The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  Several long minutes dragged by. Kirila’s ankles went rubbery and she sat down, putting out her hand to steady herself and to feel the distant, coarse, achingly green blades of green under her palm. One sharp-edged blade cut her finger. Chessie crouched, silent.

  Finally a hissing began to come from the cup, building up to a shrill whistle like an outraged teakettle. The liquid inside grew black and boiled with great bubbles that looked like bursting pustules. The whistling became a splitting screech, and then the cup shattered with a sharp crack. Fragments of pewter flew outward and Kirila flung up her arm to protect her face.

  “Bells,” the Renkin gasped. “Just before it broke—bells. Ten-year-old bells. That’s all I saw, honestly, my Lady, that’s all, it’s very hard to read enchanted pasts anyway and the spell on that one is like a dead-bolt, must have been a Master Wizard, a real professional job...” He backed away toward his hill, making futile little hand gestures at Kirila, jumped inside, leaped back out again to snatch up his second ruby, and sprang again into the hill. A second later the startled sheep jerked into a shambling run, bumping into each other and causing the dark hill—the tapestry had leaped into place without any hammering—to tilt so far to the left that a shower of pebbles and a few dead leaves cascaded off the top. Then the mound righted itself and disappeared around a bend in the road.

  Kirila knelt by Chessie. He didn’t look at her. She waited silently. The liquid, again clear and thick, was humping off into the bushes, hissing weakly.

  “Bells,” Chessie said. His voice was perfectly flat.

  “That’s something, anyway. “

  “A whole life—my whole life—lost somewhere, and all I can get is ten-year-old bells.”

  “It could be from a coat-of-arms,” Kirila hazarded.

  He swung his head around to look at her, his eyes like frozen caramel.

  “It’s possible,” she said desperately. “Or a family motto, or...or maybe in the name of your castle! Like Cloches d’Argent!”

  “Where’s Cloches d’Argent?”

  “Well, actually I know everyone there, it’s next door to Castle Kiril. But you get the idea! It’s a clue, Chessie, a real clue! Next town we come to, we’ll check the local monastery for a copy of Reglyth’s Peerage, and then if there’s a strong lead we can go to that place first, and travel to the Tents of Omnium afterward. We’ll check this out thoroughly; of course we will!”

  Chessie considered, tilting his head to one side so that his ears flopped. Then he crept closer to Kirila and put one paw on her knee. Giving just one uncharacteristic wag of his rounded purple tail, he laid his head in her lap. She scratched his ears softly. They sat like that a long while, while the stars came out and the bewitching warm starwinds of a summer night whispered in the trees and ruffled the sheep-trampled grass.

  Fourteen

  Kirila and Chessie had entered a great forest, larger than anything Kirila had ever imagined. It took them better than a month to travel through it. In Klee, a cobbler who fancied himself a mapmaker had called it “Lanston Wilderness;” a farmer in one of the thatched cottages in which Kirila had played troubadour had referred to it as “Megalith Forest;” a dour old woman cutting logs with a dull stone ax within the forest’s southern edge had called it, simply, “The Woods.” It was not a particularly difficult forest to cross, even on horseback. There were numerous clearings, well-spaced shade trees that prevented the underbrush from getting enough sun to run amuck, obligingly frequent springs and streams, and few chasms or overly-messy bogs. If the region had been more populated, the whole thing would have been cleared out to plant hay without undue trouble, having no real defense except its immense size.

  Except for the old woman, they saw no one. But game was abundant, there were berries and early apples and wild watercress, which Kirila loved, and they passed a pleasant month of shade-cool travel, arguing amiably about which side of the trees selected for navigational purposes actually had more moss and compiling lists of possible family mottoes concerned with bells.

  “How about ‘Blithe as a Bell’?” Kirila asked as they traveled one sunny afternoon. The trees were thinning, and they had decided they might be nearing the end of the unpopulated woods.

  Chessie considered. “Too frivolous. I want something dignified, stately but not stiff.”

  “You could go classical. My Wizard used to quote something—wait a minute, I’I1 remember it—’The Bell Never Rings of Itself.’ That’s Plautus.”

  “My dear child, I know that’s Plautus. But it’s too passive, not assertive and heroic enough. What about something like, ‘To Rynge the Belle of Tyme’?”

  Kirila giggled. “‘To Rynge the Belle to Dine.’ You could have a coat-of-arms with butlers passant on a field of fried ducks.”

  “Church bells, and St. Gallen!”

  “Cow bells, and old Ned!”

  “I`ve got one. ‘Virtue Beareth the Bell.’”

  “Not bad,” Kirila admitted.

  “The only thing is, I always wondered what Virtue was supposed to do with the thing. Surely not ring it—that would be sort of like blowing one’s own horn. Not at all virtuous.”

  “I’ve got it: ‘Bell, Book, and Candle’!”

  “Kirila, I’m being unenchanted, not exorcised!” After a moment he added, “Unenchanted? Disenchanted?” She giggled again, and Chessie began to sing in an exaggerated baritone:

  “Oh, they went and told the sexton,

  And the sexton toll’d the bell!”

  Kirila joined in, skidding around the melody in wild swoops, and then abruptly she broke off and reined in hard.

  “Chessie—look.”

  They had emerged from the trees on the top of a little rise, and in a large clearing below were two armored knights, their mounts cropping the same patch of grass while the knights talked. Then the knights wheeled and trotted in opposite directions, and the one in green armour clumsily dropped his lance. The other knight—his armour was an amazing powder blue, like a fluorescent robin’s egg—rode back and picked up the lance, handed it to the green knight, and clapped him heartily on the back. Mail gauntlet cuff struck steel armor with a clang, and three pheasants flew squawking out of a nearby bush. The knights rode to opposite ends of the clearing, turned, and positioned their lances.

  “Now that’s one thing I really hate to see,” Kirila complained. “It’s just so stupid.”

  “How so?”

  “They’re not really jousting over anything, you can see it’s just two friends playing around, and someone could get hurt!”

  “I suppose they have to practice.”

  “Yes, of course, but you can practice with ring and quoit, or at least with bound lance points. It’s one thing when you have to fight, in self-defense or for a good cause like Overthrowing Evil or something, but they’re obviously just fooling around with their weapons. Sportsmen. Like little boys playing games.”

  “Now there’s a feminine statement.”

  Kirila ignored him, watching the knights disapprovingly. They galloped forward, the horses’ hooves thudding in muffled rhythm on the grass and old leaves, lances rising and falling with the gait. Both lances struck at the same moment. There was a confusion of plunging hoofs and shrill whinnying and clanking armour and another indignant pheasant, and then both knights lay on the ground twenty feet apart, underlined with symmetrical broken lances. The powder blue knight groaned and twitched heavily; the green knight lay still on the dead leaves.

  “Of all the stupid affairs—” Kirila began, spurring her horse down the rise and over to the fallen knight. She jumped off and began tugging at his helmet.

  “And just look at the tiny size of that vent! If he doesn’t kill himself first, he’ll probably suffocate,” she said furiously to Chessie. “That must be this year’s ridiculous fashion, another dumb fad promoted by the armour smiths, teeny-weeny vents that don’t let in any air and are totally impractical and can easily—”

  The green helmet pulled off with a
little popping noise and she stopped dead, holding it slackly in her hands, staring at the knight.

  He was young. Only those fine lines around the outer corners of the eyes that are the gift of a life spent in the sun and rain, wrinkled his tanned face. It was a face whose lean planes seemed to have been worked out mathematically by a topographer who read Catullus. Brown hair, the warm color of polished cherry wood and absurdly fine for a grown man, ruffled in the breeze against the place where temple merged with the top of his jaw, which had managed to somehow stay taut even while unconscious. The knight stirred a little, opened eyes that were the green of stained-glass windows on Easter morning, and smiled at Kirila.

  In the slow flash of time between his smile and her uncertain answering one, she unaccountably became aware that her brown wool tunic had berry juice under the chin and dark stains under each armpit, that her hair was badly combed and needed trimming, that her breasts were rubbing against the inside of her suddenly tight tunic, that the green of the knight’s armour matched his eyes, that she smelled of sweat and horses and it was repulsive, that the sun was very hot, and that he smelled of sweat and horses and it was disturbingly masculine. Wonderingly she realized that she had never seen any of these obvious commonplaces before. The silly chatter of her ladies-in-waiting, which she had always ignored, suddenly seemed...not so silly.

  “And where did you come from?” His voice was boyish and lazy and amused, the words pronounced a little differently than in the southern kingdoms, with a more musical inflection. She stammered another smile, furious to find herself blushing. Chessie watched with narrowed eyes.

  The other knight lumbered over, puffing and clanking. He had pulled off his helmet, and with his fat, red face and protruding eyes, he looked like a fledgling turkey emerging awkwardly from a robin’s egg.

  “You all right, Larek? What a fall! Almost as bad as that one I took at Colthin in the try-outs two years ago, remember? When that Scot, what’s-his-name from the Red Team, was disqualified for fighting. Hey, you sure you’re all right?”

  The green knight sat up, flexing his arms experimentally. The sunlight flashed on his breastplate and cuisses and disappeared into the dark breaks between them where the undertunic rippled. Kirila watched, riveted. Chessie rolled his eyes heavenward.

  “I’m Prince Larek of Talatour,” he said to Kirila, “and this no-good is Lord Wek Rumtyn.”

  “Kirila,” she got out, and then added hastily, “Princess Kirila of Kiril. It’s away to the south.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes.” They sat there smiling at each other, the sun shining down on their uncovered heads, until Chessie said loudly, “I certainly am pleased to meet you.”

  Kirila started. “This is Chessie, my Lord. He’s an enchanted prince.”`

  Instantly Larek stuck out his hand. “How ya doing, fella? Hey, I’m sorry to hear about your enchantment.”

  Chessie looked stonily at some point past the hand. “Oh, don’t give it another thought.”

  “If you’re not doing anything this afternoon,” Larek continued, “my mother would love to have you come by the Castle for dinner. We don’t get too many travelers from the south, what with the forest and all, and she’d love to talk to you.”

  Chessie and Wek spoke simultaneously. The Labrador said brusquely, “We’re in a hurry; sorry,” and the blue knight protested, “Hey, Larek, I thought we were going to meet the Team and toss around a few lances.”

  “Don’t let me interrupt you,” Kirila said. “I know how important practice is.”

  “Not at all,” Larek said smoothly. “I’d like you to come.”

  They smiled at each other again, and Kirila, with a smooth swift motion completely incongruous with the fact that she had never done it before in her life, dropped her lashes and looked up at him through them. Larek’s green eyes flickered, Wek drew circles in the leaves with one sulky toe, and Chessie blinked at Kirila, his long purple face full of outraged amazement.

  Castle Talatour was not far. Kirila and Larek—Wek had gone on to the team practice—rode slowly, now through open meadows, now through forest where the afternoon sunlight sifted down through layers of leaves and dappled the flanks of Kirila’s mare and Larek’s black charger. Promise of autumn hung in the air: nothing definite, just the slightest gold edging on the tree-of-heaven, always avant garde, and the first budding appearance of the tough-stemmed autumn wildflowers. As they rode, Larek talked and Kirila murmured. He told her about his last tournament at Lepping, and his first tournament at Colthin, and a few of the more interesting ones in between. He analyzed the defects of his own style and of Wek’s, and tried to account for the exact meshing of the two that had led to the afternoon’s fall. He commented upon the points and training of his charger, and charitably did not comment upon Kirila’s mare. The sunlight struck green fire from the helmet he carried in one gauntleted hand as he twisted in the saddle to look at her while he talked, holding his horse’s reins with easy control in the other hand. Just before they reached the castle and his mother, while Larek was occupied guiding his horse across a shallow stony stream, Kirila slipped one leg over her saddle and curled it around the pommel, side-saddle fashion.

  The castle was a shock.

  From Larek’s magnificent charger and expensive-looking armor, Kirila had been vaguely expecting something grand. But Castle Talatour was small—the smallest manor house she had ever seen—and looked as though it had been plucked out of a decaying Fiefdom Development Project and dropped into its clearing from a height of forty feet. The stone walls had chinks missing and sagged inward; the drawbridge was short one plank and sagged downward; the appliqued banner on the lone turret was coming unstitched and so managed to flap simultaneously in three different directions in the errant breeze. In the castleyard some washing was hung on lines, with the overflow draped on low bushes, where geese pecked at it at it absently. The moat serpent had abandoned his duty and crawled halfway up the bank to munch on goldenrod.

  Larek was looking at her anxiously. Kirila all at once realized the source of the bravado and boasting of tournaments and jousts and hunts that had filled the ride to the castle, and her own nervousness vanished. She felt touched, and in charge, and even oddly maternal.

  “Look at your moat serpent!” she cried. “I’ve never seen one that color before. Is he very rare?”

  Larek grinned, relieved. “We caught him as a youngling, my old man and I. See, the mother was away from the nest, and we approached from downwind with a Number 3 snare and a double casting rope weighted with—”

  “Yoo hoo!” a voice called. “You’re home early. Is that Wek with you? Does he want to stay for dinner? Oh, excuse me—I didn’t know we had company!”

  Kirila looked at the woman picking her way around the missing plank in the drawbridge, and blinked. She was squat and lumpy, with a face as red and smooth and plump as a prize tomato, and she was wearing a tight black gown doubtful at the seams, a huge white apron with pinafore ruffles at the shoulders and a dishtowel hanging from the pocket, and a crown. The last was made of silver filigree and was fastened on top of her scraped-up bun with wooden hairpins skewed through the filigree open-work.

  “My mother, Queen Tackma,” Larek mumbled. “Mother, this is the Princess Kirila of Kiril.”

  “A princess!” Queen Tackma said, her round black eyes lighting up. “And look how pretty she is. Just look.” A few geese—there was no one else around—looked. “Welcome to Castle Talatour, Sweetheart. Larry doesn’t bring home too many of his girls. You’ll be staying to dinner, of course?” She smiled warmly at Kirila, showing two missing teeth.

  “I’d like to, thank you,” Kirila said. “And this is Chessie.” She twisted around in her saddle to look for him, forgot that she was not astride, and nearly tumbled backward.

  Larek grabbed her before she could fall and lifted her back to her saddle with one strong, armour-clad arm. Their eyes met and held, both a little wide. Queen Tackma watched shrewdly.


  “He was here a moment ago,” Kirila said. “Chessie, I mean. He’s a dog, a Labrador retriever. Only not really, he’s really a prince, enchanted. An old prince. A very old prince.

  “Ah, enchanted,” the Queen said. “Yes, well. They’re all a little crazy, these enchanted. He’ll turn up when he’s ready. Come with me, Sweetheart, I’ll show you where you can wash up for dinner.”

  They were eight at dinner. Kirila, who was seated next to Larek, Queen Tackma, King Otwick, Larek’s nine-year old sister Princess Ludie, two weathered old men who never said a word and who apparently comprised the whole of Talatour’s retinue of resident courtiers, and a serving maid who alternately ate with the royal family and jumped up to make excursions to the kitchen, crying things like, “Heavens, Mum, I left the butter on the hearth, I did!”

  They barely fit into the Great Hall. The table had been pulled into the center of the room, and the back of Kirila’s chair scraped against the stone wall whenever she shifted her weight. Overhead a great ancient beam sagged precariously in the middle; she had to stop herself from glancing up at it apprehensively every few minutes. She looked instead at the opposite wall.

  It was hung with shields and breastplates and lances and greaves, all of excellent quality. There were also several wooden shelves of engraved trophies that smelled of silver polish.

  The food was superb. There were a thick pea soup with little crusty meatballs floating in it, a brace of tender partridges, a dressed roast boar with wild grape sauce, spongy hot bread, four kinds of preserves and jellies, and a gooseberry tart.

  “Everything is so good,” Kirila said. “You must have an outstanding chef.” She could feel Larek reddening, but Queen Tackma said complacently, “Thank you, Sweetheart; I do all my own cooking, and you wouldn’t believe the amount these men eat. Larry puts away just as much as Otwick, and has since he was a little boy just ten years old. But he never puts on a pound, look at him. It’s all that jousting! I hardly get a taste of pastry before it’s gone, we eat like birds, but Larry really enjoys his food, God bless him. Of course he needs it all, with all the exercise he gets winning trophies and making quite a name for himself in the courts all around here—can you cook?”