Chapter V A Good Set of Teeth
V
A Good Set of Teeth
The metalworker carved and hammered away by candlelight, and when the sun rose, so did he, climbing the rank stairs from his basement forge to the great hall, and then to the apartments of the castle’s mistress.
He had the necklace strung between his fingers like a cat’s cradle, pulling gently to make sure the chain would hold, that the hammered rings of gold would not snap and clatter to the floor.
Sixty-four teeth, carved into flat disks, shining like inlays of pearl.
The teeth of the first master to live by the rules of the Covenant: Adele-Blanche’s grandfather, whose throat was opened under Berengar’s blade.
Now the teeth of Adele-Blanche. It was precarious work.
In the mistress’s old age, her teeth had begun to wither and furrow like her skin.
One impatient stroke of his hand and the teeth would shatter, and the new mistress would be bereft.
The metalworker was not above having contingency plans, however.
He often considered how quick and easy the theft would be: The dungeons were a tomb for all the dead’s teeth.
Each set was arranged into a mold, and then added to a sumptuous marble frieze.
The sculptor was forever chipping away at this frieze, adding new faces for every set of teeth that made its way into his hands.
This scene stretched for nearly a mile along the north wall of the dungeon, and the older teeth were indeed forming fissures, sometimes falling from their molds and into the foul puddles below.
And of course, the marble was always under siege by the water that dripped from the upper floors, green rot defiling all these carefully sculpted figures.
But the newer teeth, the teeth of the freshly dead, were more intact than the teeth of the ancient woman, and thus more fitted to his delicate task.
Would her granddaughters know if he made this surreptitious replacement?
He did not dare. They were both the blood of Adele-Blanche and would not forgive any such transgression.
The scene of the dungeon’s frieze was selected by Adele-Blanche and portrayed the history of their house.
A parade of lords, each more eminent than the last, braver in battle and more pious in prayer, and of fairer face, as though the sculptor was each time improving upon his craft.
He carved supplicating peasants, always with their mouths gaped open—wide enough to accommodate twice as many teeth.
The wise man works only half as hard as the fool, and Adele-Blanche would never employ a dullard.
Then there came the gash in the frieze, representing the violent intrusion of Berengar, which broke the old customs apart to the new.
Where the House of Teeth had once had masters, there were now only mistresses, for Berengar, in his deceitful cruelty, had left alive no male heir.
While he had allowed the other great houses to elevate their sons or nephews or grandsons, on the condition that they swear him endless fealty, knowing their paramount role in the raising of the dead, Berengar had punished the House of Teeth unduly, perhaps hoping that it would crumble to extinction in the absence of men.
But Adele-Blanche, even pregnant and not long after her first blood, was no cringing creature. She rebuilt the House of Teeth in her own shape, ruled by daughters rather than sons.
The metalworker sometimes shuddered to imagine what became of the boy children born to Adele-Blanche’s line.
He did not believe the freakish stories, that Adele-Blanche slathered their nude bodies in honey and left them to be feasted upon by flies.
But the truth was beyond the metalworker’s purview.
Her daughters, the ladies Manon and Celeste, had been pregnant each three times.
When their bellies first swelled, they were shut up in their apartments, all food laid outside the door.
If they even screamed in labor, the metalworker did not know it; in those months, the halls were silent enough that eggs could be heard cracking in the kitchens.
Then the ladies would emerge, twice empty-handed, and once, at last, with girl children squirming in their arms. Never did the metalworker see any men visit their rooms. By what strange means the ladies had been bred, he did not dare to guess.
The lady Agnes was the elder, but Marozia was firstborn of Adele-Blanche’s firstborn, and thus was her grandmother’s heiress.
Two more different ladies there could not have been.
Sometimes it beggared belief that they were born from the same blood.
But Adele-Blanche, with the perception of a sentry and the mind of a horse trader, saw these discrepancies and played her granddaughters like draughts tiles, ordering them into their most fitting positions, as she did all things within Castle Peake.
Now the great old woman was dead, and the metalworker held her death in his hands. By the laws of any other kingdom, he would not be an important man. But here, he was as essential as a good set of teeth.