If anyone other than Hyry Keshvara had told Lucrezia that the seeds had come from the lands south of the Forest of Absolute Night, let alone that they had come from the legendary Navel of the World of which something was said in the Lore ofGenesys, where incorruptible stone was mentioned too Lucrezia would not have believed it.
Ereleth, when the story was repeated to her, would not believe it even from Keshvara.
"If the most honest merchant of the city swears off his firstborn's life that something is true," Ereleth was frequently wont to say, 'you may be perfectly certain that it is a lie. If it is tjhe richest who swears, you may be certain that it is one of the damnedest lies ever pronounced. " Hyry Keshvara was neither the mos^t honest merchant in the city nor the richest, hut there was something in her particular excitement that Lucrezia was inclined to trust . . . something which spoke not of thirst for profit but of thirst for adventure, and perhaps for glory.
Lucrezia had fallen in love with that particular excitement, there seemed to her to be little enough in life that was worth desiring, and she had lately developed a powerful thirsr for the new and the strange. When Hyry had repeated what she had been told about the manner in which the seeds might be cultivated, Lucrezia had listened with the utmost care.
"I cannot vouch for any of this," Hyry had said, 'and cannot easily put my trust in such a wild tale, but what I was told is that one must persuade a man or a woman to swallow the nut whole. Both his legsI'll assume that it's a man must then be broken in half a dozen places, but carefully, so that he doesn't bleed to death.
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He must be buried waist deep in rich soil, left loose around his loins but packed tight about his midriff. His arms ought to be broken as well, if he's strong, to make absolutely sure that he can't uproot himself, but he mustn't be killed, for the seed will only grow in living flesh. He must be well fed while the nut germinates in his belly and begins to grow. Once the shoots are established in his flesh he'll cease to feel pain; if he hasn't gone mad before then he'll remain lucid, perhaps even cheerful, until the flowers bloom.
For a hundred days and more there'll be no sign of anything amiss with him, and he may become prodigiously enamoured of his keepers and feeders, especially any comely women among them- if a woman is used, of course, the reverse would be the case.
"The first thing to emerge from his flesh will be the thorns. His legs, face and torso will sprout quills like a porcupine, but he should still be fit and well, for the plant is very ingenious in the matter of insinuating its own tissues within its host's without any considerable disruption of function.
He must be very well fed during this phase, for the plant will be hungry and all its nourishment must be derived from its host's gut. A hundred and thirty days after the thorns, the flowers will begin to emerge. I'm assured that although they aren't exactly beautiful, they are fascinating in their peculiarity, resembling snakes with gaping jaws. It's the fang-like elements protecting the flower which produce the poison- it's said to be the deadliest in existence, but there are far too many substances of which that's said-for the claim to be taken seriously.
The flowers aren't self-fertilizing, but will exchange pollen with one another in a way which is said to be interesting to watch. Then the nuts will form anew.
"After that, the process can be repeated but I was solemnly warned that it might not be easy to bring the plants to the point of self-reproduction, and that they cannot be grown except from seed.
Some of their near cousins are adapted to grow perfectly well in animal flesh, but my informants said that these seeds cannot be relied upon to put forth flowers- or might produce sickly and sterile flowers- in any but human flesh. They said, too, that if the man in whose flesh they are growing should die, from hunger or disease or some inherent weakness, the plant will die too. There are three nuts, princess, so you have some scope for testing the truth of these statements. "
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"Who sold you these seeds and told you this tale?" Lucrezia had demanded to knoW*Darklanders? "
"Certainly not, highness. Darklanders live in daily contact with much that is unearthly, but they have a powerful dislike of the unusual.
The two men who brought me these things had kept them secret while they came through the forest. They were bronzes, who said they had long been homeless wanderers, and they boasted that they had drunk the water of the Lake of Colourless Blood and had seen the Silver Thorns. I think they were making a game of the whole matter, highness -- but what they sold me was certainly strange, and if they were telling the truth about these . . . "
Lucrezia gathered from this that Hyry was very interested to know how much truth there was in what she had been told by these enigmatic merchants, and had brought the seeds to the Inner Sanctum because she fervently hoped that Ereleth -- or Lucrezia -- would subject them to a test which she herself dared not try.
Although the first two seeds had failed, Lucrezia, Ereleth and Hyry had all been fascinated by the manner of their failure, which bore out much of what the bronze men had said. The first had got as far as producing thorns, but the redundant slave Lucrezia had been given to use had simply; not been up to the task. She had seemed sturdy enough, and was certainly not undernourished, having spent a lifetime in one of the Citadel's best kitchens, but she had shrivelled and died by slow degrees, in spite of every remedy Ereleth could prescribe. Lucrezia had no reason to think that another doctor would have fared any better. I Ereleth had been impressed by this experiment too. Initially, she had refused to believe that the plant could possibly live according to the pattern Hyry Keshvara had described, because it made no sense in terms of the theory of evolution by natural selection.
The witch-queen's curiosity had been further stimulated by the second experiment with the dog, and she had then taken it upon herself to question Keshvara more carefully about the origin of the seeds.
"There's not much more I can add," Hyry had said.
"As I told the princess, they made a game of secrecy. At the time, I thought they were merely trying to talk up the goods, but. . . Carus Fraxinus and Aulakh Phar have already chided me for missing a valuable opportunity, and they were right. There was one thing, though . . ."
She hesitated, until she was commanded to go on.
"The
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bronzes said that if there were women in Xandria with Serpent's blood
--they did say women, not men they ought to be told of this, lest they mistake the restlessness within their veins. Their words, majesty which they refused to explain."
Lucrezia knew that Hyry must know what was whispered about her own Serpent's blood, and was annoyed that the trader had not seen fit to mention this when they had spoken before, but she understood her hesitation. Mention of such matters could be considered indelicate.
Ereleth had made no criticism, though; it seemed that she simply filed the new detail away with the rest. When Lucrezia had questioned her as to what it all meant, she had confessed her ignorance with unusual frankness.
Now, as Lucrezia reached out to pet the half-buried dog, which responded to her touch with a plaintive whimper, she wondered whether there really was a special restlessness within her veins- and, if so, what it might signify.
What these people gave to Hyry was intended to serve as evidence of their power to work miracles, she thought. She understands that, and so do those friends who are determined to investigate the possibility of crossing the Dragomite Hills. I have a part to play too, and I won't let her down. If I can only persuade my father to let me have the amber, I'll prove to her--and to him! -- that the bronzes spoke the truth, and that the world is a ri
cher and stranger place than either of them dares to imagine . . . and then, by whatever means I can devise, I'll do everything in my power to find out exactly how rich and strange it is. There has to be more to life than politics and poison.
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a ndris's cell was about as long as he was tall and so narrow that he could easily touch both walls while standing in the middle. The pallet which served as a mattress wasn't long enough to allow him to stretch out full length, and the hole provided for the expulsion of wastes was the top of a pipe which led straight down to the sewer, with nothing but a wooden cover to keep the stink at bay.
Fortunately, it was a very long drop.
On a brighter note, some of Andris's few possessions had been fetched from the inn where he had been lodging, so he had a change of clothes. There was a tap over the waste-hole which produced water with which to wash. The mattress was surprisingly free of vermin; and the cell did have a small glazed window. He was told that food would be served twice a day, and if his first experience of it could be trusted it was perfectly edible, though somewhat elementary. All in all, it wasn't as bad as some prisons he had been in. ' The jailer who installed him in the cell was a small rotund man of perennially mournful aspect. He looked like the kind of man who might be easily overpowered, but the doors of all the cells were constructed in such a way as to minimise the chance of any prisoner ever having the opportunity to overpower him. They were made of very stout wood and had no less than three huge bolt-beams to secure them.
The top beam fitted over a spy-hole, the bottom one over a slit some three sims deep and twenty wide, through which food could be passed.
It was never necessary to remove more than one beam at a time- and, of course, strictly against the rules to do so. Andris didn't doubt that the doors and the beams were regularly checked and replaced before they showed significant signs of weakening. He worked out that it might be possible for a man with very strong fingers to dislodge the
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top and bottom beams from
inside, but there was no way he could get to the middle one even if he failed to attract attention when the top one crashed to the floor.
The ceiling seemed to be by far the weakest element in the forces of his confinement. There was a patch in the middle which was sulphurously yellow by virtue of the attentions of some ferocious local species of rot--but even Andris, who was probably the tallest man ever to have been locked up there, wasn't quite tall enough to touch it with his outstretched fingertips. In any case, it was impossible to figure out what, if anything, was beyond the stonework.
The cell was set very high in one of the citadel's seven towers, and it seemed entirely possible that there might be nothing above it but empty space without any convenient egress.
Andris found the height rather dizzying the first time he looked down from the window; he had never been in a building with more than three storeys before, and this particular tower had six. Andris was no more than averagely acrophobic, but the thought of a possible collapse sent shivers down his spine as he realised how many floors he might crash through on the way down.
Nor was the tower in which he was confined exceptional; he knew that the others were just as huge, and the interior of the citadel--into which his window faced- contained several erections of hardly less magnitude, including one which stood alone, unsupported by any accessory walls. The jailer informed him that this was the Inner Sanctum, in which the king kept his thirty-one wives and their households, and confirmed that there really was a walled garden set upon its roof.
"On a good day you can see the witch-wife Ereleth tending her poison apples,"
the jailer said- in jest, Andris assumed.
"You also have a wonderful view of the treasury's mint, where all the coin in the realm gets freshened up ar regular intervals, and you can watch the horses going back and forth from the biggest livery stable in the world, which happens to be directly below us. That's so our fall will be cushioned by straw and horse shit if ever there's a collapse. You can also see the whipping-post and the scaffold, although we don't have any whippings or hangings scheduled this ten day - not yet, at any rate."
It was not at all difficult to obtain such information from the jailer, who was perfectly willing to stand in the corridor and chat 47
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through the
spy-hole. He evidently found his job rather tedious. For the moment, the had less than thirty men in his charge, distributed about this floor and the one below. As the magistrate had observed, few men could afford to stay here for long.
"I need to send some letters," Andris told the jailer, once he had taken stock of the possessions which had been brought to his cell, "But I can't find my pens and paper- or my brushes and inks, come to that. I'm a mapmaker, you know."
"Impounded," said the jailer dolefully.
"No knickknacks allowed in the cell. You're only allowed spare clothing."
"But I have to try to get in touch with a kinsman of mine. He might be able to get me out of here."
"What's the address?"
"I don't know his address. I want to write to the captain of the ship which brought me here, to ask him to make enquiries on my behalf.
Surely you can let me have a piece of paper, and the use of a pen. "
"Pen and ink, with one piece of scrubbed parchment and the carriage charge, would add up to half a crown," the jailer reported. "I have my own writing materials," Andris told him.
"I only need to be allowed to use them." i The jailer shook his head.
"Rules," he said stubbornly.
"Don't know how things are in the dai-klan ds but here we do things by the rules.
We're civilised, see. " ; Andris sighed heavily.
"Just for the record," he said,
"I'm not a dark lander I'm a civilised man. Are you telling me that all my tools have been confiscated? It's not that they're worth much, you understand it's just the principle of the thing."
"What sort of tools were they?" enquired the jailer innocently. "Just the usual sort of thing," Andris said.
"Scissors, skinning and gutting knives, fishhooks, eating implements . ..
nothing out of the ordinary."
"Hunter, are you?"
"All travellers have to be hunters and fishermen when the need arises,"
Andris said.
"I'm a long way from home."
"I'll check to make sure they've been safely impounded," the jailer said.
"Maybe not- these waterfront inns are full of thieves and foreigners. Can't have 'em, though. Have to get what you need from me. Half a crown."
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Andris still had a few coins in his waist-pouch. He produced a half-crown from one of the Thousand Isles.
"No good," said the jailer, after testing it with his teeth.
"Rotten right through.
"I'll need two like that- have to go straight to the mint at half-weight. No one in Xandria takes coin that bad. There's always plenty of fresh about-benefits of civilisation, see."
Andris gritted his teeth as his temper rose. Had the spy-hole not been so tiny he might not have been able to resist the temptation to reach out and seize the tubby man by the throat, but his fist was too big to pass through it. Although, sadly, the law was not the law the world over, its keepers seemed to be much the same. He did not doubt that the jailer already knew exactly how much coin he had, and would aquire it all before the day was out.
He threw a second half-crown through the spy-hole. The jailer stooped to pick it up
and ambled away. He returned, in his own good time, with a minuscule piece of old parchment and a pen whose nib was more direly in need of refreshing than the coins he had given for it.
Presumably the royal metallurgists were far too busy re-minting coin to bother with mere implements of literacy. The ink was just as poor.
It took Andris ten minutes to write the letter. He would have taken a lot longer if he could, but even though he agonised over the choice of every word there simply wasn't enough space on the parchment to permit much exercise of eloquence or ingenuity. The jailer took the letter without comment, ostentatiously neglecting to read it although Andris was certain that he would do so as soon as he was out of sight. He was welcome; the letter merely pleaded with the shipmaster to do everything he could to find one Theo Zabio and tell him that his nephew, who was confined in the citadel, had urgent news from Ferentina. In point of fact, Andris had no news from Ferentina less than six years old, and none at all concerning anyone more closely related to Theo Zabio than himself, but he felt obliged to make every effort to persuade his kinsman that it was worth taking an interest.
Andris was fairly confident that even a Ferentinan could be relied on to do something for a kinsman in trouble- assuming, of course, that he was alive, and that he was still in Xandria, and that the shipmaster could be bothered to look for him. He was painfully aware that there might be several assumptions too many 49
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in that chain of suppositions, but what could one expect for a couple of rotten naif-crowns?
Later, as night was falling, the jailer returned and removed the beam covering the spy-hole.
"The ship hadn't sailed, so the letter's been delivered," he said.
"All a waste of time, mind."
Andris got up from the bed, where he had been trying unsuccessfully to catch up with lost sleep, and came to the spy-hole. The stars were shining brightly, but Andris's window was very narrow and the corridor without was just as gloomy as the cell. Itwas difficult to make out the jailer's features.
Serpent's Blood Page 6
