Chapter Four
She stood on the wall overlooking the wide grounds where a young boy spun furiously upon an unbroken horse. All about him a ring of men laughing and yelling him on and the boy clinging as if death itself waited and perhaps it did. The dust rising slowly from the spot and so far below that she could cover them all with her finger if she so desired. Out beyond the green hills rising in the soft and warm light of evening and the orchards and vineyards there in the foothills and the women and men in loose-fitting clothes moving between them.
He leaned on the edge of the wall beside her and took out his knife and spun it between his fingers in an absent way and she thought twice that it would fall but it did not and it seemed to move without effort in the hands of this boy of hers. The light in the fringes of his hair and turning it to gold and his body slender and well and never sick. A child nearly a man now and taking for granted this life of ease and luxury that others had bought for him with blood as they held in their entrails on battlefields of mud and screamed curses beneath a churning sky.
Below them, the men were moving out as one and behind them the company of archers and the wagons well provisioned and commands called to the cattle and horses and rising thinly to them atop the wall. She watched the column move and he did not for to him they were nothing but men he had sent away and there were many others and if pressed he would not be able to give the names of those he'd sent.
“You still don't believe them,” she said at last.
He looked up from the knife and even then it did not stop moving in his hands. “No.”
“There are many things in this world.”
“Save your stories for the fools.” He smiled and put the knife in his belt. That oiled leather. “Dragons are nothing. An invention of the ancients for what they didn't understand. A scare tactic used by priests to keep us chained to the gods.”
“Then all the stories are myth.”
“When there are stories of dragons and no dragons, what else could they be?”
“Histories.”
“Histories written by people both stupid and deceived. Someone saw a shadow or couldn't explain a fire in a barn and said the word and it moved from mouth to mouth and eventually it came around and grew and there were more who'd seen it than the one who started it.”
“Just lies from the peasants.”
“Happens all the time.”
“Some say the same thing about the Whispermen.”
“And they should.”
“The Whispermen are real. Ask anyone in Erihon.”
He leaned back on the wall and crossed his arms and looked at her. His back to this kingdom he ruled and these people his own. “Of course they're real. But that doesn't mean they're what everyone says they are. Probably nothing at all. Deranged hermits in the damned forest. A dead people. Once they were something and now we don't even really know what and the stories grow.”
“Do you believe in anything?”
“I believe in what there is. Give me nothing else.”
She looked away from him. The column leaving had reached the bridge over the moat and they were halfway across on those timbers with the men on either side standing with chains in their hands. Some dogs called out and then one answered somewhere else. She couldn't hear the sound of the hooves on the wood but she knew it deep and hollow and below the shallow water waiting for foes who had not besieged this land in generations.
Perhaps somewhere a withered old man who knew of the death and destruction those wars wrought. Who had once been young and holding an ax or a sword and striking down those on the field and calling to rally other men to him and charging into their hearts.
But more likely not. For those men were dead men and they were no more. If there was a withered old man with the scars of battle those scars were on his back and he would not talk of the fight and looked endlessly at the fields as if forever seeing there something unseen to all others.
“Trading gold for fever dreams,” he said. “We can't lose.”
“You can always lose.”
He laughed. “I think you've had enough fresh air for the day.”
She did not look at him and the guards came up the stone walkway side by side between the walls and took her arms and she did not protest and they led her back down and to the stairs. Hands rough on the tops of her arms. She looked back at him as she got to the stairs and he was still leaning with his back to the land and once again spinning the knife and then she was around the corner and going down the wide stone steps and she could see him no longer.
When they reached the cell the door was closed and one man let her go and took the keys off his belt and unlocked it. She had at first looked around when they took her out for a means of escape but she did not now. The one held the door and the other stepped with her into the room and they closed the door again.
“Come on,” the man said.
She closed her eyes and took off the dress and the jewelry and the shoes and all. Standing naked in the cold and the floor slick beneath her feet with mud and everything else. A thin layer over the cold stone and moving up already between her toes. She opened her eyes and they were just looking at her and one grinning but this time they did not touch her and then at last the one handed her the rags she'd worn before. Watched her again as she pulled those rags up over her head and slid them on. The feeling against her skin of canvas, the heaviness of the dead and decayed.
The one nodded at her and she went over that thin dark bridge to the wall and stood with her arms at her sides and he put the cuffs on her wrists. The chain rattling in the dark. Above the light faint now and failing. The metal so cold. He tugged on the chains to see that she had enough to lie down on the straw mat and he grunted and looked her up and then down once more despite the rags and grinned and then they turned and went out. The bolt fell in the door.
And the queen stood for a moment with her eyes closed and then sat and looked into the darkness and it was all silence and yet she knew in it the other watched her and she it.
She dreamt that night and it was a dream of some great worm coming from the depths of the earth. Eyes so far across she would need both arms to span them and a mouth of small teeth that ground the stones and dirt as it came up, that dirt showering off, the body pirouetting in the tunnel, thrusting its huge bulk upward and upward and the tail trailing behind until finally it was free of the earth and fell with a sound heavy and wet into the moat. The bridge snapping and breaking as it fell, the thing pulsing with the beat of every heart within.
For worms had their sections and within each a heart and if torn in two one would live and in this beat hearts like horses and it could not die.
She woke sweating and lying up against the cold wall and the chains about her and she opened her eyes and shook and lay for a time just looking at that wall. The marks on the stones of tools older than the castle above. This the ancient world, for when men built a city the first thing they built was a place to put other men and they put them in the ground with stones and water and bars and chains. And then built above them the thing both had perhaps wanted to see. The other held below as if in death until that itself came for his escape.