The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  “No, my Lady,” Slee said, wiping his eyes. “I can see how you might have gotten that idea, for we live austerely, it is true, and we are not a coeducational institution. But far from dealing with the superstitions of religion, we are concerned only with the documented, provable facts about how the world actually behaves. You may address us by our given names.”

  “I see,” Kirila said, not sure that she did. “Then, Slee, tell me this. When we met Ap in the forest, he said that the Heart of the World is explained here in the Hold. Do you have maps, maps that could lead us to the Tents of Omnium?”

  “I know of no Tents of Omnium,” Slee said. “A camping ground, is it? Some sort of resort? We don’t vacation much, my Lady; our work is too important. Ap was right—the Heart of the World is explained here, the key to its meaning.” He smiled at Ap, who looked relieved, and wary, and pleased, in quick succession, like a landscape under shifting clouds.

  “The key to its meaning,” Kirila repeated thoughtfully. “What is it?”

  “It is, simply, to order.”

  “’To order?’ Order what?” She was thinking confusedly of armies, or courtiers, or possibly ham and eggs.

  “To order the Universe,” Slee explained. “To make sense out of its basic facts, without sentimentality or bias.”

  She considered this, absently drawing her dagger and chewing on the tip, her mind pursuing the unfamiliar idea with the same interest with which she pursued a running deer. Long fingers of light from the late-afternoon sun reached in the window and touched the parchments strewn on the floor. Their smell, ancient and mysterious, hung gravid in the warm air.

  “I would ask you a boon, my Lords,” she said formally, looking at each in turn. “Grant me the privilege of boarding with you a little while, and studying these Forces for myself.”

  “With pleasure, my Lady,” Slee said instantly, and the four Quirks fell into argument about whether she should begin with memorizing the inter-Flavor marriage laws as set out in the Book of Tarn, or by working out some practice genealogies, which Kap offered to draw up in a sort of exercise book, with the answers in the back.

  Kirila sheathed her dagger and said pleadingly in the direction of the air around Chessie, “Just for a short while, my Lords, to learn what I can. Probably less than a month or so, at the most. Then I really will have to travel on.” The Labrador turned his back on her, lifted his purple tail and stared stonily at the wall.

  Five

  Kirila sat on a stone window ledge in the Library, hum-ming tunelessly as she laboriously deciphered a parchment so old that the entire left margin had crumbled over her satin skirt in fine yellow powder. A flask of ale, half empty, sat sweating icy droplets on the ledge beside her.

  Piled at her feet were more musty rolled up manuscripts, which had not yet been read and catalogued in the great Book of Order spread out on the stone table a few feet away.

  Ap was writing in the Book in tiny, curling script that was ruining his eyesight; occasionally he would illuminate a capital letter with abstract designs which he called “bag models” and which made it difficult to read the following paragraph. Chessie lay on the floor by the parchments, cracking quail bones with his long jaws. Below the window the river, lower than usual in the dry summer air, giggled and sang.

  Kirila was happy. She had been at the Hold for nearly four weeks, and had, with much lip-moving repetition, mastered the classifications of the types of Life and of the Forces by which they interact. She learned slowly, but remembered everything she learned. There were unexpected excitement and satisfaction in fitting stray bits of genealogical information into the Model. The blood line she was tracing just now was especially fascinating, since it contained, in the remote past, a mating between an Up and one of the warlike, dreaded Anti-Quirks. She pictured the girl as darkly pretty in a fierce, barbaric way, and imagined for them stormy adventures which made Ap peer at her in near-sighted perplexity when she explained them to him. There was also a kinship line to the historical Prince Lepton, who had defied the Strong Force and gone his own defiant path.

  Sometimes Kirila came across an idea that explained something she had wondered about since childhood, and she felt a little tingle go over her body, starting at her toes and working up. Her Wizard had had very conservative notions of education, focusing mainly on classical rhetorical modes and irregular verbs, and the tingle was a new sensation for her. At such times she would laboriously figure out for herself where the idea fit into the Model of Forces, take a long pull on the river-cold ale, and wonder seriously if Ap could be right about the Heart of the World.

  Carefully laying down the parchment, she made some notes on the paper in her lap. Chessie cracked the last of the quail bones and looked up.

  “I think,” he said loudly, “that it’s time we traveled on.”

  Startled, Kirila glanced at Ap. The Quirk was bent over the Book of Order, unheeding.

  “I thought that you didn’t want anyone here to know that you weren’t a dog,” she whispered.

  “We’ve been here for your month,” Chessie said, even more loudly, “and you’ve learned what you wanted to know. You understand the Four Forces, generally, and the Order. Now it’s time to move out.”

  Kirila looked again at Ap. The stout little man was frowning over his work.

  “After all,” the Labrador shouted, “you said only a month.”

  “Really, my Lady,” Ap said, slamming the Book closed. “Can’t you keep your dog from barking? The Library is not a kennel!”

  Kirila looked from Ap to Chessie, then back at Ap, then again at Chessie. The dog’s burnt-sugar eyes were half-lidded, waiting.

  “And how can you read, either,” Ap added in a reasonable tone, “with that racket going on? Maybe the dog would like to go outside; he knows the way out, doesn’t he? Go on, boy, go chase rabbits, that’s a good dog, go on!”

  Chessie stretched lazily, sauntered over to Ap, and squatted on the floor in front of him. “You know,” he said to the Quirk conversationally, “reductionism is a seriously limited philosophy.”

  “Does he bite?” Ap asked, edging away. “I’m not really afraid of dogs, exactly—wonderful manifestation of Order—but I do become uneasy when they bark at me. Call him, would you, my Lady?”

  “Chessie,” she said automatically, “please come here.”

  “I like it right here, “ Chessie said. “Even a Labrador retriever can find Order an interesting concept, as far as it goes.”

  “Please, my Lady! Why is he barking so? Is he hungry—or mad?” Ap’s round eyes grew even rounder, and he backed slowly toward the tunnel, muttering about needing “a corroborative reference—left it by his bedside—variant readings often so crucial.” He bolted from the Library.

  Chessie strolled back to Kirila. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said quietly. “Didn’t you wonder why they never remarked on my color?”

  “I thought they were just being tactful! Or, maybe, that they weren’t used to seeing purple—there’s no purple anywhere in the Hold, you know, only red and green and blue—and that they mistook it for black. You are very dark!”

  Chessie snorted. “Black, schmack. They just don’t see it at all, any more than they hear me talk. In their world, spells don’t exist, don’t have a place in the Model. Go ahead—ask the Baryon. Or ask Ap, if he recovers from his fear of the mad dog.” He poked at the quail bones, looking for one still uncracked, and didn’t find it. Jumping up on the window ledge, he tipped over Kirila’s flask with one delicate poke of a furry purple paw and began to lap ale.

  “But I will say this for the Quirks,” he remarked between laps, “they make excellent ale.”

  ●●●

  She edged into the topic at dinner. The Librarian Baryon sat opposite her at the long table—it was difficult to separate the three of them; the farther away each walked from the other two, the greater his eagerness to return to them—contentedly chomping great mouthfuls of slightly overdone venison. Ap was working
late in the Library. A little wire gate, the kind used for chicken coops, had been strung across the Library tunnel, “to keep out wildlife.”

  “Slee,” Kirila said casually, “I wanted to ask you a question about this blood line I’m tracing.” The little Quirk looked up eagerly from chasing an errant drop of gravy with a piece of bread. He loved questions.

  “I’ve worked back to Prince Lepton, in the Third Age, and one of the parchments—you know about Prince Lepton?”

  “Certainly,” Slee said, offended.

  “Well, the parchment describes his Court, and it gives one of the ballads written there by his appointed minstrel, Agglutin, for zither and three flutes. One of them starts:

  ‘On the banks of the river

  Where Columbines sleep,

  A spell brooded thickly,

  Something something to keep –’

  Anyway, I began wondering what the research says about spells. Which Force are they a manifestation of? What’s their classification?”

  Slee patted the gravy off his lips with his napkin, put the tips of his fingers together in the favorite gesture of the entire Librarian Baryon, and leaned back majestically. The long bench had no back. He recovered himself by a frantic little scissors kick, his foot catching Chessie, who was sleeping under the table, neatly under the fourth rib. Chessie yelped, scrambled out from under the table, then moved disdainfully away and lay on the cool stone floor, rolling his eyes sarcastically upward before closing them again. Slee righted himself with a series of little waddles and replaced his fingertips in their airy pyramid.

  “That’s a very interesting question, my Lady, and the Quirk who is researching folklore—that would be Gar, he’s away on sabbatical just now—could tell you the origin of these myths better than I. From the physical viewpoint of Order, of course, the question doesn’t arise—the oral tradition from which the superstition originates is so primitive and diffused that one couldn’t expect the originators to have known enough about the Forces to assign one to it, even fancifully.”

  Kirila looked confused, which she did by wrinkling up her forehead and absently chewing on a stray tress of auburn hair. “No, I don’t mean—not what Force the balladeers called it, but which one it is. Which of the four Forces actually controls spells and enchantments?”

  Slee’s round face, as well as those of Kap and Dal, looked blank, three featureless ping-pong balls in a row. Then Slee assumed a look of gentle, embarrassed tact, and said, “But, my Lady, of course there are no spells in reality.”

  “No spells?”

  “Just consider—there is no Force to make them possible. Gravity is concerned only with the formation of Law and Lawful Institutions, which I gather that these alleged spells are never a part of. Electromagnetism is exclusively sexual, drawing opposite partners to the mating behavior—you weren’t by any chance talking about that sort of ‘enchantment,’ were you?”

  “No!”

  “Well, then, that only leaves the Strong Force and the Weak Force, and they only motivate interpersonally over short distances, as, for instance, when a knight whacks an enemy over the head with his sword. So the idea of a ‘spell’ would only work if the speller and the spellee constantly had their heads chained together, or at least were within striking distance of each other. But I believe—correct me if I’m wrong—that popular notions of enchantment portray it working over long distances and time periods. So it just doesn’t fit the Model, you see; it’s contrary to the Laws of Order.”

  Kirila looked at Chessie. He opened his eyes and gave one upward flick of his tail.

  “But Ap said once—I mean, what if you someday found something, some thing or... or condition that didn’t fit the Model? Then you’d have to change it, wouldn’t you, to account for the new thing?”

  Slee frowned. “Yes, but that’s unlikely. The Four Forces and Four Flavors have been documented thoroughly, for years now, by hundreds of different kinds of research, and it’s unlikely we’d see anything at this time to upset their very foundations. Of course if we did,” he added reluctantly, “we’d have to change the basic concepts. We’re after the Truth, you know. “

  “But right here—” she stopped, and looked at Chessie. He rolled over on his side and began to sing:

  “A maid there was, of Tywargest,

  With cheeks of blushing rose;

  And fair she was, sae makeles fair,

  Except for the wart on her nose.”

  “What ails that dog, my Lady—he’s howling so! Do you think he ate something that disagreed with him?”

  “I doubt it,” Kirila said shortly, her jaw stuck out. She glared at Chessie, who rolled to his back, stuck all four feet in the air, and sang on.

  “And a knyght did ride, a questing knyght,

  And all in a flash the lady chose;

  Because he rode up from behind

  And nae could see her nose.”

  He bellowed his way through four more stanzas, one with an a capella refrain, before they put him outside, with a bowl of gruel dosed with medicine for worms.

  Six

  It had been raining for two days, a gentle even rain that politely fell straight down and didn’t require the Library casements to be closed. Occasionally the rain stopped for a while, tried the effect of a rainbow, and pattered on, like a child switching from dress-up to hopscotch. It was pleasant in the Library, cool and gray in the candlelight, the air filled with the sound of the rain and the gossiping river. There was a cozy smell of tallow and wet leaves. Kirila noticed none of it.

  She was spending fourteen hours a day stalking grimly through piles of parchments with faded ink and permanently curled edges. She didn’t notice when Ap or Dal or Slee, smiling approvingly at all this industry, entered the Library, worked for hours and left again. She didn’t even notice Chessie, who had engineered the removal of the chicken-wire by assiduously following Ap around for a week, wagging his tail and licking Ap’s hand and letting his ears droop whenever the Quirk left the room. Ap, credulous, had come over to Kirila’s habitual seat on the window ledge to tell her that dogs were actually quite underrated, and that Labrador retrievers must have a particularly well-balanced genealogy. She had smiled absently and gone back to squinting at one musty manuscript after another. The ends of her hair were chewed ragged.

  She found it in the last manuscript in a particularly ancient pile bound together with the wobbly chains of cobwebs. The pile had been brought up from the vast storeroom just that morning. Two-thirds of the way down the page, in a spidery hand dead for five centuries, was the Church Registry entry: “Lap-Al’yn Wyr, first son of Lap J’yn Gren and the Barbarian Wyr, of the mountains clanne Bottom. Died of the Speckling Disease, Age 3.”

  Kirila took the wet hair out of her mouth and read the entry again. Her first thought was, Poor child, I hope the Speckling Disease wasn’t painful. Then she read it a third time, shifted her cramped thigh muscles on the stone ledge, and looked up. Her eyes took a moment to adjust to the longer focus.

  The Library was filled with the wordless hum of steady purpose, a khaki sound made up of rustling pages and scratching pen nibs and the rhythmic cracking of somebody’s knuckles. Ap was there, and the Librarian Baryon, and two red C’s and a green S. Chessie lay under a stone table, asleep. He had been sleeping a lot lately.

  “Ap,” Kirila said softly, “come here, please.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Ap. There’s something I have to show you.”

  “Uh, huh. Mmm.”

  “Ap!”

  He looked up, annoyed. “What is it? I’m right in the middle of—”

  “Ap. Please.”

  He waddled over, looking at her oddly. In the cool rainy light from the window her face was taut and flushed. Wordlessly she pointed at the Registry entry. He peered at it, straightened, took a battered pair of spectacles out of the sleeve of his red robe, and peered at it again. Then he grew very still.

  When finally he stood up, his face was turned away from
her, toward the Library.

  “Slee!” he shouted, the shout echoing off the stone ceiling. Nobody ever shouted in the Library. The green S jumped and cracked a parchment; Slee blotted the Book of Order, and Chessie woke up, sliding one eyelid slowly upward, like an alligator.

  “Look at that!” Slee said crossly, eyeing the Book. The ink blot spread lazily in the shape of a hunch-backed butterfly. “Now I shall have to do that whole page over! What is the matter with you, Ap?”

  “Slee, come here,” Ap ordered, and Kirila flinched at something metallic in his voice, something she had never heard there before. Slee flushed angrily.

  “What are—“

  “Come here! Look at this!” Ap snatched the manuscript from Kirila, who, unthinking, snatched it back. He glanced at her, and she recoiled; his round face had lost the look of a kindly melon and become a smooth-surfaced boulder rolling relentlessly downhill, heedless of any small winged life in the crushed grass.

  Ap didn’t try to grab the parchment again. He bolted across the room and dragged the unwilling Slee over to the window, yanking on his sleeve. The blue material tore loudly.

  “Look at that!” Ap commanded. His eyes glittered.

  Slee bent over the musty manuscript, and Kirila pointed silently at the Registry entry. Unlike Ap, he didn’t remain still over the spindly writings; almost immediately he straightened and turned to Ap. His face had the mottled paleness found on the underside of poisonous mushrooms. “And what do you think that proves?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” Ap said, and even Chessie gaped at the bladed, vengeful glee in his voice. “There’s proof; there was a fifth Flavor, the Flavor Bottom. The Model doesn’t account for it—so the Model is invalid, as it now stands!”

  “If you think that one lone entry is of any—“

  “Oh, no, Slee—you’re not going to pull that! One negative result is all that’s needed to disprove any research, and—“