His Majesty's Elephant (19 page)

“No,” said Michael Phokias, still stiff. “Except perhaps that the others did not know what I knew. They approached you in good faith. I am the only one, as yet, who knowingly serves Nikephoros.”

“And serving him, you tried to kill me. You'll die for that.”

Carl said it calmly. Michael Phokias took it with almost equal calm. “Am I allowed to choose the manner of my death?”

“Not if you expect to trick your way out of it,” said Carl.

Michael Phokias smiled thinly. Rowan had to admire him for his courage, even if he might still think he could escape. He was what her father would have called a worthy enemy.

He kept on smiling, and he said, “Very well, I am generous; I yield the choice to you. I only ask that it be quick.”

The Emperor nodded. He rose; he plucked the sword from a guard's scabbard. Michael Phokias just had time to widen his eyes before the Emperor cut him down.

There was an enormous silence. They had all seen death before, as they had seen justice, and often together. But this was the justice of the battlefield, swift, sudden, and without appeal.

Rowan stared at her father.

He had done this before. She had heard the stories; she had watched him slay the boar. But to see him kill a man... that was different.

He sank to one knee beside Michael Phokias. His face had its king-look, cold and still. He closed the staring eyes, paused with his hand on the man's forehead, and sighed. “God have mercy on us.”

The priest echoed him. No one else did. The Emperor rose more stiffly than he had knelt, moving for a moment like an old man, until he remembered himself.

The guard reclaimed his bloodied sword and began to wipe it on the grass. Others, moving with quiet efficiency, bore the body away out of sight if not, for a long while, out of mind.

There was blood on the Emperor's hand. Abbess Gisela wiped it off with her own veil, not saying anything; not shrinking, either.

“He doesn't feel anything,” Rowan said to herself. “Not a thing.”

“Yes, he does,” said Kerrec at her back.

She could not safely round on him on that perch; she settled for a sharp word. “No.”

“Theoderada,” said Kerrec with all the weariness in the world, “won't you stop contradicting me at every hint of opportunity and listen for once? Of course he feels this man's death, as he feels every other death he's meted out since he became a man and a king. He can't stop dealing justice just because it hurts. That man earned his sentence. He got as easy a one as mortal sinner ever had.”

“Too easy,” said Rowan with sudden fierceness. “My father shouldn't have stained his hands.”

“Oh, shouldn't he?”

She twisted her head to glare at him, but he was gone, sliding down the Elephant's side.

Cursing every trick of men and elephants, she slid as Kerrec had, but without the grace. The Elephant's trunk held her up as she started to fall; it lowered her carefully to the ground, face to face with Kerrec.

She turned her back on him. That turned her outward toward the rest of the world.

Her aunt was standing just out of the Elephant's reach, looking more amused than not. “Gisela's herself again,” the abbess said, as if that was all she had come to say. “She woke up this morning, somewhat before your father did, with no memory of anything that happened after sunset yesterday.”

“That's a mercy,” said Kerrec. “And before sunset? Does she remember her bewitchment?”

“I think not,” the abbess said. “She's a little indisposed this morning, but then she often is. She'll have to learn to dispense with that if she expects to survive the discipline of a convent.”

“I don't think she ever will,” Rowan said. Her temper was cooling, whether it wished to or no. It often did in front of the abbess. “She has dreams. All the Emperor's daughters do. But we can't be anything but princesses.”

“Even you?” Kerrec asked.

She spun. He was not visibly making fun of her. His eyes were wide and level and bright, but not with mockery.

She answered him straight, and let her temper find its own way out. “I as much as any. Isn't that what you were trying to teach me?”

“I was trying to teach you to be Theoderada. Who is Rowan. Who is anyone she wants to be.”

“Except a plain man's wife, with no magic in her.”

“Oh, you could be that,” said Kerrec. “You only have to want it badly enough.”

Her heart thudded. She was aware of her aunt, listening but not speaking, and of the Elephant, standing like a wall behind them, and of the sun over them, growing warm as it rose toward noon.

And of her father. He had left the place of his justice and come round the wall that was the Elephant, and stood listening as the rest of them did.

Words died in her throat.

“Do you want that?” her father asked. “Do you really want that of all things in the world?”

Yes, Rowan tried to say. But her tongue was numb.

She stared at the Talisman on his breast. There was another on hers, invisible but as heavy as the world, and its name was magic. She could use it one last time, to make her father give her what she wanted; then give it up, cast it away, be nothing more or less than Rowan.

“No,” she said. “No, I don't want it, any more than Gisela really wants the convent. I'd be bored silly in a week.”

“I don't suppose,” her father said, “you want to be that man's wife.”

She looked around in incomprehension. “What man?” Then she saw the flush on Kerrec's cheeks, and felt her own rising to match it.

He was the one, this time, who said, “No. You don't want me.”

“And why not?” Rowan demanded, grandly contrary.

“I'm only the Elephant's boy. I have no lands, no honor—”

“Nonsense!” Rowan snapped. “Father, do you know who he is?”

“Am I supposed to guess?” the Emperor inquired. “What is he, one of Roland's kin?”

“Yes,” said Rowan.

Carl's face lit with pleasure. “Why, boy, why didn't you say so? What were you trying to do, play some outland game of proving yourself worthy in spite of your family? Roland tried that on me once, he and Oliver. Took me the damnedest time to see through it.”

Kerrec had gone an interesting shade of crimson.

Finally the Emperor paused for breath, and Kerrec could get a word in edgewise. “No! Did you hear me, sire? I have no honor.”

“But how can a kinsman of Roland's be without honor?”

Then Carl's brow furrowed. Rowan watched him remember. “No. No, I never believed it, in spite of what everyone said. So you're Count Everard's boy, are you? I'd heard he had a son, but they said you were dead. Else I'd have sought you out.”

“And when would you have done that, my lord Emperor?” asked Kerrec. “You have a whole empire to think of. Brittany is the merest appendage, its people more rebellious than complaisant.”

“So you thought you'd try me from behind, did you, then?”

Kerrec kept his head up, which was more than Rowan could have managed. “I thought I'd earn my way as I could, and if you honored me, then I would return that honor to my father.”

“You should have come straight to me,” the Emperor said.

“I thought of it,” said Kerrec. “But what if you believed our enemy? Everyone else did. Then what would I have? This way I had the Elephant, and respect enough to go on with.”

“And my daughter?”

Black eyes met blue ones. “I doubt that your daughter has ever uttered a civil word to me. Are the stories false, after all, that you don't allow them husbands? Are you trying to marry her off?”

Carl's mustache bristled. His eyes blazed.

Suddenly, with no warning at all, he laughed. He laughed loud and he laughed long, and he did not care in the least that no one else laughed with him.

When he could talk again, he had to do it in bursts, through new gusts of mirth. “I see,” he said, “that you know my Rowan. Prickly, isn't she? We should have named her Thornbush. And do you like her, then?”

“Do I dare?”

Carl grinned like a wolf, a grin that matched Kerrec's.

It was quite beyond bearing. Rowan thrust herself between them. “Stop that, you two! I'm not a mare you're chaffering over.”

Their grins did not even waver. She glared at them both. “Well, Father? Are you going to give him his honor back, and give us all some peace?”

“Honor,” said the Emperor, “and lands, and all else that he has lost.”

Kerrec looked faintly winded by his good fortune, but he would never give up his grin for that.

“And you,” Rowan said to him. “Why in the world would I want you for anything but a friend?”

That wiped the grin off his face.

“Friends can be lovers,” Abbess Gisela observed. “Eventually. When they outgrow their very natural urge to kick and squeal at one another.”

Rowan was blushing again. So was Kerrec. And her father was going to collapse if he laughed much harder.

She had enough wits left to make sure of one thing at least. “Kerrec has his honor back? Your word on it, Father?”

“My word and my bond,” he said. “Everything that was taken from him, he shall have again.”

“But,” said Kerrec, “what if I don't want it?”

“Of course you want it,” said Rowan. “You've spent your whole life trying to get it.”

“No,” said Kerrec. “I've spent my life trying to get my honor back. If I have that, I don't care what else I have. I'd rather stay here and serve the Elephant and be simply Kerrec, than be a lord in Brittany.”

“You children are two of a kind,” Abbess Gisela observed.

“And why,” demanded Rowan, ignoring her, “can't you have both? You can be a lord and look after Abul Abbas. I don't see why you have to be so difficult about it.”

He was going to be even more difficult, she could see. But her father headed him off. “Why, young lord, if it pleases your fancy to be the Elephant's boy, then so you shall be. He likes you, even I can see that. But you won't escape the rest of it. Honor costs, sir. It never comes free.”

Even Kerrec could see the truth of that. Maybe Abul Abbas helped him: the Elephant's trunk slithered over his shoulder and curled around his body, as if to keep him from escaping.

He managed not to look too terribly trapped. After all, the Elephant was what he wanted. He could evade the rest of it without excessive trouble, as long as he had Abul Abbas to hide behind.

“It won't be so bad,” the Emperor said, “to have a name and possessions and a place in the world apart from my lord Elephant. If nothing else, you'll be able to afford a new coat.”

Kerrec shrugged in his old and ragged one. He was trying to be nonchalant, but Rowan could see the joy bubbling up in him as the truth of it finally struck him.

It had taken long enough. She met the Elephant's eye. He was laughing at them all.

And no wonder. They had yattered so much, only to end up back where they started. The Emperor was as hearty as ever, Gisela her mooncalf self, Kerrec restored to his name and his honor.

As for Rowan, she had magic, singing in her, and a friend who was an elephant, and—yes—one who was a Breton witch.

He would look well in scarlet silk. She knew just the bolt she would cut it from. And if he objected, why then, she would remind him that he was a lord again at last, but she was a princess, and he must do as she commanded. That would put him in a right temper.

Somewhere in the air, she felt her mother's presence. It was a little warmer than the sun, and it glimmered among the apple boughs.

It did not linger long. Just long enough for her to know that it was there; to touch the Emperor with a whisper of breeze, ruffling his hair; and to pause before the Elephant, bowing to his great magic and wisdom. Then, like a breeze, it was gone.

The Elephant raised his trunk as if in farewell, then lowered it gently to rest on Rowan's shoulder. She glanced at Kerrec, who stood on her other side. He laid a hand on the Elephant's trunk, as if to close their circle.

Rowan knew a moment's urge to fling herself away from them both. But she stayed where she was. It was, not comfortable, no, but somehow right.

The Elephant's eye caught hers. As clearly as she had ever heard her mother's voice, she knew what he was telling her.
Is it better, then, than being simply Rowan?

“No,” said Rowan, too quickly. But then her tongue caught up with the rest of her. “Yes,” she said in wonder. “Yes, it is. Who'd ever have thought it?”

Who indeed?
said the Elephant.

She could not tell if he was laughing. After a moment she decided that it did not matter. A moment more, and she was laughing, too, laughter that let the sunlight in and drove all the dark away.

“For a while,” said Kerrec, reading her as easily as letters on a parchment.

A while is long enough
, said the Elephant.

In the world we know, Abul Abbas did not live three hundred years as people had been expecting that he would, or even the fifty that would be usual for an elephant. He died in the year 810, eight years after he was brought to Aachen. Germany was too cold and wet for him, and he never quite recovered from the rigors of his journey from the east.

His death was much mourned. He had been one of the great wonders of Charlemagne's realm, the only elephant in the west of the world.

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