Ventus by Karl Schroeder (leveled readers .txt) 📕

all. I don’t see those lovers, I cannot imagine the body laid in its tomb, those somber brown poems… they don’t speak to me. Death says nothing to me. I wish it did. I wish I could see what was going to happen to me, two, three days hence.

“Maut is himself death, but he can’t tell me.” She turned to look up into Ninete’s face. “He refuses to make it into a sign for me. That is what is so cruel.”

Her hand descended on a long golden hairpin. “Ninete, leave me! Work on my breakfast. See it is the best you have ever orchestrated. I have no need of you now.”

Sullen, Ninete left. Galas watched the emotions play across her shoulders, down her hips as she walked. Ninete read even this rejection like a scene in some traditional play, Galas saw. She had been sent away. And just when she was hearing the Queen’s heart speak.

Clutching the pin, she rose and went to the window. A stone bird watched from the carven boughs above her head.

“Where is this coming from,” she asked, staring at the tremble in her hand. What she had been saying just now made no sense to her. Her fear made no sense. She was angry with Maut, but did not know why. Her mind swung round and round the things he had talked about today. Behind his words she sensed a kind of…bewilderment in him, as though the engine of human speech remained incapable of rendering his experience to her, however precise the mind of the god that powered it.

Nothing explained her fury just now, however, not even the General’s campfires in the valley outside. In fact, they were rather beautiful…

She raised the long pin, and stabbed it into her left shoulder. The pain pulled her to her feet—she hissed and pulled the pin out, casting it furiously out the window.

There it was, the agony of terror and fury. It came boiling up from some hidden source inside her, taking form in blinding tears, as she curled around herself, holding her shoulder. She tried to escape the pain, turning, turning, but it moved with her. Slumping onto a stone root, she began to cry in great gusts. There it was: confusion, chaos. She wanted to run, run anywhere, and it was her body that was telling her this. Run, escape.

Her body was afraid, it was her body which was speaking in her anger at Maut, and in her fear of death. She had been neglecting it, living in her understanding and within that realm she had just accused Ninete of inhabiting: the realm of the story. How could she fail to see in her mind’s eye, the riders coming through the gate, the expressions on her people’s faces as they ran from her, to join the other side… It was the story of her death she had been telling herself, even as she tried to listen to Maut, tried to see his images, his life.

She could no more escape into his life than she could bring her death to herself here, now, by her worry.

She watched the line of blood move down her breast. The pain was intense. She revelled in it, for with it the phantasms of the day after tomorrow had fled, and Maut’s story was mere words again.

In tears, the wonder of despair and release welled from her with the blood. She remembered that once, she had loved her life.

Afraid that Ninete would hear her and come running, Galas put her head out the window. She let herself cry out, once, then hung her head.

“Your highness?”

The voice came from below. She blinked away tears, and looked down the battlement fifteen feet below. A man stood there, his form outlined in the silver, rose and black of predawn light. It was Maut.

She cleared her throat. “Are you sleepless too?” Her words sounded unsteady, frightening to herself.

“Yes.” He seemed cool as the night air, as always. “I was helping in the infirmary.”

“Really?” Galas wiped at her eyes. “How are my men?”

“Holding up bravely.”

“And you?”

He didn’t answer, but turned to look out over the courtyards of the palace.

“Maut,” she said on impulse, “join me in my chamber.”

His silhouette nodded. He vanished from sight like a ghost, and she pulled herself inside, wincing.

First, she must bandage herself. Galas tore a piece of embroidered linen and wrapped her wound clumsily. Then she selected a high-necked black gown and wove herself into it. Without a maid to help, she couldn’t do up the back. So she sat back on the divan, feeling the cool velvet against her back. The sensation set her skin tingling.

She gnawed her thumbnail, a habit her mother had never cured her of, and waited.

Presently there came a polite tap on the door. “Enter,” she said.

Maut’s hair was disheveled, and faint lines were etched around his eyes and between his brows. He had discarded his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his white blouse. He nodded to her like an intimate, and sat on the chair near her bed. She glimpsed Ninete peeking around the edge of the door, and waved her off impatiently. The door slid closed.

Neither spoke for a while. Outside, she heard the first voicing of a morning bird.

“Will you join me for breakfast?” she said at last.

“I would be honored.”

“No, Maut. Don’t say that. Will you?”

He smiled wanly. “I would like to, yes.”

“Good.” She gestured impatiently. “I have no more time for ceremony.”

Maut drew up one knee and clasped his hands around it, like a boy. He could only look more at home, she thought, if he sat sideways in the chair.

He cocked his head and looked at her appraisingly. “Ceremony has never suited you, has it?”

She laughed shortly. “No. It’s only familiarity that gets me through it. The words come automatically. Even if they’re so often like ashes in my mouth.”

“I find it hard to believe that this alone is the root of your passion. Because your passion radiates from some deep source. It catches up everyone around you. That’s why they follow you, you know. Not because you’re queen.”

“Ah.” This was a compliment she had never heard before. “I’m sure you know my story. Am I not the scandal of the kingdom?”

He shrugged. “I’ve heard things. They were obvious distortions. I came to you because I wanted to hear the story from the source.”

“Why?”

He considered, staring out at the amber sky. “I have been reading the books in your library. They all point to something… a mystery. I mean a mystery in the religious sense, almost. A meaning. When I came here I thought I was after facts, but now I see I’m after more than that. I want answers.”

“You? The man whose very mind is an impregnable fortress of history?” She laughed. “You astonish me.”

Serious, he said, “In the bits and pieces of your story that I’ve heard, I catch echoes of that mystery. I believe you know more than you realize. You have wisdom you have hidden from yourself.”

“And can you show me this wisdom?” Her hands trembled, as they had in the garden when his messenger fluttered down to land on her knee.

“I don’t know.”

“You toy with me!” She had leaned forward in anger, and felt the folds of her dress fall apart at her back. Galas sat back again quickly.

“No.”

“And what will you give me in return for my story? I think I no longer wish to hear your own tale.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Something like a smile danced around his lips. Galas found her heart racing at his examination, and her eyes traced the muscles in his arms, the set of his shoulders.

Then he did smile, rather impishly. “I should be very much surprised if you do not have the answer to that question by noon,” was all he said.

“Well.”

Maut leaned forward, the weariness returned to his eyes. “Tell me your story,” he said.

Galas closed her eyes. In her life, only one other had asked her for this—not the story, but her story. Grief choked her momentarily.

“All right. I shall try to tell it as a tale—as I’ve often wanted to. I… I pictured myself sometimes, setting my child on my knee and telling it. There will be no child. But here is the story.”

20

First, you must understand that I was considered mad as a child, even as I am today. The reasons were not the same, however—in my childhood it was my sense of justice which went against me. I treated peasants and servants with the same respect as kings and princes, and this evoked great ire in my mother, with whom I warred constantly. She strove to impress upon me the war between classes and the divine rightness of this war. It was not that I sided with the lesser people against my own—which however reprehensible would mave made sense to her—it was that I saw no difference whatever between us.

And then, when I was twelve summers old, that thing happened without which I might have grown up to become an ordinary princess—ha! Yes, there is such a thing.

You see, my father kept a book—as his predecessor had, and all the kings back into antiquity. This book contained various proclamations of the Winds made over the centuries, along with interpretations and auguries. And it came to pass that the unusual weather of the springtime and a disastrous fire in Belfonre matched some of the auguries in the book, and the only interpretation that my father and his wise men could make of the augury was that the queen must die.

In later years I came to understand that this was a pretext—he had his eye on another woman, who in time he married. She turned out to be barren, but he was not to admit the fact for many years. Anyway, at the time, I understood nothing, save that the Winds had commanded the death of my mother.

I was in the gardens with my favorite duenna when word came of the arrest of my mother. My duenna immediately burst into tears, falling on her knees before me and clutching at my skirt. She being older had grasped immediately what was occurring but I had yet to. We had been idly discussing some aspect of human nature, its rigidity I believe, which she took for granted and I in my young zeal rejected absolutely. “Nothing in us is fixed”, I had pouted. My mother’s execution was now fixed, however, and this duenna cried out, “Oh Princess, your youth is forever gone now! Where is the young girl I played with in these summer gardens? Soon you will be an embittered woman with revenge against life driving you. You will cease to laugh, you will weep at life, and you will send me away for reminding you of times lost now when you could be happy!”

“Lady, this is no sense in your words”, I said to her. I could feel the emotions overspilling around, the shaking of the messenger, the crying of my older friend, and saw how the windows that opened on the gardens were closing, one after another, shutting inside the airs of grief. For that moment I was the only calm stone in the rising flood. I shall not be carried away, I resolved. In moments all that the messenger and the duenna were possessed by would strike out to possess me—their human nature, of the same order, I felt, as the artificial distinctions between class which even they supported.

It was a moment of supreme mystery. How could the brightness of the flowers, the