The Prince of Morning Bells

by Nancy Kress

  “How do I look?” she asked. She had washed off the dirt and dried blood and had dragged a comb through her hair. It stuck together in wet hanks, thicker in some places than others, like a partly-sheered reddish-gray sheep. Of the pile of tunics she had been wearing in the forest, the bottom one was the cleanest and least tattered—although only marginally—and she had put this back on. Stuck in the belt, next to her dagger, was a wild rose, each fresh petal at the height of pink velvet bloom against the stained wool. She watched hopefully.

  The rose, especially, hurt him. He said enthusiastically, “You look beautiful, Kirila!” and immediately regretted it. Her battered face closed like a drawbridge.

  “Let’s go,” she said briefly, and picked up her knapsack. A second later she threw it down again and said fiercely, “Why didn’t you ever greet me with your paws on my shoulders?”

  “What?”

  “Why,” she demanded, “didn’t you ever jump up to put your paws on my shoulders and lick my face, like you did with Granny Isolda when we first came to Coldwater Castle?”

  Chessie was perplexed; his long muzzle wrinkled like a crumpled purple stocking. “Didn’t I?”

  “No, you didn’t! You always haughtily pointed out to me that you weren’t a dog, and then you went and put your paws on Granny Isolda’s shoulders and licked her face!”

  “But I—”

  “And when you saw me at Talatour,” Kirila steamed on, unstoppable as a rockslide, “you just jumped off that stupid wall and talked to me. Talked! After twenty-five years!”

  Chessie’s tail was twitching nervously. “But, Kirila, I wasn’t aware that—”

  “I want to know why!” She stared at him with cold anger and folded her arms, crushing the rose. Chessie felt for his words warily.

  “I guess...because...two reasons, really. Lately, in the last few years, it’s felt more...more comfortable to do dog things. I think especially so in the last few months—the pace is accelerating.” He didn’t say the pace of what. Kirila’s implacable expression remained the same.

  “And also, Granny Isolda was fond of me mostly as a dog. No—not as a dog, exactly, but as an enchanted dog. It’s a difficult sort of thing to explain, and I’m not as good at explaining as I used to be.” He sighed, and muddled on. “You and I, however—we were always like two people together. Two human beings. I talked to you the way I did—the way I do—because I can talk to you. We were two pilgrims who wanted the same thing, to travel to the Tents of Omnium—at least you always said you did!” On the last words Chessie’s voice rose with injured accusation; he didn’t see why he was being persecuted.

  Hut Kirila”s anger had fled, and she was beaming at him with swollen radiance in her ruined face.

  “Really, Chessie? That was it? You thought of Granny Isolda as a dog would?”

  “Yes,” he said, more confused than before.

  “Really?”

  “Yes!”

  Kirila laughed, fell silent, and then laughed again, this time ruefully. She nodded to herself three or four times, reached over to pat Chessie on the head, and started limping toward the distant rampart. Looking back over her shoulder to where Chessie sat, totally mystified, she called gaily, “Well, come on! Aren’t you eager to get inside?”

  He hurried to catch up, hobbling on his sore paws, darting at her little sideways glances of bewildered confusion.

  The rampart around the Tents of Omnium was perfectly circular, twenty feet high and made of upright tree trunks. The quirky bends, hollows, and branch stumps of each fitted exactly into the quirky bends, hollows, and branch stumps of its neigh- bors. The wood managed simultaneously to look datelessly ancient and not at all rotted. At the top, the rampart was perfectly level, except for minute red dots—Kirila could only see them up there if she squinted horribly—which turned out to be nesting wigyns. Swarms of the tiny red dragons were constantly landing and taking off in precise E, V, H, or A formations—the precise type depended on the sex and moulting of the leader—like freckled sky writing. When the wigyns landed in the grass to feed on a patch of clover, from a distance it was easy to mistake them for strawberries.

  Chessie watched the harmless tiny dragons admiringly. “They’re kind of pretty, aren’t they? Vivid. Although not good to eat.”

  “Chessie! You didn’t...”

  “No, of course not,” he said, offended. “But I have it on good authority, from that buzzard I told you about. Look at the wings on that one, Kirila—like a rainbow. Did you ever actually see a wigyn before?”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice suddenly muffled. “I did. Once.”

  As they approached the rampart, Kirila could see that its base was circled by a farm. This was not laid out in the usual manner of farms, with a much-trafficked farmyard, cowshed to the left, kitchen garden behind the cottage, and so forth. Instead each small field or farm buildling huddled close to the ancient rampart, as if for nurture. Kirila and Chessie, limping around the rampart toward the gate, passed an elongated field of wheat, a dovecote, a vegetable plot, and a tiny apple orchard droning with bees.

  “They must have to do a lot of running around just to get any work done,” Kirila said.

  “I told you they were stupid,” Chessie said. He was tense and impatient, hobbling along with little jerks.

  They passed a cowshed, a well—Kirila had a drink, and the water was cold and sweet—a field of hay, and a granary. The granary was fronted by a little bench on which some clay pots were drying in the sun.

  “Where is the gate?” Kirila asked.

  “Around to the north. Come on!”

  A stone cottage began to emerge from around the edge of the rampart’s long curve. Approaching it, Kirila began to tingle at the top of her head with a stretched, nervy excitement, as the point of a ship’s mast will glow with St. Elmo’s fire just before a thunder storm. The pupils of her eyes grew wider and the skin just above her eyebrows puckered tautly between the swollen scratches. She wiped her forehead with her palm, trading perspiration from each one to the other.

  Abruptly the door of the cottage flew open and four peasants sprang out at them, three with upraised clubs and one with a pitchfork balanced awkwardly in a back-handed grip. Kirila drew her dagger. The peasants stopped a few yards from her and stood their ground, scowling silently. There was an old man, a half-grown boy, and two women, one holding the pitchfork. They were completely motionless, like a frieze of peasants mobbing a castle, and then the boy furitively slipped his club from his right hand to his left and scratched his ear.

  “I am Kirila, Dowager Queen of Talatour and Crown Princess of Kiril,” she said formally, “and this is Chessie, Enchanted Prince. I am on a true Quest to find the Heart of the World. Be this the gate to the Tents of Omnium?”

  “Well, why didn’t you say so,” the old man said, lowering his club but not his scowl. “Sneaking up on a body like that!” He walked slowly all the way around Kirila and Chessie, scrutinizing them shrewdly. She stood her ground, not turning even when he was behind her—although Chessie did—and the nervy tingle jumped in small darting leaps from her head along the rest of her, so that her boots became solid cases for her fidgeting toes.

  “Don’t look like a queen,” the old man said skeptically, eyeing her torn wool rags, her ragged hair and battered face. His own was lined with plump pink creases, like the crease around a baby’s wrist.

  “Nonetheless, I am.”

  “What is the fifth primary point of royal succession, under Salic Law?” he shot at her.

  “The deceased king’s oldest brother’s son.”

  “And the twelfth?”

  She had to stop and think. “The deceased king’s oldest paternal...let’s see...oldest paternal great-uncle’s...son. No—grandson. Oh, for heaven’s sake—I am a queen!”

  The old peasant rocked back on his heels and closed his eyes. “Maybe so, maybe not. Don’t matter. You can’t come in.”

  “Why not?” Kirila cried.

  �
�Nobody goes in, hasn’t got the Quality.” He opened his old dusty eyes and jerked his head at Chessie. “He don’t got it. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you, after all the hanging around you did hereabouts last year, you and that buzzard? Turquoise is a memorable color for a buzzard, ‘bout as outlandish as purple for a dog. No—somebody in the party got to have the Quality. That’s the rule.”

  “Whose rule?” Kirila asked.

  “We don’t say.”

  “What Quality?”

  “We don’t say.”

  “But why is it necessary?”

  “We don’t say.”

  “You’re not being very helpful!”

  “Look, lady, I don’t make the rules—I just work here.”

  Kirila glared at the man, who leaned on his club and grinned back like a sour, aged imp.

  “Well,” she said, “how do you know I haven’t got this Quality, whatever it is?”

  The grin vanished. “You saying you want the test?”

  “Yes, of course, if there’s supposed to be a test—of course I want it!”

  “Lot of trouble,” he grumbled. “And all for nothing—hardly nobody has the Quality, and the Test takes at least an hour, and it’s getting on to supper time, and anyway,” he whined suddenly, putting his hand on his hip, “my arthritis be acting up. Come back next week.”

  Kirila’s eyes flashed fire at the word “arthritis,” and she hissed between her teeth, “Now. I—want—the—test—now.” Even Chessie backed a little away from her.

  “Oh, all right,” he said, “but you won’t have the Quality. All be for nothing, wait and see. And what this job pays, too!” He muttered on, talking to no one, complaining about the hours, the drought three years ago, the lack of vacation, the isolation, the unfairness of inherited family businesses. Kirila was tempted to ask him why, if he hated the job so much, he didn’t just pack up and leave, but she was afraid he might do so immediately.

  While the old man grumbled, the other three peasants strolled silently into the cottage, emerging with heavy leather sacks which made them walk lopsided, first to the right and then to the left, as they switched hands. The sacks were dragged over to the old man and upended and hundreds of white rocks, all perfectly spherical, rolled out onto the grass. The old peasant, still complaining, knelt down—Kirila watched him carefully for signs of arthritis, and found none—and began to arrange the stones in straight lines. Although the sun was not at zenith, the stones cast no shadows. They looked ancient, the mellow, amber color of well-preserved ancestral lace.

  Eventually the lines began to form a long diamond pattern. The old man sat Kirila at one of the long points and the two women at the shorter ones, fussing if they touched a stone. The peasant women sat impassively, their hands still in their laps. After placing one large white rock in the center, moving it two or three times, kneeling down to sight along it at eye level, and smoothing the grass all around it like a golfer with a crucial putt, the old man seated himself cross-legged at the last point of the diamond.

  “Close your eyes,” he said irritably. With a last doubtful glance at Chessie, crouching tensely outside the diamond, Kirila closed her eyes.

  “And keep them closed!” the peasant howled.

  There was an odd sensation in her head, like being tickled inside with a wet feather. Along with the soggy touch on her mind came the taste of ripe lemons. She set her puckered lips tightly and kept her eyes closed.

  “All right,” the old man said. “Open now.” He hoisted himself up and made her a grudging, clumsy bow. “Enter into the Heart of the World.”

  “Is that it? That’s all?”

  “That’s it.”

  “I passed?”

  “You passed.” Reluctantly he added, “Your Highness.”

  Kirila scrambled to her feet and twined her fingers firmly in the thick fur at Chessie’s neck. The boy ran ahead and opened the cottage door, bowing more nimbly than the old manbut with no more grace. They all walked through the cottage’s dark single lower room, where a round-eyed infant regarded them solemnly from a high wooden chair, and the smell of a roasting joint teased Kirila’s fluttery stomach. On the windowsill were bright red geraniums in clay pots. Kirila felt a keyed-up giggle rise in the back of her throat; she had certainly never, in any fantasy, envisioned approaching the Heart of the World through somebody’s kitchen. Under her hand Chessie stalked like a murderous panther, his burnt-sugar eyes never still.

  At the far end of the room, set into the rampart itself, was a small door shaped like a diamond. Silently the old man fumbled at his belt and produced a bent iron key; with this he unlocked a chest so ancient that the wood might have petrified since its carving, and from it drew another key.

  “Aaaahhh,” sighed the two peasant women. One had picked up the infant, and it gazed from her arms with serious round eyes.

  The second key was large and should have looked massive, but it rode lightly on the old man’s palm, as lightly as a high wind and with the same clean lines, shining in the dark kitchen like a hammered gale. Against that powerful straight shining, the peasant’s hand looked like a dead claw. He held the key a long moment, then thrust it roughly at the boy.

  “Here—might as well start you sometime, boy. I’m going upstairs and lay down before dinner. Don’t nobody dare call me until that joint’s been carved and on my plate.” He tried to scowl ferociously, succeeded only in looking like a mangy deposed lion, and stumped away upstairs, chewing on the end of his beard.

  The boy held the key reverently, his dark eyes taking on some of its pure shining, and then turned it in the lock. He bowed again, with childish pomp.

  “Begging your pardon, miss—you can go in now, miss. I’ll wait for you here.” He tried to pull proudly at his forelock, but since his long hair was parted in the middle this proved impossible, and he settled for yet another graceless bow.

  Panic swept over Kirila like fire before wind, an unreasoning shaky panic that gave her limbs the light, dry tremors of fever. The muscles in Chessie’s neck were contracting in short rhythmic spasms. Behind them the door closed softly, and ahead, on a grassy plain, stood the Tents of Omnium.

  Eight

  There were three tents. They leaned crazily against each other on sagging poles, their canvas the faded, streaky gray of sin-soiled laundry beyond the redemption of bleach. Three canvas door flaps stirred tiredly in a fitful wind that also sent debris—old papers and rags and dried weeds—swirling about Kirila’s ankles as they carried her numbly forward. On the top of one tent was a torn, faded pennant, as some weeds are topped in autumn by a spindly growth of seeds. The wind smelled of old dust and mildewed canvas.

  “What a dump,” Chessie said in disgust. Once he had actually passed through the gate, the muscles in his neck had unknotted, and he picked his way through the debris with fastidious, unsure arrogance. “Still, I don’t suppose it matters if they...he...it...can get the Heart-of-the-World jobs done all right. But it’s certainly not what I expected.” Kirila said nothing. Her face was silent, like a fallen city after siege.

  Crossing the clearing, they entered the first tent. It was empty. The wind blew the sagging canvas first outward, then after a long suspended moment, sharply inward with a harsh flapping sound, like the breathing of a drowning man. There was no floor but the grass, which had long since withered and died in the sunless gloom and lay in a frowsy dead carpet undisturbed by footprints.

  The second tent was also empty.

  In the center of the third tent was a raised slab of cracked stone, surrounded by crumpled rags, broken tent poles, torn parchments, and a great pile of dirty white candle stubs which had melted together in a glob studded with burned wicks. The flapping door faced north, and the tent was the darkest of all, shadowed and musty and stale.

  “There must be some mistake,” Kirila gasped, running her finger over the crack in the stone stab. “There’s not even anyone here!”

  Chessie said nothing, his purple head thrown bac
k, preparing to howl. Before he began, the door blew inward in a sudden gust of wind, shutting out the light. The air tasted of rusting iron, and in the thick darkness a voice said loudly, “And why not?”

  Kirila shrieked and whirled around. When the door flap blew out again, she saw a pile of crumpled canvas raise itself upward, like a long hooded cloak with no one inside. She shrieked again and clutched at Chessie, grabbing his ears hard.

  “Why shouldn’t this be the Heart of the World?” the canvas repeated. Its voice was surprisingly deep and rich, considering the cloak’s nonoccupancy.

  “Who are you?” she stammered, thinking in an irrelevant flash that it was a lunatic question. Who was no one?

  The canvas laughed, a horrible wet sound like the hiss of bats in a dark cave.

  “That’s hardly the sort of question I expected you to ask,” it said urbanely, “after all the trouble it must have taken you to get here. Don’t you want me to explain the mystery of Creation? The fate of empires? The ways of God justified to Man?”

  Mute with astonishment and with the lurid afterglow of terror, Kirila shook her head.

  “How about explaining what goes on four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three at night?”

  “No,” she said, finding her voice and pouncing on it.

  The cloak sighed. “You should read more. So what do you want me to tell you? Why are you here?”

  Chessie started forward eagerly, but the canvas ignored him, its empty dark hood turned to Kirila.

  “Tell me,” she said slowly, “tell me...why I am here. Why I came at all to the Heart of the World. And tell me what’s—” she glanced around, and drew a shaky breath “—tell me what’s at the Heart of the World.”

  The cloak snorted, collapsing slightly and then expanding again, like a bellows. “Great time to ask why you came. Because of what you are, of course, and what you want. Meaning.” It said “meaning” in the same matter-of-fact voice that a Chinese cook would say “rice.”