The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter (3 page)

Given a pallet to sleep on and a rough shift to wear, the kholic was (much to her surprise) more or less left alone. In fact, given menial tasks, like any other servant, she was soundly shunned and ignored. Only a few times over her first few days in the palace did the chatelaine manage to come by, to engage in small talk, or to half-heartedly admire the girl as she worked, but the chatelaine’s moods had begun to swing again, as they often did, and she ended up spending most of the girl’s initial fortnight in Jesthe nowhere near as enthusiastic as she had initially been, locked instead in her bedchambers with bottles of spiritus and a procession of nameless bedfellows, all in hopes of chasing away internal darkness, which inevitably slunk back, over and over, just as the chatelaine began to hope it might never return again.

The monster’s outbursts contained nuggets of truth. They always did, if one was patient enough to sift. Twelve gods had indeed descended. The sky became obscured by clouds that never again parted. Now, in Nowy Solum, empty temples disintegrated.

And time—for people, anyhow—was a relentless river. Every citizen—except for the youngest of children, and those of infirm minds—knew this for a fact.

The monster snored. Parthenogenesis took its toll. Her sides rose and fell, rose and fell, in almost peaceful rhythm. Without a doubt, something growing inside that infamous womb kicked.

Had there been lies in the speech too, or speculation? Had words been said only for the sake of their sounds?

Most likely.

Moments slipped away, to become the past, joining millions of others mingling in the fading torrent. Only subjective memories would live on, and, even then, briefly, flickering in the minds of just a few.

Like the fecund had implied.

Elements of decay, elements of entropy. Now that the era of gods was over, taking with it the promise of eternal salvation, contaminants of impermanence and mortality had once again been integrated into each event, into each moment, into each human life. Thankfully, though, small fragments of beauty remained, entangled with the abominations. Laughter and music were inseparable from pain and injustice.

Grumbling, the fecund stretched again in her sleep, and let out a bubbling fart.

Night fell on half the world and day was about to begin in Nowy Solum. But there were in-between places even the fecund could never understand. Nether regions haunted flickering gaps between sickness and health, between gods and godlessness, between life and time and the inevitability of death. Nether regions straddled night and day.

The snoozing monster would never hear of this, even if she were awake; she would dismiss these claims forthright. Because, she would tell you, she knows everything. Then she would demand food. Or make lascivious comments. Or, in the particularly garrulous mood she had been in of late, lecture endlessly.

The fecund mumbled in her sleep. One clawed hand twitched.

Best tiptoe away.

Abandoned, the twin brother was, like the chatelaine, plagued by dark thoughts. Being a kholic, though, this was the expected state. All those like him, tattooed at birth, veins thick with treacle, were thus inflicted, to greater or lesser degrees—especially those whose hearts laboured to pump the thickest, blackest of melancholy. At this boy’s birth trial, no fluids at all had leaked from the cut made by the palatinate physicker; the officer had squeezed the tiny arm, and squeezed it again, to finally reveal the slightest ooze of the pitch black humour that gave the baby life and condemned him, forever, to the ostracon, with the others of his temperament.

Naturally, the twin sister was also marked and removed, since they had shared a womb.

Their weeping mother was dismissed, empty handed, from Bedenham House.

Without his sister for the first time, the boy had slipped into an uglier and more self-destructive phase than usual. Seeing his twin led away by the chatelaine and her servants, without so much as a protest, or even a backward glance, had caused him, as the fecund would say in her vernacular, to
snap
. He howled, and he fumed, and he consumed vast quantities of ale and the hallucinogenic drug cultured from certain mould on stale bread, known in the streets of Nowy Solum as
bud
. He wanted to die. He got into fights with other kholics, wheeling through rooms and narrow halls of the ostracon, staggering alleys and streets. He blacked out entire afternoons. He woke up sick and vomited copiously in gutters. He stopped working altogether, letting garbage and shit and dead animals pile up around him while he glared at the silhouette of Jesthe, rising crookedly above the cluttered slums.

Because he was tattooed, his behaviour was tolerated, or rather, it was generally ignored. Perhaps even unnoticed, some would say. Kholics were known to be a morose bunch, prone to such outbursts. As long as the boy did not come into direct contact with a red-blooded hemo, who then complained to the palatinate, he could act pretty much any damn way he pleased, even dying on the streets with a mouth full of froth, for all anyone official cared.

But the boy did come into contact with a hemo. During this ranting and drugged-out stumbling around, cursing the clouds, railing against his lot, a beautiful and untagged girl watched from a market stall, on Tornblanket Street—which passed behind the ostracon. She circled closer, drawn to the suffering and low status of the kholic boy. To be succinct, this girl craved challenges and drama, and she was the sort who, like the chatelaine herself, had a predisposition for flawed lovers and doomed relationships. Nowy Solum was large enough, and decadent enough, to have many types. Of course, it helped that the boy (and his sister, who, at that point, felt rather surprisingly lonely in the palace) were also beautiful to behold—at least for those who took the time, or had the inclination or ability, to behold the tattooed outcasts of the city.

Bounding rabbit-like, braver children played in warrens that tunnelled into the rear of the palace, dashing out and then daring each other to go back in, farther and farther. One or two passages, children claimed—red-faced and breathless—led right into ramshackle rooms and cavernous chambers and larders stocked with dried foods. A few kids, mostly friends of friends, even returned with entire loaves of bread, or with actual stockings, but these treasures seemed few and far between, and the sources of the goods remained, predominantly, rumour.

Most tunnels ended at solid rock.

During the castellan’s reign, before he retreated up the towers, into the dungeon, and handed Nowy Solum over to his daughter, children told each other that if they were caught inside Jesthe, they would be strapped to an operating table and vivisected, to be used in experiments. But when the chatelaine took over, well, stories changed, became more vague. There seemed nobody left in the palace to catch them, and what did the woman do in there, anyhow? People said she banned the palatinate from the inner halls and rooms of Jesthe just so they couldn’t watch over her at night, and judge her. Many visitors, for certain, emerged looking a little worse for wear, into the cloudy dawn.

And there was talk, as always, of a monster living in a cell under the palace, the
fecund
, and of a strange menagerie in the chatelaine’s bedchamber, beasts that she treated as if they were her own offspring, but no stories were passed down as clear and visceral as the tales of amputations and tortures done in the father’s time, and from the even more barbaric times before that. Just what the chatelaine might get up to inside the palace was elusive for the children, beyond the grasp of young and healthy conceptions. They scared each other with stories about what could happen if they got caught, but, in the end, imagination failed them. This failure, of course, and the dim chances of being chased, diminished the thrill of trespassing.

That, and growing older.

Maybe kids still went into the narrow passageways, with exhilaration in their hearts and throats. Who knew?

Not the red-blooded girl, telling these stories to her kholic lover one afternoon as they lay on her thin mattress of straw while, outside, rain drummed on the packed dirt of Hanover Street. The boy had brought up the palace again, as he often did in their brief relationship, and he muttered about how his sister had been brought inside, and how much he hated the chatelaine for plucking his twin from the streets, as if she were a flower, a curiosity to be put in a vase and then discarded when she’d gone yellow and withered.

Lying there, listening now to the beautiful girl talk about her childhood—a red-blooded kid, playing in the warrens of Jesthe, like only red-blooded kids could—the kholic stared up at a moist stain on the ceiling. He chewed at his nails. He could get used to ticking as soft as this. One hand was behind his head. The beautiful girl held his cock, slowly making it hard again. He licked his lips, thinking about mattresses and monsters, thinking about experiments in dungeon towers.

He pictured the warrens, burrowed right into the foundation of the palace, and the nearly deserted hallways within.

He considered the chatelaine’s beloved pets.

As the hemo went down on him, and took his cock into her hot mouth, the kholic had begun to form a plan, to try get his sister back, and to teach the chatelaine a lesson.

Grey rocks, grey clouds. Cold, grey rain. Father had gone inside, snoring loudly. No lizards here, in the rain. Very few birds. With an open mouth, head back, rain felt funny on his tongue.

In the distance, lightning burst.

His name was path. And he watched, squinting through the rain, listening for thunder, trying to remember what his father had said about counting the seconds. He smiled; path liked storms.

But as the rain intensified, and winds picked up, the smile faded. Storms were good when he was
inside
, not deposited here, in the garden. He had forgotten this distinction. His father had been drinking spiritus all morning and would not wake up, no matter how close the lightning came, or how loud the storm got, or if path started to scream at the top of his lungs.

Mud started to splash up the sling, as far as path’s torso. Anxious, he wriggled his stumps, croaking, “Da? Daaa?”