by John Barnes
He brushed past Psyche to open the door and stepped into the dark library. There was no one there, but the shouts and distant gunshots from above told him the attack was under way. Drawing escree with one hand, and pismire with another, he kicked the library door open and stepped onto the landing. There was still no one there, so he raced up the stairs, his intent now all on getting to the Throne Room. He silently thanked all of the gods that he had been an active boy and knew evenry small passage, or at least every one that small boys had been trusted with. In what seemed no time at all, he burst into the Throne Room, to discover no one there.
Waldo, say what else vou might of him, had never been a coward, so most likely he had gone to the High Terrace to direct the battle from there. Amatus raced up the stairway.
He passed one slit window, turned the corner to another, and all but collided with a made man carrying a great armful or loaded omnibuses, probably to a sniper. The man stood erect, saluted, and handed Amatus all ot the weapons, then marched on down the stairway.
Amatus set the omnibuses down, then glanced through the window. On the roof of the clerihew before him, he could see a dozen real men, directing the fight on the West Battue before them. He snatched up the first omnibus, cocked the chutney, and shot the rearmost real man through the back of the head, a clean shot that made him think of Sir John Slitgizzard, and of the Twisted Man, and that the Duke had died down below, in the very library Amatus had come in through. He snatched up another omnibus, and downed another real man; and another, and another . . .
He had killed half of them before thev knew where the shots were coming from, and as they scrambled to escape, one fell from the roof ot the clerihew to the pavement below. As he struck, the others staggered—the shock was at last too much—and the made men on the parataxes wavered. At once the tops of ladders began to poke above the West Battue, and a thousand grigs whistled over and found a grip. The Army of the North was coming over.
With a great roar, the lampoon placed against the Main Gate blew an opening. The Regular Army was coming through.
Amatus turned and ran up the stairs with renewed strength, looking for Waldo.
At the top of the stairs, the guard waved Amatus through. The cloak must be hiding enough of his appearance. He dashed down the corridor, past another guard, and found the High Terrace empty. He turned to the made man—could they even talk?—and asked, "Waldo?"
"The nursery," the guard said.
Amatus rushed down the stairs, seeing no one now, for all the ones who could still stand, made men and real men alike, were rushing frantically into the courtyard to fight the armies pouring in. When he reached the nursery door, it was barred, but he could hear someone—a man's voice, but a broken one—sobbing with fear inside. He threw his shoulder against the door, again and again, till he felt a great bruise forming on his shoulder and even his feet ached with scrabbling on the stone floor and trying to get one bit more purchase that might be turned into one bit more force against the door.
The voice inside went on sobbing and cursing; Amatus realized, as he battered the door again and again, that the judgment of everyone that Waldo was no coward had been premature. Before this, no one had ever seen him lose.
Early the morning after coronation—just as Amatus and Psyche were saying good bye to Roderick at the mouth of the secret passage—Calliope was up and bustling about the citadel of Oppidum Optimum. It was not yet light, but since her arrival Calliope had become industrious and disliked remaining in bed for any length of time. The kitchen knew this, and had the hot rolls she liked best waiting for her.
"It was a splendid coronation, Majesty," the cook said, pouring Calliope more chocolate. "Surely the finest we've seen, anyway. And all done legal and proper, too."
"Thank you," Calliope said. "I'm glad you enjoyed it. I hope the cleanup won't be too much of a strain."
"When I was coming in, the night crew had just finished. They said there wasn't much, Majesty, garbage and mess is mostly food, you know, and Overhill folk don't waste food by leaving it laying about. And people took their own pots home, and many stayed to help wash dishes."
Calliope was mortified. "If I'd known so many were working, I'd never have gone off to bed!"
"And they all knew that, Majesty, and that's why no one told you. You've got to let people love you, now and then, you know. It's not an easy thing, but there it is."
Calliope smiled. "Then perhaps I could get a spot more chocolate, and another roll? I seem to be bursting with ambition this morning, and I would as soon have the energy to carry some of it out, and not have to stop for lunch until I've something done."
After her breakfast was finished, Calliope made a quick, quiet round of the citadel, finding everything in perfect order. Last of all, she climbed the stairs toward the tower, but at the first landing she was met by a guard.
"Majesty," he gasped, "I've been sent as runner for Lord Cedric and yourself. The noises behind the door are louder than ever, and we are frightened."
"Run and bring Cedric, then; I'll join your comrades." Calliope turned and hurried up the stairs.
The noises were indeed loud, and Calliope was glad that three of Pseudolus's troopers remained on guard; the thumping was a deep, rhythmic double thud, over and over, and the wailing might have been an animal in pain, a woman in pleasure, or both at once, but it was piercing, whatever it was.
Calliope had had the tapestry taken down to be cleaned, for she was sure the stains would never come out, but she had no desire to have the tapestry crusty and smelly; she hoped someday to hang it in a hall she seldom went to, and to think of it never. In the now-exposed wall, the smooth, rounded door met the arched doorway without crevice or crack for even the edge of a knife blade.
She could see the men were afraid, and therefore she must be bold and confident. She advanced to the door just as if she had been a lifetime professional at ridding citadels of mysterious noises before dawn, nodded at the guards, and placed her hand on the door.
Afterwards, no one agreed on what had happened. Two guards said that Calliope pushed the door open and it gathered her in with itself. Another said she fell through the door. And Calliope herself just said that she touched the door and found herself standing on the other side of it.
It was obvious at once what had happened; she was now the rightful Queen, properly crowned, and thus some of the citadel's magic was working for her. She turned to go back through the door, and found that it would not budge; nor could the guards on the other side do aught about opening it again. Finally, as the thumping and wailing grew louder still, and were joined by occasional strange sucking noises, Cedric arrived. He and Calliope agreed, shouting through the door over the din above, that there was little to do but for her to see what was in the Spirit Spire—whatever it was, it was meant for her alone.
The stairway was icy and the steps were slick and wet; the only light was the beginnings of gray dawn, just now peeking through slit windows on one side. The stairs spiraled up with an alarming inward tilt to a banisterless central well, and all the angles got steeper as she climbed.
It had always been called the Spirit Spire, but so much tradition had been lost under Waldo that no one knew whether it was because it was thought to be haunted, or unusually spiritual, or what. At last, just when Calliope began to fear for her footing, and to imagine sliding down a step into the central shaft and falling all the way to the stone floor far below, she came to the top, opened the door, and found herself on the flat roof of the Spirit Spire.
The thumping was coming from what could only be Waldo's heart, sitting on a pedestal, enclosed in glass.
The wailing and sucking came from a naked woman so old, so wrinkled, and so distorted that at first Calliope thought she must be some giant reptile. She moaned and cried and rubbed her face on the glass; that made the wailing, and every so often she would kiss the glass, sucking it so hard as to produce audible smacking and slurping. Her skin, like the hide of an old hippopotamus,
loose and thick and wrinkled, was a sort of gray blue, and her phlegm-gray hair hung like a heavy curtain soaked in grease around her face. Her hands were the worst, for the nails were long, broken, and dirty, and the black dirt made a fine tracery in the wrinkles on her blue-gray skin. Even from where she stood. Calliope could smell the woman—and it was not the foul body odor she might have expected, but like a wet and sentimental copy of roses, as if she had been drenched with some badly done scent to hide a still fouler odor inside.
She could only be that figure that had disappeared from the story a generation before, Waldo's mother.
She turned, saw Calliope, and flew straight at her in a screaming rage. The Queen had had no occasion to arm herself, but she was young and strong and used to fighting by now, and she punched the hag hard in the nose. As she did, she felt the leathery old toothless lips try to engulf her hand, and with a cry of disgust she shoved Waldo's mother backward.
But the foul creature was stronger than she looked, and she reached forward, closing her hands on Calliope's neck, squeezing with great force, her thumbnails crossing on the Queen's windpipe and her fingers meeting in the back, pressing Calliope downward. Even with the force of her thighs, and the floor at her back, Calliope could do no more than force enough space for a few more breaths. She dug into her opponent's eyes with her fingers, but felt only dry dust, for her eyes had dried up long ago; Waldo's mother saw nothing, thought nothing, merely grinned and simpered and moaned for more to cram into herself.
They tumbled and thrashed. All the things Calliope had done would have freed her from any wrestler, but the grip on her throat was still slowly tightening. The floor was slick with gunge that soaked into her dress to join the icy sweat.
They had thrashed and rolled to the pedestal, and now Calliope let the grip close on her throat, risked blacking out, and reached up to pull down the heart itself in its glass case. The edges of dark were creeping in on her, and in a moment or two she knew she would be unconscious. She had some idea of taking the heart as a hostage.
But the glass shattered as she touched it, and suddenly it was Waldo's living heart she held in her hands. At once the grip on Calliope's throat relaxed, and she sucked in cold dizzying air, foul with the odor of false roses. Her hips braced and she kicked hard against her naked opponent's stomach, not seeming to hurt her but flipping her over.
Now they were both on their feet, struggling, pulling Waldo's heart between them as it pulsed and shook. The Spirit Spire seemed to sway around Calliope, and she dragged the heart and the hag back toward the edge.
Now Waldo's mother was whispering. "Give me, give me, give me. Want it, want it, want it. Oooh, sweet, sweet, made it just for me, all mine, sweet, sweet, want to eat."
Calliope dragged her another step. The Spirit Spire had not just seemed to shake—it was beginning to wobble, and to slowly precess with a great thumping and rumbling; the Queen's footing on the gunge-slick pavement became less secure, but still she fought to be nearer the edge, far above the courtyard. Waldo's mother was now licking at the heart, her toothless gums not able to tear a piece from it.
A pismire roared somewhere close at hand, and the side of the hag's head exploded like a puffball. Her grip relaxed. With a convulsive heave, Calliope hurled the heart far over the edge, and then, the spire tilting under her, she slipped down the pavement, fingers scrabbling for a grip that was not there.
The hard stones of the courtyard opened beneath her, and she lost the last of her grip and fell.
She had just long enough to think that this was going to become a matter of legend—the Queen for less than a day who fell to her death—and to hope that Waldo's heart might land on something fatal to it.
Then a great, furry back was under her, and she landed on it with a woof like a kicked dog. She almost tumbled down the hairy back, but Sir John caught her by the collar, and she grabbed into the fur of the Riddling Beast, hanging on for dear life as the Riddling Beast spiraled up and away from the falling Spirit Spire, which crashed down into the empty courtyard.
Calliope, the Riddling Beast, and Sir John Slitgizzard all saw Waldo's heart impale itself upon the spear of the weather-cock by the front gate, and burst like a balloon full of thin tar; a moment later, a piece of the spire knocked the weathercock from its perch and slammed it to the stones, taking the impaled heart with it. A moment after that, the whole Spirit Spire came to pieces and fell into the courtyard and across the wall, burying the nasty punctured and squashed mess that was all that remained of Waldo's heart.
They glanced at each other, and knew that the story must even now be ending. Calliope started to laugh, for it was good to be alive, good to be rid of things like Waldo and his mother—and then she vomited, for she remembered that Waldo's mother had wanted his heart to eat. She ended up apologizing profusely to the Riddling Beast, and washing his fur herself, but that was later.
7
The Love of You
The sobbing suddenly ceased, and then there was a great shouting in the courtyard outside, for (as Amatus learned later) what remained of Waldo's army had fallen dead, as if so little of themselves was left that they perished with him; or perhaps, as one later writer noted, with Waldo's death the pieces of soul all returned to their owners, and the volume of evil done was greater than any one real man could bear. Whatever the cause, there in the bright morning sunlight, the real men fell screaming with expressions of horror, dying in fits. The made men just fell over dead.
But these were things Amatus was to learn later. For right now the young King was getting exhausted and frustrated, and just a bit cross, and he was wondering what sort of end of the story this could be, with Waldo still behind the door and himself standing here in utter futility, shoulder bruised, tired and sore, but having done the little he had done in the battle entirely as a sniper.
Thunder and Palaestrio came up behind him, shouting his name. "I am here," the King said, "and unhurt. Waldo is beyond this door but he's stopped making any sort of noise."
"Get a man with an ax," Palaestrio bellowed, and a great, burly lumberjack came up the stairs. He stepped to the door, swung his ax twice lightly to get the distance, and then with five neat chops took out the hinges and bolt. The door fell inward.
Waldo lay dead upon the floor, his hand clutching his chest. "His heart," King Amatus said. "Sir John, or someone, must have destroyed his heart."
But he said it only because, unlikely as that was, what was before them was more astonishing. Waldo the Usurper, in exactly the way Amatus had once had no left side, was missing the whole right side of his body. "He always traveled heavily cloaked, and no decent person saw him face to face, or at least not and lived," Deacon Dick Thunder mused. "Now perhaps we know why. I suppose he too must have been given the Wine of the Gods—"
"Majesty!" Palaestrio cried. "Majesty, when did—where did—"
"Quiet!" Amatus snapped. He had just realized Psyche was not there. He shouted her name twice before Palaestrio could restrain himself no longer and cried out, "Majesty, Majesty, forgive me for being the one to tell you, but, sir, you are whole!"
Amatus looked down and it was so. He was as any other man, with his left side as complete as his right, beginning on the left and continuing all the way through until it was his right. It was all there, without hole or seam, and when he saw, he wept. Dick Thunder quietly conducted the King to a private chamber and left him alone to compose himself.
They never found Psyche's body; Amatus thought perhaps she had died early, and that was why his appearance had not alarmed any of the guards he encountered. Calliope, when she heard of it much later, found herself wondering if perhaps there might have been some link between Psyche and Waldo, and could never quite shake the thought, which troubled her deeply because she had loved Psyche too.
Much later, in his diary, Cedric speculated that although Psyche was gone and Amatus whole, that did not mean that Psyche had necessarily died. Perhaps, he wrote, what was required was that she be here,
and then be gone. We never do learn all the rules of anything important, after all.
The Festival of Liberation, held on the first day of summer, was the biggest festival in the Kingdom for many centuries afterwards, and if the Kingdom could still be gotten to, and you did, you would find the Festival of Liberation celebrated in the good old way even now.
It was set forever upon the first day of summer, the day when Calliope destroyed Waldo's heart and Amatus's armies retook the castle, and it was always an occasion for oratory, fireworks, parades, pageants, and plays. The first year it was celebrated, it was a special day in any case, for it was the day that Calliope and Amatus were finally wed, and the Kingdom regained its province of OVerhill.
The festival was merrier for that, but not so merry as perhaps it might have been, for so much was still being done, and it would be late in the reigns of Amatus the Great and Calliope the Brave before the city was at all what it had been, and before the summer capital at Oppidum Optimum was the fine place it was to become. Wreck and rubble, wrack and rum, remained to be repaired, rebuilt, or razed, and almost all, from highest to lowest in the Kingdom, were just released from mourning.
Still, the rebuilding went forward swiftly now, even though the ever-dependable Cedric had resigned his posts and was hard at work on getting his Chronicle in order, as well as producing edited editions ot many chronicles that had been rotting in the Royal Library for decades. Captain Palaestrio and Deacon Dick Thunder—now Count Palaestrio and Baron Thunder—had been put in charge of reconstruction, as General of All the Armies and Prime Minister respectively. Palaestrio was doing splendidly at it, for, as Cedric pointed out, Palaestrio's skills at maintaining an army on next to nothing were the very skills the Kingdom needed in a time when taxes must not be raised. As for Thunder, what better qualification could one have in diplomacy and statecraft than having run a large and celebrated gang of robbers?
