Of course, I had a sack bulging with the volatile little things, and no need of waiting till the Ixora died. Carefully, I peeled them and conserved the wet, sweet fruit, piling the flint-pits carefully as an apology to the tall tree, so that when it died for true a veritable jungle would grow in its place. With equal care I broke the sap-vein deep in the ash and dribbled the waxy, scalding stuff onto the mashed red cherry-flesh.
All this I smeared into the mouths of the three oracles, and then—forgive my arrogance, Brother Heron!—I cut into my own arm and let the pale light of my body flow into the searing medicine, into their mouths. We know of no greater sacrament, and I knew of no other thing I could do for them.
It was hours before they could sit up, and I was well healed by then. They did not thank me, still black in their misery, but the snakes of their hair hissed sweet and comforting in my direction. Wading in their sorrow like drunkards, they moved off into the desert, past the trees, swaying from side to side, clutching each other.
As they passed my cairn of seeds, the youngest of them kicked it over, and they vanished in the flash of spark and thick smoke.
HE HAD FINISHED HIS TALE.
“Oh!” I interrupted, “the poor Basilisk! Has he no tongue at all now? What a wretched fate! He sang so beautifully last Equinox when I visited his caves!” Laakea glared sternly at me, making it quite clear that the hap penstance of my friend the Basilisk was of no concern to him.
“So you understand, Bird-Brother. When the creature comes, you must stop him.”
“How to stop a creature on a Quest? What do you expect me to do? Spoil the hospitality of my hall?”
Laakea snorted. “I do not care. Kill him. Lock him away in a tree trunk. I trust in your wisdom. But I must bid you farewell. Much have I neglected in my journey to your marsh—I must attend to the funeral rites of our sister.”
“It is not the place of any of us to interfere in the Quests of men. They insist on them—they are as fond of Quests as of their own hearts.”
“Who is to say it will be a man?” Laakea answered, bored as a babe.
With this the white-clad Star left my hall, scorching the grass once more as he walked southward, sending up veils of mist that dissipated like a memory when he had gone and not even his footfalls could be heard.
“SO YOU SEE, MY DEAR LAD, THE DILEMMA.” THE Marsh King crossed his reedlike legs in a curiously fey gesture. “In no way can I allow you to do what you intend. It is not personal, of course. It is best in the end to let women see to their own vengeance. Those who meddle are seldom thanked—take my dear Harpoon’s story as exemplum! Now. I don’t suppose I can convince you to scurry on home and be a good bear from now on?”
I shifted on my paws and murdered my tears where they stood. “I cannot simply give up! I will go on, whether or not you tell me the truth. If she can contrive her own revenge from the grave, perhaps she can grant me the small thing I ask. Why would the gods conspire to rob me of a mate? Is it such a terrible thing to mate?”
“It is, in fact, quite insignificant,” the Marsh King said gently. “The gods, if you insist on calling them such, do not conspire, but events themselves order the world like a pack of cards, and there is little you or I can do to change the cut of the deck. We must learn to accept personal loss gracefully. Duty is a noble word, after all.”
I stamped in frustration and the branches of the hall shook wildly. “There must be a way! I have begun a Quest! Quests do not simply end. You win or you lose; it is not just suddenly over.”
“I believe that you have, so to speak, put your finger on it. I see that it is not possible for you to accept that, this time, you simply lose. It is because a Quest is not a natural thing for your kind—nor mine, for that matter. A Quest is a thing for men. It is their invention, their monstrous pet, their addiction. They own all the rights in perpetuity. Every step you take, my dear Eyvind, you are robbing men of their most dearly bought treasure. It is sad for them, that they have only the machinery of Questing to sustain them. But they are a sad race. We must weep for them, but not too much. And we certainly must not take on their ridiculous penchant for self-destructive behavior. Therefore, I have devised a way to prevent you from reaching the land of my late sister and yet preserve a small chance for you to achieve the end you desire. I shall make you into the very model of a Quest—I shall make you a man.”
My mouth gaped. Horror shuddered through my fur and sweat dampened my great white jowls. “A man? Why must you punish me so?”
“It is not a punishment, you sorry beast,” the Marsh King scoffed. “You took on a Quest, which is a thing only men—and exceedingly stupid men, usually—do. So you must become a man if you wish to continue on that doomed path. It is all really very simple and nicely symmetrical, if you think about it. And a man is not such a hideous shape to find oneself in.”
“But if I am a man, the Snake-Star will not listen to me; Stars run from men, they hide away from their sweat and their stink. I can never see my beloved again! She would run from me herself, she would think me a hunter. I could not bear to see her run from me, and—”
“Oh, calm yourself. I did not say it would be permanent. You know, you might consider that a mate is not strictly necessary to survival. Look at Beast and me! We live together quite happily in blissful bachelorhood and we are not at all bothered by the lack of great, galumphing girl-bears about the house.”
At this, Beast looked up from quietly playing a game of bark-piece backgammon against himself. “Mmm? Oh, yes, quite happily. Except for the flies, you know. His Majesty does tend to diet on a rather eclectic selection—quite nauseating to watch.” He settled back into the game, which he was earnestly but decidedly losing.
“Well,” the Marsh King pursed his beak politely, “at any rate, your manliness need only last for a relatively brief period. I have already discussed this in detail with some of the lower Stars—white dwarfs and the like. I shall bundle you up tight as a mitten in a human skin until,” and here he cleared his long blue throat dramatically, “the Virgin is devoured, the sea turns to gold, and the saints migrate west on the wings of henless eggs.”
“In the Stars’ name, what does that mean?” I gasped.
“I haven’t the faintest idea! Isn’t it marvelous? Oracles always have the best poetry! I only repeated what I was told—it is rather rude of you to expect magic, prophecy, and interpretation. That’s asking quite a lot, even from a King.” He appeared quite flustered, feathers blushing up into an indignant violet. “Just, well, keep a lookout for that sort of thing, don’t you know. Sea turning to gold. Hard to miss, I’d say. Rather. Lucky to have such obvious signs. I should think you would be grateful. Now hold still, and let us get on with our business.”
“Wait! I haven’t agreed to anyth—” I meant to protest further, but I found my tongue no longer worked entirely well; it was short and stumpy and stuck to the roof of my mouth. Horrified, I glanced down at my mighty and beautiful paws only to find wretched, pasty feet covered with a scraggly down, stuck ridiculously at the bottom of skinny legs. With one touch of his wing, the Marsh King had made me hideously, but certainly, a man.
Yet the sovereign had changed as well. He was no longer a tall and regal bird with a respectably threatening wingspan, but a bent old man with a long beard that flashed all the colors of the swamp—green and brown and a brackish gray. He appeared somewhat fishlike, with sallow, damp skin and a wide, pale mouth.
“What is this?” I mumbled as best I could with my worthless tongue.
“Eh? What? Of course, I am sorry, I should have explained. When you were an animal, I appeared as a suitably noble animal. As you are now a man, I appear to you as a grandfatherly old type meant to inspire the proper respect from your new breed of creature. It is a courtesy I extend. Think nothing of it.”
“But Beast?” I inquired helplessly, for the scarlet-hoofed creature was quite the same as before.
“Beast is just Beast. He is always Beast,” came the
monarch’s bored but affectionate reply.
Hearing his name, the courtier’s crimson head bobbed pertly. “Just Beast,” he assured me.
The Marsh King raised himself up and ushered me out the door with the air of a host who has just realized he is one guest away from a comfortable nap.
“Off you go then, Eyvind, my boy—and ho! now you really are a boy! Splendid. We shall see you again, I have no doubt. Run along! Fare thee well and all that rot!”
EYVIND’S BODY RELAXED. HE HEAVED HIS GREAT mass onto a stool and sighed. “And I’ve been a man ever since. I got old and got fat until I looked something like a bear again, what with the gut and the hair. It doesn’t do any good. I’m not a bear. I try, but I’m not. I’m still waiting for the sea to turn. It never does. I stay close to the Marshes, hoping that it’s true that Kings don’t lie. I don’t have much hope; after all, your father is a King. The Marshes aren’t more than a week’s journey north of here. The days, they have their way with me now. Maybe I’ll just die serving beer to brats in this filthy tavern.”
The Prince stared at the surface of the bar, the loops and whorls of the wood like a fingerprint. “I am sorry for you,” he mumbled.
Eyvind’s face purpled. “I don’t need your pity, boy. That’s a useless load. I’ll give you a pair of walking boots with no promise they’ll fit if you carry a message—you ask that no-good bird when I’ll be getting my own back. I’m sick of waiting.”
“The… the Marsh King, you mean?”
“Stars, boy, you’re thick as a cub still sucking at its dam. Yes, the Marsh King. A week’s walk north and you’ll be knee-deep in mud and eels. Now take these and be off before I charge you rent for that stool you’re ruining.” He tossed a muddied pair of greasy black boots several sizes too big for the young Prince onto the bar and disappeared with a final grunt into the back room.
Leander took the boots gingerly and slipped out of the tavern, his face burning under the stare of the bedraggled patrons.
He set out north as Eyvind had said, and indeed, at length he came to the Dismal Marshes, their borders a clear and sodden green, full of the stink of rotting grass and bone. He easily picked up the scent of the Leucrotta itself, which was indeed very like blood, coppery and sharp. The Marshes were wide and smoke-colored, jade over polished wood, the sluicing paths of swamplands with their rattling cattails and poised egrets. The water shimmered like necklaces laid over one another, and beneath the water he could see fat eels and the flash of fish.
In fact, the Prince found the Marshes very beautiful, but every step sucked at his oversized shoes until the going was so slow that he thought he might very well be stuck there, save that he knew he must return to the Witch by the new moon in order to fulfill his promise. And so he dragged himself through the swamps, mud sloshing around his boots and catching the sheath of his sword in its wet pockets. At each up-step the mammoth boots threatened to catch, but slapped up against his heels at the last second.
In the center of the Marsh there was a copse of tamarind trees, their reddish bark glinting as though embers burned within. He wondered at it for a moment, drawn to their color. But Leander had had enough of magic, and he quite feared to be further delayed by whatever terror dwelt inside. He gave it a wide berth, though it meant wetting his breeches to the waist.
Just as he passed the copse, a shape composed itself seemingly out of the water and grasses, blocking his way.
“Do you insult me by passing through my land without paying me a visit?”
The shape coalesced into an old man whose beard drooped like the whiskers of catfish and whose hair was a great mass of tumbling moss. His eyes were precisely the shade of marsh water, sparkling green and brown in turns. His hands were wrapped in river reeds and his cloak was sewn together from fallen leaves and acorn mash.
He stood calmly, three feet over the nearest cluster of grasses, fine webbed feet resting on air, bemusedly smoking a pipe fashioned from willow whips.
“Well?” he demanded.
The Prince did not splutter, nor grasp for words like a dying trout gulping for water that will not come. He blinked slowly, once, twice, and sat down heavily on a moss-covered boulder.
The specter laughed heartily. “Poor little hatchling. It all gets to be a little bewildering after a while, I’ll admit. I am the Marsh King,” he gave a courtly little bow, “and you will have come from the Witch of the Glen to kill my friend Beast. Now, of course, I can’t let you do that, but I am happy to pass the time discussing it with you, if you would like to have a Discourse on the subject.”
“A Discourse? On whether or not I am going to kill the Leucrotta?” Leander replied, nonplussed. The Marsh King’s shaggy head bobbed merrily.
“Oh, he doesn’t stand on formalities—prefers ?Beast.’”
“Whether or not I am going to kill the Beast, then?”
“Oh, I’m afraid you still haven’t got it, my lad. Just ?Beast.’ He thinks the ?the’ makes it seem as though he puts on airs. Fine chap, Beast is.”
“Beast, then.”
“Beast.”
“And whether I ought to kill him.”
“A Discourse is such a fine thing.” The Marsh King sighed dreamily. “I recall I had a fine one once, oh, fifty years or so ago. Some other upstanding, earnest hatchling harassing Beast… they do come along at a clip these days. Let’s have one, shall we?”
The Marsh King’s eyes flashed like a glimpse of eel flesh in the shallow water, gleeful and fey.
WHEN THE LAST YOUNG MAN CAME ROUND, HE was very rude about it, all manner of officious in his gold tassels and scarlet cape. He didn’t visit me either, but when I appeared, he was amiable enough. Set his cape down on that rock and crossed his legs, as ready to Discourse with me as to lop off poor Beast’s head.
“Now”—I began at the simplest point, as you’ll see—“why do you want to kill Beast? He’s not borrowed your sword and forgotten to return it, he’s not spoiled your favorite sedan chair, he’s not bothered you at all!”
“I am a Prince,” he replied, being rather dense. “It is the function of a Prince—value A—to kill monsters—value B—for the purpose of establishing order—value C—and maintaining a steady supply of maidens—value D. If one inserts the derivative of value A (Prince) into the equation y equals BC plus CD squared, and sets it equal to zero, giving the apex of the parabola, namely, the point of intersection between A (Prince) and B (Monster), one determines value E—a stable kingdom. It is all very complicated, and if you have a chart handy I can graph it for you.”
“Ah, my lad,” I said, after he had quite spoiled one of my topographical charts with scribbling equations, “but Beast is not a monster. He does not gobble up maidens like cucumber sandwiches. He keeps to himself like any civilized Beast.”
“But he is quite ugly?” the Prince insisted.
“I think he is a fine fellow, but some might consider him homely, yes.”
“And he smells foul?”
“Well, I cannot argue with you there—one ought not to stand down-wind!”
“And he does have a terrible jaw of bone, and great tall horns?”
“Yes, yes, you’ve got Beast, all right!”
“Then he is a monster!” the Prince crowed, “and I must slay him at once. The Formula works!”
“Your Formula must result in a great deal of fighting,” I mused.
“Oh, yes, when applied correctly mighty and noble battles result! Of course I always win—the value of Prince X is a constant. It cannot be lesser than that of Monster Y—this is the Moral Superiority Hypothesis made famous five hundred years ago by my ancestor Ethelred, the Mathematician-King. We have never seen his equal, in all these centuries.”
“Of that I have no doubt.”
“If that is all, I believe I must be about my Proof,” said the Prince, brandishing his sword experimentally. “That is what we call a slaying,” he explained, giving the blade a great swing over his head. “For each time a monster is
killed, the Hypothesis is Proven.”
“How jolly of you to give it such a… civilized name. But I cannot allow it.”
“But… but…” he spluttered, indignant, “the Formula!”
“Nevertheless. This is my kingdom and no violence may come to anyone within my borders so long as I can help it. That, at least, you should understand. Here, my word is law.”
“Oh, yes.” He nodded. “The Universal Monarchic Algorithm is most central to the Theorem.”
“Theorem?”
“Of Proper Conduct.”
“Ah.”
“I did my thesis on the Monarchic Algorithm,” the young man huffed defensively. “If you will not allow violence within your borders—a moment, while I make some calculations”—he scribbled on my beautiful charts again—“I shall call him out—if he is a proper monster he will not refuse a challenge from a nobleman.”
I sighed, giving in to the inevitable. “No, that he will not.”
“Very well, then!” The Prince marched off humming a mnemonic tune as he went.
“WELL, MY FINE BOY, LET ME TELL YOU! THAT BOY tried to drop down from the crags onto Beast at the dueling ground—most unsporting—and got his limbs all tangled in poor Beast’s antlers. It took us weeks to remove them—and such unsavory work it was. Perhaps you will show more sense. Now then,” the Marsh King said, peering at him over abalone spectacles, “do you know any Formulae or Theorems?”
The Prince shook his head.
“Thank the wide-brimmed hat of heaven for that. Perhaps that style of government has gone out of fashion. Yet I fear you will still insist on disturbing Beast at this uncivilized hour.”
“I must.”
“And why? We have already established through the recitation of a most agreeable secondary Discourse that Beast is not a monster.” The Marsh King wrinkled his greenish nose in a puzzled way.
“I know.” Leander sighed. “But it cannot be avoided. And I have a question to ask of you before I reveal my purpose.”
The Orphan's Tales Page 10
