by John Barnes
Sir John and the Twisted Man brought the garlic-laced trellises together behind the vampire with a sharp, silent motion. At the blotting of the moonlight, it whirled, but now it was too late: a single step showed it could not approach the trellises.
With a squeak and a clank, the Duke unhooded the lantern. The light was all but blinding, after so long in the deep moonlight.
"So," the wrapped figure said. "At last. This." The voice was cold and wet and barely a whisper.
Sir John and the Twisted Man jumped as one, jerking the figure's arms outward, forcing it backwards, seizing an ankle each, as it beat and struggled against them. Calliope rolled off her bed and backed away as they approached, then lunged forward, holding her garlic necklace out, so that the vampire could go no farther. Duke Wassant had closed in from another side, and they managed to force it down upon its back on the bed.
The fight seemed to go out of the monster all at once, and now it was pinned upon the bed, legs held by the Twisted Man and an arm each by the Duke and Sir John. Its swaddled head fell back, as if resigning itself to what must follow.
Gingerly, Slitgizzard snatched back the heavy hood it wore.
It was Mortis.
There was no question that she was a vampire, now, and quietly, in the back of his mind, Amatus realized how evident it had been in the last week or so. His feet seemed to pick themselves up and move him slowly toward her, the stake and mallet clutched in his hand. Calliope moved around beside him, took the stake, and set it upon the center of Mortis's chest. One quick, hard stroke would do it.
Her eyes had always been dark, but something had lived in them, and now they were empty.
He raised the mallet.
"How?" he asked.
"The scream you thought an ill omen was my dying of grief, Highness." He had never heard real warmth in her voice, but there had been something there—perhaps merely interest?—and now that was gone as well. The lamp flared and flickered, and the shadows of their clouds of breath danced wildly on the wall.
"Grief for Golias?"
"Grief."
He drew a long, deep breath.
The Twisted Man spoke. "Finish it."
Amatus raised the mallet. "I am sorry."
The vampire spoke. "If I could drink your apologies, I would drain you drier still. Either finish me or release me to feed. The choice is yours."
"I would heal you if I could."
"I am dead. Your touch works only on those who have not died yet. Either put my blood on your hands or put your blood in my mouth."
With a single, clean stroke, straight from the shoulder and swung with all his force, Amatus drove the stake through her and the mattress below, affixing her to the bed.
Her mouth opened wide in a dreadful shriek. Her tongue, long and black, flew out and was pierced and impaled by her fangs as her mouth snapped closed. The stench in the room was what one might expect from the piercing of a rotted, bloated corpse pulled from the river.
Most horrible of all, perhaps, was that for one instant, as her body returned to its proper form, her hand came up and reached for the stake, almost caressing it, as if trying to gently pluck it from herself, and her other hand reached for Amatus, as if wishing to hold his hand.
He reached for it without thinking, and Calliope slapped his hand away. Shock and pain made him look up, straight into the girl's eyes—and they were wide with fear. "You mustn't. Your hand is wounded. She could draw blood and continue . . ."
Mortis expired. There was no expression of peace, as the old ballads mentioned; there was hatred, bitterness, and above all self-pity.
Something stirred in Amatus; the world was different from what it had ever been before.
For a long time none of the others spoke a word. "Highness," Calliope said.
"What is it?" Amatus asked. He had expected some part of him to come back, and he certainly felt different physically, but as he looked up and down his body he could see nothing—and yet it was different.
Calliope stepped close to him, resting her hand lightly on his arm, and leaned forward to whisper in his ear. "Your eye, Highness. You have your eye back."
Amatus looked up and around the room; time enough to look in a mirror later and see what he looked like—he had a feeling the effect was even more strange than the foot that seemed to walk of its own accord beside him wherever he went. For right now there was only the astonishment of discovering that the world had depth and a sort of reality to it that he had not seen in the time he could remember. "I . . . you all look so different," he said, looking around the room. "And so beautiful."
And then—perhaps from his own grief, or from the beauty of it all—he found that he did indeed have his left eye, for he could feel tears welling in both eyes and the force of blinking them back made the room dark.
The Twisted Man walked quickly to Mortis and put a cloth over her face. "Highness, you must go now—all of you must go—and send the King and the Prime Minister up to me."
His voice—in which fear or even concern had never been heard—was so urgent that they all obeyed at once, and in a short time found themselves on the street. "Stay as guests of the castle tonight," Amatus urged his friends. "We will sit in the tower room, with a bright fire."
To his great relief they all agreed. Of Amatus, it remains only to say that they spent the night gathered around the fire in conversations in which laughter and tears flowed freely, and went to bed late, all of them, and got up late for breakfast together. The next day Amatus healed Calliope's remaining servants, and they all helped Calliope to get her house back into order.
But Cedric, in his Chronicle, tells us of other things, which he swears Amatus never learned of. That may be true, for it is in Cedric's will also that his books be sealed unread for a century after his death, and Amatus tended to be careful and systematic about carrying out such wishes. So as to whether Amatus himself ever knew of what happened next, there is no one who can tell us.
When Cedric and Boniface came into the chamber, the Twisted Man had moved the lantern around better to illuminate Mortis's face, but left the covering over it. From the garments and from the blue skin they knew who it was, and they had both sighed, for fearsome as Mortis had been, she had been a superb Royal Witch, and they could not be sure how Amatus would take the loss of another Companion so soon after Golias.
The Twisted Man spoke. "I saw her begin to shift and change under the light before, and covered her face to stop that before he could see. What I show you now must remain between us forever."
In any other circumstance, Boniface would have objected, at least implicitly, to such an assertion of power over the royal person, but this time it seemed only in keeping. Cedric turned to the lamp and adjusted the oil valve a crack, so that the lamp was as bright as it could be, and drawing a candle from his pocket, he lighted it, and used it to light the candles in their sconces around the room.
The Twisted Man drew the cloth back, and said, "Now watch, Majesty and my lord."
Mortis's face was still beautiful, and in the bright light one could now see a sneer of contempt had settled onto it, except for a softness around the glittering reptile eyes.
But as they watched, the scales of her skin faded into it as if they had never been. The blue lightened to white, and then turned a soft pink. And the fangs which had been long and yellow as an old dog's when she was undead, now white and even pretty as they had been before, receded gently. Her features continued to change, the cheekbones coming down and sinking in, the chin broadening—
And the King cried out in deep horror and anguish; a moment later, Cedric gave a low, ill moan beside him.
The dead woman on the bed was now the very image of Boniface's Queen, who had died bearing Amatus.
"What can this mean?" Boniface whispered as he groped for a chair.
"As you have always thought might be the case, a story has come into the Kingdom, as they have so often before, and we are in the middle of it," the Twisted Man said
. "I myself have seen . . . more than one story, shall I say, if you will permit me to leave it at that? And this may either be the sort of thing that has meaning in a story, or the sort of thing that is merely in a story. As for how she came into it—know this, Majesty. We came to be your son's Companions, and we traveled together, but we did not all come from the same places at the same time."
"But I buried her!" Boniface cried. "Cedric saw her into her tomb—"
"Who can say what you would find if you opened it now? And therefore better not to open it," the Twisted Man said. "And who can say, more than that, how it happened that your son was able to taste the Wine of the Gods, which should have been impossible? If there is nothing without a point in a story like this, then most surely there was a point to that, and what is it that makes you think that it is for your benefit, or for his, or for anyone's?
"In time to come, when the magic is draining so far out of the world that a vampire can be banished by crossed sticks and a sprinkle of water, when all that we do and say here will be spoken of in the brightest daylight or the darkest, wildest night without fear of bringing anything to pass, wise men will debate why there is any pain or suffering at all, and will say many foolish things and a few wise ones about it, but is it not enough for us to say 'pain has come this way,' and let it be? We do not yet belong to the gray, dull generations, or to times without meaning, or to times when meaning drains even from stories.
"We came from different places, and to be Companions, but not all of us are Companions for the same purpose. Do not ask me mine, for I do not know; or Psyche's, for it would break my heart to tell you; or Golias's or Morris's, for now whatever it was is accomplished. But understand that they are not necessarily what you would wish them to be, and that they are not for anyone's benefit, though they may be, or they may work to someone's benefit.
"Let us strike off her head, fill her mouth with garlic, and dispose of her properly, for whoever she really is, and whether Mortis merely wore the shape of your dead Queen, or was she come back, or whether both of them were two faces of the same thing—she died as a vampire and we must see for the sake of the Kingdom that she does not rise again."
"You are solicitous of Amatus's welfare, for one who will not say that he came for his benefit," Cedric observed, as he moved to help the Twisted Man. King Boniface went to the balcony doors, opened one slightly, and stared out at the starry sky, and they did not trouble him for his help.
"I cannot say that I did not, either. I have duties to fulfill. But you know that when he was young he was often frightened of me, and I have heard you yourself mutter when I have tormented some monster or some enemy before killing it that you hope Amatus will never learn such things."
Cedric raised Mortis's—or the Queen's—head by the hair and carefully stretched out the neck for the Twisted Man's stroke. "I did not know you had heard that. I hope I have not hurt your feelings."
"I have none that can be hurt by any such comment." He pulled out his huge ax; Cedric pulled the head back by the hair, so that the neck was fully extended, and shrugged his traveling cloak around himself, for he expected a spray of blood.
There was none. The ax whistled, there was an odd tug against his arms and then a release, and her head was hanging by the hair in his hands. He turned to get the garlic—
They all, even the Twisted Man, shouted, for the body on the bed, which had brought forth no blood at all except for what had already welled up and dried around the stake, was folding and collapsing like an apple in the sun, but many times faster, so that shortly there was a bare husk there. The Prime Minister gaped as the head he held by the hair rapidly aged, dried, decayed, and crumbled to dust at his feet, leaving him holding a hank of hair.
"Well," said the Twisted Man, after a long pause, "I suppose we should fold up the sheet with what's left in it, sweep the rest off the floor, and then burn it all. We will have to apologize to Lady Calliope for burning the sheet."
They did, without talking further. As the last bits went blazing up the chimney, the Twisted Man stood and silently took King Boniface by the arm, and the two of them walked out the door.
Cedric did not follow, but the next day his discreet inquiries revealed that many people working late at night or early in the morning—dairymen, vegetable sellers, harlots, drunkards, poets, and the like—had seen the King and the Captain of the Guard walking through the darkened city, deep in conversation with each other, sometimes close together and the King laughing as if they were the best of old friends, at other times turned away and talking from the corners of their mouths as if they could barely bear to be near each other. No one had overheard a word of it.
So what they talked of, or why they returned to the castle only as sunlight first touched its top, must remain outside the story.
III
A Man Who Will Stand His Ground
1
Years and Gossip Pass in an Ordinary Way, Until a Grim Conversation on a Beautiful Day
Whether or not anyone knew exactly how the "curse" on the Prince worked—and there were many who thought they did, and would loudly explain it to anyone willing to part with coin in a taboret or a stupor and to keep listening to the explanation—there was no feeling that it was an ill thing for the Kingdom. If anything, they rather liked it; those who had had a chance to hear the Prince speak, before guilds, civic groups, fraternal societies, and the occasional cult, delighted in trying to describe how there was just half of him there, except that two parts of the half that wasn't, his left boot and left eye, were there, but with nothing in between.
It was hard to picture it in the mind, and thus the description was never like the actual effect, and no two descriptions ever quite alike, so it made for an endless subject of discussion as long as there were people about who had never seen him. Moreover, when they did—for he did not keep himself particularly secret—they always disagreed with the descriptions they had heard to date, and rushed back to their friends to argue, and that too made for long discussions in the little corners of the city, as the seasons turned and everything grew older.
Prince Amatus—the right side of him, anyway—lost some of the look of a boy, and learned to do administrative work and bother about taxes, armories, roads, and bridges, to avoid saying anything that might upset anyone pious and to always look solemn in the presence of the Hand and Book flag. King Boniface grew grayer, but seemed to become more shrewd and more jolly each year, so that there were arguments about whether, in the chronicles, he ought to be called the Merry, the Cunning, or (the most popular) the Good.
In summers the Vulgarians sat at their ease at the tables outside their stupors, having one cupola after another of the dark brown tea they brewed in silver sampans, and squabbled loudly about the Prince's missing left side.
In autumn the hunters came down from the northern and western hills, freshly killed and dressed gazebo upon their shoulders. The air was fragrant with the roasting and curing of the meat, and as the hunters ate dripping slabs of roast haunch, and drank the foaming autumn Pilaster, they talked of how the good Prince could be a whole man any time he wanted, but he must lose his Companions to gain back each part of himself and he was too decent a fellow to shorten Psyche's or the Twisted Man's days.
Winter blanketed the town with snow and made all the many colors of the bricks and cobbles shine wet in its bright light, and in every little taboret in the Hektarian Quarter, they drank the deep red Gravamen that cheered their hearts, and sang the version of "Penna Pike" which had at last been finished by the Prince, and told stories of dark nights and bright courage about him, though in truth he had done nothing more dangerous or exciting than could be found on the practice field or in the hunt for a long time.
And when spring came and the gypsies, layabouts, and troupials returned to the city and set up their trestle stages in every square, many of the little plays and stories referred to the Royal house and the connections between it and the Wine of the Gods.
Because
Cedric was still Prime Minister, as well as General of All the Armies, and as efficient and vigorous as ever, his many agents saw to it that there was much untruth mixed in what was said, and no one knew the whole truth of anything in the city. So when Waldo the Usurper, who every year grew more bitter and evil as he sucked the neighboring Kingdom of Overhill dry, sent forth spies to come and listen in the city, they went back bearing tales of the sort of peace and prosperity that Waldo longed to end, but they also told tales of magical protections and mighty invisible powers. When they described a people given over to the business of living and enjoying, they mentioned hideous curses and pacts with dark beings, made by the Royal family in times long gone for the protection of the Kingdom.
Most importantly, when the spies discussed the succession, they talked of many princesses turned back by the Prince, of his refusal to go courting, and of his fondness for the Lady Calliope obstructing a sensible political marriage and thus working to Waldo's advantage—and the rumors that Calliope herself might be of royal blood, when they came to Waldo's attention, were no more believable than any other rumors which came to the cold citadel at Oppidum Optimum, which stank from abuse and lack of cleaning, where the bones of Calliope's family continued to dry in the upper chambers. It seemed most likely to Waldo that Calliope was what she appeared to be, the rather attractive daughter of minor nobility with whom the Prince had become infatuated. After all, her name was a common one.
Then too, though Waldo had fearsome force at his command, perhaps he hesitated because he knew the Kingdom was wide and strong and rich and thus could afford a considerable army, and that Cedric, by dint of stretching and wise use of resources, had managed to make the Kingdom get much more army than it paid for.
Waldo may even have hesitated knowing that the giant, swaddled, distorted shadow that seemed always to be there at the least hint of danger to the Prince had come to the Prince as one of his Companions, and thus as some bit of personal magic. But if he feared the Twisted Man, we can hardly say whether it was because of his great strength, or his obscure origins, or because four times, when Waldo had sent assassins forth, they had not come back, nor had his spies been able to learn what had happened to them, for the spies had been found in various of the back ways of the city, some punctured by the pongee of Duke Wassant, some pockholed by a precisely placed pismire ball that spoke of Sir John Slitgizzard, and a few with their heads turned backward—which could only be the work of the Twisted Man himself.
