Mitchell Smith - Kingdom River

"The city?"

"All frozen fine. We have an opera theater and a prison. We have our college, of course, our town-meeting hall, and places where other things are done, secret and not so secret. We are civilized people, NP. We have churches to these people's Mountain Jesus and Kingdom River's Rafting one, and to our Frozen Jesus, as well as chapels for every other Possible Great, so Lady Weather is sung to, also. There is nothing Boston doesn't have!"

"I see. Houses?"

"Apartments. Gracious, don't you know what apartments are?" Apparently startled by such ignorance.

"From copybooks, I do, yes."

"Well, that's what we have! My mother's apartment is almost on the Common. My Uncle Niles – a true Lodge – lives on the Common. He has eleven rooms, not counting the unmentionable."

"The unmentionable would be… the toilet?"

This strange girl nodded Yes, apparently embarrassed to speak it.

"But how… how does everyone keep warm?"

"'Everyone' doesn't keep warm, NP. People of good birth, people with the right piece in their heads, keep themselves warm – warm enough that a cloth coat will always do. The Less Fortunate go around in fat fur boots, and wrapped in furs, and complaining. But they have furs; the Trash-up-top hunt furs for them. I had friends who had to wear furs."

"A city of ice…"

She tapped my knee gently with the tip of her sword's scabbard. "Wouldn't you like to see it? I think you would. You'd love Boston – and we could hunt for the Harvard library together!"

"Perhaps one day, Impatience."

She stuck her tongue out at me. A rude child. "But you're old. You may not have enough days to get to that 'one day.' "

"Time will tell."

"Oh, I know that saying. That's a Warm-time saying."

"Yes."

"Now…" She settled back on my cot, tucked my pillow under her armpit for support. "Now, I want to hear your story."

"But you haven't finished yours. How, for example, you came to be an ambassadress."

"Oh, my Uncle Niles likes me, so I was made diplomat to North Map-Mexico and here I am… Do you want to hear the oldest song?"

"The oldest song?"

She slid to her feet – supple as a deep-southern snake – dropped her scimitar onto my cot, struck a sudden pose, and astonished me with a prancing, impudent little dance, back and forth, her arms crossed at her breasts. And she sang.

" 'Ohhh… I wish I was in Boston, or some other seaport town…!'" Quick little kicking steps back and forth along my tent's narrow aisle. " 'I've sailed out there and everywhere… I've been the whole world round…!'"

There were two more verses – their simple ringing melody sung out in a clear soprano, and danced to with no trace of self-consciousness at all. There was great charm in it… charm I found an uneasy decoration for what might lie beneath.

She came to the end suddenly as she'd started – and sat back on my cot, placid, breathing evenly as if there'd been no song, no vigorous dance.

"Now, NP, how did you come to be a slave of the Grass Lord Khan? Is he a pleasant young man – or cruel?"

I was still digesting the performance, her singing echoing in my ears. "His father's Border Roamers came into our forest. Too many to drive away."

"Then killed your people, surely."

"Yes, in the fighting… and after the fighting was over. But I was Librarian, and pushed one of them off the library's walk when he tore a copybook for pleasure, to watch the white leaves fall so far to the ground."

"A very high library, then?"

"Yes. We built in trees, and of trees, and they loved us."

"Well done to kill a fool! But NP, why didn't they throw you after him?"

"I think I amused them. I think his being killed by me amused them. Then one of the Khan's officers came and ordered the library sent west to Caravanserai – and me with it."

"I would never be a slave." The Boston girl made a face and shook her head. "I'm almost a Lodge – I am a Nearly-Lodge Riley." For emphasis, she slid a few inches of her sword's bright steel free of its sheath… then slid it shut.

"You have not met the young Khan."

"If I did, he would like me for my spirit and beauty. He would never harm someone so pretty and intelligent!" This strange little creature then swooned down along my cot's pillow like a romantic child. "He would fall in love… and I would be his queen."

I was startled, charmed afresh – then, as she lay there, her saber cuddled, I saw in those handsome black eyes (eyes dark as the Khan's, in fact) a gleaming amusement, beneath which seemed to lie dreadful energy, incapable of weariness… Something struck me, then, and though I've never been certain, could never be certain, it occurred to me that the New Englanders might have made with their minds more subtle monsters than those that groaned and flapped great wings – might have made these more intricate others out of their own unborn and beloved children…

There were sudden trumpets then, and stirring in the camp.

The Boston girl was instantly up and off the cot – smiled good-bye – and was gone. The tent-flap, swinging closed, stroked the vanishing curve of her sword's sheath. She left, as formidable people do, an emptiness behind her, as if the earth had nothing to offer in her place.

A sergeant was shouting. The ground shook slightly to the hooves of heavy horses.

I followed outside in time to wave an armored trooper to slow. He sat his sidling impatient charger, a roan already becoming shaggy with winter coat, and gave me a courteous moment.

"Are we breaking camp?"

"No, sir."

"Then what are we doing?"

"What we're told," he said, smiled, nodded, and spurred away.

… The camp's tumult finally done – an expedition apparently suddenly undertaken, and most of the soldiers gone with it – I wandered the hill-top, asked questions of those few left behind, was given no answers, and returned to my tent for a nap. It did occur to me that trouble might have come to the northern border while the army's commander was occupied here… That trouble, of course, would be of my previous master's making, with the appearance of horse-tail banners, and horse archers with angled eyes.

I had, I suppose, convinced myself that my unimportant defection would be pardoned, if the Grass Lord ever met me again. But that conviction proved fragile as smoke when I tried to sleep in the quiet of an almost empty camp, and I realized that I would certainly be casually strangled by my student – Evgeny Toghrul being not a bad loser, but no loser at all. Not even of elderly librarians.

I slept at last, dreamed of perfect painless poisons milked from lovely vines – droplets certain to provide ease and freedom's easy end. I dreamed of dark doses through the afternoon, could taste them… then woke to early evening. I drew a cloak over my shoulders against the chill, and trudged over an encampment scored by horses' shod hooves, dappled with their manure, to a lamp-lit mess tent almost deserted.

The walking wounded, unfit to ride, had been left behind – left behind to cook supper, as well, a grim portent. A corporal I knew, called Leith, was limping among the pans and great kettles, blood spotting her bandages, while she spooned and stirred this and that, exchanging obscenities with two soldiers still staggering from injuries.

Portia-doctor, darkly handsome in a stained brown robe, and seeming weary, sat eating at a bench-table in the big tent's back left corner – and I was interested to see the Boston girl sitting across from her. The girl's tin platter was piled with the army's dreadful Brunswick slumgul, stew enough for two hungry men. This evening, apparently, boiled goat and halved turnips.