Geoffrey's Queen: A Mobious' Quest Novel

by Gwendolyn Druyor

  “As a matter of fact, my bond, that is exactly what the child has done.” dTella fashioned a sling out of a small blanket and settled the baby in it, against her chest. She moved into the kitchen to help her husband—not quite May-December, but definitely an August-December romance—coddle me. They left Geoffrey standing in the doorway.

  They fussed over me, scrubbed my cuts to bleeding, iced my purpling bruises, and checked for broken bones. Though I had fallen well, dTella spent some time checking the alignment of my hips with unusual concern and gave me some special herbs in my tea. Rich encouraged the little ones, Tira and Kver, to help out where they could which turned into a race to see who could figure out how to get my sandals off faster. And, of course, that accomplished, rather than putting them by the front door as dTella insisted, they sat on the floor in the middle of everybody’s way playing with the velcro straps.

  Through it all, Geoffrey was ignored. He kept an eye in on the proceedings and said a few words as Rich worked on the worst of my cuts, but he mainly stayed out of the way, waiting in the doorway.

  When they were finished with me, the little family dished out two bowls of hearty stew. I could identify only the carrots and the corn for certain. Everything else in the thick, brown meal was a mystery. But it was the tastiest mystery I’ve ever eaten. Thank god they served us small bowls, or I would have gorged my way through as much as my belly could hold.

  I was less impressed with the tea. Geoffrey seemed to think his cup the most wonderful drink ever. But dTella had made mine medicinal. Somehow with the double incentives of dTella staring at my cup and my incredible thirst I swallowed the whole thing down.

  During dinner Geoffrey and Rich exchanged some conversation about the population of the forest and the distance of villages. dTella, though mainly silent, pitched in some information about the general health of the forest. Tira and Kver asked endless questions, most of which I couldn’t answer and Geoffrey wouldn’t answer until Rich sent them off to play in the pillows, sleep being declared impossible with two visitors in the house and big brother Yenay not home yet.

  I was unable to follow the conversation so once I finished my meal and had no immediate activity to focus on I felt myself falling into a food coma and excused myself to crash in the pillow room where the little ones, despite their former protests, were sleeping soundly.

  dTella excused herself soon after, handing little tDav over to Rich. She left, she said, to retrieve their elder son, Yenay, who was stargazing. Rich and Geoffrey talked about a guy named Cha—now I know he is Tgeha—and a couple towns, I guessed, named Voferen Kahago and Stray Tor. As I understood it, Tgeha had stolen some birds or maybe just their wings from Voferen. Only he hadn’t really stolen them cause some guy who also only had a first name let him borrow them, but Rich didn’t think that he should have ‘cause he didn’t trust Tgeha who’d always been kind of an odd bird in that family. And I wondered if he had stolen the birds to become a bit more normal but the five men sitting around a bonfire in the attic told me not to worry about it and went back to carefully cracking the window with a pine needle and then Daddy tucked his baby bird in more carefully, rocked the crib, and sang Lydia until I fell into a deep, deep snowy warm sleep.

  I was awakened by dTella soon after the outer door had flung noisily open and their energetic teenage son Yenay had burst in with Geoffrey on his heels. They had discovered the four—I was right—sleeping soundly with no guard. It was full dark out and the wind had picked up and was helpfully rustling the trees. It was decided that we’d best move out then in order to get a solid head start.

  No mention was made of the possibility of our staying. Goodbyes were said quickly. Rich assured Geoffrey that if ever he were needed, Geoffrey need only ask. dTella offered Geoffrey cold wishes but she hugged me warmly and pressed a bag of tea leaves into my hand. The little ones woke briefly for a sleepy kiss then Yenay led us out. We hiked for nearly a mile before he pointed us in the direction that would lead us most quickly to a place with protective numbers of people. Within the day we’d found the place, this place. But no people.

  ∞

  “All of that I know,“ Geoffrey shifted on the bench and closed his fist around the charred bit of wood he’d been worrying with his fingers, “I was there.”

  “You told me that dTella returned with Yenay while I slept and then you went with the boy to check on the five. Well I woke up before dTella shook me, before you returned.”

  ∞

  I had woken, assuming the warm weight on my butt to be Mrs. Votha’s cat snuck into our apartment again and the weight on my back to be Geoffrey. I heard unfamiliar voices arguing loudly against the unusual background noise of silence. A baby cried once. Perhaps that was the sound that woke me. The male voice hushed the female. I heard footsteps and a voice crooning. Then the baby settled and the person walked away. I was too comfortable and sleepy to move, but I figured out that I wasn’t in Denver and it wasn't Mrs. Votha’s cat napping on my butt.

  “They have to leave. I do not want him in my house.” dTella insisted.

  “You yourself said it wasn’t he that did it!”

  “It’s his blood, though. You see how badly he hurt the girl. And she-”

  “That was an accident, dTella.”

  “Still then, accident’s happen around that blood. I won’t have them happening here around my blood.”

  “My love, the dTelfur were not killed by that boy. That child did not put the dragons to sleep. Only a dTelfur could be alive today for you to blame.”

  “He carries the same magic the Lander forces used against my village.”

  “And you carry the same magic that Konifer used against the Lander forces. Don’t forget who you were got by. I may as legitimately blame you for my ancestors’ deaths as you may blame Geoffrey for his ancestor’s mistakes.”

  More footsteps and the swish of fabric. The voices were quiet, and close together, Rich’s voice muffled for a moment in dTella’s short hair.

  “Let Yenay go. Let these two stay in Yenay’s room until it is safe for Geoffrey to leave.”

  “It will never be safe for him. Or for us while he is here.”

  “Your protections will hold.”

  “My magic is simple.” Her voice was bitter again, “His could negate my protections in a heartbeat, even if he didn’t intend to.”

  “We could keep the woman though.”

  I felt a sudden need to be still as their voices turned towards me.

  "She looks so much like you." Rich whispered the words almost to himself.

  "She looks so much like my sire." dTella sighed and then added with regret. "No. We cannot keep her."

  “She is a mystery. And she is frightened. Could she be dTelfur?”

  “She is too young. When the Landers marched against us, I was the youngest dTelfur.”

  Then the outer door was flung noisily open.

  ∞

  Geoffrey sat, saying nothing, staring ahead at the colorful birds perched on a low, rain-filled stone dais. One of the creatures scooped some water up and let it drain back down his neck before he undulated, shaking the excess onto the others, whereupon they all took to the air in a flurry of scolding chirps. Geoffrey shook himself similarly and I took to my feet.

  I’m getting used to his silences. He rarely explains things unless I ask specifically and then I’m not sure which questions might reveal my ignorance. I’m not entirely sure I haven’t already done so, except for the fact that he continues to hide from me and what could he possibly have to hide from someone who is completely ignorant of this world, its history, its people, its food!

  We did find a stash, you know. A second kitchen, much smaller than the cavern Geoffrey found on our first night here, with a supply of grains, cheeses, and spices beneath the hidden quarter of the castle. And, lo—yes, I said lo—in a long, shallow grave beneath the floor of this underground chamber, a supply of wine.

  We’d been living on close to nothing. We had th
e clean well, the apples, and the stupid birds. Plus I had found a protected stash of grainy flour. But after a few weeks, we were long out of apples, running empty on flour, and the wild birds were starting to get a clue. Of course, there was the flock of brightly colored birds that bathed in the tumbled statues of the courtyard and slept in its stone rafters, the wood long since burned away. But Geoffrey would not even consider eating them. He spent hours in the courtyard, trying to convince them to come to him. It was, in fact, his efforts to reach their rafter nests from the highest windows that led us to find the stocked kitchen.

  ∞

  I wandered into the yard for a drink from the well to see him climbing out a window like forty meters high, the idiot. I screamed at him and then dashed back inside to find the way up. I climbed every staircase and opened door after door until I was completely lost and no closer to him. My sense of direction was reduced to knowing only which way was up. And which way was down.

  I tried to retrace my steps to return to the courtyard where I could at least be witness to his final plummet but succeeded only in losing myself more thoroughly. I had reached a first level room that seemed designed by Feydeau it had so many doors when I decided to start shedding the heavy costume I had been scavenging from one of the many full bedroom wardrobes.

  Every door in this odd little antechamber led to a stairwell. All up but for two, including the short stairwell I’d ascended to reach this room. I left that door ajar and hung the maroon quilted half jacket on it. Then I began exploring each path, leaving clothing behind me like the pre-broiled Gretel, collecting each piece on my return to the labyrinth’s antechamber.

  The third stairwell I tried was short. It led to a dark hallway lined with empty sconces that must once have held candles. My small taper was burning low by now and its weak glow was quickly swallowed by the darkness of this long, wide passage. It seemed, as any unknown distance would the first time you travel it, to be an endless hall. But in time I reached a stone wall hung with a beautiful tapestry, but with no egress. No door, no window, no hint of opening. As I retraced my steps, I took more care in looking at the wall sconces which were placed at odd intervals no more than a meter apart though at varying heights.

  I noticed a long interval of two meters with no sconce and examined the wall there. A section was slightly recessed as if a statue should stand there. But along the back left corner of this recess I spotted a sliver thin vertical ray of dim light. An easy push increased the crack minutely. A hearty and sustained shove moved the entire section of wall far enough back for me to slip through either side into a small room lit by the late-afternoon winter sun.

  It appeared for a moment that I had traveled up the stairwell, down the long deceptive corridor, and pushed through the wall only to achieve entrance to the room I’d left. But as my eyes adjusted, I saw that the wall-to-wall doors of this room were just tapestries, decorated with doors. All but one of these woven doors were, to varying degrees, ajar, giving view to the fabulous locations one would reach if one could only go through.

  I walked along the walls, looking at each doorway. They showed what looked to me like impossible routes to Trafalmadore or Pern or Narnia or Middle Earth, even one frightening view of a Post Shrike Hyperion. But looking at them here in this impossibly empty castle in Kaveg with no idea where home is, I knew that these were designed from actual places in this world because one open doorway shows the wide field where I arrived so suddenly in this land, and another, barely cracked, shows the apple tree. The closed door, I discovered, wasn’t thread and magic. It was a real door and it led to another stairwell.

  Lucky for us the stairs led down. If I’d faced another stony climb, I would’ve turned around and forgotten the damn room. I’ve unwisely killed more than one cat in my time, but I have never been a StairMaster girl and an hour’s worth of ascending and descending is enough to quench even my curiosity. I stepped out of my underskirt, left it in the little room, and headed down in only my slippers, knickers, and the thick brocade top it had taken me twenty minutes to lace up.

  An hour later Geoffrey was yelling directions at me from a window, telling me how to get through the labyrinthine hedges surrounding the hidden open-air courtyard the stairwell had led to. Twenty minutes after that, he joined me there, his arms filled with my discarded clothing.

  “Tell me, Ananda, does everyone dress like this where you come from?”

  “Undress like this, you mean.” I reached for the skirts as the air was starting to cut through my thin pantaloons.

  “Sorry we’ll need these to mark our way through the maze.”

  And he took off.

  He ran away from me to the break in the hedge at the far side of the courtyard waving my skirts in the air. I raced after him but in imitating his vault over the little bench sculpted from shrubbery I landed on a small pile of wet leaves and found myself sprawled out face down in the grass.

  By the time I got myself up Geoffrey was out of sight and hadn’t left any clothes for me to follow. So I followed the crushed leaves. Ha on him. He thinks he’s so smart.

  After only a few twists and turns the path led out to a small alley sided by the hedge on one side and a stone wall on the other. Geoffrey’s path of crushed leaves and grass brought me to a low arch in the stone wall which led down a short entryway into an immense chamber. The ceiling was ten meters up and it was completely fashioned from stone. Nowhere else in the castle had we found any but wooden roofs. Even the large courtyard had only a couple of stone arches to support the charred remnants of roof planks. This room was lined with long, thin slits high in the walls which let in a generous amount of light.

  Two long tables defined the space: one raised on a small dais at the far end of the room, the other extending from it towards the entrance forming a T. These two tables must have seated two hundred people. They appeared to be no more than cured boards set on wide sawhorses with a few benches on either side of the long table and around the head table about fifty chairs, each of which held a small embroidered pillow. Geoffrey was standing on the near side of the long trestle table struggling into the maroon quilted half-jacket that I had shed in the first foyer.

  He also had on my skirts.

  ∞

  Geoffrey finally interrupted my memories. He turned on the bench and looked away from the makeshift birdbath. His gaze rested on me for a moment, searching and measuring me. A wind blew overhead and jostled some more bits of crumbling wood and stone from the skeletal roof. A few birds chirped and shivered in protest as a burnt chunk landed in the bath, splashing them. I tried to read what Geoffrey was thinking but I might as well have tried to fathom the pool of water on my dressing chest as it stared back at me every morning. I began to get angry.

  “I was half-asleep. Until just now I thought I had dreamed Rich and dTella’s conversation.” I stood and pulled my short cloak tighter about me, laughing as I turned back to him. “Dragons? Magic? How could I possibly lie about hearing things like that with a straight face?”

  Geoffrey stood and paced over to the birds who flew off spinning into the sky.

  “The word was dTelfur. I know I heard her say she was dTelfur.” I turned and opened the heavy door, fed up with his silence and mystery, but his curt laugh stopped me from leaving.

  “What was the last thing you heard her say before Yenay and I returned?

  “She said I couldn’t be dTelfur because when the Landers marched against their village, she was the youngest dTelfur.”

  “If she’d been in swaddling when they marched, she would now be one hundred and thirteen frseason old.”

  Eight

  ∞ Edling Geoffrey of Kaveg’s journal ∞

  Dakota Park, America

  I was allowed to drive the car today. It has been three suns since we left her mother’s home, a day and a half since we had to turn around because I have no book called passport. We spent the night in Saint Paul and three hours into this morning’s journey Nanda informed me that I would be
driving after the next rest stop. I found it bewildering at first that she would make us stop every few hours to rest, when all we did in the intervening time was sit and ride. But tonight, when she had me pull off the highway, I understood.

  She sleeps in the car. But I refuse to spend another minute trapped in that machine. I have set up a coarse lean-to on the bank of the creek in this rest area. The stars are comforting. They are so similar to my stars, I can almost imagine that I’m home again.

  Of course, I’m not. I tried vainly to find a way home after Nanda returned the evening after our fight on the train to find she’d locked me in her apartment and threw me out.

  She was behaving in her own best interests and owed me nothing. I am a complete stranger to her. She has no memory of dancing around the great dining hall of Forte in her undergarments when I stole her skirts. Nor any memory of wrestling an ex Forte guardesman in defense of my honor. She doesn’t remember that I love her.

  ∞

  The night she kicked me out, I slept on the beach near her home, staring up at these same stars, listening to the waves slap against the sand in that soothing rhythm that used to lull me to sleep when Da and I escaped the castle and camped outside in Voferen. I slept listening to the same crash of waves we heard beneath the roar of battle when the four of us landed on the shore outside the gates of Voferen Kahago on the day I left her. It was colder in Nanda’s Loyola Park. And brighter. The lamps above the streets never burned down, but kept shining all night until dawn when the dulcet sounds of retching woke me.

  The old man was clearly ill. I tried to use my healing skills to ease his symptoms. But I couldn't find any nature to call on. Nanda had called it magic and told me her world didn’t have any but I hadn't believed her. I sat heavily back in the sand at this loss.

  The old man helped me to my feet and we supported each other on the short walk down to the shore and washed up together in the chilly water. When we both had more color in our faces he offered me direction to the You I See Theater. I trudged along the sand in that direction until it occurred to me to follow the metal supports of the box we had traveled in.