The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  “You might find people to talk to,” Chessie said slyly. She pretended not to hear him.

  As they continued north, the plateau began to gradually slope downward, and, over the next week, traveling became easier. The soil grew richer and less rocky, and the summer wildflowers changed from stubbly orange hawksweed to the lusher day lillies and bouncing bet. Kirila picked great handfuls of the latter, to use the leaves as soap. Trees began to reappear, first singly, and then in thickets. The thickets grew to copses, the copses swelled to groves, the groves became acceptable woodlots. Finally the woodlots flowed smoothly together and Kirila rode through a forest, a forest with frequent airy clearings and enough room between the wide-spreading trees for sunlight to filter down and cast dappled shadows. The ground was covered with moss and summer-dried dead leaves and thick patches of fallen pine needles, which gave off a clean pungent smell that made Kirila’s nostrils tingle and flare. Birds chattered all day long and exploded from the trees as she rode by, in flashes of feathered color. Chessie grinned at low pairs of shiny eyes that watched them from fallen logs and briar patches, and the eyes blinked solemnly back at him before they disappeared in a scuttle of fur. The forest was not enchanted, but it was as perfect as a forest might be without that extra foreign aid.

  Kirila sang lustily as she rode, her voice changing key erratically if it had to leap more than two notes.

  “O, Will ye forget me, gentle knight,

  When a-questing ye shall be?

  When the heralds sound and the banners wave

  Will you know your fair la-dy?”

  “He forgot her,” Chessie said.

  “Maybe not,” Kirila said seriously. “He may have been true. Listen to this part, it gets better.”

  “Does your pitch?”

  “I’ll wear your sleeve, my lady fair,

  Your sleeve of em’rald hue,

  And all the sands of life shall run

  ‘Ere I for—”

  Abruptly she reined her horse in hard, astonishment wiping her face clear of all but a most unroyal gape-mouthed stare. The little man in the sun-filled clearing ahead of her stared back, equally astonished.

  He was no more than four feet high, and the roundest human being she had ever seen. Thin, short arms and legs and a small head sprouting from his fat spherical torso made him look like an animated melon, or one of those man-drawings that children do at four years old. He wore a cowled robe of flimsy material, long-sleeved and ground-length. It was bright red—sunset red, candy-apple red—and appliqued on the front was a large black D. He blinked at Kirila, roundmouthed in his round head, looking supremely foolish. Then he rushed forward and caught the horse’s bridle. Kirila drew her dagger, but he didn’t seem to notice.

  “What Flavor?” he demanded eagerly.

  Kirila stared at him stupidly.

  “What Flavor?” he repeated, almost climbing up on the

  horse in his urgency. Nervously the beast danced sideways.

  “Up, Down, Strange, Charmed? Who are you, what clan?”

  “I am the Princess Kirila, of the Kingdom of Kiril, which lies to the south, and I am on a true-sworn Quest!”

  “But what Flavor? You’re not Bottom?”

  “Certainly not!” she snapped, blushing furiously.

  “Oh,” the little man said flatly, releasing the bridle and coming down off his toes. “I thought for a moment—it seemed so fortuitous—but I suppose really—but, there, I must have startled you.” He smiled at Kirila, a smile of singular sweetness, and then extended the smile to include Chessie and the horse.

  “I am Ap, of the Flavor Down, of the Quirks. You are welcome to the Quirkian Hold, my Lady. We don’t get too many visitors. For what are you questing?”

  Kirila sheathed her dagger; the little round Quirk hadn’t once glanced at it. “I am on a Quest for the Heart of the World.”

  “Well, then, you’ve come to the right place. The Heart of the World is all explained right down the path there, in the Hold.”

  She was a little disappointed to discover that her Quest was realized already—in the first summer!—but she followed Ap through a thick grove, across a shallow stream, and down a wandering sunlit path. Chessie trotted behind, sniffing the air, bounding after rabbits and otherwise pretending, for reasons of his own, to be a dog.

  The Hold was unimpressive. It seemed to consist of a small square rampart of weathered stakes leaning tiredly against one another. Chinks caused by rotting wood or indented stakes had been inexpertly daubed with mud and wattle, much of which had fallen out again after it dried. Above the rampart could be seen the top of a squat stone tower, no more than two stories high. It had no banners, battlements, nor windows.

  Ap pushed at the gate until it creaked open, and they entered a courtyard with a floor of tamped earth.

  “You can tether your horse there, my Lady, by the trough,” Ap said. “And the dog—I suppose it’s housebroken?”

  The fur on Chessie’s neck began to stand up, and Kirila said hastily, “He’s not—” Instantly Chessie bounded over to her, licking her hand and whimpering, his burnt-sugar eyes throwing her a warning glance. “—not any problem indoors,” she finished. “He comes with me.” She gazed at Chessie, puzzled.

  “Well, then, that’s all right. “

  They entered the stone tower, which was a single bare room, a little damp. In the center of the floor was a large hole, faced with bricks, with a wooden ladder in it.

  “Where does that go?” Kirila asked.

  “To the Hold. Did you think that this was the Hold? Oh, my, no—we live at a lower level of abstraction. Closer to the Truth, you might say. Do you need a hand down, my Lady?”

  “I can manage,” Kirila said, without enthusiasm.

  “And the dog?” Ap asked. He added hopefully, “Perhaps the descent would be too difficult for it. It could stay here.”

  “No, Chessie can manage, too. You go first.”

  They started down the ladder, Chessie with an unexpected four-pawed agility that made Kirila want to laugh, but since she had her dagger in her teeth—it seemed melodramatic, but she needed both hands to grip the ladder—she didn’t dare, in case she should either drop the dagger or amputate her tongue. The ladder ended at the top of a dim stone tunnel that sloped steeply downwards. To stay perpendicular, it was necessary to lean backwards and walk on your heels. The tunnel was only about four and a half feet high, and Kirila, who was a foot taller, also had to crouch a little at the knees and bend her head foreward. She hoped it wasn’t a long tunnel. Walking with the dagger in one hand and the dog’s neck fur in the other, she was just wondering if there was a tactful way, without offending Ap, to ask Chessie if he could kill on command, when she noticed that the pale patch of light illuminating the tunnel was resolving itself into a window cut into the stone. She glanced at it and then let go of Chessie’s fur, leaning out with a cry of delight.

  Ap’s round eyes were twinkling. “You don’t see the edge of the plateau when you come by the forest path. The view is always a surprise to visitors.”

  The tunnel had been cut through solid rock parallel to the face of a sheer cliff, about a foot in from the edge. Over a wide stone ledge the window looked far below at the valley, silver and green. A green river rushed past the base of the cliff and broke into silver spray over lichen-green rocks. On the far bank, green tree tops surged and foamed in the wind like another, wider river, their frothing tops casting sprays of shadows on little ponds silver in the sun.

  Kirila leaned far out—Chessie nervously caught the edge of her tunic in his teeth—and looked straight down. The dizzying, smooth cliff was speckled with narrow windows all the way to the river. Directly below her was a much larger opening, shaped like an arch.

  Chessie tugged at her tunic and she tumbled back into the cramped tunnel, sitting down hard.

  “Your dog is very protective of you,” Ap said.

  “Yes,” Kirila answered, brushing off her sleeves with annoyed lit
tle slaps, “I’ve had him ever since he was a mewling scrap of a puppy and looked like a drowned rat. He was the runt of the litter, you see.”

  “How nice,” Ap said, and Chessie stalked ahead, his ears flat against his head.

  The tunnel opened into a large, bare hall with a soaring stone ceiling. The huge arch left one wall open to the sunlight and the watery baritone soliloquy far below, which echoed off the ceiling and filled the room with the presence of the river. As soon as Ap, Kirila and Chessie emerged from the tunnel, blinking, they were surrounded by Quirks who broke off various tasks to press around them eagerly, all with the same open-mouthed stare, like a ragged row of squat dominoes.

  Each Quirk had the same small round head, the same potbelly, the same thin afterthought arms and legs. All were dressed in the cowled robes, red or green or blue, and upon each was apliqued in black a large D, V, S, or C. They looked like several sets of twins or triplets, which in fact several of them were. Some stood in close little groups, holding hands; a knot of two red V’s and a blue D shyly touched the sleeve of Kirila’s yellow tunic with one exploratory finger. Nowhere in the whole airy hall was there any other yellow.

  “Is she—” a blue C whispered audibly to Ap.

  “She says not,” he whispered back, equally audibly.

  The C stared at her, his round forehead so ridged in painful thought that it looked like a corrugated snowball.

  “Well, she’s obviously not a C. And she doesn’t look like any Up or Down or Strange that I ever saw. It’s my opinion that she doesn’t exist at all.” And he turned his back on her, his fat shoulders very stiff. A murmur ran over the other Quirks.

  “Or the dog, either,” the C added over his shoulder.

  “Of course she exists,” Ap said in exasperation. “She’s here, isn’t she? So she has to be accounted for. Everything can be accounted for by the Model of Forces; it’s simply a matter of working out her genealogy in the Library.”

  Another murmur ran over the Quirks. A blue V, smaller than the rest, said worriedly to Ap, “But suppose—just a supposition, you know, for the sake of argument, say—that she can’t be accounted for by the Model of Forces? That she’s not in the genealogies?” He wiped his forehead with the back of one pudgy hand.

  Ap hesitated only a moment. Then he said firmly, “She exists. If she can’t be accounted for by the Model, then we will have to change the Model.”

  There was no murmur, but a deep, hushed silence. The small V wiped his forehead again and glanced furitively behind him. Far below, the river declaimed and heckled and cheered itself on. A rook wheeled past the cliff, crying shrilly.

  “Let us go to the Library,” Ap pronounced. He took Kirila by the hand and led her toward one of the side tunnels. She hesitated briefly, then caught the look on Ap’s melon face: intent, absorbed, and with an odd dignity. Abruptly she had a picture of her Wizard, bending over his alchemy bench in his austere tower, the late afternoon sun slanting redly over the stone floor, and she felt a sudden sharpness like a sword between her shoulderblades. She let Ap lead her. Chessie followed closely at her heels, and all the Quirks followed him, crowding into the narrow tunnel in a lumpy, variegated congestion.

  The chambers of the Hold were built just behind the face of the cliff, with south windows that opened on the river. Kirila craned her neck at everything, trying to slow down Ap’s purposeful waddle. There was a dining hall with long, wooden benches and trestle table, a kitchen with stone chimney and air ducts that gave out somewhere above ground, a long dim room with thirty straw pallets in precise rows, the bedclothes tucked in neatly with hospital corners. She saw a laundry, a cooper’s shop, a pottery. As they passed through each, more small round Quirks left their candle-making, clothes-wringing, stew-tasting and floor-scrubbing to join the end of the whispering, excited procession. Kirila sheathed her dagger halfway through an untidy storeroom. None of the odd little Quirks were armed, and the Hold was coming to seem to her like some sort of monastery, although she had never seen monks in such bright-colored robes. It was very bad taste to draw arms in a monastery, however mad.

  A long narrow room at the lowest level had horizontal slits cut along the walls with strings fastened to the edges of the slits by wooden pegs driven into the rock. The strings disappeared through the slits down the face of the cliff.

  “What are those?” she asked Ap.

  “Ale, my Lady—our own brew,” he said absently, preoccupied. “We keep it cold in the river.” Chessie looked admiringly at the strings.

  The Library was immense, a mammoth stone cavern with generous casement windows that could be closed against rain or river spray. A few heavy stone tables stood around in no particular pattern, but mostly the room was furnished with parchments. Sacks of them, crates of them, shelves of them, and, in the corners, untidy heaps of them rolled up tightly and tied with frayed and yellowing ribbons. They lay ankle-deep on the floor. The whole enormous chamber was replete with parchments, and the noisy orations of the river, and the smell of living stone warm in the summer sunlight.

  Kirila picked her way over the parchments on the floor, trying not to step on anything. Ap ceremoniously led her to three stout Quirks sorting parchments on a table. They looked up with solemn abstraction. The rest of the Quirks respectfully stayed near the tunnel, jostling each other and whispering “I can’t see!” and “Don’t shove so!”

  Ap bowed. “My Lords, I bring you a visitor, to be accounted for, the Princess Kirila of Kiril. And these, my Lady, are our Project Leaders—the Librarian Baryon.”

  Kirila bowed to the first of the round little men. “My Lord Baryon.”

  “No, no,” Ap whispered, tugging at her sleeve. “‘Baryon’ is the name for the triad. Their personal names are Slee, Kap and Dal.”

  Kirila smiled the appealing smile her nanny had taught her to use in difficult social situations. “Forgive me, my Lords, I am a stranger to your ways.”

  “No bit of the Universe is a stranger to us, my child,” intoned Slee, craning his neck to look up at her. “You are welcome. Do you know your Flavor?”

  “I am not a Quirk, my Lord.”

  “All things are of the Quirkian Model,” pronounced Kap. His voice was a duplicate of Slee’s, the sort of voice that spoke in engraved capitals. “Some are more closely related, some more distantly, but all are tied together by the Four Forces.” Chessie snorted.

  Kirila noticed a plaque on the wall, lettered in amber: “All Life has Ups and Downs, but its Charm is searching out and explaining the Strange.”

  “Are those the Four Forces?” she asked, pointing.

  “No, no—those are the basic Flavors, the clans,” Dal said tolerantly. He placed his pudgy fingertips together in the air in front of his chest and leaned back against the table. “You see, all life is related by those original kinship ties, though most peoples, of course, have long since forgotten that, or never knew it. The Forces are what govern their relationships. Strong ties, Weak ties, Electromagnetic ties—those are mostly sexual, mating and so forth—and Gravity.” He said the last a little disdainfully. “Quirks aren’t much concerned with Gravity. Vastly overrated social phenomenon. Most friendships aren’t affected by it at all, and as for the weightiness of shifting economic –“

  “Was there—isn’t there a fifth clan?” Kirila interrupted, interested. “Ap said something about a—well, a ‘Bottom’ clan?”

  The Librarian Baryon simultaneously whirled around and loomed over the luckless Ap, scowling fiercely.

  “No, there is not,” Kap said in a loud voice. “There are four Flavors of Quirks – four, four. No proof has ever been furnished of a fifth clan, has there, Ap?”

  Ap said miserably, “There are gaps in the genealogy...”

  “Which in due time will be filled in by the ramifications of the present Model. Don’t you agree that’s possible, Ap?”

  Ap looked down at his feet—he could barely see them over the bright red curve of his belly—and said nothing. The Librar
ian Baryon scowled a moment longer, three identical pairs of lowered eyebrows and creased jowls, and then turned to Kirila.

  “Come,” said Slee. “Let us account for you. You’re sure you don’t know your Flavor?”

  “Vanilla,” Chessie breathed, so softly that no one but Kirila heard him, and she pretended not to.

  “My great-grandmother was a Campbell,” she said doubt- fully.

  “Come, now, there’s a beginning! What was your mother’s maiden name?”

  For an hour each of the members of the Librarian Baryon consulted parchments, and drew family trees, and advanced various theories which the other two tore apart. They asked Kirila endless questions: “What did you say was your first cousin’s once-removed on your mother’s side son’s oldest daughter’s name, again?” and “Did your great-aunt have the same type of spinning fits as her mother, and how fast did she spin?” and “What kind of tracks did your father leave in a chamber of the bubbly?” To this last she could only offer, “He was fond of apple brandy, straight up,” and the Librarian Baryon nodded its collective head solemnly. Ap helped by humbly picking up and reshelving the parchments as the researchers dropped them.

  Finally Slee announced, “The research is completed, and the results are conclusive. You are of the Flavor Charm. It was somewhat tricky getting at it, at one point—you have some very long-lived relatives, my Lady, whose genealogies are difficult to account for, such as your Great-Uncle Jay. But you are definitely Charm.” He added, with heavy gallantry, “As anyone can plainly see.”

  Kirila bowed. “Thank you; that’s very interesting to know. But one thing more, if I may. When we met Lord Ap in the forest—or is it Brother Ap? Are you a monastery?”

  All four men threw back their heads and laughed, deep booming laughter that rumbled up from their corpulent bellies and mingled with the sonorous flow of the river.