“May Day, 323,” said Nickie, and laughed a little.
“Yes. That day, why do you suppose I was so eager to hang on to you after the Festival of Fools was over? Oh, Nickie turning up when I hadn’t seen her for two years and I’d even thought she was dead — of course. The little twirp was always my favorite cousin. But there was something else in it. I’d begun to distrust myself already, though I’d been Regent less than a year…”
I remembered the day. I often do; there’s a brightness in remembering. Nickie and I were twenty, then. We had been living in Old City for two years — obscurely, because Nickie had run away from her family and couldn’t bear the thought of being recognized, knowing the attempts that would be made to draw her back, and how such fuss and uproar would interfere with the work to which she was giving herself body and spirit. Her work was underground, with the Heretics, important and dangerous. Mine, for money-making, was in a furniture factory — Sam Loomis had taught me all he could of joinery when we were with Rumley’s Ramblers — and my other work was to learn, to read the forbidden books under the guidance of Nickie and the Heretics who accepted me because of her, to grow up with a wider understanding of the world I had to live in. She took over, my sweet pepperpot wife, where my substitute mother Mam Laura of the Ramblers had to leave off. Well, but that day, the 29th of April, eve of the Festival of Fools which makes a joyous twenty-four hours of madness for Nuin folk before the gentler delights of May Day — that day Nickie and I were careless. It was the gaiety throughout the city, the reckless delicious urgency of a clear evening of spring, when the sky was piled high with violet-tinted clouds, and there were the street singers, and the flower-girls carried everywhere the scent of lilac.
We said we’d only go for a short walk, and keep away from the celebration and foolishness. But straying, pausing at a tavern where the beer was rather too good — oh, before long we were asking each other what harm it could do if we merely went for a few minutes to the Palace Square to hear the singing, and maybe watch from a safe place when the King and Queen of the Fools were chosen. And yet Niche has told me since then that all along she had a premonition we were going to be much more scatterbrained than that. I remember how as we drifted toward that part of town, Nickie was trying to determine how accurately she could steer my walking by bumping me with her hip, neither of us using hands or arms, and we arrived at Palace Square in that style — honestly not drunk, just happy.
The custom is perhaps a hundred years old, that at some time on the eve of the Festival of Fools — nobody knows the moment exactly, but it comes between sundown and ten o’clock — a boy on a white horse will ride through Palace Square with a jingly cap on his head and carrying a long whip that has a soft silken tassel at the end. He cavorts around the square sassing the crowd and being pelted with flowers; at last he flicks his whip at one man and one woman, choosing them to be King and Queen of the Fools for the next twenty-four hours. They’re hustled up to a throne that stands waiting on the steps of the presidential palace, and the President himself comes out to crown them. He kneels to them, with considerable ritual, not all of it comic. The custom of washing the feet of the King and Queen had gone obsolete in Dion’s time, but-
It happened to Nickie and me. I ought to have foreseen it. The crowd was large, the light failing, nevertheless my lady’s face must have stood out among the other pretty girls in the crowd like a diamond among glass ornaments; I was obviously her companion, and I have red hair. The boy on his white horse bore down on us, making the crowd give way so that his whip could reach us. Then the people were closing in, laughing, kind, noisy-drunk and heavyhanded, carrying us up to the throne on their shoulders. And the Regent, Dion Morgan Morganson of Nuin, appeared in his fancy dress, and seeing Niche — frightened I know she was, rumpled by the crowd’s well-meant horseplay, staring straight in front of her — Dion went pale to the lips. Presently he was ordering one of the attendants to bring the silver basin that had formerly been used in this ceremony — I too ignorant to know this was unexpected — and he washed our feet although it had not been part of the ritual for thirty years.
“And distrusting myself,” said Dion — speaking here in our airy shelter on the island Neonarcheos, his arm around his lovely bedmate Nora Severn, and hearing as I did how a sea wind was wavering through the warm rain — “distrusting myself, I needed you, Miranda. Later on—” he said this with something more than courtesy — “I found out I needed Davy too, and the cockeyed useful way the little devil has of looking at things and speaking out.”
I was aware, on that eve of the Festival of Fools, that Dion had loved my woman before ever I knew her. It was years before, actually, for he was fifteen when she was born. Her mother Serena St. Clair-Levison was Dion’s first cousin. He was often with the family, and used to carry the baby around before she could walk. Her first clear word, spoken when he was swinging her up to the ceiling, was Di-yon… I could not have avoided knowing it, hearing him speak her name in a helpless, explosive way, there on the steps of the presidential palace when he was holding her little brown foot in his hands. It is not, today, the love of a very young man for a child, since Nickie is not a child. It is the love of friends, and on his side, more than that. We have been able to speak of it a little, the three of us; we do not when Nora Severn is with us, though she knows of it. It is not something that could be solved by a three-marriage, as Adna-Lee Jason and her lovers have done. Dion and I are are both too possessive, and Nickie is certain that for us it would not be the answer. Nay then, how much of our human complexity is our own fault!
“I think,” said Nora Severn, “that a man who knows the old dangers of autocracy, watches for them in himself — why isn’t such a man better as a governor than one who might have less self-knowledge? Not that I’m urging it — you’re more fun as a private citizen.”
She was wearing nothing but a little skirt, like most of our girls. Blonde and delicious, you wouldn’t think to look at Nora almost naked that she’s an expert weaver and spinner, so deft and imaginative that some of the older women have asked her for instruction. At work, she never spends a second of waste motion, though every thin steady finger seems to possess an independent life. She is trying sculpture too, claiming to be no good at it, and has searched the island for usable clay.
“Some of the time back yonder,” Dion said, “I’m afraid I liked being His Excellency by grace of God and the Senate Regent in Our Very Present Emergency — hoo boy! The emergency was good for eight years and would still be perking if we hadn’t been kicked out. I thmk the term ‘emergency’ originally meant ‘until His Excellency Morgan the Third by grace of God and the Senate President of the Commonwealth shall have the gracious goodness to cork off.’ But then time spun on and on, and it came to mean ‘that period extending from the time your Excellency got away with it until such time as your Excellency can by grace of God and the Senate be safely booted the hell out…’”
We were obliged to stay in East Perkunsvil until after Jed’s funeral. But for Vilet we’d have been forced to do a sneakout, for Sam and I between us hadn’t anything like the money needed for the expected religious performances, yet we were thought to be aristocrats and loaded with it — dear Jed, he would have explained it was a punishment on us for lying to the guard that evening. No doubt religion had to be invented for such gentle and simple minds, and perhaps they can’t get along without it any more than I can get along with it. Vilet had enough salted away in her sack to meet the expenses, and now — why, now Vilet was a pilgrim and didn’t want money.