Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 97

by Maria Dahvana Headley

  Sharpening his sword, Paulus imagined the boy grown into a soldier, and was filled with a black fury at what the world had done to him. No, he thought. The boy slept as only a child can, still as death, unstirred by the scrape of the whetstone. Memories rode in on the tide of Paulus’ anger. In the Book was a story of a girl named Lily, saved by a story whispered in her ear while she was sleeping. Thinking of it, Paulus found his own tongue loosening. A story came to him, and as he remembered it he told it to the boy.

  3

  Legend had it that the commoners’ gift of magic came from the gods’ anger at the separation of people into high and low. Like all legends, this one was as good an explanation as any, and the kingdom largely subscribed to it. One bit of magic, to be deployed once and only once, whether foolish or wise: this was the commoner’s reward for a lifetime of subservience. The jester found this delicious, and wasted no opportunity to crow over the kingdom’s fatuous belief. But the jester had secrets, and reasons.

  Much of his life was apparent in the topology of his face. The king’s common subjects bore an expression of calm security, a faith in their sovereign and in their one bit of magic to see them through whatever demands life would place upon them. But as if he had been built by one of the angry gods, the jester’s face quirked and twisted with freshly remembered regret, and his cast eye, forever looking vacantly away to his right, took on a horrible aspect when his humor turned scabrous and biting. The younger princes and princesses fled the throne room at his every entrance, pushing each other in most ignoble haste, and the queen reluctantly took action when the youngest prince, awakening in mortal fear from a nightmare of the jester’s crooked eye and whiplash tongue, ran blindly from his room and broke both of his legs in a fall down a flight of stairs.

  Only a few hours later, in the throne room, the queen looked sadly from her liege lord to his memento mori, telling each that the safety of the royal progeny outweighed decades of service and reward. “His loyalty to you speaks well of him,” she said to the king. “Even your dog is not so loyal.”

  The old dog looked up at her, the tip of his tail twitching. The jester thought that if he had had a tail, it might have twitched as well.

  The queen spoke more than she knew, and behind his beard the king mused. The jester farted outrageously and refused to say a word, but within the scrawny rack of his chest, his heart beat with both fear and love for the queen who at that moment was proposing that he be pensioned off to a mountain barony safely away from tender gazes. His love for her exceeded the bounds even of his love for ruler and kingdom, and in that moment the jester bitterly regretted the day when he had loosed his one bit of magic to save the king.

  Outside the castle walls, the jester sat crosslegged against a dead tree, looking out over the shore of a lake whose surface was rippled like an old window. He was tired of conjuring witty deflating comments. Tired of handstands, tired of juggling the skulls of the king’s would-be assassins. He’d grown old, found aches in his joints and sleepless nights at the end of every day. There were many things he wished had never happened.

  The jester had not always been a jester, any more than the king had been a king or the king’s dog had been a dog. The day the old king died, the crown prince sat a silent vigil by his father’s body until midnight, when he leapt to his feet and went to the chamber door. “Tomorrow a barred door closes on me,” he said to his guard. “Tonight I walk through my city.”

  In the marketplace the uncrowned king walked among his subjects. He flirted with shop girls, bought perhaps one too many flagons of wine, and found himself in the shadow of the city walls watching a pair of ragged street performers. They were tired and performed reluctantly, but he gave them the strength of gold thrown at their feet. When the first birds had begun to chirp in anticipation of the dawn, the pair of acrobats were still turning their tumbles and mining their repertoire for tricks this munificent stranger had not yet seen.

  Few things travel faster then news of a king’s death, and the two weary acrobats were attuned to town gossip as only itinerant clowns can be. The older brother had absorbed the news and let it find a resting place in his mind; the younger had grown consumed with desire to avenge an injustice perpetrated by the dead king many years before, when an unlucky circus ringmaster had made an inopportune comment about the old king’s cleft palate. One thing that travels faster than news of royal death is tidings of royal insult, and before long the ringmaster had vanished into the castle dungeon as his two boys performed with masklike faces before their sovereign, who rose at the end to pronounce the show the most excellent he’d seen in many a year.

  The older son had made his peace with this. One lived in one’s world, and one did not insult the king. The younger, though, turned the injustice inward and fed on it, not realizing that it was also feeding on him. Over a span of ten years man and hatred grew more to look like one another, and at last on a breezy summer night with dew on the ivy that climbed the city walls, the younger brother, addled with fantasies of regicide, saw his chance for revenge.

  It would be their final routine, the brothers told their sole watcher. Dawn was coming, and besides they knew no trick to better it.

  The uncrowned king accepted this. “I have been well entertained,” he said, “and who better than you to know when you have no more to give?”

  Nodding, the brothers unfolded a leather package containing ten knives. “Ready?” the older asked.

  “We should rehearse it once.”

  “Start with three, then.”

  The king couldn’t be certain whether the clowns were really so uncertain of this routine, or whether the uncertainty was part of their patter. Predawn gleam flashed on the knife blades as they flickered between the two brothers in a pattern almost intelligible. “Marvelous,” the king said. “I imagine that’s dangerous given your eye. Can you see out of it?”

  Only for a moment, an eyeblink or even less, a long-dormant sense of hurt bloomed in the older brother. His life had given him a keen sense of irony, and it never escaped his notice when audiences tossed comments toward him of the sort that had gotten his father killed. The pain passed almost immediately, but not before causing a tremor in his throwing hand.

  Blades clashed as the younger brother knocked the errant throw from the air. “Careful, brother,” he said. The older brother blinked.

  “Well enough,” he lied. “I see well enough.”

  Six knives again, this time flawless for thirty seconds. Then the younger brother said, “Now four. Now.” Together they stooped, and the gleaming pattern between them recomplicated itself just long enough for the king to think Masterful. Then the younger brother cried out and dropped his knives in a clatter. One of them bounded toward the king, who reached to pick it up.

  “Not to worry, Your Majesty,” the younger brother said. He stooped to retrieve the knife, and just as it registered in the king’s mind that this slim and smiling trickster knew who he was — had watched him from crowds since he was old enough to assume the paste crown of First Successor — the younger brother leaned in low and thrust the knife into the king’s belly.

  What should have followed then was a lingering death and a hasty scampering escape over the city walls, but the uncrowned king was not quite the fool the younger acrobat had thought him. His mail shirt, forged within subterranean earshot of the cell where the old ringmaster had died wishing for sunlight, caught the blade and held it with only an inch of its tip parting skin and muscle. The younger brother’s weight bore the king over, and he lay on his back, struggling to catch his breath and looking calmly into the eyes of his assassin.

  “This blood,” the younger brother said, holding his cut hand so the blood dripped onto the king’s face. “It is my father’s, and I will avenge it.” He drew another knife from his belt.

  “You are older than I am,” the king said. “I do not know your father. Your grievance is with a dead man.”

  “When you are dead,” the younger brother sai
d, “I will have no grievance.” He planted one knee in the king’s chest. His brother called his name.

  “Kill me, then,” said the king. “But know that you redress no wrong. You kill as a mad dog kills, because you don’t know what else to do.”

  Perhaps the younger brother hesitated for a moment, or perhaps magic saw its opportunity and spoke through his elder sibling’s mouth; but before the knife could fall the older brother said, “You will not be a mad dog, brother. You will not repay shame with shame.”

  With those words, his life’s one bit of magic whirlpooled from his body, and where a moment before the king had lain helpless under an assassin’s knife, now the older brother watched as a small brown dog pawed at the king’s tunic and strained to lick his chin.

  The king pushed the dog aside and with a disgusted noise jerked the knife from the broken links of his mail. “Did you know who I was?” he asked.

  The remaining brother, three knives in his two dangling hands, shook his head.

  “It is odd,” the king said, and had to pause for breath. He struggled to his feet. “To thank a man who would turn his brother into a dog.”

  “Odder yet to save the son of the man who killed my father,” the older brother replied.

  The king looked from the older brother to the attentive dog, who limped ever so slightly on one front paw. “So,” he said.

  “But I have seen men die, and few were able to face it as you did,” the older brother went on. He began to gather up his props and gimmicks. “I thought I saw a kingly man in you.” He tried to say something more, but he could not speak of what he had done.

  The dog sat in front of the king. His tail wagged against one of the fallen knives, and he started up at the clatter and ran a few steps before returning with tail and nose both low to the ground. “Take care of my brother,” said the lone acrobat as he shouldered his pack. “I see he wishes to remain with you.”

  “Why should I not kill him?”

  The acrobat looked the king in the eye. “Your grievance is not with a dog.”

  Dawn broke on the castle’s highest towers.

  “True,” said the king. “Very well, he will remain with me. As will you. I will have you and your brother at my throne, one to remind me of how close to death I came, and the other to remind me of why I was allowed to live. Walk with me, king’s jester.”

  All of this was bad enough; but then the jester fell in love with the queen.

  He remembered the moment of falling in love like a story told by someone else. The great stones of the hall outside the throne room, pale gray except streaks on either side, where generations of the royal wolfhounds had rubbed their ears along the grooves and ridges in the ancient stones. This king, whose life the jester had saved, was the first in memory to keep a limping brown dog of anonymous pedigree instead of the great loping hounds named for stars and mythical ancestors.

  Passing her in the hall: she taller by a head and younger by two generations, he favoring a heel bruised earlier that day tumbling for an ambassador. She with hair the color of the old streaks in the walls, a brown almost black, and eyes the color of the untouched stones, the gray of a cloud heavy with lightning; he with a balding head and knuckles swollen by winter’s chill. The jester became exalted in that moment, realizing that she was the castle, she was the kingdom, it was the twin example of her kindness and her iron rectitude that made it possible for the king to spare the jester’s brother. He loved her because she seemed in that moment to him like an ideal given flesh, an ideal for which the sacrifice of a brother was not too great. Foolish, yes, and sentimental: but as good an explanation as any.

  It haunted the jester that he had been willing to kill his brother. And he had; only the fickleness of magic had sped his mouth and stayed his hand. He found some small comfort in the royal heir’s person, his utter lack of resemblance to his father. The old king had been capricious, vindictive, wanton in both kindness and cruelty. His successor remained scrupulous and fair, even generous. Around him the kingdom prospered without war.

  And I didn’t kill my brother, the jester thought. I saved him. I protected him, as an older brother must.

  The king’s dog was old now, gray around the muzzle and lame in his hind legs. A superstition arose that the king would live only as long as his dog (no one said this about the jester), and although the king knew better, still he protected the dog’s life as jealously as his own, lest its death provoke unrest in the kingdom. The irony of this kept the jester in fine form for the mordant humor expected of him at court.

  What would happen, he wondered, if the king were actually persuaded to foist him off on some rustic baron? Sooner or later, wouldn’t the story of the dog his brother leak between the royal lips? And wouldn’t the queen . . . ? The duty of her heart was to her husband, and of her mind to her king. She would have the dog killed out of a kind of loathing mercy, pitying the beast its lost humanity even as she ordered it drowned to ensure that no entombed memory would resurface and tear out the throat of the sleeping king.

  Having once thought this, the jester grew certain events could play out no other way, just as having once seen the queen as his own ideals bodied forth he could never rid himself of his passion for her. Exaltation fled him. “Why must I love her?” he demanded of the sky, but the clouds of course took on the color of her eyes and kept their peace. Love twisted inside him the way magic had on its way from his body, anguish and ecstasy. Loving the queen who would kill his brother, the jester could only think of her implacable magnificence, her mind like light in cold water.

  It was afternoon. The jester left the lake, went back to the city and the castle, and the next day the queen mentioned it again. Wouldn’t the old jester be happier away from the trials and pressures of court? she asked, slipping through the fissure in his field of vision, and the jester knew what he had to do.

  The spell broker kept himself secret, but the jester knew where to find him in the twilit side of the city. “My magic is gone,” the jester said.

  “Else why would you be here?” the broker said, and displayed brown teeth in a round white face shaved smooth as an egg. “Let me look at you.”

  The jester kept himself still as the spell broker plucked a strand of his hair and burned it over a candle, traced the outline of his ribs, smelled his breath, looked into his eyes and ears. “What is it you want?” the broker said upon finishing his inspection.

  “The safety of my brother.” The jester had heard stories about the deviousness of the spell broker. It was best not to be too specific too soon.

  “Safety. Magic cannot guarantee safety. Magic can sometimes kill a threat, perhaps redirect it. Forgetting-magic is the easiest, though, and the surest.”

  She could forget, the jester thought. It made him inexplicably sad, though, the idea of court whispers: the queen, forget? She of the searchlight mind and unshakable will, the grey eyes like stones that held within them memories of each and every soul who passed by?

  I will protect my brother.

  “Forgetting magic, yes,” the jester said. “If it is the easiest, it must come cheaply.”

  “The cheapest magic comes dear,” said the broker.

  “Name your price.”

  “Your eye.”

  “Very well,” the jester said, and in a sudden panic thought too soon, spoke too soon, because the broker was still speaking, and the words out of his mouth were, “Your left eye.”

  My good eye, the jester thought. How will I look on the queen?

  But his mouth was already open saying yes.

  He found he could look upon the queen, after a fashion. If he positioned himself correctly, she would, on her way to kiss the king, walk through the part of his world that had not faded to a lifeless fog. He could not see her clearly, only well enough to remember how she had once appeared to him.

  Well enough.

  I did this for you, he would whisper sometimes under his breath. So you would not feel betrayed when you discovered
what I have done for my brother.

  In the jester’s thirty-seventh year, when the dog his brother was thirty-three, the king had retired him from acrobatics, and the jester passed his days in excremental assaults on courtiers even as he kept his head turned slightly away to the left of the queen. The court thought him blind in the right eye instead of the left, and grudgingly credited him for his seemly deference to the queen’s presence. They imagined that this deference arose out of gratitude at being permitted to remain at court, and the queen’s stature increased among the aristocratic gossips, her reputation for kindness burnishing the well-known brilliance of her mind and the much-praised symmetry of her face. She often stooped to pet the old dog, who would thump his tail against the leg of the throne at her approach.

  The jester kept his secrets, and he was careful around the children. The broker’s spell made no guarantee against the queen’s remembering. If he pitied himself from time to time, he ran his fingers where the queen’s had been, along the dog his brother’s neck, and he said to himself, unable to stop: One lives in one’s world, he said to the sleeping dog. One lives in one’s world.

  4

  The boy still slept. But Will had come in from outside. “You’re not blind,” he said.

  “I’m not a dog, either,” Paulus said. He set Will’s copy of the Book aside.

  Will lit his pipe. “Twice someone spent their magic on you?”

  “Aye,” Paulus said. “Twice.”

  “And how did the second come about?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me,” Paulus said.

  “Already I don’t believe you,” Will said. “Tell another one.”

  “My brother confessed to the queen and as a reward for the laughter he had brought to the court, she bought me back my shape as a man, on the condition that I enter the king’s service. I fought eleven years in the king’s wars, and then he sent me to kill the dragon. When I came back, my brother and the king had both died, and I was released. Since then I have been for hire.”