Their guide demurred. “Common criminals,” he said. “Why see them?”
Quickly enough the silence reminded him that the Little King had been just such a common criminal. The guards led them out. They tried to steer the Little King away from the Steer Pit, but he knew his way. They came to an awkward moment: the cutter was getting his tools ready to do the job. A new victim was ready, so the one in the clamps had to be cut and sent on his way.
“Of all the reliefs on the palace walls, I think this is most lifelike,” said Orem.
“What will they do?” asked Belfeva. Not that it had been kept a secret from her; the great houses simply never bothered to discuss the cruelty that kept the city safe for them.
“They’ll make a steer of him,” Orem said. He did not realize that she would have no notion of the difference between steers and bulls.
It was Weasel who explained to her. Belfeva turned away, aghast.
In the pit the cutter waited, wondering what his spectators expected him to do. Orem could not relieve his anxiety. He himself didn’t know. The victim himself had chosen—better castration than slavery. Unless Orem meant to change the law itself, what could he do but go along with the man’s decision? And changing the law was beyond his reach. He could make no lasting changes, only little meddlings that would not reshape the working of Inwit, that would go unnoticed by the Queen.
At last Orem turned away, having said nothing. The cutter wasted no time after that—they were only a little way from the Steer Pit when they heard the piteous cries of the cut man.
The Gaols were as they had been, except that now it was spring. The prisoners did not freeze now. Instead they lived in the stench and flies of their own excrement on the ground below. The upmost prisoners, as always, had it better, for the flies were not so thick where they were. It was plain that many of the prisoners were ill.
“This one’s new,” Orem said quietly as they walked past the cages. “And this one’s been here days. He’ll die before trial.” They did not ask him how he knew. He knew. He showed no feelings to his companions, but they could taste his quiet, knew that this place had broken something in him, and created something else, something that had made him not the rustic that even the Queen believed he was. Weasel took his hand. He let her, but gave no sign it mattered, and soon she let go of him again. She did not mind; it was enough to see something that the Queen did not see. There was hope in that.
Up and down the rows, up and down, as if each prisoner were not identical to all the others. At last Belfeva grew sick and lagged behind, and Timias rebuked the Little King. “Haven’t we seen enough of this!” he demanded. “Why did you bring us here?”
Orem had no answer for him. Hadn’t he asked the same question of Flea after the death at the snake fight? I brought you here because there were two free hours. I brought you here to understand Queen’s Town as it truly is, and not as it seems to you to be. I brought you here because in the criss-cross shadow of the cages, strangers saved my life. “They spat on me to wake me in the snow.”
At that moment a prisoner on the second level cried out and ran to the bars of the cage, shouting.
“Orem! Lad, remember me, remember me! The favor, lad!”
Immediately the guards were thick between Orem and the shouter’s cage. “Quiet up there!” shouted one, and several archers readied their bows for quick restoration of quiet.
Orem knew the man before he could decide whether he wanted to know him or not. “Braisy,” he said.
It was enough to stop the archers. The commander of the guards came to the Little King to explain. “He’s a common swindler, and not only that, he passes people back and forth illegally into the city. We were finally able to catch him within the walls, passless. Death for sure, for this one, my lord Little King.”
Have you ever, Palicrovol, heard the inconvenient plea of one to whom you are in debt? And have you known that a moment’s inaction would release you from his demands? But not his debt, no, there is only one release for debt. Orem stripped the place of Beauty’s Searching Eye. “Free him,” Orem said softly.
The guard went red. “My lord Little King, I can’t.”
“I confess to you, sir,” Orem said, “that I took part in this man’s crimes, and I insist that it is your duty to punish me exactly as you punish him. Open a cage for me at once.”
“But you are the—the Little—”
“Free him,” Orem said again.
Timias stepped in, spoke softly to the commander of the guards. “You heard him say the words. If she minded, would he have been permitted to say it? If she minded, would you be permitted to do it? But I assure you that if you don’t do it, then it will be minded.”
So Timias became the Little King’s conspirator in a hundred little undoings of the harsh justice of the laws of Inwit. Orem’s reason for working against the laws is plain: he himself had been a victim of those laws. Timias, however, had all his life been sustained by those laws. He maintained his wealth only because the guards kept the poor of Inwit too terrified to take it from him. Why, then, did Timias help undo what made him safe? Because Timias was no sycophant, as you have called him. Timias was that rare thing—a man who can genuinely grieve for suffering he has never felt.
This was the beginning of the small set of doings, the small Acts of the Little King of Burland. It is not a large chronicle: I will tell it all to you here in only a few hundred breaths. Yet at the end he had no reason, I think, to be ashamed.
The commander brought Braisy from the cage. Such an obsequious creature, so eager to lick the feet of the Little King. But Orem did not spurn him, and in fact spoke a few words kindly to him, and told the guards to give the man a pass.
“Name of God,” said the commander. “How can I do it when he has no work?”
“In the pass name him servant of Gallowglass, a man of private means who is without servants at the moment. If he quits Gallowglass, he quits his pass.”
Braisy’s eyes went wide, but he swallowed and nodded. “Good enough for me, that’s right, that’s fair, that’s a true favor it is.”
The guards did it, and the ripple this made in the city was small enough that Beauty did not even notice it. But it was a ripple all the same, and changed forever the city you would return to, Palicrovol.
Perhaps the taste of power was heady as brandywine; but I think that Orem wasn’t drunken on so small a draught. I think Orem went on to other exercise of power because he resented having done a mercy for a man that he despised, when there were others who deserved better of him who were not helped. He began then to use the guard for his own small purposes. Find for me these two—they were my friends:
A boy called Flea, Flea Buzz, perhaps ten or so, lives in Swamptown. But put no fear in him, treat him kindly, find out where he is and tell me.
A man named Rainer Carpenter lives in Beggarstown in hope of finding work some day on a pauper’s pass. Find out where he is and tell me.
A grocer from High Waterswatch comes once a year, not long from now; Glasin Grocer, who was once the Corthy Price. Find out where he is and tell me.
And they told him. Orem sat in the Coal House, where the spies of the city are controlled; Orem sat there with Timias, Belfeva, and Weasel, and heard: Flea Buzz was caught a month ago, no pass and robbing a poor pisser in Little Market. Lost both ears and now lives pimping in Beggarstown.
Tell no one who ordered it, but give Flea Buzz his pass, a full and free pass tied to no man, and give him an unlimited draw upon the Great Exchange; arrange it for me out of what the Queen lets me spend. I care very little how difficult it will be. It’s either that or give him back his ears—if you can’t do the second, you will do the first. And so they did it, and more: they watched over the boy, the guards who had been his terror, watched him quietly, protected him from harm; for wasn’t this lad beloved of the Little King, who plainly had the blessing of the Queen?
As for Rainer Carpenter, the answer came more slowly, for he had
never lost an ear and so did not figure on the perpetual records of the Gaols. At last the spies reported. Known to be a violent, drunken man, he was killed a year ago, days after being turned away when he tried too early to enter the city on a pauper’s pass.
“Has it been a year?” Orem said quietly.
“Well over a year,” said the spy, making sure again on his written report.
“And so too late before I even left the city.” Orem looked at the coal-blackened wall. “Had he a family?”
“In a village in the west. He was driven out when the drought made paupers of all the farmers there; came here in hope of sending money back to them. The family is barely scratching a living as free laborers now that the rains have come again.”
“Give them twenty cattle and land enough for them, and money enough for safety without arousing the envy of all their neighbors. Tell them it was earned by Rainer Carpenter before he died trying to save a lad from thieves. It isn’t even a lie.”
Glasin Grocer they found last of all. Prospering in his village far to the north of Banningside, loved and respected by all who did not envy and respect or fear and respect him. Orem thought of vengeance, but it was not his way. Glasin had cheated him, but all the same he had a chance to sell Orem into hopeless slavery, and did not do it. Was it Glasin’s fault that those who had done better for Orem had suffered more? The Sisters did not weave justice into the cloth—that would be one thread too many. So Orem told them to grant Glasin a permanent stall in Great Market, in the best place, where the square debouched into Market Street at Low Court. Never had authority taken interest in a mere grocer until now: it was enough to make Glasin chiefmost grocer and something of a legend; it added many strophes to Glasin’s song.
What matter if the guards and spies thought Orem odd? It was as if he thought his life were an artifact, and he the carpenter determined that all legs shall stand flat. Saw here, plane there, even things up, set things right until all is firm and steady again.
He had forgotten that he was not an artisan at all, but rather a farmer, whose only skill was to know the calendar and watch the sky, plow when the ground is ripe, bind when the corn is dry, and save a bit of the crop to seed the field next year.
WHY DID YOU CHOOSE ME?
It became their life together. It became the way they passed their time. Belfeva and Timias spent their hours doing what no one in the Great Houses had ever thought to do: noticing the lives of the weak and helpless. They could not undo all the suffering of the city, but they could find the single acts of infamy that might be halted, to make the whole of the city that much less unfair. Then Timias and Belfeva would bring their tales to the Little King, and he would make his plan, blind the Queen, and work his small mercies. It did not go unnoticed in the city. The word quietly spread that the common people had a friend in King’s Town, and among the hopeless and afraid, there grew a little hope, a little courage.
One day, when they were alone, Timias asked the Little King, “Why did you choose me?”
“Choose you?” answered Orem.
“To help you in this work we’re doing.” At Orem’s puzzled expression, Timias laughed and explained. “Haven’t you noticed that we’re doing a work?”
“But—I only do this because I have you with me,” Orem answered, and that was true.
But even truer was his answer when Belfeva asked him the same question. “Why me?”
“I think because whatever hand moved me to where I am, moved you to be near me.”
But truest of all was the answer he gave to Weasel Sootmouth, when she asked him bitterly one day, “Why do you keep Timias and Belfeva with you? Don’t you know it makes them ridiculous in the court, to be known as flatterers to that buffoon called Little King? And don’t tell me the gods have brought you together, because you and I both know the gods are bound.”
Orem thought for a while, and then said, “When I was a scholar in the House of God, I used to play at words and numbers, and my teachers thought that I had written truth. I laughed at them for finding truth in my play. Now I think—there’s a shape to the way the world runs. Within that shape are many names that a soul can wear. I’ve fallen upon a name that brings me here, and whoever is named Timias and Belfeva must be with me, because that’s the way of the world. All of it’s a puzzle, but it’s still the truth.”
I think you see now that Orem Scanthips will bear his death if death is what you require of him. It is we who love you both who cannot bear it if the man who has most reason to be grateful to him is the man who takes young Orem’s life.
21
Orem’s Future
How Orem learned that he must die for Beauty’s sake, and what he planned for himself in the face of death.
A CHANCE CONVERSATION
One evening Orem stood on a portico that hung emptily over a roof garden. He often came there to look down on the little forest there. Despite hours of trying, he had not yet found a way to reach the garden itself through the maze of the Palace. He thought sometimes that this is how the world must look to God, close enough almost to touch, and yet so infinitesimally small that he dared not touch it lest it break.
Out beyond the Palace Park, with its perpetual spring, a snowstorm was covering the city, the first of that year. It had been eleven months now since the snowstorm in the cages, when he stared death in the face. He thought back and remembered that he had not been afraid. He had fought death, but with stubbornness, not fear. Not passion, either. His life was so placid in the Palace that he now believed that he was by nature a man of peace. Seventeen years old, and already comfortable in the contemplative life.
Of course it was not true. He was pent-up, frustrated, but these feelings left him languid and morose, so that the more he needed action the less he felt like doing anything. That was why he came to the portico and looked down over the garden and wished he could dwell in that small place; that was why he looked out over the city and wondered what Flea was doing tonight in the snow.
Then voices came from below.
“Look. Snow again.” It was Craven.
“Already? The time has been so short.” Weasel.
“Eleven months. Rather long, I thought.” Urubugala.
Do they know that I am here? thought Orem. He almost gave them an island in the Queen’s Searching Eye, so they could converse in privacy; then it occurred to him that there might be things he could learn by listening unnoticed himself. For a moment, accidentally, he could eavesdrop the way the Queen did all the time.
“How we all look forward to the joyous day,” said Craven. “The birth of a little offspring.”
“Beauty’s rebirth and replenishment. Power for another few centuries or so. Does the Little King yet know his part in it?”
“I think not,” said Weasel. “No, he does not.”
“Should we tell him?” asked Craven.
Weasel answered quickly. “I think we must.”
“No,” said Urubugala.
“It’s always better to know the truth.”
“Can he stop it?” asked Urubugala. “If he tried to stop it, all would be destroyed. For the Queen to renew herself, all her power must be placed in the living blood. He will play this part better if he knows nothing.”
“More merciful that way,” wheezed Craven.
“Yes,” said Weasel. “But will he thank you for his mercy?”
“I care nothing for his thanks,” said Urubugala. “The cost of power is never paid by the one who wields it.”
And then silence. He did not even hear them leave.
Orem knew nothing of the books of magic. From his time with Gallowglass, however, he knew this much: that the price of power was blood, and whatever gave the blood must die. Beauty was coming to the time of her renewal. And they would not tell Orem of his role in it because all her power must be placed in the living blood. In that moment he reached the obvious conclusion. The blood of a hart was more potent than the blood of a rat; the blood of a man more potent t
han the blood of a hart; and the blood of a husband more potent than the blood of a stranger.
What blood does Beauty shed for her near infinite power? The blood of her bedded husband, the Little King.
Suddenly his almost empty life in the Palace made sense. He was the fatted calf. Beauty had bedded him and conceived his child because otherwise he would not be her true husband and so would not have power enough for her. Probably she awaited only the birth of their child, and he would die.
He leaned on the railing now because he could not stand. He was still in the cages after all. He had not been saved when Beauty sent for him. He had simply been set within her plan. For an hour he watched the snow and mourned himself.
As he mourned, he forsaw many versions of his death. Would she ridicule him then, in his last moments? Or thank him for his sacrifice? More powerful than the mere blood of a husband would be the blood of a husband shed willingly. What if Beauty asked me to give my blood freely? Does it occur to her that a man might gladly die for her? He imagined himself going to her and offering his life—but he knew that she would laugh at him. She thought him ludicrous even now; he could not make a grand gesture with her watching, for it would seem ludicrous even to him.
He also thought of escape. But after thought, he scorned that, too. Had he come out of Banningside to Inwit, come from Wizard Street to the Palace, just so he could escape at the very moment that was plainly meant to be the meaning of his life? He had wanted a name and a song and a place, hadn’t he?
And after an hour spent thinking such thoughts, he decided he could bear having his life end this way. He was reconciled to being a pawn in Beauty’s game.
Then, suddenly, he remembered lying down in his cage because he was too weary to keep walking in the snow. He felt the other men’s spit on his shoulders and face. Even when you have no hope, you do not die of sleep when you can die struggling.
Why was I brought here? Why was I brought here? Beauty does not know that I am a Sink. It was the Sisters who showed her my face in a dream. Perhaps I was meant to overhear this conversation tonight so that I would remember that Queen Beauty is my enemy. Though I still dream of her, though I stammer and feel the fool when I am with her, perhaps I am meant to use my power to weaken her.