His Majesty's Elephant (9 page)

“If he's asleep,” said Rowan with perfect sincerity, “I'll be as quiet as a cat.”

“Well then,” said Bodo, “in you go.”

In, then, she went, with Kerrec following like her shadow. Bodo had not asked about him. She wondered if the guard had even seen the Elephant's boy, or recognized him.

Not that it mattered, once they were in, and a good strong guard on the doors behind them. Rowan did not go into the Emperor's bedchamber, though she paused by the door. The squire who lay across it woke, grinned drowsily till he saw Kerrec, then wiped all expression from his face. Rowan ignored him.

The nightlamp was lit in the Emperor's room, flickering in the draft from the door. She could not see into the big curtained bed, but she could hear the noble rasp of her father's snore.

She paused for a long while, listening to that blessed rhythm, before she retreated from the doorway. She kept her promise to Bodo: she moved as softly as she knew how.

Next to her father's sleeping-room was the one where he kept his books, with a table to sit at, and a chair with a tattered silken cushion, and a locked chest for the books. Rowan unlatched the door with the minutest of clicks and slid into the room.

She had not been lying to Bodo about where she intended to go, though she had not told him all the reasons why she went. Truth, she thought, was a complicated thing.

There was a lamp lit on the table, as there always was: the Emperor never knew when he might want to get up in the night and practice his reading or his writing. He had been writing earlier, perhaps just before he went to bed. There was a scrap of parchment on the table, with what looked like a tribute-list on one side, and a line of scribbles on the other. He had tried so hard that the tip of the quill splayed, making the letters at the end of the line much darker and larger than the ones at the beginning, and spattering ink on the bottom of the parchment.

Rowan's eyes pricked with tears. Fear of losing her father was a thing of such magnitude that she could only face it by sniffling over small things. The white starkness of Kerrec's face. The sound of her father's snores. This bit of parchment with its marks of earnest intensity, its remembrance of a man who learned to read late in life, came later still to writing and yet persevered. He had an empire full of scribes to do his reading and writing for him, and children whom he had raised to be as learned as he had never been, but still he copied these scraps of Ovid and Cicero, determined to write them with his own hand.

The Byzantines would despise this if they knew of it. Rowan warmed with anger at the thought. Her father was worth twenty of any Greek yet born.

She sat in the chair and touched finger to the scrap of parchment. Maybe it was only fancy, but she thought that she could feel her father in it, like a thread that ran from her hand to the parchment to the man asleep in his bed on the other side of the wall.

The thread was as thin as a spider's strand, and as nearly invisible, and yet it had color in it, maybe grey, maybe green, maybe a little of both. It made her think of something, but she was not quite sure what.

She felt rather than saw Kerrec come up behind her and lean on the chair's high back. He spoke in a whisper. “Do you know what you're doing?”

If she answered him, she would lose the thread. It was important that she not do that.

He sensed it, maybe. He did not press her.

Somewhere far away from the center, part of her was shaking and sobbing and trying desperately to run away. But it was not the part that moved her body, or that held the thread in her hand.

It was a very real thread, a length of silk: the odd-colored silk that she had been given in the market, the day she first sat on the Elephant. She had put that thread in her workbox and forgotten about it, since it was so odd a color, even if it matched her eyes.

And yet here it was, in her hand. She knew the heft of it, the softness that was silk, the strength that hid in it and made it wonderful.

She felt Kerrec's hand on her shoulder, his presence like a wall at her back. He should be doing this, wailed the coward in her. He knew how to use magic. He should guard the thread, and let her go.

But she had seen the thread first, and she had touched it, and somehow made it real. She knew what she had to do.

It was very simple. She had to hold the thread, and keep it from breaking.

Spots danced in front of her eyes. She shook her head to make them go away, but they kept on.

Slowly they came together. They were gold, green, red, white—the Talisman with its jewels, and in its heart the holy relic.

Only the gold was dim, tarnished. The jewels were dull. The relic looked like a blot on the crystal, a sliver of darkness that grew as she watched.

“That's the spell.” Kerrec's voice, sounding strange and far away. Had she sounded like that when she told him what he saw in the water of the baths? “He's planted it in the crystal and commanded it to grow.”

“But how?” part of Rowan asked, part that had voice to speak. “There's a piece of God's own Tree in the stone. How could he turn it so dark?”

“Anything holy can be twisted,” said Kerrec. “And this had magic in it to begin with.”

“No,” said Rowan. She was not talking to Kerrec. She could see past the Talisman now, as if through a window.

The sorcerer had set the golden thing in a circle drawn on the floor of a dim and shadowy room. He stood outside the circle, robed in darkness, and chanted words that, by the mercy of heaven, she could not hear. But she could feel them, buzzing like wasps in her skull.

Something warned her to back away, to close her ears, to turn her focus entirely on the Talisman. Its gold was gone. It looked like lead, dull and drab, and the stones were like river pebbles. The crystal was black.

Rowan swallowed a cry of protest. She had not loved that splendid frightening thing, but it had been beautiful and magical and holy. Now it was all wrong, all twisted. Where the wood of the Cross had been was a demon's eye. It leered at her, seeing every speck and folly of her, and knowing her for what she was.

“Mary Mother of God!”

Rowan had not thought at all before the words were out, but they rang like bells in the night. The demon's eye closed against them. Its spell broke, setting her free.

She saw the Talisman still, blackened and fouled. A thread spun out of it, a black thread, like a shadow of Rowan's grey-green living silk. It unrolled through the dim air, aiming straight and level and swift as an arrow's flight, direct to her father's chamber.

Prayer did not slow it, not even the whole Paternoster. Just at “deliver us from evil,” the black thread touched the thread of the Emperor's life. And stopped.

Rowan did not dare to hope. Not yet. Where the two threads met was a point half of shadow and half of light. The one in her hand was like a hot wire, so hot it burned, but not for any pain would she let go.

Her body was between the black thread and her father. If it came on, it must come on through her.

Through her and Kerrec. He felt more solid than ever, standing behind her, saying nothing, doing nothing but hold fast.

The blackness moved, creeping toward her. Her teeth met in her lower lip. The pain, like the pain in her hand, helped her to focus.

She kept praying. It did not seem to do any good, but neither did it hurt. If she prayed enough, maybe she would be so full of holiness that when the blackness touched her it would shrivel and die.

The living thread darkened inch by inch. It was coming faster now.

Her hand was on fire. Her head was throbbing. She could not remember the words of the prayer she was saying. She gave it up, fell back on the old one, maybe the oldest one of all: “Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.”

She was babbling like an idiot. The darkness laughed at her. She could not listen to it, or she would fail.

It struck like a snake, straight at her hand. She jerked back.

The parchment crumbled. The living thread stretched. She stilled with an effort that shook her nearly out of her seat.

Too late. The thread snapped. The world cracked open and flung her down and down and down.

oOo

Rowan woke up with a hideous headache. She was lying on something hard and knobby, not like her bed at all. It moved, cursing in very bad Greek.

Then it spoke in decent Frankish with a Breton lilt. “Your elbow is embedded in my liver. Do you mind...?”

Rowan was too sore to mind. She moved her elbow. The rest of her slipped and came to ground with a thump, not a very hard one but enough to half blind her with the headache. It was a while before she could move again, or say anything that made sense.

Memory came back too soon. “Father! Where's—what—”

“He's breathing,” said Kerrec. “I hear him.”

So, too painfully, could Rowan. It was regular, even, the breathing of a man deep asleep. Nothing unusual in it. Nothing at all, anywhere, to show that a great sorcery had come and gone, and knocked two witch-children flat.

Except for one thing. It was a little thing, a harmless thing, but in Rowan's weakened condition it loomed enormous. The Emperor's snoring had stopped.

The Emperor was up in the morning, doing as he always did, seeming as hearty as he always was, eating his breakfast and receiving the first of the day's audiences and swimming in the baths.

But if the Emperor seemed well enough, Rowan was not. Her headache would not go away, and the rest of her ached almost as much.

Still, she stayed stubbornly near him. People thought him excessively affectionate toward his daughters, and far too indulgent in keeping them so close about him, but for once it served Rowan well. Kerrec had not been able to stay; he had the Elephant to look after, and that duty he would not shirk.

Toward midmorning, fresh and ruddy from his bath, the Emperor decided to go hunting. A boar had been vexing one of the villages, and the villagers had sent a deputation to beg the Emperor's help in getting rid of the beast. “Roast boar for dinner!” the Emperor said in high glee, shouting for his horse and his huntsmen.

And what, thought Rowan, if this was the barb of the spell? Boars were the devil's beast, cunning and murderous. What if this boar was set to kill the Emperor?

As he strode out of the audience chamber, she set herself in his way. “Father, won't you let it wait for a while?”

He kept on striding, sweeping her in his wake. “And why should I let it wait?” he asked her. “We haven't had roast boar in an age. Aren't you hungry for a platterful?”

“I think you should wait,” she said. “Maybe someone else will kill it for you.”

That was a mistake. He paused in midstride. His frank open face had gone dark with anger. “Are you saying I'm too old to hunt boar?”

“No!” she cried. “No, Father. I just don't— Oh!” She blurted it out all at once, and never mind the consequences. “What if it kills you?”

“There,” he said, growing easy again. “There, little bird. I can't say it won't happen, but how many years have I gone out on the hunt and come back without a scratch?”

“Today is different,” said Rowan. “I know it.”

“There, there,” said the Emperor. He was not listening to her at all.

oOo

Rowan rode with the hunt. On any other day she would have loved the spectacle of it, all the hunters mounted and afoot, the great boarhounds baying, the forest in its summer green, misted still in the hollows, and a soft grey haze on the sun's face.

They began in a pack, with Rowan not far from the lead on swift Galla, as near her father as she could be. He had a helmet on, and his old leather coat, and a bundle of boar-spears strapped to his saddle; he was singing in his high voice, pausing to laugh at something somebody said.

There were many dressed more brightly or more richly, and some who had a better seat on a horse, but to Rowan's eye there was no mistaking what he was. He carried himself like a man who ruled the world.

She loved him so much that it hurt, and she wanted to drag him down off his horse and shake him till he listened to her.

She did not know what she would do if the boar tried to kill him. Be a martyr, probably, fling herself in front of it and give her father time to get away.

They started animals enough as they ran the wood: rabbits, deer, something enormous and snorting that the huntsmen said was not a boar but an aurochs, a bull of the woods. Rowan had a moment of exquisite horror, of certainty that the beast was a demon. But it crashed away into the deep cover and did not come back.

Some of the younger lords went yelling after it. Rowan stayed with her father.

One or two people muttered about that. The Emperor stopped them with a look. His daughters, it said, had always gone where they wished to go. And they knew well enough to get out of the way when the men needed room to work.

They were a good league out of Aachen now, on a track that ran north from the village that had lost one of its children to the boar. “Ate him,” the woman in the delegation had said in a hard dry voice, as if she was burned empty of tears. “Flung him down and tusked him to pieces and devoured his entrails. That's not boar's work, sire, boar's tusks or no. That's a devil out of the black places.”

“Boar will go rogue sometimes,” the Emperor had said, “which is ill for you and yours. We'll get him for you, good wife. Have no fear of it.”

It would have been proper for the woman to fall weeping at his feet, babbling thanks, but she was not that kind of woman. She ducked in a sort of curtsy, pulled her companions together with a glance, and left without a word. Whether she believed the Emperor or simply had been trying a last resort, Rowan still, half a day later, could not tell.

They had ridden through the woman's village but not paused in it. It was small, poor but clean, with a sow in a wallow by the well, suckling a wriggling mass of piglets.