by Susann Cokal
I hurl the case, needles and all, into the witch’s bed.
There is a sudden flit of cloud shadow, so I can’t watch it go down, don’t even see the stars’ reflections tremble on the mud as it sinks.
I forget to pray, and utter a curse instead. I’m suddenly afraid. But in some small way, I’m also pleased, as if I’ve just flung every man I’ve ever known into the muck.
Then I turn and scurry lest the guard come to ask what I’m about.
INNER PRESENCE
NICOLAS’S lips are soft, softer even than Isabel’s or any other lady’s that Christian has kissed in greeting or in ceremony. And how does Christian know this? Because he and Nicolas are kissing, and it is not in ceremony.
Christian could not say how it began, only that it is pleasant and easeful, occurring somehow between a sip of wine and a daring lick of Nicolas’s finger. He might have been embarrassed by what would have been called flirting if it took place between a man and a woman, but he feels now that he need never be embarrassed again, there will never be anything wrong again, even his pain will vanish if he can only drink deeper of the pleasures of Nicolas’s mouth. His belly quivers.
All of him quivers. Too much. He is the King.
He stands (for he has still been sitting on his stool) and lurches toward the door of the tiny cabinet. But trips and has to catch himself against the wall, breeches down, head spinning.
Nicolas reacts immediately. Christian feels it, with a combination of surprise (new circumstances) and familiarity (old actions). The sponge, the sting of vinegar, the soothing ooze of rose-scented tallow. And nimble fingers tying the breeches loosely over a royal gut that does not know whether to be increasingly excited or — yes, maybe — ashamed.
No, not ashamed. Nicolas is helping him into the bedchamber, the chamber of Inner Presence, and closing the door on the cabinet of the stool. All Christian can think is that he wants Nicolas to turn around and kiss him some more, before they can start to realize what a sin they are committing.
Nicolas’s slender fingers grip Christian’s shoulders, then the sensitive sinews in the back of his neck. He gives the neck a soothing rub, removes Christian’s hat, and sets it on a table.
Christian feels his eyes tickling with tears. Perhaps he has only imagined . . .
More wine? No, he will not ask for it; he cannot speak.
Nicolas touches the pearl dangling from Christian’s ear, and it is astonishing how such a small sensation, a minuscule trembling in an almost invisible hole in the littlest part of the body, can make Christian’s heart soar and fall and hammer so that it might burst through the fragile case of bone to embrace Nicolas entirely.
Apparently unaware of the reaction he has provoked, Nicolas removes the earring, sets it on the table; as he does every night, he reaches up to rub both of Christian’s ears and smooth away any cold or sting there. The ears are in fact flaming hot. Christian is blushing. He’s sure now that he only imagined the kiss; he must be drunk with wine or pain.
Then Nicolas grips Christian by the dangling lobes and guides his head down so their lips can meet again.
Christian holds his breath, lest he miss some sensation.
The delicate point of the Count’s tongue snakes inside to tickle the King’s teeth, then the silky underside of the King’s lip. Christian opens his mouth, as he has never done with his wife, and tastes all the pleasures of this warm, musky, slightly sulfurous place inside another person.
Nicolas’s tongue is velvet. It is both soft and firm, salty and sweet, wide and narrow. It reaches all the way inside Christian and massages his deepest parts, stitching them up safe and free, for once, of pain.
Christian has never experienced such a swell of well-being in his life. His whole body glows with health and good feeling. And yet he knows, somehow, that there is more to feel.
Nicolas knows this too. He guides the King gently toward the bed.
A great bubble swells within Christian — pain, pleasure, anticipation . . . love at last.
There was once a princess whose land had fallen on hard times, and in order to refill the coffers and distribute charity to the poor, she had no choice but to sell herself to as many suitors as would have her during the night, at so many gold coins the hour.
Her father was grateful for the pile of money she deposited in his lap every morning, but he was a loving man and a suspicious one, so he ordered one of his guardsmen to follow the girl as she went to bed.
The guardsman discovered, of course, that rather than donning her silken nightdress upon retiring, the princess dressed in her most sparkling gowns, with her richest jewels, and painted her face in the manner fashionable at foreign courts. In this guise, and wearing the gold diadem of royalty, she rowed herself out to a ruined castle upon an island, where her suitors would line up for a chance at the favors of a woman they thought to be a fairy or a ghost, always magical in her effects.
These men were most often foreign ambassadors and lords of dark reputation who had made their fortunes outside the laws of the kingdom. They inevitably remarked on the girl’s (or fairy’s, or ghost’s) resemblance to the princess and tried to tease the truth out of her. She would smile mysteriously, holding her pretty pink hands (callused with rowing) over her face, before performing in a way that no man ever expected of a true princess.
The guardsman, of course, fell in love with her, and he picked the pockets of the ambassadors to enjoy precious hours in her embrace.
And so the people enjoyed the illusion of their princess, as well as the charity that her father was able to distribute as a result of her activities. In time the king built a mighty fleet and pressed the poor into serving as its sailors. The guardsman who had followed the princess led the new navy in battles against the foreign kings whose ambassadors had behaved so shamefully on the floating island.
As to the princess herself, her father — who loved her very much — locked her in a tall tower, to safe-keep her and the baby who resulted from her wild island nights. There she would gaze out the window with baby at her breast, hoping to catch sight of the fleet and to hear stories of their bloody adventures wafting upward on the wind. Shut away like this, she and her offspring wasted into nothing more than a few hairs and a fine scrap of softness that the wind carried off to some unseen place.
The first I know of it, a fellow scrub maid wakes me to say my stepmother is at the gates.
“She’s been clanging at them ever so long,” the girl says. “The guards are warning they’ll arrest her for the noise, but she says she will see you first.”
Blinking, exhausted — I fell asleep only an hour ago, after weeping as if to drown my broken heart in brine — I do up my clothes with cracked fingers and stuff messy braids under my cap. This is a cold morning; I actually consider wrapping the blanket around myself as I go out but decide it would be unseemly enough to result in my dismissal. Which, I think in that moment of innocent selfishness, would not be so bad . . . Surely, Father and Sabine would be kind again . . .
My head clears and I realize that I should worry, for if Sabine has come to the palace herself, with her belly, and she demands to see me — well, something very bad must have happened.
The guards let me pass the gates without a token, on condition that I remove the nuisance of my stepmother and return immediately.
“Bless the Virgin!” I cry when I see her.
In one glance, I understand why the guards want her gone. Sabine looks like a madwoman, sobbing wildly with her hair snaking about her face, her skin drenched in sweat despite the weather. I have never seen her so untidy before; it is as if she’s given up the grand-lady pretense and acknowledged that she’s a peasant in the blood.
My blood turns to jelly, but my bones hold strong beneath. I drag Sabine over to one of the little hollows in the cathedral facade where beggar trolls like to station themselves. It smells of urine and garbage, but no one’s there now; the crowd of simples hawkers and early morning churchgoers is thin tod
ay, and the trolls have gone back to their bridges.
“Is Father sick?” This is not the season for plague, but a thousand other maladies could have claimed him, his lungs never strong. “Or has something happened to the house?” I imagine fire, collapse, any number of calamities.
“Klaus!” she wails. “My Klaus is gone!” Then Sabine seems to have trouble catching her breath, for her bosom swells and her face turns purple, and I can’t get another word out of her for some time.
Of course I try: “Do you mean dead? Or has he left you?” I imagine him, madly, running off with Gerda the maid, to start life over with passion. And I imagine him lying cold in a coffin, with silver coins over his eyes. And I not given enough notice to say good-bye.
“Which is it?” I demand, and when my stepmother still cannot answer, I grab her by the shoulders and shake.
That does the trick. She turns redder than ever but manages a few words.
“This morning — the soldiers — and they knew just where to come, made straight for the house, so we had no warning at all. Klaus and his stone head with the spectacles! Wanting all the fine courtiers to find him!”
“What do you mean?” I ask with gathering dread.
“Ava, you must help. They’ve taken him away — they say he’s to blame!”
The dread becomes a lump of callused fact: The worst has happened. Only I still don’t know what the worst might be.
“To blame . . . for what?”
FLUX
IN the moments after Christian is stricken, Count Nicolas Bullen works fast. He tugs on his own clothes and wrestles Christian’s nightshirt into order, eases Christian to the floor, and closes the bed curtains, using a corner of one to mop the sweat from his own brow. He is overheated and has lost his doublet among the sheets. No one will notice that. He grips Christian, both of them groaning now, and drags him toward the close-stool cabinet.
Hearing the groans, the King’s grooms burst in. They stop to gape at the scene — Count Bullen supporting the filthy King, who moans and clutches first at Nicolas’s shirt, then at his own.
“It’s a flux.” Nicolas, visibly upset for perhaps the first time in court history, states what appears to be obvious. Christian obliges by soiling himself again.
When the grooms rush to support him, they discover that Christian is also bleeding, like a woman in her courses. The roomful of dashing men freezes, all stupefied. This royal indignity is worse than anything they saw at war (those who went). They don’t even have the strength to reach for their pomanders.
It is Willem Braj who orders, “Send for the physicians.” It is a guardsman who obeys.
Christian’s favorites dutifully carry him to his close-stool, but sitting is too torturous. They lay him in his bed instead, where he fouls the sheets again, obscuring the blood already soaked there. Then he drifts out of awareness, to fall into a painful shuddering sleep. As he moves, he seems to chant — perhaps a Latin prayer, perhaps a name, perhaps both.
In tenebris lumen . . .
Nicolas Bullen (BullenBullenBullen) stands to one side, thin and shivering. Naturally he is upset at having witnessed the onset of this most terrible crisis; anyone would be, even the man who should be best prepared to carry out an ailing King’s wishes.
Adjusting the sheets, Rafael af Hvas hands over Nicolas’s doublet without comment. Nicolas twists himself into it.
The physicians arrive, Krolik, Candenzius, Venslov, and Dé. Krolik announces that the King might choke on his own vomitus while lying on his back. The grooms turn the royal body on its side, whereupon Christian explodes again.
“How did this begin?” Dé asks Nicolas.
“I believe it is a flux,” the Count repeats himself, voice ticking like the inner works of a clock.
“But when . . . how . . . ?”
Nicolas says, sweating, visibly casting about for memories and answers, “He made use of his close-stool.” (This the doctors confirm, and they busy themselves studying the contents.) “And he gazed at the stars from a window.” (A lie.) “And he began suddenly to —” He waves, his fine family ring an arc of red. “To be as you see him now.”
Christian has lost his ovine look. He appears almost slender, noble, like the statue lying upon a sarcophagus. His breath rasps in his throat; perhaps he wants to speak. Fortunately he coughs instead, giving Nicolas more time in which to think.
The King’s Secretary needs a story, a useful story. Simple collapse will not be believed; a court that thrives on suspicion requires both explanations and rumors, real and imagined causes for each mysterious effect. It is time to direct attention — deflect it — for none must guess what he and the King were doing, how they were sealing the pact between themselves forever, the pact that ripped the last fragile bit of the long-ailing King apart. That will remain the ultimate secret.
Nicolas does not believe in Fate or even in coincidence. He believes in plot. As the others work over Christian, Nicolas collects the King’s garments, using the task to keep one eye on the physicians and courtiers while he schemes. He weighs the value of certain rumors: a lightning bolt, as opposed to Candenzius’s celestial poison, as opposed to a more ordinary earthly toxin such as is currently believed to have sickened the children. There is something to be said for an act of God, striking down a royal sinner as he gazed through a scientific machine at what God put in the heavens to mystify man. Just such a machine is to be found in Christian’s inner chamber, a contraption of metal and glass for occasional stolen minutes when Christian is seized to stare at a sky that to Nicolas looks as blank as the water on the bay.
Nicolas turns Christian’s hose in his hands, putting each leg right-side out. He wonders, Is it politic to arrest a court physician who dabbles in the stars — perhaps to acquit him later, as a favor to the Queen, who may be regent? He should order some action; he is the Secretary, the spymaster, and he should claim his power.
He tosses the hose on the cluttered table. “Remove Doctor Candenzius,” he orders. “Let him wait in the anteroom.”
Candenzius’s eyes are wide and frightened as he’s led away.
Or, thinks Nicolas, tapping his lip, what of the poisoners who have been sapping away at the children? There are plenty among the nursery workers who might be accused, as well as the Queen herself.
Totting up advantages and disadvantages, plotting out consequences, even the slyest courtier might stumble. Nicolas looks at the clock on the King’s mantel; it stopped at four, and the fancy second hand jerks forward and moves back like an itchy pendulum.
With deft swoops of the fleam and the cup, Krolik bleeds Christian from the arm, thigh, and back. Venslov and Dé assist him in every way. Their usual beakers rattle emptily; there is no point in asking the King to fill them with urine, for he has lost control of that function too, dried up like an old milch cow. Instead the doctors study cups of blood, sniffing, tasting, and heating them gently to test their qualities. They sift through basins of vomitus with their fingers, sniffing and tasting this too. They look for mandrake, wolfsbane, shards of glass. They scrape the King’s tongue and dig the junk out of his ears.
None of it illuminates.
Over the next hours, Christian’s skin turns a waxen yellow and retracts, making him appear more gaunt. He soils the sheets so many times that Nicolas finally orders the servants to stop changing them, as the actions pain Christian till his moans become unbearable for anyone with a heart.
At last the doctors admit what everyone knows already: The King is dying, though what the precise cause might be, they cannot tell. Rafael af Hvas sends for Father Absolon to offer final unction. Willem Braj offers to ring the chapel bells.
“Not yet,” Nicolas orders. “Would you commit treason? Announce the King dead already? He might still recover.” This fools no one. “Let us give the physicians time to work. Give the Queen time to wake, and give the council time to plan.”
Most members of the King’s council are here at his bedside, also too stunned to ac
t. “Is his testament written?” asks one of the lords.
“Long ago,” the bony court historian assures them. A scribe goes to fetch it. Sealed with a ribbon and red wax, the appearance of the scroll soothes the crowd. Nicolas, as Secretary, spreads it over a table and scans the first section.
“This was written when the Crown Prince was still alive. Before I became Secretary, even.”
The rest understand: The succession is not clear. Those courtiers who bear some relation to the Lunedies, however distant, tense themselves, already stiff with plans.
Suddenly Count Nicolas is inspired. Crossing back to the bed, he pretends to hear something. He climbs onto a footstool and puts his ear to His Majesty’s blue-white lips. He announces: “The King wishes to address us.”
Only half the courtiers present believe this to be the case, but all of them hold their breath, hoping to hear the King’s last words.
Nicolas’s ear stays at the royal mouth; he nods, raises his head, murmurs into the King’s ear as well. (One of the younger men present, responsible for counting royal jewels, notes that the King’s earring is missing.) Then Nicolas stands up straight on that footstool as on a dais, declaring to the crowd around the bed: “His Majesty commands us to arrest the charlatan who made those sham devices for looking at stars.”
It will be a start, anyway.
He bends to the King again, listens for another breathless moment. “And he wants to see his daughters,” he says. “Immediately.”
Rumors, traceless in origin but nonetheless clever, circulate through the tense, cold air of a dim December morning. The servants spread them without moving their lips; guardsmen and fishmongers carry them through the yards and down Skön Kanal, where lords and ladies exchange them over morning glasses of ale. And so on to merchants, craftsmen, visitors, and trolls.
