The Prince of Morning Bells Read online

  “Well, that’s the way these childhood defenses sometimes turn out,” the dog said philosophically. “But I’m sure he meant well, although actually I don’t have a very high opinion of Wizards. Black-magic fellow?”

  “No!”

  “Still, you never can tell.” He caught the gathering wrath on her face and added hastily, “Speaking of myself, not you. Your Wizard may have just had an off day, or been misled by some new revisionist school. Now me, I’m under a genuine curse.”

  Kirila regarded him with interest. It was difficult to see clearly in the smoky firelight, but she made out that he was not really black, as she had first supposed, but a rich, opaque purple, deeper than royalty, the color of the summer sky when night has not quite begun and only Vega and Altair are shining overhead. Otherwise, he looked pretty much like any conventional Labrador retriever.

  “I suppose it must be awkward going through life purple,” she said shyly, and the dog bristled.

  “I didn’t mean that. Actually, the color is rather attractive, when I haven’t muddied it tussling with bats. No, I’m not really a dog at all, in any way. I’m a prince. Fact is, for the last ten years I’ve been enchanted by a Wizard.”

  “A young prince?” Kirila asked suspiciously. She’d heard that line before.

  “Alas, no,” the dog said, smiling thinly. “A very old prince. Old enough to be your gr... your father. Only this wretched dog’s body is young, with an old mind in it. That only happens in spells, by the way, the folklore of popular heroes to the contrary, although you see enough of the opposite combination running around.” He seemed delighted with these observations until he noticed that Kirila hadn’t understood them. He sighed. “What are you questing for?”

  “The Heart of the World.”

  The dog did a very curious thing. He shuddered all over, the shudder running systematically from his shoulders to his purple hindquarters, like a jerked rope. Then he scrambled up, trotted out of the clearing into the darkness, trotted back after a second, and sat down trembling in front of Kirila.

  “Take me with you.”

  She regarded him with astonishment. “You? Why?”

  “Because that’s where I’m going in order to have this spell removed—the only place in the world it can be removed. The Tents of Omnium.”

  “The Tents of Omnium? What’s that?”

  The dog looked disgusted. “You certainly don’t run a very well-organized Quest, do you? That’s where the Heart of the World lies, in the Tents of Omnium.”

  “I didn’t know that!” she exclaimed, delighted. “How do you know?”

  “Oh, I’ve been around one or two places. If we travel together, I could protect you, if you plan into getting into many more arguments with bats, and you—”

  “I really can take care of —”

  “—could hunt and cook for me.”

  Diverted, Kirila asked, “Can’t you hunt?” She looked at the Labrador retriever’s muscled haunches and powerful, long jaws.

  “I am not a dog,” he said loftily. “I am a prince, and do not care for raw meat. I happen to be very partial to Eggs Anna and apple tart.”

  Kirila looked doubtful, but she only said, “Do you know the way to these Tents of Omnium?”

  He shook his head, his silky purple ears flopping from side to side. “Only that it’s north.”

  “North,” she repeated thoughtfully, chewing on the tip of her dagger. “I had guessed that, somehow.”

  “That’s a good way to cut your lip.”

  Absently she slipped the dagger back into her belt. “What’s your name? I can’t just keep on calling you Dog.”

  The Labrador dropped his eyes and muttered something under his breath.

  “What? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Chessie,” he said sourly. Kirila looked again at his sleek haunches and broad chest, and began to smile. She opened her mouth but before she could say anything, Chessie snapped, “No, I don’t. I hate the sight of so much as a pawn. But the Wizard played all the time, and he named me. His idea of a joke. Ha, ha.”

  Kirila tried to stop smiling, but the corners of her mouth quirked by themselves.

  “He would sit there at that damn board and enchant me into moving white, but not into knowing how. Do you know what it’s like to sit enchantment-bound in a drafty castle night after night for years, not even able to twitch your tail, and make a mess of the Sicilian Defense?”

  “No,” said Kirila.

  “Be made to make a mess of the Sicilian Defense. It was all at his whim. Once he gave me a stalemate. ‘The stalemate is the penalty for mauling without killing. One-half point!’ And threw me half a bone. That was supper.”

  Kirila had stopped smiling.

  “In time I learned to play. In enough time you can learn anything. But I still could only move the pieces he enchanted me into moving. Knowledge without power, ha ha, how funny to watch. So he named me Chessie.”

  The girl held herself very still. “But you must have another name, your real one, the one you had before the Wizard enchanted you.”

  The dog raised his head and looked at her, and she was startled by his eyes. They were light brown, the color of burnt sugar, but they had the shifting depths of black eyes, and in them moved something too terrible and lonely to be called simply pain. They were the eyes of a castaway, looking back at where Atlantis had been.

  “I can’t remember it,” he said quietly. “That’s part of the spell. I don’t know my name, my kingdom, my family, what old prince I really am.”

  They sat in silence for several minutes before she dared touch him. Then she reached out and stroked his neck, her hesitant fingers gentle as rain, and said softly, “We’ll find it. We’ll find the Tents of Omnium, somewhere.”

  They sat still a long time, and then wordlessly prepared for sleep. The wind was still rising, the air smelled of clammy mold, and in the distance thunder sounded. Kirila would have liked to keep one hand on the dog’s paw as she slept, but she was remembering the lucky-charm bat, and she rolled tightly in her blankets on the other side of the smoky fire.

  Three

  All the next day it rained, and the next day, and the whole following week. It wasn’t an awesome thun-derstorm or a majestic downpour, or even the kind of steady rain that makes the pattering illusion of company on the roofs of lonely garrets. It was a clammy, dreary, bone-chilling drizzle that always seemed about to stop but rarely did, and even then hung damply in the air so that no one would forget its imminent resumption. Kirila’s bed-roll and clothing became sodden, and sodden velvet never looks anything but tacky. Despite the hood pulled around her face, rivulets ran off the ends of her long red hair and down the sides of the horse, who took no notice of them, plodding on with his great head down. Chessie’s fur became matted in muddy patches. He gave off the strong, close smell of wet dog.

  The land sloped steadily upwards, and often Kirila had to dismount and lead the horse as he picked his way through brambles or over jagged, irregular rocks. There ought to have been a splendid view, but between thick slate mist and the pockmarked craters in which they frequently found themselves—there was always water in the bottom, and one of Kirila’s boots had two tiny leaks, shaped like bat’s teeth—they could see nothing of the valley behind them. As they rode, they talked, with the unexpected frankness of travelers who happen to find themselves congenial. Kirila told Chessie about her childhood, her Wizard, the time she fell into the moat, her restless longing for this Quest (“I just felt that somewhere there must be something more than weaving tapestries and hunting quail, although of course they’re all right in their place”), the coziness of the Great Hall at Castle Kiril when it was midwinter, and the pet dragon she’d had when she was twelve (“Only a cub, of course”). Chessie told Kirila nothing, but he sang ballads in a true voice that could achieve a piquantly exaggerated mimicry of almost any accent, including that of a seraph disputing the right-of-way with an airborn buzzard.

 
They never saw anyone else. Once they heard a hunting horn somewhere in the neighboring woods, a thin, disembodied sound like a consumptive moose. Kirila grew excited, and haloo-ed, and stood up in her stirrups, waving her arms. The sound became fainter.

  “Quick, Chessie, follow them! I think they were heading east!”

  “We don’t want to go east.”

  “But maybe we can trade supplies, or have a campfire, or something!”

  “With a communal sing, I suppose.”

  “Oh, damn the communal sing! Hurry, before they get away. Oh, the horn’s fading out! Go, Chessie, scent, boy!”

  Chessie sat down abruptly on the sopping moss. “That,” he said, offended, “is the sort of thing I never do.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, don’t be so proud. They’re slipping away—oh, there goes the last of the horn!” A few tooting coughs reached them, and then nothing but the drone of rain on leaves and rocks.

  “They’re gone,” Kirila said crossly. She glared at Chessie, the rain streaming off her hair and over the tip of her nose. “It might have been nice to talk to someone else, you know. We haven’t seen anyone for over a week.”

  “This isn’t exactly rolling farmland.”

  “But you’d think we’d see someone. A hunter, or a gypsy, or a woodcutter, or something.”

  “I thought you told me that you liked being alone. “

  “Well, I do. But not completely, all the time. It would be nice to talk to somebody.”

  “Thank you,” Chessie said furiously. “Probably we haven’t seen anyone else because they all had at least sense enough to take their water-wrinkled human bodies in out of the rain!”

  They didn’t speak for nearly two days, except to icily say things like “Would you like more rabbit, or shall I finish it?” or “You take first sleep shift, I can wait.” When Kirila shot a pigeon or a dove, Chessie fetched it to her and dropped it at her feet with a canine subservience parodied just enough to be insolent. They traveled thirty feet apart, one on either side of the road, foundering through the dripping weeds while the cleared path went to waste.

  Eventually the rain stopped. The occasional forest had finally petered out completely, and they were crossing a rocky plateau, the rocks grudgingly yielding place only to straggly, dun-colored grass and a few stumpy trees. The sun never fully came out, but slowly creaked from one thin gray cloud to another, an aging courtesan flirting tiredly with a soiled fan.

  On the afternoon of the second silent day, as Kirila was squatting by the horse, checking its shoes for stones, she said abruptly, “I know you’re not a dog.”

  Chessie nodded. “I know.” They trotted off, both using the center of the road, smiling at each other shyly. Subsequently, the horse picked up fewer stones.

  Kirila made camp at nightfall. There were only a few faint stars and the water was brackish, but she nonetheless hummed as she spread out her bedroll to dry and pinned her long hair up off her neck. After she had scoured the cooking pot and gathered enough firewood for breakfast and set her wet boots by the fire with wadded cloth to plump out the toes, they sat next to each other, watching the glowing flames. Kirila’s eyes were dark and dreaming, and she smiled a half-smile without knowing it. A little wind sloughed through the rocks and grass, mourning thin.

  “Chant us a lay, Chessie, of errant knights and beasts most dreadful.” This might be her first Quest, but she knew the proper forms.

  Chessle scratched his ear with his hind foot. “I can’t think of one, offhand.”

  “Well, then, of something else!”

  He kicked at the edge of the fire with one forepaw. An ember fell out and smoked redly on the muddy ground, and he stared at it steadily while he spoke.

  “Once, in a time not yet come but not far distant, there was no more magic. All the heroes were dead, and men aspired instead to be accountants, and forgot that there had been such things as heroes. The old gods had fled, and the weeping of angels in high heaven, and other related sounds, were not heard on earth because no one listened. No one ever saw an elf, or a griffin, or the Wilis. No one even saw a wigyn. No spells—”

  “What’s a wigyn?” Kirila asked.

  “A species of tiny flying dragon, long believed to be extinct. Crimson, with a pointed tail. No spells—”

  “But if they’re extinct anyway—”

  “I said believed to be extinct. People will believe any fool thing. No spells—”

  “But when they—”

  “Kirila, do you want to listen to this or not?”

  “Of course I do!”

  “Then listen. No spells rode the evening wind, and the moonlight was faulted for not being bright enough to plant beans by. Men preferred flatulence to flamboyance.”

  Kirila opened her mouth to say that she liked beans, thought better of it, and settled more comfortably on her rock.

  “There was a painter living then who had been born out of his time, as some men always are. He could see colors, and shades of colors, and shades of shades; what’s more, he could see the shapes of things as they were meant to be, and not only as they were. He painted beautiful women, and everyone gasped at their beauty except the subjects, who went home and looked in their mirrors and wept. But eventually he grew tired of painting beautiful women, and he shut himself up in his studio and began to paint shapes he knew in the muscles of his right hand, but not in his mind.

  “He painted a Wili, fragile as sea foam, with death-sad eyes and hair of crystal smoke so tangled in the moonlight that it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. People who saw the painting felt a choking in their hearts, as if something were missing there, and afterwards several persons refused to go out on moonlit nights. A deputation was got together to visit the painter. They didn’t ask him not to paint any more Wilis—somehow they couldn’t do that, although they would have liked to—but they asked him to paint such things behind bars, slanting across the foreground of the picture, to lend them a little distance, and give the people breathing space.

  “So he did. He painted a mist-born dragon breathing fires that dispelled his own birth mist, raging at their loss, his tail whipping the fires into demented crimson frenzy. He painted a little godling tumbling to Earth through a purity of stars and being caught in the white arms of a guardian seraph tender as love. He painted a still unicorn at dawn, and a scarlet, slant-browed demon beckoning lewdly from the fire in a kitchen hearth, and a lovely princess so cruelly bound with chains that a few of the less well-adjusted men suffered foolish fleeting thoughts of heroism. And all of them he painted behind thick black bars, with a few short people sketched in the foreground, looking in.

  “The people who saw the paintings were reassured by the bars, and talked with much head-nodding about perspective and color values and geometric composition. The very little children who were brought to the exhibition laughed, and pointed, and lisped ‘Zoo, zoo,’ or ‘A’mal.’ But all the children of a certain age, somewhere just before seven, wept to see the paintings, refusing comfort in the form of lollipops or cuddling or promises of pony rides. And one of them, a little boy with thin mosquito-bitten arms and a rounded belly defiantly stuck out, cried to the artist, ‘Why did you make those little men in those black cages? Can’t they get out ever?’”

  Kirila shifted uneasily, and peered at Chessie. He had inched imperceptibly around to the other side of the fire, and all she could make out was a purple-black silhouette, very still. After a long while she said, “But there’s still magic in the world now.”

  Chessie lay down, folding his hindquarters under himself. He began to crack the greasy rabbit bones left over from the stew, pinning each one on the ground with muddy forelegs that had once been the arms of a prince.

  “Yes. There’s still magic in the world now.”

  After a while he went to sleep, snoring softly, but Kirila lay awake for a long time in her damp blankets, staring up at the scattered faint stars.

  Four

  In th
e morning the road ended. A few times previously Kirila and Chessie had lost it and wandered around in a ragged circle, bickering amiably, until they stumbled over it again, but this time it ended neatly in a straight line, as if sheared off by a pair of scissors. A few inches beyond the end, stuck firmly in the hard ground, was a four-arrowed wooden sign, badly weather-worn. One arrow pointed back the way they had come, and said “Kingdom of Kiril.” The arm pointing east said “Briarchin Gren.” The letters on the western arm were too worn to decipher, although Kirila, tracing with her fingertips, thought she made out an “n.” The remaining arrow simply said “North.” The sign was much splattered with bird droppings.

  “Briarchin Gren, Briarchin Gren,” she muttered, unrolling the parchment map. The damp had smudged the ink badly. “We’ve pretty much reached the end of the Known World.”

  “Known to the mapmaker, anyway,” Chessie said. “How old is that thing?”

  “It’s not dated, but it feels old. I found it in the castle library, and the name on it is still a local one, so probably it was just based on family travels, or something. But even the Wizard didn’t have a better one of the North, or at any rate he couldn’t find it.”

  “He had one,” the dog said darkly. “They always do. That’s the trouble with old retainers: presumptuous.”

  “Here’s Briarchin Gren, near the edge of the map. It’s marked as a fur-trading market.” Her voice went flat on the last three words. She studied the map intently, holding it with both hands so it wouldn’t roll itself up again. “This plateau is marked—it’s called ‘Plateau’—and the end of the road. Farther north there’s a river, but there’s no name on it. Then after that, nothing, except the legend ‘Here be no more dragons.’” She studied the map a moment longer, squinting horribly—she was going to be near-sighted in her old age, Chessie thought—and then rolled it up decisively.

  “We won’t go to Briarchin Gren. I’ve heard about these fur-trading markets—a few stone huts, some skinned carcasses, a vile brand of ale. We won’t find the Heart of the World there.”