His Majesty's Elephant (7 page)

Rowan got a tongue-lashing for running out unannounced, but it was no worse than usual, and everybody settled down soon enough. They had more than her delinquencies to occupy them, with the palace still so full of people. And the Elephant's house was ready at last, which she had been too preoccupied to notice.

Abul Abbas would not escape so easily now. Instead of the stable with its open courtyards and its gates that were always seeing people come and go, he was given a place in the big half-wooded park of the Emperor's menagerie, with a tall wooden building for him to sleep in. The gates here were barred, and the most dangerous or the most flighty creatures lived in cages: the lion, the leopard, the birds that sang and the birds that were merely brilliant to look at.

Abul Abbas had his house with its great door that could be barred to keep him in or left open to let the air blow through, with his own bit of yard to walk in. Sometimes he came out into the wider space of the park, with Kerrec riding on his neck.

Children were always asking and grown noblemen demanding to ride in the litter that was made for the Elephant's back, and once in a while Kerrec allowed it. He was growing princely, was Kerrec, for being the Elephant's keeper.

Rowan stayed away from both of them. She cherished a conviction that if she did not speak to them, did not look at them, did not think about them, the magic in her would go away.

And so it seemed to. She did not even talk to her mother's memory. She was as close to just-Rowan as the Princess Theoderada could be, going to lessons in the school, attending her father at dinner, stitching at her altar cloth.

But Rowan did not ride her pony, who grew fat and bored in the pasture, and bit one of the grooms who brought her in to work a knot of burrs out of her mane. Rowan was not going to do anything that would jar loose the delicate balance of her ordinariness.

The longer she went on being so ordinary, the more she felt as if she were a peasant girl with a jar of milk on her head, and if she slipped or stumbled the jar would come crashing down. Her neck was stiff with the effort, and her stomach was knotted tight.

She went to bed at sundown with the rest of the women, and did not go out to bathe in the moonlight, no matter how tempting it was. She was just Rowan. She was safe, and her father was safe, and the Talisman was in no danger, living on its chain around Gisela's neck.

oOo

“Hist! Rowan!”

Rowan started, and yelped. Her needle had jabbed her finger so hard it drew blood.

“Rowan,” the whisper came again.

Curiosity was her besetting flaw. She had to turn. She had to see the head framed in the window of the women's gallery, tousled and spiky and permanently annoyed.

She resisted the urge to gape. Either Kerrec had sprouted wings, or he was perched on the fragile support of the grapevine that ran along the top of the portico. Either way, he was standing a good three man-heights above the ground, where he had no business to be. She turned her back on him.

“Rowan,” he said in a more normal voice, if still soft—he must have seen that she was alone with her embroidery and her basket of silks and the dapple of sun on the polished wooden floor. “Rowan, do you know where your sister is?”

A really wise woman would have ignored him completely. Rowan had never been wise. “Which one?” she asked the wall opposite. “I have an army of them.”

“You know which one,” said Kerrec with his best imitation of patience.

“I suppose she's out with the others,” Rowan said, “picking berries in the wood.”

He did not ask why Rowan had not gone with them. She wished he would, so that she could snap his head off properly.

There was a scuffle and a soft thump. She knew without looking that he was in the room, breathless, cursing softly at a barked shin or a skinned elbow.

“You'll get your hide tanned if anyone finds you here,” Rowan said with some pleasure. “Or worse.”

“Sometimes,” said Kerrec, “I wonder if all budding girls are like mares out of season, squealing and kicking at any male that happens by. Do you do it because you want to, or because you think you have to?”

A flush crawled up Rowan's cheeks. She decided to call it anger. “Why should I answer you?”

Maybe he shrugged. She refused to look. “You might care where the Princess Gisela is. She's not in the wood. They all think she's gone to pray, but she's not in the chapel, either, or anywhere else that's holy.”

Rowan found that her hands were shaking. She set down her embroidery before she drew blood again, sheathed the needle in a bit of cloth, and knotted her fingers in her lap. “Why did you come to me? What can I do that my father's guards can't?”

“You want me to be the one to say it, don't you?”

Her eyes came up of their own accord. Kerrec looked much as he always did, like a half-fledged hawk.

He was quite homely, she thought, beaky and untidy. He smelled, faintly but distinctly, of elephant.

But none of that mattered with those black eyes on her, challenging her, naming her the coward that she was. The Elephant had not let her run away to Cologne, but she had run away into herself.

“You don't understand,” she said. “You were brought up to it. I was taught to shrink from it.”

“From what? Courage?”

“Now you're the one who's playing the fool.”

“So say it. Say what you're afraid of.”

She drew a deep breath. She was not going to. No. Not the word.

It came out by itself. “Magic,” she said in a soft voice that was worse somehow than a scream. “Magic, magic, magic!”

He nodded, unruffled. “Magic,” he agreed. “You can't hide it, you know, not from anyone who can see. You can only hide it from yourself.”

“What,” she asked with bitter humor, “do I blaze like a beacon in the dark?”

“More like a candle in a gale,” said Kerrec. He reached and, with daring so mighty it was irresistible, pulled her to her feet. “Come on. And pray we're not too late.”

Rowan tried to dig in her heels. He was too strong, and he was moving too fast. She stumbled after him, willy-nilly, out of the gallery, down the back stair, into the dim and musty servants' corridors. If they passed any servants, she was too stark with mingled rage and fear to notice.

Her veil got lost somewhere. The crown of her braids uncoiled and tumbled down her back. Kerrec was running, his grip on her hand tight enough to bruise.

And because he was touching her, because there was no getting away from the magic no matter what she did, she knew something of why he ran. The Elephant—the Talisman—

She tried to wrench loose. She managed to slow them both down a little and spin him half around, but he only spun back and kept on going, right out of the palace into dim reaches of courtyards, around the royal reek of the kitchen midden and through a gate and into the orchard.

And then he stopped, as sudden as if he had struck a wall. Rowan fell to her knees.

They were both gasping for breath, and she was too furious to see anything but his sweating face. “What in the name of—” she began, and not softly, either.

His hand clapped over her mouth. She tried to twist her head around and bite, but he was too clever, or too experienced. “Stop it!” he hissed in her ear. “They'll hear us.”

She had been steaming hot, but all at once she was cold. She turned very carefully. Kerrec did not try to stop her, though he kept his hand over her mouth.

There they were under the tree that Rowan loved. They looked like innocent lovers. Gisela's head was in the Byzantine's lap. He was stroking her loosened hair, stroking and stroking it, and under his hand that lay on her breast was a gleam of gold.

As he stroked her hair he sang, his voice as soft as sleep, buzzing like bees in a lazy noon, setting all thoughts free to drift, drift...

“Rowan!”

Kerrec's voice was like shattering glass. Rowan found herself clinging to him, half ready to fall over.

Kerrec of course was wide awake. While she was still gaping and gasping, he pulled her behind a tree. “What—” she tried to say. “How—”

“That's a sleep-sorcery,” Kerrec said, as if Rowan could not have guessed. “There, he has her.”

Rowan started out from behind the tree. Kerrec pulled her back. “Not like that, idiot. That's magic he's using—strong magic. You can't fight it by blundering right into it.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?” Rowan demanded, trying to whisper and shout at the same time. “I can't just watch him take the Talisman!”

“You might have to,” said Kerrec.

“Then what—” Rowan said again, but stopped. What was the use?

She peered carefully round the treetrunk. Gisela was sound asleep. Michael Phokias paused as if to admire his handiwork, or maybe he was human enough to be struck by her beauty as she lay there, all white and silvery gold. Carefully then, with fingers gloved in silk, he lifted the Talisman from her breast.

Rowan held her breath. He did not reel or cry out, nor did he fall over dead. He took the Talisman and held it up. “And this,” he asked in a voice that still held memories of his spellcasting, “is your free gift to me?”

“Yes,” said Gisela drowsily. “It is my free gift to you.”

“To keep and to guard, and to wield as it best pleases me?”

“To keep and to guard,” she repeated in her sleep, “and to wield as it best pleases you.”

“Then sleep,” he said, and maybe that was triumph in his voice, rigidly clamped down or he would break the spell. “Sleep and be at peace. There is nothing in the world to fear, nothing to remember but that you had a relic, and you grew weary of it, and put it away with all the rest.”

“Nothing,” murmured Gisela. “Weary. Put... away...”

Cautiously Michael Phokias slid from beneath Gisela. She sighed and stirred, and Rowan dared to hope that she would wake, but she only curled like a kitten and tucked her hand beneath her head and fell deeper asleep.

Michael Phokias smiled down at her. “Dream well, my beautiful witling,” he said.

He plucked a bit of silk from his sleeve and wrapped the Talisman in it, but not before he paused to admire the gleam of sun in its colored stones. “Beautiful,” he said to it in Greek. “O beautiful.”

He was purring with satisfaction. He returned the silk to his sleeve, and the Talisman with it, smoothed his robes and straightened his hat and preened his curly beard. Then he turned toward the tree that—however inadequately—hid both Rowan and Kerrec.

She made herself as narrow as she could, and tried not to breathe. Kerrec, who was no wider than the tree, stepped out from behind it before she could stop him, and sauntered toward the sorcerer.

Michael Phokias paused. If he was angry or dismayed, he did not show it. His nose went up a fraction, as if he detected the scent of elephant on the Elephant's boy, and did not find it pleasing.

Kerrec halted as if startled—Rowan caught the edge of it as she craned around the tree. He ducked clumsily, as a peasant might bow, except that no peasant would be that awkward, and squeaked like the boy he no longer really was. “My lord! My lord, what—” He seemed to catch sight of Gisela. His voice went up another half-octave. “My lady! Is she ill? Is she dead? I'll fetch the servants—the guards—the physicians—”

The Byzantine's voice cut through his babbling. “She is sleeping. I found her so; I trust that you will leave her to it.”

Kerrec yattered on. “Somebody's been trying to—trying to—to—
force
her? Guards!”

That might have been a shout, in something near his natural tone, if the Byzantine had not tripped him so neatly that it might have looked like an accident: the gawky boy hopping and fretting, catching his foot on the man's and falling flat on his face. Except that Kerrec was not gawky, no matter how many extra knees and elbows he seemed to have, and he only stumbled and caught himself on the man's robes.

Rowan was not breathing. Kerrec was putting on a show fit to make a cutpurse proud, but the Byzantine was too slippery for him.

He slithered out from under Kerrec's hands, set him on his feet, wrinkled his fine nose again at the stink of commoner—little as he knew the truth of that—and said, “Boy, have you been at your betters' wine? For shame! and you so young. Here, stand up straight, draw a breath, yes. Yes!”

And as he said it he patted Kerrec all over, as if to be sure that he had not hurt himself, straightening the ragged tunic and refastening the worn belt and smoothing the hair that went wherever it willed.

Kerrec must have been hard put to maintain his expression of bucolic stupidity. There was a white tinge about his nostrils.

He was going to lose his temper. Rowan felt it like a bonfire on her face.

Too fast even to think, she flounced out from behind the tree, calling, “Kerrec! Kerrec, you mooncalf, what are you bothering his excellency for?”

Not all the heat in that place was Kerrec's anger rising. There was something added to it, something with a tang like hot iron. Magic. It lay in Michael Phokias' hands, wound about Kerrec as he stood immobile, and maybe he could not move if he had wanted to.

Michael Phokias was looking a little ruffled. Rowan gave him no time to speak. “My lord, you have to pardon him, he fancies himself clever. Not that he isn't, mind you,” she said with the best simper she could manage—it turned Kerrec faintly green—“but he does get a little above himself. He likes to think that he can guard a lady's virtue. Charming, isn't it? He's only an elephant's boy.” She patted him as if he had been her dog, trying not to flinch when her hand touched magic. It felt like ice wound with fire. It itched inside her skin. “But charming, as I said. And very much more interesting than he looks.”

“I hope for your sake, my lady,” said Michael Phokias, “that he is.”