by Susann Cokal
Gorma moan. I take another cloth to wipe her mouth.
“I made that,” say the ratty maid.
My eyes narrow. Some nurses gossip, but I do not.
“That towel.” The maid point at my hand. She think I do n’t under stand. “I cut and hemmed and embroidered it. That particular carnation pattern is always mine. Until this week, I was one of the Queen’s needlewomen.”
This girl is like a reed that scream a note each time the wind pass by. My eyes so slitty now I hardly see her stupid face. Far behind it is the Countess’ black dress of grieving, and if this girl think it care to me that once she sew with a needle what now I fold up wet with Gorma spit, she be wrong as a frog in a cream pot.
When I were little, I lived with fifty aunts in a house made of turquoise. I had an arm of gold bracelet and four black cats I name my self. That make no differents now.
“Shh,” I tell her. “Shhh, shh, sh.”
The Princess fret to hear me sound at some one else. “No!” she say, loud enough that Countess Elinor cock her ear, though she keep spooning to Crown Prince Christian and trying coax his smile.
“Shh,” I hiss to Princess again. I say it different to her, though, and stroke my hand downside her face — soft, wet pink skin. I tuck a curl in to her cap.
Gorma open her mouth like a baby bird. I spoon.
That maid come so close, I smell her woolly smell. She think she and I be friends now. I think this shall change with nursey-work. We all reek like bottoms of a moat, so our lovers hold their breath when we embrace. We none of us are friends.
Her voice lower to a whisper, and she talk in the way of those girls who do with out their lips. “Were you there when it happened? Princess Sophia?”
I do n’t look, just shake my head. I knew what she mean before she spoke.
She go on: “Do you know what took her? Have you heard? Some sort of seizure, I heard. Or else a poison. But what kind?”
I ignore the maid, wipe Princess Gorma’s face, do as I am supposed. After so many year, I can feel when the Countess my mistress coming close. If she leave the Prince, this mean he all ready asleep, and she wonder why the other children are n’t. After they all fall off, nurses and grooms will pick them up and put them in the little night rooms, where some body sit and watch each one till dawn.
I murmur in my throat, water on a stone, and see Gorma lids go droop. Soon she sleep.
That girl still have n’t seen the Countess coming. “What do you think?” she ask. “What can you tell me?”
I turn to this stupid girl and open my eyes all they way. She believe this a kindly thing; she blink, smile, then part her mouth to speak again.
I open my mouth first and show her my tongue.
She scream.
They are no uncommon sights these days, the wounds of men who’ve been to war and the scars of disease at home. But there is something worse, something evil, in the tongue that Midi Sorte shows me.
The thing is forked. Split from the tip to the root and scarred thickly down the way. The two halves of it move, waving like snakes till they wind back into her throat and disappear.
Of course I scream.
My scream rouses Princess Gorma. She screams too, thinking Satan’s wraiths have come to drag her to her sister’s fate. The other children take up Gorma’s cry, and there’s such a general wail and clamor that the glass leaves tremble on their branches overhead.
Countess Elinor’s face is a knot of fury when she descends upon Midi and me. She sees the twist of Midi Sorte’s lips, now pressed tight together, and guesses what I’ve been looking at. She gives Midi a cuff across the jaw that wipes the lingering smirk clean away.
This is some small vindication for me, but not enough. I feel sorry for having brought Elinor Parfis’s wrath on Midi Sorte, even though she did provoke me. Sorry, too, that it seems Midi cannot speak; she could have been my best source for what Lord Nicolas wants of me.
Later, while I sit among the deserted fanciful beds, waiting to be needed in one of the night chambers, that tongue troubles my mind. Midi Sorte has gone to her own cot in the nurses’ dorter; but in the shadows I see her tongue licking the walls, splitting itself into a thousand parts, opening holes and passageways within the bricks; then knitting up again in a long, fat muscle that could make toothpicks even of Prince Christian’s massive lion bed. It is a demon, a dragon, worse than the monster of any story I’ve ever heard.
I surmise this forking of the tongue must be some custom of the place Midi came from — I’ve heard she arrived from the south as a present for Countess Elinor, who in turn gave her to the Queen — but I can’t figurate why the King and Queen allow her among their children.
I imagine Midi Sorte wagging her tongue, scaring Princess Sophia to death on her wedding night. But is it worth reporting to Lord Nicolas — as evidence of evil, witchcraft, something? Would a split tongue satisfy him?
That demon tongue is my only company in the long night hours. It divides and twists, gobbling up the room in which I sit.
WAITING
IT is long past midnight, a deep blue hour. Countess Elinor Parfis is waiting.
She waits not in the small chamber where the door must remain open so that she can hear if the Queen snores or hiccups in her sleep — that chamber where she is virtually a prisoner — but in another room deep in the bowels of the casemates. It is scarcely more than a nook, a pocket filled to bursting with objects of richness pilfered from here and there around the palace: a gilded chair, a rock-crystal swan, a clever silver pitcher that never empties. A clock sent to the Queen by some minor foreign prince, tick-ticking away on a worktable piled with more rich stuff, measuring out the seconds and the minutes almost to an hour.
Elinor is not by nature a patient woman, though she has bided her time the last six years, traveling back and forth to court until she made herself indispensable. The Queen is now unable to act without the advice of her one true friend. Chief lady-in-waiting, Mistress of the Nursery, favorite of Crown Prince Christian. Not a woman who should wait any longer.
Elinor is just on the point of leaving — swiveling on the balls of her feet, swooping up a golden toothpick in the shape of a cruel Eastern scimitar, for she feels her time should be compensated — when she hears a key scraping into the other side of the door. She slips the toothpick into her high-sprung bodice as the complicated lock clicks into place, the latch rattles, the door opens.
And there he is, her partner. Standing framed in the doorway with a whale-oil candle, light dancing over the shadows of his doublet, cloak, and breeches. There never was a man so vain as this.
“You’re late,” she snaps. Then is annoyed with herself for letting her temper show. She hoists her bosoms even higher, never mind if the golden scimitar peeks out (it doesn’t) or pricks her (it does).
She softens her voice to the purr she uses for the royal Lunedies. “You’re late, and I must return to my post,” almost as if she regrets it. Her eyes linger on him as if she is in love.
He plays the same game, looking at her tenderly and speaking in a voice that rolls over her like velvet. “Don’t you know I would rather have been with you?” That voice gives the impression of size and substance, even though he is not a large man; it makes her tingle as she imagines she would if she were actually in love. She almost relents.
But the glint in his green-blue eyes keeps her purpose firm. She resists the impulse to ask where he was — let him have his secret; she has hers too.
“The Queen thinks I never leave her side.”
He smirks. “Because you drug her before you disappear.”
She shrugs; it’s true. “What is the sense of having access to so many poisons if I don’t put them to use?”
“Let me put you to use,” he growls, stepping close enough for her to smell his perfume. He always uses too much of it; it’s hard to trust a man who covers his own scent like a wolf.
“Not tonight,” she says curtly. “I’m going back.”
“Any news first?” He doesn’t seem to care about keeping her anymore. She suspects he has no real interest in fleshly conversation, only uses it as a spider uses a web, to trap his prey, because he is so vain as to think himself universally desired. But she is not prey.
She could report that Morbus Lunediernus is moving swiftly through the other children, weakening their bones such that Princess Amalia’s wrist snapped when she was shifted in bed. But he doesn’t deserve to know, not after making her wait.
“No news,” she says. Her purr has become the rasp of ice scraping against the hull of a ship.
He passes her and sets his candle down on the table, begins examining the papers lying there. (Nothing of interest; she already read through them.) “You still haven’t made progress?”
“The Princess died, didn’t she? No babies to come from Sweden.” That was due more to luck than skill, but she won’t tell him so. “And how about you — have you managed the King yet? Is the old sheep likely to name you an officer in his will?”
Her maddening conspirator apes her gesture and shrugs. The clock ticks loudly in the quiet between them.
These two are uneasy allies at best. Each suspects the other of keeping too many secrets, of being careless with the ones they do exchange. But for now they want the same thing: power; and when they have it, Elinor fully intends to rid herself of her crippled old husband and marry this man. Who might be easily dispatched as well, once he’s served her purpose; she really has learned an astonishing amount about poisons. Secrets she will keep to herself.
“Till next week, then,” she says, looking over her shoulder as she lifts the damask door flap. “And don’t keep me waiting again, or I’ll find someone who is ready to plot.”
He puckers his beautiful mouth (yes, Elinor is still susceptible to beauty, especially with such a husband as she has) and blows a kiss through the still air. He says, “Enjoy your new toothpick. Use it in good health.”
“I shall.” Her voice is as cold as the air in a long, dark winter.
She steps into the corridor, taking half the light in the room with her.
THE KING’S HEART
KING Christian V is not in the habit of contemplating unpleasantness. But sometimes truth is undeniable, and here is a terrible truth: He is in love. At last, and for the first time in his life. He loves; it is pleasure and it is agony.
Who could capture the heart of a king who, perhaps alone out of all Christendom, and in forty-two years of life, has broken not a single marriage vow? For Christian V has been a model of that particular virtue: conjugal fidelity. The common people celebrate him for it, even as (he knows, has always known) the nobles speculate about his failure to take a mistress. His wife has been pleased to think him a Catholic like herself, decorous and loyal and nearly monklike.
But now Christian wants, needs, something different.
Of course, taking a mistress would be less terrible than a . . . something for which there is no word, or none that Christian will let himself think. There are priests, generous priests, who say that love makes a sin less serious. But that love is customarily one between man and woman.
Christian V is not in love with a woman. He loves Lord Nicolas Bullen af Bon.
This love came on suddenly; it came to him strong. He cannot believe now that he was dimly aware of Lord Nicolas without realizing the power of those light eyes, black hair, musky sweet perfume . . .
It is worse than unwise. It is impossible. He should send Lord Nicolas away, perhaps as ambassador to an important court. The man himself would be the first to say so . . . And yet it is in Nicolas’s arms that Christian yearns to seek comfort for the loss of his daughter; Nicolas in whom Christian dreams of confiding his fears about a weakness of the Lunedie blood, the nightmarish sense that dark-winged doom is swooping swiftly toward him. Always, now, Nicolas — the only councillor whose opinion seems to matter. After a mere whiff from that eight-celled pomander, so thoughtfully provided at just the right moment, some kind of sorcery has enchanted Christian.
He barely knows the man, has only just asked him to leave the Queen’s household and join Christian’s own. But at last — and for the first time, yes — Christian knows what poets mean when they write of longing, burning, mingled joy and sadness. He experiences the sweet grief of the unattainable all day long. Nicolas finds a thousand subtle ways to praise Christian’s kingly form, his just decisions. There is no king so judicious, no king so generous, so handsome. Each compliment is like a pearl cast before him. Nicolas hints that even if Christian were not king, there would be an endless string of willing suitors for his heart. He flatters so deftly that Christian might almost think Nicolas himself would be such a candidate.
This much is joy.
But there is despair in knowing that Nicolas — loved as he is — conducts his life in a different way, the way that involves women. Christian has heard rumors about Nicolas’s traffic with apron wearers, even one or two of the court ladies. A Countess Ditlevnavn or Engberg, or some other . . .
Never mind.
So Christian frets, and resolves to love no one but his children, again, and become a better king. A better husband, a better father. He will give his daughter a glorious funeral, and her murderer (she must have been murdered, it is the only allowable possibility) a terrible punishment.
At the same time, he knows his resolution is in vain. Whether Nicolas is aware or not, he will keep the King’s heart, for Christian is nothing if not faithful.
SILENCE
SUCH a splendor! Such riches that generous King Christian lavishes on his eldest daughter, even after her death! Every household and workroom and warehouse in each corner of the city prepares for her funeral. There will be a catafalque of gold cloth, a girdle of sapphires, a tower of the season’s last white lilies, a feast of delicacies as fine as those at the wedding, for the Swedes must be shown, one final time, that this land is every bit as prosperous and refined as theirs. And Sophia, of course, must be mourned as befits the place she has held in her parents’ hearts and hopes.
While she is on view in the cathedral, the restored Princess wears the emerald parure that Duke Magnus gave her for the wedding, as well as that sapphire girdle. Incense from Lebanon burns sweetly around the body, obscuring any hint of rot. Her rosy wedding costume has been expertly stuffed to give the illusion of more fullness than poor Sophia showed in life; her face, carefully painted. She is, for the first time, beautiful.
Sophia has become a figure of legend, like the original witches and mermaids and the secret stairways inside the palace walls that have never been found. She is the Virgin Bride, the Perished Lily, the land’s greatest treasure. The chroniclers speculate that she will bring the land more honor and renown in death than she did in life.
During this time, Magnus of Östergötland mourns in a way traditional for males. Guided by one of Christian’s trusted friends, he and his men go north to one of the green islands to hunt meat and birds for next week’s feast. They plan to return in time for the grand ceremony, when Magnus will present his dead bride’s parents with a drinking horn he has ordered inlaid with gold. The horn is from one of the oxen killed for the wedding feast. Christian, Isabel, and Magnus will drink to Sophia from it, then set it aside forever.
The people of Skyggehavn imagine these treasures will be used just once, then vanish into eternity when they are rowed out to Sophia’s grave at the monastery of Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle. But apart from the incense, everything has been put to service before, and after the funeral it will all return to the palace vaults along with the new drinking horn. Except the emeralds — they will sail back to Östergötland with Magnus. Such is the cycle of royal wealth and public fantasy.
As the monks of Saint Peter’s rehearse the funeral songs, the limners paint their last dainty portraits of the dead Princess, and the goldsmiths fashion frames for them. The palace bakers roll out yet another pie crust; the butchers slaughter more cows, sheep, and pigs. Sophia’s tra
gedy deepens all their souls. Poor Perished Lily. They contemplate her as they work; she has brought coins to pockets twice, first for her wedding and now for this.
When their work is done, the people visit her in the glowing cathedral and leave little tokens of affection: a ribbon, a flower, a roasted nut. When she is to be entombed, they stand on the broad plads and watch while black-clad nobles pile into barges at the palace dock, then row out to the floating monastery of Saint-Peter’s-on-the-Isle. They wait through the funeral ceremony, while their feet swell and ache, hoping to taste some scraps from the grieving feast.
The courtiers have much more to do. Through the long afternoon — the prayers, the songs, the interminable lecture in Latin — they maintain a rigid silence. They are silent in the boats; they are silent as they find their places at table in the great hall, and as they bow for the entrance of their King and Queen.
King Christian’s ornamental sword sways in its hilt like a duck’s tail, slapping him on the calf. No one laughs or even whispers. It would be the worst breach of etiquette to let go any sound during the funereal feast; lips must smack quietly, belches and farts be stifled no matter the agony they cause. The musicians in the gallery hold their instruments in their laps, staring dumbly forward. They are there as reminders of the absence of sound, the quiet of the grave.
King Christian sits, then Queen Isabel, then Duke Magnus and all the others. The dwarfs (Le Fariné, Wantonesse, Champignon, and all the other grotesques) sit at their tiny table without cutting a single caper.
At Isabel’s right, Duke Magnus’s eyes droop. He has had enough of life at this dull northern court. Even the whores have been in mourning this week, and the hunting was terrible.
Then comes the quiet padding of pageboys’ feet as they carry out the first pie of the evening, so big that four of them must bear it together on a sturdy board. Eel and cod’s roe in thick buttered gravy, with a flaky lard crust. Delicious in aroma; the diners’ mouths water.
