by Nancy Kress
“Your...ah...intended?”
“Oh, no—we’re just friends.”
“I see! And what does it take to free him—a kiss from a virgin?” She waggled her finger coyly in the air on “ virgin.”
Chessie was backing warily toward the door. Kirila mouthed at him silently, “Serves you right,” and turned back to Elaine.
“No, not that. He can only be freed by a magic strawberry.”
“Oh,” Elaine said speculatively. “I see. One of those. Unfortunately, strawberries are out of season here just now. Still, a messenger could be sent...handsome, you said?”
“I like your gown,” Kirila said hastily. “It’s so unusual—did you design it yourself?”
“Why, yes, I did,” Elaine said, diverted. She smoothed the silver ribbon, tugging on it until everyone in the room held his breath, but the ribbon held. Elaine began to talk of bliauts and boleros, dagged-edged velvet and quilted satin, jeweled cauls and muslin fontages and the new goblet sleeves, edged in ermine, that looked so well on women with thin arms. Kirila’s eyelids began to droop and then flutter abruptly upwards, like a paper in an errant breeze. Except for her palms circling the warm soup bowl, her hands throbbed and ached, and the lower finger bones stood out as stark and gnarled as mauve coral. Her damp clothes crowded heavily against her damp body, and the back of her neck ached horribly. Outside the rain beat against the window.
“...and of course I don’t like the new hoods on older women, who really look so much more quaint in their native linen caps, but for someone like me...”
Kirila turned to look at Elaine. The sad powder was flaking off the corners of her mouth and falling onto the velvet gown. Dorima had a gown that wine color, Kirila remembered, and as she considered Dorima in her wine velvet gown, Dorima’s sleeping-doe breathing under the tight smooth bodice, Kirila’s forehead grew puzzled.
“...the best of the pearl-embroidered sleeve edgings all have that...”
She glanced at Elaine’s hands, playing in her lap with one end of the overly-glossy black plait. The hands were veined and liver-spotted, and two of the knuckles were puffy. Kirila closed her eyes.
“...hitched up in the back over a sort of violet silk...”
“Goodwife,” Kirila said to the farm woman, “I seem to have traveled faster than I’d planned on, and I’m very tired. Would it be possible to lodge here for the afternoon and night? I’d like to lie down immediately, if I could.”
The farmer’s wife nodded agreeably, the gleam of silver in her eyes, and Chessie padded across the room and gently laid his head against Kirila’s knee.
Four
Chessie had a whole new repertoire of ballads and tales, twenty-five years’ worth, and he performed for her while they traveled and at the campfires they built early each evening and left late the next morning. Dwellings became fewer, and the rocky ground often rose so steeply that Kirila had to lead both horses and travel on foot. Since this brought her closer to Chessie’s eye level and he could sing to her without getting a crick in his neck—he always maintained eye contact when he sang—he pronounced the arrangement to be a vast improvement. Kirila smiled and removed another stone from her boot. As the week slid behind them, she noticed that he never sang ballads that alluded in any way to bells, and that sometime when the weather was bad or the game scarce, he even avoided those concerned with shells, wells, cells, or smells.
“I’ve heard that one before,” she said, after his spirited version of “The Black Knight’s Other Lady.” They were crossing the top of a stony ridge, and below them the land fell downward in terraced eddies of color that glistened in the hard cold autumn air as though preserved in diamonds like insects in amber.
“A jester came to Talatour a few years ago,” Kirila continued, “and that one was among his ballads, although I don’t think he sang it as well as you. He had a dancing bear with him.”
“I always feel sorry for the poor things.”
“So do I. But you know, Chessie, I just thought of something. I’ll bet that the kingdom you were Prince of lay far to the south, farther south than Talatour or Kiril, because that’s where most of the minstrels and jesters travel about, and you seemed to have heard so many to learn all their songs. And, after all, the south is where the great large kingdoms are.” Somehow, Kirila knew that Chessie’s lost kingdom was a great one. “How far south did you search?”
“All the way to where the sea curves back on itself; the folk there call it the Cape of the Lost Temple, and their queen wears a robe covered with fine spider webs always kept wet with glistening dew. No spiders, you understand—just webs. Spiders would be a bit melodramatic.”
“I don’t know where that is,” she said thoughtfully. “The map collection in the library at Kiril was so small.”
“And at Talatour?”
“Talatour didn’t have a library. How much higher do we climb before the pass?”
Chessie studied the sky, inspected the rock formations under his feet, tested the wind by twitching his ears into it, and finally closed his eyes and mumbled figures to himself, his muzzle twisted sideways in thought. “About a week. We have to head east as well as north.”
“It’s getting really cold at night.”
“Good for your blood.”
“My blood is middle-aged, remember?”
“The prime of life. Think how old I am. I was old when I became enchanted, even if I haven’t aged since then. Besides, you don’t look middle-aged now. You look younger than when I first came back to Talatour.”
Kirila said nothing, carefully leading the horses around an eroded gully the shape of a carrot, and Chessie trotted along by her side, his purple tail twitching contentedly under the combination of cold air and warm sunshine. What he had said was true. Kirila had gained weight and it made her coarse skin look less gaunt, gave it back some of the roundness of a young girl. The arthritis in her hands seemed to have checked itself, as premature arthritis will sometimes inexplicably do, and her fingers had less swollen stiffness in the morning and hardly none at all during the rest of the day, unless it rained. Her hair would never be red again, but it had begun to grow. This so astonished her that she was afraid to take any notice of it in case it should change its mind, so the hair hung loose nearly to her shoulders and blew in the clean mountain wind. Toughened by the weeks of walking and riding, her slim body was hard and dancer-supple. Chessie added twenty and twenty-five, and was amazed that it came to so much.
“What is this pass like?” Kirila asked. “How will you know when we reach it?”
“Oh, I’ll know,” Chessie said. She looked at him sideways and he said hastily, “It’s a tunnel, not a true pass, and the shape is distinctly odd—a sort of misshapen oval. You can’t miss it.”
She nodded and they climbed on, the horses following patiently behind. Chessie hummed the chorus from “The Black Knight’s Other Lady,” and after a moment Kirila joined in.
“You still change keys,” Chessie said happily.
“And you still don’t.”
“How would you know?” he asked, and she grinned at him. Below, in valley upon valley, several kingdoms lay shimmering in the cold, diamond light.
●●●
When they reached the tunnel four days later, they had climbed high enough so that it was really cold. At night the pale cold seeped into Kirila’s bones like a desolate dream, and she awoke shivering violently and with inexplicable frozen tears on her frozen eyelids. She and Chessie took to sleeping in shifts, one always awake to stamp about on the hard ground and tend the meager fire. Wood was scarce; at this great height grew only dwarfed, misshapen bushes, all leaning away from the wind, like so many drunken deformed soldiers in a worn army of mercenaries. Far below it was still possible, when the weather was clear, to see green field and flashes of warm sunlight on mill ponds. Kirila didn’t look. Chessie no longer sang ballads. They were tired, tense, and always cold.
The horses cropped the scrubby grass, looked around
for more, didn’t find it, and began to lose weight. Even the plodding mare grew balky and kicked the pack horse in his skinny flanks. Finally both horses refused to move at all.
“Untie them,” Chessie said wearily. “Maybe you can get them to follow if you lead one at a time.”
Involuntarily Kirila glanced down at her bulky leather gloves, scuffed and torn by climbing. She knew what her fingers looked like under them.
It took her ten minutes to untie the horses. Awkwardly anchoring the rope on the pack horse under a rock, she blind-folded the mare with a dirty tablecloth, led her a little way up the mountain, tied the reins to a bare, fragile-looking bush which the mare immediately began to eat, and went back for the pack horse.
“Do you think you could hold this rope in your teeth and lead the other horse?” she puffed at Chessie. “That way I wouldn’t have to cover all this ground twice.” The bruised circles had reappeared under her eyes, and there were rope burns on the palms of her twisted hands.
Chessie looked doubtful. “If the horse bolts, I could lose a tooth. Several teeth.”
“Well, we certainly wouldn’t want that to happen,” Kirila said acidly; she ached clear down to her marrow. “They’re such beautiful white canine incisors.”
He stiffened. “Oh, give me the damn rope. But just remember, Kirila, that you’re dependent on my teeth for game just as much as I am.”
“Not that you’ve caught much in two days.”
“There hasn’t been much to catch!”
They climbed in distant silence for the next hour, Chessie alternately tugging on the horse’s rope and scrambling frantically ahead when the animal finally moved. He had asked to have the lead rope lengthened as much as possible, and he stayed its full span away from the horse’s hoofs. As he worked, he muttered continually, the words mashed and sieved by the mouthful of wet rope to a sticky, unintelligible pulp. Kirila thought it was probably just as well.
The mountains frightened her. Mixed in with the rocky, wind-battered ledges over which she and Chessie traveled were deep, dark ravines—she kicked a stone into one and never heard it hit bottom—erect stone towers like swords upthrust just before the bloody lunge, and sheer blank cliffs of gray rock, as smooth and relentless as a suddenly vertical ocean. It was these that frightened her the most, sending a slow terror creeping through her like ants crawling on her bones as she waited for the impassive gray waves, suspended at their one second of stasis, to curl forward and fall. Far above even these were the snow-capped summits, taking no notice of them at all.
“Chessie,” Kirila rattled through chattering teeth, “Chessie, I’m sorry. I didn’t m-mean that about your t-teeth, and I really d-didn’t know you were afraid of 1-large animals.”
“I am a large animal,” he said coldly. “I weigh 79 pounds, which is very nearly what you weigh.”
“Just the same, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m so c-cold, and I keep thinking, what will happen if I g-get wet?”
After a wary glance at the horse behind him, Chessie moved close to her and rubbed his purple ears against her hip. “You won’t, Kirila. I’ve been watching, keeping track of eaves and clefts and such. If it snows, we can shelter under an overhang of rock.”
She looked up at the gray cliff astride the gray sky, and shuddered. “I suppose so. But...I dreamed about it again, Chessie, the mountain falling over on us, and not only on us—the rocks were spewed all the way to Talatour. I know how silly the dream is, but it was so vivid.”
Chessie was looking at her oddly, like a blind man at a painting which he has been told is beautiful.
“Chessie,” Kirila said slowly. “Don’t you...don’t you ever dream?”
“0h, certainly. I dream about chasing rabbits, and retrieving quail, and the way partridge bones crunch when you get down to the warm marrow. Come to think of it,” he added thoughtfully, “those actually aren’t such bad dreams at all.”
He smiled to himself and licked his jowls, and Kirila walked on, suddenly colder than before.
At mid-afternoon they reached the tunnel, coming upon it after rounding an unexpected wrinkle in the face of the mountain. Below them the rock fell away as cleanly as if the whole mountain had been a single tapped crystal, and only a wide ledge jutted between them and the cotton-wool sky.
“Here it is!” Chessie called joyfully. “See—I told you it was shaped oddly, flattened into those two weird points. But fortunately it’s set cross-wise to the wind, so there’s no problem with wind funneling or anything. And if we...I’ll be damned,” he said slowly. “It’s warm inside the tunnel, really warm. Must be some sort of volcano in here somewhere. Sure, and the heat is seeping upward to warm the tunnel. I never noticed that before, but then when I was here it was summer and everything else was warmer, too. What a piece of luck, Kirila!”
But Kirila wasn’t listening. She stood before the tunnel, the mare’s bridle slack in her gloved hand, her bruised eyes as wide as the sky below them. “Chessie,” she said, each word wrapped in layers of conflicting inflections, like a package gummy with too much criss-crossed tape, “Chessie, don’t you see what that tunnel is shaped like?”
He inspected the opening carefully. “No.”
“Wings,” she whispered.
Chessie looked again at the tunnel, swung his gaze to Kirila’s face, and then back again to the tunnel. “That’s utterly ridiculous!” he exploded. “Ridiculous! Are you trying to tell a that some...bird flew right through the mountain and just parted that rock as smooth and neat as parting hair? Kirila, that tunnel is two miles long! Don’t be absurd!”
“Not just ‘some bird.’”
“No,” Chessie said forcefully, backing away a little from he tunnel mouth. “No, you’re wrong. Those are religious myths in the Chronicles. Oh, the Lielthien were real enough, and they were—are—probably truly great Wizards, maybe even greater than the Dark Wizards themselves. But that was all they were, Kirila, and not even Wizards could do this. The rest is just legend—you know, a grain of truth, and then exaggerations and embellishments all just pile up on top of each other in the retellings. Of course that’s what happened. Like King Arthur. Or the Tooth Fairy.”
She didn’t answer. Suddenly Chessie cried out, cutting himself on every word, “There has to be some limit to their power! If not, what defense do we without magic have against the world!”
Scalded by pity, Kirila looked away. His face was naked as a flayed rabbit. Without having to think about it, she knew Chessie would writhe under her pity, and she groped, as if blind, for something to fill the time until he should have decently clothed himself. Her hand touched the inside of the tunnel; it was warm, as Chessie had said, but the rock seemed to have no cracks. It was smooth and polished, like cabinet wood rubbed faithfully with linseed oil, and the whole tunnel had the clean dry smell of freshly-ironed cotton.
“I think,” she said slowly over her shoulder, “that I know what the rest of the Renkin’s riddle means. ‘Across where the ancient was lost.’ That plain you told me about—that must have been where the first men...where the Lielthien...”
“Perhaps,” Chessie said behind her. The ragged edge had gone from his voice; it was bland and noncommital. “Do you think the horses will object to going through the tunnel?”
“I don’t think they’ll like the closed darkness. I can blindfold the mare again, but I only have one tablecloth. After all, this isn’t supposed to be a royal banquet. Isn’t it odd that horses will willingly walk anywhere, as long as they can’t see it?”
“No,” said Chessie.
A search through the gear turned up nothing suitable for a blindfold, although they did find a misplaced corkscrew. Finally Kirila took off one of her tunics—she had been wearing all her clothes at once, for warmth—and used that. The warmth from the tunnel had already melted the mountain frost crusting in the corners of her cloak, and it plopped at her feet in an irregular drip the color of dishwater.
“Mind you don’t slip,” she told Ches
sie.
“You mind those fool horses don’t slip,” he answered darkly, keeping well to their rear.
Kirila held her breath as she stepped into the wing-shaped tunnel, half-expecting some strange sensation—a ghostly tingling or singing fever—but the tunnel felt mostly like a tunnel. It was high enough in the center for her to stand upright, and this gave her pause when she remembered the size of the tiercel in Polly Stark’s window, but then hadn‘t someone—certainly no one at Talatour, but someone—once said that gods always shrink as civilization grows? As soon as she had laboriously reconstructed the quote, she shoved it away. An inexplicably-sized black tunnel in a mountain was preferable to a melting gray one in...nowhere.
“I think I can see a light at the end,” she called to Chessie over the clop-clop of hoofs on stone. Her words echoed and re-echoed, falling over themselves like drunken rhumba dancers, ramming into each other with each ricochet.
“What?” Chessie called from far down the tunnel. “I can’t understand you!” His echoes mingled with hers, going the other way.
“What did you say?”
“What?”
Kirila gave it up. The light grew stronger and, blinking mole-like, she stepped out of the tunnel.
The plain below her must have been a high plateau, for the descent on this side of the mountain was not nearly as steep. Grayish snow lay over it in an even blankness, like a sheet of cheap parchment dingy with age. The gray-white plain stretched away and merged fuzzily with the gray-white overcast sky, so that the horizon was lost and the plain seemed to be curving back over on itself, upside-down. Kirila felt dizzy.
“It looks a lot better in the spring,” Chessie said, without conviction. “Look—there’s Coldwater Castle, against the mountain there, to your left. That’s where we’ll stay the winter. They’re expecting us.” After a moment he added, “Sometime.”
Coldwater Castle was large and plain, without moat, drawbridge or tower, clinging to the side of the mountain like a grim swollen limpet. Smoke rose from its chimneys, the only sign of life in the whole desolate vastness of the gray white plain.
