Orson Card - Hart's Hope

If he had chosen to surrender all his passion, she had chosen to surrender all her will. "Are you a virgin?" she whispered, her voice soft and urgent.

It was not enough. Impatiently she asked again. "My boy, my husband, my Little King, has your seed ever spilled inside another woman's womb?"

And Orem spoke, though where he found his voice he wasn't sure. "Never."

She leaned forward and kissed him. It was a cold kiss, yet it lingered and Orem did not want it ever to end. As she kissed him, her breasts leaned in to touch his chest, and then they met hip to hip, and her left hand was behind his back and she clung to him. He did not think of the unfaced sisters or the whore he had been unfit to use; he had neither need nor wish to worry about what his body could and could not do. The kiss ended. "I will never love you," she whispered. "You will never have my heart." But the tones of her voice rang with love, and Orem trembled at the power she had without using any magic at all.

Should he answer? He could not. For he had worn the ring on the hand of passion, and that was a vow to love forever and completely. Yet in his heart he knew, without knowing why, that he would never love her, either. His heart was surrendered, but not to her; her will was surrendered, but not to him.

"We will have a child," she said softly, leading him to the place where the floor gave way to a vast sea of a bed.

"It will be a boy," she said as they knelt together and her hands softly touched him.

"I will give him all of myself," she said, "and that is why there will be none of me for you."

They lay together all the night, and the twelve-month child was conceived. Orem knew the moment that it happened, for the Queen cried out in joy, and for a moment her eyes were too bright to look upon. I am in and of you, Orem said silently.

Two times you had her body also, Palicrovol. Once she did not want you, and once you did not want her. But did you ever look into her face and say I am in and of you? You gave her no Dance of Descent, King of Burland. Do you begrudge her this: that once in her life she had a man who loved her with his whole heart, if only for that moment?

And if it tortures you to know that another man was with her in her life, console yourself with this: he only knew her but the once, though for weeks afterward, Orem had only to think on some moment of that night with Beauty and his body would be roused, would violently spend itself, all in a few seconds from the memory of it. When Beauty possesses a man, Palicrovol, is he to be held responsible for what his body does?

Yet I will not pretend that she forced him the way she forced you. Orem knew as no other man could know that none of it was magic. She had worked no spell on him that night. She could not have, for a twelve-month child cannot be magically conceived. What Orem felt for her was genuine, and not just for love of her perfect flesh. I know Orem truly, and I know that when he loved his bride it was not a Queen he loved, but rather the girl Asineth as she might have been if she had not been destroyed in her childhood.

The Queen's Companions

How Orem came to be called the Little King and met those who would most kindly, most cruelly use him.

The Love of Beauty

Who can blame Orem Scanthips for awaking in wonder, surprised at joy? For the first time in his life the truth was better than the dream, and more improbable. For that first hour he thought he had found name and place and poem, all in one, and that all were happy. Sunlight danced from a thousand mirrors. And more:

I believe that if Beauty had been kind to him, he would have loved her, and so we and the gods would have been undone.

Yet if Beauty had been able to be kind, it would not have taken her death to release us all from bondage.

So we go in circles. And here is the cruelest circle of all, Palicrovol: I believe that, by the end of her life, Beauty loved Orem Scanthips as much in her way as the Flower Princess loved her King. Though Orem was born when Beauty had already passed three centuries of life in power, still the girl Asineth had found her lover—a dreamer, a good man, a kind man who cared less for his plan than for the people in it. That is how he was unlike you, Palicrovol, and that is why she loved him.

Poor Beauty. May I not pity her, of all people? She loved him, but she had only learned one way to show her love—through cruelty and abuse. After all, whom did she love most in all the world? Those who had dwelt at her right and left hand for fifteen score years: Weasel Sootmouth, Urubugala, and Craven. That was what she knew of love. No wonder Orem never recognized her love when she gave it to him. Even now, if he knew that she had loved him, it would break his heart.

But he did not know, and does not know, because this is how she served him from the first day of their life as husband and wife:

The Naming of the Little King In the morning they dressed him in brocades and velvet, clothes so heavy that at first they bowed him and made him look a bit ridiculous. He did not know how to wear the robes of a King—that is not born in a man, as you know. Then they led him through the palace, whispering to him the names of the rooms so he could ask for them again, though he did not yet know what to do with the Chamber of Stars or the Hall of Asps, the Porch of Keening or the Room of the Dancing Bulls.

"Are you blind?" Orem asked softly. Surely he could not see without an aperture for vision; yet didn't the eyes look up at him?

"To light I am blind," whispered the old man, not taking his gaze from Orem's face.

Where had he seen such eyes? "Who are you?" Orem asked.

"I am God," said the old man. He smiled, and his mouth had neither tongue nor teeth nor anything at all—just blackness behind the lips. Then he bent again to his work, and the servants gently insisted Orem up the stairs.

Who but the Little King would have spoken to an aged, naked servant oiling the wooden stairs? This is sure: only one who carried with him an invisible hole in Queen Beauty's Searching Eye could have heard the answer that Orem heard. He did not understand; he did not forget, either, despite all he learned of Queen Beauty before the hour was up.

Who but Queen Beauty could be noticed in the Moon Chamber, with its great discs of silver lit by a thousand candles? She used it as her private court. The servants led Orem to the edge of that huge circle of glass called now the Round Table and called then Beauty's Moon. He faced the Queen, who sat on her ivory throne.

When the servants had left, the Queen arose and stepped forward, offering him her hand. Orem took it and started to bow to her, unsure of protocol, thinking only of the night before and marveling that this woman now was his wife. But the Queen stopped him, and did not let him bow. Instead she bowed her head to him. The gasp from behind him was the first he noticed that someone else was in the room.

"Beauty has taken a wife," intoned a high-pitched voice with an edge of madness, "to last her all his life. Has she taken him to bed with poison in his head?"

The Queen lifted her head and faced the others in the room; Orem also turned. In the middle of the table sat a black man, a small man, nearly naked, with a headdress of cow's horns on his head and an immense false phallus hanging from his belt. He had not been there when Orem entered. It was he who had recited the rhyme, and now he spoke again.

What a pretty little king, With a pretty little thing,

When he finds he has no sting?

"Shut up," the Queen said beautifully. The dwarf turned a somersault and landed, laughing, at Beauty's feet.

"Ah, beat me, beat me, Beauty!" cried the black man, and then he wept piteously. In a moment he started tasting the tears, then retreated to a corner of the room, dabbing at his eyes with the stuffed phallus that dangled longer than his legs.