“The chatelaine wants to see me?”
“Yes. And you’d better hurry. She’s in a bit of a state.”
Left with instinctual cravings and not much else, seeking concessions to dignity and a sense of peace, yet struggling with the means to accomplish this (let alone understand the drive), Pan Renik was more animal than man. From an early age, the situation of existence had been pretty clear to him: he could not live within the narrow parameters established by those who defined the norms of his society. Pan Renik had been an outcast even in his earliest memories. Now, in the treetop settlement, he was know simply as the exile.
He built his nest in the upmost branches, high above the huts and nets and concerns of the others, high above the padres.
Cut off from the hunts, without access to buckets of water patiently collected, Pan Renik was also desperate, hungry, and thirsty most of the time. Loneliness was a given.
Filthy, on skinny haunches he listened to the fading moan of the padre’s horn. The instrument had sounded for the third consecutive night. Pan Renik decided right then and there that he would descend (albeit very cautiously, of course) to investigate.
The night was clear, with steady wind. Moon illuminated the cloudscape. Dreamlike. A triad of notes played over three nights indicated to Pan Renik—if memory served correctly—that an errant soul, teetering on the edge for some time, had now fled its corporeal home; the emptied husk could be sent on its way, to fall beneath the clouds, where only the dead could go.
Pan Renik, bug-eyed apparition, who once tore out his own matted hair, in dreads, to expose his white skull to the sky and unsuccessfully release unwelcome visitors from his beleaguered brain (and then lay bleeding and feverish in his nest, without help, for weeks), climbed quietly, hand over hand, lower and lower, nearer to the settlement.
Perched on a bough, body hidden by clusters of big leaves, he paused. A large crowd had gathered on the main branch. He hoped for an easy opportunity to rob an attendee or two—dash in, maybe get a few nuts or other treasures, then scurry off and up—but there were far too many padres and citizens on the branch for that: almost everybody in the settlement had gathered. Rows of people lined the bough, mostly on this side of dead man’s run, extending out to the end of the huts, their hollowed faces illuminated by well-guarded candles, and by the moonlight as it filtered through the rarified mists blowing overhead. Surveying this, Pan Renik grunted. Decrees must have been passed. Padres had wanted, for arcane reasons, full congregation.
Pan Renik wondered, for the first time since hearing the horn, who might have died.
Glimpsed between the forms of the citizens, he saw the corpse, tethered to a raft. No details. Pan Renik waited. He was good at waiting. That was another of his gifts. His life, it seemed, had been nothing but waiting.
Finally, caught in the orange glow of the guttering candles as they flared in the wind, he discerned the profile of the dead man’s face and he understood the turnout, the decrees.
The oldest man in the world had finally died.
While winds picked up, Pan Renik hunkered against the bark, clinging tight, not sure what he felt. Remote memories churned, memories of when he had still been a citizen, when he had known this dead man and had lived in the settlement, among his people. (But already an exile, he reminded himself: already stared at, talked about behind his back, mocked and derided.)
Back then, Pan Renik had slept in a forked branch, not too far from the dead man’s hut. Images rose and burst in procession. Once, he recalled, as punishment for a forgotten transgression—for breaking some ridiculous rule—he had been forced by padres to clean out the dwelling of the oldest man. Pan Renik remembered the stench of dried garbage, caked to the woven floor, and chunks of yellow phlegm, hardened at the side of the man’s cot. Even in these memories the old shitheap had been ancient. Yet padres, of course, loved the man, then as now, in death, because the dead man had been a toady, devout and unquestioning, a symbol of the padres’ success.
Pan Renik spat between the gaps in his rotten teeth.
As a young boy, he had heard that the oldest man in the world was born before the great branches of the world first kissed the sky—
Thwack!
The swing of the settlement’s sole metal knife caught Pan Renik by surprise; one of the attending padres—ironuser, it looked like—had cut the raft free.
Pan Renik craned to get a better look.
The old man’s lemurs, clearly terrified—not yet ready to leave this elevated plane of existence—huddled low against the corpse, growling and staring about wide-eyed as the raft began to roll down dead man’s run.
From the crowd—most holding candles aloft—came muted sounds of encouragement.
Beyond the limit of the last hut, where the great bough dipped and the safety nets ended, the raft picked up speed. Light of the moon was strong enough beyond the canopy that the shroud of leaves over the corpse seemed to glow with a light of its own. Despite his disappointment at the lack of opportunities here, and despite the sour sensations remaining from his reflections of the past, Pan Renik’s mood was briefly distracted, buoyed almost to amusement by the spectacle of the raft as it launched over the edge of the world, hanging there, suspended for a moment against a backdrop of night and endless clouds, small lemurs pinwheeling slowly out, shrieking into open air.
He grinned and bobbed his head and scratched at his scalp (which was and forever would be patchy, scarred and itchy).
Distant lights flickered under the clouds, illuminating the skeletal ghost of another treetop a great distance away, though Pan Renik saw this apparition as the fiery hand of a man who was trying to wake up before sinking under the poison for a third and final time.
He made a low hooting sound, like a little monkey he had once seen, as the death raft plummeted out of sight, lost forever—
But here came padres, walking the branch in two groups of three, chanting and swinging their braziers. Tiny red eyes glinted inside their cowls. They scrutinized the gathering. Maybe they were looking for him? Pan Renik sniffed the wind. Dawn approached. He lifted his eyes skyward, saw his lonesome nest.
Sun started to limn the clouds.
Reluctantly, Pan Renik clambered back up, empty-handed, his brief enjoyment gone, replaced now by the more familiar longings and sparse trappings of his solitary life.
In times of crisis such as this, the chatelaine found herself wondering about moments immediately before and after tragedy. Though her world had crumbled this morning, and she was distraught, she managed to cast her thoughts back to her waking moments, just before the discovery, to see if there had been a clue that the burgeoning day would soon take an awful turn. Had there been portentous dreams? The fecund, rambling about time and the city from her cell? No images lingered or stood out. Certainly nothing that would make the chatelaine reach bedside for any cotton wadding.
Regardless how much she reviewed the early part of her morning, it seemed there had been no hints, nothing amiss. Just aches and dull pain and the regrets of a regular hangover. Minor issues, quotidian and insignificant—no longer of any consequence—had nagged her when she opened her eyes at the door’s knock.
The day someone was to die in an accident, did they have premonitions? Seconds before a huge chunk of stone, say, fell from an archway overhead to crush a man where he stood, was he truly unsuspecting? Or had this man, for that second, given up, surrendered to his fate, knowing that inevitable destruction hurtled closer?
For the chatelaine, the idea that tragedy could strike without any indication, no matter how subtle, must be impossible.
But she’d had none she could recall.
She took a deep breath, thought for a second that she might cry. She did not.
Her morning, thus far:
A lifetime ago, she’d been awoken by knocking, both at the doors to her bedchambers and from within the confines of her own skull. Her muscles and nether regions throbbed. Her mouth was very dry, sinuses swimming
with the fumes of her dirty room. Without opening her eyes or even moving, she had done a quick inventory of her body, as was her norm on mornings after such excesses, searching herself for injuries other than the usual, such as sprains or cuts, or ruptures and other sources of discomfort that might run even deeper.
Then she’d cracked one eye open, examining the bed for guests. Seeing none—nor any on the floor—she felt a moderate sense of relief.
Her chambers were a disaster.
Banging again at the door.
Memories of the previous night were incomplete, but physical evidence of her activities had left her with a strong need to remain alone for as long as possible. Yet she was never allowed to stay alone for long. There would be parchments to sign, meetings to attend, her father and the citizens and the entire damn city to worry about.
She sighed.
Noises from Nowy Solum came muffled through the parchment over her windows. Judging by the light, it was well past dawn.
Banging, a third time, at the door.
Then the squawkings from her pets. Was that the sign things were amiss? Had her creatures been more upset than usual, or were these regular cries for food and affection now they knew she had woken?
“Please,” the chatelaine had whispered, holding onto her forehead, where an invisible knife twisted. “Please, my little babies, please. Momma has a splitting pain. Give me a second . . .”
Breakfast was pears and quince jelly, a croissant, black coffee. The tray was left abandoned in the doorway, on the wooden planks of the Great Hall. Nobody around. A glass of fizzy water for her stomach, which she sipped before returning with the tray in one hand to her bed. Once there, picking at the meal, propped up against her pillows and listening again to the sounds of the morning outside and to the protests of her pets, she tried hard to recall details from the latter parts of the night—faces at least—forcing herself to steer away from further guilt or regrets, or at least staving off these feelings for as long as possible. Clinical, she told herself. Be clinical. This is your science, your study.
Several people had been in the room. Evidence was widespread: empty and half-filled glasses; a broken bottle; discarded garments. The son of a barker from Soaper’s and Candles, a man she had taken a liking to—Jonas, was it? And maybe he had brought a friend. And a dark-skinned girl, from goodness-knows-where, possibly outside Nowy Solum, who had sat on the mattress for the longest time, fiddling with her hair and frowning before finally crawling over. Her lips and tongue had been black, rough. There were oils flowing, endless spiritus, the smell, and crack, and taste of leather.
At one point, two cobali had watched the activities—she remembered an isolated and crystalline image—laughing at the exertions from the foot of the bed.
Then the chatelaine lay thinking about the kholic girl, the one from Hot Gate. She pictured her pretty face. The poor thing had been brought inside with the best intentions and then left, alone, somewhere in Jesthe. Was she still in the palace? The chatelaine had no idea. Not that she ever wanted to involve the girl in an orgy, but neither did she intend the child to become lost in the huge halls and empty rooms of her home, just another servant. Today, she vowed, on this very day—or perhaps the next, at the latest—she would seek the girl out.
Almost ready at that point to throw off the cover and call for a bath, the chatelaine looked into the large mirror—which took up most of the west wall, and in which she discerned the row of her beloved beasts, stirring in their gilded cages—and, for the first time, saw the door to one cage hanging open.
That was the moment her day, her world, her life changed.
Agitation was clear in the faces of those remaining creatures, at least those with eyes. Fearful expressions, not understanding what had happened, brimming with hurt and betrayal of what they had seen in the night. The cries had been much more than hunger: they were of betrayal.
Why had she not looked earlier?
Heart pounding, the chatelaine stood for a moment, dizzy, naked except for the band of flea fur around her upper arm. She held onto the bed for support. Tiny stars spun about her head and drifted, falling, across her vision.
Her cherub was gone.
She glanced about the bedchambers, a slight twist of anticipation on her face, as if maybe an obscure joke had been told, one she didn’t quite get. Or maybe she was hopeful that the precious creature might be watching her, perched on a curtain rod, or on a statue, but she saw nothing of the sort and her wispy smile faded as quickly as it had come, replaced by apprehension that was like a rag pushed into her throat.
The cherub had never before been out of its cage.
Oiled parchment over the windows remained intact and the door had been closed when she awoke. Had one of her guests taken the poor thing during the night? Had a guest done unspeakable acts with her beloved pet after she’d passed out? She recalled, before the evening had really fallen apart, an image of herself and a man called Zoran, from the kitchen (bearded, skinny), standing in the alcove, drinks in hand, laughing while she introduced, one by one, her menagerie.
Had she taken other guests over there later?
The chatelaine stumbled over to the alcove. The beasts, looking away from the mirror to see her physically enter, let loose with shrieks and twitters and grunts, feathers flying or fur airborne. Only one or two remained inert; they had no choice, created immobile, twitching with pent emotions. She had caused this hurt, had torn apart their safe and pampered world by acts of irresponsibility.
How could she have just lain there?
The lock to the cage was scratched. Part had been bent. Picked, no doubt. Really, though, the quality of the lock was embarrassing, little more than an ornament.
Biting a knuckle, she stifled a wail.
Her poor cherub. Her poor, poor cherub.
She was a fool and an idiot and a terrible mother for getting herself into the state she’d been in, for letting strangers into her room every night, for drinking until oblivion put her to bed. The pets were right: she had done this with her own hands.
Two things became certain to the chatelaine as she stood there, breath coming in ragged gasps: first, of course, for the sake of Nowy Solum, she had to replace the cherub as soon as possible. Second was that she must tell the chamberlain of her mistake. Erricus and his palatinate officers already called her all sorts of a fool. She knew of their profound disapproval, for just about every aspect of her lifestyle.
They were right, it seemed.
She took another deep breath and began to pace.
As a young and anxious girl, the chatelaine had been handed control of Jesthe. Now, after years of decline, she had finally proved herself unworthy. There need not be a lecture from the chamberlain about priorities and her lack of security, and respect for the palatinate; she was all too aware that they had warned her of this very thing, as far back as the day she had first banished them from her wings of the palace. Erricus would imply, as he had back then, that she actually harboured a wish for someone to come into her bedchambers and cut her throat while she slept. She was lucky this time, he would say. This was a warning, a wake-up call.
The chatelaine did blubber a bit then, because she hated platitudes, especially when they were called for.
She offered hysterical apologies to her remaining pets.
Painful to admit that the chamberlain had been right all along. She sniffled.
Where was her little baby?
She made a fist.
During today’s conference, she would tell Erricus that the palatinate could return to all halls and chambers of the palace. She would admit defeat, and be humbled before his smugness.
Would this make her father happy? She was sure that the castellan worried about her, without protection down here, but in his current state of mind it was hard to be certain of anything.
She ground her fist against her palm.
Searching the floor for clues of any sort, she saw the signs of struggle and distress, but noth
ing unusual. Could she recall nothing? What was the matter with her?
Maybe a person other than a lover had come into Jesthe during the night, from the slums outside? Might even a servant, one of her own women, have done this? Almost anyone could enter the bedchambers on nights like the previous one. The palace was riddled, like old cheese.
Were there people in Nowy Solum who wished her ill-will? This concept was always a bit hard for her to get her head around. Why would people want to hurt her? The biggest crime she’d ever committed was sloth, or disregard. She was not malicious, nor had she ever harboured any ill-will of her own to force upon the citizenry.
She wiped her nose on her sleeve. “They should receive steel,” she told her pets, who raised a small furor at the sound of her voice. “Or burn in eternal fire!”
The chatelaine could trust none of her staff. Not one of them. They were all backstabbers, harpies vying for attentions and favours and—
The kholic.
This time, thoughts of the girl stopped the chatelaine in her tracks. Even her pets fell suddenly silent. The first kholic ever to be in these parts of Jesthe and the chatelaine didn’t even know where she was or where she had been. Could the kholic have taken the cherub?
Surely the girl was as innocent as her pets?
But what did the chatelaine really know about kholics? They were taken away from their mothers at birth, raised in the ostracon. Everyone knew that much. They had black fluids in their hearts and could get no pleasure, save from cleaning up the refuse of hemos—
If Erricus and his officers were allowed up here again, on this level of the palace, what would become of the melancholic girl? They would encounter each other at some point. What then?
If the kholic was still around.
The chatelaine dressed quickly in a long chemise and threw open the doors to her room, standing at the threshold to the Great Hall. Crooked Greta, the candlemender, was, by a misfortune of timing, passing by at that precise moment.
“Fetch the new girl,” demanded the chatelaine.
Greta frowned, twisting her entire upper body to make eye contact. “What?”
The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter Page 5
