The Duke In His Castle (10 page)

Eventually all three become drowsy. Nairis is soothed and lies back against the feather bed, is covered and cosseted, and her eyes, overcast with languor, are finally closed.

Since she appears to be asleep, the two maids pull the draperies nearly closed around the great bed leaving just a small space to observe her, then make themselves comfortable in two large upholstered chairs. They have been told to stay with her overnight, to watch for any peculiarities, to handle any of her needs. And so they do as they are told for the most part, watching with one eye, as the common saying goes. The older maid is already snoring softly, chin sunken down toward the deep shadowed space between two fat bulging breasts, while the younger maid goes to bank the flames in the fireplace, stirs the coals, then clambers up into the other chair, feet curled up underneath her apron for extra warmth.

A single tallow candle remains lit on the side table.

By three o’clock past midnight, the candle is nearly down to one third of its column, with the rest of it pooling in the dish.

It is then the door of the chamber opens and a gaunt tall man enters the room.

The Duke makes no sound as he steps inside. It’s an uncanny ability that he has attained as a side-effect of his arcane learning—he can move in absolute silence and, if he desires, can make himself dissolve into abstract non-presence with nothing more than a subtle shift of focus. He employs this craft upon occasion to test himself, by passing within inches of oblivious servants in the hallways and listening to private conversations.

And now he uses his ability to stand and observe and then approach. He moves toward the bed and is undetected by the maids. The younger whimpers like a pup in her sleep and shifts her cramped position in the chair in restless slumber, while the older breathes heavily in a deep rumble; her bonnet has shifted slightly to expose wisps of corn-yellow hair.

The Duke moves past them both and draws part of the bed curtain aside so that the waning candle casts a clean radius of illumination over the sleeping Nairis. She is lying on her back, one slender arm thrown up on the pillow, coverlets bunched to one side exposing the shape of her waist and hips covered by the linen nightgown. Her long hair fans out along the pillow and coverlet, meanders in curling tendrils along the neckline of the gown and her chest, and obscures half her face in a natural tangle. The portions of her face that show are defined by clean lines, a slender angled chin that continues into an elegant neck, a delicate pulse at the throat.

He watches that pulse, mesmerized. What has drawn him here, but this? The pulse of her life flickering in and out of being, her rhythmic movement of lungs that he
hears
several floors away in a remote different tower as though they are grand bellows of a smithy, working in his mind.

He considers,
Does the Deity feel this urge toward the Creation, this pull to be with the offspring and observe?

Indeed, is there a pang of terror that comes to grip his own lungs in a fist, fear that the creature left to fend for itself cannot be thus, cannot exist in stand-alone condition without the parent, maker, progenitor?

Or is he merely insane within his permanent condition of solitude? Is his reaction akin to that of a natural parent watching his newborn child, but he does not know it is thus?

Rossian looks at her and thinks,
No. It is not the same thing at all.
And he does not feel fatherly in the least, nor divine . . .

He feels profane.

The Duke knows of the function of sex, and is familiar with the cycle of procreation and the mechanics of the act involved for the human animal. Yet he never engages in such intimacy, for there is no one and nothing that can overcome the defenses of his inner reserve. Not even the internal urges of his body, the pulsing alchemical humours that course through his blood with regularity and bring him erotic dreams and nightly swellings of his genitals, not even this chronic restless longing for unknown release has sufficient influence over his aloof state.

Maybe it’s that the Duke knows so well how to curtail one kind of longing—that for freedom—and as a result finds it easier to rule himself in all other things. Or maybe yet again, this is but a side-effect of his proficiency in the arcane arts.

Whatever the reason, the Duke is virgin in body; in his mind he has allowed himself the full range of debauchery known to the imagination, and it seems to be enough to sustain him.

Until now.

The Duke watches Nairis, the living one, and thinks how she is thus because of him. Only hours ago, she is
not
—she is nothing, death, a bit of dust and desiccated bones. And now she moves; he has bestowed upon her automation, existence, life.

He is god to her mortality, the maker to her flesh.

And he feels a profound need to reach out and despoil what he has brought into being. Far from being the sculptor of legend who creates a statue of a beauty, falls in love with her, and in the course of love brings marble to life, no—he is an artist locked in his studio with an intricate finished canvas over which he suddenly pours random globs of pigments in an elemental burst of creation-fury.

The maids continue sleeping and the candle burns lower still, while the Duke stands in atrophy of the senses and movement, watching the living canvas before him as she slumbers, innocent. She is his, this creature. So easy to take a fistful of that soft hair, and pull. . . . To maul her slender arms. To rip the linen cloth from her and see her center, her solar plexus, and what lies below.

And the Duke leans down and reaches out with his hand to run his fingers like a whisper upon the inside of her upturned arm. He feels a cool place on her skin, followed by a sudden warming, and, as his fingers continue slithering toward more tepid places, a deep heat—in sleep her living body burns.

And his own body responds, so that suddenly he is burning too, as though dreaming in sensual pleasure. He leans over Nairis, and feels himself growing, as his penis fills with the blood-humour and hardens, prodding at the confines of his clothing.

The maid stops her rhythmic snoring and coughs, without waking up; he glances her way to make sure, notes the rolling of her breasts engorged with milk as they pool sideways in her bodice while she lies draped against the padded armrests of the chair. The peculiarity of this arrangement affects him—the fact that all these other women are in the room, no matter how oblivious—and he feels an unexpected additional pang of desire; desire is misdirected and he has no conscious way of curbing it in this odd
moment
in particular.

The Duke responds by lifting up the lower folds of the nightgown that covers Nairis and pulling it up slowly and soft as a feather over his creature’s thighs. Nairis makes a small noise but does not wake up; she too is under the thrall of his sorcerous invisibility and non-presence.

Her thighs are smooth and warm—ah, they are scalding-hot with the sleep fires. He separates them wider, taking care to move ever-so-lightly, then places one palm against the inside of her thigh-flesh. Somewhere higher up, that deep cleft of her female privates remains concealed by the coverlet and the gown which is bunched up just over that place.

He pauses, then with trembling fingers works the stays of his trousers in the front, the pouch that holds his genitals. Long seconds stream by and pull into infinite strings while his fingers catch on fabric, on loops, on idiot ties. Then, he is free. . . .

The trunk of his penis has grown thick and hot. He hears, feels, smells himself—the pungent vigorous meat is pulsing with his own heart’s clockwork, only now there is no illusion of ever-slowing machinery but instead a speeding up, a fierce, violent quickening.

Only a few steps away the younger maid moans in her chair, a high-pitched girlish timbre, followed by a light sigh.

The Duke feels the intruding sigh resound in his genitals with a wash of sensual urgency; the echo slides over him, it seems—if sound has a tangible physical mass, then this one is a caress of buttery smoothness, so that he feels a corresponding moan building in the back of his throat. He needs to release it, needs to make the sound himself, thick and low, a grunt. Instead, he parts his lips into a silent O.

And then he takes hold of himself down there, hand rubbing the nether side of his sack, then advancing onto the trunk with its subdermal prominent vein, the grotesque limb of ugly-beautiful, a tree-root, a gnarled thing that drives him to fierceness.

Nairis lies before him, heated with sleep, her white thighs displayed, while he abstains from touching her and instead closes his hand around his thick circumference—it is so thick, his fingers barely meet—and starts the violent pulling movement back and forth along the penis. Within moments, drops of an unfamiliar liquid begin to gather at the blunt tip.

Previously he does this only in dreams. His control for the greater part of his life is impeccable, and this is the first time he allows himself to be consumed by the choral rhythm of other living beings around him—consumed by the polyphony that is life.

He watches his female creature as he pants in a silent orgy of self-consumption, exhaling more harshly, louder, with each hand-stroke, while he nears
something
of which he is unsure but which he somehow knows profoundly from the pleasure-haze of his erotic dreams.

The buxom maid gives a loud rasping snore, a coarse shocking scrape of sound which acts upon him in an unexpected way to elicit a response. And in that moment he groans and lets go, blanks out, while his penis becomes a shooting cannon beyond his control.

Buttermilk—or a liquid that he initially perceives as buttermilk, although he knows it is his semen—blasts out of him in white and thick pressure-bursts, and it strikes the bedding and the coverlet, and splatters upon the white thighs of Nairis.

His living canvas is stained, despoiled (with something else of his that is vigorous and alive, the irony is undeniable), while he makes one long final groan of release, and sinks onto his knees on the edge of the bed. He is broken, a marionette with strings that have lost all tension, sprawling in a tangled pile of wood pieces. The illusion of living movement is gone. And he is shuddering with a chill after-effect of an irrevocable fracture of control.

The sleepers remain miraculously unaware and nothing has changed, it seems. Only the candle takes that moment to sputter in the last of its tallow, and the golden light goes out. The chamber is consumed with darkness and suddenly the world is very cold.

V: Following A Nondescript Sunrise

D
awn is here, chill and crisp, and clouds coalesce in grey streaks of varying degrees of pallor over the castle. In the faint blooming of light the castle is but an arbitrary rock formation standing in silhouette against the transforming sky that holds in it a suggestion, a foreshadowing of the sun, while the cloud cover veils it, extending its cool respite in twilight.

Grey and silver is the light of intimacy. Such is the inviting sensation achieved at the rare moments when the world appears to have no color. There is something placid in the surface of a grey sea or the overhang of silver sky. When rain comes thick as a curtain, again, color is diffused and dissipated, and all that remains is the same as what’s on the inside of one’s eyelids.

This particular dawn is quite the epitome; its intimate huelessness calls all unto itself, into its pallid grey places, to come and be soothed in the infancy of light. . . .

Duke Rossian of Violet sleeps right through it. Unlike his usual self he sleeps past the faint earliest glimmer in the east as can be seen from the windows of the easternmost tower where he frequently stands waiting for the spectacle. He sleeps through the luminous ghost-sky and the deepening of incandescence as it takes the edges of heaven along the horizon, and night begins to melt away.

The Duke comes awake eventually and it is now a sun-lit morning. For a moment he is an innocent, his mind emerged from the
elsewhere
of sleep equal to the consciousness of a newborn.

And then he remembers. Remembers another such child mind. And the memory and all else that goes with it wrenches him with a pang of terror followed by a wave of sickness. He tries to think what is the meaning of abomination. And somehow, there is no longer an answer. Edges are blurred and old familiar definitions do not seem to fit but overlap, while descriptions collapse into senselessness of random detail.

The mind itself is out of focus. Kaleidoscopic patterns are now random shattered glass; ideas fall together in sham bits of sparkle treasure from a magpie’s nest.

The Duke rises from his bed and examines his body. As he stands to void himself, holding the chamberpot in one hand and himself in the other, he watches the arc of his urine and thinks of what else comes out with a more rhythmic violence. His body is unblemished and healthy, and he is bursting with the life force.

Does he not prove it sufficiently, last night? If not, then what exactly does he prove? What has been done?

Mind continues to spin, a child’s top that is incapable of stopping.

In addition to all the other clamor in his mind he also knows that now he will be expected to test the boundary of his castle. And imagining the ordeal ahead of him, he tarries, while a gnawing sickly fear commences working at his insides.

Whatever has been done, the world is changed in a plurality—his world. For when change comes, it comes on its own terms, and with a retinue.

At some point Harmion knocks politely on the bedchamber door, reminding His Grace not only of a cold breakfast, but of a certain annoyance called the Duchess of White waiting for him. No mention is made of Nairis, and indeed at the thought of
her
whatever is burrowing in his gut takes a deeper wrenching bite.

The Duke of Violet mutters as he quickly dresses himself without assistance, his actions punctuated by stabbing thoughts.
She is, she lives, I gave her life. . . .