“I hope you like this one better than the last,” he said.
“No. I definitely do not like it, and I don’t wish to be the subject of any more of your poems.” She said this calmly, but with resolute authority and precise elocution.
He slumped forward, gazing at her with great longing as he said in a trembling voice, “If I can’t win you with my poetry, I can’t win you.”
Again her irritation quickened. “Don’t even think of winning me. I am not a prize.”
“Do you like any poetry at all?”
“Of course I do. We had bards from many lands on our ships. They recited the epics and the sagas of all the peoples of all the continents on the upper earth and some of the lands beneath to entertain us.”
“Some say my poems are epic. Some say the sagas written about today will be written by me.”
Tharfen made a disapproving face.
“What is wrong with them?” he asked, his brow just slightly creased with offence.
Tharfen shook her head with a sigh. “I’m not your intimate. I will never be your intimate, yet the poem implies that I am. That’s a lie.”
“But it’s part of the tradition. It’s a literary device.”
“I don’t care.”
“I will make you immortal.”
“That’s a bold thing to say to someone who has a fleet of Cyclopes after her. Don’t you think I can become immortal through my own deeds?”
“Yes, but my poems will make you even more immortal. They are already well-known. Ettinender used to read them to his beloveds. They just pour out of me.” The poet was reciting every line he had ever used before to impress a girl. “They can barely keep me in ink. I have to always have a ream of paper. It’s as though all the Phaer poetry dammed up in us by the Pathans has found its outlet in me and me alone.”
“You do know we face imminent invasion here? Don’t you think if you could become as expert with the sword as you claim to be with the word it might serve your city better?”
He could’ve held up his bud of a hand right then, but he wanted to keep the illusion of his physical perfection.
“Don’t underestimate the power of poetry.”
“No, I won’t. Next time we have some Cyclopes to kill, you are the first warrior I will recommend be sent out there with your sharpest and deadliest words.”
He almost felt like walking away at that. But his anger was nothing — it was a straw in the inferno of his love for her. Just being this close to her, in her presence, he would have borne a thousand insults against family and art. He hung his head and said, “But I love you. I would die for you.”
“Now, that is pure guff. Do you know how often I’ve heard my brothers pumping out that dishonest bilge into the world? Have I not been in ports in a thousand cities across the globe and heard a hundred lonely cabin boys telling any girl they meet that they’ve just fallen. And have I not heard them laughing about it afterward, telling each other in disgraceful detail what they’ve gained by trickery?”
“Have mercy. I used to write everything, but now I can write only poems to you.”
The increasing desperation in his eyes raked at her irritation. “Don’t.”
“I’ve had to set aside my plays, my oratorios.”
“Stop it. I mean it.”
“I mean it, too.”
They were both quiet.
“Can I say it outright just once then?”
She glowered at him. She was feeling quite annoyed, but she was trying to be merciful and she didn’t say no.
“All my life I’ve had a feeling as though I had been cut away from some larger thing I had once been part of. But when I first saw you, I lost that feeling. Suddenly I no longer had an edge or a limit. I was just one in the flow of oneness. By loving you I became infinite, eternal.”
“Well, I will grant you that I haven’t heard that one before,” she scoffed. “Are you sure it’s not just my pretty face you love so very much?” She turned her right cheek out of the poultice and revealed a face that was half Tharfen and half a pallid eggplant with one almost closed slit of purple eye. What she saw in return was no look of repulsion. In fact, a tender expression came over him. He reached out his hand as though he would caress her face, but he stopped himself. He bit his lower lip, his brow creased, and the look of compassion on his face was so clear the hardness of her heart relented a little, and he could see that. It encouraged him. He continued like someone pleading for his very life.
“Yes, I loved you when they all loved you. Yes, I loved you when you were pretty and brave, but now I love you when you’re broken. When your ship has sailed and your face is swollen like some kind of moon calf.”
Her right eye crinkled at this as though she found it a little funny. He got bolder.
“I loved you when they stood up in the arena and proclaimed you a hero, but I still love you now when they curse you everywhere and call you a coward. I do not let them. I—”
Suddenly he stopped. The way she was looking at him gripped him and squeezed him tight enough to stop his breath and his chatter.
“A coward?” she whispered, ashen and explosive.
He hung his head, afraid. Afraid of losing her.
“A coward?” she repeated.
There was no way out of it. He looked back up at her. “Because you fainted when that creature came,” he said in a hush. He felt suddenly deeply ashamed and stupid. There was another long silence until she looked away. He went to say something else, but she stopped him. “No. That’s enough of that.” But he was fool enough to go on. “Not everybody — not even a majority of people think that, but—”
She exploded with such a volume and ferocity that he jumped back in terror. “No!”
Her face was now completely red and she could feel the piece banging around the swollen part of her cheek. “I don’t want to hear anymore of your drivel.” These words came ripped raw from her throat. Her fury was having such a physical effect it was hurting her heel.
“Go!” she bellowed imperiously, waving him away. “Don’t you dare write any more poems about me. Not with the word love in them. I don’t love you, and I will never love you, so give up on that now.”
He said no more. His eyes glistened and he seemed like he might cry, but she looked so furious at this prospect the tears retreated from whence they came. He saluted her and then turned and left.
Tharfen pushed what he’d said out of her mind and went back to practising with her sword. There was a battle coming and she needed to be prepared, if only to defend herself. She exercised strenuously, and every time the image or thought of someone calling her a coward popped up, she shoved her sword through its eyes and hacked off its head.
35
Another Lirodello
It hadn’t rained since the hurricane. Once again the drains and gutters were full and foul and now the cisterns that collected most of the water supply for the whole city were running dry. The ever-increasing populace would surely have succumbed to some disease or another had it not been for Lirodello’s innovative use of the spell kones. There were no spell kones to bring on rain or to manufacture water from air, but there were day-long beer kones in crates on skids out of sight in the underground cavern. Parallel to them were great casks of day-long white wine kones, day-long gin kones, and a kone that produced twelve shot glasses of deliberate whiskey. Any of these required but a drop of water in advance to manifest. Lirodello had people washing the streets with it. By night he had the large kones known as beer barrel kones carried to the tops of the hills that led down into the sewage-laden streets. When he had twenty or thirty of them assembled at once, his Thralls turned the cranks, transforming single thimbles full of salt water from the sea into entire barrels of beer. At Lirodello’s command they then cracked them open and let the beer run out. Even though it was spellcrafted beer, whatever contami
nations it carried away with its hydraulic force as it ran downhill got carried away anyway. Spell-made gin even after its day was done and it had disappeared still left real-world animicula disinfected.
Lirodello had the stonemasons with day-long chisels shaping new blocks for the ramparts. Carpenters with one-day hammers built palisades. Even those who claimed to have no skills were good for gathering rocks, stones, and anything that might be flung down upon invaders. Lirodello also had the good sense to feed everyone frequently. In long, brightly coloured tents recovered from underground vaults he provided them with sumptuous meals hundreds at a time. They ate with great gusto and satisfaction. Absolute meals — potatoes and carrots, cheese, bread, and beef. No sooner did one hundred diners leave the tables before another hundred were brought in and the gorging continued. Of course the satisfaction didn’t last long. No matter how well you digest spell-made beef, when it’s gone it’s gone like it never was. The people were constantly eating but never getting any more nutrition than what was in the small crumb or grain the kone used as source material for its ordained dinner. Still, none of them ever felt hungry in an absolute sense. So there was none of the bitterness and cynicism and fatalism that can come in besieged towns when hunger weakens one. And not all the beer and gin were used to wash the street or the people. There was drinking, as well. One could get wildly drunk, but when the spell wore off all effects of drinking were off and one was stone-cold sober and ready for work.
This was not his preferred way to run a government, but Lirodello did it for the sake of morale. And the defenders of the city of Ulde didn’t complain about the deception. To become dehydrated while constantly drinking was surely better than dehydration from outright, absolute thirst.
Stories about Lirodello’s wisdom, stories that he had been born to save them, spread among the refugees. The very sight of him seemed to lift people’s hearts. At the suppers, in addition to their spell-made smorgasbords, he instructed whoever among the members of the academy knew any of the old stories and epics to recite them. These, too, being well-chosen for the occasion, did much to lift the spirits of the hungry, threatened populace.
No one was comforted that the wind remained still. But if it blew again they would be invaded and that was even worse. The longer it took to blow the more time they had to prepare. Lirodello formed whoever was able-bodied into brigades, and with sticks and cudgels he had his best swordsmen teaching them quickly the basics of self-defence. And everyone was expected to do some gathering — whatever was big enough to be used as a club. Whatever might be hurled, flung, or catapulted.
Lirodello’s wisdom in having the young scribes recite the epics to the people was much acknowledged by the people themselves, but not everyone could see the wisdom in his instructions to the theatre company. He had their best set designer working with carpenters to construct portable, realistic looking brick walls and porticoes. And if any of the council members persevered in search of a rationale for this, he only winked charmingly and repeated. “Please trust me on this.” And they did. Lirodello’s political skills, too, were much on display as he forged alliances amongst the obsessively contrarian counsellors.
He was another Lirodello at night, though. Things were not going well with Zila. That first nightingale, she told him after eating it, was not a nightingale at all, it was a red plover. Lirodello knew otherwise. He knew with absolute certainty that it had been a nightingale, but he didn’t argue. He apologized for his mistake and promised to get another. The next bird he acquired was a slightly larger nightingale than the first, but this poor bird she declared with some rage to be a scarlet sparrow. Again Lirodello apologized and promised to try harder. But he was not forgiven. In fact he was sentenced to sleep by the window where the need for her assailed him like physical pain. But he didn’t dare attempt to acquire another nightingale. He knew in his heart that no nightingale could be enough for her. He needed something else.
36
The Sword Within the Sword
Carefully, Xemion worked his way down from the tip of the sword, removing speck by speck the sheen of silver. Star by star the astrologer’s paint came away from the surface and he began to see once again the curved striations at the top of the flattened scroll within. He kept being tempted to roughly run the scraper from hilt to tip in one long motion, but he dared not risk damaging the paper underneath and thereby wreaking who knows what damage on whatever text might be on it.
Scrape. Scrape. All day he scraped, and when his kone thrall started to gnaw away at him he read another of the Rondell poems. His other diversions were losing their power. Rewriting texts in the air with his sword was useless. Even when he wrote them so fast he could hear the whipping sound of the blade. He took a brand from the fire and tried to write so fast the glow of the text lingered in the air. But it didn’t hold him. Quickly he returned to scraping the sword. He was only halfway down the blade and still there was the varnish underneath the silver and that would also need to be removed before the scroll could be read. He only had enough poetry left for at most a day and a half.
After 103 pages of Rondell, dusk came, and with the onset of the dark the silver paint, having been exposed to the sunlight streaming in through the window, began to shine with a dull green luminosity that Xemion hardly even noticed. He went on working well into the night as Bargest restlessly traipsed about the chamber, the click of his claws on the stone floors rhythmic and melodic.
Somewhere in the night, his back aching, Xemion lay down for a brief rest on the flagstones. And there he fell into a dream. He was being drawn across starless places as far as light can go, moving through it like another wind inside the wind or a faster river in the fastest river possible. Suddenly he found himself gazing down over a vast field of stars. He moved his arm and one great arm of the galaxy moved with it. He was stars, his hand gripping a luminescent letter X, that first letter he’d seen on the Great Kone, the letter that began his name.
Xemion’s waking eyes pulled into focus and the luminescent X became the haft and hilt of the half-stripped sword in his hand, and what he had thought were stars were actually those moon-blanched scatterings of paint he had so recently scraped off its blade.
“Behold the paper sword,” he said out loud, holding it up by the hilt.
“The paper’s word,” Bargest’s rumbling voice attempted to repeat.
“Yes, it is less and less a paper sword and more and more paper’s word,” Xemion joked to the dog. And then he thought he heard a sigh. It might’ve been the dog, but … He dashed over to Saheli. The green luminescence of the star paint specks attached to his clothes and hair bathed her in eerie points of light. He put the little mirror to her mouth. Nothing. Again, and as always, he had an urge to kiss her. But he didn’t. One of the star flecks fell down from his hair and landed on her chest, and then another star fell and landed in the splay of her hair on the other side of her face. He couldn’t see where, so he leaned closer. He found the little star in her hair and removed it on the tip of his index finger. His lips were so close to hers, so close he thought he felt the warmth of them. Startled, he drew away. He ran the back of his finger over them. No. They were the same. He took her hand gently; there was still no pulse. He put the mirror to her mouth again; still no breath.
It was well into the night and he should have been sleeping, but instead he began to clean up the luminous scatterings all over the floor. He would press the tip of his index finger on each one and then brush it off into a small, cracked inkwell. An hour later the cracked inkwell was half-full of little stars and he put it back beside his shoes and the sack he used at the market. Then he read one more poem by Rondell. He had to read slowly. Carefully. Noticing and taking in each word, letting it move him, noticing its context, then letting that move him even more as he moved on to the next word and let it all happen again. Even though his mind crawled as slowly over the poem as a snail crawls over pavement stone, it was over too quickly
, so he read the poem backward, looking for meaning in the backward flow. He recited both versions aloud forward and backward several times. He looked at the dog and whispered the poem to him. He intoned the words soft and somberly like a hymn. He lay down and ran them through his melodic mind like lullabies, and not long after his lips stopped moving he fell back asleep.
Come in
like through a door
where there is no house,
no garden,
no wall.
Just myself
on hinges,
and
the world.
37
Facing Her Fears
“Smacky, smacky.”
Tharfen awoke with a gasp. There was a face over hers as big and round as a frying pan. The eyes were wide open and a reeking mouth gaped and descended in a big O as though it were about to kiss her. A scream exploded from her. Her hands pushed back at the thick chest enough to get away from under him and stand up and face him. Then she saw that it wasn’t a chest she had pushed at, it was a back. She screamed again. It was the examiner, Rotan Smedenage. His big round face, still tilted around at an angle and backward on his body, saw the knowledge of this shoot through her and the big round mouth opened in laughter as he rushed back at her.
He lifted up his paddle in one backward hand, a deeply strangled voice sang “Smacky, smacky,” and he lunged at her. Tharfen’s sword was just out of reach, but the bronze cat rolled up in her scarf beside the bed wasn’t. With whip-cracking urgency she whirled it round her head once like a sling and brought it down on the side of his face. Suddenly Tharfen awoke. Her bedding lay on the floor. She was shaking.
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