimes the ladies embroider what has been written down on sleeves or doublets or arras. Then the stonemasons carve what has been embroidered into designs across a lintel or mantel or font. Even the cook pipes stylized letters in marzipan across cakes and candies. They fill their bellies with their frantic writing.

  Somewhere in all this was Dirk’s true name. I didn’t know how much time I had. Around a turn of the privy stairs I had overheard two ladies whisper that the girl who could spin straw into diamonds had already been captured and was imprisoned in a caravan traveling toward the palace.

  I couldn’t read. But I could remember. Even shapes, even of curlicued letters. But which curlicues were important? There were so many, so much excess corrupting the true.

  The day after the privy stairs, the prince came to me. His blue eyes were cold. “You are not raising Dirk properly. The law says you cannot be replaced as his mother . . . unless, of course
, you should happen to die.”

  I kept my voice steady. “In what way have I failed Dirk?”

  He didn’t mention the screaming, the knives, the cruelty. Last week Dirk cut the finger off a peasant child. Dirk’s father merely smiled. Instead, the prince said, “He has been seen playing with rats. Those are filthy animals; they carry disease.”

  My heart leaped. Rats. Sometimes, in the hour just before dawn, I had the dream again. Even if it wasn’t true, I was always glad to have it. The rat-boy bending over me, and the baby with pale, quiet eyes.

  The prince said, “Don’t let it happen again.” He strode away, magnificent in gold-embroidered leather like a gilded cow.

  I found Dirk and took him to the walled garden. Nothing. We searched my chambers, Dirk puzzled but not yet angry. Nothing. The nobility have always taken great care to exterminate rats.

  But in the stable, where the groom lay drunk on his pallet, were holes in the wall, and droppings, and the thin sour smell of rodent.

  For days I caught rats. I brought each to my room hidden in the ugly-rich folds of my gown, barred the door, and let the rat loose. There was no one to see us; since the rumors of the girl who can spin diamonds, I was very often left alone. Each rat sniffed the entire room, searching for a way out. There was none. Hours later, each rat was still a rat.

  Dirk watched warily, his bright blue eyes darting and cold.

  On the sixth day, I woke to find a pale, long-nosed girl sitting quietly on the floor. She watched me from unsurprised eyes that were the simplest and oldest things I’d ever seen.

  I climbed down from my high bed, clutching my nightshift around me. I sat on the floor facing her, nose-to-nose. In his trundle Dirk whimpered.

  “Listen to me, Old One. I know what you are, and what you need. I can get you out of the palace.” For the first time, I wondered why they came into the palace at all. “No one will see you. But in return you must tell me two things. The true name of my son. And of one other: one like yourself, a boy who was here three years ago, who was carried out by a page because he taught a washerwoman’s daughter to spin straw into gold.”