Orson Card - Hart's Hope

There was a hurry about the servants that he passed, and urgency, sometimes even fear. That was a sure sign that Queen Beauty was feeling out of sorts. The servants always scurried then. Silently Orem apologized to them for making their day a bit more difficult than usual today. Queen Beauty, his poor wife, had perhaps had little sleep.

As quickly as possible he lost himself in the woods, wandering as he pleased until he found himself at the high west wall of the Castle. He walked north along the wall until it curved in sharply at Corner Castle, where the Lesser Donjon waited, the prison of the great, more dangerous in its gentle way than the Gaols. He could hear from within it, faintly, a distant cry; perhaps, he thought, it's only a sound from the city beyond the wall. It was not. Orem pressed his ear against the stone of the tower and the sound came clear. It was the scream of a man in agony; it was the scream of the worst terror a man can know. Not the fear of death, but the fear that death would delay its coming.

Orem could not conceive of the torture that would arouse such a cry from a human throat. The stone he leaned against was cold, and he shivered. The sun was now half-hid behind the western wall, and already the air was getting cooler. He left the tower and the suffering man inside it. He wondered if his own throat could ever make a sound like that. If it did, he would not know it: when such a sound is made, its maker is past hearing.

He walked back a different way, through the woods again, but this time brutally, thrusting the brambles out of the way and letting them whip back savagely in his face. He let his shirt tear, let his face bleed; pain was a delicious language, one that he knew how to understand. Then he came suddenly to the Queen's Pool.

It was water from the Water House, the pure spring that flowed in an endless stream as if God himself were pumping, right in the heart of the Castle. The Baths of the Water House were public and the water good; but most of the water went somewhere else, went in aqueducts to the Temples, to the great houses and embassies lining King's Road and the even more exclusive Diggings Avenue, went in bronze pipes to Pools Park, where the artists dwelt outside the Palace, and came here, to the Queen's Pool, where few ever bathed and the water was as pure as a baby's tears. Orem stayed back in the trees, just looking at the water rippling in the breeze, transparent, green, and deep because the sun had not yet risen far enough to shine from the surface.

While he watched, two visitors came to the pool. The first to come was an old man in a loincloth, and Orem knew him: the mad servant who called himself God and had no pupils in his eyes. He came and stood across the pool from Orem, looking down into the water. Orem did not move. They seemed to wait forever, both of them statues in the gathering night.

She swam slowly, barely rippling the water, never splashing at all. She is misnamed, thought Orem: Not weasel but otter is her animal self. Then she dove under the surface.

Now the servant who called himself God moved, throwing wide his arms. Green flashed his eyes, a light so bright that Orem looked away. And when he turned to watch again, the old servant was naked, pissing savage green into the water, his eyes bright green and staring into the wood. Still Weasel had not come up. The green spread shining across the water until the pool was all suffused with that living light. Still Weasel stayed beneath. Then the old man bowed and bent and knelt beside the pool, and dipped his head into the water up to the neck. Only then did Weasel rise, only her head above the surface, as if those faces could not live on the same side of the water. She seemed not to notice the vividness of the pool.

The tableau broke; the old servant pulled his head from the water, and Weasel turned to him, reached out and touched him. Perhaps they spoke: Orem could not hear. She kissed his brow and the servant—wept? Sobbed or cried out or spoke a single word, Orem could not tell. Then the servant arose, taking his loincloth, and walked haltingly into the well-trimmed path that would take him to the Palace. Weasel swam a few minutes more until the water gradually grew dull and ordinary. But Weasel did not become dull. Orem looked at her and realized that it was not an accident the Queen kept her close at hand. Those nearest the Queen were those most tortured; the quiet ugly woman who had come with him on so many jaunts with Belfeva and Timias was more than she seemed, surely, or the Queen would not torment her.

He cast his net for her, and counted the layers of spells, the depth of the spells the Queen had laid to pen her in, and yes, as he suspected, she was bound and tortured. Who are you, Weasel? Prisoner here as much as I, and perhaps as hopeless. I who will die, am I luckier than you? For I will soon be free of her, and you will not, bound forever in the company of a Queen who grieves you as she can; and she can so exquisitely give grief.

It was then that Orem first loved Weasel Sootmouth. Not for her flesh—Orem had known the body of the Queen. Not out of pity—he knew her too well to see her from the distance that pity requires. He loved her because he admired her. For bearing without complaint the burden that the Queen put on her. For still being gentle and loving when she had ample reason to be bitter. And because when she swam in the pool and kissed the servant who called himself God, she was, oddly enough, beautiful. Does that surprise you, Palicrovol? That of all people, your son could look at Weasel Sootmouth and see beauty? The Queen Discovers Her Husband

"Queen Beauty has been looking for you."

"Oh," said Orem.

"She wants you to come to her at once."

For a terrible moment he thought that his war with her was already over, that she had found him out and meant to kill him now. He did not feel as brave as he had felt yesterday on the portico. Then he realized that if it were death she intended, she would not have entrusted her message to this quiet servant. So he followed the servant to a place in the maze that he had not known existed; Beauty's apartments were well-masked, both with magic and with the illusions of clever artisans. Having gone to her once with a guide, however, the illusions were spoiled for Orem and he could find his way again easily. As for the spells, they never worked on him at all.

Queen Beauty lay in her bed looking out the window when he arrived. The servant left him alone with her. The door closed, and she turned to him.

"My Little King," she said.

Her beauty was undiminished, but her weariness could not be hidden. After all, it was a living beauty that she had, and her face was not unexpressive. She was tired, she was worried, she was grim, and her belly was heavy with the child that she had carried for eleven months. Only then did it occur to him that the pregnancy might be sapping her strength, and that was why she could not respond well to his attacks on her in the night.

"I fear I've ignored you far too long," she said.

"I've made friends."

"I know," she said. "Weasel tells me that you're pleasant company."

He could not hide the fact that it pleased him to know that Weasel Sootmouth had said such a thing—he was young enough to make more of that than was really in it. "Does she think so?"

"It's your child in my belly, you know. I'm weary with the waiting, and the child weighs me down. You should cheer me up."

"How can I?"

"Tell me things. Tell me about your country home. Tell me about childhood on the farm. They say your rustic stories are amusing."

It was a grotesque hour he spent then, telling tales of High Waterswatch to the woman who meant to kill him. It galled him to tell of his father and mother to her—but what other stories could he tell? She laughed a little when he told her of his early attempts at soldiering, and how the sergeant regarded him as unfit. She seemed interested in everything, even tales of how a farmer knows when the grain is near to harvest, and whether a cow is full of twins, and the signs of a storm.