Thursdays with the Crown (9 page)

Lilah made an irritated noise, rolling her eyes at Celie.

“I can feel you rolling your eyes, Delilah,” Rolf said over his shoulder. “You could go and get Ethan, if you want to help.”

“Oh, no, carry on,” she said airily. “I wouldn't want to ruin your fun.”

“I am having it!” Lulath cried out. He was grasping the loop of iron in both hands. “It is contrary to our closings!”

He heaved back, twisting the latch to the right at the same time, face tense. Pogue put his hands next to Lulath's and twisted, too. There was a horrible groaning and scraping noise, and Pogue made a drawn-out yell as they very slowly moved backward. Then it all gave way with a lurch, the door sprang open, and Lulath and Pogue fell against Rolf. All three of them landed on the ground, and Lilah leaped out of the way just in time to avoid Lulath's crushing her.

A broad, low door hung open in front of them. Beyond it was nothing but darkness.

“I am so much the elation,” Lulath said in a hushed voice.

“Me, too,” whispered Celie.

Pogue went to the entrance and tentatively stuck his head inside and looked around. He pulled back and they all watched anxiously as he breathed in and out and finally spoke.

“It's dark but seems safe enough, though the air's a little stale,” he announced.

“Let's go, then,” Rolf said. “I can deal with stale air.”

“So can I,” Celie said, grabbing the back of Rolf's tunic so that she was right behind him.

Pogue stepped aside and let them go in first, although his expression was wary. He followed close behind, with Lilah on his heels and Lulath on hers.

There were four stone steps going down, and then they were standing on a smooth stone floor. There was a sense of space around them, but also Celie could feel things crowding that space. Ethan had told them that there were torches
and a tinderbox near the last step, so Pogue and Rolf fumbled around for a minute, then finally located and lit a pair of torches.

The light flared, and Lilah screamed.

“What is it?” Rolf brandished his torch, and let out a yell, too. There was a man standing only a pace away from them.

Celie's knees turned to water and her throat seized up. She tried to back slowly out of the tomb but couldn't move more than an inch.

“Oh,” Lulath cried out after a terrifying minute, “it is being armor! It is being the king's only armor.” He laughed, lighting a torch of his own and moving closer to illuminate the suit of armor, arranged on a rack so that it looked alive. “Fine work, of the bronze,” he noted. “Ah!”

He leaned around the armor and touched his torch to something. It was another torch, which sputtered and then came to life. Pogue moved to the other side of the door and found two more torches in sconces and lit them. Slowly the shadows in the mound lifted, and Celie felt her heart lifting with them, like Rufus taking flight.

The Tomb of the Builder.

“Look at the helmet,” Celie breathed to Rolf, pointing a shaking finger at the armor.

It was shaped like a griffin's head, with the beak curving down to form the nose guard. The griffin's “eyes” were huge topazes the size of Celie's palm, that glittered in the torchlight and seemed to be following them as they crept farther inside.

Lulath found more torches and lit them, and soon the domed tomb was bathed in flickering golden light.

“Oh. My.” Lilah clapped her hands lightly. “Oh. My. Goodness.”

It was a treasure trove, like something from a story. A hoard worthy of a dragon, or the lair of some fabled thief. It was all cobweb covered, grimy, and stale, but Celie had never seen such riches in her life.

There were bushel baskets of gold coins, open chests of jewelry, and bolts of fabric that gleamed with silver and gold bullion embroidery beneath a layer of dust. There were racks of weapons and statues of women and children that had been painted to make them appear more lifelike. They wore clothing, too, of rich velvets and silk, and the women wore real crowns and necklaces of ruby and emerald and opal.

“Ah!” Lulath found a holder for his torch and stuck it in. This freed up his hands to wave around at the statues and weapons. “Ah! I am doing reading of this! He is being buried with all the splendor! With the family and the things that are his!”

“The family? But they're just statues,” Celie said.

She reached out and delicately touched the folds of the nearest statue's gown. It was dusty, but underneath the dust the satin was still a shining violet color. The statue itself was of a tall woman with a proud face, looking into the distance with eyes that had been painted blue. She had brown-painted hair, wore a crown of sapphires and pearls,
and was more handsome than beautiful, with a rather long nose. There were two smaller statues on each side of her, both of young girls, wearing necklaces of rubies and gowns of straw-colored silk.

“They are being statues of the wives and the children, because they are not being dead, most probably,” Lulath explained. “Or they are being buried in another place. The wife is being buried in the home of her people, instead of in this place, in the perhaps.”

Lulath pointed to another of the adult-size statues. This was of a curvaceous woman of medium height, and her skin had been painted a mahogany color. Her hair had been carved as intricately coiled braids, and she wore a crown of strange workmanship that looked like a pair of snakes wrapped around her brow. The snakes had winking pale-green gems for eyes that matched the clasps on her gown, which was of sheer white fabric that had been wound around her form and fastened at the shoulders. There were four child-size statues around her of three boys and a girl, all with skin painted several shades lighter, but with the same black hair in intricate braids.

“This is the greatest thing we have ever done,” Rolf announced. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet, turning in circles to take it all in. “Can you imagine? No one has seen these things for thousands of years! We don't even have words for these weapons! Or names for these people or where they're from!”

“How many wives did he
have
?” Lilah asked. “There are
five
women here!”

“I would guess five, then,” Pogue said in a dry voice.

“And nineteen children,” Lilah said, counting them. She threw up her hands. “No wonder the Castle has so many bedrooms!”

Celie laughed, giddy.

“It is such an amazement, that he is having five queens,” Lulath said. “I would not have been thinking it! But marvelous!”

“I would never marry anyone who had more than one wife,” Lilah said, horrified.

“Oh, it is not being bad,” Lulath told her with a shrug. “We are sometimes having the many wives in the history of my Grath. Many of wives, they are being as great friends as can be seen.”

Lilah gave him a narrow look. “How many wives do you plan on having?”

Lulath's face turned bright red. He spread out his hands and gave her an innocent look. “Am I to think of such things? Now?” he said.

Before Lilah could reply, Rolf interrupted.

“All right, enough of that,” Rolf said. “Have a little respect for the dead, who do not need to hear you flirting!”

“What dead?” Lilah asked, hiding her red cheeks with her hands. “These are statues.”

“There's even his dogs,” Pogue said, loudly. Looking
over, Celie thought that Pogue looked a little red as well, and he stepped over a basket of coins with unnecessary stomping of his boots.

Opposite the wives and children were ranks of statues of dogs and even something that looked like a kind of wildcat. They all wore tooled leather collars, and one of the larger dogs had a sort of harness across its back, bearing two quivers of arrows. The floor was so crowded that it was impossible to walk. Celie moved past a basket containing bottles of wine to have a closer look at the dogs, and ended up walking around a tapestry that was hanging from the ceiling at the back of the tomb.

“The pets are even more bizarre than the statues of the children,” Lilah said.

Her voice sounded muffled by the thick cloth curtaining off the part of the tomb where Celie was now standing, rooted to the spot. She took another small step forward, then stopped again.

“It's not bizarre,” Rolf argued. “It's impressive. Look how rich he was! Look at how much stuff he had!”

“See, that's what's so awful,” Lilah said. “You're basically saying this dead king was vain and wanted everyone to know how much he had, but who would see it? Grave robbers?”

“You're missing the point,” Pogue said. “You can't actually take your gold with you to heaven, but there are people who believe that if you have it buried with you, you can at least prove that you were important.”

“And that's supposed to matter?” Lilah asked. “What if he was some kind of monster, and everyone hated him, but he's rich so he gets to go to heaven?”

“Yes, but at the same time, you're missing the point,” Pogue said impatiently.

Celie had never heard him talk this way to Lilah before. She wanted to see his face, but she didn't dare to move another step.

“It's not so much that he's buying his way in,” Pogue went on, “it's that he's showing what he
accomplished
. It's completely different!”

“You're talking like you know him,” Lilah said with irritation. “And he's not only long dead, his body isn't even here! This isn't really a tomb: it's just a greedy man's way of hiding his things from the world!”

“No,” Celie said. The word came out as a little choking noise, so she cleared her throat and tried again. “No, he's here,” she said.

“What was that?” Pogue called to her. “Celie? Where are you?”

“Celie!” There was a rustling sound as Lilah looked for her. “Where did you go?”

“Over … over here,” Celie said. “With him.”

Pogue ducked around the tapestry dividing the tomb, his belt knife drawn. He looked at Celie to make sure she was all right, and she just pointed to what she'd found. The others followed Pogue, their continued chatter breaking off suddenly.

“And here is the very king,” Lulath exclaimed, not one to be silenced for long. “How wondrous!”

Lulath was right. It was the very king. The king who had built the Castle, lying on a narrow marble bed in a robe of purple velvet, wearing a crown that looked like the top of one of the Castle's towers made of jewel-encrusted gold. He had his hands folded on his chest, just over the hilt of his broadsword.

And he was very dead.

And so was the griffin lying on the adjoining marble bed. A bier, Celie remembered suddenly. It was called a bier.

“That's disgusting,” Lilah squawked.

“It's their
tomb
,” Rolf pointed out. “Where did you think they would be?”

“Well they … oh!” Lilah just threw up her hands, and then put an arm around Celie. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” Celie said.

She was, oddly enough. Now that she'd gotten over the initial shock, she was very much all right. They didn't look decayed. Much like the fabrics and goods on the other side of the tapestry, or the tools and cloth that had appeared over the years in the Castle, there was no sign of the years that had passed … but they were nevertheless dead. The king's face was stiff and dry and the griffin looked fragile, like an old butterfly cocoon.

“The master of the very Castle,” Lulath said with reverence. “He is being perhaps the most very man of every century and land!”

“And a griffin rider,” Celie said. The griffin's beak was almost touching the king's shoulder, and Celie had the sudden urge to try and scoot them closer together.

“He created the Castle,” Pogue said with great respect. “This man.”

“And he had nineteen children and five wives,” Rolf said. “Which is almost as great an accomplishment, at least in my view.”

Celie ignored Rolf. She was looking at the rings on the king's sunken fingers. There were two plain gold rings, set with emeralds, on his right hand, but on his left was a ring shaped like a castle turret, much like his crown. The color of the gold and the workmanship looked breathtakingly familiar. She leaned over and studied the ring from a better angle.

“Careful!” Lilah grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Don't touch him!”

“It's not like you can catch death from a thousand-year-old body,” Rolf argued as Celie gave the ring another look, ignoring Lilah's insistent tugging.

There was something about the ring that drew her eye. She felt as if she knew this ring, as though she had seen it before, many times, but almost forgotten it. Her feet and hands itched a little, and she rubbed her palms absently against her grimy skirt.

“This is the mate to Daddy's ring,” she announced, cutting off Rolf and Lilah's argument over whether it was disrespectful to lean over the body of a king. “The griffin ring.”

“What? No,” Rolf said slowly, leaning over beside Celie. “I mean, look at it. It's nothing like Father's ring.”

Celie just shook her head at him. She was certain of it.

“I think Celie's right,” Lilah said, her voice pinched as though she were trying not to breathe too deeply near the dead king. “It's exactly like Father's.”

“I don't see what you're talking about,” Rolf said again. “And I've
worn
the griffin ring, remember?”

“No, Celie's right,” Pogue said. He was tall enough that he could stand behind Lilah and still lean over enough to see the ring. He nodded his head, his hair flopping over the fading bruises on his temple. “It's the same craftsmanship. Same weight, too, and the same gems and gold alloy.”

“See! And Pogue knows these things,” Lilah said.

“
Now
you listen to me,” Pogue muttered.