Summer King, Winter Fool

by Lisa Goldstein

  Val nodded, understanding now why the forest had felt so still, so haunted. “What did they fight about?” he asked.

  “No one knows.”

  “But the king—some of the kings—still have magicians. The last king did.”

  Pebr looked at him sharply. “What do you know about that?” he asked.

  “Only what everyone knows. The wizards died. They were killed, people say.”

  Pebr nodded. “Aye, they were killed. That’s what happens to magicians, that’s why it’s unsafe to meddle in their art.”

  “You shouldn’t have started him on the subject,” Taja said, laughing a little. “He hates it that I work in the library.”

  “I have enough money to support us both,” Pebr said. It had the sound of an oft-repeated argument. “There’s no need for you to work.”

  “About a third of the library was destroyed in the war,” Taja said. “Books of magic, mostly. He’s got it into his head that it isn’t safe to work there.”

  “What other books do you have?” Val asked.

  “Oh, everything. History, poetry, languages, old stories.”

  “I’d love to see it.”

  “Why don’t you come with me? Oh—but I wouldn’t want to interrupt your work.”

  “You won’t,” Val said. “Perhaps I can find inspiration in the library.”

  “Good,” Taja said. She said farewell to Pebr and they went outside.

  She led Val down the village path, heading toward the tall white building he had noticed earlier. Fog shrouded the building, clung white as cobwebs to the stone cottages. As they walked he saw dozens of ladders leaning against the houses, and his heart lifted a little to see them: so they celebrated the Feast of the Ascending God here too.

  “What do the other people in the village do?” he asked. “They don’t all work in the library, do they?”

  “No. They’re fisher-folk, mostly.”

  “Fisher-folk?”

  “Aye. We’re on the coast here. Or don’t gentlemen read maps either?”

  He frowned; he didn’t like the teasing in her tone.

  “Look, I’ll show you,” she said, and turned off the path that led to the library. They came to a steep cliff; looking down Val could see a cobblestone harbor and tiny, fragile-looking boats bobbing in the water. Waves hissed in to shore. The fog had started to lift and he noticed that the ocean was a dull gray, nothing at all like the color of Tamra’s eyes. A fisherman mended a purple net stretched out on the sand. A heron preened nearby; without thinking about it Val put his hand to the charm at his throat.

  A huge stone arch, nearly covered with moss and weeds, stood on the cliff overlooking the ocean. Taja followed Val’s gaze. “That’s the arch of Sleeping Koregath,” she said.

  “Sleeping—”

  “Legend says that the arch is the giant Koregath, turned to stone during the war of the poet-mages.”

  A giant, Val thought, trying to imagine that much power. A gull cried in a shrill voice above them.

  They headed back toward the library. Someone called out to Taja, and she turned.

  At first Val thought the thin old woman coming toward them was one of the Maegrim. She wore the same black, shapeless rags, and her gray hair hung lank to her shoulders. His heart began to beat loudly. What prediction did this woman have for him?

  As she came closer, though, he saw that she had no hood of badger skin, and he breathed easier. And now that he had time to think he realized that no one he had heard of had ever been approached by a single Maegra; there were always six of them, and then seven. But the hint of something uncanny still clung to this woman. He wondered who she was, what she wanted.

  “Good morning, Taja,” she said. One of her eyes was brown, Val saw, and the other webbed white with cataracts. “Good morning, my young lord.”

  “Good morning, aunt,” Taja said.

  Val nodded to the old woman. For a moment he had the feeling that she knew everything about him, his place on the ladder, his reasons for coming to Tobol An, all his innermost thoughts.

  She tilted her head back and looked at the sun. The fog was completely gone now; Tobol An seemed a little warmer than the cold-locked city to the north. “A good day,” the old woman said, looking back at them with her brown eye, nodding toward him shrewdly. “A good day to work, to search, to discover one’s fortune.”

  Some answer seemed to be required of him, but he had no idea what it could be. Taja saved him by saying, “Thank you for the salve, aunt. Uncle Pebr says his arm is much better.”

  The old woman nodded again, briskly, and pushed past them down the path. They continued on toward the library.

  “Who in Callabrion’s name is that?” Val said when he was certain she could no longer hear them. “Is she really your aunt?”

  “No,” Taja said, laughing a little. “Her real name is Mathary, but everyone in the village calls her aunt. Everyone except Pebr, who won’t speak to her.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I think he thinks she’s one of the ancient wizards, the last survivor of the great battle.”

  “But she would have to be—”

  “Hundreds of years old, I know. Pebr has some strange ideas. To be honest—” She began to whisper, though the old woman couldn’t possibly hear her. “—he threw out the salve I gave him. He said he’d rather live with the pain in his arm than use anything that has the taint of magic on it. She knows that, of course—did you see the way she looked at me when I thanked her?”

  “Do you think she’s a wizard?”

  “No, of course not. She’s a harmless old woman who knows something about plants, that’s all.”

  The library had grown closer as they walked. Now Val could see that his first impression had been correct: it had been built in the shape of a shell, spiraling out from an unseen center. Taja unlocked a door set into the wall and they went inside.

  They stepped into a corridor lined with books. The corridor seemed to turn in slightly. “It leads inward,” she said, pointing.

  He had never seen so many books in one place; not even the library at the university had had so many. Their deep musty smell was not unpleasant, the moldy odor of scholarship and discipline. “Do you have to walk through the entire building if you want a book all the way inside?” he asked.

  She laughed. “There are entrances and exits all over the library,” she said. “And there are stairs leading to higher levels. Tell me where you want to go and I’ll show you how to get there.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what’s here.”

  “Well, this book for example,” she said, taking one off the shelf. “It’s an old story about a man who dreams about the same woman every night. Every night he struggles to free her from danger and every morning he wakes exhausted from his efforts. But finally, after seven years, he rescues her. And when he wakes up that morning she’s lying in his bed next to him.”

  Now Val could see that the shelves held more than books; unbound manuscripts and loose rotting pages and scrolls competed for space with books bound in brass and iron and jewels. “This one,” Taja said, replacing the book she had shown him and taking another. “The book itself is completely worthless. But here—” She opened the rotting pages; Val saw lists of words filling the margins. “It was owned by the wizard Hanra, and her commentary is on every page.”

  Suddenly Val realized that he hadn’t seen her strike a flint or light a candle, yet the library had no windows. “Where does the light come from?” he asked.

  “From the floor and ceiling,” she said.

  “How is that possible?”

  “We don’t know.”

  The light was clear, he saw, and brighter and steadier than that of candles or oil. “I’ll tell you what I want,” he said. “Do you have a book of Cosro’s poetry?”

  “If we do I haven’t seen it. I don’t know every book here—just the ones I’ve added to the catalogue. I calculated once that if I live to be five hu
ndred I’ll be able to list them all.” She looked around her. “Sometimes I imagine all the old librarians and poet-mages working here, walking the corridors, studying, whispering to each other over an old book. There must have been dozens of them, hundreds perhaps. And now there’s just me. Don’t you feel it?”

  Val stood still for a moment, trying to see the ghosts she had summoned up. But no one walked the corridor lined with books; the library remained empty, silent. He shook his head.

  Someone knocked on the door to the outside, and Taja opened it. A woman stood there, her arms filled with notebooks and manuscripts and a pen case. “Good fortune,” she said. “I’d like to look at the birth records, please.”

  “Of course,” Taja said. “This way. You’d better come along too, Val—it’s easy to get lost here.”

  They started up the corridor. The other woman was probably a natalist, Val thought, someone who sought to predict a person’s future place on the ladder from his or her birth date. “Do you have birth records here too?” Val asked.

  “The king sends us the records of birth and marriage and death every year, along with a small subsidy for our work.” Taja opened a door; it led to a flight of stairs and they began to climb. “He’s late with this year’s subsidy.”

  “He’s had a lot of expenses,” Val said.

  If Taja was impressed that Val knew court gossip she didn’t show it. They went down another corridor, through a door leading inward and another door opening on another flight of stairs.

  Finally they came to a small room off the main corridor. A polished wooden table stood in the middle of the room, and cabinets lined the walls. “Is everyone’s birth recorded here?” Val asked.

  “Of course,” Taja said. “When were you born?”

  “The seventh year of the reign of Tariel III.”

  She directed him to one of the cabinets and pulled out a drawer. “You’d be here,” she said, turning to help the other woman.

  Val opened the drawer. Almost immediately he found names he recognized, schoolmates, fencing partners, men and women he had met at court, all of them mixed indiscriminately with people from the lower rungs. Here was Narrion, Val saw, and Tamra, and Dorio, his friend from the university who had become an astronomer-priest.

  He came to the end of the births for that year. He had not seen his name anywhere. Puzzled, he searched through the records again. The natalist had settled herself at the table, surrounded by records and charts and pens and inkstands holding ink of different colors. “I can’t find my name here,” he said to Taja.

  “Are you certain of the year of your birth?” Taja asked.

  “Of course.”

  “Well, the scribe may have made a mistake. Check the years before and after it.”

  He turned back to the cabinet. Taja searched with him, perhaps intrigued by the mystery, but neither could find the missing record.

  He laughed, trying to make light of it. “Perhaps I don’t exist,” he said. He shivered; he had spoken truer than he knew. No place at court, no hope of rising on the ladder, no birth record. He shivered again and touched his charm to ward off evil.

  “I have to start work now,” Taja said. “I’ll show you the way back.”

  He followed her, trying to forget his disquieting thoughts. Probably it was nothing, a scribe’s mistake, as Taja had said.

  They came to the outer door. “You can stay if you want,” Taja said. “I’ll find you something to read.”

  Val shook his head; he had had enough of the library.

  “A good day to discover one’s fortune,” old Mathary had said. Whatever Pebr might think, the woman was certainly no wizard; she could not have been more wrong. It would be a good day for someone else, maybe; he was starting to think that he might have no fortune to discover.

  Three

  BY THE TIME HE RETURNED TO THE STONE cottage he had managed to put all thoughts of the library behind him. He borrowed paper from Pebr and began a sonnet to Tamra.

  A few hours later he read what he had done and set the poem aside in disgust. He had written that Tamra was the daughter of Scathiel, the winter god; that explained her beauty, he said, and her coldness to him. But she was not cold; she had simply not decided among the dozen or so courtiers that vied for her hand. Would he marry her if she wanted him? Or was it only the chase that mattered, and not the conquest itself?

  He stood and began to pace the small room. He had been in Tobol An less than a day, and already he was starting to question his old life, the artifice of the court. He laughed harshly. Perhaps he would marry Taja. They would live together with Pebr in the stone cottage; he would become a fisherman, and bring up the silver wealth of the sea in his purple net.

  Why in Callabrion’s name had Narrion killed Lord Damath? When would he be allowed to return to Etrara? He was not suited for a life spent in solitude, for endless questions.

  Restless now, he left the cottage. He walked along the cliffs, watching the waves below. As evening fell the sky turned rose red over the water and dark blue farther up, with a thin line of blue-gray separating the two. Clouds drifted overhead, archipelagoes in the vast blue gulfs of the sky. A seagull called; another answered. The colors deepened, becoming the same dark mass as the sea, and he turned to go.

  When he got to the cottage Taja and Pebr were already eating. Fish—he should have guessed. He served himself and sat at the table with them.

  “I have a few ideas about your birth record, Val,” Taja said. “Could your parents have been out of Etrara when you were born?”

  Val shook his head. “They would have told me if they had been, surely,” he said.

  “Can you write to them?”

  “They died a while ago,” Val said. “The plague.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Val.”

  “Don’t be.” Their deaths, which had been an aching grief to him for several years, had given him less sorrow as he grew older. Still, he would remember them at odd hours, and the old sadness would catch at his throat.

  “My parents died too,” Taja said. “In a storm at sea, when I was very young. They lived in Mirro An, down the coast. Pebr brought me here and raised me—I don’t remember them at all.”

  “I’m sorry,” Val said.

  “Well,” Taja said. “I didn’t mean to make us so gloomy. Here—I brought you a book.”

  Val took it from her. It was faded, and there was no title on the cover or spine. He opened it and saw poems by a number of people, some of whom he recognized as contemporaries of Cosro. “Thank you,” he said, genuinely pleased. “Thank you very much.”

  So the days passed. Val began a number of poems in the morning, but by noon he would always lay them aside and read one of the books Taja brought him from the library.

  A day came when he finished a book and had no more to read, and he went by himself to the library. He met with no one while he was there, though at first the sound of his own footsteps alarmed him.

  He was astonished to find such richness. Hours passed as he took down book after book from the shelves: plays he had never seen and poems he had never read and accounts of voyages to lands on no current map. There were books on natalism, on chemistry, on the science of watching the stars. And in every third book he saw long lists of words in the margins: sun and leaf, sea and stone. Wizards’ commentary.

  A week after he had come to Tobol An he went for a walk by the cliffs. A cold wind blew around him. “She told me she would love me, forever and a day,” he sang. The ocean’s rush answered below him.

  Taja came toward him from the library. “But then one day in winter, she said she could not stay,” he sang.

  “Good fortune, Val,” Taja said. She was smiling; did she enjoy his singing?

  “Good fortune.”

  “I saw you out walking. It’s getting late—I thought we might go home together.”

  He looked at the sky. It was not only late but overcast, with clouds like sodden gray wool. A harsh wind bent back the gr
asses of the cliff and roughened the waves beneath him. He shivered.

  Heavy rain began to fall. Val took Taja’s hand and headed toward the stone cottage. “Wait,” Taja said.

  “Come—the storm will only get worse.”

  She studied the fishing boats drawn up in the harbor, then looked out to sea. The ocean had turned slate-gray, almost black. “What is it?” he asked.

  “One of the boats hasn’t come back.”

  She hurried down the slanted path that led to the harbor. He followed her, wondering what she thought she would do. Against a storm like this, he thought, they would almost certainly be powerless.

  More people joined them on the path, which was slick with rain. “Who is it?” someone asked.

  “Dochno,” Taja said, her voice blown back by the wind. “His boat hasn’t returned.”

  The crash of the ocean was louder as they came closer. The fisher-folk studied the sea as Taja had, clearly wondering if they could venture out and survive. Pebr stood among them, huddled against the wind.

  “Look!” someone said. “It’s Dochno. He’s swimming back!”

  A small figure appeared above the waves and then was tossed under. A few of the fisher-folk hurried toward their boats. Val ran down to the sea, taking off his boots as he went. “Val!” Taja called. “What are you doing?”

  He could not stop to explain. He had swum in the races in the Darra River for the last three years, and had won the last one. He touched the amulet at his throat and plunged into the waves.

  The water was chilling, as cold as the rain. He surfaced, brushed hair and water from his eyes, and looked around for Dochno. There. He swam toward him, his strokes cutting through the water.

  A wave battered him, turned him around. He struggled to the water’s surface, took a deep breath, searched for Dochno again. The drowning man seemed no closer.

  He renewed his efforts to reach him. His muscles felt like lead. He looked around a third time, saw Dochno almost on top of him. The man seemed to make one final effort to reach him. Val held out his hand and Dochno grasped it.