Hart's Hope (3 page)

“If these soldiers are my enemies, then I will not come out. I will stay here and make them pay in blood for every step they take inside my walls.”

“And if we are your friends?”

“Why did you come to me?” cried Palicrovol from the battlement. “Why do you taunt me?”

“I dreamed of you, Count Traffing. Why did I dream of you?”

Palicrovol turned to Sleeve, who smiled. “It is the Feast of Hinds,” said Sleeve.

“It is the Feast of Hinds!” called Palicrovol.

“The tripes were heavy, and the womb was all but five days full,” said Sleeve.

“The tripes were heavy, and the womb was all but five days full!” called Palicrovol. As he echoed Sleeve's words, Palicrovol was relieved. When the hind that gave herself at the Feast of Hinds was utterly full, the enterprise of the master of the feast could not go wrong.
Someone's
enterprise, anyway, and it was usually polite to read all good omens for the host.

“I know nothing of augury,” said Zymas. “Who is the wizard who is teaching you what to say?”

Sleeve spoke for himself then. “I am Sleeve,” he said. “The Sweet Sisters showed me a heavy hind. God spoke to Palicrovol through an old fool. And the Hart has come to you in a dream. If all the great gods are with Palicrovol, what will withstand him?”

Zymas had not said there was a hart in his dream. “What need has he of me?”

“What need have you of him? It is enough that you are both committed to treason now. If you work together, you can bring down this King. If you oppose each other, Nasilee will find his work much easier.”

Zymas thought of still another argument. Sleeve, the greatest of the living wizards, is with this Count Traffing. “Palicrovol, if you would be King, I will help you wed the King's daughter and have the throne. Will you be a just and good king?”

“I will be the same sort of king as I have been Count,” said Palicrovol. “My people prosper more than the people of any other lord. I am a just judge, as far as any man can be.”

“If that is true, I will follow you, and my men will follow you,” said Zymas.

So the Godsman's prophecy was perfect, though it had predicted an event as unlikely as Burring flowing backward. Zymas had come to him, and come even before Palicrovol himself had taken one single act toward rebellion. God was now his god. “And I,” cried Palicrovol, “I will follow God.”

And I, whispered white-skinned Sleeve, pink-eyed Sleeve, I could shake the earth and unmake this fortress, and with my left hand I could cause a forest to rise in the place of Zymas's five hundred men. Why should I link myself to these unmagicked men, particularly if they fear that ridiculous god named God? They have no need of me, nor I of them. But Sleeve felt the hind's blood hardening on his arms and hands, and he was content that Palicrovol should be king, even if he did it in the name of this angry young God.

And that is how Palicrovol began his quest for the throne of Burland.

Three times in her life, Asineth learned what it meant to be the King's daughter. Each lesson was the beginning of wisdom.

A
SINETH'S
L
ESSON OF
G
OOD AND
E
VIL

When Asineth was only three, the ladies who cared for her walked her in the palace garden, in the safe part, where the gravel walks are neatly edged and the plants all grow in animal shapes. One of her favorite games was to sit very still, dribbling sand or gravel from her fingers, until the watching women grew bored with her, and got involved in their own conversations. Then she would quietly get up and walk away and hide from them. At first she always hid nearby, so she could watch the first moments of panic on their faces when they realized she was gone. “Oh, you little monster,” they would say. “Oh, is that a way for a princess to run off and leave her ladies?”

But this time little Asineth hid farther away, because she was getting older, and the world was getting larger, and she was drawn to that part of the garden where moss hangs untrimmed and the animals are not rooted to the ground. There she saw a great grey beast drifting slowly through the underbrush, and she felt a strange attraction to it, and she followed. She would lose sight of the beast from time to time, and wander searching for it, and always she caught a glimpse of it, or thought she did, and moved after it, farther and farther into the untamed garden.

She did not hear the ladies searching for her; she was not nearby when, frightened, they reported to the Butler that she was missing; only when the sky was getting red and the soldiers found her bathing her feet at the edge of a large pool of water, only then did she remember her game of hide and seek. The soldiers took her away from the pool and carried her through the woods to the safe garden where she had been playing. There she saw the three women who had not watched her well enough, naked and staked out upon the ground, their backs and thighs and buttocks bloody from flogging. She was afraid. “Will they beat me, too?” she asked.

“Not you,” said the soldier who carried her. “Never you. King Nasilee is your father. What man would dare to take a whip to you?”

So it was that Asineth learned that the daughter of the King can do no wrong.

A
SINETH'S
L
ESSON OF
L
OVE AND
P
OWER

King Nasilee's favorite mistress was Berry, and Asineth loved Berry with all her heart. Berry was lithe and beautiful. When she was naked she was slender and quick of body, like a racing hound, and all her muscles moved gracefully under her skin. When she was clothed she was ethereal, as distant from the world as a sunburst, and as beautiful. Asineth would come to her every day, and talk to her, and Berry, beautiful as she was, took time to listen to the little girl, to hear all her tales of the palace, all her dreams and wishes.

“I wish I were like you,” Asineth told her.

“And how would you like to be like me?” Berry asked.

“You are so beautiful.”

“But in a few years my beauty will fade, and the King your father will set me aside with a pension, like a housekeeper or a soldier.”

“You are so wise.”

“Wisdom is nothing, without power. Someday you will be Queen. Your husband will rule Burland because he is your husband, and then you will have power, and then it will not matter if you are wise.”

“What is power?” asked Asineth.

Berry laughed, which told the six-year-old girl that she had asked a good question, a hard one. Adults always laughed when Asineth asked a hard question. After they laughed, Asineth always studied the question and the answer, to see what made it such an important question.

“Power,” said Berry, “is to tell a man, You are a slave, and he is a slave. Or to tell a woman, You are a countess, and she is a countess.”

“So power is naming people?” asked Asineth.

“And something more. Power is to tell the future, little Asineth. If the astronomer says, Tomorrow the moon will come and cover the sun, and it happens as he said, then he has the power of the sun and the moon. If your father says, Tomorrow you will die, it will also happen, and so your father has the power of death. Your father can tell the futures of all men in Burland. You will prosper, you will fail, you will fight in war, you will take your cargo downriver, you will pay taxes, you will have no children, you will be a widow, you will eat pomegranates every day of your life—he can predict anything to do with men, and it will come to pass. He can even tell the astronomer, Tomorrow you will die, and all the astronomer's power over the sun and the moon will not save him.”

Berry brushed her hair a hundred times as she spoke, and her hair glistened like gold. “I have power, too,” said Berry.

“Whose future do you tell?” asked little Asineth.

“Your father's.”

“What do you say will happen to him?”

“I say that tonight he will see a perfect body, and he will embrace it; he will see perfect lips, and he will kiss them. I predict that the seed of the King will be spilled in me tonight. I tell the future—and it will come to pass.”

“So you have power over my father?” asked Asineth.

“I love your father. I know him as he does not even know himself. He could not live without me.” Berry stood naked before the glass and drew the borders of herself, and told Asineth how her father loved each nation of her flesh, told her which he came to as a gentle ambassador, which he dealt with sternly, and which he conquered with the sword.

Then her voice softened, and her face became childlike and peaceful, even as her words became colder. “A woman is a field, Asineth, or so a man thinks, a field that he will plow and plant, and from which he means to reap far more than his little seed. But the earth moves faster than a man can move, and the only reason he does not know it is because I carry him with me as I turn. He only plows what furrows he finds; he makes nothing. It is the farmer who is plowed, and not the field, and he will not forget me.” Asineth listened to all of Berry's words and watched the motion of her body and practiced talking and moving like her. She prayed to the Sweet Sisters that she would be like Berry when she grew; she knew that there was never a woman more perfect in all the world.

She loved Berry even on the day she spoke of her to the King. Nasilee let her sit beside him in the Chamber of Questions, and though she was young, he would sometimes publicly consult her. She would give her answer in a loud voice, and Nasilee would either praise her wisdom or point out her error, so all men could hear and benefit, and so that she could learn statecraft. This day the King asked his daughter, “Who is wiser than I am, Asineth?”

In the innocence of childhood she had not learned that there are some questions whose answer you must pretend not to know. “Berry,” she answered at once.

“Ah,” said her father. “And how is she so wise?”

“Because she has power, and if you have power you don't have to be wise.”

“I have more power than she has,” said the King. “Am I not wiser, then?”

“You have power over all men, Father, but Berry has power over
you
. You can never get a farmer to plow the same field twice in a year, but she can get you to plow twice in a day, even when you have no seed left to sow.”

“Ah,” said Nasilee again. Then he told the soldiers to bring Berry to him. Asineth saw that her father was angry. Why should he be angry? Didn't he love Berry as much as Asineth did? Wasn't he glad that she was wise? Hadn't he poisoned Asineth's own mother because she was angry at him for taking Berry into his bed?

Berry came with manacles on her wrists and hands. She looked at Asineth with a terrible hatred and cried out, “How can you believe the words of a child! I don't know why she is lying, or who told her to say these things, but you surely won't believe the tales of my enemies!”

Nasilee only raised his eyebrows and said, “Asineth never lies.”

Berry looked in fear at Asineth and cried, “I was never your rival!”

But Asineth did not understand her words. She had learned her first lesson so well that she was incapable of imagining that she had done something wrong.

Berry pleaded with her lover. Asineth saw how she used her beautiful body, how she strained against the manacles, how her robe parted artfully to show the swell of her breasts. Father will love Berry again and forgive her, Asineth was sure of it. But Berry's lover had become her King, and when all her pleading was done, he sent for a farmer and a team of oxen and a plow.

Out in the garden they did it, plowed Berry from groin to heart with a team of oxen pulling, and her screams rang in the palace garden until winter, so that Asineth could not go outside until winter changed it into another world.

It was a cruel thing her father did, but Asineth knew that he, too, heard Berry's screams in the night. Berry dwelt in every room of the palace, even though she was dead, and one day, when Asineth was nine, she found her father slumped in a chair in the library, a book open before him, his cheeks stained with half-dried tears. Without asking, Asineth knew who it was he thought of. It comforted Asineth to know that even though Berry had not so much power as she had thought, she had this much: she could make herself unforgotten, and force her lover to live forever with regret. Yet Berry's death itself was still a half-learned lesson, with the meaning yet ungiven, and so Asineth asked her father a question.

“Didn't you love her?” asked Asineth.

To her surprise, he answered, “If I did not love her, I never have loved anything.”

“Why did you kill her, then?”

“Because I am the King,” said Nasilee. “If I hadn't killed her, I would have lost the fear of my people, and if they do not fear me, I am not King.”

Asineth knew then that of the two powers Berry taught her, the stronger power was naming. It was because Nasilee was named King that he had to kill what he loved most. “You did not love Berry most of all,” said Asineth.

Nasilee opened his eyes, letting their light shine narrowly out upon his young daughter. “Did I not?”

“More than her, you loved the name of King.”

Her father's eyes closed again. “Go away, child.”

“I don't want to go, Father,” she said. I loved Berry more than I loved you, she did not say.

“I don't want to see you when I think of
her
,” said her father.

“Why not?” asked Asineth.

“Because you made me kill her.”

“I?”

“If you hadn't told me of her treasonous words, I wouldn't have had to kill her.”

“If you had merely laughed at the words of a child, she could have lived.”

“A King must be King!”

“A weak King must be what other Kings have been; a strong King is himself, and from then on the meaning of the name of King is changed.” The words could have been Berry's, for Berry understood these things, and Asineth only still guessed at all that she meant.

“What does it matter?” said the King wearily. “You said the words, the King heard them and had to act, Berry had to die, and now I mourn her and wish that you had died in birthing, and taken your mother with you, by the Hart I wish it, by the Sisters I swear it, now leave me, little girl.”

She left him. Until that time, she had been the one person in all Burland who did not fear King Nasilee. Now there was no one left who did not fear him, for he was King, and could break anyone with a word.

A
SINETH'S
L
ESSON OF
J
USTICE AND
M
ERCY

It was the day of Palicrovol.

The terrible rebel had roused all the people of Burland against the King. With that traitor Zymas he had defeated army after army, not in open battle but by cutting off their supplies, separating, wooing soldiers, troops, whole armies to desert and serve Palicrovol. Now, at last, after fifteen years of a war that had never come to battle, Palicrovol's army was outside the walls of Hart's Hope. Hart's Hope, the great city on the Burring, the capital; and Nasilee looked out and saw no help.

For the last ten years tax payments had fallen steadily, ceasing first in the outlying counties, and finally diminishing to almost nothing. The commerce of Hart's Hope itself had failed, for Palicrovol had built a highway in the west and forced all the river traffic to travel overland, though it raised prices; Hart's Hope was starving, and the people fled. Now Nasilee waited inside the impregnable walls, watched as Palicrovol, a Godsman, gathered his white banners, each with a hundred men around it, until the land outside foamed white as the crests of the sea.

Asineth also waited. She watched her father consult his wizards—the few that remained. She watched him wander the half-empty halls of the palace, haunted by the knowledge of his own death. Everyone knew that the walls of Hart's Hope could not be breached. They were miles long, rods high, yards thick; even the few soldiers Nasilee had left could hold it against Palicrovol's army, even with Zymas the traitor in command.

But Asineth was afraid. She was old enough now—twelve years old, with her womanhood newly on her—to know that her father was a wicked man, that the people were right to hate him. Asineth knew that Palicrovol was beloved of the people, for even the servants in the palace, loyal as they were, talked wistfully—and quietly—of the freedom and prosperity that Palicrovol brought wherever he conquered. Asineth feared that her father's soldiers would betray him and open the gate for Palicrovol. And so she prayed to the Sweet Sisters. She brought the blood of the moon with her to the altar of women in the secret place, and said, “Make the hearts of these men loyal to my father, so we are preserved from our enemy.”

The morning after the night when she burned blood for the Sweet Sisters, the gates of the city swung open, and the soldiers of the outer wall raised the white banner of Palicrovol's God. Word was that Zymas had come to them alone in the night, unarmed, and with his stirring words had won their hearts.