His Majesty's Elephant (12 page)

“That's not so,” said Rowan.

“Of course it's so,” said Kerrec. “You don't want to see it, that's all. You are safe no matter what I do. I pay whatever penalty we both deserve.”

“No,” said Rowan.

He shrugged, so arrogant and so indifferent that she hated him. “If you can't face that, how do you expect to face magic?”

“I faced it when the Greek took the Talisman.”

“You faced dire necessity. Now the worst is done. We lost that fight. Victory now, or even stalemate, will be long and slow and deadly uncertain. How much courage do you have, king's daughter? How much strength is in you?”

“More than you would ever admit,” said Rowan.

“Then teach yourself magic.”

“But I
can't
!''

“Then don't,” said Kerrec. He drew up his knees and clasped them, letting his head droop over them.

She could see his face still. It was closed tight.

Rowan despised every bit of him, right down to the patch in his shoe. Damnable, prickly, unreasonable sprat of a Breton. How dared he speak so to her? She was the Emperor's daughter. He was no one at all.

The Elephant shifted slightly, curled his trunk and uncurled it, and sighed. Rowan's anger melted in fear for him, for her father, for everything she knew. Even for Kerrec.

“I don't know why I trouble myself with you,” she said out of the last of her temper. “You're all edges, like a rackful of knives. Don't you cut yourself, with so many?”

“All the time,” said Kerrec. Neither tone nor face showed any sign of softening, but he had answered her. That was enough.

She had known horses like him. Stallions, usually, too young to know what they wanted, but old enough to be outspoken about it.

The good ones steadied as they grew. Kerrec would steady, she thought. If he lived that long.

“If you won't teach me,” she said with care, “would you stay by me while I learn, and stop me if I stumble?”

“Do you trust me to do that?”

“Who else is there to trust?”

“Why, no one,” he said. “No one in the world.”

Rowan had crossed a line, that early morning in the Elephant's house. The full force of it did not strike her for a long while after; by then it was too late to turn back.

Using magic to stop a spell in the working was one thing. She had had to do that.

Using it in cold blood, with intent to make it stronger, was another thing altogether. And surely it was proof that she was damned.

She wondered if her sisters felt the same way when they took their lovers, knowing that it was a sin, but unable to stop.

“Nonsense,” said Kerrec, to whom she let the thought slip. “Taking lovers doesn't offer some hope of keeping an emperor alive.”

“How do we know that?” Rowan asked. Kerrec did not dignify it with an answer.

oOo

With the Emperor's illness, everything seemed to stop. The life of the palace went on, that was true. People had to eat, sleep, go about their business. The city was as crowded as ever, the churches full of prayers and incense. But the heart of it was a man mute and all but lifeless in a bed, and the silence of those who kept vigil, and the doctors' muttering.

To Rowan it felt like the stillness before a storm's breaking. She did not see the Byzantines anywhere, would have thought them sensible if they had made excuses and left, but they were still in Aachen. There was no mistaking that sensation of rats in the rafters. Michael Phokias would not leave until he had proof of his victory.

She spent a great deal of time with the Elephant, and coincidentally with Kerrec. But she could not sleep there, as safe as she knew it would be. People were talking enough already about the time she spent with the Elephant—and the Elephant's boy.

The Elephant, like the Emperor, had sunk into silence. Sometimes Kerrec could coax him to eat a mouthful, or to go out into the sun. Mostly the great beast stood unmoving in his stall.

Day by day his skin seemed more wrinkled, the arch of his back more distinct. His ribs were like the ribs of a ship Rowan had seen once careened on the sand at Brundisium, when she went with her father to Italy.

Her father was sturdier, or his frame less susceptible to the ravages of sickness. He looked as solid as ever under his coverlet. But his face had lost its ruddy glow, and his hands folded on his breast were suddenly an old man's hands, rope-veined and sharp-boned and frail.

oOo

The great chapel was full of people praying for the Emperor. The women's chapel had a priest in it, saying Mass. Rowan's sisters were there, all but Hrotrud, who was not diligent in her devotions. Rowan saw Gisela's silver-gold head beside Bertha's wheat-gold one, and one in a veil beyond them, keen eyes lowered, white still-beautiful face rapt in prayer.

Rowan had not been going to go in, but she found herself beside her aunt, close enough to the younger Gisela and far enough to the side to see her face. That was as lovely as always, and no more vapid than usual, fixed on the priest as he moved through the Mass.

And yet cold walked down Rowan's spine. She had been too intent on her own troubles to take much notice of Gisela now that the Talisman was in another's hands. If she had thought of her sister at all, she had thought that, once he was done with her, Michael Phokias would have let her go. He could hardly kill her to keep her quiet. Too many people would notice.

Something was not right with Gisela. It was nothing that the eye could see or the mind catch hold of. It was more like a prickle in the back of the skull, a quiver in the thing that Rowan had learned to call her magic.

The Mass crawled to its end. Everyone lingered to pray. Rowan prayed: she had reason enough. She hoped that God was as capacious as the priests said, or she would overburden him with all the things she needed him to look after.

The Abbess Gisela was one of the first to leave. Princess Gisela was one of the last. When at great length Gisela rose from her knees and crossed herself three times, bowing to the altar, Rowan got up a shade more slowly and with fewer gestures, eyes fixed on her sister. Gisela seemed not to notice her, even when she went out right on Gisela's heels.

Rowan should probably have tried for concealment, but the same instinct that cried warning about Gisela cried none about secrecy. So she took the easier way, walking behind her sister, following where she went.

It was not very interesting. She went to the gallery first, and stitched at the altar cloth she had been stitching at for the last month and more. Her stitches were as even as ever, her embroidery as exquisite. She did not say anything to the others, but then no one was saying much.

After a while she got up. Again Rowan got up to follow her. She caught a sharp glance from her aunt, but no one else seemed to notice.

This time Gisela went outside. It was nowhere incriminating, only the herb garden.

She wandered aimlessly, with Rowan for a shadow. Once she plucked a sprig of rosemary and held it to her nose. For a moment something changed, as if the old Gisela woke and wondered where she was; then the rosemary dropped from her fingers and she wandered on.

oOo

“And that's all she did,” Rowan said to Kerrec. “Wandered. Sniffed the flowers. Sat in the sun and folded her hands in her lap, and there she stayed till dinnertime, and not a word out of her.”

Kerrec had been eating his own dinner when Rowan found him. She had had no appetite for hers. She took the bread he offered, hardly noticing what it was, and bit into it just as absently.

“You should have steered her into the rosemary bush,” Kerrec said. “Then maybe she would have remembered.”

Rowan bridled a little. “Why on earth should I have done that?”

“Rosemary's a healing herb,” he said with such patience that she could have hit him. “It helps the memory.”

“But what could she have forgotten?”

He looked at her as if she had forgotten her wits. “What could she have remembered? She had the Talisman for long enough to make it her own, even if she didn't know what she was doing. Then she gave it up. Look at what happened to your father, and to Abul Abbas. How could she keep from catching the edge of the spell?”

“But she's an innocent,” said Rowan. “She never knew what she had.”

“Nor did your father. And what is Abul Abbas but an innocent?”

“Abul Abbas is as wise as Solomon. He knows much more than he's telling.”

Kerrec granted the truth of that, no more graciously than he ever did. “That's three whom the spell has touched. We say in Brittany that there's power in threes. What kind of power would a sorcerer want from an emperor and a princess and an elephant?”

“From the Emperor, it's obvious,” Rowan said. “From the princess, too.”

“She's not the only daughter,” said Kerrec.

“But Bertha is protected,” Rowan said. “She's as good as married to Father Angilbert, and everybody knows it. Hrotrud will marry nobody, and she's too fierce to be tamed as Gisela was. The rest of us are younger, and negligible.”

“Then why the Elephant?”

“Because he's part of the Talisman. Because he's exotic, and strange, and prized by the Emperor. Or maybe,” said Rowan, “that was an accident, and so was Gisela. All he really wanted was my father.”

She could say it steadily, think it clearly. She had had enough time to steel herself to it. But inside she kept wanting to break down and howl.

Kerrec stroked the Elephant's trunk gently, as he had been doing off and on since this bleak conversation began. Maybe he thought that it helped, somehow, if only to make him feel that he was doing something.

“Do you think,” Rowan asked him, “that rosemary would make Gisela remember? Would it help Father, too? We could roast a lamb in it, feed it to them both.”

Hope rose as she spoke, and got into her voice. Kerrec dashed it. “If it were only a spell of forgetfulness—yes, it would help, a little. But this is a great working, with a demon in it. He'd only laugh at your little banners of herbs.”

“Maybe little things are better than great things, for this,” said Rowan stubbornly.

“No,” said Kerrec, just as stubborn.

Rowan scrambled up from where she had been sitting in the Elephant's uneaten hay. “I'll try it in spite of you. It's better than sitting here feeling sorry for myself.”

oOo

The Emperor's master cook was an awesome personage, a great prince of his kind and mightily aware of it, but he had always been indulgent with Rowan. Mostly it was because she liked to watch him work, but she knew how to keep quiet, and she had not prattled about his secrets even when she was small and given to telling everything she knew. And then she was good at tasting for him—she could tell if something needed seasoning, if not always exactly what. He had said once where she could hear, that it was unfortunate she was a girl and a princess; she would have made a decent cook.

Of course Master Gottfried would never say it to her face. He was as intent on his work as an emperor in a battle, and as caught up in marshaling his forces. A palace needed an army of cooks and undercooks and apprentice cooks, scullions and spitboys and potboys, bread-bakers and meat-carvers and hearth-tenders, and one haughty personage whose chief task was to mete out the spices from their hoard.

The master cook oversaw them all. He had a chair where he could see the whole kitchen, but he was never in it. He was always in the thick of things.

This evening Rowan found him at the spits. They were roasting an ox whole, and one of the chains had given way. The fire had been doused, at what cost in curses Rowan could well guess, and a pair of brawny scullions stood in the still-smoking embers, struggling to restore the chain. A third, much smaller boy poured water over their leather-booted feet, with much hissing and bellowing of steam.

It was very like the hell the priest had droned about at Mass. Rowan wished she could consign Michael Phokias to it, and quickly; but wishing was no way to work real magic, as she had already learned to her sorrow.

Master Gottfried had no time to greet her, even if she had expected any such thing. She stayed quiet and out of the way while he saw the spit repaired and the fire rebuilt and the ox returned to its roasting. The only sign of impatience that she allowed herself was a shifting from foot to foot and a darting of glances about.

The ox was just started; it would roast all night, slowly, till it was tender for tomorrow's dinner. Most of the cooks had gone, now that dinner was past, to take their well-earned ease. The scullions who scrubbed the pots were done, all but one who wore a look of martyrdom as he scoured the largest cauldron. One or two pots still simmered on the lesser hearth, with a yawning boy to oversee them. It was much too early for the bread-baking, much too late for the saucemaking.

In short, it was as quiet as the kitchen ever became, which was why Rowan had chosen this time to visit Master Gottfried. Once the spit was back in its place and the ox turning over the new-lit fire, he granted her the favor of a glance.

He was quite ordinary outside of the terror of his office, a middle-sized, mouse-colored man with a soft voice and a mild demeanor. He even smiled, sometimes, when he was not commanding his armies.

He did not smile now. No one did, since the Emperor had taken ill.

“Master,” said Rowan forthrightly but with careful respect, “may I ask a favor of you?”

His eyebrows went up. Rowan was not given to asking favors, though she might wheedle the odd sweetcake out of him when his mood was amenable. “And what favor may that be?” he asked.

“Do you remember the broth you made once, that my father liked so well—the one with mutton in it, and barley? You put rosemary in it, with other herbs that made it really rather miraculous. And he ate it, though he never eats anything that isn't roasted or raw.”