Suddenly Count Palicrovol grew afraid. “I am Count of Traffing.”
“The people hate King Nasilee. They have given him their life’s blood, and he has given them only poverty and terror. They long for someone to set them free from this burden.”
“Then go to a man with armies.” If Nasilee heard that Palicrovol had even listened to this Godsman, it would be the end of the house of Traffing.
“General Zymas will come to you and follow you to the day he dies.”
“Which will be very soon, if he dares to rebel against the King.”
“On the contrary,” said the Godsman. “Three hundred years from now you and Zymas and Sleeve will all be alive, with a man’s life yet ahead of you.”
Sleeve laughed. “Since when does your magic-hating god give gifts to a poor wizard?”
“For every day that you’re glad of the gift, there will be five days when you hate it.”
Palicrovol leaned forward. “I should have you killed.”
“What would be the point? I’m only a poor old man, and when God lets go of my body, I will know even less than you do.”
Sleeve shook his head. “There is no poetry in this man’s prophecy.”
“True,” said Palicrovol. “But there’s a tale in it.”
“This is not a prophecy,” said the Godsman. “This is your name. Zymas will come to you, and in the name of God you will conquer. You will enter the city of Hart’s Hope and the King’s daughter will ride the hart for you. You will build a new temple of God and you will name the city Inwit, and no other god will be worshipped there. And this above all: You will not be safe upon the throne until King Nasilee and his daughter Asineth are dead.”
These words spoken, the Godsman shuddered, his jaw went slack, and the light departed from his eyes. He began to look about him in tired surprise. This had no doubt happened to him before, but plainly he was not yet used to finding himself in strange places—particularly in the midst of a very serious Feast of Hinds.
“What bright servants this god chooses for himself,” said Sleeve.
Palicrovol did not laugh. The fire that had left the old man’s eyes had left a spark in Palicrovol. “Here before you all,” he said, “I will tell you what I have not dared to say before. I hate King Nasilee and all his acts, and for the sake of all Burland I long to see him driven from the throne.”
At these treasonous words, especially spoken at the Feast of Hinds, his own men grew still and watched him warily.
“It is good that we love you,” said Sleeve. “We will all keep silence and tell no one that you spoke against King Nasilee. And we will pray to the Hart that you will not be seduced by the flattery of a strange and jealous god.”
Sleeve’s words counseled against rebellion, but Palicrovol had learned that Sleeve’s words rarely gave Sleeve’s meaning. Sleeve might mean that it was already too late for Palicrovol to change his mind, for now he would live in constant fear of betrayal by someone who had heard his words. And as to the Godsman’s prophecy of victory, was Sleeve doubting? Or testing? Palicrovol looked at the unnaturally white face of the wizard, his transparent skin, his hair as fine and pale as spiderweb. How can I read your strange face? Palicrovol wondered. Even as he wondered, he knew that Sleeve did not mean his face to be read. Sleeve probed others, but was not himself probed; Sleeve comprehended, but remained incomprehensible. “You came to me for no reason I could understand,” said Palicrovol. “Until now. You came to me because of now.”
Sleeve pursed his lips contemptuously. “I follow the entrails of animals. I use the power of their blood and in return they teach me where to go. Whatever plans God has for you, they’re no concern of mine.” But his denial was a confirmation, for never had Sleeve bothered to explain himself before.
A trumpet sounded outside the palisade. Count Palicrovol leapt to his feet. The treebark mantle slipped from his shoulders as he stood. “The King,” whispered some of the men, for such was the terror of King Nasilee’s Eyes and Ears that they thought he had already heard of this treason and come to punish Palicrovol. They felt no easier when they saw an army of five hundred men gathered outside the fortress.
“Who are you, who bring an army to my gate!” cried Palicrovol from the battlement.
“I am Zymas, once general of the King’s army. And who are you, who stand naked at the battlement!”
Palicrovol felt the winter cold for the first time in the Feast of Hinds: the prophecy was already being fulfilled. In that moment he made his decision. “I am Palicrovol, King of Burland!”
But the army did not raise a cheer, and Palicrovol felt the giddiness of despair: he had spoken treason in front of the King’s right hand, all because he had believed the mad prophet of a foolish God.
“Palicrovol!” called Zymas.
“Can these gates keep you out if you want to come in?” asked Palicrovol.
Zymas answered, “Can these soldiers keep you in if you want to come out?”
“If these soldiers are my enemies, then I will not come out. I will stay here and make them pay in blood for every step they take inside my walls.”
“And if we are your friends?”
“Why did you come to me?” cried Palicrovol from the battlement. “Why do you taunt me?”
“I dreamed of you, Count Traffing. Why did I dream of you?”
Palicrovol turned to Sleeve, who smiled. “It is the Feast of Hinds,” said Sleeve.
“It is the Feast of Hinds!” called Palicrovol.
“The tripes were heavy, and the womb was all but five days full,” said Sleeve.
“The tripes were heavy, and the womb was all but five days full!” called Palicrovol. As he echoed Sleeve’s words, Palicrovol was relieved. When the hind that gave herself at the Feast of Hinds was utterly full, the enterprise of the master of the feast could not go wrong. Someone’s enterprise, anyway, and it was usually polite to read all good omens for the host.
“I know nothing of augury,” said Zymas. “Who is the wizard who is teaching you what to say?”
Sleeve spoke for himself then. “I am Sleeve,” he said. “The Sweet Sisters showed me a heavy hind. God spoke to Palicrovol through an old fool. And the Hart has come to you in a dream. If all the great gods are with Palicrovol, what will withstand him?”
Zymas had not said there was a hart in his dream. “What need has he of me?”
“What need have you of him? It is enough that you are both committed to treason now. If you work together, you can bring down this King. If you oppose each other, Nasilee will find his work much easier.”
Zymas thought of still another argument. Sleeve, the greatest of the living wizards, is with this Count Traffing. “Palicrovol, if you would be King, I will help you wed the King’s daughter and have the throne. Will you be a just and good king?”
“I will be the same sort of king as I have been Count,” said Palicrovol. “My people prosper more than the people of any other lord. I am a just judge, as far as any man can be.”
“If that is true, I will follow you, and my men will follow you,” said Zymas.
So the Godsman’s prophecy was perfect, though it had predicted an event as unlikely as Burring flowing backward. Zymas had come to him, and come even before Palicrovol himself had taken one single act toward rebellion. God was now his god. “And I,” cried Palicrovol, “I will follow God.”
And I, whispered white-skinned Sleeve, pink-eyed Sleeve, I could shake the earth and unmake this fortress, and with my left hand I could cause a forest to rise in the place of Zymas’s five hundred men. Why should I link myself to these unmagicked men, particularly if they fear that ridiculous god named God? They have no need of me, nor I of them. But Sleeve felt the hind’s blood hardening on his arms and hands, and he was content that Palicrovol should be king, even if he did it in the name of this angry young God.
And that is how Palicrovol began his quest for the throne of Burland.
2
The Girl Who Rode the H
art
Three times in her life, Asineth learned what it meant to be the King’s daughter. Each lesson was the beginning of wisdom.
ASINETH’S LESSON OF GOOD AND EVIL
When Asineth was only three, the ladies who cared for her walked her in the palace garden, in the safe part, where the gravel walks are neatly edged and the plants all grow in animal shapes. One of her favorite games was to sit very still, dribbling sand or gravel from her fingers, until the watching women grew bored with her, and got involved in their own conversations. Then she would quietly get up and walk away and hide from them. At first she always hid nearby, so she could watch the first moments of panic on their faces when they realized she was gone. “Oh, you little monster,” they would say. “Oh, is that a way for a princess to run off and leave her ladies?”
But this time little Asineth hid farther away, because she was getting older, and the world was getting larger, and she was drawn to that part of the garden where moss hangs untrimmed and the animals are not rooted to the ground. There she saw a great grey beast drifting slowly through the underbrush, and she felt a strange attraction to it, and she followed. She would lose sight of the beast from time to time, and wander searching for it, and always she caught a glimpse of it, or thought she did, and moved after it, farther and farther into the untamed garden.
She did not hear the ladies searching for her; she was not nearby when, frightened, they reported to the Butler that she was missing; only when the sky was getting red and the soldiers found her bathing her feet at the edge of a large pool of water, only then did she remember her game of hide and seek. The soldiers took her away from the pool and carried her through the woods to the safe garden where she had been playing. There she saw the three women who had not watched her well enough, naked and staked out upon the ground, their backs and thighs and buttocks bloody from flogging. She was afraid. “Will they beat me, too?” she asked.
“Not you,” said the soldier who carried her. “Never you. King Nasilee is your father. What man would dare to take a whip to you?”
So it was that Asineth learned that the daughter of the King can do no wrong.
ASINETH’S LESSON OF LOVE AND POWER
King Nasilee’s favorite mistress was Berry, and Asineth loved Berry with all her heart. Berry was lithe and beautiful. When she was naked she was slender and quick of body, like a racing hound, and all her muscles moved gracefully under her skin. When she was clothed she was ethereal, as distant from the world as a sunburst, and as beautiful. Asineth would come to her every day, and talk to her, and Berry, beautiful as she was, took time to listen to the little girl, to hear all her tales of the palace, all her dreams and wishes.
“I wish I were like you,” Asineth told her.
“And how would you like to be like me?” Berry asked.
“You are so beautiful.”
“But in a few years my beauty will fade, and the King your father will set me aside with a pension, like a housekeeper or a soldier.”
“You are so wise.”
“Wisdom is nothing, without power. Someday you will be Queen. Your husband will rule Burland because he is your husband, and then you will have power, and then it will not matter if you are wise.”
“What is power?” asked Asineth.
Berry laughed, which told the six-year-old girl that she had asked a good question, a hard one. Adults always laughed when Asineth asked a hard question. After they laughed, Asineth always studied the question and the answer, to see what made it such an important question.
“Power,” said Berry, “is to tell a man, You are a slave, and he is a slave. Or to tell a woman, You are a countess, and she is a countess.”
“So power is naming people?” asked Asineth.
“And something more. Power is to tell the future, little Asineth. If the astronomer says, Tomorrow the moon will come and cover the sun, and it happens as he said, then he has the power of the sun and the moon. If your father says, Tomorrow you will die, it will also happen, and so your father has the power of death. Your father can tell the futures of all men in Burland. You will prosper, you will fail, you will fight in war, you will take your cargo downriver, you will pay taxes, you will have no children, you will be a widow, you will eat pomegranates every day of your life—he can predict anything to do with men, and it will come to pass. He can even tell the astronomer, Tomorrow you will die, and all the astronomer’s power over the sun and the moon will not save him.”
Berry brushed her hair a hundred times as she spoke, and her hair glistened like gold. “I have power, too,” said Berry.
“Whose future do you tell?” asked little Asineth.
“Your father’s.”
“What do you say will happen to him?”
“I say that tonight he will see a perfect body, and he will embrace it; he will see perfect lips, and he will kiss them. I predict that the seed of the King will be spilled in me tonight. I tell the future—and it will come to pass.”
“So you have power over my father?” asked Asineth.
“I love your father. I know him as he does not even know himself. He could not live without me.” Berry stood naked before the glass and drew the borders of herself, and told Asineth how her father loved each nation of her flesh, told her which he came to as a gentle ambassador, which he dealt with sternly, and which he conquered with the sword.
Then her voice softened, and her face became childlike and peaceful, even as her words became colder. “A woman is a field, Asineth, or so a man thinks, a field that he will plow and plant, and from which he means to reap far more than his little seed. But the earth moves faster than a man can move, and the only reason he does not know it is because I carry him with me as I turn. He only plows what furrows he finds; he makes nothing. It is the farmer who is plowed, and not the field, and he will not forget me.” Asineth listened to all of Berry’s words and watched the motion of her body and practiced talking and moving like her. She prayed to the Sweet Sisters that she would be like Berry when she grew; she knew that there was never a woman more perfect in all the world.
She loved Berry even on the day she spoke of her to the King. Nasilee let her sit beside him in the Chamber of Questions, and though she was young, he would sometimes publicly consult her. She would give her answer in a loud voice, and Nasilee would either praise her wisdom or point out her error, so all men could hear and benefit, and so that she could learn statecraft. This day the King asked his daughter, “Who is wiser than I am, Asineth?”
In the innocence of childhood she had not learned that there are some questions whose answer you must pretend not to know. “Berry,” she answered at once.
“Ah,” said her father. “And how is she so wise?”
“Because she has power, and if you have power you don’t have to be wise.”
“I have more power than she has,” said the King. “Am I not wiser, then?”
“You have power over all men, Father, but Berry has power over you. You can never get a farmer to plow the same field twice in a year, but she can get you to plow twice in a day, even when you have no seed left to sow.”
“Ah,” said Nasilee again. Then he told the soldiers to bring Berry to him. Asineth saw that her father was angry. Why should he be angry? Didn’t he love Berry as much as Asineth did? Wasn’t he glad that she was wise? Hadn’t he poisoned Asineth’s own mother because she was angry at him for taking Berry into his bed?
Berry came with manacles on her wrists and hands. She looked at Asineth with a terrible hatred and cried out, “How can you believe the words of a child! I don’t know why she is lying, or who told her to say these things, but you surely won’t believe the tales of my enemies!”
Nasilee only raised his eyebrows and said, “Asineth never lies.”
Berry looked in fear at Asineth and cried, “I was never your rival!”
But Asineth did not understand her words. She had learned her first lesson so well that she was incapable of imagining that she had don
e something wrong.
Berry pleaded with her lover. Asineth saw how she used her beautiful body, how she strained against the manacles, how her robe parted artfully to show the swell of her breasts. Father will love Berry again and forgive her, Asineth was sure of it. But Berry’s lover had become her King, and when all her pleading was done, he sent for a farmer and a team of oxen and a plow.
Out in the garden they did it, plowed Berry from groin to heart with a team of oxen pulling, and her screams rang in the palace garden until winter, so that Asineth could not go outside until winter changed it into another world.
It was a cruel thing her father did, but Asineth knew that he, too, heard Berry’s screams in the night. Berry dwelt in every room of the palace, even though she was dead, and one day, when Asineth was nine, she found her father slumped in a chair in the library, a book open before him, his cheeks stained with half-dried tears. Without asking, Asineth knew who it was he thought of. It comforted Asineth to know that even though Berry had not so much power as she had thought, she had this much: she could make herself unforgotten, and force her lover to live forever with regret. Yet Berry’s death itself was still a half-learned lesson, with the meaning yet ungiven, and so Asineth asked her father a question.
“Didn’t you love her?” asked Asineth.
To her surprise, he answered, “If I did not love her, I never have loved anything.”
“Why did you kill her, then?”
“Because I am the King,” said Nasilee. “If I hadn’t killed her, I would have lost the fear of my people, and if they do not fear me, I am not King.”
Asineth knew then that of the two powers Berry taught her, the stronger power was naming. It was because Nasilee was named King that he had to kill what he loved most. “You did not love Berry most of all,” said Asineth.
Nasilee opened his eyes, letting their light shine narrowly out upon his young daughter. “Did I not?”