Read The Kingdom of Little Wounds Online
Authors: Susann Cokal
The Kingdom of Little Wounds (34 page)
Or so it seem to me, who have charge of Gorma still and am rocking her bed to soothe her tears. She weep not for her father and his dying but for the fact of not under standing how her sister be elevated and she is not. The ladies may explain till they finger tips turn purple, but they cannot make her under stand about the law of being born first, even if the birth be of a girl. The new ruler might be monster or a goat, for all the logic Gorma see.
Give her a soothing draught,
say pocky Belskat. Another nurse go to mix it.
If I had one single tongue, I might tell Beatte about logic, how it belong only to the men and occasional lady with the power to twist and braid it. It mean no thing to the rest of the world.
“Not fair!” cry Gorma. “Not fair!” I rock the harder, till the nursey bring her cup. This time no body give me a slap. They want Gorma rocked away.
When she sees Gorma drinking, Beatte’s eyes do shine. The ladies shake out a skirt of violet silk.
At last I know what she is singing, so happy she could burst. It is a funeral song of this place, sung fast.
For one moment I press my hands together like saints in church. Gorma scream at me to rock again.
A king of the Trolls wanted a child so badly that he vowed to turn his barren wife out of his palace or, at best, kill her in a way that would outpain the pangs of childbirth.
His queen, then, wanting nothing more than to please him, decided to present him with a child and call it their own. She combed the twigs and hollows of the forest for a suitable infant to steal but could find none; nor was there a healthy baby among the cradles of the few humans who managed to eke out a living in Troll territory. She had almost despaired of the project — and her husband was sharpening his cruel Troll fingernails, for he planned to execute her himself — when the idea struck that she did not need to find a baby in their domain after all, but might in fact go looking in another element entirely.
So it was that she borrowed a boat and went rowing out over the sea with a net such as is used to catch herring. She spent a day and a night and another day on the waves, until she managed to fling her net wide enough to capture a tiny, wriggling, sparkling mer-baby, a boy, who was perfect in every way except that his complexion was paler than that of the Trolls and that instead of legs, of course, his body ended in a tail.
These things could be disguised, at least for a time. She swaddled the child tightly and fed him from a cut in her own breast, rowing valiantly back to her husband’s castle and claiming that the exertion had brought on the birth of a child she did not know sat in her belly. She pinched the baby’s cheeks to a satisfying ruddiness and praised her husband for planting such a robust creature within her.
The infant thrived on salt water and raw fish, which fortunately the Trolls found in abundance; and if he wept when he heard the keening of his kind in the distance, well, all babies cry, and this one’s sobs were pleasingly melodious. The queen delighted in bathing him herself and in giving his fat cheeks those ruddying pinches.
It was only years later, when the age of swaddling was past and her husband at last saw the child’s tail, that the queen discovered her first feelings of remorse. She realized that instead of netting a baby and bringing it back, she might have kept rowing until she reached a more hospitable land where she could have started her life anew.
Instead, she watched as the Troll king sliced down the center of their son’s tail with one long talon, and when the bloody operation failed to produce a boy who could walk around on two legs, he ordered both the child and the queen put to death. This was swiftly accomplished, as the boy had already died from his cruelty and the queen was ready to try her luck in the afterlife.
Under the sea, the mer-people never forgot the insult, for they were capable of intense feeling too. Whenever the Trolls tried to venture beyond their own bay, the mermaids sang throaty songs to make sailors leap from their boats and drown in trying to reach them. Thus the Troll population grew ever smaller, until there were only a few descendants of that horrible king hiding in a forest that the humans had cut back, such that there was almost nothing left but rock and a few bean stalks.
EX NOSTER PROMPTUS EST
T
HE noble body of Christian V, last king of the Lunedies (perhaps), lies in the amber-lined cathedral. He is watched over by monks who have rowed out from Saint Peter’s, the same monks who (once Doctor Krolik made a quick, nervous inspection) washed the corpse, emptied it of certain viscera and effluvia, stitched its open parts shut, and dressed it in Christian’s most splendid robes: green silk, white ermine, gold brocade; the sharp-tined crown of state and the jewel-encrusted sword of justice.
The cathedral crackles as amber walls swell and contract. It echoes. Is this one voice or many? The monks.
The monks pray for Christian’s soul. They pray for his daughters, his wife, his wife’s belly, his people. They praise God.
Nicolas Bullen comes every day. He prays, too, with his head in his hands, his ears ringing with the sound of his own sobs, so that he hears none of the monks’ songs, none of the rustlings, creakings, and pops that show he is never alone at the corpse-side.
And Sophia the Wraith Princess is always there. She has become impish in her after-death; with her rosy skirts held high, she dances on her father’s chest as she could never manage on the flat floors of life. She leads her sisters and brother in a lively galliard across the body, over the catafalque, around and around the statues who make stony partners for the dance. They creep into Nicolas’s breeches and make him feel the pain of every stony boss inside. They tweak the monks’ noses and blow in their ears to make them drop the notes of their prayers.
The wraith children gather up those fallen notes and fling them to the rafters, black dots of echo. They sing to Christian,
Awake, awake! —
though they are afraid of having him among them. He might save the land and spoil the party. They feast on his body, suck the eyes from between the lids, reach up his
anus
and tie what innards he has left into knots.
So runs Isabel’s fancy when she remembers her husband.
This time, the gestures of love seem empty. Virginity is nothing and dangers feel merely sad.
Surrendering my maidenhead was not nearly as grand a gesture as I expected. A stab of pain, a quick exclamation, and then Grammaticus lay sleepy on his back. I burned for a few hours and tied on a monthly cloth, but I still felt the same inside myself.
Could
I
love Grammaticus? I ask myself while we undress as much as is necessary, while he touches and licks and rocks his way into me, loosing showers of dust from his bed curtains and exciting a creak in the bed’s old wooden joints. I keep wondering till he shudders and goes still.
No, I decide then, I do not love him, and I no longer wish I did. He is now simply a fact in my life. He’s the person I hope will at least preserve my father’s memory in a positive light, if he will still do nothing to alter what he calls the flow of history by asking for Klaus Bingen’s release. The person who provides some tiny measure of comfort as I wait for doom to lower itself over me.
No, I do not love him.
Suddenly I grasp Grammaticus tightly, fiercely, as if I am drowning and he is the only bit of flotsam left from the ship bearing me forward.
“Ava,” he murmurs, sighing, with more puzzlement than affection in his voice.
This life together is not what he longs for, either; he, too, lives with disappointment. Over Midi Sorte, I suppose — she who stares coldly past the both of us if by chance she sees us together. She has been elevated to companion and personal attendant of Queen Isabel, who is said to have demanded her by name. Not even Christina-Beatte could call Midi back to the nursery; Count Nicolas, who shares the regency with Queen Isabel, has made sure of that.
I feel sick. My heart pounds. This happens not just in my hasty, secretive couplings with Arthur Grammaticus but all the time, as I eat and scrub and haul my buckets from the cisterns to the slop drains and rubbish heaps. While Midi Sorte glowers at me in the Dowager Queen’s rooms and hisses if I make an unexpected noise. While I empty the Queen’s chamber pot and turn the contents over to her doctors or dispose of them in the jakes; while I try, fruitlessly, to wash the stink of hard work from my hands and restore them to their seamstress softness.
It is endless, this task of cleaning rooms that never looked dirty until I started to scrub them. They now seem to be nothing but filth, so quickly does it renew itself. I think again of silver coins and how long I’ll have to work to earn the rest of my passage to Denmark. Or if I’ll have to spend them all to buy some comfort for my father — I cannot hope to buy his freedom, not unless some miracle spins filth into gold.
As I work, I overhear rumors, strange gossip. They concern the man who is contracted to marry our Queen Apparent. Now that she occupies the throne, her marriage is of prime concern, and the arrangement has given rise to whispers.
Henri of France is improper.
Revolting . . .
Delicious!
A sinner whose sin has no name.
Henri is the brother of the French king who, with his mother (if reports are to be believed), killed thousands of Protestants this past August. No one mentions the family’s bloodthirst, however, all being more preoccupied with determining the nature of his sin. They guess:
Eats human flesh.
Does not like ladies.
Or what lies inside them.
Each concludes as if he is the first to think it:
France must never marry the Lunedies again!
“Are the rumors true?” I ask Grammaticus as we lie together one early morning. “What do they mean?”
“Why, Ava,” he asks, “after all this time, are you really such a gossip?”
I leap up and gather my clothes.
Grammaticus says nothing until I’m repinning my apron. “Ava?” then, tentative.
I don’t reply — I want only to be gone as fast as I can. I don’t want to understand him; I don’t want to feel any gentle feeling at all at this moment.
“Ava, I don’t —” While I’m stuffing the braids into my cap. “Why are you angry? Why do you care about French Henri? Did someone tell you to ask me about him?”
This is worst of all, but I still hold my tongue. If Arthur likes a silent woman, he’ll get one in me — a woman who asks him nothing and tells him even less. Let him enjoy guessing my mood as I suppose he used to guess Midi’s. He’ll see I’m not such a gossip and that I’m not spying on his opinions.
“I didn’t mean to wound you,” he adds feebly as I reach the door.
As I cross the outer courtyard to the royal chambers again, I gaze beyond clouds into the winter sky and wonder how I ever found beauty in it. The darkness makes a rippling curtain whose points of light are the claw holes of an evil fate tearing its way through. It is another witch’s hollow, more terrifying because we are all wallowing in it.
I think that my father would understand this, down in the dungeons of the Lower Chambers.
KYGGEHAVN
O
UT in the city, the regular busyness moves forward. Landholders must be fined for misappropriating public space, fallen bridges rebuilt. A canal that has silted up must be closed, sounded, and dredged to allow boats to pass freely to the bay.
“Wait, wait!”
The dredgers of Krydder Kanal stop work. Hans Rasmussen, young son of the poorest among the workmen, has spotted something shiny in the roil stirred up by the sounding poles. Hans has hoped all winter, while he has helped his father, to find evidence of a mermaid.
And now, here, what is it? Before his father can stop him, he hops down into the silt to see. He sinks to his knees, then his waist — grabbing around himself in the mud.
The workmen curse. Hans’s father, Rasmus, takes hold of a pole, and the other men lower him carefully in to retrieve his son, who is nearly up to his neck now.