The Duke In His Castle (2 page)

“Sir. Need I repeat the description? The same one, remotely mercantile in some distasteful manner or another. Definitely vulgar. The one who claims to have the bones and dust of—ahem—Nairis, the Fabled One, and who also claims that Your Grace is the only one who can restore her to life.”

A startled flicker comes to the young man’s eyes. They are violet-blue places of murk, and now they are agitated. “Life, life . . . bringing to life. Bones and dust . . . Nairis, the Fabled One . . .” he mutters, listening to the sound of words as they drift in the chamber. Then, emerging from the daze, “What, not this nonsense again? Didn’t you tell him once to be gone, and that I’m busy? Remind him, do, that despite my considerable abilities and learning I know of no power in the world—no ritual sorcery, no psychic magic, no blood-letting sacrifice, not even charlatan smoke and mirrors—that can return the dead to this mortal coil with true permanence.”

The butler clears his throat, swallows phlegm; a chronic habit. “Absolutely, my Lord, I told him, speaking as plainly as possible. But the man is obviously a raving buffoon. He does not appear to believe me. And now, I’m afraid to say, he threatens you with some mischief.”

“Hah!” the Duke snorts, beginning to pace the room, its floor of creaking ancient wooden timbers. The butler watches a shelf of flimsy bone china bric-a-brac perched precariously near, figurines trembling with each step. The Duke is indifferent to these dubious heirlooms of pasty Dresden pink and gilded white, and yet here they sit—have sat thus for years, dancing in porcelain palsy at his frequent outbursts.

The Duke raves. Words flow in a stream now; he is unstoppable, and he uses language high and low, an interwoven entity fleshed out of anger, ragged barking elements that echo in the chamber, pound in dull torpor against the fabric insulating the walls and ring in clean violence against the exposed stone of the lofty ceiling.

“What has the world become? Why, the world’s a pock-marked backside of an ass! Or is it the front of an ass? Nay, a breeding place of dribble-spit idiots and lunatics, insolent upstart commoners daring to threaten blue bloods!”

“Another thing, my Lord. There is also a young . . . female creature at the doors. Very oddly attired, scandalously, I must add. And with no attendant menservants. She claims to be sent by the Duchess of White.”

“Hell and Damnation and Pestilence and Pox! Not in the mood for that again, not at all. No more vile cousins-fifty-seats-removed and their minions snooping around, looking for the essence of my
secret
—their secret, everyone’s secret!—all uselessly. And staying for a fortnight or two, eating out my pantries and emptying my cellars—woe to my ancient wines, my cognac!—not that I care a whit for that filthy piss-sour cognac, blast it to smithereens, but still, they never even offer thanks for it. Instead, endless tedium, broken only by the agony of a myriad questions posed by asses. Jackass braying is what I get, bray, bray, bray. Punctuated by idiotic, meaningless prods into my nature which have nothing to do with anything but succeed in ruining meals.”

“I remember, my Lord. The Duke of Blue’s minion inquired once after the color of the spot at the base of our smallest billygoat’s rear left hoof. Something to do with the mark of the devil on livestock. And we don’t even have goats.”

The younger man gives him a sharp look.

“My Lord . . . It is my business to recall such things. In any case, what should I do about your callers?”

The Duke visualizes pouring rain, a deep gully filled with pea-soup mud and his callers dunked in it, all in one tangled mass of limbs and plastered clothing and human tedium.

“I suppose you must let the wench in,” he says, savoring the word “wench” as though it were a chunk of fresh crusty bread and he sinks his teeth into it. “No use having the White Duchess disgusted by our rudeness—just yet (we’ll be sure to disgust her in excess, later). But the vendor—mischief indeed!—tell him to get out of my castle and off my lands and never to come back if he wants to keep his nose and his precious ancient remains intact!”

The Duke pauses. “No, wait, that’s too trivial. Nose, precious remains, no. Tell him that he should not return here unless he is prepared to lose a limb of his body and a decanter of blood. I shall ravage him with my teeth.”

“Yes, m’Lord, as you say.” The butler inclines his head just in time to conceal a little smile of satisfaction, and exits.

When the thick door shuts behind him, Rossian allows his features to go slack. Longing emerges once again, dredged out of some abysmal repository of raw and half-formed instincts inside. His eyes lose focus, gaze returns to the rectangle of daylight, and he slowly nears the window, its ledge carved into a flat crude fissured shelf of rock, a place to lean with the elbows.

Once more he strives far ahead, and his thoughts are winged and lustful, crimson and orange-feathered birds; they circle out there in dust-mote specks, where the brilliant sky rises over the gaily colorful countryside with its bucolic fields and meadows, mushroom colonies of tiny thatched roof cottages in the distance, and a curling strip of mirror-brightness where the river winks in and out of being along the horizon. The land, as far as the eye can see, as far as a lustful bird-thought can fly, is all his.

Yet Rossian, Lord over this domain, has never been outside the grounds of his castle. It is simply that he may not; he
cannot
.

The young Duke is virile and hale. He is in full possession of mobility in all his limbs, and he carries inside him a steady heart which (despite the vertigo illusion of slowing clockwork) continues to serve him well. And yet, the Duke never looks up and down the full breadth of sky without its edges framed by crumbling walls. He never takes more than a dozen steps in direct sunlight, never lacks shelter from drenching rain or soaks up fully-formed banks of mist with his skin.

Only his spirit wanders forth. And his imagination.

Now, Rossian shivers and looks away, as though coming awake, but as always it is only from one level of dream into another. He inhales dust; he sees disarray, the careless arrangement of the room, the infernal tapestries with dynasties of dead kings, bookcases of abandoned, long-untouched volumes bound in faded brown vellum (after years of obsessive perusal he knows their contents by heart; they never need be opened again), a shelf of flimsy knickknacks that he despises but which supposedly belong to his departed mother and for that he holds on to them as though they were her ashes.

And now there is the imposition to consider—a half-conscious awareness of immediate reality, a wash of cold existence, a grounding.
Truly
, he thinks,
it is only with the coming of my unwanted guests, that I come to life. Maybe I should be grateful to them for dredging me out of the dreaming swamp
.

For what innumerable time he wonders what a particular relation, in this case, the Duchess of White, is like—for she too is imprisoned and he has never seen her in person and never will. He wonders what kind of pet, acolyte, messenger, spy she sends this time. Of all his noble relations, she is the fifth—maybe sixth—to investigate him thus, leaving only the Dukes of Green and Yellow who haven’t yet bothered to pay him a visit through the necessary proxy. It’s a veritable circus, this Ducal family circle of theirs. He has seen a half a dozen circuses; knows them well, for they come to the castle to entertain and shock and invoke pity, as they make rounds of the countryside with their wagons and sequins, their caged beasts, grotesque freaks, and acrobatic fire-eating charlatans.

Circus or not, there is no doubt whatsoever: an ancient curse lies upon the Dukes of this realm—this field and meadow Eden-country sprawling beneath the uncharted infinity of sky. This curse makes his existence what it is, a simmering unending purgatory of suspended being.

Ages upon centuries upon decades and seasons and days ago, the so-called Just King rules all, and they—the Dukes and Barons and the Knights—having amassed great wealth through valor, accomplishments and power, think themselves equal to him and imagine their veins filled with a liquid the color of heaven. They rise in rebellion. They are bright, fierce, arrogant in their blue blood, and the struggle fills codexes of history. When blue blood is spilled, it flows plebeian red, but the ground is hungry for whatever hue as long as it is thick with the residue of life.

Eventually, the Just King, no less a sorcerer than a statesman, quells their revolt. He employs an intricate combination of artifice and force, and is merciful as his name.

The great-great-grandparents of the modern Dukes are not put to death. Instead, a
binding
is laid upon them and their heirs unto eternity. How the King concocts it is unknown to history or speculation. And yet it is an amazing sort of thing; a simple, cruelty-lacking, gentle torment; a death without dying, a spillage of blood without the breaking of skin, anemia without leeches.

The binding amounts to a curious kind of imprisonment—without walls or physical restraint. Neither the Dukes nor their heirs, those children who become Dukes or Duchesses after them, can leave the grounds of their home castles or strongholds. It’s as if an invisible wall of resilient air springs all around, and they cannot venture a step outside. Many try, of course; indeed, all do. They use fierce will, passion, anger, physical effort, sorcery and guile, but naught comes of it. Nothing can, for an unconditional binding of such magnitude is designed to contain.

The great grandparent of the Duchess of Orange, it is said, brandishing his ceremonial sword and cursing at the sky, rides his battle steed at full gallop through the open front gates of his castle. It is to the effect of meeting a steel wall. While the stallion races on undaunted, the rider is thrown and falls dead to the ground on the
inside
of his own castle land. Upon examination
medicalis
and dissection, he is found to be crushed to death by the pressures of what amounts to a mound of quarry stones.

Another brave ancestor, the grandmother of the Duke of Black, feeling that her parody of life is not worth a blade of grass, decides to jump out of the window of the highest turret of her castle. It is a suicide, a sin of outrage against the divine, and no matter if she falls to the ground, or dies in some mysterious way such as a volley of heavenly lightning and thunderclaps—nothing is too unexpected—she swears she would be satisfied. She is prepared for flames and eternal damnation. She is not prepared however, simply to step off the window ledge, only to feel the invisible wall support and hold her aloft in the air, and not allow her further movement outside. There she flounders suspended between the heaven and the earth, a human fish caught in the airy ocean net, a cod, a mackerel, a gasping carp with prodding limbs instead of gills. It is then that the neighboring villagers looking up at the castle witness their first miracle.

Other miracles follow. One Duke has his life miraculously saved when he is shot upon from the outside. The enemy projectile bounces off an invisible
something
as soon as it reaches the boundary of the castle grounds; the curse is revealed to hold its own blessing.

I want none of it, none
, thinks Rossian.
The only blessing is to end, quietly, maybe while submerged in a bliss-dream. I will never find out all the secrets, and I will not try. What remains then is slow decay
.

The
secrets
. . . .

It is rumored that when the Just King lays his binding all those ages upon centuries ago, he also bestows upon the Dukes a single hope of redemption, of an eventual freedom from the curse. The curse itself is everlasting, but it does not disallow a way out. All have been given, supposedly, a different secret power to be passed on through the heir in their lines. When a single Ducal heir discovers
all
of the secrets of the others, he or she will be free of the binding. . . . And maybe then the sky will fall, and the subterranean well waters will rise and flood the land and torrential heaven waters come down from on-high to fill the rivers past their banks—and once the waters from above and below meet, there will no longer be green meadows and verdant fields to plow, only swampland and mist. . . .

And freedom.

Now, locked up in the strange prisons of their own castles, the great-great grandchildren of the original traitors send endless messengers and spies to one another, in spring or autumn, in winter and summer, some in the guise of a proxy friendship “visit,” others not bothering to hide their intent at all.

Each one tries most desperately to discover the secret power of every one of the others. Having no means to accomplish it in person, each has to rely upon the adequacy of trustworthy and guileful messengers, usually other relatives. What a grand heirloom joke the Just King sets in motion all these ages ago! A punishment of endless self-inflicted hell; with in-laws, to boot, in every sense of the word.

“Excuse me? You
are
the Duke of Violet?”

The door to his study has been soundlessly opened while he is lost in thought.

Rossian winces at the ringing timbre of the speech. His grimace intensifies when his gaze, accustomed to aesthetically soothing blandness and order, locates the actual source of the disturbance.

The female creature—for no one sane would call it “woman”—the creature peeks from the open door, head first, then fills the doorway with the rest of her terrifying self, and enters. On her head she wears a peacock screaming-green page cap. Its foundation of fabric is obscured, for the cap is festooned with layers of natural materials that might be employed by nest-building birds or rodents—branches and ivy and wildflowers, tufts of moss, several small apples threaded and attached with a rainbow of satin ribbons. The ribbon ends are weighed with bells and there are bunches of baby’s breath stuck in spots along the brim. If the cap were a Yule table centerpiece, it would be too garish. If it were a bird’s nest, it would frighten magpies.

The rest of her outfit clashes with the headgear in a chromatic fury, and in that way manages to complement. Her upper body is assaulted and consumed by a great doublet of various shades of orange, many generations out of fashion and many sizes too large, while lower down there is harlequin’s masculine hose. One leg is Sherwood Forest green and the other crimson with black stitching at the seams that dares to mimic a highlands tartan. The hose fits loosely like old skin over thin limbs, and suddenly the gaze is drawn to a ludicrous codpiece stuffed with rags.