Chapter 24 #2
Into the silence, not-yet-Vivian said, “Look at you. So grand, with your silver sword and your silver armor. And tall—even taller than me!” She laughed, but hiccuped halfway through.
“Do they sing songs about you? They do, I know they do, for I made it so.” There was a sudden, disconcerting sheen to her eyes.
The point of your sword wavered. “Tell it all to me, first. Tell me how—I came to be.” You were buying time, perhaps. Or perhaps not—what would I ask my own mother, if I could speak to her? “I don’t even know your name.”
The girl blinked the sheen away. “No? But—you must know all of them, by now. Yvanne, Tilda, Lysabet, Vivi—”
“Your true name. The one you were born to.”
“Oh.” She frowned a little. “But I wasn’t born to anything.
My mother and father were midden-rats who lived on scraps and offal.
I was Brat or Babe. I was Another-Mouth-to-Fill, before they sold me.
My teacher called me other things when he bought me for his household.
I was Girl and then Clever Girl and then Sweet Girl.
” She smiled shyly as she said it, as if she were bragging.
Then her lips flattened, and her tone turned older and more world-wise.
“And then, of course, I was Cunt, there at the end.”
She didn’t say anything further, and you didn’t ask. I sighed a little. All these years together, and you still hadn’t learned how to pull a story from someone. “And who was he? Your teacher.”
“Oh, a great man,” the girl answered eagerly, as if it mattered.
As if a person might call you any name he liked, so long as he was great.
“A king! Or at least, what passed for a king, before I came along. He conquered a pretty piece of land in his youth, and in his old age he set himself to conquer higher things. Mathematics, astronomy, history, alchemy. Life and death. Time, above all. I was only his fetch-and-sweep girl, at first, another no one in his hall—but I didn’t remain so.
I refused.” Her chin lifted, and I could see the hard line of her jaw through the fat.
“I had no letters or numbers when I came to his service, but I saw that they were precious to him, and so I learned them. Just by watching and listening and stealing scraps he abandoned. The work it took, the will—for years I studied late into the night, slapping myself to stay awake.” She cast you an odd look, resentful and proud.
“You had help. You had someone to make you what you are, someone to guide you, but I had to do it myself. I was alone, always.”
You said, in a voice like a whetstone, “So was I.” Everything I have done, I have done alone.
“Oh? And yet every time you die, I have to pull this man off you like a leech from a wound.” There was the Vivian I knew, suddenly visible, the asp moving in its leathery egg.
She ducked her head, a mere girl again. “And if you were sometimes lonely—it made you strong, as it made me strong.” There was compassion in her voice, but no regret.
To regret would be to doubt, and Vivian had never once doubted herself.
The wind rushed over us all, laying the grass low and pressing the girl’s skirt against her legs.
There was a funny-colored stain just above her knees, still damp.
She continued, unprompted, “But he was a great man, as I said, and very busy. He didn’t notice me until I made him.
He left his slate lying on the workbench one day with a calculation unfinished.
I finished it for him. He came storming into the kitchens where we slept, kicking us from our nests and asking who had meddled with his work.
He was so angry—until he saw me.” A memory so sweet she had to close her eyes.
“He looked me over. He checked my teeth and pinched the fat of my arms. He called me clever, and I never slept in the kitchens again.”
I wondered where she had slept instead. I wondered how old she had been. I swallowed, and it tasted foul. “And so, the king became your … teacher?”
I left the same pause before the word that she had, and the girl gave me a wary, furtive look.
“He would not have called himself such. But what else should I call him? Master, though it was I who mastered him, in the end? Majesty, when I had seen him panting and stupid, brought lower than a rutting dog?” She snorted.
Both you and I flinched. “No. I call him teacher, for he taught me so many things.”
Your sword sagged until it pointed at her knees, rather than her throat. I glanced at your face and found it startled, almost fearful, as if Vivian was undergoing some hideous transformation, and you were no longer sure whether she was villain or victim.
I asked, “What did he teach you?”
“He taught me of the past, first. He read me holy scripture and ancient myths and showed me how to tell truth from myth. The Savior was his particular obsession: The man who died, yet lived again. The mortal who became God.”
“Next, he taught me of the future. About ambition, which is the future on purpose.” Her voice had a sing-song rhythm to it, as of a child reciting a lesson they’d learned by rote.
“I had plenty of ambition, I thought. I wanted to eat the next day. I wanted to survive to see my next spring. But my teacher wanted … more.”
She paused again, and it was you who prompted her this time. “What more could a king want?”
Not-yet-Vivian cast you a patronizing look, incongruous on her young face.
“What does every king want? To stay king.” She looked between us and spoke in the slow, overloud voice shopkeepers sometimes used with me when they thought I was foreign.
“He was old, I told you. Soon, his crown would be someone else’s.
His story would end. His name might be remembered for a time, but he’d studied history well enough to know that nothing that lives lasts forever.
” Her head tilted. Her eyes fell to my closed fist. “Save, perhaps, dragons.”
The seed felt suddenly hot in my hand. I unclenched my fingers.
“He made a study of them. He had them caught and staked, carved and pickled. And eventually he found … that.” She nodded at the seed in my palm, and I saw it doubled in her eyes, like a small red spark.
“A seed, hidden in the heart of every dragon, which burns on even after their death. He thought it was something to do with their life cycle—when a dragon dies, a tree grows from its heart. And one day, when the tree is grown, the dragon will be reborn, curled around the trunk. But he didn’t want more dragons. ” A shrug. “He wanted more time.”
“That’s why you hunted them all down, then.” I remembered, so vividly I could almost hear it, that long, keening cry as the last dragon died. “So that no one else would discover what your teacher had.”
“Yes, of course, but please don’t interrupt.
I’m still doing my list,” said not-yet-Vivian, crossly.
“He taught me the past, and the future—and he taught me what it cost.” One hand came out from behind her back and clutched, convulsively, at the flesh of her stomach.
“We studied that seed for months and months. Then one morning he woke me with a cup of sour tea. I drank it, and he explained that he’d solved the puzzle long ago.
He said all he needed was a heart—but a heart that had never been born. A soul, misplaced in time.”
My eyes fell to the stain on her skirt, crusted and glossy. At the rucked fabric where her hand had fisted over her empty belly. It had been recent, I thought. Only hours ago, although she told the story like a distant memory. “I’m sorry,” I said.
“You’re quicker than me.” Her voice had gone clipped and modern, less youthful. “I didn’t understand what he meant until the bleeding started.”
You asked, blankly, “The bleeding?” and I wanted to press my hands over your ears.
She ignored you. “The hell of it was, I would have drunk that tea myself. I would have drunk arsenic if he’d asked it of me.
” She laughed, blackly. “But he didn’t ask, did he?
He didn’t have to. I wasn’t his student or his daughter or his lover or even his whore, not really.
I was only his. And he hadn’t chosen me because I had wits and ambition.
He’d chosen me because I had most of my teeth and a working womb. ”
The sun was high enough now that it was difficult to look directly at the girl who would become Vivian Rolfe.
She was a shadow, a hole torn neatly in the sky, which told us a terrible story.
“You were born still in the caul,” said the shadow.
“Tiny and curled up, like the fiddlehead of a fern. But dead, of course.” At my side, you began to shake.
“Remember that—you were born dead. Every breath you’ve drawn since then, every second you’ve lived, was a gift, which I gave you. ”
I stepped stupidly in front of you, as if I could shield you, as if I could catch the words before they found you. Your breath at my back was uneven, too fast.
The shadow continued. “A necessary sacrifice, he called you, in exchange for greatness. I told him I would be great, too, one day, and he couldn’t imagine it.
He laughed at me—laughed! While I held our little dead daughter!
Then he kissed my brow and told me to go to sleep, and so”—the shadow shrugged—“I killed him.”
You said, like a woman holding fast to one guiding star in thick fog, “Good.”
“Yes,” said the shadow. “I should have done it sooner, probably, but I loved him so. Another thing he taught me: There is nothing a person will not endure, for love.” A lesson she had passed down to her daughter. Who is free, who loves another?
“And then?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know, but you did, and the sun was hot on my face and my legs were tired and I wanted, badly, to be through with this.