The Kingdom of Little Wounds (26 page)
Read The Kingdom of Little Wounds Online
Authors: Susann Cokal
Another time, there was a wife who wanted a child very badly. She had lost something by marrying her husband, who was kind but had his head in the clouds with his work, for he was a keeper of stars and he loved them more than his own life.
The wife went to the Queen of Elves and asked for a baby. She was assigned three impossible tasks, and upon completing them, she was given a child. It was a child so hideous, so loud and squalling and horrible, that not even a mother could love it.
This was the wife’s only offspring, and she left it in the hearth nook to sleep or scream as it chose.
One day the husband came down from the clouds and said, “Wife, you have brought me nothing I value. I will take a new bride, and it will be the one you keep in a corner.” The wife saw then that the elfin baby had grown into a young girl, pretty if still ill-tempered.
The wife was stricken with despair, for she loved her husband, after all. Nonetheless, she offered to prepare the wedding feast.
That night the husband and his guests dined on a pie made of flesh so tender, it melted away at the touch of a spoon. “You have murdered my bride and served her to me to eat!” accused the husband, but when the elfin girl was summoned, she appeared — sullen at having to do someone else’s bidding on the eve of her wedding.
Surprised, the husband went to his old wife, who had aged greatly in the last hours, and lifted her skirts. She had cut off her own legs and stewed them for the pie. “My arms will be next,” she said, “and then the rest of me.”
The new bride clapped her hands. She took an enormous slice of pie and went out to howl through the woods with her wild elf cousins.
And so the first wife disappeared, down to the very memory of her. The elf-bride wove her hair into a blanket to swathe her first baby. So is it with mothers and their children.
From time to time, the husband had a thin sensation that his life was not now what it once was, but he decided this was the effect of living mostly in the clouds.
HE
H
EAVENS
O
N a single night in November, the world changes. History, astronomy, religion, and medicine must be made over: A white point has poked through Cassiopeia.
A new star.
A priest sees it first, on his way home from a deathbed; he trips and falls with a splash in a canal, to be retrieved half drowned and babbling about miracles. Twin sisters, daughters of a baker, see it from their bedroom window and feel the pangs of first menses. In a glassblower’s shop where a shutter was left carelessly unlatched, the new light shatters every vessel on the shelves.
Doctor Candenzius notices it from the window of the awful little room he now shares with Venslov and Dé. Trembling with opportunity, he sends a message to the astrologer Stellarius, who later tries to claim discovery, and one to the King himself, who has his men drag a cot and a brazier up to the west tower so that he can study the new arrival too.
Christian V invites the scholars to join him. And Nicolas.
Stellarius, Candenzius, the King, the Secretary, all of them are dumbfounded. This hole in the black sieve of night, this unprecedented phenomenon, reorders a sky-scape that’s never altered in recorded history. Maps, predictions, zodiacs, and expectations must be reinvented. Stellarius and his assistants busy themselves immediately with charts and pencils. The others simply tilt their heads back and wonder. This is 1572.
“A newborn star,” Christian declaims in a loud voice.
“
Stella Neonata.
”
It is as if he is Adam, naming all that surrounds him, helping in its creation. He lies on the cot, gazing upward, with Nicolas behind him. How much grander this manifestation is than a finger, even the finger of his most beloved daughter, pulled from the mud. This is the type of event that makes a man’s reign.
Nicolas adjusts the pillow behind Christian’s head. Christian breathes deep. He thinks that despite the smoke from the brazier, he can smell his beloved’s perfume.
The King says, “This is an occasion, is it not? For once, the bells should ring for happy news.”
So church bells chime through the mists of Skyggehavn, informing those who do not already know that theirs is an age of miracles, and all should leave their homes to look. Footpaths and squares crowd with burghers in cloaks and shawls; the trolls who live beneath the bridges crawl out and join them. Even those who don’t know the constellations can see this star, for it is stronger and clearer than any other pinprick in the heavens, including the moon.
Indeed, for a fortnight there will be many who swear they can see the star during the shortening hours of day. Stellarius will say so himself.
“A great light,” he pronounces that first night, on the flat west tower.
“
Stella Magna. Stella . . . Lunediae
?”
Christian Magnus V merely grunts, considering. He orders all to fall quiet, that he might listen to the music of the spheres.
If the historian were not sworn to record events rather than shape them, he would refine the astrologer’s Latin, if not the King’s.
Some at the court are excited; some are afraid. The new French astrologer takes one look, decides he is in danger, and sails back to Bordeaux. Stellarius is pleased.
“
Stella Nova
is a good omen,” he tells the King.
The new star is a portent; everyone agrees on that. But of what? Here the scholars disagree. Candenzius calls it a sore in the heavens; he believes it will prove Krolik’s diagnosis of
Morbus Lunediernus
wrong.
“Such an intense light is a concentration of celestial poisons,” he says. “You shall see, the children will sicken with its arrival.” He declares that he’ll find some way to lance and poultice a boil in the heavens. He orders the grinder of perspective glasses to make a device that might sweep among the astral gases and stir them to a new combination.
Krolik, however, disagrees. “It can’t be any but a good sign,” he says. “The children are improving.”
The two men bicker famously. The King orders them to be silent when he is up on the tower, giving himself the illusion that he is alone with his thoughts. He will eventually bestow upon the star an official name (
Stella Supra?
the courtiers suggest.
Stella Christiani?
), but he waits prudently for his scholars to settle on an interpretation.
Even on a misty night or a rainy one, but not during a storm, the new star beams steadily down. Poets call it the most gorgeous sight in the heavens, the new jewel of the kingdom; they compose page after page of praises to it. Goldsmiths, glassblowers, and embroiderers try to reproduce it with their earthly materials. The people fall asleep looking at it, and their hands and feet suffer frostbite.
That star is like a toddler romping overhead; there is no telling what it might do. But there is hope that it will grow into something wonderful.
The new star has put all of us off balance. We’ve always expected things to change down below, in the canals, the streets, and so on, but the heavens have been constant in our memory. This star shines even in the daylight, as if to drive away the sun. It is so bright that it seems heavier than the rest; we have the impression that if we were to stand on tiptoes, we might touch it.
In response, we ourselves change. We grow braver, more hopeful; reckless, with girls flopping down for boys who forget, for a moment, about the beauties of the heavens as they explore the pleasures of the flesh. Excitable, with great plans laid and ambitions encouraged.
Every night now, Skyggehavn grows taller, as people add rooms onto their houses so they might view the star better. Sometimes entire buildings gather up their skirts and shift into a footpath or new street. The most fashionable item in town is a perspective glass, whether it’s a proper tube as made by my father or a simple glass sphere filled with water that magnifies the light in waves. Even bare-eyed, we love to stand among the stretcherous buildings and gaze.
Not everyone views the star as a good thing. I’ve heard some of the maids worrying that it will launch to the ground and destroy us all. Others insist that it is Sophia, the Wraith Princess, burning with fury and waiting to strike. Still more think it a sign that the Perished Lily has become an angel.
Nothing captures the fancy like a new arrangement in the heavens.
I try to see the star as a sign of hope, but in my case it seems like an ill omen instead — yet another something pretty that brings nothing good after all. Like my position at the palace. Like my love affair with Arthur Grammaticus.
At the very least, the star makes an excuse for a scholarly man to be absent from his rooms. Surely, I tell myself, the study of this star is what occupies Grammaticus now, and why I have not seen him in days. Over and over, I tap on the boards of his door, wait for him or an apprentice to open to me. No reply. It is as if he doesn’t exist — or I don’t. And I need him to reassure me.
I peer through the keyhole and see only a corner of his table and a sheaf of grubby pages. I consider what I might say to him:
What does it mean that you taught Midi Sorte to write?
Now and forever, sure. Though I am certain I know.
I can’t bear that my lover should have so many secrets. And that he should avoid me in this manner. And that he just might not be my lover alone, but Midi’s as well. He may have been hers for years. They might have kissed right before she fetched me from the stairs and brought me to him. I was most likely a brief distraction, a sort of dalliance. And no wonder she doesn’t like me either . . . She must have thought to marry him. Or at least be kept by him.
You gave her expression in the fingers when she had none in the tongue — why?
But this much is obvious. There is only one reason, really, a man ever wants a woman to express herself: to praise him.
Why he pretended to want me, I do not know. To make Midi jealous? I have to see if I can rescue some good from it. I will do as I did with Count Nicolas. I will tell a tale that shames the subject — but the subject will be Nicolas himself, and when the King hears the report, he will banish his friend to the Lower Chambers. And then Arthur.
I decide to wait at his room till he turns up. I sink to the floor outside his door and watch the shoes shuffling and striding by: leather, velvet, wood. I don’t care if the courtiers and their servants wonder about my presence here; I don’t care if they gossip. I hear maids giggling and don’t bother to listen for their remarks. I have been the subject of much worse, and I will never shake the shame.
I wait an hour, then two, with an ear cocked for the bells that mark time. Still, Grammaticus does not return. Finally I give up; I have to set about my work. I go to the kitchen for a handful of coarse bread and a bucket.
This is the reason I need Grammaticus now, an important one — I am no longer a maid of the nursery. With the new star, I have become a yet more lowly scrubber, one who cleans fireplaces and floor tiles throughout the Queen’s household. Doctor Krolik, as Master of the Nursery, gathered us all together and explained at some length that with fewer children in bed, there need be fewer girls to attend them. And so our duties have been reconfigured according to our talents, and this is supposed to be mine. I am told it was Duchess Margrethe who recommended me personally for this task; she recalled how hard I scrubbed the night after Countess Elinor was arrested.
Midi Sorte smirked when my new duties were announced. She, of course, remains in charge of Princess Gorma; she rocks a cradle while I slop a bucket and feel myself become invisible.
I’ve discovered that picking up a bucket in this place is the same as putting on a cloak knit by elves. No one wants to see a scrub maid, so no one does. I am invisible; I could go virtually anywhere, as long as there was a dirty floor or fireplace in it.
While the last children are asleep in their night beds, watched over by the night nurses, I scrub the black-and-white of their new dayroom with stinking lye. In the morning, when the children are settled into their fanciful beds, I clean their simpler night rooms the same way. These quarters were previously used by the Council Chancellor and his wife, who were not notable housekeepers. The drifts of lint and dead insects seem to regenerate nightly till I sweep and scrub them away.
As I clean, I make up speeches I will deliver to Grammaticus.
Damn you,
I will say sternly.
May Satan himself bury you in dung along with Count Nicolas.
Or,
Please love me after all.
I do need him. I would use him.
On a Sunday I receive permission to visit the house with the stone head. We — my father and his wife and I — sit in the smoky hall and make polite conversation. Sabine is unwell, tottering with her new bulk and uncomfortably windy; she craves marzipan and cumin, and she makes water more often than a porpoise.
“It is difficult the first time,” Father confides to me when she is off using the pot. “Your mother was greatly inconvenienced by you, though she was a young woman in all her pregnancies. Sabine, alas, is no longer truly young.”