Chapter X Tantalus
X
Tantalus
Never had Agnes been summoned to the king’s private chambers before.
There was no reason for her to expect it and, even now, she was surprised by the request to join him there.
She was further surprised to learn that these chambers were so far from the other apartments, those occupied by the prince and Marozia and herself.
He was nearer to the servants’ quarters and the leeches’ bay, one short stone staircase above the great hall.
When she considered this, it made a good deal of sense.
Even in these past nine months, the king’s mobility had been greatly reduced.
He could not ascend steps without assistance from at least three attendants, and of course he would not wish to be very distant from the kitchens.
Yet—when she entered the chamber, Agnes was impregnated with the heavy scent of ripening fruit.
It made the room thick and damp like the air above a scummy pond.
She choked on her first inhale and put a hand decorously over her mouth.
She felt that she was the one to rudely penetrate this perversely hallowed place, that her presence was the infection and not the reverse, that this was an environment that could not foster burgeoning and tender life; it could only spread about decay.
Her senses had not misled her. Piled about the chamber were bowls and bowls of fruit, most of them past ripe and into rot, softening and blackening.
They overfilled their vessels and tumbled onto the floor, where they leaked their putrid juices.
The carpet was spongy, like moss thick with rainwater, and each step wet the soles of Agnes’s feet.
Nausea slicked through her. She should not be here.
Her hand throbbed, those dormant nerve endings flaring like signal fires, alerting her to the danger of being alone with Nicephorus.
And, too, there was a less cerebral fear within her: the base and animal fear of entering a world in which she did not belong, a world she could not know, could not love, and that could not love her in return.
She was in it like poison in a vein. Like a worm in an apple. Her vision shuddered.
“Come. Come here,” the king rasped. Agnes could not see him, only his shadow; he was behind a thin screen. “And bring me a bowl.”
Agnes recoiled at such a request, her shoulders pinching.
How could she touch—she should not touch—and yet it was an order, which she could not refuse.
So with no small amount of reluctance, she reached for the nearest bowl.
The fruit within was so far gone that its rancid juices sloshed about when she grasped it.
The bowl was copper, and heavier than she expected.
She had to draw an arm around it and hold the vessel to her breast as she approached the king behind the screen.
He was half reclined upon a velvet chaise, his doublet unbuttoned to show the stained shift beneath.
It stretched and pulled tautly across his tumescent belly, turned as thin as onionskin by such strain, translucent enough that Agnes glimpsed through it to see his dimpled flesh.
Blue veins bulged gruesomely on his neck, pulsing a sluggish beat.
Past his shift, he wore nothing at all. His legs were bare and mottled purple.
Several toes, Agnes noticed, had been removed, and some not-so-clever leech had badly cauterized the incision, leaving the scar tissue lumpy and gnarled as a knot on a tree.
Every step must cause him great pain, Agnes thought. She wished this realization pleased her. Yet no sensation could slither through her disgust.
“Here,” Nicephorus snapped. “Give it here.”
Glad to be rid of it, Agnes held the bowl out. Yet she had not grown close enough, and when the king reached for it, he merely swiped at the air. A low growl of frustration rumbled in his throat.
Scattered about the floor around were empty bowls, overturned, and the mushy black rot within them spilled and seeping into the carpet.
Standing there, Agnes contemplated such a tormented existence.
The fruit was all around him, yet he could not reach it without help.
The rot was not the sickness itself; it was a symptom.
For the king would have consumed all the fruit, quickly, if he were simply able to grasp it in his own hands.
But because he could not, this world was a torturous one.
It was water running over him, yet nothing he could drink.
Pity, at last, wriggled its way through her revulsion.
Agnes stepped closer, and the king successfully grabbed the bowl. He fished through the slime and pulp for the most intact fruit and bit into it. Rancid juice, dark as ink, ran down his chin. Agnes’s stomach rippled and churned.
King Nicephorus ate the fruit down to its core before he spoke again.
“I am told I have two grandchildren,” he said.
Agnes frowned, wondering why she had been the one summoned to relay this information. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
“And are they hale?”
Her frown deepened. “Perhaps, Your Majesty, you might speak to a leech. I do not have their art; I am not fit to judge—”
“All my leeches are imbeciles. They prefer knucklebones to setting bones and gambling coin to stitching wounds. I am asking you, Lady Agnes. Did you not witness the princess’s labor?”
“I did,” she replied slowly. “It was not an easy one. The princess survived, but barely.” The king’s expression did not shift; it was as if the words had not been heard at all. “But as best as I am given to know, the children will live.”
The king gave a mere grunt of acknowledgment, neither pleased nor displeased.
An ember of rage burned within Agnes. All of this garish suffering, all of this blood, at his orchestration—yet now he could not even be persuaded to feign joy at its happy outcome?
He had done this, he was the architect of her agony, and Marozia’s, and his son’s.
She recalled the gash on Liuprand’s cheek, his swollen lip, and the ember of rage grew to engulf her, flushing her cheeks and quickening the beat of her heart.
She would do it, she thought, she would speak, or otherwise make her fury known—
Before she could act upon this urge, there was a knock on the door.
“Come in,” the king called out in his throaty bullfrog’s rasp.
Agnes turned and watched his chamber fill with bodies.
First came Waltrude with the child in her arms. Agnes’s heart winced to see it again, that white swaddling that held so much lovely innocence within.
Then, to her surprise, came Pliny, and to her even greater surprise, Liuprand.
Yet she could not have expected the last to enter: Marozia, her handmaiden attending her, and her daughter asleep against her breast.
A lump swelled in Agnes’s throat and almost choked her.
A mere day had passed since the labor that had nearly killed her, and Marozia somehow looked as preeminent as she ever had.
The bulging stomach made impossibly flat again; her face, drained so cruelly of blood, now flushed prettily.
Her dark curls were gathered neatly into a golden hairnet; her bare throat, as slender as a white-gloved hand.
Her breasts were milk-swollen, straining the bust of her scarlet gown—yet this did not detract from her beauty; it amplified it, swanning the proof of her sumptuous fertility.
Agnes tasted it again. The sour bile of envy.
No word, no blow, could wound her as grievously as the sight of her cousin, lush and flowering, with her daughter in her arms. Liuprand’s child.
Despite the lack of sympathy between husband and wife, here was a thread that bound them to each other, inextricably and mysteriously, forever obscure and forbidden to Agnes.
She wanted to howl her sorrow, but it was an invisible thing. Absence could not be seen.
“Your Majesty,” Marozia said. Her voice was clear and bright as ice melt. “I present my daughter for your viewing.”
“I can view nothing from here,” the king said. “Come closer.”
Marozia did. Her heeled slippers sunk into the damp carpet, and thus her footsteps were soundless.
She leaned over and showed the infant’s face to King Nicephorus.
The infant stirred, but only to give a sweet whimper.
From her vantage point, Agnes could glimpse the loose, soft coils of golden hair.
The petal-pink, toothless mouth. Yearning and more yearning filled her.
“She will be fair,” the king proclaimed after several moments’ inspection. Marozia gave a nod of pride and drew the infant to her breast again. She stepped back to her handmaiden’s side.
A subtle gesture then, which was not observed by any but Agnes: Marozia allowed Ninian to rest a hand on the small of her back, steadying her.
Agnes could not place why, but it sickened her to see this.
In that moment she hated—and she was shocked by the force of her own loathing—this mousy handmaiden with her queer, mismatched eyes.
“Now bring the other,” Nicephorus said.
Obediently, Waltrude now stepped out of line and approached the king.
When the infant was held out for inspection, he did not stir at all; within his swaddling, he was as still as a stone.
Agnes’s stomach clenched nervously—was he in truth a sickly child, infirm?
She could not bear it, if it were so. But the king’s brow furrowed as he examined the princeling’s face, and then at last, he proclaimed, “A handsome child.”
Agnes suppressed an exhale of relief. Such gore and madness, yet against the odds, all was well.
“Leech,” the king said, jerking his head toward Pliny. “Tell me—are they hale?”
“Yes, Your Majesty.” There was an odd hollowness to Pliny’s tone.
Perhaps the horrors of Marozia’s labor had left a mark upon him.
But that would be strange—had he not seen worse before?
Had he not witnessed his own master’s brutal slaying, the total emptying of the Master of Blood’s noble veins?
“To the best of my judgment, both will grow strong.”
Pleasure spread across the king’s red-blistered face. No, perhaps not pleasure. It was satisfaction, which was not quite the same thing.
“Then all will proceed according to my design,” he said.
“The boy-child is heir. One day, he will wear the crown. It is good to have the line of inheritance secured so early. And the girl-child will be wed to Lord Unruoching’s son as soon as she can walk and talk—ha!
Would that she could be wed before she gains the faculties of speech; the line of Lord Fredegar does so like its silent brides. ”
The air seemed to crackle, to prick against Agnes’s skin. She heard Marozia draw a sharp and uneven breath.
“Your Majesty,” she said in a voice that was no longer clear, no longer shining, but that twisted and strained, “it is the custom of my house that the first daughter of the first daughter be named Mistress of Teeth and be given all the rights afforded to the head of a great house.”
Nicephorus’s damp, reptilian eyes narrowed. “And is the child not, equally, the blood of Seraph?”
Marozia’s mouth quivered. Against her breast, the babe shifted.
“She is,” Marozia replied at last. “But—”
“Then there is no more to be said,” the king cut in. “The child has been promised to Lord Gamelyn since before her very conception. She will be wed as young as the House of Blood will have her. It is done.”
Again the chamber was utterly silent, and yet, when Agnes turned to Marozia, a shuddering transformation took place that froze the marrow in her bones.
She saw her cousin not as she was now, rigid and upright with her daughter in her arms, but rather as she had been a mere day ago, prone on the cold stone floor, blood pouring from between her legs.
The sweat-soaked and soiled nightgown, the plum-colored head of her daughter cresting forth.
This image of Marozia shrieked and howled, yet it was silent.
Her mouth opened to a chasm, and no sound came out.
Her body convulsed. Her mute tongue thrashed.
And for this, Agnes wanted to scream until her vocal cords withered to nothing.
But Marozia did not speak. Her chest heaved, and the color drained from her face, and then without a word she turned and fled the room. Ninian gaped in shock and then scuttled after her. In her haste, she overturned a bowl of fruit, and its rotten contents scattered all over the floor.
Agnes dared a single peek at Liuprand. She had not laid eyes on him since their disloyal tryst in the chapel.
The blood on his cheek had dried black and jagged and harsh; his pride had not allowed Pliny to treat the wound as he should.
The swollen lip was only swollen now with the memory of her kisses.
It seemed to her both debauched and tragic, her love as ruinous as his father’s hate.
Liuprand’s throat pulsed as he swallowed.
“Is this all you wish to say?” he asked curtly.
“Only a faithless son grows weary of his father’s voice and counsel.
” Nicephorus dropped the empty bowl without ceremony, and it fell soundlessly to the soaked carpet.
“The boy shall be brought up as a prince, trained in all the arts befitting a future king of Drepane. And take him to the tiltyard the moment he is old enough to hold a sword. I’ll not have him grow up a milksop with his nose in a book.
” He looked with a shining eagerness at Liuprand, as if he hoped the words would rile him.
Liuprand’s expression remained unmoved. However, in a flat voice, he replied, “Every wise and humane father wishes for his son to be greater than him.”
Nicephorus’s jaw twitched. Fear entered Agnes—she wished Liuprand had not said such to provoke him. But she suspected the king could not rise to his feet without help, and none of his attendants were about. No revenge would come, for now.
“That is all,” he said lowly, at last. “Every one of you, go now. Let me see no more of you.”