The Throne of Bones (26 page)

I turned my thoughts deliberately, as I seldom did, to Zara, whom I maintained in a cozy suite at the Plume and Parchment. She was a handsome woman with a keen intelligence and an exuberant sense of humor, who would do anything I wished and pretend to enjoy it. Some thought her eccentric for affecting the speech and manners of an earlier age, but I have been accused of the same quirk. She liked me well enough for myself and even boasted of me, her patron who wrote books.

Then why had Zephreinia’s praise been so important, why did I crave her further approval, why did I want to look into her eyes when I could direct my chairmen to the tavern and gaze into Zara’s, which were equally bright and equally blue? I didn’t know, I would never know, I would go to the grave with some such futile question on my quivering lips and an equally futile tingle in my desiccated loins.

Sekris Square had been so renamed for one of the Lord Admiral’s victories, but most Crotalorners thought the Lord Admiral was a homicidal halfwit and persisted in calling it Peartree Square. Because Zephreinia had used the new name, and because each word she had spoken was a delight I yearned to recapture, I directed the chairmen to Sekris Square. They consequently assumed I was a tourist and tried to charge me twice the usual fare when I alighted. This led to hard words.

“Dr. Porfat, what are you doing?” Zephreinia cried, running halfway down her stairs as words became blows. She diverted my attention fully, permitting one of the cowards to send me sprawling. “Zephryn, come quickly, help him!”

“I need no help, lady!” I called. Invigorated by her presence, I kicked one of them off his feet and regained my own. The other tried to attack me from behind, but I fell back to pin him against the fallen chair with my not inconsiderable bulk.

“No, please! Help me! Please, Sir, I’m sorry, don’t crush me!” the chairman sobbed.

“Which one shall I help?” a young man asked Zephreinia. He spoke through his nose in the annoying way of Omphiliot, and I took a dislike to him even before he said: “The poor lout beneath the whale is getting the worst of it. Do you fancy him?” The first of the thieves, seeing the newcomer’s naked sword, ran off, pausing to fling oaths and cobblestones. I kicked the other on his way.

As Zephreinia fretted and exclaimed over me and I dusted myself off, I covertly studied the young man with the sword. The shadows under his eyes and the slack-lipped sneer that seemed his habitual expression suggested unhealthy habits, as did his boneless, can’t-be-bothered-to-stand-up slouch against the railing of the areaway. Worst of all, for I assumed he was Zephreinia’s lover, he was more handsome than I had ever been. It consoled me slightly that his bones would pay for his idle posing, and that he would be a twisted wreck by the time he was my age, if drink or his loose tongue failed to kill him first.

“Doctor, this is my brother, Zephryn Phrein,” Zephreinia said, and no words she had yet spoken gave me such unalloyed joy. They dote upon the
Z
-sound in the former kingdom of the Zaxoin, and I had not realized that the names of this brother and sister made the kind of match that parents of a whimsical bent find irresistible. I embraced and pummeled the young man as I gripped his hand. In my elation it took me a moment to grasp that he detested this.

We went in to a lunch where the sister flirted, the brother sulked and I beamed on both of them, although I regretted that Zephreinia had traded her bold fashion of the evening for modest daytime dress. Last year only a Frothiran or a faddist would have seated a naked guest at the dinner table, and now I met them at the palace of Prince Fandiel. That the world was going to hell, I reflected, might not be an unrelieved disaster.

Closer study suggested that Zephryn was her younger brother, perhaps no more than twenty, although he had seemed at first an older man. The immoderate quantity of wine he drank while cutting his food in bits and pushing it around his plate suggested one cause of his deterioration, but I thought there must have been others.

“Well,” I said when food and conversation grew thin, “you wanted to consult me, lady? If we might retire to—”

“Doctor, not I! I thought I made that clear. It’s my brother I want you to look at.”

I wish I could have seen my face at that moment, for I felt it collapse. Actors wishing to portray a character whose fondest hopes have been dashed might have studied it with profit.

“Look
at?”
her brother echoed with his intolerable sneer. “He’s been looking at me all through the meal, when he could spare a moment from thrusting his great red turnip of a nose down your bodice and peeking at your tits, dear sister.”

“Sir!” I rejected the many words that might have offended Zephreinia and said only, “You try me!”

“Zephryn, please, you know you haven’t been able to sleep for a week—”

“It’s not that I can’t sleep, I don’t choose to sleep,” he whined as he sprang to his feet and kicked his chair away. “And whatever I do, what have you or this prosing old jackass got to do with it?”

I gathered up my bag and prepared to retire, the sole course I could take that would not be irreversible, but Zephreinia clung to my arm. No matter how deceitfully she had used it on me, her charm still worked.

“Please, Dr. Porfat—”

“Porfat?” Her brother seemed astounded, as if in his arrogance or drunken confusion he had not heard my name before. In a tone that flew as far beyond respect as his earlier one fell short of it, and no more endearing, he said, “The famous ghoulologist?”

“I despise that name even more than your manners, Sir. Never speak it to me again.”

He laughed.
“Porfat?
I completely agree. I might have enjoyed hearing what you have to say about ghouls, Doctor, if only as a relief from all the inanities you’ve blithered. Rather than suffer any more of your sententious nattering, I’ll leave you to wallow in this bitch-infested hellhole and grub for my sister’s twat under the table until chance takes pity on your failing memory and guides your fat fingers.”

I might have struck him at last, but his parting shot so shamed me that he got away. It was true that I had patted Zephreinia’s thigh from time to time in making a point, and I had taken no small pleasure from this. I must have been crude and obvious indeed.

“Forgive me,” I said, disengaging my arm. “I’ve behaved inexcusably.”

“You? Oh, Doctor, no! My brother has, certainly, but please don’t abandon him. Sometimes his ways are abrasive, but he doesn’t mean to offend.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” I said, “and he doesn’t want me to know. There are physicians who can catch an elusive patient, they make it their business to know such tricks, but I don’t. As I told you, my work is with books and bones.”

“And with ghouls,” she said. “Doctor, he prowls the dark, he haunts strange places, he has odd friends. Must I recite all the symptoms from your own book?”

I could not deny this. His sardonic manner and his lack of appetite were also consistent, though hardly conclusive. During my slow convalescence I had noted similar peculiarities in my own habits, and I was surely no ghoul. But if she had wanted to seize my interest, she might have done so more surely by telling me these things than by misleading me with her wiles. I wanted nothing further to do with either of them, and I told her so.

“At least give me something, Doctor, something to make him sleep. He’s killing himself.”

And good riddance, I thought, but I gave her a small bottle of the laudanum I had prepared to treat my own illness and advised her to consult Dr. Beliphrast. I tried, too, to give her some hope: “If he were afflicted with ghoulism, he wouldn’t be running out into the daylight so eagerly at this stage.”

“I know. But you wrote that nothing about the disease is certain.” She smiled wanly. “I really did read your book.”

Next day it rained, and I seized the excuse to relapse into my new habit of sulking at home. I could see that Feshard, as he dusted around me, itched to comment on the book I had chosen to idly peruse, my own
Etiology of Ghoulism,
but he sensibly restrained himself. Reading my work had soured my temper. As I remembered the book, my brilliance should have curled and ignited the pages as I turned them. It did not.

Experience had refuted my fatuous assertion that a graveyard miasma caused the disease. I had crawled through the tunnels of the ghouls; to my everlasting disgust, I had been clawed by one. If it were infectious, I would now be breakfasting on something quite different from pears and cheese and Fandragoran wine.

I was not ready to abandon the work of a lifetime and join the fools who ascribed the condition to diabolism. I now inclined to the theory that it was hereditary. Lady Glypht, a far greater authority than I had ever been, had claimed that she ensured her son’s ghoulism by the incestuous concentration of her degenerate bloodline. Without intending to, I began making notes in the margins for a revised edition. The notes sprawled onto the backs of letters, to crumpled papers from the pockets of my robe, to blank pages of any other books that came to hand. When I called for a second bottle of wine, I was so absorbed that I neglected to study Feshard’s manner for signs that he disapproved of the request.

“I said, a lady to see you, Sir.”

“Oh. Well. Send her in.”

I hardly noticed this exchange. If I had given it any thought, I would have supposed my caller to be Nyssa. Zara was the only other woman who visited me, but not unless I sent for her. It gradually penetrated my preoccupation that my caller sat opposite me without saying a word; neither my sister nor my mistress had ever so much as attempted that feat. I looked up to find myself staring at Zephreinia Sleith.

“No, don’t stop! It’s a thrill to watch a man of genius at work.

It was like Mopsard’s tale about the woman who could fly: when someone told her she flew, she fell. The next time I tried to concentrate on my work, I would think of Zephreinia and her comment. I would be aware of myself as she had seen me. I might never be able to concentrate again, thanks to her. I kept such churlish thoughts to myself as I tried to put my notes in order.

She must have walked here. Her hair was darkened by the rain and clung to her head in a way that bared the structure of her face and clarified the crystal of her eyes. I had thought her pretty; she was in fact unbearably beautiful.

Instead of trying to express this, more like a hollow inside my chest than a thought, I said, “You’re wet.” Then I called, “Feshard! Lay a fire.”

“You have one,” Zephreinia said.

“Oh. Yes.”

I stood, shedding loose notes and even a few books that had rested unnoticed in my lap. I wanted to embrace her; I wanted to pick up the fallen books. Doing neither, I struggled to keep my confused hands from flapping aimlessly.

I hesitate to set down the chief cause of my confusion, for Filloweela is a Goddess for the young. Until yesterday, I had not seen the inside of her temple for at least twenty years. But after leaving Zephreinia’s house, I was compelled to go there—by nostalgia, perhaps, by bitterness, by the Goddess herself, who knows? I bought a white dove and asked the priestess to sacrifice it for my intention. Exactly what that intention was, I had not stated clearly even to myself, but my prayer had obviously been answered: and not in the quirky way of a god, but with the prompt obedience of an un-Feshard-like servant.

But if I raised her from her chair and kissed her as if she were a gift from the Goddess, and her visit were only a banal coincidence, Zephreinia might take offense; if I failed to carry her to my bed soon and gratefully, the Goddess might take offense. So I dithered.

“You have one, Sir,” said Feshard, who had taken so long to get here that I forgot why I had called him. “A fire, Sir.”

“Of course I have a fire, moron! Get out my sight, my hearing and my home until tomorrow! Go and visit those nieces you’re forever rattling on about.” I observed my guest’s startlement and hastened to pat her hand. “Don’t mind that, it’s the only way to talk to that impossible man.”

“Do you give him holidays that way so you won’t be burdened with his gratitude?”

I disliked hearing my motives analyzed, even by her, so I said, “How is your brother?”

I had picked the worst alternative subject. She started to speak, then her lip quivered and her eyes brimmed. I raised her to her feet and held her. This was not quite as I had dreamed it, but it would do. She clung so totally, so trustingly that I think she would have fallen if I had let her go.

“How can I speak of it?” she sobbed. “You won’t help him.”

I wished she would use some of her analytical skill to explain how she could make me writhe on my back and wag my tail. I heard myself saying, “I’ll help him. What can I do?”

She regained the strength to stand, to pull away, and then she sat, leaving me warmed with the imprint of her body. I resumed my seat, too, arranging my robe to conceal my state of excitement, though of course she had felt it. I tried hard to look wise. I doubt I succeeded.

“Doctor, my brother is no longer a boy, but he wishes he were.”

“We all do,” I said, sounding unintentionally flippant.

She smiled, her eyes lowered. “I see you don’t follow me. It’s difficult. As a boy he was beautiful, you have no idea, and happy. He rages against becoming a man, as you ... so clearly ... are. When he was a boy, he joined with others in exploring the new possibilities of his body, the wonders of the flesh, as I suppose all boys do. He yearns always to turn time backward and return to those golden moments. But he has the body of a man, you see, while his playmates are still boys. Where we come from, few circumstances arouse so much antipathy.”

I was still grinning absurdly over her delightful “clearly” and secretly praising the name of the Goddess when her meaning pierced my euphoria. I said without pausing to think, “You mean to say, in addition to being a boor and a drunkard, the swine is a pederast?”

She recoiled as from a blow. “You’re cruel! Yes, yes, he is, but I had hoped for some pity from a man who can spare it even for
ghouls!”