His Majesty's Elephant (11 page)

Rowan tried to take in a breath. It turned to a hiccough, and then to a strangled shriek.

The abbess set her down briskly in a chair and poured unwatered wine into her until she stopped sobbing and gulped.

The wine burned as it went down. The fumes rose at once to her head. Oddly, they steadied her.

“Now,” said the abbess. “What's so bad that you can't tell me?”

Rowan found words to say, and breath to say them with. “I can't tell you.”

“Then what good is it?” the abbess inquired.

Rowan stared at her. There was little else she could do, with the abbess' hand cupping her chin and the abbess' face filling her vision.

The younger Gisela would look like this, if she lived so long: her silver-gilt gone to silver, her beauty thinned and fined with fasting till it shone out of her like light from a lamp. But Gisela's eyes would never be as keen as these, or as pitiless.

“Aunt,” said Rowan with a small sigh, maybe of despair, maybe of relief, “if I told you, you'd tell me I was vaporing.”

“Tell me,” said the Abbess Gisela.

This brisk good sense was what Rowan had run away to find, when her magic was still so new that she could not endure it. Kerrec and the Elephant had prevented her then. They were nowhere in evidence now.

Deserters
, a small part of Rowan muttered. The rest of her looked for a way to put everything into words that her aunt would listen to and understand.

There was no way, really, but to tell it straight out. “There's a sorcery on him,” said Rowan.

The abbess' eyes narrowed, but she did not say anything, only waited for Rowan to go on.

Rowan had more than half hoped for a reprieve. She should have known better.

She breathed deep. This time it did not break into sobbing. She told the whole thing then, from the beginning, the day the Elephant came to Aachen.

When she was done, her throat was sore with talking, and her head was aching all over again. The abbess had not spoken through any of it, or changed expression, or done anything but listen. At the end of it she nodded slowly.

“I knew it would come to this,” she said as if to herself.

“To what?” Rowan asked before she thought.

“You,” said the abbess. “This. Your mother was not well loved, and for good reason. She was never precisely tactful about what she was.”

“She wasn't a witch!”

Rowan had said it so often that it was like a ritual. The abbess knew that very well, but still she chose to answer it. “She was something other than a simple woman, then, whatever you want to call her. She saw things that no one else could see. She could bend a man to her will with a look—”

“So can any beautiful woman,” said Rowan.

“She wasn't beautiful,” the abbess said. “Not that it mattered. She had lineage and lands and the art of pleasing a man, and her ambition was charming when she was young. She never worked her will on my brother, that's true, unless he wished her to. He married her of his own free will, knowing what he had, and rather more proud of it than not.”

“She didn't lay a spell on him,” Rowan said, drawing herself into a knot of misery. “She didn't.”

“She didn't need to,” the abbess said.

Rowan glanced toward the bed. The Emperor was laid in it, washed, clothed in a clean white shirt and covered with a light silken coverlet.

He had not moved through washing or tending or dressing, except, once in a great while, to close his eyes, then to open them again. He was closing them more often now than he opened them.

“Do you believe me?” she asked her aunt.

The abbess did not answer at once. She was staring at the Emperor, too. There was no telling what she thought. “It might be wise,” she said after a while, “to let people think that he's taken sick as old men do. An apoplexy is thoroughly credible in a man of his girth and habits.”

“Why?” Rowan demanded. “Why don't we tell everybody? Then they'll drive the sorcerer out.”

“Do you want them to? Think, child. We know where the Greek is, and what he does. If he's driven out, who knows where he'll go, or what vengeance he'll take?”

Rowan did not want to yield to the sense of that, but she had learned long ago not to argue with the abbess when she wore that particular, forbidding expression.

“And,” said the abbess, “we know something that the Greeks aren't aware we know. Everybody here thinks that they speak for the Empress. We know that she was deposed and is dead, and that an emperor rules in her place.”

“If I didn't dream it all,” said Rowan, “or let the Breton deceive me.”

“I doubt he did,” the abbess said. “You're not an easy person to deceive, except when you're trying to deceive yourself.”

That was hardly fair, in Rowan's opinion.

The abbess had got up from beside Rowan's chair and gone to stand by the bed. She shook her head, looking down at her brother. “Ah, Carl, if I could disbelieve her, I'd be a happier woman.”

“But what can we do?” Rowan cried.

“We'll think of something,” the abbess said. “Go on now. Young things need to eat, and you need sleep.”

“I don't want to leave him,” said Rowan stubbornly. “Who will protect him them?”

“You don't think I can do it?”

Rowan met those clear pale eyes and shivered. She would not have wagered on the devil himself to face down the Abbess Gisela. “If you'd been here last night...” she began.

“If I'd been here last night, I would have been praying in the chapel, and doing no good at all. Now, Theoderada. Supper. Then bed.”

No one else could have taken that tone with Rowan and been listened to. But Aunt Gisela had been afflicting Rowan with her merciless good sense since Rowan was a weanling. There was nothing for it but to give in to it, whether she wanted to or no.

oOo

Rowan ate, somewhat to her surprise, and slept, to her lasting astonishment. Bertrada did not come to bed that Rowan knew of, and if the maid snored, Rowan was oblivious. She did not even dream, that she remembered.

She woke in the grey dawn with an ache in her throat that spoke of tears, and the salt taste of them on her tongue. For a blessed moment she could not remember why she might have been crying in her sleep. Then it all flooded back.

She got up, washed and dressed herself and plaited her hair, and said her prayers. No one else was awake in the women's palace, although the cooks were in the kitchens: she smelled the incomparable smell of new bread baking.

The morning was heavy with mist, the air chill. Rowan was glad she had thought to put on her mantle. She picked her way across a dew-wet courtyard, slipping on the stones that paved it, and cut through a corner of the garden. Her shoes were soaking by the time she came to the menagerie's gate.

The menagerie was an eerie place in that light. Cages loomed grey out of the mist; the creatures in them slept, dark huddled shapes in corners, or stared at her with lambent eyes.

Something shrieked like a damned soul. Rowan nigh jumped out of her skin, but it was only a peacock waking out of sorts, pecking the nearest of his hens and dragging his tail behind him as he went in search of breakfast.

Rowan had not thought to bring anything for him. It was one more misery to add to the rest, small amid everything else, but weighty for its size.

The door to the Elephant's house was shut this morning. Rowan slipped through the small one set inside it.

The odor of elephant swept over her. There was light, surprisingly bright, from louvers in the roof, and from tall windows too narrow to let the Elephant escape. It shone on the mountain of hay that had been brought in yesterday, and the gilded howdah, and the chest where the rest of the Elephant's trappings were kept.

The Elephant was farther in, in his stall, blending so well with the shadows that for a moment Rowan thought his tusks were tricks of the light. Then he came clear, all the vast grey bulk of him, and the smaller shadow that was his keeper, leaning against his foreleg.

Kerrec looked as if he had not slept in longer than Rowan had. “And where were you,” she demanded, knowing it was unjust but refusing to care, “when the sorcerer trapped my father?”

“Abul Abbas is ill,” said Kerrec as if she had not spoken.

“My father might die,” Rowan said, “and you were hiding here, behind an elephant.”

Then his words caught up with her. “Ill?”

She peered. The Elephant was unusually still. He had not stretched out his trunk to her as he usually did, or looked at her, or seemed aware that there was anyone with him at all.

In the pause he sighed, a sound like wind in the rafters, and nosed listlessly at the mound of hay in front of him.

“He hasn't eaten in two days,” Kerrec said. “He won't tell me what's wrong.”

“Maybe it's grief still,” said Rowan. “Or maybe he ate something that disagreed with him.”

Kerrec's lip curled. “If it were that simple, do you think I wouldn't know it?”

“How do I know what anybody knows of elephants? Maybe he's tied to the Talisman,” Rowan said. “Maybe he can't tell you because there's a spell on him, too.”

She was only letting her fancy run wild, but Kerrec seized on it with ferocity that took her aback. “Yes, I thought of that. I'd be almost sure of it, if he'd only tell me.

“Why does he need to tell you? He's an animal. Animals don't use words.”

“You don't care about him at all,” said Kerrec angrily. “You don't care if he lives or dies.”

“I care if my father dies,” Rowan shot back, “which is more than you ever did.”

Kerrec's jaw set. He shook his head, not to deny what she said, not exactly; more as if he was weary of the whole fruitless argument. “Nothing we do seems to help anything. Mostly we just make it worse.”

Rowan snorted in disgust. “Now you're going all over Breton again, gloom and doom and black despair. That's not doing us any good at all.”

“You're a cold hard creature, do you know that? Your father's dying. Why aren't you at his bedside?”

“Because that's not where I can help him.”

Rowan would not break down and cry in front of Kerrec, however badly she wanted to. She moved closer, looking up at the motionless bulk of the Elephant.

His hide was as soft to the touch as ever, and maybe a little warmer, but not warm enough for fever. His trunk hung slack; his eye was dull. His ears did not even flick to dislodge the flies.

She brushed them away, as high as she could reach. She might have been invisible, for all the notice he took of her.

Her throat hurt. Somehow it was harder to keep from crying over the Elephant than over her father. They had the same mute passivity, the same utter unlikeness to themselves, but the man had all the help any living thing could have. The Elephant had nothing but Kerrec, and Rowan. No one else knew enough to care.

“You're arrogant, you know,” said Kerrec, “to think that you can be of any help to your father. That's a task for priests and princes.”

“And wizards of the Bretons?”

She was mocking him, and he could not help but know it. His eyes glittered. “The great ones never leave their native earth. Here, there's only I, and I'm too weak to fight this magic.”

She could dispute it till she was breathless, but there was no doubt of the truth. “Then we have no help and no hope, and we can only wait for both of them to die.” She stiffened her back. “I don't care how true that is. I won't accept it. Somehow—some way—”

“Stubborn,” said Kerrec, who was no sweet yielding flower himself.

“I'll be anything I have to be,” said Rowan, “to keep my father alive.”

“Even a witch?”

She went rigid.

“You can't go that far, can you?” Kerrec said. “You can't really do it.”

“I'll prove I can.”

“How?”

Rowan had no words to say, though she hunted for any that would do. Kerrec, who should have laughed in her face, sank down with his back against the treetrunk solidity of the Elephant's foot.

“I think I'm tired of despair,” he said. “I know I'm tired of thinking I can save everything if I only knew how. What if both of them did die? Maybe it's their time.”

“God would never use that devil's sorcery,” Rowan said fiercely.

“Why? Do you share his secrets?”

She could hit him. That would feel wonderful. She could run away from him. That would be prudent. She chose instead to sit on her heels in front of him, skirts tucked about her, and glare at him until a faint flush stained his cheeks under their olive-brownness. “Can you think of anything at all useful to do or say?” she asked him mildly, under the circumstances.

“No,” said Kerrec.

Rowan sighed. Tears were farther away than they had been for a while. The knot of misery was still there in her center, but she could think around it. “Neither can I,” she said. “But I will. While I wait—” She paused.

Her shoulders were stiff; her hands were damp and cold. “Will you teach me? To use magic?”

“No,” said Kerrec.

Rowan reared back till she almost fell over. “What do you mean, ‘No'? Who else in Aachen can teach me?”

“No one,” he said.

“Then why—”

“Because I don't know everything that I should know, and what I do know is man's magic, and you are a woman; your magic is different. Because if I teach you what little I do know, and if it helps you at all, who's to say I won't be caught and flogged for tempting the Emperor's daughter into iniquity?”

‘Then you're a worse coward than I am,” Rowan said bitterly. “You won't even try.”

He laughed, flat and hard. “You don't know what it is to be anything but a princess. Whatever your father allows, you can do; if he's difficult, you wheedle him round. The rest of the world has to live by other laws. It's not your back that would be laid open if we were caught, or your life that would hang in the balance if our crime were reckoned great enough. The worst that you would suffer would be confinement to a convent for a while—and you would find that more restful than not.”