The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  ●●●

  On the fourth day they reached the forest.

  It rose abruptly, with no overture of grass or bush, in a solid green cliff. A wall of nettles and thorn bushes, high as a man’s shoulder, wrapped vicious brambles around the trunks of the dense trees, which in turn tangled their limbs and voracious vines around the bushes and each other. There were no spaces anywhere between nettles, bushes, trees, and vines, and the last, which were parasites and had killed off some of their host trees, held the dead ones in the same strangling embrace as the living. A faint wind snarled through the interlocked mass.

  Wonderingly Kirila poked hard at a tough green briar. The whole wall of forest swayed, like a bedspread on a clothesline. She tried to peer inside.

  “Why are the bottom plants still green?” she asked Chessie. “They can’t get much sunlight in there. Why are they still green?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So guess,” Kirila said grimly.

  “I think,” Chessie said unwillingly, “that there may be a spell on the whole forest. It doesn’t like company.” The wind snarled louder, and Kirila shuddered.

  “Well, I don’t like it much, either, so we’re even. Chessie, are you sure we can go through here?”

  “I did it before.” He was watching her closely. “Twice.”

  She took a deep breath and nodded. “Then let’s go.” Her stomach was queasy.

  “Sort out what you really need and strap it on your back, Kirila, but not in a high heap. The only way to get through is to go under, crawling where the vegetation is lighter. A little lighter, anyway. Put on all your tunics and skirts at once, wear your gloves, draw your hood close around your face, and keep your dagger in your hand to cut your way through if you have to. Make sure you can reach your food supply without too much maneuvering, but make sure it’s well covered. I’ll go first, to break the path. And Kirila...”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t believe everything you see,” he said slowly. “There’s a patch in there where I remember—at least I think I remember, I’m not sure—some sort of white flowers, and...and...there, it’s gone again. I had the idea, when I just saw the forest again, that there was something I didn’t tell you. But I can’t quite think what.”

  Kirila looked again at the knitted green mass, spiky with inch-long thorns and choked with grasping vines.

  “I’ll manage, Chessie. Bring on your dragons,” she said, smiling feebly, determinedly, and with terror.

  Crawling flat on her stomach, dragging herself with her elbows and pushing forward with her knees, Kirila penetrated the forest behind Chessie. The knotted roots and tangled vines gave way grudgingly; brambles tore at her face and hands like miniature defending arrows. The holes bored by Chessie’s body closed up so quickly after him, sealing themselves with interlocking thorns, that Kirila had to hack with her dagger just to be able to squeeze after the dog’s flattened body. After a few yards, it became as dark as a moonlit night, and she wriggled and hacked in a green-black gloom moldy with the smells of rotting leaves and pulpy, decaying bark.

  “Are you all right, Kirila?” Chessie called. His disembodied voice was as muffled by the thick vegetation as by several tapestries. “I can’t see you.”

  “I’m here,” she gasped. “Right behind you. I can see your tail. Chessie, I’m so glad that Wizard didn’t make you green!”

  Their progress was agonizingly slow. It took time for Kirila to hack at the knotty bushes, time for Kirila to squeeze on her stomach between roots and under brambles, time to stop and free herself from the myriad thorns that snatched at her clothing and held it fast. A trail of wool threads hung on the nettles behind her, and she shuddered at the sudden thought that all her tunics might be torn off her entirely. The scratches on her face stung sharply from poison in the nettles. At her eyes, vertical red scratches criss-crossed horizontal crow’s-feet like a macabre chessboard, and she tried to keep her eyes half-closed as much as possible.

  “Don’t drink the water!” Chessie called.

  “What water?”

  “Up ahead of you. No matter how thirsty you are.”

  When she reached the water, not even the parched burning in the back of her throat urged her to drink. The silent dark stream, only a few inches deep, was thick with rotting leaves and dead vermin. It smelled horrible, like carrion in the sun. Kirila whimpered, took a deep breath, and crawled through it, following Chessie’s inexorable purple tail.

  The foul hours dragged by, time without meaning in the timeless fanged gloom. Every moment the forest fought them, fought with spike and root and sharp little burrs that worked themselves down under Kirila’s clothing and into the folds of her skin. Her stomach and elbows were scraped raw, and no nettle—not even the one that lodged inside her glove and under her fingernail—was sharper than the pain in her shoulders and in the knotted muscles of her neck. She was crying, sobbing over and over again in a low hopeless drone, and didn’t know it.

  A long naked vine the color of a dead snake writhed through the brambles and twined around her legs. Slashing at it with her dagger, Kirila felt a slippery fear rise in her, the thrashing fear of a fly as the strands of web draw closer. The serene confidence of the plain, which she had considered so hard-won, had oozed away in the face of this dark, aggressive forest. It seemed to her that she could almost see—or See—the forest’s malevolence, surging toward her in cold pale waves.

  “We’ll stop now,” Chessie called wearily. “It’s nearly night. I think.”

  Crawling up to him, she reached out her hand. Nothing could be seen in the blackness, but she smelled sweat and blood, and could feel his fur under the torn nettles. The fur was slimy, like wet mold.

  “Kirila, you have to eat.”

  “I can’t,” she sobbed.

  “You have to,” he said desperately. “We’re over half-way now, and if you don’t eat you won’t have the strength to finish.”

  “No!”

  “Listen, Kirila—listen to me. That buzzard I told you about, the one I met on my last try at the Tents—he told me that once a person has actually been to the Heart of the World, the forest doesn’t try to keep him out anymore! Fact. It just parts like the sea for Moses, or something. We won’t ever have to do this again. So please, Kirila, eat your dinner. Come on, there’s a good princess!”

  She sobbed harder.

  “Kirila,” Chessie said, darting in between sobs, “Kirila, I’m hungry, too. Couldn’t I have something to eat? Please?”

  The tears stopped, and Kirila lay still. After a moment she began to work the food pouch off her back, moving with weary, hopeless jerks. Chessie wolfed the dried meat and stale bread eagerly, but Kirila left half of her portion uneaten, falling asleep on her stomach with the food clutched in her lacerated hand. She slept as if drugged, the dark forest woven around her like a wooden shroud.

  When Chessie woke her, the menacing half-light was back, and it was raining. The rain was evident only by a faint distant pattering and an occasional drop of water that had been rejected by countless leaves and branches above. Kirila’s whole body was scratched, scraped, cold, muddy, and throbbing. The inside of her mouth felt like a stable.

  “Can you crawl, Kirila? It’s really late; the whole morning has gone by. I guess. It’s hard to tell in this damned gloom.” Chessie’s eyes were a sickly yellow, and his nose was covered with dried blood. Dozens of thorns, all sticking inward, rode on his purple coat.

  “I can crawl,” she said, dutifully eating breakfast. It hurt to chew. The forest pressed in on her from all sides.

  “Do you know what’s odd?” Chessie asked with a forced, weary heartiness. “There are no animals in this forest—not even insects. Did you notice that?”

  “If I were even a mosquito,” Kirila said with spirit, “I wouldn’t live here either.” The spirit surprised both of them. As they began the endless dragging and hacking and untangling, Kirila found herself slowly, achingly, becoming furious.


  “What right have you!” she cried in angry gasps, slashing at a wall of nettles. The nettles shuddered in wavering ripples. “I’m going through, no matter what—who—what tries to stop me!” She squeezed on her stomach through a hole in an immense, snaky tangle of tree roots that rose two feet into the air. The hole seemed to squeeze back. Kirila kicked at it viciously when she was finally through, and there was a shower of rotten wood chips, the sickly white of a snake’s underbelly.

  “Uh, Kirila,” Chessie said, “don’t you think you might be, uh, diluting your strength by all that yelling?”

  “Questing to the damn Tents,” she yelled, “as I...swore I would!” Fighting her way through a writhing mass of vines, one caught at her ankle and she severed it savagely, striking even after it had been entirely cut through. Chessie suddenly felt, for no reason he could name, that it wasn’t the vine she was slashing at, but something else entirely.

  “Kirila, for heaven’s sake—don’t get hysterical!” She didn’t answer. Frantically Chessie reviewed all the usual remedies for hysteria—hartshorn, a feather stuck up one nostril, the boiled tail of a yearling dragon, a hard slap across the face. None of them seemed practical at the moment.

  Kirila continued to crawl after him, cursing and slashing with equal fervor, and all at once Chessie had a clear memory. It didn’t crystallize detail by forced detail, but was just suddenly there, solid as a painting. Chessie considered it eagerly, for clear memories were becoming harder and harder for him. There was no trouble remembering the location of rabbit’s nests, or the various smells of various places, or such mental flotsam and jetsam as the date of the Battle of Hastings. But sharp memories of people, the nuances of how they behaved, of a characteristic turn of the head and tone of the voice and certain graceful gesture with one hand—these were becoming increasingly blurred. His mind was becoming simpler, and sometimes he even forgot that this was so.

  The present clear memory was of a much younger Kirila, cursing and fighting gamely as she was swirled down a river, her bright red hair foaming in and out of exploding spray. Chessie grinned hugely. Immediately he regretted it, for pulling his face into the taut grin had shifted the alignment of all the nettles in his muzzle, and they all started to hurt all over again.

  “Go to it, Kirila!” he called feebly, trying not to move his mouth.

  “My Quest, and I’m...damn well...going to finish it!” she puffed, tearing at the clotted masses of brambles and roots and vines. The dark walls of vegetation seemed to draw a little away from her.

  By late afternoon, her fury was spent. One elbow had worn through the layered tunics, and Kirila crawled forward on the scraped raw flesh, leaving a trail of blood. It no longer mattered if her direction were forward or not. She dragged her body mindlessly, hacking with a detached, numb grimness. It seemed to her, without actually thinking about it, that she was no longer following Chessie, or making progress, or carrying out a conscious decision. Her body performed the meaningless, tortuous mime of hacking, crawling, hacking, crawling, because it had always done so, and always would, too weary to wonder or curse or cry. Somewhere her left glove had come off and been lost. Its loss was merely another pointless given. The forest around her began to blur for long seconds at a time, and once she cut herself with her own dagger. When Chessie called to her, she never heard him.

  On a bush ahead were small, white flowers, shaped like stars. Kirila began to slash at them dully. A dank, sloughing wind blew suddenly toward her, and slowly she lowered her dagger the six inches to the ground.

  The bush with the white flowers stood in a little cleared space domed by spiked wilderness. It was a completely round bush, about a foot high, with dense shiny leaves, like a well tended topiary. In the gloom of the forest, it glowed with an odd light. As Kirila watched dully, sprawled on her stomach in the rotting leaves and damp fungus, the bush began to change, to furrow into deep ridges on its melon-round head...

  “Don’t frown so, Ap,” Kirila said aloud. “Of course I’m coming back; I have always intended to come back, one day. Didn’t you realize that I’d need to know how the Model was changed by our discovery of the fifth clan? What happened, Ap—did it affect the Forces, too? I had an idea once, while I was washing dishes, about those Forces, and I knew that eventually I would have to ask at the Hold. But I can’t go now,” she said reasonably. “There’s something else I have to do first. No, I can’t go now!”

  Ap faded, merging into a star-shaped white mist, and Kirila raised one bloody hand in farewell. She left the hand suspended in mid-air as Ap’s round face became Dorima’s round belly, swollen under a wine-velvet gown.

  “Mother, I hate to ask you,” Dorima said, and Kirila saw that the proud Lady Brant was weeping. “But the truth is, I’m a little frightened, and I feel so sick! If you could stay here with me until the baby is born...”

  “Kirila!” called Chessie’s voice, from far away.

  “You’re never frightened, Dorima,” Kirila said.

  “Oh, I know, Mother,” the girl said hastily, “but this is different. I’ve never been so sick before. And Brant is always busy jousting, and sometimes I feel so lonely and trapped...”

  Kirila winced. “I understand, and I’ll help you, Dorima. But first I have to finish my Quest. Then right afterward I’ll come to you, before I travel to Kiril. I have to ask my Wizard about this bat...”

  “But I need you here now!” Dorima pleaded, and began to wheedle and pout and beg. Kirila listened, a desperate weakness growing in her stomach, where the dragging weight of a baby would press, until she noticed that the kohl around Dorima’s eyes was being carried by her tears in long black smudges down her cheeks. But Dorima’s kohl never smudged; she didn’t permit it. And Dorima never begged, and now that Kirila thought of it—now that she was thinking—Sir Brant considered jousting just a bit too plebeian.

  A little of the white mist lifted from Kirila’s brain. “Dorima,” she said. Then, “Ap.” And then, quite clearly, “The Tents of Omnium!”

  Raising her dagger as high as she could while lying on her stomach, she slashed at the bush. It shattered with a sharp clear note, like expensive crystal, and Kirila tried to crawl on over the shards of flowers. She was stopped by Chessie’s face, a few inches to the side of her own, his teeth clenched around a twig which he was trying to poke up her left nostril. The end of the twig had been chewed and broken so that fibers fanned out at various lengths.

  “If it’s shaped like a feather,” he muttered indistinctly around the other end of the twig, “then like a stupid feather it ought—Kirila! You’re back!”

  Kirila shook her head, first from side to side and then up and down, trying either to cry or not to cry—it wasn’t clear which. The grim battle resumed. Hacking mindlessly, every muscle burning, crawling forward a few feet, tearing the nettles from her bruised face, hacking again. Her hood had been torn back, and with every movement strands of reddish-gray hair were yanked from her scalp. She scarcely noticed. Her weary mind was detached from her aching body, blurring into a pewter mist, with the result that in the darkness she dragged herself a few feet beyond the perimeter of the forest, which ended as abruptly as it had begun.

  “Kirila, what are you doing? We’re out! Kirila!”

  Struggling to look upward at Chessie’s looming face, a shapeless dark blob only a little darker than the sky, she saw behind him torn flecks of white. With a shock Kirila realized that they were stars. Under her was grass, short and thick and springy, damp with dew. She stretched out a tattered arm, groping in the darkness; there was nothing there, no brambles or trunks or roots or vines, only darkness, and the battered queen laid her bloody cheek against the sweet-smelling grass and wept.

  Seven

  When Kirila awoke the next morning, the sun was shining warmly, and the dew had already dried off the bright grass. Sitting up groggily, scratched and dirty and sore, she looked around her with an eager trepidation, like a convalescent chancing a walk after a long illness. Her clo
thes fluttered around her in muddy tatters; there were oddly sparse patches in her snarled hair where whole fistfuls had been yanked out; and her face was swollen from the poison nettles into shiny irregular lumps. She looked like a conquered harpy with the eyes of a curious child.

  At her back was the shuttered forest, and ahead stretched a huge clearing centered with a sprawling dark structure, which Kirila took to be the rampart surrounding the Tents of Omnium. She sat on the grass, her legs sticking out straight ahead of her, staring at it bemusedly, until Chessie yawned, stretched, and snapped awake.

  “That’s it, Kirila,” he said reverently and sprang up. He landed on sore legs, yelped, fell down, and again got to his feet, this time with gingerly care. “We did it—we really did it! Let’s go!”

  “Not yet!” she exclaimed, shocked.

  “Why on earth not? Come on—we can eat while we walk.”

  “I want to get cleaned up first “

  “Oh, bother that! Let’s go!” He danced sideways in ragged impatient circles.

  “Chessie,” Kirila said, not moving from where she sat, “I’m not going into the Heart of the World looking like this. I’m just not.” She folded her arms and glared at him from under her rat’s-nest hair.

  “Kirila, are you going to see, or to be seen? Of all the dumb feminine—”

  “Forget it, Chessie. I’m not.”

  “But after all that—”

  “I’m not.”

  “Oh, all right! There’s a pool over there, near that rock. Try not to be all day about it!”

  When she returned, limping, Chessie had also bathed somewhere, and was pacing restlessly up and down, periodically sending drops of water flying off into the air. The night before, Kirila had picked the brambles off his fur and nose, and now he looked reasonably presentable, his purple coat glistening wetly.