Читать книгу The Cracks in the Aether - Robert Reginald - Страница 9

CHAPTER FOUR

“QUEEN L’S”

My meeting with the Council had left me shaken right down to my bones. Never in my memory had a vision so immediately and harshly impacted my psyche, so that I found myself questioning everything that I regarded as “normal.” For if what I’d seen was true—as I had to believe—my entire world was on the verge of disintegration, even destruction.

As a member of the Court, I couldn’t escape being drawn towards one faction or another, willy-nilly—and if I tried to hold myself somehow above the fray, so to speak, that wouldn’t protect me in the end. First I would be courted, and then, when I refused the overtures of one pretender over another, I would fall under immediate suspicion of collaboration with the “enemy,” whomever that might be.

No, there was no safe ground here that I could see anywhere, and the end would come as soon as the aging Queen lost her sensibilities or died, thereby destabilizing the fragile balance at the heart of Paltyrrha. Even I could not see precisely how much time was left to her, but it could not be much more than a decade. I had to find some way to extricate myself from this conundrum, and survive to fight another day.

I also needed the counsel of someone wiser than myself.

I dispatched a message requesting an audience with the Chancellor, not certain of how or even whether he would respond. We had never been close: my previous contacts with him had been limited to my few Council appearances, various receptions and public functions, and one consultation on a personal matter—the whereabouts of a grandson who’d gone missing years earlier. I was hoping that our short, shared experience during that period of heartache would prompt him to make time in his hectic schedule for a consultation of my own.

I received his reply within the hour: “Queen L’s. Tomorrow at the third hour.”

I recognized the reference, of course—any denizen of Paltyrrha would. The statue of Queen Landizábel had been erected at the center of the maze in the Hanging Garden built by King Tarás i for his eighth and last wife. Even as a child, I’d heard the stories of how the White Lady still roamed the maze at night, looking for an honest man; and I’d actually met someone once who’d claimed to have seen her—but that’s another story. And it was there, too, that Melanthrix the Mage had once plotted the overturning of the realm; and that Afanásy Ivánovich, his friend and foe, had envisioned and eventually accomplished the restoration of Kórynthia’s glory. Many important events had swirled around the symbol of the Tighris tughra that formed the heart of the hedge-lined puzzle.

“What do you hope to gain, Master?” Scooter asked, as I nibbled on a light supper of fruit and cheese and bread. I’d already given the wherret an account of the afternoon’s events.

“I wish I knew. I just haven’t been paying enough attention to what’s been going on in the Kingdom, and now my lack of political awareness is rapidly becoming a liability, personally and professionally. I need to understand what I have to do in order to survive what’s coming.”

“And what if you can’t, Sir?”

“I just don’t know.”

And truly, gentlebeings, truly I didn’t. I’d spent my life to this point working unceasingly to secure my future, trying to redefine myself while assiduously avoiding any mention of my exceedingly modest origins. Very few people in this world knew anything about the background of Morpheús the Hypatomancer, and I preferred to keep it that way. Whenever the obvious questions were posed, I sloughed them off, as one discards a worn-out garment. I avoided close relationships with others, both because I had no time to form or sustain them, but also because I wanted my previous life forgotten and purged, even by myself.

The Brothers of Saint Bronisláv had been the ones to rescue me, back in Zmyrna, on the west coast of Asia Minor. My father Kallíkratês had served with Emperor Belissarios ii as the leader of a Hundred, until he’d been wounded at the Battle of Svetfantástika. Then they pensioned him off and sent him home, where he helped maintain the Lesser Julian Aqueduct, and later worked as a stabler and cart-keeper. It provided a modest living.

I was then known as Oridión uios Kallíkratous, being the eldest of four brothers and five sisters, and I had no desire to follow my father’s footsteps into a life of unremitting physical labor. So when the good Brothers came to town, seeking young candidates to be tested for Psairothi training, I stepped forward, much to my family’s consternation—for as the oldest male of the next generation, I was expected to enter the workforce at puberty, and help provide for the needs of the others. But they could not block my application, for under the law of the Byzantine Julian Empire, the needs of the state outweighed the needs of the few.

Brother Amandos’s offer of a gold solidos to secure my father’s permission did much to assuage his concerns. After all, he had other, more malleable children still at home who could provide for his old age.

From that point on, I worked as hard as I could to secure my place in the world, so that I would never have to return to that dusty, dirty, bug-ridden, chicken-filled, two-room stone house on the outskirts of the city. And now all of my efforts were threatened by events seemingly beyond anyone’s control. If the Queen and her government couldn’t find a solution, how could I?

I posed that question to Lord Gronos the next morning, amidst a light drizzle-cum-fog that made the hedgerows loom alarmingly at us out of the gloom as we strolled through the maze. They could have almost been the monsters that had been plaguing my dreams of late.

“If the problem could be solved by talking or negotiating or entreaty,” the old councilor said, “it would have happened already. But something else seems to be at work, driving apart the existing factions in the Kingdom—and not just here, either. Old Emperor Stephanos ii is nearing the end of his reign, and as the center of the Julian state weakens, his eldest son and heir, Prince Ioulianos, spends his days hunting and gambling and chasing young boys. He seems particularly ill-suited to sit on the Golden Throne of Julianople.

“And in the West, the Holy Roman Cæsars seem equally at sea. Pope Leo Magnus ii has been fighting barbarian uprisings in the Maghreb for the past decade, and his three nephews are all striving against each other to succeed him. In Germania, Emperor Bernhardt iv is struggling to control his client states, with another outbreak of religious heresy directed at True-Pope Wilhelm iii providing the flashpoint. Even the Poles, as dangerous as they’ve been in the past, are undergoing one of their periodic convulsions, with rival Kings Bentinck ii and Iwon i tearing their country apart.

“Dissension, poverty, economic dislocation, political failure—all of these seem to be spreading throughout the civilized states of the world. It’s as if an outside force is deliberately fracturing us, revealing the worst elements of our society and nature. Queen Evetéria may not be the freshest flower on the Tighris family tree, but she tries very hard, and she feels her lack of control just as painfully as any of her more capable ancestors might have. And she knows all too well—and understood the fact long before you emphasized it the other day—that her death could mean the end of all her family has struggled to achieve. The little men who want to occupy the Tiger Throne are none of them her equal. Only Lady Karlyna possesses, in my estimation, the intellect and ability to hold this country together, but she has the least chance of any.”

“What do you suggest that I do, Lord Gronos?”

I heard the cawing of a crow somewhere off to my left, and then another, far away to my right.

“If you can contribute to the political stability of the state, you have an obligation to do so. If you cannot, you should leave, preserving what you can of your life and knowledge.

“For myself, I shall remain at Court until they inter my body under the earth—which I think is not long distant. But your recent revelation at the Council meeting makes you a target, Morpheús.”

“But I thought the proceedings were secret,” I said, startled at the notion that someone would want to harm me. I’d always eschewed training in the martial arts—perhaps I’d erred in slighting my education in this arena.

“Ha! Already the rumors have started, and they’re wilder by far than your prognostications. The factions will want to confirm or deny what they’ve heard—and the only way they can do that is by taking you prisoner. You should return home today. You can better defend yourself there.”

“What does the Queen say?”

“She agrees. You have her leave to go.”

I sighed. “I just don’t know what to do, Sir.”

Having spent my life furthering my own ambitions, it seemed, well, unseemly suddenly to decamp—and lose all of the time and effort I’d put into the project of creating myself.

Then I heard a rustling in the hedges to my left, and I felt the Chancellor’s bony fingers grab my elbow and pull me to a halt.

“Quiet!” he hissed. Then: “Listen!”

He did something that I couldn’t see with his other hand and muttered a word that I couldn’t hear, and then I discerned quite clearly the mumbling of two other low-pitched voices.

“Where are they?” one said.

“I can’t see anything in this damned mist,” the other man replied.

“Jocko’s on the other side somewhere. Maybe we should call him.”

“And tip off the marks?” the second man said. “Keep your voice down!”

Slowly we edged backwards along the path, retracing our previous steps. Lord Gronos pointed at a mid-sized stone barely visible on one side of the walkway, and motioned me to pick it up. I threw it as hard as I could in the direction we’d previously been traversing, and could hear it crashing through the hedges.

“They’re over there!” the first man said. “Come on!”

“That will keep them busy long enough for us to escape,” the old man hissed.

When we were safely back in the palace, Gronos turned to face me in the entranceway before heading back to his quarters.

“Everyone says that you have a singular talent, Master Morpheús, one that has not been evident here in many generations. I’ve seen it displayed only twice, and on both occasions, I was greatly impressed by your workings. Can you do more with your ability than play parlor games with the Queen? Maybe you need to look within, before you can look without. If you can so clearly envisage the future, why can’t you shape that future? Instead of being a Hypatomancer, perhaps you should become a Hyphainomancer, a Weaver of dreams—dreams that we can all share and believe in.

“But I’m just an old man living out his final years. What do I know, anyway?”

And then he kissed me on both cheeks and walked away.

I never saw him again in my life.

But I thought to myself then—and retain the thought even today—that he knew a great deal more than I, about most everything. The country of old men is visited all too seldom by the young, who perhaps envisage in those ancients’ physical and mental decay their own Ultima Thule; but miss the fact that the fallen arches of elderly feet have trodden the very same paths that their juniors now traverse; and that, for the merest of kind words and a tad of patience, the latter could have derived much wisdom from their elders, and avoided repeating the mistakes of an earlier generation.

Such has been the saddest observation of our fathers and grandfathers, but like so many other truisms of life, is forgotten anew with each washing of the spheres. All I knew after talking with him was that my own trial was yet to come—and I dreaded it.