His Majesty's Elephant (5 page)

No guard. There never was on this door. It opened near the midden, which was reeking splendidly in the heat, but after that was the wall and a postern gate and a moonlit corner of the garden.

The cook's old dog was sleeping near the gate. It raised its head, eyes gleaming, but did not bark.

Rowan paused to scratch its mangy ears. It thumped the ground with its tail. “I'll be back in a little while,” she said. “Keep watch for me.”

The rest of the way was both lighter and sweeter-scented, going down a short steep slope to a wall that was much older than the other. Old Rome had raised these pale stones and these flat red bricks and carved the capitals on the columns. Old Aachen was inside of them, Aquisgranum of the Romans, dim whispering vaults filled with the lap of water and the stink of sulfur.

In the daytime the baths were full of people. The Emperor was there as often and as long as he could manage, even holding court in the largest of the pools. That was disconcerting for people who had not been warned, foreigners who could not imagine where to look while the Emperor sat naked in the water, or swam back and forth thinking over their petitions.

Now there were only echoes, and moonlight slanting through the louvers in the roof, and the glimmer of water in the pool. The first few times Rowan came alone to the baths at night, a long while ago, she had come with beating heart, terrified that someone would catch her.

But no one ever had. If she was missed, people supposed that she had gone out to the privy, or at most to the garden: and that won her a lecture more than once on the mists and demons of the night. No one ever seemed to suspect the truth.

In winter it was a shivering, teeth-chattering run through the snow-buried garden, and the bliss of warmth in the hottest pool at the end of it. In summer it was a promise of coolness, a long idle paddle in the coldest pool while the lamp burned down and the moon went its round and she thought her thoughts away from the clatter of the palace.

She could talk to her mother here, if she was minded. Her mother very likely would not have approved when she was alive; she was the queen, after all, and the queen had appearances to keep up. But now that she was dead, she could come to Rowan as easily in the baths as in the chapel or the garden, and with much less fear of interruption.

A lamp always burned by the keeper's bench. Why it burned there, Rowan had never learned. The keeper did not come at night, nor did anyone else.

Rowan used the lamp to light the one she had brought. It was convenient not to have to fret with flint and steel.

The wick caught easily in the still air, flared and sank and settled to a steady flame. The room that had been black dark and white moonlight grew an island of pale-gold lamplight.

“Maybe,” Rowan said to her mother, “the lamp is for me: the spirit who comes to bathe in the night.”

Her mother said nothing. Rowan smiled, walking fearlessly through capering shadows. She had thought that she would swim in the coldest pool, but impulse turned her toward the largest one, the one that was both warm and cool. She set her lamp on one of the benches—she barely needed it here, with the moon shining in—and slipped out of her gown.

Something moved.

She froze. Mouse, she thought. Cat, maybe, hunting. There were plenty of both in this place.

It was a very large cat, then, or a whole tribe of mice. And it walked on two feet.

Rowan's gown was crumpled on the pool's rim. She shivered in her shift. Stupid— she had remembered the lamp, even the flint and steel, but forgotten the belt she always wore in the day, and the little knife that hung from it.

A shadow moved apart from the rest. Rowan's eyes darted. Door—if she could get as far as that, and if it, he, whatever it was, did not know the baths as well as she—

The moon gave the shadow a face. Black mane of hair, black pits of eyes, sharp hawk-curve of nose.

“Kerrec!” Rowan's fear was gone all at once, in white rage. “What in the name of all the angels and saints are you doing here?”

“Who is that,” he asked as if he had not heard her, “standing behind you?”

She whipped about. No one. Nothing. Only moonlight and darkness. She spun back, more furious than ever.

“She's beautiful,” said Kerrec. “Strong, too. She looks like you. Your mother?”

Chill ran down Rowan's spine, even through her temper. It was the way he said it: so calm; so strange in that light, with his face bleached pale and his eyes all the darker for it, fixed on a form that she could not see.

“There's nothing there,” she said, loud and angry. “Nothing and no one.”

“You know there is,” he said. “You don't have the sight, I can see that. But you feel it. That's better than eyes, some ways. Less distracting.”

“You're mad.”

He smiled. “Moon-mad?”

He looked completely different when he smiled. All the sulkiness went away, and the tightness that made his whole face seem a backdrop for his beak of a nose.

“Did you follow me?” Rowan demanded, the sharper for that she had almost weakened and found him worth liking.

“I came where the moon was,” he said.

Touched, definitely touched. “The moon is in the sky,” said Rowan with elaborate patience.

“It's in the water,” said Kerrec. “You feel the magic here. This is water that comes from the womb of the earth, heated in her fires. Moon touches it—that's air, and sky. All the elements in a single place.”

“You
are
a witch,” Rowan said. She thought about backing away, but failed to see the use in it. If he was going to bespell her, he would do it wherever she fled.

“Yes,” he said, “I am a witch and the son of a witch. She was a great lady of the Bretons, a princess of the old people. My father was a Frank.”

“Of the House of Roland, I suppose,” Rowan muttered.

Something of the mooncalf madness went out of his face, and the old bitter twist came back. “He was the great Count's kin. He had honor enough, until it was taken from him.”

“That's how it always is in stories,” Rowan said. “One's father is never a stableman or an honest tanner. He has to be a nobleman. Dishonored, of course. Or—”

“Sometimes the stories are true,” said Kerrec. “Though what would you know of that? You've never had a moment's pain. Your father is lord of the world. Mine is dead. He died because of a coward and a fool. And that coward, that fool—he took my father's honor and claimed it for himself, and gave my father his own dishonor, because my father was dead and could say nothing.”

“Then how do you know?” Rowan demanded.

He looked at her with those black eyes, the eyes he must have had from his mother. “How do you think I know?”

“You couldn't save him, then, you and your mother?”

He stepped back shaking, and dropped to his knees. His fists struck the tiles of the floor as he must have wanted to strike Rowan. “He was all the way across the empire in the Saxons' country. We could only watch. We saw him lead his men in glory. We saw the coward turn tail and run, and my father spur after him, and haul him back by the scruff of his craven neck, and throw him down. But he was clever, that snake of a man. He got a grip on my father's foot, and when he went down, my father went with him. The snake got up. My father never did. He had a Frankish dagger in his back. Because, the snake said, my father was running away, and he fought the snake, who tried to call him back, and there was no help for it. And they believed the snake, because my father was dead, and couldn't speak for himself.”

“People must have seen,” Rowan said. “His men—”

“His men all died. The snake saw to that, too. There was no one left to tell the truth. Who was to doubt the liar? The one he told lies of was a marcher lordling mated to a witch of the old people, and the liar was noble Frank clear back to Merovech, with a wife as nobly Frank as he was, and an army of kin to stand behind him. For us there was only Roland, dead a dozen years, and a few weak cousins who were ashamed to be seen with us.”

“And you,” said Rowan.

“I was hardly weaned,” Kerrec said. His anger was gone, or gone cold.

“Who was it?” Rowan asked. “Who did that terrible thing?”

“Does it matter?”

She planted her fists on her hips. “You've been waking the dead with your outrage, and now you say it doesn't matter?”

His lips stretched back from his teeth. It was not a smile. “That's exactly it, princess. My father's murderer is dead.”

“Dead? But—”

“Yes, I came too late. By all accounts he died peacefully in his bed, with his soul duly shriven and his place in heaven assured.” Kerrec did not even sound angry, only bitter, and tired.

“That's not fair,” said Rowan.

“Should it be?”

“Yes,” said Rowan. “Did you come to kill him?”

“No,” said Kerrec. “Yes. It doesn't matter, does it? My enemy is dead. My father is dead. My mother is dead. My family's honor is dead. And here where there might be mending for all of that, what am I but an elephant's keeper?”

“That's not so little a thing,” Rowan said. “You can talk to my father. He'll make it right.”

“As easy as that?” Kerrec sat on his heels and sighed. “Let it be. Maybe it's best that I be no one here. I can prove myself as myself, and not as my father's son.”

She did not say anything to that.

“You don't understand, do you?” he said. “But you do believe me.”

She did understand: better maybe than he could imagine. And she did believe him. “Liars are smoother,” she said, “and don't bother with me. They go to Bertha, who's the oldest, or Gisela, who's the favorite. And they don't... feel the way you do.”

Either he understood, or he was too tired to wonder what she meant. He looked terrible. She wondered if he ever slept, or if he lay awake all night long, brooding on his troubles.

His eyes blurred in the lamp's light. They really were black, not brown, not simply all iris in the dimness. She had never seen eyes quite like that before. But then she had never seen a witch, either, or at least anyone who admitted to it.

She should be more afraid than she was. When he scuttled on hands and knees to the pool's edge, she followed, keeping a careful distance, but not too much of one.

He bent over the water. The moon came right down into it. He reached as if to touch, but stopped short of it. He breathed on the water, and his breath, instead of ruffling it, stroked it hollow and smooth. The moon spilled into the bowl that he had made, filling it full.

Rowan was on her knees beside him. She did not remember kneeling. She certainly did not remember taking his hand. His dark thin fingers wound with her plumper, paler ones.

“Look,” he said.

The moon was in the water. She could not see any more than that. She did not want to see any more than that.

“See,” said the witch from Brittany. “A chamber, rich as a king's, and every hanging and carpet is purple when it's not gold. There's a bed, look, and people standing about it, and a woman in it. She's not old, not terribly, but she's very dead.”

Rowan could not see, but as he spoke, she knew what he was seeing—knew as clearly as she knew her prayers. “That's the Empress,” she said, slowly at first, because she had half decided to be horrified by the strangeness that had come over her. But once she had started, she found she could not stop. “That's Empress Irene in Byzantium. She's dead. They deposed her, and then they killed her, but they made it look as if she died all by herself. Is there someone standing near her—a man whose shoes are red?”

“He's standing over her,” said Kerrec. “He's smiling.”

“He's the one who had her killed. He's the Emperor now.” Rowan's eyes went wide. “Then the danger is gone. The Empress of the East is dead. She can't marry my father. She can't cast a spell on him, or poison him, or—”

“The danger is greater than ever,” Kerrec said, “if there's an Emperor in the East. An Empress might marry a man who calls himself Emperor of the West. An Emperor of the East, who wants to be Emperor of the world—he'll kill anyone he reckons a rival.”

“Not my father,” Rowan said.

“Not yet.” Kerrec peered into the pool. “That's Michael Phokias. Look, he's talking to the man in the red shoes—but the man's shoes aren't red, yet. He's giving something to Michael Phokias.”

“Gold,” said Rowan, no longer even wondering that she knew, “in a purse. And orders. So the Byzantine isn't the Empress' man. He's the other's—the new Emperor's. He's to-—to—” She gasped. “He's supposed to do something to my father.”

“Kill him,” said Kerrec.

“No,” said Rowan, but the thing that made her know so much also made her helpless to deny the truth. “Not... all at once.”

Kerrec was too intent on the pool to answer. “Gold. There's gold in the water. Jewels, crystal—the Talisman.”

Rowan shuddered so hard that she almost fell into the pool. But Kerrec held her. She clung to him, both hands now, as hard as she could. “It's—it's not—” Oh, it hurt, to have those words tearing themselves out of her, and no way to stop them, no way not to say them, not to know what was in them. “If they get it, it will be deadly. I knew that; I felt it. What else it is—what it can do—it has more magic in it than anyone knows, even the Byzantine. But he knows enough. Once, only once, if the one who wears it has a pure heart, it can grant her—his—heart's desire. If he works on Gisela, if he gets her under his spell, he'll have what his master wants. He'll have my father.”

Kerrec was silent. He was looking at her now and not at the water.

A cloud ran across the moon. The bowl of his seeing melted and scattered.

Horror, held off too long, crashed down on her with trebled force. She had knelt in the middle of magic. She had been part of it.