Читать книгу The Cracks in the Aether - Robert Reginald - Страница 7

CHAPTER TWO

“THE GREEN—OR THE PUCE?”

Her Puissant and Sublime Majesty had embarked upon a massive redecoration project shortly after her accession fifteen years earlier, and the overall result was somewhat less than the rendition of the parts. The grand old tableaux etched in stone had been covered over with ghastly, garish tapestries and paintings harkening back to a time and an art that had never actually existed. I found them, well, distasteful and disrespectful, but most of the minions at Court seemed to think otherwise. Perhaps I was just out-of-touch, or maybe this feeling of growing ennui with my situation derived from some other sphere entirely. Whatever the case, I did not relish the thought of another somnolent session with the Queen.

The Majordomo Baldvín announced us, and then we entered the “Little”—the Crimson—Throne Room.

Queen Evetéria i—long may she reign!—had seated her expansive rear on a padded chair at the left-hand wall, surrounded by long-suffering sycophants and simpering signorinas. Among them I spied the shiny white cowl of Bishop Palladios, her favorite spiritual advisor, bobbing up and down in the mêlée like some bloated maggot, sucking on the hopes and fears of his congregation.

“Morphy!” she screamed, as soon as she spotted me. “Oh, do come here, you silly little thing! I need your help!”

I waved my arms to the right and left, and the masses parted before me. I felt like a modern-day Moses.

The Queen had several swatches of cloth clutched in her crab-like claws.

“Do I go with the green—or the puce?”

She thrust them into my face.

I must confess that I thought neither sample suitable for anything but the garde-robe, but of course I couldn’t say so, not with Scooter present—its sensibilities would have been severely tested.

“The green, Majesty,” I said, dropping to one knee in acknowledgment of her rank.

“Oh, how absolutely sublime!” she said. “You’re absolutely, absolutely right as rain, as always.”

She grabbed the samples with one hand, and raised me up with the other, and I found myself looking her straight in the face.

Queen Evetéria was some five-and-fifty years of age, with a bulging bush of oily black hair (a wig, I knew), and a narrow, almost pinched face saddened with two spots of rouge. She had never been intended nor trained for the place of power she now occupied, but the unfortunate death of her younger brother, Prince Féliks, in battle against the Liets, and the subsequent passing of her father, King Ánatol, and his childless male heir, Prince Zakháry, before him, left her the only possible candidate for the throne. Thus she became just the second Regina Regnant of Kórynthia, after Her Late Majesty, Queen Grigorÿna i, who had reigned more than a century earlier.

She was not a mean person or an evil one, but she lacked the judgment and decisiveness needed to rule a country as large and diverse as ours. She spent her days in a royal fairytale she called Tighrishály, playing her games of “Praise the Queen” and “Renovate This Room”; and that, with a constant attendance upon the duties of the Church, encompassed all the days of her life.

She shooed away the Lady Balbina, and patted the seat next to her.

“Here, Morpheús. My Scanner Prime absolutely needs to find some of that sooth for me in the æther, so pray do sit down and tell me true: is green the way to go?”

“Indeed, my Queen,” I said, “It’s not easy being green, but I know that someone with your sense of style can always find a way.”

“Oh, I do agree, I do,” she exclaimed, clapping her hands together, almost like a little girl. “Do you hear that, Balby?—it’s green! It’s going to be green!”

“Then green it shall surely be, Your Majesty,” the lady said.

“I hereby order it done!” Evetéria said, putting her hands together once again.

Then she turned sideways to me: “Tell me, Morphy, tell me about my future. What’s in store for me this next year?”

What, indeed? I thought to myself. And what’s in store for you, pray tell, oh soothsayer?

I decided to play at chiromancy. I gently took the Queen’s narrow hand in mine, and turned it palm skyward, slowly tracing the life lines etched therein.

“Hmmm,” I said.

“What is it?” she asked, almost breathless with anticipation. I suddenly envisioned her as a girl of fifteen.

“Hmmm,” I repeated.

“Tell me, tell me, oh do tell me,” she said.

“This is unseemly, Your Majesty,” Bishop Palladios suddenly interrupted. “The Church frowns on such pursuits.”

The cleric was a fat, flashy, frumpy little toad of two-and-sixty years, who owed his meteoric rise in stature solely to the fact that he had been the Queen’s chaplain before her unexpected succession to the throne.

“Oh, you’re such a fussbudget at times, Pallády,” Evetéria said. “Why don’t you go pray for my soul or something?”

She waved the prelate away, and he had no choice but to obey. The Queen could be vacuous and vacillating, but I knew from my own observation that to cross the will of Her Imperiousness could invite sudden and brutal repercussion. Those of her creatures who dwelt in Court quickly became aware that her moods often wavered on the winds of whim.

“Now, Morphy, what do you see in my future?”

I saw plenty of things, including Her Majesty’s undignified death some years hence—for such was the nature of my talent—but I could relate none of these things to Evetéria. They flashed through my mind like a stack of cards, images that slipt by quickly—one, two, three!—and then were gone, barely leaving a trace.

For it is the simple, sad truth that most people do not welcome the simple, sad truth, particularly as it relates to their own lives. Perhaps that is why a hypatomancer can only envision the future of others, and never, ever—of himself.

“A glorious destiny indeed, Majesty,” I exclaimed, in a voice loud enough to be heard throughout the room. “Glorious and grand. You will be known to history as La Demoiselle Décoratrice, the greatest ruler of her kind, who created an entirely new standard of fashion in the East. No one will ever be able to match your fantabulously fantastic designs.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” was all she could say. “You’re so good to me, Morphy.”

She had no idea, which was perhaps just as well. I could feel the silent humor of the wherret beating upon my soul.

“Oh, oh, oh,” the creature whispered in my ear. “You’re so good to me, Morphy.”

I had to bite my cheek to keep from laughing out loud.

“Is something wrong?” Evetéria asked, looking at me with deep concern in her eyes—well, as deep as her concern ever reached with anyone.

“A, um, a frog in my throat, Majesty,” I said. I coughed several times. “Perhaps, if Your Majesty doesn’t mind….”

“Of course, of course. You should retire at once. Oh, thank you, dear Scanner Prime. I shall increase your stipend to three thousands of pounds of salted herring a year.”

Oh, joy! I thought to myself.

“Thank God for all the fish!” Scooter hissed.

I almost lost control at that moment, but I somehow managed to keep my face straight-laced until I reached my quarters.

“Thank God for all the fish?” I said, starting to laugh.

“Well,” my companion replied, “at least one of us gained something from the encounter. Salted herring—why, that’s one of the very best things about Nova Europa.”

“That might be a slightly biased perspective,” I said.

I pulled the cord to order dinner.

I nearly choked when the servant delivered a platter piled high with eels.