The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  The Prince of Morning Bells

  by Nancy Kress

  Books by Nancy Kress:

  The Prince of Morning Bells

  The Golden Grove

  The White Pipes

  Trinity and Other Stories

  An Alien Light

  Brain Rose

  Beginnings, Middles, and Ends

  Beggars In Spain

  Beggars and Choosers

  Beggars Ride

  The Aliens of Earth

  Maximum Light

  Oaths and Miracles

  Stinger

  Beaker’s Dozen

  Dynamic Characters

  Yanked

  Probability Moon

  Probability Sun

  Probability Space

  Character, Emotion, and Viewpoint

  Nano Comes to Clifford Falls and Other Stories

  Steal Across the Sky

  The Prince of Morning Bells

  Copyright 1981, Nancy Kress

  Smashwords Edition

  Smashwords ISBN-13: 978-1-936771-10-3

  Smashwords ISBN: 1-936-77110-1

  all rights reserved

  ebook editions March 2011

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  FoxAcre Press edition published May, 2000

  originally published by

  Pocket Books/Timescape in 1981

  http://www.nancykress.blogspot.com

  cover art by N. Taylor Blanchard

  http://www.ntaylorblanchard.com

  foxacre.com

  Book One

  One

  Castle Kiril was built of flat gray stone, at the edge of a beech and oak forest for which legend was only a matter of time. There were all the usual castle features: tall pointed turrets that prickled at the tolerant sky, a massive drawbridge capable of shivering ominously whenever it was raised (which was seldom, the kingdom being perpetually at peace), tapestries woven with unicorns and fleurs-de-lis and slightly bored-looking angels. The resident princess, for her first eighteen years, took the castle’s silent hint and did all the customary princess things. In the summer she picnicked by the moat and threw tidbits of fruit or strawberry tart to the moat serpent, who leaped for them high into the air, the silver sunlight breaking into shards around his flashing green scales. In the winter she sat at a heavy oak table and conjugated verbs, her tongue stuck out thoughtfully at the corner of her mouth, and unsubtly tried to badger her Wizard into supplying the subjunctive. In the spring she went a-Maying; in the fall she attended harvest festivals and obligingly gave her autograph to any peasant who happened to ask for it. She even worked a tapestry herself, taking the work in easy stages over five years. It was of the Creation of the Natural World, and if one looked at it from any distance greater than two feet it was hard not to get the impression that the natural world had straightened out considerably since its beginning. But her royal parents were proud of it and caused it to be hung in the Great Hall, a little lopsided so as to compensate for the lean in the Tree of Knowledge.

  But when she reached her eighteenth year, the princess—whose name was Kirila—grew discontented. It was not the sighing-by-the-window-and-writing-poetry discontent; she was not that sort of princess. She became moody and short-tempered, and went through a period of issuing decrees by the dozen, many of which later proved contradictory when they got as far as Court test cases.

  One spring day, after a strenuous hunt during which Kirila rode as if pursued by the dragon and not the other way around, causing all her ladies to fall off their mounts trying to keep up with her, she clattered up the stone stairs to the top of the highest tower, her riding boots purposefully striking only every other step. Here was the Wizard’s deep-shadowed lair.

  “I want to go on a Quest!” Kirila blurted breathlessly. She was panting; her breast heaved under her green velvet doublet and stray tendrils of red hair, the color of copper in sunlight, curled damply on her forehead.

  The Wizard looked at her with sad eyes. “A Quest?”

  “Yes! Just listen, Wizard—I’ve got it all thought out. Even a Crown Princess hasn’t got very much to do around here that’s really important—you know that’s true!” she asserted, although he hadn’t tried to deny it. She knelt on the floor by his chair, her hands restless and excited on the carved wooden arm. “I want to go on a Quest to discover the Heart of the World!”

  The Wizard began to pull at his white beard; there were knots in it. “Wouldn’t consider something less ambitious, I suppose? The Holy Grail, overthrowing Evil, something along those lines?” The hands on the beard trembled a little.

  She squared her soft chin. “If I do it, I’m going to do it right. And that means looking for the Heart of the World.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?”

  “Yes, why? Why does it mean looking for the Heart of the World?”

  She was taken aback. “Well, because—because if I find it, and know what’s there, at the Heart—” she frowned, looking for words like a man in darkness who knows beyond doubting that he put the candles somewhere, but not just where. She had also always had trouble with the more esoteric uses of the ablative absolute. “-then I’ll know what’s most important, and why—why I should do things. And how.” She nodded several times, pleased with this, and then added, “And what things. It will be a learning experience, as well as an adventure! And if you say it’s all right, part of my education, then Mummy and Daddy won’t object. Much. And anyway, I’m not going to that finishing school!”

  The Wizard tried to hide his trembling by pretending to rub goosebumps on his arms. Something in the shadowy corner of the tower room, something the shape of mist under a pewter sky, keened softly. Kirila didn’t notice.

  “You’ll do it, won’t you Wizard?” She straightened up and looked at him with hopeful, unabashed pleading.

  “Where would you look for it, my Lady?”

  She paced to the one small window. Far below, smug fields lay in tidy patchwork on both sides of a portly river. The banks of the river were crowded with columbines and heart’s-ease and yellow buttercups and shamelessly scarlet roses, the blowsy kind with no thorns. Kirila pointed upriver. “To the north, away from the sea. Where the river comes from when it’s still hungry.”

  The Wizard stopped rubbing his arms and went back to pulling his beard. “Very wise. The Heart of the World probably doesn’t lie among beach cottages and surf resorts. Probably.”

  “Then I can go!” she cried, her young face suddenly so alive that the Wizard turned away, as a man will turn from the stripped heart under the surgeon’s knife. The Wizard had known the princess since her childhood.

  “You may go, if you can,” he said gently, but Kirila didn’t hear the second part, any more than she heard the wail of the mist-creature in the corner. But the Wizard heard, and his already pale cheeks turned the color of parchment ashes.

  “I’ll take my grandfather’s sword,” she cried, and tugged it down from its oiled-leather straps on the stone wall. It was a beautiful sword, a wide-bladed falchion with an intricately worked pommel the shape of a Brazil nut.

  “It’s too heavy for you,” the Wizard said automatically.

  “Pooh, I can manage it,” Kirila huffed, awkwardly wielding the weapon with both hands. But however modern her p
arents had been in matters of liberal education and hunting in a divided skirt and non-sexist children’s literature, she had never been taught sword-play, and in the end she had to leave it home.

  She whirled from the room, kissing the Wizard on his ashen nose, and clattered down the steps to see about maps and new riding boots. The Wizard didn’t look after her; he sat for a long time staring into the empty fireplace, his old fingers knotting and unknotting his beard. In the corner, the mist-creature made a noise like branches scraping on a cracked windowpane.

  •••

  Kirila started her Quest on a blue and gold morning when the summer air shimmered and swooned and preened itself. The whole castle turned out to see her off. There were her parents, with identical tear-stained faces like salty marshmallows; her old nanny, who kept remembering things the princess ought to take, crying, “Naw, wait a minute, me Lady,” and dashing back into the Castle after them; two or three sullen youths who had fancied writing “Royal Consort” after their names; her second cousin, who was a decent chap and tried hard to repress his knowledge of the line of succession governing lost heirs; the ladies-in-waiting, incredulous and tittering; and several small boys who waved flags and dared each other to touch the horse’s knees. The Wizard watched from his tower, blinking, although he wasn’t facing into the sun.

  Kirila rode alone. She had staved off all pleas to take a chaperone, body guard, squire, lady-in-waiting, or laundress, relenting only when the Wizard brought her a charmed bat as she kept her vigil in the Courtyard the night before the Quest.

  “It will only stay with you until you reach the borders of this kingdom,” he told her solemnly. “Bats have a strong sense of local color. But I’ve put a spell on it, and it will talk with you if you get lonely and want a bit of company.” He saw her begin to frown and added hastily, “Not that it’ll say anything unless you talk first. And never any advice!” He looked at her anxiously; his beard looked like dingy macrame. She took the bat.

  It hung now underneath the horse, upside-down, clinging to the saddle girth. Kirila kissed everyone, waved gaily, urged the horse into a trot, rode back to accept a dozen handkerchiefs from the nanny—they were still warm from the clothesline and hadn’t been ironed—and started off again, cantering down the river road with the breeze at her back. The scent of wild flowers rose all around her, and sunlight skipped off the river and ricocheted over the tame hills. She wore a bottle-green velvet doublet and divided hunting skirt, and green velvet ribbons tied a spray of columbine to the horse’s bridle. A new bow and quiver of green-tipped arrows were laced at her back, a little jewelled dagger was stuck jauntily in her belt, and her red hair whipped around her face. There were circles under her eyes from the all-night vigil—usually she went to bed at 10:30—but she had never felt more awake, more alive, more complete than when she glanced back over her shoulder and saw the gray spires of Castle Kiril sinking below the sharp line where the buttercups met the brilliant turquoise sky.

  Two

  The clear weather lasted. Kirila wondered if the Wizard had anything to do with that, and, if so, when he would stop. She wasn’t really on her own, she felt, while he could still reach her with apple-blossom days and starry nights orchestrated with the chant of crickets. Stubbornly, she refused to be grateful, and held her own by camping out every night instead of using the kingdom’s comfortable Inns.

  “It isn’t as if I couldn’t ride in rain,” she told her horse fiercely. She talked to the horse often, from sheer exuberance as yet untinged with need. “I like rain; I’ve always liked rain. I like to walk in it, especially.” After a moment she added, naively, “It’s poetic.” The horse tossed his head—a fly had settled on his nose—and continued to trot down the smooth dry road.

  “It reminds me of when I was a little girl, and the Wizard would make sure it never rained on my birthday.” She smiled at this, and then fell into a reverie, remembering various birthdays. It seemed to her that there had been a great many of them, very long ago.

  The bat never spoke at all, and she never addressed it. Each evening, right after Kirila made camp, it abruptly hurtled itself off into the dark, spooking the horse, and wasn’t seen again until morning. Secretly she was a little glad; although not squeamish, she was uneasy about the bat, and tried not to think about it clinging underneath her horse as she rode, its wings folded over its little red eyes. It always flew back before dawn, belly bulging, with a sly, sleepy look on its ferret face. Once she saw very small, pale blue feathers stuck in the blood around its mouth, and quickly she looked away.

  The second week, dull-colored clouds began to gather tiredly over the sky. The wind veered sharply and blew from the north, smelling rank and damp. The road left behind the farms and fiefs and ran through rocky ravines and past patches of dark forest where the trees intertwined in desperate half-Nelsons.

  “This is more like it,” Kirila told the horse, with satisfaction.

  She was making camp in a clearing with the woods ahead of her and an outcropping of gray boulders at her back when the bat suddenly spoke, startling her so much that she dropped the frying pan into the fire.

  “Going to rain,” the bat remarked from his upside-down perch. He had unfolded his wings.

  “Ow! Look what you made me do!” She tried to retrieve the frying pan, burned two fingers, uttered an oath the Wizard didn’t know she knew, and fished the frying pan out with a stick, which caught fire twice.

  “I thought you weren’t supposed to speak unless spoken to!”

  “Victorian notion,” the bat said disdainfully. “And anyway, it only applied to children.” He ruffled his full-grown membrane wings. The end bone, the thumb, was clawed, and naked of membranes.

  “Well, stop that fluttering—you’re spooking the horse,” Kirila said, a good deal more bravely than she felt.

  The bat ruffled its wings once more, then closed them slowly. She tried not to look at it as she fried her dinner, two fish caught earlier that afternoon. The wind was stronger now, and tasted vaguely of rotting marshes. The smoky fire, only half shielded by the boulders, quavered fitfully in the oily darkness.

  “Suicide rate rises when the weather’s stormy,” the bat said conversationally. “Fact.” It had a sibilant, hissing voice: Sssuissside.

  “Can’t you say anything pleasant?” Kirila snapped. She felt obscurely close to tears, which was odd because she seldom cried. Chewing her bread, she leaned her head back against the gray stone. It was the same granite as the walls of her bed chamber at home.

  The bat smiled, a stretching of taut fleshless skin around teeth like the spikes of an infant-sized Iron Maiden. The horse whimpered and danced sideways. With lordly leisure the bat drifted from its underside to a branch jittering in the wind a few feet above Kirila’s head. In the blackness beyond the firelight something rustled softly.

  “Pleasssantnesss isss a point of view. All a matter of cultural moresss,” the bat said. “One man’sss meat, and ssso on.”The fish were done on one side, and she turned them with the point of her dagger, trying to ignore the bat. The dagger was new, with hilt and crossguard studded with small multi-colored jewels outlined with a latticework of inlaid gold, now dull in the smoky firelight. Something brushed her hair as she leaned over the fish and she sat down abruptly and started to eat them half-raw. A twig snapped in the darkness and there was the sound of scuttling furry feet and a tinny squeak.

  “For inssstancce,” the bat continued, “it isss possible to regard Hitler asss a man of integrity in the sssenssse of being true to hisss own belieffess, who will be guilty only of failure.”

  “Who’s Hitler?” Kirila asked, in spite of herself.

  The bat made a sound like teeth rattling in a skull: it might have been ‘Tsk, tsk.’ “And you call yourssself educated, with only one tenssse of referenccce! But, then, why should you harbor any ssspecccious sssemblancccesss—” it took him a good twenty seconds to get the phrase out “—of knowledge when you are ssso pretty?”

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sp; “I don’t think—” Kirila began angrily, but the bat continued, its voice caressing.

  “Ssso pretty, and ssso sssoft, ssso very sssoft—”

  As the bat swooped, Kirila screamed and grabbed for the fishy dagger. Before she reached it something hurled out of the darkness, snatched the bat in mid-swoop, and crashed with it into the blackness beyond the other side of the clearing. The murky gloom above the tall grass thrashed and writhed like Chaos during Creation. Then something huge and black trotted into the clearing with the bat in its mouth and threw it into the fire. The bat’s spine was broken. It fell grotesquely, unable to struggle, but its red eyes glowed insanely and it screamed a single agonized shriek so piercing that Kirila dropped her dagger and clapped her hands over her ears. Immediately she snatched the dagger up again and whirled around, pointing the trembling tip at a large dog, who grinned at her amiably,

  “Put that thing away, honey,” the dog said, still grinning. “You’re safe enough now.”

  “Who are you?” she squeaked. “Identify yourself!”

  The dog swept out one foreleg and bowed its head, raising his eyes up to her. They twinkled mockingly. “Your noble protector, honey!”

  Kirila drew herself up. “I am of the blood royal, Dog. You may address me as Her Royal Highness Princess Kirila, Crown Princess of Kiril.” Her voice still squeaked a little and she felt like a perfect fool. Talking bats and mocking dogs; it was just too much.

  “You’re entitled,” the dog said laconically, and she had the grace to blush.

  “Thank you most kindly for saving my life.” All at once her knees turned to water and ran downhill and she sat down hard, turning to the fire with horrified eyes. The bat had disappeared.

  “A bad one, that,” the dog said, watching her.

  “But he was a gift from my childhood Wizard,” Kirila stammered. “To start me on my Quest. A lucky charm!” Her lower lip quivered.