Chapter XV Ruinous Fruit
XV
Ruinous Fruit
The Exarch rose from his cot in total darkness, as had been his custom ever since Widsith the Precious had sealed off the one window into the chapel.
He lived now as a dove in a dovecote, and the melted wax on the walls and on the altar were like his droppings.
The tattered ends of his ceremonial robes dragged on the floor behind him, clearing a path through the dust that had gathered as thickly as a layer of ash over a decimated city.
He must light one candle on each end of the seven-pointed altar and then work inward, slowly, moving from point to point, until the whole altar glowed like a star.
It would have been easier of course to start in the middle, and light every candle on each arm of the star, but this was not the will of God.
The Exarch also did not concern himself with his own longevity.
If the sleeve of his robe caught fire and he burned to death, that would be the will of God.
Because he believed God’s will existed only within these walls, and nowhere else on this dreary, death-soaked island, he must do all he could to preserve it.
This ritual was also important because it was the only manner by which he could measure time.
It took fourteen seconds to light each candle with his tremulous, age-spotted hand.
And then sixteen seconds to shuffle to the next altar point.
By the time he was finished, that was the morning, and the brightly flaring altar was his dawn, and his breakfast would be arriving soon.
The Exarch then sat back on his cot. He lifted the hem of his robe to examine the tumescent bulge on his left leg, which had been at first only the size of a grape but now was a throbbing purple mass that more resembled an eggplant growing beneath his skin.
It made his gait even more labored. But if the tumor had grown within these walls, it was the will of God.
He was God’s garden and in him God had planted a ruinous fruit.
Who was he to try to chisel away at the architecture of his impending demise?
He would be no better than the godless heathens of Drepane, who thought they could pilfer from death like four-fingered thieves.
The thought of fruit made the Exarch’s stomach whimper.
His breakfast should have come by now, delivered as it always was on a very tottery silver tray.
He considered rising, but why? The door to the chapel locked from the outside and could not be breached.
And on the highest floor and in the remotest tower, he could bellow and pound on the walls and no one would hear.
He could even set fire to the chamber, and it would be hours before anyone glimpsed the smoke.
Before he could ponder whether or not God had decided that today should be the start of his starving to death, with all the many implications of that conceit, the door rasped open.
From the hallway came a shaft of light, uncommonly gold. The Exarch squinted as the light planked his face.
“Good morning, Your All-Holiness,” said the prince.
“You?” The Exarch coughed out this syllable. “What need have I of you?”
Lit from the back, with the candle flames dancing in his overly blue eyes, the prince smiled. “You have need of breakfast, I presume.”
He was carrying the Exarch’s silver tray, piled with all its usual satieties.
There was the bread, only the tough ends of the loaf, toasted until their crust was blackened and they tasted equally of flour and ash.
There was the dollop of honey, which he would smear on one piece of the bread using his thumb.
And then, in the center, in a glazed green dish, there were six gauzy strips of cured ham, crumpled like soggy parchment.
The Exarch liked to stretch out each piece until it snapped and went limp in his hand.
Sometimes he amused himself by rolling the gummy meat in his palm, forming a red-and-white marble that could roll quite assuredly across the altar.
Then he would lick his sticky palm clean, savoring the perspired oils of Seraph.
Of course he could not perform this ritual in front of the prince, so he would have to wait, which made him cross.
“Set it here,” the Exarch said, waving his hand toward the altar. There was one square of empty stone upon which the melting wax did not intrude, and the tray fit within it perfectly.
The prince set down the tray so decorously that it hardly made a sound. Then he stood back, hands clasped at his waist and head angled down, an oddly penitent position for a man born in the hurricane-eye of this heathen island, who had never once touched the radiant shorelines of Seraph.
But Seraph had touched him. The prince had hair the color of the sand on the Seraphine coast, eyes the shade of its jeweled lagoon, and the broad, powerful build of the bronze statue that stood over the entrance of the bay, ships passing beneath its spread legs, its reflection painting the water below in ripples of gold.
This softened the Exarch’s gnarled and rancorous heart. He pinched a strip of meat between his finger and thumb and lifted it, light shining through the translucently pink and white-veined morsel.
“This animal knew the scent of the Dogaressa’s perfume,” he said. “Rosewater and morning dew. It counted every feather on the winged lion as it walked through the city gates. It heard the arias from the opera house. It felt the gentle lilt of a canal boat on a hazy summer night.”
“Then this was the most illustrious and genteel pig in Seraph.”
“Liuprand the Droll. I might prefer your father yet. He never tried to make anybody laugh.”
The prince thinned his mouth. “Go on, Your All-Holiness.”
“Widsith’s men slaughtered the animal on the deck of a ship bound for this barbarian little place,” the Exarch said.
“Since then, it has been butchered and cured, and kept in its preeminent barrel. You must have heard the cook say as much to you. I will not eat a bite of meat that was born on this island. I will not taint the vessel of God.”
“As you wish it.” The prince regarded the tray. “And you may have your meal in sacred isolation, but first I must invoke my rights as your sovereign.”
“My sovereign?” the Exarch repeated sourly. “My sovereign is the Dogaressa.”
“And the Dogaressa has sent you here to serve the royal family of Drepane.”
The prince had been standing halfway in the room, his knee holding the door ajar, and at this point he stepped inside fully, letting the door shut behind him.
Now again the only light was from the incandescent altar, and from the gleam of one hundred and twenty candles gathered within the prince’s marvelously blue eyes.
The Exarch could have been staring directly into the lagoon of Seraph.
“What would you ask of me, then?” he barked. “Say it quickly.”
“Tomorrow you will climb down from your tower and bless my marriage.”
A marriage. Had a new Seraphine bride been smuggled to the island like the most precious plunder?
Would she have hair the color of sun-drenched sand and carry the scents of rosewater and morning dew?
The Exarch allowed himself to hope. He imagined breathing into the nape of a Seraphine woman’s neck, inhaling against the holy column of her throat.
“Tell me of her,” the Exarch said. “Your bride.”
“She is a noblewoman.”
“And?”
“And it is a profitable match,” the prince said.
Sitting so close to the candle flames, the Exarch’s meat had begun to sweat. “And? Can you lay no plaudits upon your betrothed? Do her manner and form not move you to poetry?”
“I am not Liuprand the Bard,” he replied. “You will be fetched at first light.”
The Exarch felt as though something was slipping away from him, something he was not even aware he had held at all until it was gone. Like water, pouring from the cracks in his wizened hands.
“Tell me her name,” the Exarch said. “Seraphine names are each themselves a psalm.”
The prince was silent for a long moment.
At last, he said, “My bride has no Seraphine name.”
“No,” the Exarch croaked, like some dull little frog. “It cannot be. No. God will not permit it.”
The prince said nothing, allowing the Exarch’s world to crumble down around him, allowing the Exarch to lie gasping in its ruins, choking on the ash of desolation, seizing with visions of a million matches, all burning to their ugly blackened ends.
“I will not permit it,” he said, speaking as a dead man.
But the prince’s mouth quivered into the slightest of smiles. “Do you not wish to partake in this civilizing mission? You will be the herald of Drepane’s new age.”
“She will poison you,” he rasped. “That viperess, that striga who will share your bed. She will suck the fine blood of Seraph and leave you a gray corpse. That is the aim of all women, all creatures, on this apostate island. You will allow yourself to be the vile serpent’s prey?”
He did not like this prince, this too-beautiful, too-canny prince. But he loved him, as a hungry man loves the last morsels of meat on the bone. He would worship at his feet, kiss him for the faint taste of morning dew on his mouth.
“You do not even know what you do not know,” the Exarch whispered.
“I would cut out your eye to show you—how it is the precise color of Seraph’s waters.
Liuprand the Last, they will call you. Worse than a Sluggard, leading your line to its demise.
Do you not ponder your own condition? Do you not fear for the fate of your soul? ”
“I ponder the condition of the island and the fate of all the souls upon it.”
A breath came out of the Exarch’s mouth. It was as cold as the murmur of a ghost.
“God cannot help you,” he said. “Liuprand the Ill Portent. You are already lost.”
“Tomorrow,” the prince said. “At dawn.”
He turned then, his cape fluttering mightily over his shoulders. He grasped the knob on the door, but rather than stepping through and then shutting it again, he thrust the door wide open and held it to its hinges, letting the light pour in.
“Adjust your eyes, Your All-Holiness,” Liuprand said. “You will need them to read the rites.”
The Exarch cried out and threw up a hand, but still the light beamed through his skin, through his eyelids, and boiled his eyes right in his skull.
The altar candles flickered only dimly, cowed as he was by the totality of this external light.
White was this light, not gold, white like the sourest pear, the most unready apple, divested too early of its peel.
The prince propped the door ajar and left the Exarch trembling on the floor, bargaining with God: Please, he prayed, let my tumor burst before dawn.