Fractured Fairy Tales (22 page)

Ivory Tower

Cecilia Clark

*This story written in UK English*

The prince looked exhausted. Shadows circled his eyes, his skin was pale and sallow, his hands trembled slightly and his eyelids drooped.

“He needs a doctor.”

“He needs a man of God”

“Is he possessed?”

“Is he dying?”

The courtiers whispered amongst themselves—not so softly the prince could not hear. He turned his head and gazed unseeing out of the window near his seat. The court watched the prince lift himself wearily from his seat and shuffle from the room.

The king and queen called for their advisors. They suggested the prince should get out in the sun, spend less time indoors, read less, be more physical and go to church more often.

“Maybe it is time he chose a bride, your majesties,” advised the most sage of the learned men.

“Has anyone asked him what the matter is?” an elderly woman knitting in the corner made her soft voice heard over all the others. They all quieted and turned toward her. Her needles clicked loudly in the lull of other sounds. “There seems an awful lot of talking about instead of talking with.” Her attention returned to the thing she was knitting, and the others in the room looked across the council table at each other.

“I shall talk to him,” the king announced

The king, followed by the usual entourage, found his son in the prince’s favourite library chair. His head lolled to one side and soft snores emanated from his pale lips. Exhaustion had etched the beginnings of early lines in the young man’s soft cheeks.

The king felt loathe to wake him and shushed the entourage out of the library. He sat near his son and watched him sleep. Where was all the vitality he had shown just months ago. The dear sweet boy had given his father every reason to swell his chest with pride. Kind, loyal, affectionate and smart, the prince was everything a man could want in his only child.

The lad rode his horse with a fine seat and played the dulcimer with the hand of a bard; he could strategize better than the warlord and speak to every foreign diplomat in his or her own tongue. He was sensible in his cups, gambled only on a sure thing and was the best opponent in chess the king could desire. Yet, since his last birthday, the Prince had begun to decline, coming from his room later and later in the morning with his energies sapped. He no longer practiced at sword, nor rode his horse. He could barely drag his feet to come to the table, and when he did, he nibbled like a small bird.

“What ails you, lad, and how may I help? Are you possessed or haunted, ill or mad? Whatever it is, I must find a way to help you. What good is being a king, if I cannot heal my son?” The king rubbed his face with a gnarled hand and left the Prince asleep in the library.

The king had a guard placed at the door and spies to watch if the prince were climbing from the window and going out dancing all night, but the Prince stayed in his room from dusk until dawn.

“He does seem to be talking in his sleep a lot, your majesty.” The taller guard looked to the shorter for confirmation.

“Yes, and he does seem to be making a lot of noise, but it is muffled through these thick doors. There is no hint of light, so he is not reading, I would wager.”

The king had doctors and wise men take a look, they found the prince in reasonably good health, his wit intact, yet with an air of exhaustion as of one who had stayed up all night for many nights in a row. The prince stoically endured the pokes and prods, leeches and bleeding with a lethargy that appalled the physicians.

Religious people of all persuasions looked over his son.

“Possession by demons, madness and sin, the boy is in grave danger,” they howled and offered talismans and smoke, symbols and prayer, and hints for donations to the greater good of their Gods. The prince dutifully prayed, offered them gold coins for their troubles and gazed at each with the respect due their position, but his eyes were dull with fatigue.

Finally, the king called for a hedge witch and a horse doctor. They looked at each other and then at the prince. The horse doctor lifted the prince’s lip, looked at his teeth, asked him what he had been eating and if his bowels were working and tested muscle resilience and tendon flex.

The prince answered softly, each sentence pushed from him on a puff of tired air.

“Fine young specimen, but needs more sleep in the night hours.” The horse doctor nodded and chewed a piece of dried grass. “Tis important to sleep enough and set the body clock working with the sun and moon.”

The hedge witch looked at them all and shrugged. She peered closely at the prince.

“What do you do all night, My Lord, which has you so worn out? Has anyone bothered to ask you that?”

The king rubbed his chin and scratched at his salt and pepper beard. A frown grooved a furrow between his brows. The horse man nodded. The wise men and fools threw up their hands at such a ridiculously simple question.

“No one has asked, good woman, and though you have, I may not tell you,” the prince spoke respectfully in his soft dry weary voice. He turned to his father, the king, and bowed as was expected.

“Father, my king. I must go on a quest and ask your blessing and beg you not to ask me where, when or why.”

The king widened his eyes and his mouth formed an ‘o’ over a chin dropped low. His furry grey eyebrows wiggled under his crown, then dropped to their usual position shading his eyes. and the deepening furrow between them reasserted its usual place.

“Whatever you need, whatever you want. If it will help you, then so be it. Are you able to go on a quest?”

“I must.”

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The girl gazed out of the tiny window, high in the wall of her bedroom, in the highest peak of the tower. The tower was her life. She could barely recall the time when she had not been in the tower, but the memories were fading into a dusty past. Dust was something she knew in theory, but it too was something from her long forgotten past.

The window framed a patch of azure with the tiniest brush of horse tail cloud. She checked the mitred corners of her bedspread as she did every morning, smoothed down her dress and left the bedroom to descend the spiral staircase all the way to the bottom, where the library was situated.

She did not eat breakfast. She supposed that it was to do with the tower, because she never ate anything. She did not hunger or thirst. She did not need to do anything to her body and had worn the same dress every day since she had come there. She brushed her hair in the morning, simply because it felt pleasant and was part of her entrenched routine.

Time was measured in books. The library housed one hundred and forty-three thousand and sixteen books. She had counted and read them all. She had written seven thousand stories of her own. She had studied the subjects from languages to mathematics to astronomy and everything else the books contained. She had cross referenced, made studious notes and critiqued works. The books had been her sanity.

In them, she had learned the geography and history of every country in the world outside her tower, but she was trapped in an eternal prison where even the books were not enough. How pointless to read of snow and never touch it or feel what cold meant. How pathetic to read of love as an intellectual concept only. She scoffed at romance, and threw the book of poetry across the room, but regretted it and smoothed the pages before replacing it in the shelf. She had cook books, but no need for food. She had books on mechanical things and inventions, but nothing to use as tools or materials. She only had herself, her bed, her one dress and the library, but she could not learn from the books why she was there, or when she had come, or who she was.

The window let her know it was day or night. She could not reach it to see more than the tops of a rugged mountain range and the sky—the ever changing sky. She had no candles or lanterns, so when the sun began to fade, she would make her way up the stairs to her bed, lay down to sleep and wake again when the sun turned the sky pink in the morning.

On the day she finished the one hundred and forty-three thousand sixteenth book, for the first time, she felt a strange tingling throughout her body. She carefully put the book in the shelf and began to ascend the stairs. Counting each one, as was her habit, she climbed in a distraction— forgetting to keep count after the third turn as she pondered this new sensation. She lay on her bed and watched the last of the light fade from the patch of sky through her window.

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She shivered in the cold night air. “Am I on a balcony? What a lovely view.” Lights twinkled in a dark city scape. The girl slipped inside the room through an enormous pair of open windows to seek warmth from the fire. The leaping flames and glowing embers filled her with delight.

“So that is what a crackling fire looks like, how beautiful.” She gazed into the flames and felt the warmth seep into her skin. After a few moments, her curiosity made her look around at the rest of the room. It was richly furnished in velvet and gilt. A large bed stood in the centre of the room, draped in velvet curtains. Pulling one aside, she peeped in to see a young man sleeping. A book he had been reading had fallen on his lap. She tried to pick it up, but her hand passed through it.

“Am I a ghost?” she cried in distress and stepped away from the bed, pressing her hands to her mouth.

The young man opened his eyes.

“Who is there?” he called and noticed the girl. “Who are you?”

“You can see me?” she said in wonder.

“Of course I can see you, what are you doing in my bed chamber?”

“Is that where I am? It is a very nice bed chamber. I do like the fire.” She drifted toward the fire again. She liked feeling the warmth. “I don’t think I am a ghost?” her wistful tone caught the young man’s attention.

“Tell me who you are and from whence you came? Please sit down.”

They sat on each side of the fire and, although she did not know where she was from or what her name was, he found that conversations with her were the liveliest and most enjoyable he had experienced. She knew a great deal about historical places and kingdoms long gone, and he began to take great interest in a subject he had hitherto abhorred. As the night progressed, they spoke of a great many subjects until, finally—against his will—the young man fell asleep in his chair, just as the sky was turning from dove grey to delicate shell pink.

The girl woke in her room. The window framed a patch of azure with not a cloud. She mitred the corners of her bedspread, as she did every morning, smoothed down her dress and left the bedroom to descend the spiral staircase all the way to the bottom where the library was situated. The day seemed longer than it had before. She felt too restless to read or draw and paced up and down the stairs, checking the light in her bedroom window. At last, when the sun began to fade, she made her way up the stairs to her bed and lay down to sleep.

He was waiting on the balcony, and she stood in his room looking at him and the way the wind playfully flipped his glossy hair. He turned and saw her standing there.

“I thought you may not come. I thought I dreamed of you. Come sit by the fire. Do you play chess?”

She laughed and sat in the same chair as before, confessing she knew chess but had never played with someone else. They talked and played, and the prince drank a thick dark drink to help him stay awake. She could not move the chess pieces, so he would move them for her. Sometime she won, and sometime she didn’t, and they found they were evenly matched. So they set a pattern.

Each night, she would arrive, stay with him and they would talk about the world and politics, the stars and life. They discovered her history and politics were a century old, and he would bring in modern tomes for her to read with him. She would explain the courts of old, and they would laugh and compare the changes. They would paint and draw, with him doing the actual work and her giving suggestions, and laughing at the results. He would play his flute or lyre, and she would sing. They would compose love songs and laugh some more.

During the day, he could not stay awake in his classes and stopped going out. He slept later and later. Though he tried hard to meet his daytime obligations as a good Prince should, his steps grew weary and his eyes dull. Only at night, when she was there, did he feel truly alive.

“Where is your tower?” he asked her, “Do you remember anything from before you were there?”

Try as she might, she had no recollection, except that she never saw the sun through her window. One night, she recalled the name of a village, and they poured over maps until he discovered an ancient scroll in the library archives that showed a town of that name had once existed.

“There is only a very old forest there now. Maybe your tower is there?”

Always, he would fall asleep as the sun was rising, and she would be gone when he awoke. Always, she would wake in the tower, never tired, but more restless as the days passed.

“I cannot continue like this,” he said to her. “I am wearier by the day, and I grow weak and ill.”

She noted his hair had lost its gloss, and his eyes were not so bright. She felt something in her stir.

“I do not know what weary is, except this weariness of spirit, yearning to be free.”