Neveryona (3 page)

Pryn nodded.

‘When she was fifteen years old, for arcane political reasons, the evil priests decided to kill her outright. But they were afraid to do it themselves – for more political reasons, equally arcane. They couldn’t get any of her family to do it, so they tried to hire her own servants, one after the other, all twenty-three. But the first servant was the queen’s nurse, an old woman who loved the girl and came to her young mistress and told her what the priests intended.

‘ “What shall I do?” the queen cried.

‘ “You can be afraid,” said the old servant. “But don’t be terrified. That’s first. You see, I have a plan, though it’s a sad and sorrowful one. I’ve made a bargain with the priests, which they’ll respect because they think me a great magician. I’ve told them I will betray you
if
they will pay me one gold piece. And I have also made them promise that if I fail, they will hire the next servant to do the same deed for
two
gold pieces – twice what they have paid me. And if that servant fails, they will hire the next one to do the deed for four gold pieces, twice again the amount paid the former. And if he fails, the next will be hired for twice the amount paid to the previous one. And so on.” The old woman produced from the folds of her
gown a single gold coin – and a knife. “Take my pay and hide it. Then take this knife – and strike me in the heart! For only my death will corroborate my failure.”

‘ “
Kill
you?” demanded the queen.

‘ “it’s the only way.”

‘The queen wept and cried and protested. “You are my beloved friend, my faithful bondswoman, and my dear nurse as well. You are closer to me than my own mother!” But the old woman put her arms around the girl and stroked her hair. “Let me explain some of the more arcane politics behind this whole nasty business. These are brutal and barbaric times, and it is either you or I – for even if I
do
kill you, the wicked priests plan to dispense with me as soon as I stab you. They cannot suffer the murderer of a queen to live, even the murderer of a queen they hate as much as they hate you. If you do what I say, you will have the gold coin as well as your life, whereas I shall lose
my
life in any case.”

‘And so, after more along the same lines, the queen took the coin, and the knife – which she thrust into her old nurse’s heart.

‘Not so many days later, a second servant came to Queen Olin. “Here are two gold coins and a rope with which I am to garrote you. Take the coins and hide them; then take the rope and strangle me – if you yourself would live. For
my
life is over in any case.” Again the queen protested, but again the servant prevailed. So the young queen took the rope and strangled him. A few days later a third servant came with four gold pieces and a great rock to smash in the queen’s head. After that a fourth came with eight gold pieces and a draught of corrosive poison. The fifth had sixteen gold pieces. The sixth had thirty-two coins. The next –’

Pryn suddenly laughed. ‘But I’ve heard this story before! Or one just like it – only it was about grains of
sand piled on the squares of a gaming board. I don’t remember how many squares there were, but by the end, I remember, all the sand in the world was used up. Am I right about the ending? At the end of the twenty-three servants, she had all the money in the world …?’

Norema smiled. ‘She certainly had all the money in the monastery. And at that particular time, all the money in the monastery was pretty much all the money in Nevèrÿon.

‘That
is
an old story. I know, because I’ve heard it before. The version about the sand grains, that is.’

‘That part of the story is old. But there are some new parts too. For example, after she had killed all her servants, the beautiful young queen felt very differently about herself.’

Pryn frowned. ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well’, Norema said, ‘for one thing, in less than a year she had stabbed, strangled, bashed out the brains, poisoned, beheaded, and done even worse to twenty-two of her most faithful bondsmen and bondswomen, who were also the closest things she’d had to friends. After that she began to act very strangely and behave quite oddly. On and off, she behaved oddly the rest of her life – even for a queen. And in those days queens were expected to be eccentric. Often, after that, she was known as Mad Olin’.

‘I thought you said there were twenty-
three
servants.’

‘There were. But the last survived. He was not only a servant, but also her maternal uncle – though, alas, I can’t remember his family name. And there’re reasons to remember it, too, but for the life of me I can’t recall what they are. Anyway. Years before, he had fallen on bad times and had indentured himself to the queen’s mother, which was why he was with Olin in the first place. But he had always set himself apart. Along about the queen’s murderings of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first
servants – all particularly gruesome – the evil priests were, financially speaking, in rather bad shape. Olin was by then quite well off – though mentally she was a bit shaky. Her maternal uncle, who, like the first servant, was also something of a magician, had, with the help of the rest of the family, managed to engineer an escape for the queen. It took a good deal of the money; and Olin took the rest – to hide lest the wicked priests manage to trick it back, even as her first wise and faithful servant had tricked it from the priests.’ Norema sighed. ‘Raven and I once visited that monastery – it’s still there today. And there are still priests – at least there were when we went. Now, I’m not sure. Anyway, you could certainly tell that the place had seen better times. Clearly they hadn’t gotten their money back.’

‘Are the priests still wicked?’

Reddish brows lowered. ‘Well, I doubt if either my friend or I would ever stop there again – unless we absolutely had to.’

‘What about Olin’s escape?’

‘Ah, the exciting part!’ Norema said. ‘Her uncle spirited her away from the monastery in the middle of the night, with the money in a caravan of six great wagons, each pulled by six horses. It was a lot of money, you see, and took more than one wagon to carry. Also, there was a lot more than gold coins in it by now – jewels and iron trinkets and all sorts of precious and semi-precious stones. The uncle took her to his family home, there in the south, and that evening he went with her up into a tall tower – at least that’s how one version of the story goes. In another version, he took her up on a high rocky slope – ’

‘Shouldn’t you choose one or the other for the sake of the telling?’ Pryn asked.

‘For the sake of the story,’ Norema answered, ‘I tell both and let my hearer make her choices.’

‘Oh’, Pryn said.

‘In the stone chamber at the tower top – or in the rocky cell at the top of the rocky slope – the uncle began to read her the sequence by which the gold coins had come to her: one, two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, one hundred twenty-eight, two hundred fifty-six, five hundred twelve, one thousand twenty-four, two thousand forty-eight, four thousand ninety-six – ’

‘I
see
how fast it goes up!’ Pryn exclaimed. ‘That’s just halfway through them, and it’s already almost five thousand gold pieces. Two more, and it’ll be over twenty thousand. Twenty thousand gold pieces must be close to all the money in the world!’

‘That’s what
you
see.’ Norema smiled. ‘What the young queen saw, however, was a city.’

Pryn blinked.

Norema said: ‘The queen blinked.’

‘What city?’ Pryn asked. ‘Where did she see it?’

‘Precisely what the queen wondered too – for she blinked again … It was gone! Through the stone columns at the stone rail, the queen looked down from the tower – or down to the foot of the slope – and saw only some marshy water, an open inlet, rippling out between the hills to the sea. But the queen
had
seen a city, there among the ripples, as clearly as she now saw the hills on either side of the inlet, or, indeed, as clearly as she saw the swampy growths that splotched the waters where they came in to the land. When she told her uncle what she had seen, immediately he stopped reading the numbers and showed her all sorts of magic wonders, including a circle full of different stars, which he gave her to keep. Then he took her down from the tower – or down from the rocks – to a great dinner that had been prepared for her, where they talked of more magic things. Then he did something terrible.’

‘What?’ Pryn asked. ‘So far, this story sounds more confusing than exciting.’

‘To the proper hearer,’ Norema said, ‘precisely what seems confusing will
be
the exciting part. When the queen came back from a stroll in the garden between courses, the uncle gave her a goblet of poison, which she, unknowing, drank.’

Norema was silent a long time.

Finally Pryn asked: ‘Was that the end of the queen? I’m sure her uncle probably wanted the money for himself. This doesn’t sound like a real story to me. What about the “circle of different stars”? I don’t even know what that is! I mean, it doesn’t
seem
like a story, because it … doesn’t really end.’

‘It certainly doesn’t end there,’ Norema said, ‘It goes on for quite a while, yet. But that always seemed to me an exciting place for a pause.’

‘What
did
happen, then?’

‘See, you
are
caught up in the excitement, the action, the suspense! You want to know the outcome – I think it’s very important to alert your listeners to the progress of their own reactions. I can foresee a time, after lots more tales have been told, when that won’t be necessary. But for now it’s a must. Well, the poison
didn’t
kill the queen. It put her in a trance – and when she woke, if indeed she wasn’t dreaming, she was on a rocky ledge. It was night, and as she pushed herself up on her hands and looked around, she saw she was lying between two white stones, one taller than the other – now here, again, there’s another version that says the queen woke up in a boat which sailed in to a strange shore that morning, and on the shore she found the white stones – one higher than the other; at noon on the longest day of summer, this version says, one stone casts a shadow three times as long as –’

‘But in
this
version –’ Pryn tried to blot the image of sun and glaring sand that had itself blotted her image of darkness, full moon, and cool air – ‘it was night?’

‘Yes,’ Norema said. ‘And the full moon was up.’

Pryn started to ask,
But how did you know?
, then decided that if she were going to hear the end, she’d best stop interrupting. Besides, it was the teller’s tale; the teller ought to know what happened in it, for all her multiple versions.

‘The remaining money was in huge piles beside the queen, in heaps and bags and bundles, and the circle of different stars lay on the rock near her knee. Down the ledge from her, the water was covered with fog. The moon looked ghastly, a yellow disk hanging over a fuming inlet. Water flickered beneath mists. Olin sat on the rock, hugging her knees in the chill light, biting her inner lip, her chin on her kneecaps. A bird woke up and screeched! The queen looked to see green wings starting from the branches of a pecan tree. She got to her feet unsteadily, still groggy from the poison. She stood on the ledge and cried out across the waters, just as if someone had told her what to say (though none of the versions I know says who): “I am Olin, and I have come to warn the Worm of the Sea of the Northern Eagle’s evil gaze!” Then she took a step back and put her wrist up to her mouth as if she were afraid she had said something blasphemous. She stepped to the ledge’s edge again and looked down toward the foggy water. The mists were a-broil, and now and again splashes geysered up hot silver.

‘There was a rumbling, as of some vast engine, not only from the water, but from the ground. Trees trembled; small stones shook loose to roll down into fog. Below swirling fumes waves swirled even faster.

‘Water surged, now into the land, now away. At each surge away, water lowered; and lowered.

‘Olin saw the first broken building tops cleave mist and waves – three towers and a bridge between, dripping. Waves broke higher than fog; foam fell back, roaring, to the sea. More buildings emerged. Water poured from their roofs. Through fog, water erupted from stone windows. Fog rolled and roiled off. Green and white water lapped away through mud and weeds and clotted alleys. Water rushed from a street where pillars still stood. Water carried weed and mud from patterned blue flags; other pillars were broken. One lay across its square pedestal. At the same time she saw the cleared street, she saw other avenues still silted, dark, and wet. Shapes that might have been buildings were mounded over with mud, glistening, black, and green. To the earth’s rumblings and the water’s ragings, the city rose.

‘The young queen, half running, half falling down the slope, only just managed to get her feet under her – when she plunged shin deep in muck. She staggered on, arms flailing, till she reached the first cracked paving – nowhere near as clean as it had looked from the ledge. Mud clung to the walls beside her. Weeds in windows hung down dripping stones. Fallen masonry, scattered shells, and soaked branches made her progress by the carved pillars almost as slow as it had been in the mud. Dirty-footed, wet-handed, scratches on her shoulders and legs, the young queen pushed between stones and driftwood, making her way by broken walls, their carvings veiled in sea moss.

‘What movement down what alley made her stop, the queen was never sure. Off in the wet green filling another street, something dark as excrement flexed, shifted, slid. The building beside her was heaped over with runnelled mud. That moved too, quivered, rose – not mud at all, but some immense tarpaulin. The sheet shook itself loose.