Chapter IV The Mummers #2
She did not understand the language of Seraph but it did not matter, for the mummers did not speak.
They went through the motions of their act in silence, with great, exaggerated gestures, swooning dramatically or stomping in feigned, sensational fury.
The plot was a simplistic one and could be followed even without speech.
There were no heights or depths. Two men fought over a woman (who was really a man in a gown and a wig, for mummery was a profession prohibited to the fairer sex), and the woman died.
The men raged in grief and stuck swords in each other’s bellies.
Yet they played it all with humor. The king chortled as the mummers shook their fists at each other; when the woman died, he laughed so heartily that he dribbled wine down his doublet.
These acts were the new fancy of Nicephorus, whose former amusements had worn thin.
It was whispered that he had grown too indolent to even welcome his favorite whores to his chamber.
He had tasted every flavor of pleasure on Drepane.
It all turned to ash in his mouth. So now he must import his merriment from Seraph.
Always the acts were excruciating, and none but the king enjoyed them.
Perhaps he derived some pleasure from this—the small torments he inflicted upon his court by forcing them to watch again and again these dull charades.
Agnes picked up her wine and took a sip, but it was as thin as water and as sour as bile.
It did not fill her; it only reminded her of her own emptiness, how she had not felt Liuprand’s lips on hers for nine terrible months.
Marozia had touched neither her food nor her wine.
It would not have been an easy task, anyway—her chair was pushed far back from the table to accommodate the swelling beneath her gown.
That sorrow swaddled in velvet. Agnes’s throat grew tight as she stared at it.
Since she had returned from the House of Blood, they had not shared a bed.
She had not seen how her cousin’s stomach had grown; she had only been able to perceive it as a stranger.
And yet its grotesqueness was not lessened for that; it was even augmented, perhaps. If Agnes had been able to touch her cousin’s flesh as she once had so commonly, she might have managed to glean some fondness from it. Yet as it was, there was only limpid horror.
“You must eat something,” she said, softly. “To keep up your strength.”
Marozia’s gaze snapped to hers immediately. “I will eat when and what I please.”
Agnes felt a pricking at the corners of her eyes. “Perhaps just some bread?”
Marozia did not acquiesce, but she did not refuse, either.
Her gaze was still fixed ahead. Agnes took the bread from her own plate and began to butter it.
This was not the easiest task, given the limited use of her left hand, but she had been training her right to compensate so she did not make such a terrible mess of it, did not clumsily mangle the bread.
She then cut the bread—with her right hand, again, in uncertain motions—and held out one small piece of it to her cousin.
As she did, Agnes’s fingers were shaking.
She was afraid Marozia would not take it, but she was equally afraid that she would.
Marozia’s head turned toward her, and in the dark mirrors of her eyes, Agnes saw herself not as she was but how she had been—the corpse-like figure with odd-jutting bones, her flesh more gray than white, the statue-girl, the silent lady.
She saw her mouth as that unused, parched, ugly thing—the lips that had not ever been kissed, the tongue that had never tasted wine.
It would be so easy to fall, she thought, to slip back into that creature like a ghost returning to its body.
She was filled with horrible terror, horrible dread, which made her want to drain her goblet and crunch the gristle of meat in her teeth to remind herself that she was not that creature, not anymore, though her flesh remembered all its abuses and her belly remembered its scraping emptiness.
Please, please, do not let me go back, I cannot return to that—
Gingerly, as a cat laps at a bowl of milk, Marozia bit off the smallest chunk of bread.
She chewed, chewed, and swallowed. Agnes grew as still as stone.
When Marozia took another bite, Agnes felt her teeth graze the very tip of her index finger, and her tongue slightly rasp her thumb, and she was falling then, not into an empty abyss, but rather into a smothering warmth, almost a womb, a place that was so familiar to her that she nearly keened.
She nearly fed her thumb into her cousin’s mouth.
Marozia had a handmaiden now to share her bed, and Agnes had not held or been held by her in nine months. In this moment, she realized she missed it, missed it the way a whetstone missed its blade. And so Agnes lapsed back into silence as Marozia ate the bread from her hand.
Yet her gaze wandered as she did. Wandered to Liuprand, who was watching this act unfold intently.
His ocean eyes were a maelstrom, but Agnes could easily imagine the thoughts turning behind them.
He was willing her, in his mind, to stop this.
He could see how it both comforted and diminished her.
He was wishing that he were the hand, and she were the mouth, that he could feed her endlessly, that he could take her fingers into his mouth.
This was the part of him whose shoulders trembled under the weight of the crown.
And then there was Liuprand the Just, who saw his wife being attended, who saw the ripening of his seed in her belly.
The child who would mend these gashes his actions had left upon the island, turn those wounds to stiff blue scars.
He had told her in haunted, miserable tones how the child had come to be conceived—and Agnes had listened, beaten by each word like flotsam caught in a snarling tide.
She came to me in my chambers. She was escorted by the Dolorous Guard.
Flanked, on either side. They said my father had given them orders not to leave until it was done.
They stood outside the door, and when they heard nothing but silence from within my bedchamber, they sent in those two leeches—those hideous creatures Truss and Mordaunt.
The tall one came to me and the other to her.
He stroked me roughly until my body betrayed my mind, and the princess’s legs were pried apart and held there—and I was guided by their crass hands…
when it was done, the stained sheets were taken to the king.
Agnes had then lapsed back into the agony and safety of silence, as her mind supplied her with a single thought: I cannot bear this manner of existence for a moment longer.
The mummers’ act was done, and they bowed deeply. Through a mouthful of meat, the king ordered applause to be given. Agnes did not clap; her hand was occupied. Marozia was eating from it, but the bread was nearly gone. When it was, Agnes would miss it.
“There,” Agnes said, softly. “Would you like any more?”
“No,” Marozia whispered. “Just water, to wash it down.”
So Agnes lifted the goblet in trembling fingers, and Marozia drank deeply of it.
The mummers proceeded out of the hall, their feet slapping the stone floor.
She wondered if they could feel the coldness through their slippers.
And all the while Liuprand watched Agnes with a steady gaze, as if they were the only two creatures in the world, when in truth the world was crushing them inward, like grapes mashed for wine.