Sword and Song

by Kate Story

  She’s good, Ophelia thinks. She’s got that whole rhetoric thing down. People want to please her. Even me, I don’t know what’s going on but I’d do anything she’d tell me to. Her flesh goosebumps, her hair prickles on her scalp. Everything is very sharp and clear.

  “And then we will go to the battlefield.” Nancy’s voice is low, thrumming like a bass note. “Ophelia—” and here, horribly, she looks at Ophelia; the whole coliseum looks at Ophelia “—Ophelia will raise the Dragon with her voice! She will sing, sing new songs from hell! The songs will raise the Dragon, and harness her!”

  What?!

  But the effect on the crowd is electrifying. The place fills with howls, hoots, stomping feet. The Virgo’s hands are shaking the air.

  Is she crazy? Ophelia wonders. If she is, then she’s got the power to make everyone else go crazy with her. It’s like that horrible travesty of a performance before the tsunami: Ophelia is the singing harpy in the frothy pink dress, and she’s supposed to ride a Dragon. . . .

  Pim’s eyes are rolled back in her head, and she drops to a crouch, rocking back and forth on her heels.

  “She will go to the great tower!” The cheers build, cresting. The Virgo looks at Ophelia and directs her voice, more quietly, at her now. “It is the portal into the land of the dead. You will release the dead from their suffering, and harness them for our victory.”

  “Me?” Ophelia squeaks.

  “You have the power. You are our Chosen.”

  “But I didn’t choose . . .”

  “I will guide you,” Nancy says. “As the Mender’s intermediary,” she adds.

  That’s who’s missing. The Mender.

  “Pardon me,” whispers Ophelia, “but are you fucking insane?”

  “Sometimes,” Nancy answers softly, “I wish I was.”

  Pim is shaking her head, her whole body, growling low in her throat. The Virgo looks up and out at the vast crowd. “All hail our Chosen!” she gestures at Ophelia. Another wave of excitement. The warriors bang weapons on shields; the noise deafens.

  “Nancy, please, don’t make me into some kind of figurehead. . . .”

  Nancy puts her arm around Ophelia, pinning her to her side. She’s cresting the wave of sound, soaring over it with her voice. “She will make music for our people and raise the dead for the final battle. She will harness the Dragon, and we will be victorious!”

  “What damn dragon?”

  The din from the crowd feels like it will shake the walls down. Pim’s rocking becomes violent. Ophelia tears away from Nancy and crouches next to her friend, so she is only dimly aware of the stir among the cluster of Virgos, the bleat of a creature that sounds rather like Doctor Capricus. An actual goat, a large black ram with great spiraling horns is led forward. He is struggling; the Virgos expertly drag him to Nancy. Nancy holds out her hand. The goat quiets. She unloops a rope from around her waist and, quick as a thought, she’s lassoed the ram’s feet and drawn the loop closed. The ram kneels, then falls over onto the stone.

  The crowd is humming, they are singing, chanting. That song again. Horses. Horses. Horses. Horses.

  The Virgo has a knife. Ophelia cannot move. The woman is going to kill the goat. Ophelia thinks she hears the woman mutter from under her veil, “I’ll never get used to this.” But then Nancy holds the blade high in the air, there’s an agonizing pause. With one sure movement she sweeps it across the goat’s throat. The goat, he doesn’t even move. His bright eyes stare, then dim.

  His blood pumps over the top of the stone slab, spills rhythmically over the lip, and pools on the stone floor.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  A Perfect Kiss

  Later, Ophelia remembers the smell of the organs of the goat, the raw scent of them pulled from the body, the thick sizzle on the brazier. The chanting of the people, their cries. She remembers the way the Virgo studied the entrails, making pronouncements. Somehow this ritual was helping her plan the expedition, or the war, or whatever it was. Ophelia crouches on the stone floor next to Pim and they rock together. Pest joins them, less because he’s afraid, Ophelia thinks, and more because he likes to do what Ophelia’s doing.

  They remain until everyone has filed by the Virgos and eaten a fragment of the meat, until the singing and chanting have faded, until the crowd has finally drained away and the meat is gone and the brazier has been reverently doused and taken away by two of the smaller Virgos.

  It is quiet. The sun slips low, sending long fingers of light through the coliseum. They are alone. Gradually, soft chirping and runs of song herald the return of small birds. The rhythmic, distant sound of the sea lulls like the beating of a great heart. Pim seems to calm, slowly comes back to herself.

  “Was there a sacrifice?”

  Ophelia has almost fallen asleep in the cool shade. She lifts her head. Pim is regarding her sleepily, and Pest lies with his head on her legs.

  “Hmm?”

  “I can smell it.”

  “If that’s what you call it. Sacrifice.” It’s horrible. “What kind of god do you people believe in that wants a dead goat?”

  “God?” Pim yawns. Her teeth are so white, her gums and tongue a lovely pink-brown. “What’s a god have to do with it?”

  Ophelia thinks for a moment. “If you sacrifice, doesn’t it go without saying that you’re sacrificing to something or someone?”

  “Oh . . . the land, I guess.” Pim scratches behind her ears. “But more than that. All things. The interconnectedness. Land, spirit, living, and dead.” She yawns again. “You’d better ask my mother.”

  Pim’s mother. That strange, powerful, charismatic woman who opens up a longing in Ophelia’s heart that threatens to drown her. She could ask Pim’s mother, ask about everything, but would she get an answer?

  Pim caresses Ophelia’s cheek. “You’re upset.”

  “Of course I’m upset!”

  “I don’t understand. We have a clear way now!”

  Ophelia struggles for control. “It’s . . . everything. The poor goat . . . and that horrible whatever you call it—games—here, before the wave . . . and the wave . . . and people keep talking about a dragon, and everyone says I’m to sing or something, we’re going to war . . . Well, now I’m crying.” She swipes at the tears. “I hate it here!” She knows she sounds like a child. “Pim, it wasn’t like this when you and I . . . Before. It was lovely. I hate crying.” She brings up her knees to hide her face.

  “It’s okay, Chosen,” Pest pipes up. “You can cry.”

  “Why do you call me that?”

  “I guess because that’s what you are.”

  Pim raises her head. “Here comes the doctor.”

  Indeed, it is old Doctor Capricus, sprightly on his goat legs, picking his way across the coliseum floor.

  “You have emeeeeerged from your traaaaance?” He bends over, tenderly cupping Pim’s chin.

  “Yes, doctor.”

  “And you, sir? How are you feeeeeling?”

  Pest giggles. “Good.”

  “How about our young Chooooosen?”

  “A little overwhelmed, to be honest.”

  “She’s upset about the ritual,” Pim tells the doctor.

  “Why does the Mender condone these things?”

  The doctor runs his fingers through his goat beard. “As Nancy would say, these things are neeeeecessary.”

  This is so unsatisfying. Ophelia grasps at a concrete question. “And that dead place I went to. That’s not part of Antilia, it’s another world again?”

  “It is Antilian, but only people from your world can see it,” Pim says, “and it is always almost empty. The Mender used to be able to go. . . .”

  “The Mender?” Ophelia catches her breath. “Wait. She is from my world?”

  Pim and Capricus nod. “Of cooooourse.”

  Ophelia’s bounces on her toes like she is about to run a race. “Why didn’t anyone tell me before?”

  “I thought you knew, Ophelia. I am sorry—”

/>   “Why am I the last to know everything?” Ophelia’s words ring out in the empty coliseum. Pest and Pim and the doctor look at her with sadness. Guilt sweeps through her for her temper; but really, it is too bad. “I have to talk with her.”

  “Then let us go to her,” Pim says.

  But Doctor Capricus is adamant. “She is asleep. I have given her a mild sedative; these events have taxed her consiiiiiderably.” He swallows the rest of the bleat and looks at Ophelia sorrowfully. “I do not like to deny you, but . . .”

  “Can you let me know when I could visit with her?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Thank you.” Ophelia has to ask. “How long has she been like that?”

  “Iiiiill?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t really remember a time when she was strong,” Pim hesitates. “There was an attempt on her life about fifteen years ago. The Render in the North tried to poison her.”

  “Poison her? That’s so . . . arcane.”

  “The Mender—the South—we weren’t so much on our guard, back then. We didn’t realize how much hatred was motivating the Render.”

  “He knew the Mender liked cigaaaaars. He poiiiiisoned one, using spies. She haaaaas been as you seeeee ever since.”

  Ophelia remembers her mother telling her something like this when she was a kid—isn’t that cigar story really from Cuba, some CIA assassination plot against Castro? Ever since Mary told her that story, she’s thought of poison whenever she sees someone smoking a cigar.

  “Now do you see why we had to execute those people at the Games?” Pim goes on gently. “It is real, Ophelia. The threat is constant.”

  “You didn’t need to try and execute a small boy for stealing food.” Ophelia pulls Pest close to her.

  “The Games bring out . . . ”

  “Uncontrollable blood lust?” Ophelia cuts in, not even trying to keep the outrage from her voice.

  Pest takes Pim’s hand. “Maybe it was because of the last split not getting fixed properly.” He looks up at Ophelia and Pim with complete trust.

  Pim smiles. “I do believe you are correct.”

  Ophelia thinks of the Mender, coming here from Earth, then getting poisoned. Sick, almost dying, for years and years.

  She does not want to remain in Antilia for that long. The thought goes around and around in her stomach. She feels sick with it. “Do the people like me, like the Mender . . . do we ever go home?”

  “Yeeeees.” Capricus answers so matter-of-factly that Ophelia almost believes him. “When thiiiiings work as they should.”

  Work as they should. “Reassure me, why don’t you.”

  “Usually,” says Pim, “after a Chosen comes from your world and heals the split here in Antilia, there is a long period of calm.”

  “Yes,” Capricus bleats. “Thousands of yeeeeears, even.”

  “But the last healing was botched because of the Render’s treachery,” Pim continues. “The ground has kept shaking; it’s never stopped. My whole life it’s shaken. Things are out of balance. Famine, death, massacres. And the place of the dead—you saw it.”

  “Everything is wrong here now,” Pest says. “It’s not like the old days,” and he shakes his head like a man of ninety.

  Ophelia softens, and when she remembers what he’s been through—his whole family dead, his stowaway trip to the South—she melts entirely. “So then, we need to fix things, don’t we?”

  Pest looks like the sun just came up. “You will do it?” His body vibrates with hope.

  Ophelia must talk to the Mender, she must. Maybe then she will understand what she’s doing here, and how to fix what went wrong before.

  “Will you try?” Pim’s voice is gentle.

  The sun has slipped below the horizon; the air turns blue in the twilight. No breeze. It is very quiet, even the birds have fallen silent. What is it they all think she can do? Pest, Pim, Doctor Capricus, the Virgo, the Mender. Ophelia feels her heart sinking like a ship.

  She is alone in this strange land.

  She remembers the feeling of Rowan’s hand, gently touching her face, just before they kissed. He’d reached out his hand, so much bigger than hers, it was funny to put their palms together and measure. Remembers his bruised face, his broken nose and how it made him talk like he had a cold, and she’d had to work so hard not to tease him about it because she knew he felt embarrassed. And the way his eyes crinkled around the edges when he smiled at her. He’d looked so happy.

  She lets herself remember kissing him. A perfect kiss.

  She wishes he were here. She feels silly, but she does. It’s not like he knows anything more than me, she thinks. But she is certain that somehow, together, they’d be able to figure this out. She and Rowan, they are like a two-piece puzzle.

  Except she is sure he doesn’t love her. She reminds herself of the evidence. He was using her. Right? Except . . . he wasn’t lying about Kalmar. She knows that now.

  Her hands twist together in the hem of the green dress he got her.

  There’s only one way to find out. Maybe, if she is able to set things right here, she will be able to go home, to see him again.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. But I will try.”

  It’s the strangest thing, but Pim, Pest and the doctor are all looking at her with tears trickling down their cheeks. They are profoundly moved. It makes Ophelia uncomfortable. “Oh, let’s go find some supper.”

  Pim wipes her cheeks and straightens up in one smooth movement. Pest bounces like a rubber ball. The doctor wipes his gentle furry face.

  “There will be a great feast,” Pim says. “At the castle, to celebrate our going to war.”

  “Well, I have suddenly decided that I am a vegetarian.”

  “Ah.” Pim’s eyes gleam. “You are dedicating yourself. The Virgos also eat only . . .”

  “It was that goat,” Ophelia interrupts. “I’m off meat for life.”

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  New Laws For New Times

  Rowan is ushered into the grand house to meet the head of the Council.

  It seems that a serving man had been behind that door all along, waiting for the thugs. Expecting them with their precious stolen sword, listening to the fight, and doing nothing.

  He lets Rowan in now, and closes the door. One of the guys outside is still screaming with pain, and Rowan’s legs feel like they are going to give out from under him.

  “Will you take care of those . . . the injured?” Rowan asks. The servant, an older man with his lips caved in where teeth should be, nods, and gestures at Rowan to follow him.

  There are armed guards in the foyer. They shift when Rowan passes, but do not move.

  The toothless servant leads Rowan through stone halls hung with tapestries, up a winding staircase, and into a great hall. A long table with a white cloth upon it is set for dinner, and around it sit men, women and children. Several guards stand at the periphery. The servant leads Rowan into the light.

  At the head of the table is the man who calls himself the Render.

  The man sees him and stands rather suddenly. He wears a white robe and the circlet around his head that Rowan remembers from the first time he saw him, at the gathering by the white stone. He’s a handsome man. He looks like a leader. The shock on his face is quickly masked.

  A woman rises with a little half-scream. A small boy begins to cry.

  The guards step forward, but the white-robed man puts up his hand and they fall back.

  “Chosen! All praises that you are safe.”

  Rowan is suddenly aware of his own smell, and the blood that stains his face and the blade he holds stiffly before him. He thinks he should have cleaned the sword—that’s what people always do in the books and old tales. He wishes he was shaven, clean. Thoughts stutter through his mind; he realizes he’s still holding the sword straight out in front of him, and makes himself lower it.

  The toothless servant goes to the council head and mumbles somet
hing.

  “Please,” Rowan says, “there are some injured men on your doorstep—will you see that they are cared for?”

  “Your men?”

  It takes Rowan a moment to understand what the man is saying—Christ, he feels tired all of a sudden, the adrenaline from the fight draining out of him like water out of a bathtub. The council head is performing a lie for the benefit of the others. “No,” he says. He stands as tall as he can. “I believe they might be yours.”

  The man’s eyes shift. “See to them,” he says to the servant, who leaves the hall.

  “I come alone,” says Rowan. “The ones outside tried to take this from me.” He makes an abbreviated gesture with the sword. “Please,” he says then, looking at those around the table, “I have not come to hurt anybody.” He tries to look reassuringly at the woman who screamed, at the children staring round-eyed. Everyone, he notices, is richly dressed in velvets and silks. They are plump, clean, so much more prosperous than the Whetungs or those at the resistance meeting. These must be the rich of Kalmar. There’s a great fish on a metal platter in the centre of the table with an apple in its mouth, like the whole roasted pigs he’s seen in illustrations of medieval feasts.

  “Why have you come?”

  “I told you,” says Rowan. “The gang tried to steal my sword. I followed them to your doorstep, and I was coming here at your inv—”

  “The sword belongs to you?”

  So, the man doesn’t want the others to know that he met with Rowan at Great Night and invited him to come here. Rowan closes his mouth, opens it again. “It seems to think it does.”

  “A sword doesn’t think.”

  “It burns anyone else who touches it.” Rowan turns the hilt toward the man. “Care to try? If you are truly the Render, as you claim, it will not hurt you.” His voice wobbles a little, but the sword stays steady.

  The man looks around the table and meets the eyes of a woman with jewels in her hair and exhaustion in her eyes. “You and the children will leave us now.”