Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback(21)

Yannis, cautious, casual: “His wives, you mean?”

“No wives at present. He got sick of wives. His daughters. No sons—none of those useless women of his ever made him a son. Just girl after girl. Now look. Here they come. Do as they please. Women always will, unless you curb them.”

Color. Like a bright stream they rippled into the basin of the big room, flowed together across the platform.

And if this king was only human they, Yannis thought—or was the idea only the strong ale?— they were not, not quite. Nor like that other unhuman king. These women, these girls, these twelve princesses . . . like water and like fire, things which gleamed and grew and bloomed and altered, metals, stars, alcohol—the sun-wind in the wheat . . .

Not beautiful—it was never that, though not un beautiful— graceful as animals, careless as . . .

“Where are you off to?”

Yannis found he had half-risen. He sat again and said quickly to the armorer, “Pardon me, just easing my leg.”

And looked away, then back to the platform and the twelve flames now settling on it like alighting birds. Because of the table’s angle, he could see each of them quite well. They had no jewels, unlike their father. They wore the sort of dresses some not-badly-off merchant’s brood might put on.

You could not but look. Their hair . . .

A hush had gone around the hall, and then been smothered over by an extra loudness.

Watching, very obliquely now, Yannis noted the king exchanged no words with any of these young women, not even she who sat down nearest to him.

None of them appeared particularly old. Yannis tried to guess their ages—a year, a little more or less between each one and her closest neighbor.

? 74 ?

? Tanith Lee ?

He had been dazzled. Enough.

Yannis took another draught of ale, and when he raised his head the armorer had shifted, and there was another man.

“Listen, and get this right. You’re done dining. In a count of twenty heartbeats get up. Go out that door to the yard. Someone will meet you. You’ll be going to see the king.”

Then the man himself got up and went, and the armorer did not return, and Yannis counted twenty beats, rose, and moved out into the torch-scripted, black-white winter yard. The wind had dropped with the snow. Two new guards bundled him along to another entry, and up some miles of crooked steps. It was like being escorted to his own hanging. God knew, it might well be before too long.

The king stood in his chamber. He was a bloody king, lit by the galloping hearth.

The king scrutinized Yannis, unspeaking.

After which, the king spoke: “The Land of the Sun Beneath.”

Yannis stared. He must be meant to—the king unsmilingly smiled: “Have you heard of such a land? No? But you’re traveled. Where have you put your ears? In a bucket?”

Yannis had pondered what to do if offered a drink—in the light of the witch’s advice to trust only the communal and well-patronized plate or jug, as in the hall. But this was not a hospitable king, either.

It was a game-player, and—an enemy?

Something nudged Yannis’s brain back to its station.

“Your Majesty means—the country into which the sun sinks at evening, in the tales . . . ? The lands beneath the world . . . ”

“In the tales,” said the king. “The sun goes under the rim of the earth. Where else can it go?”

Yannis stood there. He knew that many clever scholars had decided the earth was not flat, that the sun circled it. Others, however, remained stubbornly in the belief of a flat world with killing edges. It was, observing nature, difficult not to. And the roots of this city were ancient, primal.

? 75 ?

? Below the Sun Beneath ?

“Yes, Majesty.”

“Yes. The Land of the Sun Beneath, where the sun rules after darkness falls here. But there is a land beneath those lands, ever without the sun. Some call it Hell, and some the Underworld. What do you call it, Crank-Leg?”

Yannis thought the king did not anticipate a reply.

The king said, “I suppose, soldier, you’d call it death. Maybe, when they cracked your leg off, you even paid a little visit.”

Yannis found he hated the king. It was a response that this king wished to foster in him. The king preferred to know how he weighed with common men, and to make men hate and fear provided an instant measure. Yannis had glimpsed traces of hate, fear, all over the court, both high and low exhibited signs. So the king knew where he was.