His Majesty's Elephant (4 page)

And anyway, Kerrec was nobody. A stableboy who looked after an elephant. The Elephant. Who trusted him, and who talked to him, maybe told him stories in the nights, wonderful tales from places beyond the moon.

The words ran dry. Rowan stood blinking. She was sickening for something, maybe. She felt dizzy, as if she had a touch of fever.

Kerrec did not tell her that she was out of her head. She wished he would. He did not say anything for so long that she decided he was not going to, and moved to push past him.

He caught her arm. She stared at his hand. His dark cheeks flushed; he let go. “Why did you tell me this?” he asked her.

“I don't know,” she said.

“Because you're the witch's daughter?”

She was too tired to hit him. “She wasn't a witch.”

“I think maybe she wasn't,” he said, “after all. But you—”

“I'm not. I don't have any magic in me at all.”

“You don't know—” He stopped. “No, you don't. What do they teach you here?”

“Grammar,” said Rowan. “Rhetoric. Logic. Music, astronomy, geometry, arithmetic. Latin, a tiny bit of Greek, a little Arabic. Poetry, philosophy, theology—”

“Nothing,” he said. “Not a thing that you need to know.”

“And I suppose you know everything?”

“I know about magic.” He said it remarkably calmly. “We do know about that, in Brittany.”

He was mocking her, but not enough to make her angry. “You're not a stableboy, are you?” she said in realization that was not quite sudden; it had been growing for a while. “You don't talk like one. You understand everything I tell you—empresses and caliphs and schools and all the rest of it. They don't teach such things between the hayloft and the stalls.”

“Unless you mean monks' stalls.” That was a flash of humor, so quick she wondered if she had seen it at all. “No, I'm not that, either. I didn't run away from a monastery.”

Rowan stared at him. For once she was empty of words.

“Don't let your sister get that Talisman,” he said, looking like himself again, dark and sulky and damnably arrogant.

Everything in her said that he was right, but the way he said it, as if he had a right to order her about, made her go all contrary. “And why shouldn't she, after all? What can she do with it? It's just a pretty relic. She loves relics, especially when they've jewels on them.”

His expression was pure male exasperation. “What she can do with it doesn't matter in the least. It's what Michael Phokias will do when she lets him touch it.”

“Is that his name? I never noticed. No, he shouldn't get it. But who says Gisela will give it to him?”

“You do!” He threw up his hands. “Why do I bother with any of this? Let her take the thing. Let her give it to him. Then see what he does with it. What should I care? This house could fall about my ears, and I'd be no worse off than I've ever been.”

“Are you laying a curse on my father's house?” Rowan asked, low and very calm.

“I don't need to. The Byzantine will do it for me.”

She hit him. Not the way a lady would, a weak flathanded slap, but a good solid blow of the fist in the face, sweeping him right off his feet.

He went down in blank astonishment. She stood over him. He stared up, rubbing his jaw. “You'll have a bruise,” she observed.

“You're moon-mad,” he said.

“Of course I am. I'm a woman.”

He lay in the hay with his jaw already going purple, and he laughed. It was dreadfully catching.

Rowan's knees gave out. She toppled beside him, holding her aching sides.

She blinked through tears of laughter. Kerrec looked no better blurred than clear. “Tell me,” she said, “why a Byzantine should want to get hold of a single relic in a whole palace full of them.”

“I don't know,” he said. Then when she glared: ‘This isn't just a relic. You know that as well as I do, or you wouldn't be here, running out on what you very well know you should be doing.”

“What? Embroidering crosses on an altar cloth?”

He did not dignify that with a response. “Have you wondered why he doesn't just steal it?”

“He's a Byzantine. Byzantines can never do anything the simple way.”

“Granted; and seducing your saintly sister would be just the sort of thing to spice the game. But,” said Kerrec, “what if there's a reason why it's not to be stolen—why it has to be a free gift?”

“A spell?” Rowan asked.

“How did you feel when you saw it?”

She shivered.

“You see,” he said. “Your eyes get all white around the edges when you talk about it. And you didn't even touch it. Or did you?”

“No,” she said. “Oh, no.”

“I think,” said Kerrec. “I'm not sure, but I think... there's something the Talisman is meant to do.”

“Something bad?” Rowan whispered, huddling in on herself.

“Do you think so?”

She did not want to think at all, but his eyes were so steady that she could not help it. After a while she said slowly, “No. I don't think it's bad. Just... strong. And—wild?”

“Unmastered,” said Kerrec.

Rowan sat up so quickly her head spun. “You've seen it!

“No,” said Kerrec. He was not looking at her. She twisted about. The Elephant stood as he always did, but something about him made her think that he listened.

“Abul Abbas knows,” said Kerrec. “He isn't telling. He says we aren't ready.”

“You really can talk to him,” Rowan said. After everything else, it was hardly worth remarking on.

“He says,” said Kerrec, “that you have to make your father keep the jewel. Make him wear it, if you can.”

“Why?”

Kerrec's brows drew together. He looked as if he was getting a headache. “It's not for your sister, and not—ever—for your father's enemies.”

“Will it destroy them, do you think?” Rowan asked hopefully. “Blast them when they touch it?”

“If it were that easy,” said Kerrec, “do you think we'd have to do anything about it?”

“I don't know,” said Rowan. “It's all impossible. You're making it up. I'm making it up. It's just a splinter in a crystal, and that's just an elephant, and you're just a stableboy. And I—I'm just Rowan. I don't want to be anything else.”

“Do you think God cares what you want?”

“I think,” said Rowan, “that you are appalling.” She scrambled up, shaking hay from her skirt. There was hay in her hair, too. She brushed at it. Her hands shook. “You'll hold your tongue, or I'll have it cut out.”

That anyone could look as if he had drawn himself to a full and impressive height while lying flat in a pile of hay, Rowan would not have believed until she saw it. He got up with more grace than she had, and bowed so perfectly that it was like a slap. “As her highness wishes,” said the Elephant's boy.

It was too late to stop Gisela.

She must have waylaid the Emperor when he came from the baths. He was always expansive then, flushed with warm water and good exercise, smelling of sweet herbs and clean wool, and ready for a long evening's feasting and talking. All his daughters knew that that was the best time to wheedle a favor out of him, when he knew perfectly well what they were doing, but was too delighted with himself and his world to refuse.

By the time Rowan found him, he was in the women's hall surrounded by his daughters and their ladies, and Gisela was leaning on his shoulder. She had always been his favorite, his white lily. He had his arm around her, and he was smiling while she murmured in his ear.

The rest went about what they were doing. Most of them were working on embroidery. Bertha was reading from a book—something Latin and sonorous. Rowan wanted to scream at them all, wake them up, set them on their traitorous, innocent sister.

She could not even pass the doorway. Sunlight through a high window cast a ray of light on the two in the room's center, turned the Emperor's hair to ruddy gold and Gisela's to shining silver.

They looked like painted saints. Even his voice did not break the moment. It was as high as always, but sweet to listen to, warm and indulgent. “Of course you may have it. It's too pretty for me, but you'll look a right beauty in it.”

“Then,” Gisela said, cooing soft like a dove, “may I have it now, do you think—if it's not asking too much—?”

He laughed. “Of course you may have it now. I'll send Odo with it; then you can wear it at dinner. Wear your best dress, too, the blue silk that suits you so well, and we'll show the princes of the East what beauty we have here in the barbarous West.”

Gisela blushed and simpered. Rowan ground her teeth.

She had not lost yet. The Emperor had to walk by her as he went out.

First he kissed each of his daughters and said polite things to their ladies, and made a great show of reluctance to leave them. Not that it was false; he did love his daughters' company. But he was not a man to sit still for long.

He did not start when he saw Rowan, or object when she fell in beside him, trotting to keep up with his long strides. “Get thrown in a hayrick, did you?” he said.

Rowan's cheeks were hot. He kept his face stern, but his eyes glinted. He reached out, plucked a stem from above her ear, inspected it as he strode on. “New crop,” he observed.

They rounded a corner. One more passage and they would be in his own rooms amid crowds of people.

Here there was no one. The servants would be in the hall, getting it ready for dinner. The guests were all out hunting or prowling or keeping one another company.

Rowan caught hold of her father's sleeve and dug in her heels. He came to a halt. “Father,” she said, “don't give Gisela the Talisman.”

His brows went up. He was not angry. He never lost his temper with his children unless they gave him strong cause.

Nor had she surprised him. “So you heard that, did you? You'll all be getting something. I thought you might be more partial to one of the infidels' horses. There's one, the bay with the white foot—”

Oh, that was temptation, but Rowan was not to be distracted. “I don't want the thing. I just don't want you to give it to Gisela.”

“Jealousy's a sin, you know,” her father said.

Rowan stamped her foot. “I'm
not
jealous! I just—”

“You don't want me to give the relic to Gisela. Why? It's very much her sort of bauble. She'll take better care of it than anyone else would. Even,” he said, “you.”

He was laughing at her. And she was forgetting that she was a woman now: she heard her voice spiral up to a whine. “Father! The Caliph gave it to you.”

“And he'll be delighted to know that I thought enough of it to give it to my daughter.”

“Your favorite daughter.” Rowan did not mind that. Gisela was an idiot, but she was the kind of idiot people could not help but be fond of. “She's not going to keep it, Father. She's going to give it to—somebody.”

Her voice caught on the name. She bit her tongue trying to say it, or anything that would tell her father enough to make him listen.

The Emperor did not seem to notice. “I'll tell her not to give it away,” he said.

“You shouldn't give it away at all,” said Rowan.

For a moment she thought she had him. He actually looked as if he was listening; now, please God, he would ask her why she was so insistent, and please God she would be able to explain.

The moment fled. Somebody called his name, an echo down a stair.

He smiled, dropped a kiss on her forehead, and was gone. She would have had to run to catch him.

And for what? To tell him that the Elephant had warned her not to let him do this? That a Byzantine had tempted Gisela— he might have listened to that, but then he would have laughed at the thought of Gisela tempted by anything but a veil and a cloister.

Rowan wished she really were a witch's child. Then she would know spells and wishings, and ways to make the blind see.

But she was only Rowan. She had wanted to be that. Wanting and being, she was beginning to think, were not at all alike.

oOo

Gisela had the Talisman. She wore it to dinner with her best gown, the blue silk from Byzantium that made her look more silvery-fair than ever. The relic glowed on her breast, gold and crystal and the bright droplets of jewels.

And nothing happened. No lightnings leaped out of the golden rondel. No devil came to take it, Byzantine or otherwise. It hung on its chain like any other jewel, larger than most and stranger, but no shudder of magic in it.

It was all foolishness. As for Kerrec, with all his frets and fears—he was the worst fool of all. Talking with the Elephant, of all things. Even Rowan knew better than to believe that.

oOo

For a month and more, the quiet went on: long slow dreaming days and brief warm nights. On the eve of Midsummer Rowan went back to the orchard, daring herself to do it, but the only company she had there was a flock of sparrows.

The Caliph's men went back to their own country. The Byzantines stayed, but Rowan kept out of their way. She kept watch on Gisela. As far as she ever saw, Gisela did not meet with the Byzantine named Michael Phokias, nor with any other man.

On a night so warm and still that even the moon seemed to be asleep, Rowan crept out of her bed in the women's hall. She had her own room back again at last, and it had a window that opened on the courtyard, but there was no air in it.

She stepped softly over Bertrada, the maid who shared the room. Bertrada did not even pause in her snoring.

It was pitch dark in the passage, but Rowan knew her way. The stair caught her before she was ready. She stumbled, then steadied herself, picking her way down, watchful of the creak in the seventh step.

The door at the bottom was latched but not bolted. She opened it just enough to admit a slender girl-body and slid softly out.