The Dragons of Babel

by Michael Swanwick

  Outside the building a band of duppies was playing reggae and citizens were dancing in the street. The king's heir had been found and the monarchy was restored. The stewardship of the Council of Magi, the Liosalfar and the Dockalfar, and the Lords of the Mayoralty was over. Democracy was no more. The king had returned to set everything right, and everyone who lived in Babel, it seemed, was mad with joy.

  For them it was the happiest day in the world.

  18

  In the Shadow of the Obsidian Throne

  A train whistle at night was a word that meant the same thing in all languages. It was compounded of loneliness and otherness and the futile desire to be anywhere but here, anybody but one's own wretched self. What made the heart ache at the sound of it was the knowledge that the locomotive was pulling out without you and always would. You were never going to catch that imaginary train that would carry you to the faraway land containing the solutions to all your problems. You were never going to arrive at the impossible city where all the things for which you secretly yearned were given away free in the streets.

  Sitting on a carved serpentine bench in the midnight garden, listening to the whistle fade, Will almost wished that the train would come and carry him away to his death.

  He heaved a sigh.

  "Sir? Is there anything you want?" the disembodied voice of his majordomo asked.

  "No. Of course not. I have everything. What could I possibly want?"

  "Sir?"

  "Go away, Ariel."

  At Will's feet was a pond as black as ink. Above him was the moon.

  He looked from one to the other. There were fish in the pond as strange as anything to be found in the crystal cities of the moon. Yet in all the universe he could think of nothing as strange as he himself, a king apparent who wanted only to escape his servants, wealth, and palace, a con man who had scammed himself into the most opulent prison in the history of the world.

  "The Master of the Tests approaches."

  "Shut up, Ariel."

  A shadowy figure came down the garden path, his feet almost silent on the gravel, and sat down on the bench alongside Will. "You understand things better now, I imagine, than when first we met." It was Florian L'Inconnu. He didn't exactly smile, but his expression was nowhere near so unfriendly as Will would have expected it to be.

  "I understand that I'm trapped here."

  "You shouldn't feel that way. Not when the tests have gone so well." So they had. The blood work had proven Will to be part mortal, which had not surprised him, and the ring that Nat had given him had been declared sufficiently old and plausibly similar enough to the recorded aspects of the kings signet to pass muster, which, given Nat's attention to detail, was only to be expected. But he had also passed tests — the spontaneous cure of a scrofulous imp after Will touched him, the wizards' approval of a humble wooden spoon plucked at random from a trove of hundreds of gaudy trinkets—that he had expected to fail. That very afternoon, the sibyls had thrown seventeen coins minted of virgin silver and they had all come up heads. Which convinced Will as nothing else would have—for he could work that same trick in a dozen different ways—that the tests had been rigged in his favor.

  "So what? There's only one way this can end."

  "I know that you believe you are not the true heir," Florian said. "I ask only that you consider the possibility that you might be wrong. Enough survivors from your former village have been interviewed to establish that your parentage is... clouded."

  "I'm a bastard, you mean."

  "Which is no shameful thing when the biological father is the king! The monarch is numinous. His touch ennobles. His sperm breeds true."

  "It'll make a great pickup line, anyway." Will was silent for a long moment. Then he said, "How is she?"

  Florian did not pretend not to understand. "Well enough. She has her work, and that's something. You may have noticed how well prepared everybody was when you showed up at Ararat with the rabble at your back—the entire Council present and accounted for, with no laggards. That was Alcyone's doing. She got a plaque for it." "I'm glad."

  "She always asks after you. Guardedly, of course. Are you being cared for properly?"

  Will snorted "I asked for a sword so I could keep in practice with my fencing. I was thinking of an epee, though I could've made do with a toil, but I didn't actually specify that." He raised his voice. "Light!" A line of garden torches burst into flame making the silk party canopy behind them flutter. "Take a look at what they gave me."

  He held out both hands flat and a sword appeared in them. Drawing the blade free of the scabbard, he gave it to Florian.

  "A Masamune!" Florian held it up so that the torchlight glittered from the martensite crystals m the habuchi. "Look at the nie! Like stars! It is a privilege just to hold it."

  "Yet they gave it to me."

  "Who better?"

  "My skill is mediocre at best and I've only ever practiced with a European blade. Before they gave me this, I'd never even held a katana. Surely it belongs with somebody who can appreciate it."

  "You're in quite a mood tonight." Florian put a hand on Will's knee.

  Will looked at him in astonishment. "Is that what you want?" "What? No," Florian said. "Oh, I'm perfectly willing, of course. But what I really want is a king. An absolute monarch is a weapon finer than anything Masamune ever crafted, and I want to wield one with my own hand." He gestured with the sword. "One stroke to cut through the bureaucracy and red tape that keeps Babel from ever accomplishing anything. A second to behead the lawyers. A third to strike down the traitors who return from the War and spread tales that it is bogged down and unwinnable. Another for subversives and activists fueled by class envy, labor unions, intellectuals, defeatists..."

  "There are good reasons for laws and lawyers and truth-tellers." Will stood. "Nor do I value action for its own sake." He walked in among the trees and Florian followed.

  Twelve trees grew in the garden of the Palace of Leaves. These were the Birch, the Ash, the Alder, the Willow, the Hawthorn, the Oak, the Holly, the Hazel, the Vine, the Ivy, the Water-Elder, and the Elder. The Vine was a tree only by courtesy, of course. But taken together, the garden formed a grimoire written in the runes in the Alphabet of Trees, and thus to one who could read them (and there was no shortage of such in His Putative Majesty's service), all auguries were implicit therein. Further, in accord with the quantum-astrological law, "As Above. So Below" and the principle of reverse causation, its foretellings must inevitably bring whatever they predicted into existence.

  "Behold." Will plucked an elder leaf from a limb hanging over the edge of the garden and dropped it over the railing. It twisted and looped in the night wind and then was lost to sight. "I have raised a storm half a world away," he said. "Or perhaps I have quelled an earthquake. A child will be born with two extra fingers. One who was meant to be lame will be whole. There's no way of knowing, is there?"

  "No."

  "So is it wise to meddle blindly?"

  "Not blindly, lord, but boldly." Florian fluidly moved into a fighting stance. With a stroke of the katana too swift for the eye to track, he lopped a limb from a birch. The blade struck a glancing blow off the trunk of an oak. Bark flew. "A ship sinks! A city declares bankruptcy! Revolutionaries launch rocket attacks across a previously quiet border!" Twigs showered down upon his head and he laughed. "Glory falls from the sky!"

  "For the love of the Seven, stop—you don't know what you're doing!"

  "Why should I care?" Electrical fires crawled about Florian's face and hair. "For me, anything—even if it entailed my own death— would be preferable to peace and stagnation."

  Will felt the dragon-anger rising up in him and choked it down. "Put the katana away," he said, and the sword disappeared from Florian's hand and its scabbard from the bench. And to Florian: "Your scheme, then, is to replace a functioning democracy with the rule of force. "This brute anarchy and nothing more."

  "Why should you defend the old regime? A demo
cracy is a bovine thing that wants nothing more than to be left alone to endlessly chew its cud and fertilize the fields. It has no taste for blood. It lacks the capacity to endure hardship, nor does it welcome pain. Only in extremis, and at the urging of the elite, will it rise to greatness, and when the crisis is over it inevitably sinks back down into the muck of inaction and petty corruption."

  "You had best pray that I am not the king. For I would never trust one such as you."

  "No, Majesty. I am the only one you can trust, for I have revealed myself completely to you. Think you the others are saner or less ruthless than I? Pfaugh! They will smile and flatter and lie, all from the same mouth, and you will know they are misleading you but not to what purpose. But I am a tiger—you understand me. So when need comes, you will turn to one whose biases you know."

  "Then I suppose that there's a bright side to the fact that the situation will never come about." Will leaned heavily on the garden rail, feeling the exhausted breath of the city warm on his face. A thousand windows gleamed on the skyscrapers below. Almost whimsically, he said, "I could leap over the edge here and now and fly away."

  "If you had wings, you mean." "Even without them. I'd be free. For a time," Will said darkly. He turned back to face Florian. "I am weary and I am going in to sleep now. You may retire from my presence."

  "My liege." With only a hint of a smirk, Florian withdrew.

  Will remained, staring out into the darkness, thinking thoughts he would not have cared to share with anyone. After a time, a polite voice said, "Sir? Will you be needing your bed turned down?"

  "Fuck off, Ariel."

  A Pretender did not wake himself up. The music of fairy flutes entered his dreams to warn him that his sojourn in the lands of sleep was come to an end. Then a soft and deferential voice informed him that it was morning. Twin yakshis eased him from the bed. A dwarf in red velvet read him the day's schedule as he was being dressed.

  "... Immediately following the test by fire and oil. After which you will oversee the installation of the new garden furniture."

  Will stretched and yawned, sending the yakshi who was fitting him into his brocaded vest dancing after his hand. "Is that really necessary?"

  "If you'll recall, it was your own request, sir. You were deeply involved in the design."

  "Oh, yeah." Will absently scratched his stomach, earning a small but fetching pout from the second yakshi, who was kneeling before him, buttoning his trews, and now had to undo them again in order to tuck his blouse back in. He flapped a hand negligently. "Pray, continue."

  "There will then be an hour's free time, which may be spent napping, or in light sports, or in educational pursuits." "I'm in the mood for a monoceros hunt."

  The dwarf smiled indulgently, as one might at a willful but fundamentally sound child who didn't know how transparent his attempts at deception were. "There would scarcely be the time, sir. Also, while you're on probation, you can't leave the palace. If you wish, you could go up on the roof and hawk for pigeons."

  "It's not the same thing, is it, Eitri? I think I'll spend the hour in the cabinet of curiosities."

  Half the palace was forbidden to Will because it was taken up by the the living quarters of the servants needed to make it function, and it would be wrong to embarrass them by barging in unannounced. Half of what remained was closed to him at any given time because it was being cleaned or stocked or restored or disenchanted, and it was not proper for the help to labor in his presence. Of the rest, a great deal was not to his taste, and even more served no function that he could understand. Yet what finally remained was enough to occupy anyone. Will was particularly fond of the library and the sauna and the roof garden, with the orrery, the saurischian pit, the Victorian fernery, and the observatory not far behind. The picture gallery was, admittedly, a bit of a disappointment (all the finest paintings were on loan to public museums, he was told, but could be recalled upon his coronation), but the smoking room with its Whistler peacocks and gold trim, and the Frank Lloyd Wright lounge, rescued from a house demolished during the last teind, were first-rate. However, what he enjoyed above all else, the only thing that he out-and-out loved, was the cabinet of curiosities.

  Or so he'd made certain that all the staff knew.

  So that afternoon, immediately after he'd approved the new rattan tables and chairs (the tables looked more like overturned bushel baskets than he'd anticipated, but that was all to the good) and the rose-hedge plantings to either side of the garden canopy, he allowed himself to be taken to his most cherished possession.

  "Sir," the docent said with the smallest and stiffest of bows when he entered the cabinet.

  "Dame Serena," Will said. Alone of all the staff Dame Serena refused to permit the Pretender to address her familiarly. Yet Will could never resist trying. "You're looking as lovely as ever, today."

  "Piffle," she said. "Age has laid its hand upon my shoulder and left me hunchbacked, skinny as a twig, and so wrinkled that even prunes shudder at the sight of me. A gentleman which is an estate that even a king would do well to aspire — to would not have brought up so painful a subject."

  "Eitri says you were a king's mistress when you were young."

  "Does he."

  "He says you were mistress to two kings and the terror of every monarch since."

  "Eitri is a verminous little gossip, and a backstabbing snitch. If you had any self-respect, you wouldn't listen to him. Now. What is it that you want to see today?"

  Though the original cabinet may have been a single piece of furniture, the collections had long since metastasized to the point where they required a vast, barrel-vaulted room stuffed with cases and vitrines. A Conestoga wagon, a whaling boat, and a Soyez spacecraft hung from the ceiling. There was a Scythian lamb growing in a pot alongside a stuffed Capricorn. Hidden away within drawers were comprehensive selections of stone flowers from the Urals and dried mushrooms from the Fôret de Verges; on the walls were the only portraits of Queen Lilith and Lord Humbaba known to have been painted from life; elsewhere were to be found the cauldron of Ceridwen, a vast table whose polished top was made from a cross-section sliced from a single horn of Behemoth, endless shelves of Japanese shunga, a crystal skull that could talk, though not to any purpose, seven coral-encrusted brass bottles in which Solomon had imprisoned rebellious djinni — only one of which had been obviously breached — and much else besides.

  "The amulets of power, I was thinking," Will said.

  "Follow me."

  Dame Serena glided down the aisles, not bothering to look to see if Will was keeping up. She stopped before an exhibit case and one by one its drawers glided open at her glance, each containing hundreds of amulets, Will pointed at random to an amulet that was set with garnets. "What does this one do?"

  "Place it around the neck of whosoever you desire and he or she will fall completely and immediately in love with you." She sniffed. "I imagine that makes your eyes light up, eh?"

  "Alas," Will said, "getting someone to love you is the easy part."

  "Quite right," the docent said crisply. "Though where in the world one so young as yourself learned such a salutary lesson is more than I wish to know." She nodded and the drawers slid closed. "What else would you like to see?"

  "There was another drawer with some interesting amulets..."

  "You'd be thinking of the unicorn-ivory amulet with the secret name of fire carved into it. The one you tried to snitch the last time you were here. No, I don't think that you need to look at that. What else?"

  Will drew himself up. "Dame Serena. I am the king apparent, not only of this tower but of all Babylonia and half the civilized world beyond. So that amulet is properly mine. You may doubt the legitimacy of my claim, if you wish, but even if I were an imposter — what conceivable difference would it make? Where could I possibly go with it?"

  The docent's face grew taut with anger. Old though she was, there was no denying that she had great cheekbones; it was easy to imagine what her dead lovers
had once seen in her. She jabbed him hard in the chest with a long bony linger. "Don't you try to pull rank with me, you young jackanapes. I've got tenure. And it's been a long time since I was impressed by mere royalty. Once you've seen an absolute monarch drunk, covered in his own puke, and weeping because he can't get it up, you lose all sense of awe for the institution. Now. At the risk of repeating myself, what next?" "Urn... winds?"

  The cabinet of winds held a suite of shallow drawers divided into partitions like typesetters' trays. Each partition in turn contained a short length of rope tied into a witch-knot, and each witch-knot different. Dame Serena lightly touched four knots at the cardinal points of the tray. "These are the Anemoi, according to the Greek system: Boreas the North wind, Zephyros the West, Notos the South, and Euros the East, which are also known as Tramontana, Ponente, Ostro, and Levante, in the medieval compass rose system, whose octave is completed by Maestro, Libeccio, Siroco, and Greco. The subdivisions are theoretically infinite, of which this collection contains several hundred particularly select exemplars."

  "These are from Lapland, right?" Will said, fingering the tray. He lifted a knot. "What happens if I untie one?"

  "We shan't ever know, shall we?" Dame Serena slapped his hand. "Drop it," she said, adding, "You're a regular font of mischief today."

  "It was only a zephyr," Will said placatingly. He placed the witch-knot back in its rectangle with such exaggerated care that Dame Serena didn't notice that he had palmed the original knot, while leaving a carefully tied duplicate of it in its place.

  The hour went quickly. ("Ten minutes, sir," Ariel said, and "Get stuffed," Will replied.) As Will was turning to leave, however, Dame Serena slid open yet another drawer. "There's something in here you'll want to see," she said. "This is Your Majesty's smallest territory. It'll take no time at all to inspect." Within the drawer were blue ocean waters with spouting whales smaller than earwigs and a mountainous island no more than a yard across, complete with harbors, a bustling port, and wee stone cities.