Alium, page 17
One bright little eye opened slowly, a shiny button in Muewa’s plush face, and straight away a big smile parted like a seam beneath it. “Awake at last my dear,” she said, beaming up. “The dews of the wood draw even the most lucid minds into rapturous slumber.”
Sylna grinned in return, stooping and crawling to come sit in the hall of saplings. “Usually I am unhappy to sleep so late, and end up in a sorry hurry; but today when I woke it was as though haste was a very silly thing; I enjoyed my waking rituals more than ever.” Her contentment wavered now, looking at the Piv to whom she had expressed such urgency the day before. “In my complacency I have meditated too long in the forest.”
Muewa’s laugh twittered like the lilting voices of the pucks, and even some of those little red birds peeped their heads from the foliage to see what the fuss was all about. “Already you brush against the great truths of the universe, Sylna. Nubes chose you well. Yet ‘too long’ is a strange notion for the seeker of peace. Why, when there is not enough time in the day to meditate, I often drop everything I’m doing and spend a whole week doing solely that—sitting and being.” She nodded at the birds as if to assure them that all was well, and they disappeared one by one into the bushes whence they came. “However, I believe in this case we must work quickly. We’ve both our reasons.” She turned back with large green eyes, tranquil as they were serious.
Sylna bowed humbly, removing her hat. “I am very sorry Muewa. I will make it up to you.”
“There is no need. It really can’t be helped among these old trees…” Muewa trailed off gazing up into the canopy. “Why, Nubes slept three days when he first came to me. And though he might not seem it, that wizard is quite a hasty fellow, always going from one thing to another, never satisfied…” She hummed a busy little melody. “Now, I have accomplished much good thinking while you were away. Firstly how about some lunch, or should I say breakfast?”
A troop of Piv came out from the high grass parting to admit their little cherubic faces, bearing lightly wrapped morsels, and leafy cones filled with crystal water. Sylna was offered three different mushrooms, each tasting nothing like the others. The earthy food brought sudden vitality even in the smallest nibbles.
Sylna and Muewa laughed all through their meal discussing Nubes’ obsession with such mushrooms; each had stories quite new to the other’s ear. The Piv expounded upon the wizard’s fear of Oerbanuem, which she found quite ironic, especially now that his young pupil had faced the fungal god and suffered, perhaps, the most terrifying vision yet afforded to mortal minds. Sylna though deflected this feat, though much to the hysterics of Muewa, with tales of Nubes’ psychonautical adventures, for many were the mornings when he would wander into the tower dishevelled with sleeplessness, covered in fungal crumbs, bug-eyed with pupils like pots, and sit stroking a live turtle in his lap until again the sun had set and risen.
When all was eaten and drunk, and when the last laugh was had, such that they sat simply admiring and missing old Nubes, Muewa led the witch out of the hall and into the dense trees, now especially enormous compared to the saplings which had housed them. Sylna walked briskly while the Piv worked her fourfold wings, though it was impossible to see any one of them, so quickly they moved in an emerald continuum. For a long while they wove around wet trunks, brushed through waist-high families of shrub and fern, scrambled within gullies of mossy stone. Deep, cool leaf-caves and tunnels of shadow passed over their heads, where only the sound of dripping dew was heard. Coming out of these chill, dark places they crossed broad, sunny clearings latticed with creekwater, or navigated winding mazes of tree and toadstool many whose species were novel to Sylna.
In one clearing the loamy turf sloped upwards into a steep hill. For half an hour they meandered up its high grass-sheened back, until, at the rounded top, they stood level with the highest, sunniest echelon of the forest. It was as if they summited a bald pate around which manifold trees like endless locks of hair tumbled and curled ever out. Far, far away she thought she even saw the roof of Nubes’ tower. And beyond it, behind the stretching surging treeline, there was Zenidow tall and noble, a silver axle if the sky and earth were great wheels. Girding its base were the white mountains—highest in the world—that like the jagged teeth of some godly jaw ensconced Pivwood on all sides.
Muewa lighted atop a smooth boulder and folded her wings elegantly. “This is as good a place as any for weather workers. But before we speak of storms,” she tittered warmly, “I should like to know absolutely every detail concerning your comprehension of what Novare call ‘magic,’ though through Nubes I believe you know it as ‘folding,’ or ‘sewing,’ or something or other.”
“Absolutely every detail?” The witch’s eyes widened into brown pools.
Muewa laughed. “The significant ones, yes.” Her wings snapped out and returned in a fey gesture. “We Piv are sensitive creatures. Tell your story as you know it should be told.”
Frowning, Sylna sat cross-legged beside the boulder, murmuring without inflection, “How shall I begin?” She looked out over the sea of embracing treetops, listening to the wind, feeling the sun on her shoulders and back. Removing her bow from its place she set it gently in the soft grass, leaving one hand to rest on its white wood. Muewa with perfect patience waited, so still and natural that it looked as though Sylna sat alone beside a strange flower growing from the rock.
“I suppose…” Sylna began, tilting her head towards this flower, the pointed tip of her hat flopping to that side. “Everything has its beginning in Ardua, my birthplace. My mother was Queen of the Golden Palace, highest and absolute ruler of the Holy City. Among her many ambitions was the wish that I one day wear her mantle. Though she spoke this command only once, my father carried on the sentiment as he was her limb. I was very little when first she shared that destiny. She watched me carve this bow, as the royal huntress had shown me to do, and spoke as from a high place, though nearer to me physically than ever she’d been.”
Sylna looked down at her ringed hand now tightly grasping the weapon. A dewdrop—assimilated from a blade of grass—glistened on its string. “When I finished, she took the bow and held it—naturally as I’d seen the huntress with her own—but returned it quickly, and turned her back. She said my work was fine, and to keep the bow with me as an emblem of my skill and strength, but never to use it. ‘Killing,’ she said, ‘is not your path.’” Sylna began to smile softly as she spoke, though her grip upon the white wood did not loosen.
*
“I should say, my inheritance was once compelling. Mother seemed so righteous. Power was in her step and glance, wisdom on her brow. She was tall and graceful, noble-cheeked, fire-eyed; blonde as the sun, her hair was never cut. When she walked she floated, and all things melted in the gold of her robes and jewellery. Though I scarcely spoke with her, the magnificent paintings and golden statues of her likeness throughout the castle inspired a special love for her glory. I imagined her a ruler gracious and understanding, and aspired to become like her—that idea of her—and earn the profound respect with which the people approached her court. Such unconditional surrender, I thought, could only come from a place of love.
“I would sit in her throne nights, the seat so large I could reach only one of the great gilt armrests. I’d pretend to oversee the great hall like I watched her do, placing an invisible crown atop my head, raising an invisible sceptre in my hand. Before me the people of Ardua would stand proudly for the splendour of the land and all the glories of our mines. Then there would be a great feast for all the Queendom, long bounteous tables filling the hall. This, for a long while, was how I imagined the people of Ardua: loving, gay, perfectly sustained yet dreaming sometimes of even greater wonders long promised them. Such was my own state, and so I projected it upon their distant faces. Yet every incipient ruler must one day observe her subjects.
“Our golden palace stood tall and sharp in the centre of a great garden, many miles across, forested with ancient, hardy trees that bore the frost wondrously. In many places thickly covered by their branches, the snow did not reach, and one could lay in the cold grass. Though I was permitted to wander quite far into this wood, and though I had explored its densest thickets, plumbed its every extremity, I could not dare, in those moments, looking up at the high black barrier, to disobey the only other direct commandment given me by Mother: ‘You will not leave the garden.’ But when I was thirteen, the time, it seemed, had come. Father wrapped me in furs and took me in his chariot to experience the Holy City.
“I passed at last through the golden gates onto a cobbled street, and the dizzying, onyx garden wall fell behind. The condition of the road quickly deteriorated. Trees withered and gave to decaying, black buildings decked in snow and lacquered with ice. These edifices were nothing like those which comprised the castle and its surrounding quarters, or even the stables of our beasts. They crumbled and listed one against the other. Jagged cracks storied their flanks, and paneless windows gaped like wounds. Leant feebly against the base of one dilapidated tower was a dirt-streaked man all alone, clothed only in tattered trousers, ribs upholding tight sallow skin, cheeks sunken into shadow, tongue lolling. I was stunned; here a state of being I had never beheld.
“He called up to us as we approached. ‘Help me, Blessed Ones. I am starving.’
“‘Can we not feed this man?’ I implored. ‘We have far more food at home than we’ll ever need.’
“Scoffing through his gold-ringed beard, Father scourged the team of capramons onward. ‘He has already chosen his path,’ he said. The beasts trundled more hastily, and the weary face of the beggar was lost in a slurry. ‘Your mother is too wise to exhume wretches from graves of their own digging. If we spoil this vagabond he will never earn his own way.’ Though I hadn’t the aplomb to speak against him in those days, as we rattled along without speaking I did not struggle to disagree with father. Such a state of being could not be voluntary. Begging seemed the ultimate act of humility to me, the absolute recognition of need. I saw the man in the road as one who cannot go on but for the grace of others. Even if he was a villain, how could we, the rulers and self-professed guardians of Ardua, ignore such open declarations?
“The empty and desolate streets near the garden were replaced with more sturdy black compounds as we went. Shadows came out of ice-hung alleyways. Anxieties steeped in the frigid air. Rank odours rolled along the rock. More beggars in various stages of grief and starvation sat weakly or trudged along with no particular aim, pausing to gaze empty-eyed at some cracked wall, an overturned, rotting cart, the raw sky. Now there appeared more livable houses and many-storied stone buildings. Other citizens of the like I’d seen in Mother’s hall—though clothed in nothing so fine as then—peeped their ruddy faces from stony apertures and disappeared shortly.
“Those few who came out from the crumbling manors—along the more affluent streets we achieved by noon—were most of all disgusted by the ubiquitous poor, spitting upon them and tossing rinds or bones before their groveling shapes. We passed only one House of Faith that afternoon. It was a beautiful, well-maintained, and clearly royal citadel, dwarfing both physically and aesthetically all around it with its magnificent, polished glory. High was its slender, black steeple, and the rich sloping roof shingled with golden slabs melted like cataracts of radiant godly tears upon towering walls of smooth stone veined with the finest carvings and murals of Mother I’d yet seen. As we drew near, a priestess came out onto the step; her raiment was nearly fine as my own, her countenance smug as Father’s.
“These differences in caste already too much for my naive heart, I realized as we passed that a kind of equality did in fact exist in the Holy City; the rich and poor, young and old—even the priestess who seemed so above them all—called out to Father with desperate praises, all of them stooping low and crooning in unctuous tones. Will Your Holiness be needing a suit of armour? Might the Divine Daughter be interested in a bouquet of mountain flowers? When will the God-Queen conduct the Ritual and absolve us? Father barely noticed them, though he held his chin high and there was dominion in his eyes. I could clearly see that he thought himself strong and resplendent before his daughter. He wished for me to envy him, to covet our blood, to crave power.
“But when I returned home to my enormous, silk-canopied bed with its satiny, touching blankets, comfort eluded me. The revolting softness of everything, the sick gold of my spacious and fragrant chamber dredged up flavours of bile, when far off in the streets there vied but varying degrees of hateful squalor. I cast off the repugnant sheets and fell shaking out of bed as from the dangerously plush tongue of some gruesomely patient ambush predator, pressing my shoulder and cheekbone against the hard polished floor, grateful for its resistance. Rolling onto my back and stiffly lying there I thought only of that beggar somewhere in the cold doing the same. The luxuries of my life rose up in nightmare shadow from the peripheral dark bulk of bed, and hung over me in a horrible moving tableau; fine foods piled in gross mounds upon tables stained with wasted wines; relentlessly warm firesides beside grand couches spilling viscera of swollen pillows; rouged royals drooling sophisms of faultless praise with too-tender fingers wandering across their fat bellies; mindless automaton servants on mechanized tracks hidden in the interstices of flagstones, bowing rigidly, conceding with clockwork enthusiasm. A memory of Mother in court swelled as from behind it all, and took to itself the shadowed forms of sick excess as a great roiling mantle of black, showing now in her courtly countenance a manner not of love and acceptance, but of absolute control.
“The days and weeks that followed only fed my nightmares, for on those few occasions when I glimpsed Mother through the curtains of my box looking on the great hall from above, I saw only hate and wrath in her. I realized that her special smiles had moved my naive daughter’s love before only by their rarity, not their splendour, for I saw them now thin and contrived as they truly were, the impression of a painted canvas mask pulled tight against a pale dead skull out-glared by golden hair and crown. Yet, sickening as she’d become, it was Father first and last that spurred my ultimate flight from the palace, for he was less abstract, and more often seen. Little sleuthing showed he was a callous brute, and treated our servants, when he thought I could not see, with terrible rage.
“One night I stayed up later than I was taken to even in those days of sneaking and watching. He was drunk and red-faced, carrying Mother’s sceptre as if it were his own. At his blunt command the servants were whipped in front of dishes they’d dropped, forced to drive their hands into the slivers of glass. The sound of it was odious—thick snakes of leather sliding dead from naked backs. All of this wailing and gnashing and tearing of flesh before the great hearth and its crackling, friendly flames, blood splattering the ornate carpet where I had sat so many times looking up in reverence at the golden bust of my mother licked with light.
“When I could no longer bear it, I fled to my room, grabbed what things appeared significant, and tripped out into the freezing garden muffling my sobbing as best I could. In the lamp-touched dark I tore my clothes and muddied my face and body and cut off my hair with an arrowhead. I hid my bow in a secret place among the trees which I alone would know, and covered myself there in a fallen bough. I slept in liminal space, still cloistered by the royal grounds, yet repulsed by the leering gold of the palace. In the morning a thick slurry masked my hike through the garden, and soon—by paths only I knew to travel—I came to the grand highway leading out into Ardua.
“Crouching in the cold shadows of a snow-clumped bough, I waited for a cart to approach the golden gates. At last such a vehicle came from the direction of the palace, and I slunk in its shadow as the way was opened. So tattered and spectral was my passage that the guards seemed not to notice. When I stepped under the gilt archway dividing the royal grounds from the city, I half expected to see the very beggar who had begun my transformation, but no soul was about. Going to the tower where he’d lain, I called softly into the crypt-like darkness of the alley nearest, and placed at the side of the road a small sack containing all of the gold ever I’d been given. Then I walked until my feet could no longer sustain me.
I passed the squalid houses of the lay, wandered the crumbling structures of commerce, avoided the always patrolling, black-caped Holy Knights like shades in gold plate armour, gazed up at the eldritch cathedrals, and dodged through their constant streams of haggard worshippers. I bumped shoulders with faceless shrouded others on their dreary ways through crowded spaces. Into candle-lit barns and ale-rank taverns I stumbled to be quickly sent away. At dusk I collapsed in an inky alleyway and slept like a stone; at dawn I sat out on the road and begged for food. When finally I had earned something to eat—that first day it was a mouldering husk of bread—I took again to my blistered feet, wanting to know everything I could about the real Ardua.
“As the months passed, I grew hard and tough, and my needs narrowed. Scraps of food made hearty sustenance. Water could be soaked up from the sides of streets and strained through my rags. I came to know instinctively the concentric, ringed layout of the city, its network of crannies, its special hideaways, and the most prosperous footholds for alms. I caught rumours on the breath of the people that the Princess had disappeared. But it was almost as if I needn’t cut off my hair or cover myself in dirt, for few eyes fell on those who begged, and those that did were clouded with disgust. But inequity of status was hardly so concerning as the other horrors of Ardua, which I could never have anticipated. Men and women starved to death in the streets, their shrunken corpses long ignored. Public executions were played out on gruesome stages before bloodthirsty crowds of all castes. Holy Knights slew commoners in the streets for fictitious blasphemies. Murder and theft ran like stinking veins through the frozen night, but lawmen cared only to accost those they might capture easily.
