Finding Emilie (54 page)

Just then two young servants, a girl and a boy, came in dressed in peasants’ clothing. “Who are you?” Meadowlark asked. “And why aren’t you tied up too?”

“Tied up?” They laughed until they clutched their sides. “We can’t sit around all day. We have work to do. And besides, we’re not wealthy enough to have gold rope and silver chains. You need those to be properly tied up, don’t you?”

“I suppose,” Meadowlark said.

“And if you have them, you need to show them off,” the chained woman tried to explain, though her voice was muffled almost beyond comprehension. “What good are chains if they’re locked in a drawer?”

A little girl with a silk bag over her head was squirming in her chair. Meadowlark pulled it off. “I want to get up and walk around,” the little girl said. “I want to go outside.”

“You can’t do that,” her parents said.

“Why not?” Tom asked.

“Because we can’t tie her up when she comes back.”

“Aha!” said Meadowlark. “And if that’s the case, who will stop her from leaving?” She pulled the girl’s chains off her lap and untied her ropes. “You’re free!” she said.

“Free?” the girl asked. “What’s that?” She turned to the servants. “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” they both said. “Maybe it just means different from before.”

“Well, that would be enough for me,” the girl said, running toward the door. “Anything has to be better than this!”

Meadowlark went to the door to watch the girl jumping in the air as she ran down the street. Her legs were not very strong from having spent so much time in chains, and before she had gone very far she fell down, exhausted.

“Help me up,” Meadowlark heard her order the people passing in the street. “Don’t you know I’m one of the Chained People? You’re supposed to obey me.”

“The Chained People never help us,” one of them said. “Around here, you learn to do everything for yourself.”

The girl looked around, not sure what to do. She spied Meadowlark, who was now standing next to her. “Can you help me up, please?” she asked, fluttering her eyelashes.

“You’d better learn to stand on your own, unless you want to go back there,” she said, pointing in the direction of the house. The girl looked at the house and then at the road out of town. She sighed, and with a great effort, she pulled herself up and dusted off her skirt.

“I’ll be going, then,” she said. Her hand flew to her mouth. “I think I forgot to close the door behind me!”

Meadowlark laughed. “I’ll do it for you,” she said. “I’m more than happy to help the Chained People with that.”

In which Meadowlark and Tom go to China and learn about love …

F
rom the sky, Meadowlark picked out the Great Wall of China and guided Comète down to a palace nearby. In the garden, twenty paces apart, two men at small desks faced each other. Above them on a terrace, a princess sat with her ladies-in-waiting.

One of the men rolled what he had written into a scroll, which he put on a gilded platter to be delivered to the man at the other end. The servant bobbed his head like a chicken pecking for scratch as he carried the scroll, and when he reached the other man, he bowed vigorously for several minutes before extending the platter to him.

As the man read it, his nostrils flared upward and his lips pursed, as if the words smelled too rotten for a delicate nose to bear. He tapped his nose and turned his face sideways in profile, lifting his chin skyward. The first man sniffed indignantly and did the same. Meadowlark saw their eyes darting toward each other, waiting to see who would break the pose first.

The second man wiggled his fingers and a servant handed him his pen. Without moving his head, he scribbled something on the scroll. When he was finished, he flicked his wrist in the direction of his adversary, and the servant scurried off with his reply.

“Who are those people?” Meadowlark asked a servant standing nearby.

“They’re Ting and Tang,” the man said. “Two great nobles of the realm. They’re fighting a duel.”

“A duel?” she exclaimed. “In France they fight those with guns or swords.”

Ting looked up at the sound of an unfamiliar voice. “I suppose we could do that,” he said. “After all, we invented gunpowder. But”—he motioned Meadowlark to come closer so no one else could hear—“we’re only fighting over a princess, and there are too many of those in China to care terribly much who wins this one.”

“Well then, how do you fight?” Meadowlark asked.

“We exchange notes about the ways we wish the other would die,” Ting answered. “For example, I told him I would like to see him fall through a crack in the ice and drown, and now”—he took back the scroll, which had just been returned to him—“Tang has written that he’d like my ship to be lost at sea.”

By then the princess had come down to see what the commotion was all about. “Lost at sea?” she said, looking at the sun lowering on the horizon. “It’s getting late. Don’t you think someone should be drawing blood by now? We need a winner before supper.”

She looked at Meadowlark and Tom. “You’re rather strange-looking. Where are you from?”

Her attention was distracted by the servant, who had delivered the scroll to her instead of to Tang. “What’s this?” the princess said, raising her eyebrows.

“I thought you might like something different,” Tang said. “So I wrote directly to you. It’s a poem.”

The princess unrolled the scroll. “‘I planted a rose garden for you,’” she read.

White for your skin, like cool ivory

Pink, for the lips I long to kiss

Yellow for your flowing hair—

“Wait a minute,” the princess said. “My hair’s not yellow. I’m Chinese.”

“I know,” Ting said, pointing at Tom. “But his is, and I needed another color for a rose. It isn’t a very good poem, but I did write it for you.”

“It certainly isn’t,” the princess said. She read again, “‘Blue for your eyes—’”

She scowled at Ting, who gave a helpless shrug and gestured toward Tom’s eyes. “My eyes are brown and there isn’t even such a thing as a blue rose.”

“There is in my garden,” Ting said.

The princess sniffed. “‘Red for the blood I’d rather not shed.’ Well at least that makes sense.” She squinted. “What’s this word? Your penmanship isn’t very good.”

“Garden. ‘My garden will grow only if watered with your love,’” Ting said. “That’s the last line.”

Tang came over to them. “Have I won?” he asked. “It is rather late, and I’m quite hungry.”

The princess ignored him. “This is most out of the ordinary, and I don’t like it at all,” she said to Ting. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow and have your duel according to the rules.”

Meadowlark was puzzled. “I rather liked the poem,” she said. “It sounds as if he really loves you.”

“What does that matter?” the princess said. “If I let him write a poem to me once, what would stop him from doing it again?” She stamped her foot. “Rules are rules!”

“Rules are rules,” Tom said to Meadowlark.

“I suppose so,” she replied. “Even as far away as China.”

In which Meadowlark and Tom go to Kiev and learn about free will…

T
he golden domes of Kiev caught the rays of the rising sun as Meadowlark and Tom set Comète down on a grassy bank near the Dnieper River running through the city.

“Look at all these churches!” Tom said. “They must be terribly religious here.”

“Except there’s no one in them,” Meadowlark said. “It looks as if there’s nobody here at all.” They wandered down empty streets for almost an hour until they ran into a little boy hiding something wiggling under his cloak. “What do you have there?” Meadowlark asked.

“Nothing!” the boy said as he dashed past them. Tom grabbed his cloak, which came off in his hand.

“It’s a puppy!” Meadowlark said.

“No it isn’t!” the boy replied tearfully.

Meadowlark pointed at the little animal cradled in his arms. “I can see it right there.”

The boy looked down at the little dog blinking in the bright sunlight. “I’ve lost him for sure now!” he said, breaking out in sobs.

“Why? Did we catch you stealing him?” Tom asked.

“No, but he’s the last one in the litter and I’ve been hiding
him because I don’t want the Court of Good Choices to hear about it.”

“The Court of Good Choices? What’s that?”

“Here in Kiev everyone believes in free will. We have to. It’s the official opinion. If you say ‘I’m going to eat the last apple in the basket’ and someone else gets to it first, that’s not free will. You’re supposed to get what you wish for. Everyone is. Otherwise there’s no free will, and that isn’t possible because it’s the law.”

“That’s not what free will means!” Meadowlark said, shaking her head.

“It means that here,” the boy replied. “Parlément voted on it. And now it’s the Court of Good Choices’ job to make sure it’s enforced. Suppose somebody else sees the dog and wills it to be theirs. We’d have to go to court, and there can’t be a loser because that person wouldn’t have free will. So they’ll decide neither of us can have the dog, so it has to be drowned. Or at least I think that’s what happens. They don’t tell us exactly, because then someone might say, ‘It’s my will that it not be drowned.’”

“But if neither of you get what you want, how is that free will?” Meadowlark asked.

The boy scratched his head. “It doesn’t make sense to me either. They call it the doctrine of adjusted happiness. You have to adjust what you want until you get it, and then you’ll be happy. If you both want the last apple, it has to be laid on the ground halfway between you, and you can’t move until one of you decides you don’t want it. Tennis has been banned altogether, because both players want to win. But it doesn’t work as well as that all the time. If a husband wants to live on one side of the river and his wife wants to live on the other, they have to live on a boat in the middle.”

“So free will actually means never getting what you want,” Meadowlark said.

“It seems to work out that way. Nobody’s ever satisfied, but nobody can complain that someone else is freer.” The boy looked around him at the empty street. “That’s why hardly anybody lives here anymore. They’ve all moved to places where you don’t get what you want most of the time, but you stand a chance of getting it once in a while.”

“They have crazy ideas about free will here,” Meadowlark whispered in Tom’s ear, “but I know I’m not waiting around here long enough for anyone to will me to stay.” She called for Comète, and they jumped on his back and were gone. Below them they could just make out the boy’s voice.

“Wait a minute!” he yelled. “I will you—” but they were too far away to hear the rest.

In which Meadowlark and Tom go to Carpathia and learn about obedience …

T
he tower atop the Carpathian Mountains loomed high over the snowcapped peaks below. Through a small window at the top, Meadowlark heard the sighs of a young maiden.

“What are you doing up there?” she called.

“I’ve been imprisoned by my parents because I won’t obey them.”

“What do they want you to do?”

“It’s what they don’t want me to do.” A girl of about sixteen pushed huge tangles of thread aside and looked out the window. “I love to spin, and they say it’s not fitting work for a princess.”